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Rimmer didn’t appreciate distractions even at the best of times. He liked to appear busy, studious, focused – anything to avoid looking like the alternative.
It was something he had done for years, mostly just to give off an air of motivated enthusiasm for his work in the slim hopes that some generous superior with a good eye for talent would notice and decide to throw him a bone and give him a promotion.
It had never actually worked out that way, though, and with Red Dwarf largely empty these days, with all but one of its original crew complement dead and gone, his once lowly status as a Second Technician now rendered him, laughably, the highest rank on the ship, so who he thought he was still trying to impress or convince with maintaining this act was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was just force of habit.
Rimmer was consistent, hard-wired into his old routines and patterns so completely that even in spite of it all being a futile and worthless endeavour in the grand scheme of things, he still insisted on trying to pass the smegging Astro-Navigation exam. When he wasn’t patrolling the ship bossing skutters around and generally making a royal nuisance of himself by nit-picking and complaining about every minor thing, he was holed up in the bunk room with a revision textbook on his lap and a stony look of concentration on his face.
At times like these, he absolutely did not want to be disturbed.
At times like these, of course, Lister always seemed to decide to do just that.
Plopping himself down unceremoniously on the sleeping quarters’ couch, a pack of Leopard Lager under one arm and an armful of snacks under the other, Lister let out a grunt as he made himself comfortable while Rimmer closed his eyes beside him and took a long, forcefully restrained breath in through the nose, his mouth drawn together in a tight, thin line.
“Lister,” he said, as evenly as he could through gritted teeth. “I am busy.”
Lister spared him a quick glance in acknowledgement, muttered something in response that was probably along the lines of ‘I know,’ and then reached for the television remote and as soon as he did that, all hopes of restraint were reduced to ashes in the wake of incandescent, nostril-flaring irritation.
“Which means I do not want to be disturbed!” Rimmer snapped, swiping a hand out to try to snatch the remote from his hands and missing as Lister held it just out of reach. “Some of us on board this ship have more important things to do than watch trash and eat garbage!”
To that Lister merely offered a shrug and defiantly switched on the television. “It’s a big ship, Rimmer,” he said, flicking open the first can of lager and taking a swig. “You don’t need to watch with me.”
“But I was here first! You—” He cut himself off, aggravated, slammed the textbook on his lap shut with a sharp crack and then he stood up, shook his head in defeated frustration and strode swiftly, rigidly out of the room to leave Lister to his nonsense.
He didn’t need to deal with this.
That was how things usually went whenever Lister decided he wanted to watch something. It didn’t matter how long Rimmer had been sitting there, quietly jotting down notes and reading and re-reading paragraphs that didn’t make any sense the second, third, or fifteenth time round. Once the impulse hit, he was more than happy to indulge it. It just so happened that that usually resulted in bursting Rimmer’s study bubble but, frankly, he didn’t really have it in him to feel all that guilty about it. Keeping him from putting himself through more disappointment at studying for and failing yet another exam was probably, in some way, good for him.
In truth he wasn’t actually trying to irritate Rimmer. That just happened to be a common side-effect (as it was towards most things Lister did). Most of the time he just wanted to put something mind-numbing on to distract himself from the otherwise soul-crushing loneliness of being the last living human in deep space, or something soppy and melodramatic to make him feel something. Rimmer was free to sit and watch with him if he ever bothered to put the smegging book down and loosen up a bit. In fact it would maybe be nice to have the company for a change.
Even if it was Rimmer.
Of course, Rimmer never tended to stick around to give anything of that sort a chance. Whenever it became patently clear that Lister was about to disrupt his peace and quiet and destroy what little threads of focus he had managed to string together he was usually quick to vacate the premises and leave him to it.
Usually.
Little by little, though, that had gradually started to change.
Dropping heavily down onto the sofa again one night, the jarring motion causing Rimmer to drag an involuntary ragged line of ink straight across his neat, copperplate notes, Lister fully expected him to erupt into the usual fit of rage and storm off but instead he watched, surprised, out of the corner of his eye as all he did was huff a long-suffering sigh and flip the ruined page over to a fresh one. He made no attempt to stand up.
