Chapter Text
“So,” Lister said, not for the first time that day “This is really it? We’re really home?”
“We’re really home,” Kryten confirmed again.
It was a miracle. A fluke in the law of probability. Or, in other words, sheer dumb luck. While drifting aimlessly through space on Starbug, having long since given up following the trail of Red Dwarf, they’d encountered a wibbly wobbly swirly thing, which they soon realised was a wormhole.
On the other end was Earth. An alternate version of Earth, in the year 2180, just as Lister had left it. Maybe it wasn’t technically home, maybe in this Earth compasses pointed you South instead of North and Pot Noodles were considered the height of cuisine, but it was as good as they’d get.
They were home.
“I can’t believe we’ve really done it. After all these years of Earth being our big goal, we’re actually back.” Lister mused as he watched the satellites go past the foggy window of the commercial space shuttle they’d caught a ride on. He’d made this journey so many times when he was younger, drunkenly returning from off-planet benders and the like, but he’d never really taken the time to appreciate the view.
As this universe would presumably have another Red Dwarf considering the time frame, it would’ve been too conspicuous to park Starbug on Earth, so reluctantly, they’d grabbed their things, left it on the nearest moon, and gone the rest of the way on interstellar public transport. Which is where they were now, pressed up against intoxicated partygoers and sharp-suited Martian businessmen.
“ Your big goal, you mean.” Rimmer said, recoiling as one of the men next to them in the carriage keeled over and threw up on the ground.
Lister looked at him, puzzled “How’d you mean?”
“Well it’s great for you, isn’t it? You get to go back to Liverpool, find your old drinking buddies, and slip back into your old life like nothing happened. Or even better, get a drainage grant and those swimming horses you always wanted,” Rimmer ranted. Lister resisted the urge to roll his eyes “But in case you’d forgotten, I’m dead. I’m a hologram. I’m second-class here. Kryten’s model won’t exist in this universe for another twenty years, and Cat’s species hasn’t even started evolving.”
Lister mulled it over. He’d never thought about it like that before. He was always so focused on getting back to Earth, hopefully finding Kochanski on the way, and going to Fiji to finally live out his Plan. It’d never occurred to him that his crewmates wouldn’t want the same.
Lister tore his eyes from the grimy window, mood lowering as he came back to reality. He looked up at Rimmer, who was wearing a loose button up shirt and over-ironed trousers, the closest approximation of casual clothes Lister had ever seen him in. His stupid hair was brushed over his H, barely obscuring it. Lister sighed “So. What are you gonna do when we get there, then?”
Rimmer shrugged “No idea. I’d go back to Io but they wouldn’t give me a second glance once they realised I’m dead. They’re a bit backwards about Holograms up there.”
From what he’d heard they were a bit backwards about most things on Io, but Lister didn’t interrupt.
“I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere to live first,”
“You can stay at my flat if you want. Until you find somewhere else, I mean,” Lister offered, a little too quickly
Rimmer looked at him disgustedly “Stay in your scummy place in Liverpool? I bet the mould in there has mould growing on it.”
Lister flipped him off “Yeah, yeah. Better than living on the streets though, isn’t it?”
Rimmer didn’t look convinced “Maybe,”
“What about those two?” Rimmer said after a pause.
Lister followed his eyes and saw Kryten and Cat across the carriage. Kryten was wearing a fedora and suit that bent oddly around his angular metal body. Cat was dressed as he always was, sharp and garish, and was carrying two bags of suits so full they were bulging dangerously at the seams.The pair were attracting plenty of bemused glances from the other passengers on the shuttle.
Lister chuckled “They can stay at mine as well. I’ve got plenty of pullout beds from when my mates used to stay over,”
“And after that? Can you really see the Cat getting a nine to five and taking out a mortgage?” Rimmer raised an eyebrow.
Lister rubbed the bridge of his nose with his hand “Look, we’ll work it out when we get there. We’re on Earth, man! We’re home! Save the worrying for later, alright?”
Rimmer sighed, clearly dissatisfied, but before he could get another word out the shuttle landed with a violent jolt, and the frazzled crowd of people flooded out onto the dark street.
They were home.
---
Liverpool in the 22nd century wasn’t exactly heaven on Earth. The sky was a smoggy brown from pollution, the rivers almost black, and the thick dirty air left a lot to be desired. Briefly, Lister’s mind wandered back to the artificial air back on Starbug, and the faint tangy metal taste it left in his mouth. A part of him yearned for that taste.
