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The Drive Room was quiet, which was a welcome relief of sorts after the chaos of the previous month.
A lot had happened over a very short period of time and if he was being quite honest with himself, Rimmer hadn’t even really begun to scratch the surface of properly processing most of it.
It had been an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish, a pendulum swinging repeatedly between good and bad so quickly there had been almost no time to process one type of event before it had already wildly switched over to the other, and while the good had only sort of – for the most part – been just ‘okay’, with brief peaks of something genuinely positive occasionally poking out above the mediocrity, the bad had largely ranged from only mildly inconveniencing at its best to genuinely life threatening at its worst. This had gone on for a couple of days but it had felt like so much longer.
For Rimmer, personally, it had been utterly exhausting.
He had gone from initially feeling ecstatic, incredible even, at upgrading his hologramatic projection to diamond-light, to almost immediately fearing for his very existence when his lightbee battery had just about burnt itself out trying to maintain it and that had only been the beginning of his troubles.
For the rest of the encounter with the feral cats he had had to remain plugged in to a power socket at all times lest his battery completely deplete and bring his borrowed extra time as a hologram to a humiliating and, this time, very permanent end.
Things had even reached such a low at one point that he, Arnold J. Rimmer, champion of self-preservation over all else, had genuinely considered just giving up.
It had been a strange thing to experience, and an even stranger thing to have Lister try so hard to convince him to change his mind. It hadn’t made sense. The stupid git had always joked about switching him off before but then, when he had actually been ready to let his light go out properly, for good, suddenly it hadn’t seemed so funny to him anymore. Suddenly, he had seemed to put a lot of thought into trying to convince him to stick around.
Certainly, it had worked in the short term. His little moonlight speech had been enough to snap him out of his existential crisis and convince him to keep on going but once the dust had settled on the whole mess and life on board Red Dwarf had begun to return to normal not even being declared a god had been enough to keep doubt from slipping like a traitorous little serpent back into his thoughts.
The fact of the matter was that as heartfelt and moving as Lister’s speech had seemed at the time, now that the danger had passed and Rimmer had the benefit of distance to pick at it and examine it under the negatively-tinted microscope of his own mind, he simply didn’t believe a single damn word of any of it.
Lister had lied to his face to get out of a crisis before, and the memory of that still stung harder than Rimmer would ever like to fully admit. The cold, hollow disappointment that had dropped into his gut when the others had all admitted that they hadn’t meant a word of any of the uplifting positive nonsense they’d tried to feed him on that psi-moon all those years ago still sat heavy like a stone that couldn’t be budged.
He wouldn’t put it past him to do it again. He just knew better than to ask for confirmation. Sometimes it was simply better to assume and never find out for certain, than to ask and be disappointed to learn you were right.
Frowning at the screens agitatedly as he sat at his station on the back right of the Drive Room, Rimmer slid up the sleeve of his tunic to glance at his watch for what felt like the thousandth time and exhaled a sharp, irritated breath through the nose.
The stupid gimboid was late.
It didn’t come as a surprise, of course (Lister was almost always late after all) but it frustrated him nonetheless. He had been sitting waiting for his shift monitoring the screens and supervising Red Dwarf’s course to end for what felt like an eternity now. He was beginning to suspect Lister might have forgotten completely that there even was a shift to take anymore.
Having Holly restored had largely removed the need for them to cycle through shifts at the helm but today had been an exception. Holly was undergoing a full system detox of sorts, mostly to try to reduce the already ridiculous level of slowdown the ancient old computer had been experiencing since being rebooted. It had had something to do with uploading all of his old files again. There was an awful lot of garbage in there to sift through.
The long and short of it, however, meant that for a few hours he would be offline and therefore incapable of overseeing the navigation of the ship which in turn meant that it fell to Red Dwarf’s remaining crew to continue to handle things as they had been doing during his prolonged absence and take shifts in the Drive Room until Holly came back online.
Flicking impatiently, restlessly, through the various navigation screens and scan readouts, Rimmer’s frown only continued to darken to a scowl.
There was a moon somewhere up ahead which was anticipated to be a reasonably decent supply of some much-needed raw materials for the ship and they would likely have to make a quick stop to visit it for those very reasons, and that ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem at all but right now any mention of moons only served to drag Rimmer’s mood back to Starbug’s dimly lit cockpit, to thoughts of turning himself off and being done with it all, to the image of Lister’s concerned face trying to make an at the time convincing, heartfelt appeal for him to reconsider.
