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reddwarfslashTitle: Dear John
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister (implied), other
Rating: PG-13, for this part
Disclaimer: I don't even own the fictional series IX and X of Red Dwarf. I make no money from this fannish venture.
Notes: This is part 4/? - part 1 is here, part 2 is here and part 3 is here. Dedicated to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smaych, who is both an Arnold and a John. <3
On the spare bed in the corner at the far side of the room, Kryten was pretending to snore heavily. Lister wasn’t sure if it was just some quirk in his programming, or intended to help Lister sleep. If it was the latter, it wasn’t working. Not that a quiet room would have been much help either.
It probably was for Lister’s benefit. Before they’d said goodnight, like two best friends at a smegging sleepover, he’d mentioned how quiet the station was. It was true; Lister was used to Starbug’s ‘nureeks’ and ‘rututts’ by now, but even Red Dwarf had been noisier than this. Maybe that had been by design too? Something about the lack of noise made the lack of people all the more obvious. Then again, mile-long mining ships weren’t supposed to be empty.
This station wasn’t supposed to be empty either. Lister didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Places had gone out of business all the time back in Liverpool; people just left and moved on, or not, depending on the state of the economy. How was this any different? Maybe sheer size was a part of it; when a corner shop or jewelers closed down in Church Street, another would pop up to replace it in due time, or it would be taken over by a restaurant or a Superdrug; something more or less – though usually less – useful coming out of the wreckage. This place though – this place was never coming back, ever. All that was left was ghosts.
Sighing, Lister flopped over onto his back, trying, at least, to enjoy the crisp sheets and the high quality mattress. It didn’t help. It reminded him of the fact that someone had slept here, which in turn made him think about people sleeping, which was far too close to 'sleeping together', which was definitely not something he wanted to think about right now. He'd stopped the tape before he'd seen any naked bodies, but some of what had been going on between John and Saunders hadn't required nudity. That would probably have surprised Rimmer. No, don't think of Rimmer now! Oh, this was all going to smeg.
It didn’t mean anything. Of course it didn’t mean anything. He just couldn’t stop thinking about it because, well, seeing John had been such a shock. When Lister had first met Rimmer, he’d been determined to like him. They’d be living together for at least six months, after all, which was the time it usually took JMC to process an application for a room reassignment. And Lister had tried. He really had tried, but it was as though every single aspect of Rimmer’s personality was working against every single aspect of his, attempting to beat it into submission with tiny hammers.
Eventually, they’d settled into a nice ‘you won’t bother me, I won’t bother you’ sort of arrangement, none of them really keeping up their end of the bargain. But that was as far as it could ever go, and Lister had fully accepted that, long before the accident that got them stuck together for the rest of their lives or lack thereof. Anyway, what it all boiled down to was this; Lister had never really thought about what Rimmer would be like if he were nice. If he wasn’t always so smegging defensive and angry and uptight. Sure, there was Ace, but Ace had been supernatural; unreal. There’d been nothing of Rimmer left in him that Lister could see, so there was no mental connection to make. But John had been very real.
And John… truth be told, all things considered, Lister had found John –
The door wooshed open, admitting a wild-eyed, twitching Cat. “I didn’t do nothing; nobody saw me do it; you don’t know I did it!”
The snoring stopped abruptly as Kryten got to his feet. Above them, the lights flickered on and off. “Sir,” Kryten mumbled, looking at them nervously, “we may have a problem.”
“Smegging hell,” Lister yawned, struggling upright, “that’s a relief!”
This was wrong. It wasn’t just wrong; it was absurd; Rimmers didn’t hug. In point of fact, Rimmer could hardly remember either of his parents having touched him after he was old enough to dress and bathe himself. With some effort, he broke out of John’s embrace, shoving him away, violently.
“What the smeg do you think you’re doing?!”