Lister raised a curious eyebrow but didn’t draw attention to this subtle deviation from the norm. Instead, he flicked the screen on and reached for the remote and, ah, there it was, the irritated click of the tongue, the settling down of the pen. Surely, he would get up to leave now.
Rimmer leaned forwards instead, reaching for something on the desk in front of him and holding it out purposefully in front of Lister, clearly indicating for him to take it.
Lister blinked, bemused, at what was quite plainly a set of headphones and turned to stare questioningly into Rimmer’s frowning face.
“If you’re going to insist on watching garbage at least have the consideration to wear these so I don’t have to have my brain melted by any of it,” Rimmer explained haughtily, noticing his confusion and shaking the headphones impatiently.
Lister took hold of them slowly, turning them over in his hands, and raised a curious eyebrow.
“What, you’re not gonna storm off in a huff this time, Rimsy?” he asked, one side of his mouth quirking upwards in a lop-sided, impish smile.
Returning his hands to his lap, Rimmer picked up the notepad and pen again and clicked it.
“I was here first and, until you came along, quite comfortable,” he went on, ignoring the teasing tone Lister had used. “I shouldn’t have to sacrifice comfort and concentration just because you decide you want to watch Attack of the Scantily Clad Killer Zombie Beach Babes 2.”
“Hey now, that one was actually pretty decent!” Lister cried, only somewhat defensive, a playful twinkle in his eye. “You should really give it a try some time.”
“I’ll pass, thank you, Listy,” Rimmer said icily, turning the textbook balanced on the arm of the couch to a new chapter and readying his pen to begin taking notes. “Now be quiet and let me focus.”
Lister rolled his eyes and gave the headphones in his hands a reluctant, disdainful look. He didn’t really want to have to wear them but whatever. If he had to, he had to.
Plugging them in, he slipped them over his ears and reclined back on the couch, lifting his legs to rest his boots on the desk below the screen, an action he suspected would infuriate Rimmer greatly. He could imagine him tutting away disapprovingly beside him but with the headphones fitted snugly over his ears he wouldn’t have heard it if he had. Maybe these weren’t such a bad idea after all.
It started to become something of a familiar routine after that. Every now and then whenever Lister would sit himself down with his drinks and snacks ready to indulge in an evening of mindless visual entertainment, Rimmer would wordlessly hold out the headphones towards him without so much as even a single glance up from his notes. Lister would pull a face but put them on obediently and the two of them would pass the evening in relative silence, seated at opposite ends of their shared couch, less than a metre away but otherwise worlds apart.
It didn’t exactly make for a riveting interpersonal interaction but in some ways it was a step up from complete and total avoidance of each other’s company. It may be the best compromise it could hope to be. Lister got his movie, Rimmer got to, generally, revise in peace – if what counted for peace meant still having to endure Lister snivelling miserably into a cushion at mushy scenes and flinching every time he heard him laugh or utter the occasional word of commentary a little louder than necessary because the headphones were muffling the volume of his own voice in his ears.
For what it was it was fine – good, even – but Lister always felt, secretly, that it could probably still be better.
Shooting a sideways glance at Rimmer as the current mind-numbing program of the evening dragged on through a slow stretch, Lister found himself surprised to find that his bunk mate’s eyes weren’t glued to the textbook at all, but rather were peering up, transfixed, at the screen, brow furrowed in a mix of confusion and intrigue. Without any kind of context, he was evidently baffled by what he was seeing but somehow it had piqued his interest enough to hold his attention.
A small smile bloomed across Lister’s face as he reached as subtly as he could for the remote and pressed the option to enable subtitles.
Rimmer’s response was immediate. The moment he realised he’d been caught, that Lister had noticed, his expression crumpled and he bowed his head low, shoulders squaring defensively, the line of his jaw set in a taut, tense grimace. The knuckles of his right hand were rapidly growing white with how tightly he was gripping the pen and his brows were knitted together in a mortified scowl as he glared intensely, furiously, down at what Lister could now see was an empty notebook.
