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Lister would die one day.
It was an undisputed fact, an inevitable, cold, hard truth of the universe.
Lister knew it. Cat and Kryten knew it. Rimmer knew it. Hell, he frequently cracked jokes about it at every chance he got, making light of it all. Hardly a day could go by without him commenting on Lister’s shoddy self-care (or lack thereof) and atrocious diet and waxing lyrical about the catastrophic cardiac event that would one day put an end to a lifetime spent drowning in beer milkshakes and curry sauce and tobacco.
It was an established fact at this point, though, that when Lister died, Rimmer would too. It was just the nature of their relationship. Rimmer had been brought back for the sole purpose of keeping Lister from losing his mind to the soul-crushing loneliness of being the last of his kind, the only human heart left beating at the edge of existence. It stood to reason that once Lister was gone Rimmer’s reason for existing would be gone too and their lights would flicker out together, whether Rimmer wanted them to or not.
It wasn’t something he liked to think about. He had already died once, over 3 million years ago when he had been barely into his thirties, from an accident that he had had an unintentional hand in causing. As far as he was concerned he didn’t want to have to ponder the uncomfortable reality of having to die again someday, just because Lister had to go and be fragile and mortal and human.
It was an uncomfortable truth and Rimmer coped with the existential dread and creeping unease of it all by dragging Lister down into the misery with him.
Maybe if he kept reminding him how deeply unpleasant his fated heart attack would be one day, he’d think about trying to do something to delay it as long as possible.
Fear was, generally speaking, a fairly effective deterrent for most things, and a pretty powerful motivator for others. It was just unfortunate that Lister seemed to be immune to its effects. It was either that or the apathy had set in early and he just didn’t give a smeg anymore.
The important thing was that Lister’s inevitable, natural demise was largely, thankfully, a future problem, something he could safely just brush aside and not have to think about in the here and now, a bridge he would only have to confront the idea of crossing when he finally got to it in maybe another thirty or forty years. It was far off, distant, not an imminently pressing concern and therefore something Rimmer could quite happily poke fun at in the meantime and continue to avoid having to ponder too deeply.
Unfortunately, there were plenty of other ways to die, and although physical health and wellbeing were something that could be monitored and – to a certain extent – controlled and managed, there were other things out there that were far less predictable and far harder to account for.
Starbug lurched violently to the side as a blinding flash of light filled the cockpit, a thunderous boom crashing somewhere in the back, rocking the entire vessel and nearly throwing its inhabitants right out of their seats.
Hands splayed out bracingly over the navigation console, gripping on for dear life, Dave Lister huffed out a startled, hurried breath and straightened up in his seat, eyes wildly searching the various screens and scanners for a read out on what on Earth had just happened.
“What the smeg was that?” he cried, flicking switches to silence the emergency alarms that were blaring aggressively in his face from seemingly all sides.
In the back of the cockpit, Kryten quickly surveyed a screen to his right, a grave look of dismay on his robotic features. “We’ve been hit, sir,” he said.
Well, that much was obvious but Lister wasn’t going to be the one to say it.
“What by? Who are they?” he asked, peering out into the vast expanse of space in front of them, trying to catch even the slightest glimpse of their pursuers. “What do they want?”
“Let’s just hope it’s not Listy’s in-laws looking to put the death in ‘til death do us part’,” Rimmer sneered grimly behind him, his face pale and strained, adam’s apple bobbing with anxiety.
“Ha ha. Very funny, Rimmer,” Lister bit back flatly, though there was a nervous edge to his tone that belied his true feelings on the matter. He really hoped Rimmer was wrong. “Kryten? Any clues?”
“A simulant ship from the looks of things, sir. It was probably waiting for someone to approach the nearby derelict.”
“Gotcha. Any damage from that last hit?”
“Just superficial for now, sir, but we’d best shake them off before they can do any worse.”
“With you all the way on that one, Krytes,” Lister nodded and then glanced to his right. “Cat—”
“Already on it, bud,” Cat cut in, inputting the commands necessary to give Starbug a fighting chance at escaping. “Engaging re-heat right now.”
“Okay. Rimmer, keep an eye out for anything incoming. Kryten’s right,” Lister said, shaking the tension out of his shoulders and flexing his fingers on the controls. “We don’t want to risk any direct hits.”
Rimmer nodded grimly and swallowed hard, his gaze fixed nervously on the screens, jaw tense and mouth drawn taut.
“Why does no-one ever accept a good old fashioned surrender these days?” he muttered bitterly. “The sooner we shake them off the better.”
A few deceptively quiet moments passed wherein nothing of note seemed to happen, which only served to worsen the burgeoning anxiety over the situation waiting apprehensively for whatever the next move would be. It was something akin to the deeply unsettling quiet before an oncoming storm.