John didn’t seem to care, his eyes staring at some point just above where Rimmer’s eyebrows met. Ah. Well; what of it? It’s not like he was the only deadie in the room. John reached out towards the H with a careful hand, and Rimmer jumped away.
“Get your filthy hands off me! I’d say I don’t know where they’ve been, but I do, which is what makes it worse!”
John blinked, still staring at the H. “I just can’t get over it; you’re so stable.”
Even with his newfound anger, Rimmer was taken aback. “I’m sorry; what?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. How do you manage to keep the wave/particle paradox in check so smoothly? The only way we found to do it was to force it into a particle state, but that’s not actually possible. Long-term, I mean. Or, well, at all really, which is the problem, and why you have to calculate for both eventualities.”
“What?”
John shook his head. “Sorry; I’m sorry. It’s just, this job has been my life for close to two years, now. It’s all I ever think about.”
“I’d hardly say that.” Rimmer crossed his arms, bile rising in his throat.
Finally, John seemed to focus on the here and now. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you seemed to have time for a few extra-curricular activities.” When John just looked at him blankly, Rimmer spat out, “oh, for Io’s sake, man! Have you no common decency! Don’t you even realize what you were doing was depraved? Or is it that you’re screwing so many lab techs in your quarters that you can’t keep them apart; is that it?”
John’s eyebrows raised, in perfect tandem. “Is that what this is about? Saunders? Me and Saunders?”
“Yes,” Rimmer nearly screamed, “that is what this smegging is about, ‘you and Saunders’! You really don’t care, do you? Great Space, you are just like Howard!”
A strange look crept across John’s face, settling uneasily. “Why do you keep saying that? Of course I’m like Howard; so are you.”
This had gone beyond insults now. Rimmer’s mouth opened and closed, wanting to spew out words his brain was unable to supply. There were the sort of scandals you talked about in Rimmer’s family, like uncle James getting drunk at Frank’s wedding reception and flashing people outside the women’s loo, or Aunt Flossie wearing a mini-skirt to her grandmother’s funeral and yelling out ‘good riddance, you old bat’ when they lowered the coffin, and then there was Howard. It wasn’t that they never talked about Howard; they just very obviously didn’t talk about… how he was. Even thinking about it was hard for Rimmer; you trained yourself not to. He knew though; of course he knew. Rimmer’s room had been next to Howard’s, and he’d heard when he brought those boys back, sneaking them into the house in the middle of the night. He’d even caught one of them in the bathroom he shared with his brothers once; he’d grinned and smiled at Rimmer; even winked. And later, of course, there had been the postcards from Europa, full of innuendo and with pictures of half-naked men on the front. Rimmer had even gotten a few after he’d joined JMC, but mercifully Howard had died before Lister had moved in. Rimmer couldn’t even imagine what Lister would have done if he’d found one of those, addressed to Rimmer and signed with kisses as they were. He grabbed the edge of a table for support, and pulled himself together. “You take that back,” he said, through gritted teeth.
John’s eyebrows rose, and his nostrils flared. They were huge, cavernous things; a family of four could go camping in one. At least he didn’t look like that, Rimmer thought with some disdain. “Oh, Arn. I’m so… I honestly had no idea. When mother told me you’d joined JMC, I just assumed that was your way of rebelling. I mean; working on a mining ship, as a junior technician? It was like a slap in the face for father!”
“Why are you saying these horrible things to me?” It hadn’t meant to come out that pathetic. Rimmer sniffled, wondering why he had to.
John sighed in apparent exasperation. “I’m an idiot. I should have just called, or e-mailed, or got in touch, somehow. But I thought you were OK; I thought you’d escaped. But you didn’t, did you? You spent your whole life still believing that smeg; still trying to live up to those smegged-up ideals and hating yourself.”
“I don’t hate myself,” Rimmer mumbled.