The tips of Rimmer’s ears were starting to flush pink and the knowing smile of amusement on Lister’s face only continued to grow.
He slipped the headphones back off his ears and let them rest loosely hooked around his neck. “If you wanted to watch you should’ve said somethin’,” he said and Rimmer’s nostrils flared in indignation as he straightened up to fix Lister with an affronted glare.
“I wasn’t watching,” he lied.
Lister’s eyes twinkled as his smile widened further. Rimmer wasn’t fooling anyone. “You were,” he said, drawing out the vowel.
“I wasn’t!”
“Rimmer, I saw you—”
“What you saw was a brief glance up just to see whatever garbage you were filling your head with tonight, Lister!” Rimmer cut in caustically, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the screen for added measure. “That does not amount to the same thing as actually watching.”
Lister rolled his eyes. Trust Rimmer to bicker over semantics instead of just admitting something had caught his eye.
“Okay, man,” he said resignedly, sarcastically, slipping the headphones back up over his ears. “Whatever you say. Go back to your empty notes.”
Whatever biting remark Rimmer might have shot back at him, it was muffled mercifully by the headphones and bounced off him completely unacknowledged. He could feel the dark scowl being leveraged at him out of the corner of his eye but paid it no mind and simply popped open a pack of salty snacks and proceeded to stuff them unglamorously into his mouth all at once, crunching them loudly in a deliberate attempt to rankle Rimmer further.
For a good long while after that he could positively feel the undiluted scorn radiating out from him even from the other side of the couch but he held his resolve and didn’t risk shooting another glance at him until enough time had passed that he didn’t seem likely to be paying him any attention anymore. When he did, however, it was to find – much to his surprise and silent amusement – that Rimmer had once again ended up captivated by the film. His head was still lowered, angled intently towards the textbook in his lap, his pen resting poised over the crisp, pristine paper of his notebook, but his eyes were most definitely locked on the screen, following the subtitles Lister had deliberately decided to leave enabled.
A smug, triumphant little smirk pulled up the corners of Lister’s mouth but this time he didn’t say anything. If Rimmer was too embarrassed to admit to being at least somewhat interested in what was going on in the movie that was his own problem but Lister wasn’t going to ridicule him too much for it. If he wanted to feign studying as a cover up for occasionally glancing up at the action, so be it. Lister would leave the subtitles on for him just in case.
As it happened, Rimmer was far more interested in Lister’s bizarre movie collection than he was comfortable letting on.
Ever since that first night that he had caught him taking a peek, he had noticed it happening more and more, especially now that he kept the subtitles on by default these days. It was actually becoming quite frequent.
If he were to ask, Rimmer would probably make some lame excuse about the flashing screen distracting him from his note-taking and then retreat stubbornly back to the pretence of giving a single smeg about what any of the technical jargon in his textbooks actually meant. He might as well have still been trying to learn Esperanto with how little he understood any of it… As far as Lister was concerned, it didn’t really seem like all that much fun, certainly not an enjoyable way to spend any significant amount of time.
More and more lately he found himself trying and failing to find a way to broach the subject of Rimmer’s obvious curiosity and to put forth the suggestion of just giving it a go, having him set aside the textbooks and notepads he hid behind and inviting him to just sit and watch some godawful trash together with him – even if all he would end up doing is criticising every last plot point for its entire duration. Maybe poking fun at it could even be a bit of fun in and of itself.
Regardless, he couldn’t come up with a single way to go about it that wouldn’t result in Rimmer getting his hackles raised over nothing and flying into an overly-defensive rant about how he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in doing anything of the sort.
In the end, he gave it up as a bad job and decided to just leave things as they were, settling down carefully on the sofa as had become a habit and leaning forwards automatically to reach for the headphones.
“Wait,” Rimmer said suddenly, pausing him mid-stretch.
He was very deliberately not looking at him, gaze fixed on some complex looking diagram that spanned across two pages of his textbook. He looked a little awkward, a little sheepish, and Lister didn’t know what to make of it.