The simulant ship was a small but agile vessel, looming somewhere behind on the starboard side, dipping in and out of view so frequently Rimmer was having to constantly switch between different display readouts to keep track of it.
According to Kryten there was a suitably large debris field from the nearby derelict ship they had been planning to investigate that might be able to provide them some cover long enough to give them a chance to formulate a better plan of evasion so Cat and Lister were easing Starbug round to make directly for it, fingers ready to swerve out of danger at the slightest indication of it.
To a certain extent they were somewhat used to this by now. They had escaped from GELFs and simulants multiple times in the past so there was a wealth of experience there to draw upon but it never quite stopped the roiling dread from stirring itself up into a tempest in their guts. Every encounter had an element of unpredictability about it and relied strongly on a discomfiting mix of skill and luck. Luck may have been on their side up til now but there was always a risk that one day it might run out.
On the scanners, the simulant ship suddenly veered sharply to the side and disappeared. “Smeg,” Rimmer cursed, flicking frantically through all displays in search of it. “I’ve lost visual on it. Kryten?”
“I’m afraid I’ve lost them too, sir. They’re probably preparing to—”
The whole ship quaked as a second blast hit out of nowhere, the navigation console sparking dangerously with the energy surge the shock sent through the system. Above them, a panel fell loose and dangled freely over Lister’s head, held on by little more than wires.
“The whole place is gonna fall apart on its own before we even take a third hit,” the Cat cried, attempting to steer away from their current trajectory and out of lock-on range. “We’re deader than crocs and those things never should’ve existed in the first place!”
“Easy, Cat, man,” Lister said, holding a hand out, trying to steady both the Cat’s nerves and his own. “We’ve got out of bigger scrapes than this. Just keep evadin’ them. I have to sort this.”
Standing up, he grabbed hold of the loose panel and tried to reaffix it back in place. Behind him Rimmer rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, leave the smegging thing, Lister!” he snapped. “You can fix it later when we’re not at risk of becoming space mince.”
“It’ll just take a second, Rimmer, don’t be so—”
BOOM!
A third, far more powerful hit rocked the ship, throwing Lister violently off balance. He jerked forwards, unable to steady himself, his head colliding sharply with the solid metal of the overhead console unit before tilting backwards, his body falling heavily, limply over the back of Rimmer’s navigation station.
“Lister?” Rimmer cried out in alarm, a sickening, bottomless feeling opening up in his gut as Lister failed to immediately respond.
“Mister Lister, sir?” came Kryten’s concerned voice to his right but Rimmer could hardly hear him, the blaring alarms of Starbug beginning to fade into distant, crackling static.
His eyes were fixed, wide open and horrified, on a weeping gash on Lister’s forehead, thick rivulets of dark crimson flowing steadily out from it and trickling alarmingly down over his unresponsive face.
Lister was hurt. Lister was bleeding.
Rimmer couldn’t breathe. Tension had gripped his chest, cold and tight, and even though he didn’t necessarily need to breathe anymore, the pressure that was rapidly building in his simulated lungs felt about as realistic as if he did.
Starbug had all but faded into nothingness around him now, little more than a hazy blur of flashing lights and undefined shapes. There was a hollow ringing in his ears, high-pitched and piercing, and anything else that might have been going on had become muffled, as though his head had been stuffed full of cotton. It felt a little bit like passing out but without the unconsciousness.
The only thing that remained in crystal clear focus was Lister. The only thing that mattered—
“…sir! Mister Rimmer, sir!”
“What?” Rimmer blinked, startled back to reality by a hand clamping down on his shoulder.
He felt unmoored, faraway, a strange wobbly tremor running through his whole body, anxiety thrumming under his skin like electricity. He didn’t really feel like he was piloting his own body.
He dragged his eyes away from Lister’s unconscious body to stare, panicked, into Kryten’s gravely serious face.
“I said you need to get Mister Lister to the Medical Bay,” Kryten said, a detectable note of concern evident in his voice. “I’ll fill in for him here and see if myself and Mister Cat can’t navigate ourselves out of this sticky situation.”
“Yeah, don’t get your hopes up on that one, bud…” the Cat muttered anxiously, tilting the joystick in his hands in fervent hope that it would steer them away from danger. “My nostril hairs can only do so much to help figure out where these dudes are at. It’s gonna take a miracle to get outta this one.”
“Oh, don’t be so pessimistic, sir!” Kryten insisted, manoeuvring himself round to the front and hooking an arm underneath Lister’s frame. “We’ll be fine. Mister Rimmer, sir, a little help?”
“Oh, right.”
Feeling decidedly detached and a little unsteady, Rimmer shakily got to his feet and hurried round to assist Kryten in lifting Lister up and away from where he had collapsed across the navigation console. Little by little he felt that he was coming back to himself, immobilising fear giving way to a distressed, frenzied rush of adrenaline bringing the rest of Starbug back into sobering sharp focus.