“Of course you do, talking like that about Howard! Arnie; we’re all like Howard. You know that.” He paused, taking in Rimmer’s rigid face. His eyes widened. “Smeg, you don’t know, do you? They didn’t tell you?” He shook his head, his mouth tightening to a thin, hard line. “Bastards. That’s low, even for them. Maybe they thought you’d do better if you didn’t know, after what happened to Frank and me and Howard. And it worked, I supposed, if you lived your whole life like that.” He looked up; pity – smegging pity - in his eyes.
“What are you talking about,” Rimmer managed, his voice going wobbly. Overhead, the lights flickered.
John put his hand on Rimmer’s shoulder, and this time, Rimmer didn’t resist. “We’re all the same, Arnie; you and me and Frank and Howard. We’re clones.”
“Look; I said I didn’t do nothing, nothing happened, and I wasn’t even there.” Cat looked from one surprised, questioning face to the other. Monkeys were stupid, and that metal monkey wasn’t much better. He’d already explained this!
“Sir, please try to remember. It is vital that we know if anything has happened to the station’s life support systems.”
“Yeah, cut the smeg, man.”
“I already told you; it wasn’t my fault. After I got bored with eating, I had a horrifying realization.”
Curry-breath narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“I hadn’t made nearly anything in this place mine yet!” Triumphantly, Cat pulled out his small, gilded scenting-bottle. It was nearly empty; there were quite a lot of things to make his here. “I gotta refill this soon,” he mused.
The little pudgy monkey stared at him. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
“Sir,” square-face interrupted, “I feared the same when I first saw Mr. Cat using it. I took the liberty of analyzing a sample he’d sprayed on Starbug’s kitchen counter,” the monkey made a face again. It was kinda funny-looking, but then, he was always funny-looking. “It’s a pheromone concentrate. Perfectly taste-, and to human olfactory senses, odorless. And utterly harmless.”
“Thank Space fer that.”
“Yeah,” Cat grinned, “I get it from these knobbly things under my arms.”
“Glands, sir,” that metal guy supplied.
“Wonderful.”
“Anyway, like I said, I’m nearly out. I didn’t wanna start refilling right there in public; what if someone that wasn’t a sexy female cat came along and saw me without my shirt on? These slacks were never meant to go with the topless look.”
“Sir, the station has been abandoned for more than three million years.”
“You can’t be too careful. Besides, I didn’t take the clamps with me, or the…”
“Please just go on.”
Cat sniffed at stinky boots. Not too strongly, for obvious reasons. “Stop making your face look like that; don’t you know know pale green clashes horribly with charcoal? Now, where was I? Right; I started making lots of things mine, getting into all the long-windy-bits…”
“Corridors, sir?”
“That’s right, and crawling into all the secret places, ‘cause I wanted to make sure I got all the important stuff. Like that big turney-roundy-noisy thing.”
Those other two guys exchanged glances. “Big turney-roundy-noisy thing?”
“Yeah, in the secret room, with all those monkey-scribbles on the door. All in yellow and red and black. It was big, really big, with all these moving, shiny parts making a massive humming sound. I knew it had to be really important, so I had to make it mine. But I was running low on stuff. So,” he grinned, “I improvised.”
“Kryters,” the monkey whispered, “that big noisy thing, is that…”
“I fear so, sir.”
Turmeric stain turned to Cat, pointing a stubby finger. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“You peed on the power generator?!”
“I made it mine! What are you looking at me like that for!”
With a soft sort of humming noise, the lights went out.
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister (implied), other
Rating: PG-13, for this part
Disclaimer: I don't even own the fictional series IX and X of Red Dwarf. I make no money from this fannish venture.
Notes: This is part 4/? - part 1 is here, part 2 is here and part 3 is here. Dedicated to
smaych, who is both an Arnold and a John. <3On the spare bed in the corner at the far side of the room, Kryten was pretending to snore heavily. Lister wasn’t sure if it was just some quirk in his programming, or intended to help Lister sleep. If it was the latter, it wasn’t working. Not that a quiet room would have been much help either.