He wanted to forget about it already, to put it behind him and just lock the bitterness away with everything else but it was still too recent in his memory, still floating around in the forefront of his thoughts whether he wanted it to or not.
The heavy thud of approaching footsteps sounded suddenly behind him and he straightened up in his seat, expression hardening as the familiar sight of a scrappy leather jacket finally came into view.
“What time do you call this?” he snapped furiously, pointing angrily at his watch. “I’ve been waiting nearly twenty minutes for you to come and take your shift!”
Lister simply flashed him a half-apologetic half-apathetic smile and shrugged nonchalantly as he made to take his own seat up front.
“Sorry, man. I lost track of time.”
Rimmer’s nostrils flared, anger igniting like a gas exposed to a flame. “That’s no excuse, Lister! Holly’s system clean-up isn’t scheduled to end for another hour at least so you knew you had to be here! I’d put you on report for this but it wouldn’t be much use would it?”
“Hey, you’re starting to get it now, aren’t you? Only taken you a couple decades,” Lister said, grinning impishly before brushing the empty snack containers he had left from his last shift off his seat and plopping down heavily with a grunt.
“Anyway, what’s new? Anythin’ I should know about?”
Rimmer eyed the trash on the floor with disgust, his lip curling, but he bit back the urge to comment on it for now. Kryten could take care of that later if Lister wasn’t going to make the effort to.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said stonily, pulling up the display screens at his own station again. “The scanners indicate there’s a small moon up ahead that possesses some useful materials. Probably about 6 hours away at our current speed. We’d be fools not to make use of its resources.”
“Gotcha. When we get within a good range we can nip down in Starbug and grab some, yeah?”
“Yes, try not to be late for that too won’t you, Listy?” Rimmer sneered, eyes boring contemptuously into the back of Lister’s chair.
He could almost hear the infuriating grin in his voice when Lister next spoke, and his hands curled tensely into fists at the sound of it.
“Can’t make any promises, Rimmer.”
He bit back the urge to fire back some sort of retort, instead choosing to roll his eyes and click his tongue and not waste his breath on such a pointless argument. Lister was just trying to wind him up as always. He wouldn’t give him the pleasure of succeeding.
Silence settled on the Drive Room for a few awkward moments during which Lister had expected Rimmer to get up and leave him to it, presumably to go strutting off go reprimand Kryten for something, but the longer the seconds dragged on without him seeming to make any sort of effort to move, the more he wondered why.
“Are you stickin’ around or…?” he asked eventually, peering up at Rimmer’s reflection on one of the darker monitors.
Rimmer answered him without looking up from the current readout he had been skimming over, his tone icy.
“I’m just making sure you’re actually doing your job and not about to fall asleep at the helm again.”
“Hey, that was one time!” Lister cried, positively scandalised even if Rimmer did sort of have a point. “And besides, Holly will be done and back online soon so there’s nothin’ to worry about.”
“Even so, Lister, it only takes a moment of inattention to bring about catastrophe.”
Lister fought the impulse to roll his eyes. “I’m not gonna fall asleep, okay? I’ve already had me nap. That’s why I was late in the first place.”
“Well, see to it that you don’t, alright?”
“Alright!”
“Good.”
With that, Rimmer promptly stood up, brushed the creases out of his blue tunic and turned swiftly to leave. He’d almost made it completely through the doorway and into the hallway beyond when he froze mid-step and paused, seized by a sudden irrepressible urge to do the one thing he had told himself over and over that he wasn’t going to do, to ask the one question that had been roiling unpleasantly in his gut for the last few weeks and which he had desperately tried to tell himself he didn’t want to know – didn’t need to know – the answer to.
The two of them were alone now, with no likely interruptions expected for a while yet, which only made the temptation harder to resist.
Lister seemed to have noticed his hesitation, turning slightly in his seat to peer curiously over his shoulder. “Rimmer?” he said uncertainly.
Rimmer’s fingers tightened where they rested against the doorframe, gripping the metal so hard his nails could have left indents, his mind fighting a losing battle against his own burgeoning ill-advised curiosity.
He knew better than to ask this, he tried to tell himself firmly. He knew better than to repeat the past and seek confirmation of something he already knew without being told. He knew better…
Apparently he didn’t know better.
Sucking in a shaky, tense breath, trying to steady himself ahead of what was sure to be inevitable disappointment, he let it out harshly and turned his head, only a fraction, back in Lister’s direction.