“Yeah?” he pressed, waiting to hear what Rimmer wanted to say.
Rimmer swallowed thickly, jaw tense, the fingers of his right hand flexing as they adjusted their grip on the pen. “It’s fine,” he said quietly, inclining his head towards the screen. “If you keep the sound low, it’s fine.”
Lister blinked at him, stunned, as though he’d just grown a second head. He wasn’t really sure he’d heard him right. “What?”
Rimmer huffed, aggravated, and shrugged stiffly, rigidly, as though he was having great difficulty shaking off some inexplicable tension he was holding in his shoulders.
“I’m saying you can leave the sound on for once,” he snapped irritably and then, realising he hadn’t intended to come off so harsh, dialled it back down at bit and added, “If you keep it at a reasonable volume.”
Lister felt the tug of a knowing smile on his features again. Rimsy wasn’t slick. Not in the slightest.
“Just admit you wanna watch it with me.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Rimmer sniffed, indignant, clicking his pen anxiously. “I’m simply making a compromise. You don’t need to take it.”
“Because you want to watch and hear what’s happening,” Lister pressed on, smile stretching broadly from ear to ear now. “C’mon, Rimmer, don’t be such a stick in the mud about it.”
“I can rescind the offer, you know,” Rimmer replied icily, still refusing to look up and meet Lister’s gaze. “It makes no difference to me.”
Lister huffed a laugh and rolled his eyes but the smile remained affixed upon his face as he powered up the screen and popped on his latest cinematic crime against humanity and let it play out quietly into the otherwise tranquil silence of the bunk room. He didn’t need to look over to see that Rimmer was looking up at the screen along with him.
They were sitting a little closer together than usual, Lister noticed somewhat belatedly, Rimmer’s form in the periphery of his vision looming larger and less out of reach than he was used to. If he concentrated hard enough he could even sense the subtle heat that radiated out from his hard-light projection, comfortingly warm, almost human.
Cracking open a can of lager, he took a hearty swig and relaxed back into the aging softness of the bunk room’s well-used couch, stretching his legs out just enough that his right knee could ever-so-slightly graze Rimmer’s left.
He expected him to jerk it away skittishly at the contact but for whatever reason he didn’t, instead pretending not to have noticed, his long slender fingers focused intently on gliding his pen in broad, controlled strokes, recreating the diagram from the textbook in his notebook, line for line.
Lister watched him for a while as the opening titles of the movie seemed to take forever to get to the point and then, when the first gunshots of actual action sounded out, he finally tore his gaze away and started paying attention again.
It was some mafia movie he was watching tonight, an obscure cult classic of sorts even if the plot was a tad generic and contrived. Lister had seen it before and had generally enjoyed it for the action scenes and the steamy romance that left little to the imagination. He rather hoped he’d get to see the face Rimmer would pull when it reached that point. It would surely be a sight to see.
Shooting a curious glance at him, he smiled when he noticed that Rimmer’s pen had stilled now that the plot was taking off in earnest, hazel eyes fixed critically but nonetheless fixedly on the action.
“What utter garbage is this, Lister? I’m not sure it’s doing your brain cells any good,” he said, nose wrinkling in disapproval.
“Hush, Rimmer, it’s a classic!” Lister said, and then he thought about it for a moment, frowned and shrugged as an afterthought. “Okay, yeah, so it’s a remake of a remake of a classic but it’s still sort of a classic.”
Rimmer didn’t look convinced, his face contorting into a regretful grimace at deciding to give Lister’s taste in cinema even the briefest consideration. “Whoever greenlit this should have been shot,” he muttered flatly.
Lister couldn’t resist. He nodded solemnly. “He was, actually. Twice. But not for this one.”
Rimmer’s eyes widened and he whipped his head round to stare in horrified disbelief at him. “Wait, really?” he cried, incredulous. He hadn’t actually meant it seriously.
