Drabble Fic: Creation (Rimmer/Lister, G)

[nice-girls-play.livejournal.com]

Title: Creation
Author: nice_girls_play
Rating: G
Word Count: 500
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister (if you turn it sideways..)
Spoilers: Back to Reality
Summary: A little thing for nyghtshayde's "the gods must be crazy!" ficathon. Rimmer contemplates Lister as God. And is *nauseous*. (Sartre would probably have something to say about that, but we won't bother him at this juncture.)

--



Two days, four hours and thirty-seven minutes after they’d blasted away from the Esperanto; after the Bug’s hull and ventilation system had been rigorously “de-inked” by Kryten; after he’d had the scutters throw his swimming certificates out of the airlock, Rimmer still remembered.

He doubted Lister remembered. He’d been determined – perhaps the most determined apart from Holly (who seemed to be suffering from a senile electronic form of PTSD) – to forget the devastating events of The Game That Wasn’t Really a Game. But Rimmer couldn’t forget the Brummy goit’s words, tossed off so casually as meaningless fiction. Not the words about himself – he knew the fallacy of those to the marrow of his no longer existent bones. He wasn’t a hero. Not a guide. Not an officer. At his most solicitous, Lister wouldn’t let him be his toilet valet. The words that clung to his brain with razor claws were the ones concerning Lister’s destiny. Not just Lister’s, as it happened, but the Dwarf’s, the Bug’s, His, Holly’s, the Cat’s, all of them.

He couldn’t shake the image they evoked: Starbug blown to bits in order to jumpstart the universe; Lister as God for the second time in three million years; and the rest of them powder in the keg decimated by the blast of Creation.

It was like the old ballad his mother had liked to play – “Everything old is new again…” – before Uncle Frank had smashed her cassette deck with his nephew’s favorite toy truck.

He knew what Lister -- who’d swung from believing divine energy to be in everything to “No God in No Thing” in just a few short years -- would say: it was an illusion; a psychotropic group hate fantasy cobbled together from the madness of four individuals who’d spent too many nights sequestered in one tiny room inside a ship a mile long and 2000 decks deep. And everything in his higher electronic brain agreed. Of course it couldn’t be true! Rimmer could accept the Universe as a science experiment gone terribly wrong or an alien being’s evening cocktail gone hideously right. He couldn’t fathom universal life from Lister hooking Starbug up to a car battery and blowing himself up.

Still, it wouldn’t leave him. It coagulated in his light-projected stomach creating a nausea as tangible and real as any illness he’d ever had when he was alive: the fate of the Universe, the *Genesis* of the Universe inside Lister’s grubby hands. The man who didn’t wash after jerking off and half the time didn’t even change the sheets before rolling over and passing out in the wet spot. Every life that had ever lived or would ever live, in those still, dead hands. There was something deeply offensive about that.

And he wasn’t admitting that it was true.

But he’d already made up his mind that it wouldn’t happen.

Comments

[nice-girls-play.livejournal.com]

True true, esp. when you take all of Back to Earth into consideration.

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

I think it was showing as early as season 6, 7 latest. I was actually a bit let down by Back To Earth- I felt like they glossed over a lot. It makes me wonder how much of it is Lister growing up, and how much is him being isolated and losing hope.

[nice-girls-play.livejournal.com]

I think in at first it was just an evolution of his character: even in confirming Kryten's question about him being a pantheist, Lister's still conceding that he doesn't believe God is in a frying pan or a calculator. But he believes sentient electronic entities like Kryten, Rimmer and the wax droids are *living beings* who have a right to continue living as they choose. And we have that great conversation with him and Rimmer in "Waiting for God" which is basically an atheism vs. transcendentalism debate (but instead of God/No God, it's Aliens/No Aliens). He never says he doesn't believe in that conversation, but he doesn't understand why the origins of things are such a big deal.

By the time we get to BTE, he's just tired and without a mission and wondering if there's anything he's *supposed* to be doing, with those initial goals of getting back to Earth and getting Kochanski all but fallen away.

I think it's something Rimmer would notice, too.