“It was a load of old tot wasn’t it?” he asked, feeling the knot of anxiety twist and coil unpleasantly in his gut, hearing the tight, strained quality that had entered his voice.
Lister blinked blankly for a moment, not understanding.
“What was?”
“What you said back on Starbug!” Rimmer snapped, all pretence of self-restraint and cool control dissolving instantly as he whipped round to fix Lister with the full weight of his glare. “On the desert moon. You only said that to keep me from offing myself.”
Understanding dawned on Lister’s features and dropped into his stomach with all the putrid unpleasantness of a bad curry coming back to haunt him. He shrugged stiffly, trying to shake off some of the tension that had suddenly gathered in his shoulders.
“Well, yeah,” he began, already dreading where this conversation was going. “But—”
“You just cobbled it together from some of your corny old movies,” Rimmer cut in, ignoring him, the bitterness in his tone so palpable he could almost taste it in the air. “Didn’t mean a word of it did you?”
Lister brought a thumb and forefinger up to pinch his nose in resigned aggravation. He’d just woken up. He didn’t need to deal with this.
“Where is this coming from, Rimmer?”
“You know fine well where it’s coming from, Lister!” Rimmer all but spat, his features distorted, brows furrowed deeply over dark, scowling eyes. “You were just trying to come up with something to make me feel better in the moment. Just saying whatever you thought would work.” He narrowed his eyes and swallowed hard, the muscle in his jaw flexing visibly with tension.
“Just like on that psi-moon,” he added coldly, acrimoniously.
“Oh smeggin’ hell, Rimmer,” Lister groaned, shaking his head and dragging the hand at his nose down his face raggedly. “Not this again… That was decades ago!”
“And I’m expected to believe things have changed since them, am I?” Rimmer scoffed derisively, raising a dismissive eyebrow in dubious disbelief. “That you aren’t still capable of lying boldly to my face and then taking it all back once the danger’s passed and you can drop the pretence?”
“Rimmer, I wasn’t—”
“You just didn’t want to have to feel guilty if you let it happen did you? Any other day of the week you just can’t wait to let me know exactly how much you want to get rid of me!”
Lister stared incredulously down at the controls in front of him. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He knew fine well the kind of mental acrobatics Rimmer could perform in his own mind in order to twist and distort things to make himself miserable but he had really thought, really had hoped that that little moment on Starbug had been a step forwards for both of them. Now it seemed he had been sorely mistaken. Even after that, even after the trouble he had gone to to try to get through to him, Rimmer still couldn’t seem to accept anything other than abject contempt as fact.
He sighed, sitting back defeated in his chair, not willing to look Rimmer in the eye.
“But I don’t want that,” he said quietly, more softly than he intended to, the ridiculousness of this entire conversation weighing down heavily on him leaving him world-weary and exhausted.
Rimmer’s features twitched into an indignant snarl.
“Yes you do!” he snapped, and Lister let out a loud, audible groan of exasperation at that.
“No,” he responded firmly, insistently. “I don’t.”
Rimmer didn’t say anything for a good few moments. His expression was livid, nostrils set to maximum flare as his whole face seemed to contort around his curled lip and scrunched up nose. He rolled his jaw from side to side, tight and stiff, sucking his lips in over his teeth before opening his mouth with a pointed click of the tongue.
“Well, you certainly did before,” he said eventually, his voice hard and flat.
Lister frowned, confused, and finally turned around to look Rimmer incredulously in the eye, holding his dark, accusatory stare evenly.
“What? When?”
“All those times you threatened to turn me off in favour of swapping in Kochanski,” Rimmer said matter-of-factly, like it was obvious. “How about that?”
“Rimmer, that was years ag—”
“Or how about when I went away, then – as Ace or with the Quantum Skipper?” he cut in, not allowing Lister even the slightest moment to get another word out. “You didn’t try to stop me there, did you laddo? In fact you seemed quite happy to watch me go, get me out of your hair. ‘So long smeghead and good riddance!’”
He accompanied that last remark with an exaggerated, sarcastic wave of the hand, his voice momentarily switching to a mocking mimicry of Lister’s accent before his expression hardened back into embittered, icy scorn. “I bet you celebrated for weeks.”
Lister looked at him, flabbergasted and speechless, beside himself with disbelief at this point. How long had he been holding onto all this anger for? He’d never let on about any of it before. How was Lister supposed to know this was how he’d really felt about all that the whole time?