Lister’s face split into a gerbil-like grin and he nudged a teasing elbow playfully into Rimmer’s side. “Nah, I’m just messin’ with you. He did get a lot of threats from people saying he’d ruined everything that was good about the original, though.”
Rimmer sneered at that. “Yes, I can imagine…”
This was weirdly comfortable. Exactly what Lister had hoped it would be. Rimmer seemed interested enough to watch the cinematic car-crash play out and quite content to sneer derisively at every overused, poorly executed plot point and offer more than just the occasional scathing bit of commentary and Lister was happy to indulge him, to explain the various threads of the story and how this adaptation paled in comparison to the original but brought something refreshing to the table as well.
Rimmer grimaced at that, believing Lister’s definition of ‘refreshing’ to mean disgustingly, uncharitably horny and Lister didn’t deny it. Instead he laughed guiltily and took a long hearty swig of another can of lager, sinking further into the easy back and forth of casual, harmless bickering, all the while his body was slowly starting to tilt to the side, drawn by the gravitational pull of warmth, until his shoulder brushed up against Rimmer’s and, incredibly, wasn’t immediately shaken off.
Rimmer eyed him suspiciously, turning his nose up at the stench of alcohol on his breath, but otherwise made no real effort to shrink away from him and Lister took that as a minor victory, relishing the little scrap of positive human connection, however small it was.
Eventually, as was inevitable whenever Lister had too many lagers and too much junk food, his energy began to flag and his eyelids started to succumb to the relentless pull of drowsiness. Distantly, he was still somewhat aware of the film and the point it was at, but in his drink-addled, sleep-hazed mind he was far more preoccupied with nestling as far as possible into that cosy, comforting warmth against his right side, leaning into it instinctively, willing it to envelope him completely. He’d forgotten, somewhere along the line, who that warmth belonged to.
Yielding to exhaustion, unable to fight it back any longer, he allowed his head to loll to the side, resting it against something solid enough to support him but soft and warm enough to be comfortable and as it shifted slightly against him he nuzzled his face against it, chased it as it tried momentarily to flee and as his breathing evened out into something deep and regular he let out one final deep, contented sigh and sank beneath the veil of sleep.
Rimmer, meanwhile, had gone stock still with shock the moment Lister’s head had touched his shoulder, a million different thoughts clamouring together all at once in his mind, rendering absolutely none of them clear enough to decipher.
His whole body was as stiff as a board, every muscle clenched taut and tense, every nerve alight with a kind of strange, fluttery anxiety. In spite of every other impulse that told him he should move away, retreat to the relative safely of the other side of the couch, he instead remained frozen in place, unsure of the best course of action moving forward but oddly drawn to the sensation.
Lister was already snoring gently against his shoulder now, the aged lines of his face slackened with sleep. Somehow, up this close, Rimmer realised that although he was getting on in years and didn’t have nearly the same stamina as he had once had, Lister somehow still had the capacity to look just as young and fragile as he had looked almost thirty years ago when he had first found himself in this complicated situation.
There he was, the last living human being in existence, still meandering his way languidly through whatever amounted to a life, leaning on one of the only things in the entire universe he had left to keep him company.
Rimmer’s artificial, hologramatic heart ached in his chest and he forced himself to look away, tearing his gaze towards the screen instead as what was supposedly intended to be a romantic sub-plot played out in all its mediocre glory.
The years had clearly done something to him, softened his prickly, hardened edges and drained away most of his bite and somehow, miraculously, it had made him care, at least just a little bit, about the lonely heart beating ever onwards beside him, humanity’s last living, breathing bastion for compassion and soft-heartedness and love for all things mundane and imperfect.
He stayed like that for quite some time, immobilised by indecision, equal parts awkwardly uncomfortable and loathe to move lest the soft, welcoming warmth of Lister’s body pulling away exposed too much of the loneliness he himself tried so desperately to cover up and pretend didn’t exist.
Even though it was Lister of all people, there was something about being chosen to be a shoulder to lean against, about being reliable – trusted - enough to be used as something of a makeshift pillow, that made Rimmer feel some peculiar type of way.