He pushed it down. He was home now, he had what he wanted. He breathed in deep, resisting the urge to cough as he did.
“This place is a dump, bud.” Cat complained.
Lister looked over his shoulder “Look, we’re almost at my place now, just hold on a bit longer.”
“Wow, thank God for that,” Cat grumbled sarcastically.
They did, eventually reach Lister’s place. The block of flats he lived in was grey and drab, but once they’d gotten through the door and endless damp hallways, the room they ended up in was cozy and distinctly Lister’s.
There was a gap on the wall where the posters had been ripped down when he’d packed for Red Dwarf, but besides that, the room looked untouched. As soon as the door was closed, Lister dropped his bag on the ground and threw himself at the bed, making it creak ominously beneath his weight. He was home. He was home. He kept repeating the words in his head like a mantra, waiting for them to sink in. He felt better than he had in years.
“So, let me get this straight,” Rimmer started suddenly, in a tone that suggested he was going to ruin the mood. Lister braced himself “This dimension is almost identical to our own, right? And this Earth is at around the same space in time as ours was before the radiation leak wiped out the crew?”
Kryten thought it over for a moment, before replying “Yes sir, that sounds about correct.”
Rimmer paused like his point was obvious, but when he realised it wasn’t, he continued “What about our alternate selves? I mean, should we be worrying about an alternate Lister waltzing in here in the middle of the night and calling the authorities about the clone of him and four strange men on the floor?”
Lister sat up on the bed and mulled it over, realising he could have a point “But wait, it’s 2180 here, right Krytes?”
“Correct.”
“Well, we’re sorted then. I was already on Red Dwarf by then, Alternate Me is way out in space and he will be for the next three million years. We’re fine!”
“But what if Alternate Lister decided not to sign up for Red Dwarf? What if Alternate Lister decided to stay here fishing for condoms and getting drunk? What if Alternate Lister is on his way back from the pub right now?” Rimmer said, frantic
“Oh, would you stop worrying? If Monkey-boy here said it’s fine, it’s fine.” Cat said peevishly “Now, what I’m more worried about is that it’s been five hours and I still haven’t had a nap.”
“Oh, smeg, yeah. Sorry man,” Lister said hopping up from the bed and starting to check the cupboards for the pull-out beds
“I’m still not sure about this,” Rimmer said uneasily.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lister dismissed.
It was going to be a long night.
---
Around lunchtime the next day, a human, a hologram, an android, and a creature evolved from cats were headed to the Liverpool Megamart on a supply run. The ‘other Lister’ seemed to already be long gone, and as it turns out, food goes a bit gross if you leave it alone for a year (even if it was in the fridge). There had also been much grumbling about the state of the apartment, especially the dirt and lack of presentable furniture, so off to the Mart they went.
At some point in the early 22nd century, all major shopping chains had been merged into one destination, the Megamart. It was a supermarket, an Ikea, and even one of those funny dingy little corner shops nobody ever seems to walk into. It was the one-stop destination for anything you could ever need to buy, and also not a great place to go incognito, which was something that had inspired a tirade of whinging from Rimmer.
“God, would you pipe down?” Lister snapped “First it was the vague possibility of a double me, now it’s the vague possibility someone could see your H when you go shopping. We can’t just be hermits. Cat and I need to eat, Kryten needs something to clean with, and you just need to stop complaining. Come on, we’re nearly there now,”
As it turned out, they weren’t nearly there at all, but after what felt like another hour of walking, the megamart didn’t disappoint. The building, inside and out, was so large and had so many things going on simultaneously it could barely be comprehended, with layers upon layers of stores and steep curved walls that led to a skylight at the top, giving an unimpressive view of the soil-coloured Earth skies.
“Where to first?” Rimmer said, still looking uneasy.
“Well,” Lister sighed, looking around the uncountable amount of shops. He’d been here a few times, before the accident, but it never failed to leave him in awe “I dunno. Where takes your fancy?”
“I’m getting some clothes. Two suits is not enough to keep a man sane,” Cat interjected, before disappearing into the heaving crowds of people.
“Well, I suppose that’s him sorted.” Rimmer said weakly, watching the spot in the crowd he’d just been absorbed into “Does he even have any money?”
Lister laughed “No, God knows what he’d buy. He’ll get bored and come back in a minute,”
Kryten eventually left in search of cleaning supplies, while Rimmer borrowed some of Lister’s dollarpounds and head off himself, grumbling the whole way that the arrangement made him feel like he was getting an allowance from his mum.
