Work Text:
“Afternoon tea?” Lister’s moustache trembled with the force of his scoff. “All those tiny little cups and cucumber sandwiches? You know the younger boys will hate it. You know I’ll hate it. Why are you doing this to me?”
“It’s necessary training for when they’ve achieved what they’ve set out to achieve.” Rimmer was on fine form. How he managed to be this officious while lounging half-naked on the captain’s bed was beyond Lister’s comprehension. “They need to learn how to schmooze. Who better than the highest-ranking person on the ship to show them how it’s done?”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
“Oh, all right!” Rimmer kicked vaguely at the cushion nearest his feet. “You’re the last person they should be ‘learning’ from, but I only got them to agree because it’s you. They’ll be on their best behaviour regardless — you can be sure of that.”
“Thought so. Just don’t be surprised if Howie comes home wearing a saucer on his head. I’ll tell him it’s the latest fashion in Nob-land.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“I would.”
“You wouldn’t. And if you value our relationship, you won’t smoke around them either.”
“I know!” Lister exclaimed, offended. Much as he loved his cigars and rollies, he had never smoked either around the boys, whether in or ex utero, a fact that Rimmer had not once acknowledged during 20-odd years. “What do you take me for?”
“Good.” Rimmer blew out a breath. “Now that’s out of the way, what were you saying about that new Dionian sparkling wine? Highly recommended by The Space Oenophile, was it?”
Sometimes, it was frightening (and exciting) how quickly Rimmer could switch gears.
Arnie gently removed the empty teacup from atop his youngest brother’s head. “Uncle Dave was joking, Howie.”
Howie stuck out his lower lip. Teatime had already gone on too long for his liking, but Father had told him to be a good boy and sit through the whole thing. Still, there were consolations. “May I please have another slice of chocolate cake?” he asked in his extra-formal voice.
Uncle Dave chuckled and pushed a laden tray towards him. “Have three if you want.”
As Howie crammed two fat slices of cake into his mouth at once, Johnny cleared his throat. “Can we talk to you about something?”
“’Course you can.”
“Father wants me and Frankie to take these exams.” He said exams as though it referred to a nasty space virus. “The pre-Space Corps entry exams, or in Frankie’s case, the pre-Junior Space Corps entry exams.”
“Ah.”
“Another beautiful boy,” the image of Rimmer told him jubilantly. “We’ve named him Frank.”
“Frank,” Lister repeated, a suspicion that had been nagging at him since Johnny’s birth coming to the forefront of his mind. “You’ve named him Frank. As in your brother.”
“Yes.”
“Like you named Johnny, well, John. As in your brother.”
“Er, yes. Your point is?”
“What are you playing at, Arn?”
He wasn’t sure what sort of response he expected, but Rimmer looking at him like he’d gone mad and slowly saying “They’re perfectly normal, sensible names” wasn’t it. “Laura’s adamantly against ‘Julius’ and ‘Napoleon’ and names of that nature, and to be honest, she’s right.”
Strictly speaking, this was true, but…
“No, no ‘but’. I don’t lecture you on how to raise your children, do I, sir? So I’ll thank you to refrain from doing it to me.”
“My chil - what children?”
Rimmer’s smug smile was terrible to behold on the colour-unbalanced vid screen. “Exactly. Oh, look at that, he’s crying. Toodle pipski!”
“It’s demented,” Frankie complained, spraying crumbs everywhere. “We found out the other day that he’s got a twenty-year life plan drawn up for each of us.”
“That is demented.” Lister tapped his unlit cigar against the table for emphasis. “I had suspicions, but I had no idea it was that bad. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Why didn’t he tell me?, he didn’t add. He knew why: Rimmer was all too aware that Lister would disapprove and ultimately persuade him otherwise. “Have you talked to your mum about this?”
“A bit,” Johnny sighed. “She’s been at him to stop pressuring us so much, but she’s - well, she’s from Io, isn’t she? She got away from the place, but she doesn’t not like the idea of us becoming officers and all that smeg. For her it’s a matter of us being ‘ready’ first.”
“Yeah, except we’ll never be ‘ready’ for that life.”