Maybe it was the depressing fact that he couldn’t recall anyone ever doing it before – he couldn’t recall having ever been close enough to anyone for this kind of thing to have had any chance of happening in the first place.
In a strange way it showed how far the two of them had come since those first volatile, antagonistic days after finding themselves alone on the lifeless shell of Red Dwarf together. They had grown closer quite without realising it, without thinking that anything much had changed at all. Lister could lean on Rimmer’s shoulder and Rimmer would let him now. He didn’t quite know what to make of that.
He watched the rest of the movie in silence, acutely aware of the press of Lister’s body against him, and as the credits rolled and Lister continued to sleep on, he turned his attention back to the forgotten textbook to his right, using the peace and quiet to try to claw back a bit of academic focus. It was easier said than done with Lister’s breath, hot and damp, tickling his throat, the tight dark curls of his hair lightly grazing his cheek and rendering it damn-near impossible for him to pay any sort of attention to the words on the page.
He tried to write it off as simply Lister being something of a human radiator, but the proximity was beginning to make him feel quite hot. It was too close. They weren’t normally like this. He was almost certain the moment Lister woke up and realised what he’d done he would cringe in disgust at even the mere thought of falling asleep against someone like Rimmer, and boy was it strange to feel the sharp pang of disappointment at imagining that image. Maybe the stupid movie had destroyed some of his own brain cells after all…
After a while of sitting in silence with nothing but the hum and groan of the ship all around and the intermittent flickering of the JMC screensaver that had been playing on a loop since the film had ended, Lister finally, eventually began to shift, scrunching up his face and opening his mouth in a wide beer-breathed yawn that made Rimmer wish he could turn off the sense of smell on his nose.
Blinking bleary-eyed back into consciousness, Lister’s brain was slow to process his surroundings. He squinted groggily at the screen, dug the heel of his palm into his left eye and then brought it down to wipe at something cool and damp at the corner of his mouth.
It was only then as he lifted his head and registered the familiar blue of the material he had been leaning against that he remembered who it belonged to.
“Oh, whoops,” he laughed gruffly, voice rough from sleep. “Drooled on you a bit there, sorry.”
Up this close his breath positively stank, a sensory abomination of cheap lager, curry flavoured snacks with an ashy hint of tobacco and Rimmer wrinkled his nose at the stench.
Inclining his head a fraction to look at him, he peered momentarily down to glance reproachfully at the little damp stain on his shoulder and then fixed him with a long-suffering look that wasn’t so much severe as it was resigned.
“It’s fine,” he said quietly, a little surprised with himself at finding that it wasn’t even a lie.
Lister blinked slowly, slightly out of sync. He was still slightly leaning against him, still pressing warm and soft and heavy into his side. It felt oddly like the two of them were encased in their own little pocket of warmth, cosy and safe, separated from the cold, unforgiving void of space all around them. It was comfortable in a way that Rimmer wasn’t used to.
Lister was looking at him strangely, his eyes still just a little unfocused, a little half-lidded like he was still partway lost in a dream state. His expression was soft, warm, the brown of his eyes deep and dark in the light of the bunk room, shimmering with something that looked almost fond and which made something strange flutter in Rimmer’s gut.
“Lister,” he said, as sternly as he could muster, but the usually sharpened, pointed edges of his voice came out a little rounder, a little more softly than he planned. “Go to bed.”
Lister took a moment to process, the gummed up gears of his brain straining to turn, but after a moment he nodded slightly, a little unsteadily and his mouth pulled upwards in a lazy, sleepy smile.
“Yeah, ‘s probably for the best,” he slurred, the words rolling clumsily into one another as he struggled to co-ordinate himself to move.
He fixed Rimmer with that strange, dreamy-eyed look again, his thoughts entirely inscrutable. He looked a little like he was mulling something over, holding Rimmer’s gaze just a little bit too long, as though he’d forgotten he was supposed to be trying to get up.
Rimmer opened his mouth to begin to remind him but the words never made it out into open air, his lips finding themselves suddenly and startlingly preoccupied.