And then Lister was alone, and somehow the crowds began to look bigger. Oh well, he thought, might as well just have a look around and see what he could find. As he wandered, his eyes were drawn to a group of teens, dressed in violently coloured clothing that hadn’t been in style since he was their age, milling about by a shop. He noticed as he passed them that they were staring at him funnily, as if they recognised him.
One of the teenagers, a girl who looked about sixteen, maybe seventeen, with multicoloured hair that reached her waist, began heading towards him in fast strides.
“Oi,” the girl said, putting her hands on her hips and standing in front of him. Her friends let out awed giggles from behind her.
Lister looked up at her warily “Yeah?”
“Are you the Om guy?”
Lister blinked at her vacantly for a moment, before the realisation hit him over the head and stole his wallet “Oh. You mean like, the song Om?”
She nodded eagerly.
Lister relaxed, puffing out his chest a little “Yeah, yeah that was me. Why, did ya parents see my band or somethin’?”
She laughed, almost incredulously “No, no, not the sort of stuff my dusty old cryptofacist parents would be into.”
“Your- What?”
“They just don’t make music like it anymore. The artistry! The raw feeling captured in every ‘Om’,”
Before Lister could even begin to form a response, the girl was already on her way back to her friends.
“Love your stuff!” she shouted finally over her shoulder.
Just as Lister thought he might be safe to collect his thoughts for a minute and work out what had just happened, the girl ran back towards him, panting “Me again, sorry. Do you think you could sign this for me?”
---
Earth, and being back on it, Lister had decided, was weird. He looked up at the big megamart skylight. A familiar sight to him, but one that somehow felt new and alien now. Like he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He’d got feelings like this before, like when he’d first met Ace Rimmer, a feeling like there was something not quite right. Weird dimensional travel stuff, he supposed, but he had a gnawing feeling it was more than that.
As far as he was concerned, it could keep gnawing. He decided to head to find Kryten.
It didn’t take him too long, as Kryten was just where Lister thought he would be, a bright white shop called ‘Cleaners and Co’ or something to that effect. The kind of place Lister would put stopping by at on his to-do list, then mysteriously lose said to-do list before he could get to it.
As he headed in, walking towards a suspiciously octagonal head peering above the shelves in an aisle near the front, he found himself between highly stacked clusters of hoovers. Kryten was leaning against one in a way that could only be identified as a man who was on the pull.
Lister looked at him uncomfortably “Should I, uh, leave you to it?”
Kryten didn’t respond, but as Lister walked away briskly, he looked over his shoulder to see Kryten slipping a twenty dollarpound note into the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and saying something that sounded like ‘Treat yourself to something nice,’
That was something a man should never have to see.
He decided to head off in search of Cat instead.
After a lot of walking up stairs, and down stairs, and through crowds of people loitering around benches and trying out their new solar powered turbo roller skates, he finally spotted him emerging from a smaller shop holding armfuls of things that Lister couldn’t identify. As he got closer, he realised they were bath bombs in all kinds of shapes and sizes.
“Cat, man, hey. Where’d you get all that stuff?” Lister puzzled. Cat beamed at him, fangs showing.
“That shop over there. I went in because it smelt good, and there were all these mountains of shiny things. Then this hot guy at the door said ‘Hey, want some free samples?’ so I said ‘Hell yeah I do!’ and he gave me all these shiny things!”
Lister sighed, looking at the towering collection of bath bombs, and after a moment of hesitation, said “You can’t carry all of that. Put them in my bag.”
Cat complied, and Lister recoiled at the glittery residue they left on his bag on their way in. It was worth it if it stopped Cat from getting into a mood for the rest of the trip.
When they all finally managed to regroup in the beans aisle of the Megamart Supermarket (“How can you have an entire aisle of just beans?” Rimmer had complained “Frankly, I think it’s a bit obnoxious. ‘Oh, look at us, we have so much space we can dedicate an entire aisle to the most boring food’. Show-offs,”), they were all far worse for wear, but no longer empty-handed.
Kryten had managed to acquire a good selection of sprays and brushes (when he wasn’t trying to get a Henry Hoover into bed with him), Rimmer had grabbed a small food haul, and Lister, after a while of wandering and getting distracted by happenings around him, had nabbed some clean sheets and pillows for the spare beds. All in all, a successful trip, if a slightly messy one.
The walk back was quiet. The sun was beginning to set, which effectively only meant the sky went from brown to darker brown, in its glorious and exciting nightly transition to very dark brown.