“Fair enough.” Lister refilled all of their cups in turn, only sloshing a small amount over the rim of Frankie’s. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s the same for your father. He’s a long way and several decades from Io, but he can’t let go of all of it, know what I mean? He had a hard time of it when he was young.”
“I want to be an artist,” Howie piped up. “I haven’t told Father yet, though.” He had broken the third slice of cake into small pieces and was now sticking them together to form some sort of abstract sculpture. Whatever it was, it looked good.
“You can be whatever you want,” Arnie reassured him absently from behind his book. He had always been a serene child, not a rebellious bone in his body; happy to try and meet whatever expectations were placed on him, he’d grown into a serene adult who was going up, up, up the zi…was going places.
The younger three, Lister knew, were not cut from the same cloth. He caught Howie’s earnest, shining gaze and shuddered a little at the thought of it clouded by the stress of a career path he hated.
No more of that. “I’ll talk to him. More sandwiches?”
“Ah, hello. How did it go?”
“You’re too hard on them,” Lister said without preamble. “Stop with the exams and the ‘life plan’ smeg.”
Rimmer coughed into his glass of expensive cognac before setting it on the coffee table. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Aha!” Lister untied his cravat with one sweep of his hand and tossed it aside before sitting down. “So you knew I’d say that.”
“With respect, sir, I don’t tell you how to - ”
“How to raise my nonexistent kids. Yes, I know. But Arn, they’re miserable.”
“Arnie isn’t.”
“Yeah, that’s only one out of four. You can’t expect the others to be clones of him. I mean, look at your brothers. Did all four of you have the same personality, value the same things in life? Have the same strengths and weaknesses?”
“Actually, yes. John, Frank, and Howard did, anyway. I was the anomaly.”
“Ah, there it is, see? ‘The anomaly’.” Lister hadn’t anticipated the conversation becoming so profound so quickly, but it was too late to turn back now. “You weren’t broken, you know. Just different. And you need to let go of whatever smeg from your family you’re holding on to about that.”
“I’m not holding on to anything.”
“Yes, you are.” There was far too little nicotine in Lister’s system for Rimmer’s nonsense, and it was making him tetchy. “You want to raise four boys to be four officers, just like your parents did. By no stretch of the imagination is that ‘letting go’.”
The frown lines in Rimmer’s forehead deepened, and his shoulders went up, as they tended to do when he felt defensive. “What harm is there in pushing them a bit?”
“A bit?” Lister repeated in disbelief, squinting at Rimmer through the cloud of cigar smoke he’d just produced.
“Not all of us - ” Rimmer paused to wave away some of the white haze so that they were properly facing each other again. “Not all of us can become Captain through sheer jamminess.”
“Oh, here we go!”
“It took me a long time, yes, but the conventional path worked for me. Look where I am now, living the dream — officer, married, four sons.”
“Thanks, Rimmer. I feel truly special.”
“I was going to say ‘loving partner’ before my loving partner so rudely interrupted.”
Slightly mollified, whether by the nicotine or Rimmer’s words, Lister motioned for him to join him on the bed. Rimmer sat down close enough for their feet to knock together and stole the cigar away for a single brief puff. That was all he tended to allow himself these days.
“Come on. You didn’t get here, or get me, by being…I don’t know…Todhunter.”
“Must you mention that man?”
“Passing every exam on the first try, posh weekends brushing horses or kicking cricket balls or whatever it is they do — that’s not you.”
“I know.”
“If Arnie’s into that sort of thing, though, that’s okay. If the younger boys aren’t, that’s okay too.”
Rimmer leaned back on his hands and stared up at the ceiling. “I know,” he sighed after a prolonged silence. “Sometimes I just…don’t remember.”
“It’s not always easy.” Lister rested a heavy hand on his thigh. “Good thing you’ve got me to remind you, then, eh?”
Rimmer looked over at him with a smile. “D’you know, Howie showed me one of his drawings the other day. It’s a pencil outline of a Starbug, really detailed. Maybe he could show you next time you see him?”
“Maybe he could.”
“It’d look marvellous on your office wall.”
Lister grinned. “I’d be honoured. So…how much time have we got before you need to get back?”