“Rimmer, I thought you wanted to go?” he stated, quite unsure of what else to say.
Evidently, it had been the wrong thing to go with.
“Of course I didn’t want to go you stupid goit!” Rimmer shouted, brandishing a furious hand around, gesturing wildly, his voice pitching upwards into something almost hysterical. “Why would I want to do any of that? Go off and get myself killed gallivanting around as a ridiculous-looking poncy git? No thanks. Not for me.”
Lister could feel his resolve waning under the weight of Rimmer’s reproachful, unwaveringly accusatory stare. It was like talking to a brick wall, and maybe the brick wall might have listened to him better.
Rimmer was near-incandescent with rage, his eyes positively burning with a sour, hurt kind of fury that had clearly been smouldering away in secret for years waiting for a chance to erupt. Now that it was forcing its way out and dredging things up from long ago to shed light on them again in new and unexpected ways, Lister didn’t really know what to say.
He tried to heave an apologetic shrug, but nothing really felt sincere enough to make a dent in Rimmer’s rancour.
“Sorry, man. I didn’t know.”
“Poppycock!” Rimmer spat, and the immense pressure, the seething venom behind it almost made Lister flinch. “You couldn’t wait to get rid of me! You made it perfectly clear on that psi-moon that absolutely none of you like me and not a thing has changed! There I was, ready to turn myself off and be done with it all and you still couldn’t say it. You had to go and make Kryten give the most unconvincing nod the entire universe has ever seen! And then when that failed you threw together some nonsense to do the job instead!”
“It wasn’t nonsense!” Lister all but shouted back, defiant, but it was useless in the face of Rimmer’s stubborn, pig-headed belief in his own version of events.
“Of course it was nonsense, Lister! Flowery words to make me feel like I had some worth! And I went along with it for a while but I knew better than to fall for your little ‘moonlight analogy.’” He brought two fingers up to punctuate those last words contemptuously with air quotes. “I knew you didn’t really mean it. I just knew better this time than to ask.”
“Rimmer—” Lister began, but he barely managed to get another word out before Rimmer steamrolled over him again.
“Just admit it, Lister! Be honest for once in your stupid, pathetic life!”
With a sharp, echoic crack, Lister’s patience snapped and his whole face crumpled into a scowl, fingers curling around the edge of his seat, digging into the fabric.
“What,” he growled, his tone challenging, combative, his eyes wide and piercing beneath his deeply furrowed brows. “You’d rather I didn’t give a smeg then? You’d rather I hadn’t bothered at all?”
Rimmer’s expression faltered, briefly, wavering under the intensity of Lister’s stare but he recovered himself quickly and returned his gaze in kind, holding steady.
“I’d rather you’d meant it—” he began, pressing on uninhibited as Lister tried to interject.
“I did—”
“—but you don’t and I’ve had long enough to rationalise that myself now so there’s no point pretending anymore. Just admit it.”
Lister huffed a sigh, harsh and tired and strained, and with it he felt all the fight drain out of him.
“Rimmer. I meant it,” he said, and suddenly his voice sounded small, almost desperate.
“But—”
“I meant it.”
There was a sense of finality to Lister’s tone as he uttered those words and lowered himself slowly back down onto his chair, a dangerously warning edge to his voice that demanded that Rimmer stop talking nonsense and listen to him, and Rimmer found himself feeling decidedly off-balance all of a sudden, the overwhelming burn of sincerity in the dark brown of Lister’s eyes catching him off-guard and extinguishing whatever biting, sceptical remark had been waiting to climb its way out of his throat next.
In an instant, all that pent-up anger and unrestrained bitterness seemed just to evaporate into thin air, leaving Rimmer a gaping, wordless husk, too beside himself with disbelief to even begin to string together the words necessary to formulate any kind of response at all, let alone a refutation of Lister’s claim.
He had been so confident in his belief that Lister couldn’t possibly have meant a word of anything he had said, had even expected him to agree with him as easily as he had once before, so this continued, defiant refusal to yield to Rimmer’s accusations was quite the unexpected surprise. He hadn’t expected him to fight back quite so passionately. It was enough to almost make him question whether he had somehow got it wrong.
Feeling decidedly unsteady all of a sudden, Rimmer walked stiffly over to the navigation console and lowered himself heavily, somewhat dazedly, into the vacant seat to Lister’s right, where the Cat usually sat.
