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"Well talk to me then," Lister pleaded from the
top bunk. This was
intolerable, that Rimmer refused to speak! And after all
they'd been
through in the past three days, since the 'Dwarf and its crew
were
resurrected.
"No."
"Look, I'm sorry, OK? How many times do you want me to
say it? I. Am.
Sorry," he stated, punctuating each word of the 'apology' by
clapping his
boots together.
Rimmer glared back at him. "No. You're.
Not."
"It was an accident."
"An accident?" Rimmer repeated in disbelief.
"You poured a whole tube
of it over me, you disgusting, rotting, fetid piece of congealed
monkey vomit."
His face twisted in distaste, and he turned away from his
cellmate.
"At last you're talking to me," Lister said in
satisfaction, swinging his legs
back up onto the bunk and picking up his magazine. He'd
gotten what he
wanted. "I knew we'd make it up." He
glanced back at the story he'd been
reading, as if it was now the only thing on his mind.
"83..."
Rimmer buried his nose in his book in disgust.
Lister smiled gleefully, hidden behind the glossy pages.
This was more like it!
Almost like the old days. Almost like the old Rimmer.
His Rimmer.
He shook his head ruefully, at the thought of how much his
opinion of the
other man had changed. That was something he'd only
just got used to, how
he felt about the man he'd once referred to as a cancerous polyp
on the anus
of humanity (although the memory of that particular insult still
made him
laugh). Even though he had sworn that he would never, ever
miss his former
bunkmate -- especially after Kryten's AR masterpiece 'The Rimmer
Experience'
-- more and more he'd found himself thinking nostalgically
about the past.
Since the hologram had left to become the next Ace, things just
hadn't been
the same. He was glad for Rimmer, that he was off somewhere
realizing his
dream of being a hero and all, but deep down he knew that
something was
missing because of his absence. He also knew that, no
matter how vehemently
he denied it, he missed Rimmer. A lot. <<And it'd been
getting worse
lately.>> But then, when they'd landed on the newly
reconstituted Red
Dwarf, with the newly reconstituted crew...it was like something
that had been
switched off inside him had suddenly been turned back on, when he
saw who'd
been brought back with the rest. All right, the Rimmer
sharing his cell wasn't
his Rimmer, the hologramatic one that had kept him sane
for all those years,
but he was close enough! Too bad the nanobots hadn't remade
this one in the
hologram's image, with his memories. This one's personality
was just as annoying
and unpleasant as his Rimmer's had been in the beginning.
But that could change. If his Rimmer could do it, could
become slightly less
of a smeghead than he'd started out as, then this one could too.
He thought of the old Rimmer again, 'his' Rimmer. When had
he started
thinking of him like that, as 'his'? Lister wasn't sure; it
just sort of happened.
And why shouldn't it? They'd been through so much
together. He was the
only one of their small crew who'd been with him from the very
beginning,
when he was right out of stasis and he'd had to accept that the
entire ship's
complement was dead. Cat had shown up almost immediately
afterwards,
but then he wasn't a member of the original crew -- he wasn't
even from
Earth, and he didn't know how it felt to be so utterly alone in
the universe.
Rimmer did. Even though he'd been brought back after Dave
had been
awakened, as a hologram he could not touch anything and was
effectively
separated from the world around him. at least until they'd met
Legion.
After all that, he was bound to have some affection for
him, smeghead or not.
He grinned again. Affection was probably the last thing
Arnold Rimmer
wanted right now, what with the effects of the sexual magnetism
virus still
fresh in his mind. At least some of the virus had remained
on his clothes,
enough to infect most of the people trying to remove them, which
had taken
some of the heat (so to speak) off him. After being
'rescued' from the
amorous advances of his fellow prisoners, Rimmer had been taken
to the
medical bay and checked out, then thoroughly
decontaminated. A little too
thoroughly, from what Lister heard. <<Well, he
deserved to suffer a little,
after trying to get us all framed.>> But he supposed
he could forgive him.
It was just Rimmer being Rimmer after all.
And he'd always forgiven the other Rimmer.
Lister peaked over the top of his magazine to steal a glimpse of
the other
man, so very much like his former shipmate, and smiled
again. He'd already
begun to see cracks forming in Rimmer's prickly outer defenses --
probably
from Lister's unexpected treatment of him as a friend and comrade
when he
came on board, rather than as the git he'd been forced to bunk
with. It had
started the same way with the hologram. With time, the same
mellowing would
likely happen to his cellmate as well.
And if Lister wanted to speed the process along, he still had an
ace up his
sleeve. Or rather, a virus. One he could infect
himself with quite easily,
with just a swig or two from the shatterproof pyrex container
he'd kept
carefully hidden from the guards.
He hadn't poured the whole tube of it over Rimmer, after
all.
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