Disclaimer: They are NOTHING to do with me!
Author's note: Yes, some of you may be a little confused, but you see, I am having severe writer's block with 'Love' and I need something to ease the pressure. So this is it. Sorry about the lousy title and summary, by the way. They do NOT reflect the content! Honest!!!
I truly hate you
Sugar puff sandwich crumbs were strewn across the blanket.
Dirty socks were littering the floor.
A shoulder-high pile of dirty magazines were stacked against a wall.
And Rimmer was sick of it. It was his room too, and if Lister didn't understand that then he could just move out. Rimmer didn't care how lonely he got, or how much Holly insisted they should room together, if Lister didn't mend his ways and tidy up, things were going to get ugly.
The man himself entered with a chirpy grin on his face.
"Gooooood morning!" he sang. Rimmer mumbled something.
"What?" Lister asked.
"Nothing," Rimmer sighed. Lister leapt up onto his bunk and threw away his empty lager can…using the floor as a bin.
"Are you going to pick that up?" Rimmer asked through gritted teeth as Lister opened up another.
"Maybe. Later."
"How about now?"
Lister propped himself up on his elbow and took a good look at the hologram.
"What is with you today?"
"I'm sick of it, Lister! I'm sick of this mess! It's unhygienic!"
"You're a hologram, what does it matter to you if it's hygienic or not?"
"You don't need to keep reminding me I'm dead, Lister. The 'H' does enough by itself. Look, are you going to tidy up or not?"
"I told you: later."
"When exactly is 'later', Lister?"
"I dunno," Lister shrugged, "next week, perhaps…"
Rimmer wanted to hit him so much, but he couldn't. So he did the next best thing.
"OK, Listy, play it your way. You have one week. If this room isn't spotless, then you can go."
"What?"
"And don't try and get Kryten in to do the job because I've already ordered him not to," he said, mentally putting it onto his 'to do' list.
"You mean…move out?"
"Yes, Lister, move out. I can't stand this any more. You have one chance, and one chance only."
"OK, fine, fine. I'll do it."
One week later and nothing had changed (apart from another of Lister's mechanical fish had conked out from the grime inside its tank). Lister looked down from his bunk at his roommate's eyes.
"Get…out," Rimmer said, quietly but clearly.
"You what?"
"Get out."
Lister lay back down, giggling to himself. It was so funny when Rimmer went like this. All tetchy and irritable.
"Did you not hear me?" Rimmer asked sinisterly.
"Yeah, I heard you: get….out!" he mimicked, not holding back the laughter.
"So do it."
"What?"
"Get out."
Lister was worried, now. He had never heard Rimmer sound so sincere. He decided to play along, for the moment. He slipped down from his bunk and shuffled out of the room.
Another week passed and Rimmer's mood didn't improve. Lister was starting to get angry: "What the smegging hell is smegging wrong with you?"
Cat couldn't help but interject with: "Where do I start?"
But the pair's argument continued despite this.
"Wrong with me? Excuse me, but I'm not the one who treats his superior's bedroom like a smegging pigsty!" Rimmer raised his voice for the first time.
"It's my room too!"
"So?"
Four hours later and the Cat had got bored and gone to bed, and the argument reached its climax:
"Well, maybe moving out is a good thing: I can eat what I like, drink what I like, spill what I like," Lister shouted, spitting wherever possible, "and best of all, I get to be away from you! I HATE you!"
"You do not hate me! If you hated me why would you put up with me?"
There was a tense pause before Lister got up and walked slowly towards the hologram.
"I hate you, Rimmer," Lister repeated more calmly, "I truly hate you."
He left without another word.
"Emergency, emergency!" Kryten plodded down the corridors of Red Dwarf frantically.
"What is it, Kryten?" Holly asked.
"Starbug, it's crashed! Mister Lister's on it! Oh, I feel terrible! I said I should go with him!"
"Shh, why has he taken it by himself?" Holly tried soothing tones to calm the mech down.
"He wanted to get away from Mister Rimmer for a few days. Oooh, I told him! I told him not to go!"
"Kryten! Shut up, a second. I'm picking something up…a message from Lister!"
Lister's face materialized on the screen.
"Krytes! Thank God! There are these weird silvery ball things, they keep bouncing on Starbug and burying me in the ground!"
"Just stay calm, Mister Lister, sir, just stay calm. Everything will be OK if you stay calm, sir. Are you calm? Please, REMAIN CALM!"
"Kryten! That's not the problem! The problem is that every time one of these things comes near me, I feel…..good. Like I want them to come near me. Then they hurt me, but I still want to be with them. It's freaking me out, Krytes!"
"OK, sir. We'll be coming down soon, sir."
Minutes later, Kryten, Holly and Rimmer had gathered in Blue Midget. Cat had refused to come.
"I'm wearing scarlet today, are you blind? Silver and scarlet? Uh, no thanks!"
Kryten took a seat as he analysed the results of the psi-scan and Holly started up Blue Midget.
"Well, what are they?" Rimmer asked nervously.
"Some sort of orb…" Kryten said vaguely.
"Thank you, Professor Knows-Nothing."
"They have strong powers, capable of destroying emotions," Kryten translated from the sheet he was reading, "and can even affect electronics. Holly, you and I had better be careful."
"No problem. With me on the lookout, you have nothing to fear!"
Rimmer rolled his eyes. They were doomed.
As they approached the planet Lister had crashed onto, Blue Midget suddenly screeched to a halt.
"Ow!" Rimmer exclaimed, as he was now in hard-light form and had just crashed into the control panel.
"Sorry, chaps. No choice," Holly explained, "Those silver orbs, they were gaining control of my CPU. Telling me to crash this thing. I recovered enough sense to stop it."