He didn’t meet Lister’s gaze, the intensity of it now too great to look at directly. Instead, he looked down at his hands, clasped tightly as they were on the edge of the console desk, knuckles blooming white with tension. He ran the argument through his head again, trying to find holes to pick in it but the more he replayed it the more unshakably resolute Lister seemed. He’d never seen him look quite so gravely serious before.
Beside him, he heard Lister let out a drawn-out, long-suffering exhale and could see out of the corner of his eye the way he repositioned himself to face the front again, busying himself with various screens and displays, trying to shake off the uncomfortable tension that had wound up tight like a spring inside him.
In spite of Lister’s unyielding insistence in his own sincerity, Rimmer still couldn’t quite find it within him to believe it. Not fully. Not yet. There were still too many things he couldn’t make sense of, things he needed more satisfactory answers for.
He swallowed thickly, the tightness in his throat still, as of now, unwilling to abate.
“You said you needed me,” he said quietly, after a protracted, suffocating silence, his expression pinching into something confused yet desperate to understand. “But I went away before and you were fine. You didn’t need me then.”
Lister exhaled slowly through the nose but it wasn’t the same aggravated sigh as he had let out a few moments ago. This time there was something oddly distant, oddly gentle about it.
“You don’t know that,” he said quietly, fingers flexing nervously on the console controls, eyes fixed deliberately on any space other than Rimmer’s face. “Maybe that’s when I realised I did.”
Rimmer’s brow furrowed slightly, pondering the implication of Lister’s words.
“So, what, you’re saying you missed me?” he asked, incredulous, already beginning to feel the acidic burn of bitter resentment growing in his gut once more. “You actually expect me to believe that? How stupid do you think I am, Lister? Why would you miss me? You don’t even like me!”
Lister’s voice remained low, calm, defeated in a disarmingly honest way that Rimmer didn’t quite know how to take.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” he said with a half-hearted shrug. “But it’s true, man. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Rimmer mulled it over, really gave it some thought and tried to consider taking Lister at his word, but the more he tried to make sense of it the more he felt like he was adding two plus two and ending up with three plus change.
“But it doesn’t make sense!” he cried, shaking his head vehemently and finally turning his head to face Lister again. “You compared yourself with the Sun but the Sun doesn’t need the Moon! The Sun shines on its own power. I doesn’t need any help from some dull, dead little space rock.”
Lister didn’t say anything but Rimmer saw his eyes momentarily flit in his direction and the anxious, unsettled way his adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed and he felt a miserable little pang of triumph at feeling as though he had finally backed Lister into a corner he couldn’t talk his way out of.
A self-satisfied, condescending little smile pulled at the edges of Rimmer’s mouth but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“So tell me, then, Listy,” he began, straightening up to fix Lister with a cold, interrogatory stare. “What does the Sun need the Moon for that it can’t get anywhere else? What would the Sun be without the Moon?”
He waited a moment, watching the way Lister’s jaw set and the way he closed his eyes and breathed in a steadying, shaky little breath and his eyes flashed with bittersweet satisfaction at his own petty little victory.
He opened his mouth to speak, to discredit any argument that might seek to say the Sun got anything beneficial from the Moon’s presence, but whatever words he had been going to say never made it out into open air.
The moment he had so much as sucked in the breath, Lister cut in, curt and blunt, knocking all the wind out of Rimmer’s sails with a single word:
“Lonely.”
Rimmer blinked, mouth hanging open uselessly until he found the presence of mind to remember to close it. “What?” he asked, tentative, uncertain he had heard him right.
Lister opened his eyes and there was something pained in his expression, something so achingly sincere as he spoke his next words that Rimmer found that he genuinely, honestly didn’t know what to say in response.
“The Sun would be lonely,” he said again, and something strange flipped in Rimmer’s chest at the sound of it.
What? Lonely? That didn’t make any sense. Lister hadn’t been alone. If anything Rimmer had been the one on his own, jumping uselessly from universe to universe deeply regretting ever having left his old one behind, mourning the very real possibility of never seeing it ever again. Lister was saying he’d felt lonely? What a load of utter nonsense. He’d had Cat and Kryten. And Kochanski! He had been the farthest thing from alone!
“But…” Rimmer started, floundering helplessly for something to say, still uselessly clinging to this stupid analogy. “But there are still other planets…”
“Yeah, but they’re not the Moon are they?”