As Rimmer shifted to take the full brunt of Lister’s dead weight, Kryten let go and slipped past him, sitting himself down heavily in the vacant seat and taking hold of the controls.
Rimmer was thankful his hard-light drive granted him slightly more physical strength than he would have had otherwise but even so he did not appreciate having to drag Lister by himself out of the cockpit and down into the medical unit. Even under perfectly normal circumstances doing that would have been difficult but doing so while Starbug was being buffeted by enemy fire and swerving sharply to perform evasive manoeuvres only made it harder. The relentless tilting was enough to make even the hardiest stomach feel seasick and the lack of consistent balance nearly had him topple over onto the central table and chairs at one particularly jarring impact quake.
By some miracle, Starbug was still holding itself together by the time he made it to the medibay and after one particularly strenuous heave to get Lister up on the medical table and safely secured Rimmer had to lean heavily against the wall to gather back his breath and steady his nerves.
Looking down at his hands, he found them trembling slightly, the sight of dark red blood smeared across his fingertips an unwelcome reminder of just what was at stake here. Lister’s face didn’t look any better, the wound on his forehead still leaking steadily, the deep crimson meandering down the curves of his face making him look worryingly pale under the medibay’s harsh lights.
Never had Lister’s fragile humanity seemed more stark and obvious than now, when all the bravado and self-assured confidence and untameable vitality was stripped back to reveal the vulnerable mortal body it masqueraded around in. It made Rimmer feel overwhelmed with a sense of aching helplessness.
Checking Lister over as quickly and comprehensively as he could, given the circumstances, he was relieved to find that he was still breathing, that his heart was still beating, that at least for now he was alive and still maybe had a fighting chance at survival.
As another violent swerve tilted the ship, Rimmer grabbed hold of the bar at the back of the medical table and hooked his arm tightly around it to stabilise himself in the event of another hit. With his other hand he pressed the palm firmly against the gash and applied pressure, hoping at least to get the bleeding under control.
The medicomp was still performing a more in-depth scan so the full extent of Lister’s injuries for the moment remained to be seen but Rimmer hoped fervently, prayed to whatever god there might be out there – whether he believed in it or not – that it wouldn’t be serious, that it was nothing more than a superficial flesh wound. Head injuries always bled heavily, after all. They always tended to look worse than they might actually be. Maybe this would just be like that. For Lister’s sake (for his own sake, of course, how could he forget?) he hoped it would be.
He didn’t want to think about the alternative.
It felt like he was standing braced like that for an eternity. Lister’s head was warm under his palm, which was a tremendously reassuring comfort, and when he finally peeled his hand away to check if the wound had stopped bleeding he was utterly relieved to find that it had.
The quaking of the ship had largely stopped now and the sound of the engines had died down to a quieter rumble, which to Rimmer’s mind suggested that they had managed to get away somehow. He breathed a tentative sigh, not letting his guard down quite yet until he heard news from the cockpit but the encouraging quiet did allow him to loosen the crushing grip he’d had on the examination table and straighten up a tad.
With a little more stability, he was able to properly assess the medicomp’s readouts and relax a little at the assurance that Lister would likely only come away from this with something of a treatable head wound and possibly only a minor concussion. Lady Luck was still smiling down on humanity’s last stubborn survivor, for now at least.
Free to move around now, he quickly located some supplies and proceeded to carefully clean the blood from his hands and from Lister’s face, careful not to aggravate the wound as he did so.
He wasn’t sure if it was just because he wasn’t bleeding profusely from his head anymore but Rimmer swore that a little colour had started to return to Lister’s complexion. It now actually looked like he was going to be alright and the immense rush of relief that Rimmer felt flooding through him at that realisation was almost enough to floor him, all that frenzied, anxious energy threatening to drain away through the soles of his feet all at once and render him an exhausted but deeply relieved husk of a man.
The hand that had been dabbing away the blood hovered, just for a moment before he retracted it, over Lister’s left cheek, the backs of his fingers lightly grazing the skin before a pulse of something strange and fluttery flared alarmingly in Rimmer’s chest and prompted him to quickly pull it away.
It was self-preservation, he told himself firmly as he wrung his hands together nervously, anxiously, waves of some unfamiliar, strange emotion washing over him, setting off the frantic, rapid beating of his heart again. Self-preservation – nothing more, nothing less. It didn’t mean he cared about Lister on a personal level, on any level at all! It was just a means of survival. He had to give a smeg about keeping Lister alive because it kept himself alive by extension. That was all it was. That was all…
As he looked down at Lister’s face he tried, not for the first time and certainly not for the last time, to suppress that pestering little voice in his mind that told him that that wasn’t all it was, and that he knew it.