Chapter Text
“I feel… alright. Calm. Ish.”
“Yup,” Rimmer popped the P. Lister could’ve kissed him or decked him. He wasn’t even sure which he’d rather, the jammy, relaxing git.
“How did you… how are you so smegging good at that? How can a man who made eight people kill themselves in an afternoon on the Samaritans hotline be so good at that?”
“Don’t let my bold daring deceive you, Listy, I am quite well versed in panic attacks,”
“Cause you get those, don’t you?” This gave Lister pause. “You go through that all the time. When you disappear off to freak out, that’s how you feel, isn’t it?”
“Oh, don’t make me sound so pathetic.” Rimmer’s smugness vacated as quickly as it had appeared.
“I’m serious” Lister felt overtaken, suddenly, by an very bizarre surge of empathy.
He was a pretty relaxed guy, but it certainly wasn’t his first rodeo where panic attacks were concerned. He hadn’t had the most relaxing of lives. And he also knew what Rimmer was like – one whiff of danger and he was scarpering off to breathe into a paper bag with a colander on his head – but that was just it. That’s what Rimmer did. Lister rarely spared a thought to the human drives behind all of Rimmer’s… well, Rimmer-ing.
The day to day terror even their most mundane days must bring, interrupted as they often were by simulant death ships or hostile GELF colonies or pan-dimensional liquid beasts, to a man with the nervous system of a startled rabbit. The fact that never, once, even pre-accident, had Lister even thought to soothe him like that. That he didn’t even know how.
And there Rimmer was, sat in the cockpit of Starbug on an unstable planet, waiting for him and talking him down from complete meltdown. Lister tried to imagine their situation if the decades were rolled back. Rimmer would’ve been all-engines-fired, flying back to Red Dwarf before Lister had even hit the ground. But there he was, being reassuring and a bit selfless and kind of nice.
“I’m surprised you haven’t scarpered yet,” said Lister after a while, and it wasn’t what he’d wanted to say at all, really, but it was all that came out.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,”
“No, but, you know. You weren’t exactly jazzed for us to land in the first place. I’m surprised you didn’t just leave me to it,”
“You’re right, I wasn’t exactly jazzed about you crawling around the carcass of some burnt out supply ship, and yet you did. And I wasn’t exactly jazzed to watch the thing crumble like I knew it would. And now I’m even less jazzed at the prospect of you dying under twenty tons of disintergrating metal and dehydrated curry stocks. And so I’m still here.”
That’s really sweet actually, thought Lister. Thank you, thought Lister. Please don’t leave and please keep talking, thought Lister.
“I wish you were right about the curry stocks, man. At this point, I think I’d eat one dry out the bag,” said Lister.
“I believe you,” Rimmer replied, appalled. It was playful, though; the serious edge to his voice was gone as fast as it had appeared. “Now you’re a bit more zen, what’s your situation? Think you can try and, I don’t know, climb? Or something? I’ve been trying Red Dwarf but the signals too dicey. Nothing’s going through. Until Kryten starts wondering why you aren’t home for your evening Weevil I’m afraid it’s just us.”
That didn’t make him feel remotely zen. They might’ve been a bit of a Mickey Mouse operation on Red Dwarf, but he’d feel much more comfortable knowing that the whole Clubhouse was on the case. He sighed.
Looking at the nothing all around him, he reached out experimentally and found he had a lot less room then he’d imagined. He must’ve slipped into a gap between chunks of ship when the floor gave, and what space he had was no wider than the inside of a chimney. His suit was heavy, and when he pushed out he heard the very ominous creak and groan of shifting metal.
“I don’t think climbing’s on the table.” said Lister in the understatement of the century “I don’t know if there’s any ship left to climb to. I can’t tell. All I know is if anything else gives, I can’t run nor hide,”
“Glad your boundless optimism has made it through unscathed,”
Lister tried to rub an exasperated hand across his face, then remembered the whole helmet thing. “Rimmer, switch on the in-flight telly and surf your way to Channel Real. I can’t even see my own nose right now, let alone find my own way back to Starbug. Unless you plan on Ace Rimmer-ing your way in here and hauling me out we’re at a total stalemate, man.”
Lister was very surprised he made that joke. Ace was up with gazpacho soup in terms of no-go topics, the line in the sand found from years of practiced bickering that divided ‘Rimmer getting annoyed’ from ‘Rimmer giving him the silent treatment for a week’. He had no idea why he’d gone there, and was even more surprised when he got a reply.
“I don’t plan on Ace Rimmer-ing my way anywhere, thank you. It was dreadful enough at the time. Be thankful I’m babysitting you and not orbiting a cemetery planet,”
Ten years, Rimmer had been back. Ten years of a complete return to normal – sharing a ship, a cockpit, a bedroom – and that one bitter remark was the most he’d ever heard him say of the Ace days. These strange circumstances had clearly shifted something in the fragile status quo between them. Despite having plenty else to worry about, he found this thought quite disconcerting.
Lister desperately wanted to try his luck by probing more (what better possible distraction?) but was nervous in the face of potential silent treatment considering he was a rumble away from death with only Rimmer’s voice for company, and so, he hastily changed the subject.
“Okay. Okay. Just keep talking to me, man. I’m going mad down here. Tell me about, erm…” Lister wracked his brains, ignoring the little voice going Ace Ace Ace.
“No more famous first questions. You’ve heard them all and, frankly, I don’t care to repeat them.”
“Ha, Frank-ly.” Lister chuckled, knowing the exact pissy expression that comment illicited without even seeing it “Okay, fine. How about, what would do have done? If you could’ve done something else? Like, besides be in the Space Corps?
“That’s a stupid question,”
“I don’t care! I’m bored down here.” Lister whined. Please just let me pretend this isn’t happening a little longer, he didn’t add.
Rimmer softened minutely like he’d somehow heard it anyway. “Well, I’ve never put much thought to it, really. You know how I was raised. I ate, studied, crapped and breathed the Space Corps. There was never anything else.”
“Yeah but like, you must have a passion, guy. You can even make it up. Just talk,”
“I always liked Geography,”
“I can imagine that, actually. Little Arnold plotting where to invade in his next Risk campaign,” Lister snorted. He felt kind of fond imagining it, comforted by the complete dorkiness of the idea. What a gooey old man he was.
“I liked the colouring,” Rimmer mused, as if not interrupted. “You should’ve seen the maps I used to paint. I got top marks on every one of them. My teacher at Io House called them works of art. It was a shame when I got older and it got bogged down with all that learning business.“
“You’re quite good. Maybe you could’ve done something with it, been less of a total neurotic failure,”
“Geography?”
“No, painting, you git. Not geography. You thought Merseyside was a kind of cheese,”
“It isn’t?” Rimmer paused. “Wait, how would you know?”
Oops.
“I may have found your sketchbook. That one you hide behind the wall panel by the diesel deck lift. With all the paintings in,”
“What?”