I am writing this fic because Kochanski and her back-story was a part of the canon and fandom that I felt had been neglected to a degree. I know there are good reasons for this; a canon two-dimensional Mary Sue character is only to be expected from a male writing team and at the end of the day; she's no Rimmer/Lister. But I have persevered and given it a go.

The plot bunny of epiphany jumped on me during a rewatch of series 7, and in particular Ouroboros. A dead Dave, a golden Kryten and a silent Cat were too good an enigma to pass up.

I have set this fic just after the brilliant fic written by the missus (cazflibs) "Hidden Depths".

There were a lot of reasons that prisons were not suitable places for a young lady to be, reasoned Kochanski as she handed in her CANARIES uniform and equipment to the vaguely androgynous guard at the holding area of the Women's Wing of the Tank. She had been keeping a diary in the many, many empty hours that she was paying at the Space Corps pleasure. She had a vague hope that it would be the source of a great many anecdotes in the Officer's Club once all this had blown over. So far though, tales of collecting the evening meal's custard, letting it brew for a week and using the vile smelling mixture as an incredibly powerful hair removal cream was something she wasn't sure she wanted to share with the pervy likes of Todhunter.

Pulling on the starchy purple jumpsuit, Kochanski once again became JMCRD435 and the guilty thought once again skidded across her mind that at least her parents weren't alive to feel the disgrace of their daughter becoming a criminal. She supposed that she was more of a political prisoner; being held because she and her crewmates had knowledge that could destabilise the entire ship, but that probably wouldn't have mattered to her Father. She remembered how upset he was when he found out her Mother's great great great Grandmother's cousin had been arrested and held for three hours because she looked a bit like Emmeline Pankhurst.

The whirring of servos and the clanking of metallic feet clomping on the metal decking in the changing area announced the arrival of her cellmate. His massive frame, the strange peachy colour of a game show host who has been kept in a dark cellar for too long, was being strangely demure. He shuffled in shiftily, covering his non-existent genitals in a defensive gesture he had picked up when the girls had forcibly re-programmed him. Across the room, Jennifer "Slasher" Williams caught his eye and dragged a thumb across her throat in a gesture of calculated malevolence. Kochanski had mixed feelings about this. There was a certain level of protectiveness she felt for her crewmate. But the fact that the third week of Krytie TV's broadcast had been advertised in the Men's Wing on a huge poster declaring it "Princess Krissie and Jenny the Slasher: Red Hot Girl-on-Girl Soaping" with a picture taken in the communal showers meant that Kochanski felt Jennifer was pretty justified in her rage.

Kryten sidled up to Kochanski and with mechanical efficiency pulled on his large jumpsuit. They both finished lacing their boots at the same time with no words exchanged. They had learned the hard way in their early days that the way to survive in the Tank was to keep your head down and your mouth shut.

They finished dressing and went through the process of being logged, sorted and escorted to their cell. It was only when the heavy door wheeled shut that Kryten burst into a huge grin and spoke to Kochanski.

"Well Ma'am, I must say that it's good to be back."

Kochanski stared incredulously at the mechanoid as he settled down at the table in their quarters and started to fill in the twenty-five-page requisition form, requesting more starch for the laundry.

"Good to be back? We are stuck in one of the most desperate hellholes in space. In Officer Cadet School there were legends about the inmates who had served time in these places. There was a man from Liverpool called Charles Keenan who was put in the Tank in my reality and do you know what he did?"

"I'm pretty sure that he ate his wife, Ma'am"

Kochanski looked strangely at Kryten who hadn't looked up.

"Have I told you this story already?"

"Oh no, he was a school chum of Mr. Lister"

Kochanski shuddered. "Dave never told me that. I mean, I knew his school was rough but he didn't talk about it much with me. I thought he just meant that there was a lot of horseplay from some of the other boys. I never thought that he was buddies with a degenerate, sociopathic cannibal."

Kryten did look up at this comment and fixed the young lady with a stare.

"Miss Kochanski ma'am, I assure you that Mr. Lister knew the gentleman you refer to when he was seven years old. And anyway, I'm sure eating one person is hardly sociopathic…"

"Why are you doing this Kryten?"

"What am I doing Ma'am?"

"Why do you have to be so passive-aggressive? It's like sharing a cell with a moody teenager."

Kochanski took the chair opposite Kryten and stared at him over steepled fingers.