“I thought Earth was supposed to have really nice sunsets,” Rimmer mused “They always look alright in those god awful movies you make me watch,”
“It’s only because it’s polluted down here. You go up to, I dunno, Fiji say, sunsets are gorgeous,”
Rimmer rolled his eyes “It's always Fiji with you, isn’t it? I’m surprised we’re not there right now. We could go for a beach holiday,”
“Oh, shut up Rimmer.” Lister sighed, knowing it wouldn’t stop anything but still resenting the smarmy, patronising tone the man always adopted when he talked about Lister’s plan.
“Yeah, I can picture it now. The knee high water, the floating sheep. Kryten could sit on a rubber ring reading a beachside calculator erotica, I could put those swimming certificates into use… Hey, I bet if you lay still enough we could use you as a canoe!”
Lister didn’t give him the satisfaction of an irritated comeback, and they walked in tense silence the rest of the way back to Lister’s apartment.
---
“Rimmer, I’m not eating any of that stuff. No way,”
“Come on, Lister. Think of your arteries.” Rimmer tried
“No, I’m not doing it. Smeg off,” Lister said testily
Rimmer let out an exaggerated long-suffering sigh, and in a movement that was even more long-suffering and exaggerated, pulled a (now defrosting) frozen curry from the shopping bag and slid it across to Lister.
“I thought you’d say that,”
Lister grinned, and tucked into the curry with obvious, irritating relish.
The curry was the highlight of Lister’s day, which said a lot considering this was his first day on the home planet he’d been yearning for since he signed up for the space corps, that probably said something about his priorities.
The rest of the evening went slowly. The four of them dropped off to sleep on the now far cleaner pullouts, until only Lister was left. Lister and the crushing weight of all the things he’d spent the day trying not to think about.
“Rimmer. Rimmer, you awake?” Lister whispered. At first he took the man’s silence for an indicator that he wasn’t, but when Rimmer eventually rolled over towards him with a sigh, he looked about as tired as Lister felt.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Sorry about the sleeping arrangement. S’a bit crowded to be comfortable,” Lister said, not entirely sure why he was apologising.
“It’s alright, I can’t sleep when I’m on my own anyway. Besides, it could be worse.”
“That sounded a bit optimistic for you, Rimmer,” Lister quirked an eyebrow
Rimmer rolled his eyes.
Lister chuckled gently, before sensing an opportunity to be distracted “Wait, what d’you mean you can’t sleep when you’re on your own?”
Rimmer lay on his back, staring at the ceiling “Well, back on Io I’d always be sharing rooms with my brothers, and at school it was always dorms with other boys. Then on Red Dwarf I was always stuck with you, so I guess I’ve just got used to cohabiting with people,”
Lister nodded, like he was satisfied with that answer, and the two lapsed briefly into silence.
“So how are you dealing with all this?” Rimmer finally spoke up
Now this was getting really weird. “What did you do with the real Rimmer? My Rimmer’s never cared about my wellbeing,”
As soon as the trace of caring had appeared, it disappeared again “‘Your Rimmer’ was just trying to make conversation. Sorry for trying, I won’t in future,” Rimmer snapped. Lister almost regretted making a jab about it.
“No, no, I was only teasing ya,” Lister said placatingly “If I’m honest, I’m not dealing that well.”
Rimmer quirked an eyebrow, as if inviting him to continue.
“I mean, it’s great being back and all, but it all feels kind of, I dunno, off?” He stopped a second to roll onto his back “Like, I always thought it’d be a bit more of a song and dance when we got back. I’d find Kochanski, head right to Fiji, and it’d all go like my plan. Not… sleeping on pullouts, being skint, and eatin’ curries. This is just what my life was like before the accident, I didn’t want that bit back. This is… this is depressing, Rimmer.”
Rimmer looked at him for a short while like he was thinking it through, and for a moment, the room was quiet.
“Well, have fun with all that.” Rimmer said finally, rolling over to face away from him.
“What? Oi, you can’t invite me to spill my guts like that then just go to bed without saying anything!” Lister said incredulously
Rimmer didn’t roll back over, but the smirk was audible in his voice “Yes I can.”
Lister shook his head in disbelief “What a smeghead,”
When he was sure Rimmer was asleep, or at least not entirely conscious, Lister propped back up on his elbows and looked out the window. This did feel wrong, really wrong, but it wouldn’t get any better if he stayed up staring at the walls all night. With a sigh, he plopped back onto the bed and tried to get some sleep himself.