Lister turned to face him then, an odd, tender shimmer in his eyes, the faintest hints of a gentle smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He looked tired, resigned, but there was an openness to his expression that Rimmer wasn’t used to seeing, like he had pulled back the shutters to give him a glimpse of something he hadn’t been aware of the existence of before.
“And there’s a difference is there?” Rimmer asked, his voice suddenly tight with the tension of trying to fight the traitorous little tremor that threatened to worm its way into it.
Lister held his gaze evenly, letting his shoulders slacken slightly as he let out another deep, defeated exhale.
“Yeah…”
So Rimmer had been wrong. It felt strange to have to accept it, felt impossible even now to really comprehend that there had perhaps been genuine truth to Lister’s little pep talk after all and that it hadn’t just been a string of nonsense he’d thrown together to deal with a crisis. He had meant what he’d said about Rimmer being something he needed to keep around, something that had become genuinely vital to his own continued existence, exactly as Holly had said he would be.
Rimmer didn’t know how he felt about that. His artificial heart ached in his chest, too overwhelmed to really take it all in quite yet, but at the same time still too doubtful to fully believe it. He’d been let down before, hurt by the withholding of open affection too many times to count, and even after all this he was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the inevitable let down that he had been pessimistically anticipating this whole time.
“So you need me then…” he said slowly, surrendering to allow himself at least to accept that as a concept, however incredible it still seemed. “But you still don’t like me.”
“I like you just fine, Rimmer.”
The admission was so staggeringly unexpected it almost winded him. That strange little agonised pang seared across Rimmer’s chest again and he hated the way he recognised it as the desperate tug of hope in the face of something utterly unbelievable. His lip curled.
“Now I know you’re lying,” he said coldly, dismissively.
“I’m not!” Lister said, eyes wide and earnest.
“Then why couldn’t you say it before? Back then? When I was about to throw everything away? I gave you numerous opportunities to say it, Lister. To name me one person on this stupid smegging ship who likes me and you didn’t say it.”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I did, you daft smegger.”
A little ring of truth, hollow and undeniable, rang through Rimmer’s mind there and he couldn’t find it in him to try to deny it. Of course that was true. What reason did he have to believe otherwise?
He didn’t say anything in response and Lister regarded him for a long, quiet minute before inclining his head in a half-shrug and looking down to fiddle idly with a fraying thread from his gloves.
“Listen, Rimmer, I know you,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t have listened to me. I had to find another way to get through to you and I just thought, you know, after what the Cat said to you earlier that maybe moonlight was the way to go.”
He shot a glance in Rimmer’s direction again, casting his gaze over the rigid, wound-up tension in his form, the tight line of his jaw, the deep crease in his brow, the doubtful, desperate look in his eyes.
He thought back to those moments on the psi-moon what felt like a lifetime ago now, ran his mind over the things he had said, the strange race in his pulse that had jolted rapidly into existence as he’d reached out to touch a man he’d never thought he’d come to care about. He hadn’t fully been lying back then, it had just been much easier to take it back than to lean into it, to pretend he hadn’t meant a word of it.
Look where that had got them now.
“I wasn’t tryin’ to lie to you, Rimmer. Not this time.”
Rimmer stared at him for a good long while, hazel eyes searching every last minuscule part of his expression, trying to find some indicator of deception, some tiny shred of dishonesty. He felt a little lost, a little out of sorts, like he was floating adrift in unfamiliar seas with no clue how best to proceed. He didn’t know how to navigate any of this anymore.
They had never been this honest with each other before. It had always been something of a standoffish, antagonistic relationship that they had had over the years, pockmarked with all the scars of distrust and petty jabs. Every scrap of vulnerability, of open emotional honesty, had been forced out by the emergence of dire circumstances or had slipped out, unbidden, unfiltered, whilst in an alcohol induced haze.
They had danced around addressing those deeper layers, those moments of almost genuine connection, the missed opportunities for closeness, and had largely remained stubbornly reticent, reluctant to stop hiding behind the familiar safety of the old pattern, to dare to really try meet each other where they were.
They had known each other for so long, and yet only now did it seem they were even beginning to make any sort of progress, to start to peel away the top layers, prickly and defensive as they were, and see what more lay underneath.
Still, it was hard to shake off what has long-since been the previously established norm, to try to slot something new and unfamiliar into the picture.
“I still don’t believe you,” Rimmer said quietly and Lister nodded, solemnly understanding.
“I know.”