"They had control of me, too!" Kryten added, "They wanted me to disable Holly. And…I wanted to. I really, really wanted to."
"Kryten," Rimmer said impatiently, "not a day goes past that I don't want to disable Holly. What's your point?"
Kryten just stared blankly at the joystick in front of him.
"Kryten? Holly, what's happened to Kryten?" He turned to face Holly, but instead of her face, there was a blank screen.
"Holly! Kryten! What's happeni-?"
Kryten suddenly jerked the joystick forward and Blue Midget was hurled towards the planet. Rimmer found himself alternating between hard- and soft-light, and it was making him feel quite nauseous. He looked on helplessly as the planet came speeding towards them.
Blue Midget suddenly jolted and slowed down as though it had hit water.
"Don't worry," came a familiar female voice, "I've got it I hand. Just try to get Kryten off the controls."
"I can't! I can't touch him, my light-bee's gone haywire!" Rimmer retorted.
"Try!" Holly persisted, "I don't know how much longer I can stay on-line!"
Rimmer tried as best he could, but every time he got a hopeful grip on the mechanoid, he fell through the desk and had to start from scratch.
"Ooh, Rimmer, they're trying to get into my CPU again!" Holly said uneasily. Rimmer swore that if she wasn't a computer and therefore incapable of real emotion, she would be very, very frightened right now.
"Don't worry, Holly," he said, two octaves too high for it to sound heroic, or indeed believable, "Keep trying!"
"You too!"
Four heart-stopping minutes later, Holly had been overridden, Kryten lay off-line, and Rimmer shielded himself from any rubble that may have fallen from Blue Midget's wreckage. He didn't dare move for several hours, until Kryten brought himself back online.
"Mister Rimmer, sir! What happened?"
"Those, whatsits…orb things. They took control of us all," Rimmer whispered cautiously.
"Is Holly alright?"
"Uh…" Rimmer looked sadly at the smashed in screen. He wondered if he would ever see Holly again. He thought back to every mean thing he'd said to her and felt incredibly guilty. He hadn't meant it, really. Just like he hadn't meant to send Lister away.
"We need to find Mister Lister," Kryten interrupted Rimmer's train of thought.
"Oh, yes, of course."
Maybe then he could apologise.
They trawled across the landscape. Everywhere looked the same, just blue, dusty ground and a grey hazy tint in the air. Rimmer was stuck in soft-light form, but Kryten carried a bazookoid. They both had the feeling it would be ineffective, from past experiences with emotion-sucking monsters, but it made them both feel safer. A silver glow came from the horizon. Rimmer pointed it out to Kryten.
"It's an orb, sir," Kryten verified, "and a large one, too. Stay very quiet."
Rimmer didn't need telling twice. He clamped his mouth shut and they passed the orb safely. Rimmer let out a long draw of breath that he had been holding for quite some time. Things weren't going to get easier. He knew it.
Another hour of nothingness passed before they came across a crashed spaceship. A green, insect-like spaceship. The registration read: 'Starbug 3'. And it was surrounded by orbs.
"Oh, great," Rimmer said in an undertone, "now what?"
"We're going in," Kryten said dramatically.
"What?! Are you insane? It's swarming with those things!"
"Well, we'll just have to distract them, won't we."
"How? The only thing those creatures are into is emotion."
Kryten simply looked at him.
"No," Rimmer said bluntly.
"Sir, it's the only way! Please, just think about it."
Rimmer thought about it. And thought. And thought. And thought. What choice did he have?
"Hey!" he yelled at them when Kryten gave the signal, "Look at me! I'm…er…filled with…joy. Yummy, tasty joy!"
The orbs came gliding towards him whilst Kryten broke into Starbug and started his search.
Rimmer had never been so scared. As they approached him, they collected in groups and formed a mass offensive. They got closer and closer and closer. Rimmer found himself slouching a little. His eyes relaxed and the image was split into two blurry ones. He felt totally at ease with himself. He was still capable of conscious thought ("Those orbs are weird", "I hope Holly's OK", "I need Kryten to make it back and transport me to the safety of Red Dwarf") but none of it meant anything. Anything he did would be the right thing to do right now. If he shot himself it would improve the economy in Venezuela, that's what he believed; that's what the orbs were making him believe. The last thing he remembered was being 'eaten' by one of the orbs. Inside the orb was a paradise. It was warm and inviting. There were no images or lifeforms in the orb, just a sense of peace and tranquility. It was eerily discomforting. Luckily, Rimmer didn't have to experience it for long as Kryten transported him back to the Dwarf.
"He did what?" Lister said as he clutched his tea.
"He sacrificed his emotions. Only momentarily," Kryten explained as he tried to bring Holly back.
"But, he really did it? Really?"
"Yes, sir."
"Wow…" he couldn't get over it - Rimmer helped in saving his life. Not only did he distract these blob things, he was actually devoured by one. "How is he now?"
"Getting better," Kryten replied, trying to shove a cable back into its socket.
"Good…good…" He had said that he hated Rimmer. And yet he was willing to sacrifice his life for him. It didn't make sense: did Rimmer like him? Despite everything, did Rimmer actually like him? Maybe he just felt it was his duty. No, not even Rimmer would go that far. He must like him…
Maybe a friendship with Rimmer wasn't off the cards completely…
A/n: Oooooh, that felt good! Probably a load of crap (it's just a little 'stream of consciousness' piece) but please R&R! (Sunrise, I know YOU'LL like it! You always do!) ;) Hehe!
Anyway, 'Love' should be updated after Xmas - have a good one!!! :)