Disclaimer: all characters belong to Grant Naylor Productions and the BBC.

Author's Notes: AU which branches off somewhere after Stoke Me a Clipper, but before Epideme. Assumes that they didn't lose Red Dwarf, Kochanski stays with the crew and that series VII is otherwise generally continuing.

A year after Holly permanently configures the hop drive for interdimensional travel, Lister sleeps with a living Rimmer on a Red Dwarf they find a couple of dozen universes away. He's not really sure how it happens, but it seems like one minute they're in the drive room of the alternate Dwarf, and the next he's in Rimmer's quarters with no memory of anything in between apart from Rimmer looking at him and Lister seeing, just for a moment, the eyes of a man who's known the same things as he has: frustration, loss, regret, pain, and, too briefly, love.

They start with hands and mouths and finish up rubbing off against each other, Lister grabbing at Rimmer's arse and feeling him come utterly, shakingly apart, the way he always does when Lister dreams about this, but without the burst of static that always accompanies it; without the spark and tingle of hologrammatic skin under Lister's fingers. He cries for a while, afterwards, all snotty, and Rimmer holds him tightly, his eyes screwed shut, like someone fervently praying for something.

When they talk a bit more, he tells Rimmer how their Holly invented the hop drive to get them back to Earth, but smegged things up a bit, and about Deb and the twins he couldn't keep. He tells him about all the other dimensions they've been to; the ones where they both survived; the ones where they both died and the ship was capable of sustaining two holograms; the ones where they never joined the Space Corps but ended up together anyway; the ones where some or all of the crew had kids together. He tells him about his Rimmer getting his hard light bee, and about him going off to prove himself as the next Ace, but somehow he never gets round to telling him about the feeling in his chest as he stood and watched space and time fold in on itself and swallow the Wildfire up. It's always the next thing he means to get to before he dozes off. So when he wakes up, his heart pounding in a weird way and feeling like he's been dreaming about something he can't quite remember, he's grateful to be able to lie with his head on the taut mesa of Rimmer's stomach and let Rimmer talk about it for him.

"My Lister brought the cat on board, but it was me who got caught with it. It crawled back out of the service duct in our quarters and I'd just found it using my combat magazines as cat litter when Todhunter walked in. The cat got away again, I got eighteen months in stasis. I thought the cat was the lucky one."

Lister listens to the background sounds of the ship. Some are almost comfortingly familiar, some subtly different, and some absent. He'll never get used to a Red Dwarf without Kryten's housework noises. When Rimmer doesn't speak for a moment or two, he glances up. "But you survived. You survived the accident, same as I did. That's some luck."

"When Holly said that Dave had died along with the rest of the crew, I didn't feel like it was."

Beneath his cheek, Lister feels the other man inhale and exhale. His biological, human functions seem less real than the simulated version, his skin both too warm and not hot enough, and, naked in his arms, Lister suddenly feels more alone than he can ever remember feeling before in his life.

"You never told him. Like I never told my Rimmer."

"I take out my memories of him sometimes and flip through them, one by one. He was giving me - signals. I'm sure of that, now. I didn't respond. Maybe I didn't know how to, or maybe I was in some sort of denial about how I felt."

"You didn't know," Lister says, "until you lost him." He's not sure who he's really saying it to any more.

Rimmer reaches for his hand and squeezes it, faintly. Lister closes his eyes. They lie like that for a while, each of them taking what the other's able to give.

~oOoOoOoOo~

Holly hadn't been able to revive this dimension's Lister as a hologram. His disk had been corrupted. Kris and Kryten work for so long, painstakingly trying to restore it a file at a time, that Kryten eventually has to shut down to recharge, and Lister finds Kris asleep, her head pillowed on her arm and her other hand still resting on the keyboard.

McGruder watches quietly, her soft light status stopping her offering much direct assistance. More than a couple of times, wandering around the ship, Lister finds her knocking seven bells out of a hologrammatic punchbag in what looks like a stress-relieving exercise. He tries to imagine what that feels like; knowing you were somebody's second choice. Would he have switched Rimmer off, back then, if he could have had Kochanski? He cringes, inwardly. It's one smegging thing to thing about.

Kris's usually amazing hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. She rubs her eyes, slowly, as she talks. "Kryten and I have run a full set of diagnostic tests on the Lister disk, and we think it'll work. Holly should be able to use it to boot up a viable hologram."