"I think we should have a talk."

Kryten pulled a face; a grotesque parody of a man listening to the sound of a high speed drill going through a stack of glass sheets or an album by Paris Hilton.

"I'm serious Kryten. Back there on the planet we were really coming together as a team. We worked together against the guards, got the CANARIES together and found the boys. Why is it that as soon as we are not in mortal peril you go back to this petty hatred of me?"

Kryten had the presence of mind to look offended but still was less than convincing.

"Ma'am, I'm not capable of hating anyone. I am merely programmed to serve."

"Damnit Kryten, stop doing that! This is what I was talking about, passive aggressive. If it would do anything to you I would choke you. We have to spend at least another year and a half together in this damn room, why can't we be at least a little civil to each other?"

"I am being perfectly civil. What you seem to want is for us to be chummy. You want to come running to complain to me about how difficult it all is and help comb your hair. 'Ooo, Kryten it just won't go. Feed me cottage cheese and make it all better' Well, I'm afraid that that is something I'm not willing to do."

Kryten carried on filling in the forms as Kochanski put her head in her hands and massaged her temples.

"I'm not trying to make you into my Kryten, I just want to be able to have a normal conversation with my cellmate without them making snide comments and undermining …."

"My Kryten, Ma'am?"

Kochanski's fingers slowed and she looked up into Kryten's face, with its slightly twitchy left optical sensor.

"Of course I didn't mean that I wanted to own you, far from it. I just meant the Kryten from my reality was very much…"

Kryten stood. "No need to elaborate Ma'am, I can conjecture precisely what your Kryten was like Ma'am."

Kochanski tried desperately to splutter out the words that would make this conversation all better. Officer training did cover dealing with disgruntled staff under her command but there were no lessons on the best ways to handle relationships with a highly intelligent but incredibly irrational, mother-hen-clucking robot. So she went for her standard approach.

"Why do you hate me Kryten?"

Kryten leant down, placing his hands on the table and looked her in the eyes.

"I do not hate you Ma'am. I tolerate you. At times I even respect and admire you. It is just that Mr. Lister is in love with a woman that is not right for him. I do what I can to convince him that she is not right, that she cannot possibly live up to his expectations and that she will hurt him more than he can possibly imagine. He will not listen. I am now forced by the fact that this backwards society seems to be convinced that I am female due to my lack of some, quite frankly disgusting sexual organs, to spend every moment with this woman. To live day in day out with her, knowing full well that there is no way I can stop him from hurtling down the soap-sud-slalom to his ultimate rejection by a woman he has worshipped for near on a decade. "

Kochanski stood and matched the mechanoid, glare for glare. "I didn't ask Dave to be obsessed with me. I'm not here to take him away from you. Whatever weird relationship you have with him, leave me out of it. He's a mate; he's completely different to the soul mate and lover I left behind. He's a bad copy, a curry smeared fun-house mirror image of the man I love."

Kryten's eyes widened with shock. "You're lying."

Kochanski shook her head. "No honestly, he's just a mate…"

"You don't love him"

"That's what I mean, he's just a mate."

"Mr. Cat and Kryten had to hold him back from leaping into the blank nothingness of none-space after you fell and you don't love him."

"What do you mean? He ran off with you guys to get that crossbow, which the bastard then shot me in the..…"

She tailed off, realising the significance of what Kryten was saying. The mechanoid had picked up what she was saying about her Dave. She looked down, ashamed to be caught out in a lie. It didn't matter that she had been trying to convince herself that it was the truth for years.

"Dave is a nice guy. We were the only humans left in the entire Universe and he was sensitive and caring and he was there for me when I needed him the most. When he became hard-light, we decided that we…."

Kochanski trailed off, watching Kryten as he slowly sat down, staring off into the distance. The whirring as his CPU was digesting this information was audible to her on the other side of the table. She sat with him and waited, looking at his rubbery head, the mouth open and the eyes unfocused. Uncomfortable, she broke the silence by clearing her throat.

"I'm so sorry I wasn't straight with you Kryten but I wasn't even sure I felt this way myself until recently. Prison gives you plenty of time to reflect on everything you've done wrong in the past and I guess I owe you an explanation. When I was revived from stasis, everybody was dead. Everybody. I was quite probably the last person alive anywhere. Holly's mind had degenerated from spending millions of years alone in deep space. He did what he could to help me. He brought back someone to keep me sane…."