Silence, heavy and thick, settled over them like a suffocating blanket, the weight of all of the revelations hanging suspended in the air between them, crystalising into something more solid, more real, with each passing second as it gradually, finally began to sink in.
Lister sounded so remorseful, so regretful of his past actions, so sincere in his wish to be believed now and Rimmer was almost ready to actually consider it, to risk trusting him again, just this once. What good did it do Lister to admit to something like this, after all? After all this time, why try to swim against the flow, to change the dynamic? What did he gain from it? Why lie about something like this… unless it wasn’t a lie?
He liked him? Lister liked him? In spite of all their complicated, smegged up history, in spite of all the ire and bitterness and petty disputes and rancorous arguments, in spite of every foul word or contemptuous look he’d ever shot at him, Lister somehow, in his own perplexing little way, had come to like him. And he had missed him when he had gone away.
Something light and fluttery flitted around in Rimmer’s chest, making him feel decidedly light-headed all of a sudden, a bewildering feeling after the grim, heavy weight this whole conversation had been. He felt, tentatively, looser somehow, unburdened by the crushing pressure of his own doubts and insecurities whispering in his ear, telling him he was worthless and despised. Lister had no reason to stand his ground and defend his word unless he really had meant something by it and that knowledge was something of a comfort, a warm little nugget of hope that maybe he could trust him on this one little thing if nothing else.
Beside him, Lister shifted in his seat, stretching his shoulders and rolling his neck before settling back against the padded backrest and breathing out deeply. He seemed largely to have shaken off most of the discomfort of the last tense few minutes, confident that the worst of it had passed now.
He cleared his throat and decided to test whether the waters had calmed enough to return to some sort of normalcy again.
“Hey, since you’re still here, d’you mind checking the console on Cat’s side?” he said, tilting his head slightly to his right but keeping his eyes on the screens in front of him. “Think a few things were on the fritz there the other day.”
Rimmer’s face opened with alarm, eyes widening and regarding the console in front of him in horrified disbelief.
“What!?” he cried, utterly appalled at the lazy lack of urgency Lister seemed to show towards the situation. “And you didn’t think to mention it? Or even try to fix it yourself?”
Lister shrugged, raising his hands innocently to brush off the responsibility. “Hey, man, don’t look at me! It’s the Cat’s station! I don’t use it!” His lips quirked into an impish, lop-sided grin as he turned and indicated with his eyes towards the console again. “Just give it a look over will you since I’m obviously very importantly busy here.”
He poked his tongue out teasingly beneath his teeth and Rimmer rolled his eyes at him and shook his head, peering down to get a better look at whatever it was Lister believed was wrong with it.
“God, I have to do everything around here, don’t I?” he muttered, but it was only half-hearted. In actual fact he was quite relieved to have left the tense atmosphere behind and lapsed back into something more comfortably familiar. “Where is it?”
“It’s there, Rimmer. You’ll see it.”
Rimmer frowned, sensing something odd, playful, in Lister’s tone and he straightened up to regard him suspiciously, an eyebrow quirked high on his brow.
“Lister… I don’t see anything wrong with any of the controls.”
The smile on Lister’s face only broadened and there was a twinkle in his eye as he shot Rimmer a faux-apologetic look.
“Must’ve been my mistake then.”
“Clearly.”
“You can keep lookin’ if you want.”
“I’ll pass.”
That was what he said, but for a good several seconds more Rimmer did still cast his gaze one last time across the whole console just in case there really had been something he’d missed.
Finding nothing, he sat back the chair and pondered, belatedly, whether Lister had just been messing with him, deliberately trying to steer them away from the uncomfortable precipice of vulnerability they had previously been balancing precariously at the edge of.
He had to admit the familiarity of their usual level of bickering was a welcome return to normalcy after how tense and uncomfortable the last while had been. It had toed a line there, taken a tentative step over a border neither of them usually went anywhere near. Things were out in the open now that hadn’t been made clear before. Something important had changed. It just goes to show just how long they’d been stuck in this situation together by now. Even the most stubborn immovable souls in the universe could begin to grow if given half a chance and a couple of decades.
He should really be going right about now. He had already wasted far too much time lingering about in here and he had plenty of other things he ought to be getting on with but somehow he found himself loathe to peel himself away, content to sit in the little bubble of quiet a little longer.