"It'll work," Rimmer repeats. He sounds half-dazed. He blinks, and leans forward across the table. "Are you sure? Absolutely sure?"

"Yes. But, there's a catch."

Kryten clears his throat circuits. "The core personality will be intact, sir. The hologram would, for all intents and purposes, be your Mr Lister. But we were unable to retrieve the long-term memory subroutines. He would have no recollection of his life before his death, and he would be unable to learn new things, or to form lasting bonds. He would simply, you might say, 'live for the moment', and no more."

The knuckles of Rimmer's clasped hands grow white. "He wouldn't remember me?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"And we could never have any kind of relationship." A statement, now, rather than a question. "We could live on this ship together for the rest of our lives, and I'd still never mean any more to him than the smoky bacon Hula Hoop he found behind the bed last Wednesday."

Kris bites her lip. "I'm so sorry," she says.

"He wouldn't even remember the Hula Hoop, would he?"

She shakes her head.

"D'you want me to have a bash at it?" this universe's Holly asks, from the viewscreen.

A few moments pass as Rimmer hesitates. Then the dreams fall out of his wishing and the bottom out of his world, and his shoulders slump. He seems to curl in on himself. "No," he says, bitterly. "No. Leave him in peace."

Later, while the two Cats are off doing cat things down in the cargo bays, and Kris and Kryten are talking with McGruder, Lister follows a hunch and goes up to the observation dome. Rimmer is standing quietly, looking out into the black expanse of space. When Lister puts his hand on his shoulder, he reaches up and covers it with his own. He readily accepts touch, in a way that Lister had to patiently teach his Rimmer to. Lots of differences.

"You okay, man?" Lister asks.

"How did you know I'd be here?"

"My Rimmer always used to come up here to think. Or it could have just been to have a wank." Rimmer raises an eyebrow at him, and Lister grins a little. "Could have been either. We carried on bunking together, so there wasn't much privacy."

"Even after you had Red Dwarf to yourselves?"

Lister shrugs. "Yeah. I dunno. I think it was a stubborn thing at first - y'know? Neither of us were going to let the other one drive us out of our territory. Then, later... I liked him being there. Even if we drove each other smegging crazy. He made it all better, somehow, when I got lonely."

"I know what that feels like."

"Maybe you should ask McGruder to move in," Lister suggests. That earns him a soft laugh, but not one without a certain undercurrent. After a minute, he asks, "Would you have done it? Switched her off - if we could have fixed your Lister's disk?"

"Yes," Rimmer says. His lip curls, almost imperceptibly; nothing more than the wan ghost of a smile. "I'm a bastard. These last few years we've spent together -" He stops, and sighs. "I know she cares about me. And I do about her, in a way. But I couldn't have passed up the opportunity, if I'd had it. If I'd been given that second chance -"

Lister looks out through the glass, into the bottomless sea of stars. They could be tiny, glittering souls, he thinks, every one of them. "There's millions of second chances out there. Universes where we got to be together, for a bit. Ones where we got to stay together. I've seen all of them."

Something gets in his eye, and the starfield blurs a little. He swallows. "Miss you."

Rimmer turns and wraps his arms around him, and they stand, suspended together in the centre of the ocean. Rimmer's heartbeat is strange, and his curls don't look like they'd reach anywhere near the roof even if his hair wasn't neatly trimmed, and everything about him is just off and wrong, but then he says one word, brokenly, "Lister," and just for a fleeting, perfect second - it's him.

"Find you again," Lister says, "out there. Somewhere." He's not talking to Rimmer, and, at the same time, he's saying everything to him. Rimmer draws back, and looks at him.

"No. I'll come and find you."

Lister manages to smile. It's shaky, but it's a smile, and he means it. "Just don't take too long about it, yeah?"

Rimmer is still for a moment, then he ducks his head and kisses him, one last time, and Lister suddenly has the conviction that right now, at this exact moment, there's millions of Rimmers and Listers kissing, millions of Rimmers and Listers calling each other smegheads and gimboids, millions of them getting down to a shag, millions of them losing and looking for each other, over and over again. All run through with the same thread, like beads on a string. The idea makes him feel incredibly happy.

Life goes on.

They will, too. For the rest of eternity.