Lister’s lips were warm, soft and more than just a little clumsy, a little off-target, pressed as they were a fraction off to the side of the thinly drawn line of Rimmer’s mouth.
They didn’t linger there long, probably little more than a few seconds, and yet, paradoxically, to Rimmer it felt simultaneously overwhelmingly too much and decidedly too little.
With a short, wet pluck, Lister pulled away and Rimmer cursed himself for the involuntary way his head moved forwards to chase him, to instinctively follow the warmth in spite of anything else his brain might scream at him for doing so.
He felt unmoored, untethered, uncertain if this was all some strange and concerning figment of his imagination. Or a prank. God, this could be a prank…
Lister’s expression blossomed into a goofy, sleep-dazed grin and Rimmer absolutely did not feel his stomach flip nervously in his gut watching his tongue dart out to swipe lazily over the lips that had just moments ago been pressed against his.
“Night,” Lister breathed, eyes twinkling, and then he finally peeled himself up and away from the couch, pushing off to his feet with a laboured grunt and as the cool air rushed in to fill the void formed by Lister’s absence Rimmer tried desperately to ignore it – to deny fervently to himself that he felt any sense of bereavement at the loss of warmth.
He watched, utterly dumbfounded, immobilised by the incomprehensible impossibility of the situation, as Lister staggered his way unsteadily towards the bunks, oblivious to the bombshell he had just detonated in Rimmer’s mind, utterly unaffected by the enormity of what he’d done.
He just clambered with the same poorly-coordinated drunken difficulty as always up his stupid smegging ladder and onto the waiting comfort of his stupid curry-stained bed and left Rimmer to gape helplessly at him, scrambling desperately to recollect his thoughts and quiet the racing pulse thrumming away wildly in his chest.
“Wh—” Rimmer started, breathless, flabbergasted. “What—”
It took a moment, or rather it took several, but eventually the confusing, maddening swirl of emotions swimming in his head finally allowed him to co-ordinate himself enough to speak and when he did, it came out as a spluttering, flustered shout.
“What the smeg was that!?”
Lister scrunched up his face, peeling open his tired eyes to squint bemusedly in Rimmer’s direction. “Wha…?”
Rimmer’s nostrils flared. Oh, he wasn’t letting him get away with this. He wasn’t going to do this to him, to fall asleep on him and force him to feel some kind of something and then go ahead and do that and act as though it was nothing. No, they were addressing this now.
“You know what!” Rimmer cried, utterly furious at the fact he could positively feel the rosy red burn of the flush that now absolutely stained his cheeks. “Why did you do that?”
Lister let out an anguished groan and rolled over, half-burying his face in his pillow like a child trying to resist getting up. “Why did I do what? Rimmer, man, me head hurts. Can’t this wait til mornin’?”
“No, it absolutely cannot!! You can’t just do something like— like that and then just go to sleep! Do you have no sense of shame? Of tact? Of anything at all?”
Lister didn’t say anything, just made some muffled unintelligible noise and breathed in deeply and evenly where he lay.
Rimmer’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Lister, are you awake? Lister!”
There was no response, save for the incriminating sounds of snoring giving away what Rimmer suspected had happened and he prepared himself to yell, prepared himself to bellow right into Lister’s stupid smegging ear if he had to, but then at the last second he changed his mind and let out the breath as a long, world-weary huff and gave up. He wasn’t going to get any serious answers out of Lister tonight.
Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe he genuinely hadn’t even realised what he was doing. He’d been half-drunk and half-asleep at the time, after all. He might not have been able to see him clearly; might have somehow mistaken him for someone else.
Rimmer rubbed unconsciously, agitatedly at his chest and scowled at the confusing contradictory swell of emotions those thoughts dredged up.
He lowered himself back down onto the couch, reached shakily for his Astro-Nav textbook and tried in vain to drag his attention away from the painful hammering of his heart and the nervous churning in his gut, tried not to think about why the thought that Lister could have confused him with someone else felt more disappointing than comforting.
For the next few hours he stared desperately at the same open page and never took in a single sentence.