It probably was for Lister’s benefit. Before they’d said goodnight, like two best friends at a smegging sleepover, he’d mentioned how quiet the station was. It was true; Lister was used to Starbug’s ‘nureeks’ and ‘rututts’ by now, but even Red Dwarf had been noisier than this. Maybe that had been by design too? Something about the lack of noise made the lack of people all the more obvious. Then again, mile-long mining ships weren’t supposed to be empty.
This station wasn’t supposed to be empty either. Lister didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Places had gone out of business all the time back in Liverpool; people just left and moved on, or not, depending on the state of the economy. How was this any different? Maybe sheer size was a part of it; when a corner shop or jewelers closed down in Church Street, another would pop up to replace it in due time, or it would be taken over by a restaurant or a Superdrug; something more or less – though usually less – useful coming out of the wreckage. This place though – this place was never coming back, ever. All that was left was ghosts.
Sighing, Lister flopped over onto his back, trying, at least, to enjoy the crisp sheets and the high quality mattress. It didn’t help. It reminded him of the fact that someone had slept here, which in turn made him think about people sleeping, which was far too close to 'sleeping together', which was definitely not something he wanted to think about right now. He'd stopped the tape before he'd seen any naked bodies, but some of what had been going on between John and Saunders hadn't required nudity. That would probably have surprised Rimmer. No, don't think of Rimmer now! Oh, this was all going to smeg.
It didn’t mean anything. Of course it didn’t mean anything. He just couldn’t stop thinking about it because, well, seeing John had been such a shock. When Lister had first met Rimmer, he’d been determined to like him. They’d be living together for at least six months, after all, which was the time it usually took JMC to process an application for a room reassignment. And Lister had tried. He really had tried, but it was as though every single aspect of Rimmer’s personality was working against every single aspect of his, attempting to beat it into submission with tiny hammers.
Eventually, they’d settled into a nice ‘you won’t bother me, I won’t bother you’ sort of arrangement, none of them really keeping up their end of the bargain. But that was as far as it could ever go, and Lister had fully accepted that, long before the accident that got them stuck together for the rest of their lives or lack thereof. Anyway, what it all boiled down to was this; Lister had never really thought about what Rimmer would be like if he were nice. If he wasn’t always so smegging defensive and angry and uptight. Sure, there was Ace, but Ace had been supernatural; unreal. There’d been nothing of Rimmer left in him that Lister could see, so there was no mental connection to make. But John had been very real.
And John… truth be told, all things considered, Lister had found John –
The door wooshed open, admitting a wild-eyed, twitching Cat. “I didn’t do nothing; nobody saw me do it; you don’t know I did it!”
The snoring stopped abruptly as Kryten got to his feet. Above them, the lights flickered on and off. “Sir,” Kryten mumbled, looking at them nervously, “we may have a problem.”
“Smegging hell,” Lister yawned, struggling upright, “that’s a relief!”
This was wrong. It wasn’t just wrong; it was absurd; Rimmers didn’t hug. In point of fact, Rimmer could hardly remember either of his parents having touched him after he was old enough to dress and bathe himself. With some effort, he broke out of John’s embrace, shoving him away, violently.
“What the smeg do you think you’re doing?!”
John didn’t seem to care, his eyes staring at some point just above where Rimmer’s eyebrows met. Ah. Well; what of it? It’s not like he was the only deadie in the room. John reached out towards the H with a careful hand, and Rimmer jumped away.
“Get your filthy hands off me! I’d say I don’t know where they’ve been, but I do, which is what makes it worse!”
John blinked, still staring at the H. “I just can’t get over it; you’re so stable.”
Even with his newfound anger, Rimmer was taken aback. “I’m sorry; what?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. How do you manage to keep the wave/particle paradox in check so smoothly? The only way we found to do it was to force it into a particle state, but that’s not actually possible. Long-term, I mean. Or, well, at all really, which is the problem, and why you have to calculate for both eventualities.”
“What?”