Lister was humming now, some tuneless little ditty, and he was drumming his fingers on the console absent-mindedly as he flicked through different display screens that only continued to read the same as they had before. For all that he was getting on in years, there were still many things about him that hadn’t changed. He still left a mess wherever he went, still turned up late to his shifts and lost interest real quick if things weren’t interesting enough to hold his attention, and he still drove him up the wall with his terrible singing and mediocre guitar playing.
Rimmer would never admit it, not even if he was dying a second, permanent death, but he had missed this. He had missed Lister’s stupid, deeply frustrating personality more than he had expected to while he’d been away and there was something pleasantly surprising to find after all this time that the feeling had in fact been mutual.
God, the effort it had taken to even get to the point where that could be made known, though.
Rimmer huffed a short, sharp little breath and regarded Lister again, straightening up in his chair.
“Lister,” he made to say, but whatever had been about to follow never made it out.
One of the screens in the middle of the console flashed suddenly and a familiar gormless old face flickered into view, the tired lines of his mouth pulling up in the faintest of smiles.
“What’s happenin’, dudes? What’d I miss?”
Lister’s face broke out into a wide grin at the greeting. “Hol! You’re back online!” he exclaimed, a barely disguised note of relief in his voice.
“That I am, Dave,” Holly said with a self-satisfied little nod. “Clean and fresh and fully operational.”
Rimmer rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest, shaking his head. “Sure, if you can call what you are these days ‘fully operational’…” he muttered.
“You what? Are you doubting my superior capabilities again, Arnold?”
Rimmer made to respond but Lister waved him silent. “Rimmer, don’t get him started,” he said before turning to Holly again and loading up a few screens. “Here, Hol, there’s a moon up ahead with some useful resources. Think you can get us close enough to it on your own?”
Holly’s brow furrowed into a frown at the very thought that such a request would be troublesome for him.
“Sure can, Dave,” he said confidently. “Could even do it with me eyes closed.”
“Please don’t…” Rimmer groaned, bringing up a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose frustratedly.
“And speakin’ of moons,” Lister said, pulling himself up out of his chair and leaning forwards to give Rimmer a firm, friendly pat on the shoulder. “There’s a moon in here too that needs to loosen up a bit. C’mon, Rimmer, let’s leave it to Holly.”
“But—”
“Come on!”
He was reluctant to obey but somehow felt himself being tugged along anyway, drawn away by something intangible and invisible but powerful all the same. It was like being caught in a gravitational pull, like being dragged into the orbit of something too irresistible to break away from and it hadn’t even been the first time that had happened.
Every time he had tried to go away before, to leave in search of something better, he had always felt himself being inexplicably drawn back, returning without fail to the comforting – if highly aggravating – familiarity of being in Lister’s company.
Maybe Lister had been onto something with the whole Sun and Moon thing, about him being moonlight. Maybe he really was a moon, tethered to the pull of its nearby sun. Maybe he was the light that existed because of that.
He had always assumed that if Lister had meant what he had said at all then he had surely meant it literally; that Rimmer was the moonlight emitted from a lightbee moon to reflect back the memories of the Rimmer that Lister had once known but he wondered now whether there had been more to it than that – whether moonlight encapsulated something more, something broader about their relationship to one another.
Perhaps it wasn’t just him that moonlight represented but them, the sum of the two and everything that they made together by being in each other’s company, both the good and the bad.
Moonlight was the arguing and petty bickering, the sarcasm and the scorn, but it was also in the quiet admissions and personal stories, in the knowing looks and rare smiles. It was David Lister and Arnold Rimmer and everything that passed in between. It was something that had been sorely missing when he had been away, something that couldn’t exist without both of them.
“The Sun can’t make moonlight without the Moon, and the Moon can’t make moonlight without the Sun, so who’s making the moonlight?”
“They both are…”
As Rimmer followed Lister out of the Drive Room, let himself be pulled along into his orbit as always, he felt himself begin to feel lighter than he had felt in some time, the bitter weight of all that doubt he had been holding onto since that night stranded beneath the sands of the desert moon falling away with every step, and when Lister turned to flash that same old gerbil-like grin he’s always worn, he found himself momentarily dazzled by it, felt something warm and pleasant bloom suddenly in his chest, radiating out to fill every last bit of him, warming him from the inside out.
Distantly, as the unconscious beginnings of an unwitting smile began to tug on the corners of his lips, Rimmer thought – with a note of fondness he would surely come to anxiously ponder the meaning of later – that the sun suited Lister rather well.