John shook his head. “Sorry; I’m sorry. It’s just, this job has been my life for close to two years, now. It’s all I ever think about.”
“I’d hardly say that.” Rimmer crossed his arms, bile rising in his throat.
Finally, John seemed to focus on the here and now. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you seemed to have time for a few extra-curricular activities.” When John just looked at him blankly, Rimmer spat out, “oh, for Io’s sake, man! Have you no common decency! Don’t you even realize what you were doing was depraved? Or is it that you’re screwing so many lab techs in your quarters that you can’t keep them apart; is that it?”
John’s eyebrows raised, in perfect tandem. “Is that what this is about? Saunders? Me and Saunders?”
“Yes,” Rimmer nearly screamed, “that is what this smegging is about, ‘you and Saunders’! You really don’t care, do you? Great Space, you are just like Howard!”
A strange look crept across John’s face, settling uneasily. “Why do you keep saying that? Of course I’m like Howard; so are you.”
This had gone beyond insults now. Rimmer’s mouth opened and closed, wanting to spew out words his brain was unable to supply. There were the sort of scandals you talked about in Rimmer’s family, like uncle James getting drunk at Frank’s wedding reception and flashing people outside the women’s loo, or Aunt Flossie wearing a mini-skirt to her grandmother’s funeral and yelling out ‘good riddance, you old bat’ when they lowered the coffin, and then there was Howard. It wasn’t that they never talked about Howard; they just very obviously didn’t talk about… how he was. Even thinking about it was hard for Rimmer; you trained yourself not to. He knew though; of course he knew. Rimmer’s room had been next to Howard’s, and he’d heard when he brought those boys back, sneaking them into the house in the middle of the night. He’d even caught one of them in the bathroom he shared with his brothers once; he’d grinned and smiled at Rimmer; even winked. And later, of course, there had been the postcards from Europa, full of innuendo and with pictures of half-naked men on the front. Rimmer had even gotten a few after he’d joined JMC, but mercifully Howard had died before Lister had moved in. Rimmer couldn’t even imagine what Lister would have done if he’d found one of those, addressed to Rimmer and signed with kisses as they were. He grabbed the edge of a table for support, and pulled himself together. “You take that back,” he said, through gritted teeth.
John’s eyebrows rose, and his nostrils flared. They were huge, cavernous things; a family of four could go camping in one. At least he didn’t look like that, Rimmer thought with some disdain. “Oh, Arn. I’m so… I honestly had no idea. When mother told me you’d joined JMC, I just assumed that was your way of rebelling. I mean; working on a mining ship, as a junior technician? It was like a slap in the face for father!”
“Why are you saying these horrible things to me?” It hadn’t meant to come out that pathetic. Rimmer sniffled, wondering why he had to.
John sighed in apparent exasperation. “I’m an idiot. I should have just called, or e-mailed, or got in touch, somehow. But I thought you were OK; I thought you’d escaped. But you didn’t, did you? You spent your whole life still believing that smeg; still trying to live up to those smegged-up ideals and hating yourself.”
“I don’t hate myself,” Rimmer mumbled.
“Of course you do, talking like that about Howard! Arnie; we’re all like Howard. You know that.” He paused, taking in Rimmer’s rigid face. His eyes widened. “Smeg, you don’t know, do you? They didn’t tell you?” He shook his head, his mouth tightening to a thin, hard line. “Bastards. That’s low, even for them. Maybe they thought you’d do better if you didn’t know, after what happened to Frank and me and Howard. And it worked, I supposed, if you lived your whole life like that.” He looked up; pity – smegging pity - in his eyes.
“What are you talking about,” Rimmer managed, his voice going wobbly. Overhead, the lights flickered.
John put his hand on Rimmer’s shoulder, and this time, Rimmer didn’t resist. “We’re all the same, Arnie; you and me and Frank and Howard. We’re clones.”
“Look; I said I didn’t do nothing, nothing happened, and I wasn’t even there.” Cat looked from one surprised, questioning face to the other. Monkeys were stupid, and that metal monkey wasn’t much better. He’d already explained this!
“Sir, please try to remember. It is vital that we know if anything has happened to the station’s life support systems.”
“Yeah, cut the smeg, man.”
“I already told you; it wasn’t my fault. After I got bored with eating, I had a horrifying realization.”
Curry-breath narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“I hadn’t made nearly anything in this place mine yet!” Triumphantly, Cat pulled out his small, gilded scenting-bottle. It was nearly empty; there were quite a lot of things to make his here. “I gotta refill this soon,” he mused.
The little pudgy monkey stared at him. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
“Sir,” square-face interrupted, “I feared the same when I first saw Mr. Cat using it. I took the liberty of analyzing a sample he’d sprayed on Starbug’s kitchen counter,” the monkey made a face again. It was kinda funny-looking, but then, he was always funny-looking. “It’s a pheromone concentrate. Perfectly taste-, and to human olfactory senses, odorless. And utterly harmless.”
“Thank Space fer that.”
“Yeah,” Cat grinned, “I get it from these knobbly things under my arms.”
“Glands, sir,” that metal guy supplied.
“Wonderful.”
“Anyway, like I said, I’m nearly out. I didn’t wanna start refilling right there in public; what if someone that wasn’t a sexy female cat came along and saw me without my shirt on? These slacks were never meant to go with the topless look.”
“Sir, the station has been abandoned for more than three million years.”
“You can’t be too careful. Besides, I didn’t take the clamps with me, or the…”
“Please just go on.”
Cat sniffed at stinky boots. Not too strongly, for obvious reasons. “Stop making your face look like that; don’t you know know pale green clashes horribly with charcoal? Now, where was I? Right; I started making lots of things mine, getting into all the long-windy-bits…”
“Corridors, sir?”
“That’s right, and crawling into all the secret places, ‘cause I wanted to make sure I got all the important stuff. Like that big turney-roundy-noisy thing.”
Those other two guys exchanged glances. “Big turney-roundy-noisy thing?”
“Yeah, in the secret room, with all those monkey-scribbles on the door. All in yellow and red and black. It was big, really big, with all these moving, shiny parts making a massive humming sound. I knew it had to be really important, so I had to make it mine. But I was running low on stuff. So,” he grinned, “I improvised.”
“Kryters,” the monkey whispered, “that big noisy thing, is that…”
“I fear so, sir.”
Turmeric stain turned to Cat, pointing a stubby finger. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“You peed on the power generator?!”
“I made it mine! What are you looking at me like that for!”
With a soft sort of humming noise, the lights went out.
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Date: 2010-07-05 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 10:57 pm (UTC)And yeah, they're people too. Parents like Rimmer's would leave a mark on anyone...
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Date: 2010-07-05 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-05 06:33 am (UTC)Poor Rimmer. He has to figure out he's like Howard after he just got to the point where he was beginning to be OK with not living up to his brothers' example? Oy boy! Good stuff, Maynard!
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Date: 2010-07-08 11:04 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading and feeding back - I'm glad you're enjoying the story!
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Date: 2010-07-05 06:35 am (UTC)Just the one word missing to make it perfect - "And then *there* was Howard." Sorry, stupid niggle, but it's the most powerful line in the whole fic. Beautiful.
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Date: 2010-07-08 11:06 pm (UTC)I'm really glad you're enjoying the story; thanks for the lovely feedback! :D
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Date: 2010-07-08 07:21 pm (UTC)ALL clones! Alas, poor Rimmer(s); expected to fit into one perfect mold, and then of course none of them do. Nice to see that they're identical on things with genetic basis, while still having that range of personality that makes them relatable as individuals.
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Date: 2010-07-08 11:22 pm (UTC)And yep, you called it! :D And all the way back in part 1, too. I'm glad their differences are coming out; I get into that a little more in the next part. (Up now!)