This fic bunny started nibbling on my ear when I put on my ipod as I headed home from the office this evening and "Synth and Strings" and "Boom Boom Pow" came on (so you may want to listen to these tracks as you read this to get a sense of how I'd pictured it). I loved Kryten's leaving party in the episode "The Last Day", it sounds like they had a fantastically drunken night. But I'm equally as intrigued as the Dwarfers - where the smeg did they get the traffic cone and policewoman's helmet and suspenders?
For those that haven't read the Red Dwarf novel "Infinity Welomes Careful Drivers", Lister goes on a Monopoly board pub crawl in London on his 25th birthday and wakes up in a McDonalds on Mimas. He then joins Red Dwarf to get back to Earth and never makes it home.
This fic pays homage to the coming together of two epic drunken nights out. Cheers!
Contains spoilers for "The Last Day" and "Timeslides"
*********************
The four remaining crewmembers of the JMC mining ship Red Dwarf were most definitely drunk on duty.
After learning of Kryten's fate, the others had decided to throw him a leaving do to remember. A party to end all parties. However, due to the sheer amount of booze consumed, it was unlikely that they would recall more than a third of the evening.
The ragtail bunch staggered down the corridor, dressed in their now less than immaculate black tie suits. It is a truth universally acknowledged that even a gathering of complete strangers, if intoxicated enough, will be united through the power of a drunken ballad. The particular ditty that wailed and echoed across the lonely corridors of the ship was a strange chant most likely zero-gravity football in origin, about the misadventures of a JMC miner and a less-than-holy Titan hooker.
Lister surveyed the scene through his purple-feathered bird mask. The energy between the group was still buzzing under the surface, and he felt the time-honoured conundrum float to the surface of his booze-soaked brain. Head home, or - ? Lister grinned, swaying visibly. Stay out?
He crossed unsteadily in front of Kryten and with a huge degree of drunken concentration, managed to land his hand in the middle of his chest to slow him to a stop.
"You still wanna sssstrut your funky stuff, Krytes?" he slurred. He tried to tap a conspirital finger against his nose but missed by several inches. "I've got a plan."
The lights in the Science Room were dimmed as Lister fiddled noisily with the slide projector, attempting to drop in a slide as if the task were something out of the Krypton Factor.
Rimmer swayed in the darkness. "Where the - " he hiccupped, throwing off his balance for a moment before he regained equilibium, " - ssssmeg is my Napoleon hat?" he demanded loudly. He gestured wildly with a half-drunk bottle of hologrammatic Moet & Chandon champagne. The crystal glasses of the Officer's Club had long been discarded in favour of a neon pink silly straw. "If I'm going to be lord of the sssstarfleet I'm gonnaneed my hat."
Kryten threw back his head and cackled loudly. "It's on your head, you smeee heee - "
Cat barely looked up as he attempted to iron the creases out of his sleeve jacket without burning himself. "Yeah, barely - " he mumbled to himself.
The pair were indeed correct. The Napoleonic party hat perched on Rimmer's head was at such a precarious angle it seemed to be defying gravity. He righted it with his free hand, pushing it forward so that it now sat at a jaunty angle over his eyes and and swayed enough for his torso to pass silently through the slide projector.
The projector spluttered into life as a beam of light thrust its way through the darkness. The four of them blinked rapidly as they adjusted their eyes to the once-lifeless photograph that was now playing out as a window to the past on the screen before them.
The Lister on the screen didn't look much younger than he was now. Dressed in a filthy pair of khakis, his best Mugs Murphy t-shirt and a lady's pink crimplene hat, his younger self grinned towards the camera, ably supported by two of his drinking buddies. A deep, thumping bass emanated from the screen as the blue and purple lighting flashed in furious passion.
"Isssme 25th burfday," he grinned happily. "We were on a Monopolopolopoly board pub crawl in London. We took a wrong turn after Oxford Street and landed up in a nightclub in Ssssoho."
Cat didn't have the good grace to keep his tongue in his mouth as he ogled the orgy of female forms grinding to the infectious beat. Rimmer slurped audibly from his bottle.
Lister thrust forward his Leopard lager can toward the screen in a call to arms, spilling a quarter of the contents in the process. "It's party time!" he hollered for the second time that night.
Lister's younger self looked a little shocked as four figures suddenly stumbled into the shot, but he soon let out a whoop of drunken joy. After all, with their black tie suits strewn with streamers and their faces obscured with masks and party hats, they looked like any other stag party hitting the West End that night.
The Cat was in his element. With a great flourish he slid with a yowl into the centre of the dancefloor and began to dance, flick and spin like his body was liquid. A small crowd gathered to chant him on as he writhed to the beat, watching in awe as he leapt up to latch onto the discoball, whooping as he swung in a perfect arc, reaching down to catch each of their upheld hands, and landed with a grace far beyond human ability.
His efforts were greeted by a bright pink feather boa that flashed over his head, ensnaring and reeling him into the most gorgeous pair of seductive blue eyes he'd ever seen.
"You're under arrest there, stud, for murder on the dancefloor," the woman purred in his face. She gave him a suggestive wink from under the wisps of blonde hair that hung over her eyes. "How do you plead?"
The Cat's eyes flitted up to the policewoman's helmet perched at a flirtatious angle on her head before dropping to the L-plate that was pinned to her gorgeous bosom that sheened with sweat. He met her gaze once more, grinning so that his canines flashed in the light.
"Guilty as charged, baby," he purred back.
Rimmer sucked hard at the silly straw, watching in the flashes of light as the bubbles span through the endless curls and loops. The effects hit his lightbee instantly and he smacked his lips with a contented sigh, covering his mouth with the back of his hand as he fought the urge to create a Jackson Pollock. After a moment's thought, his hand shot up to his party hat with the twitchiness that possesses all truly nervous drunks who fear they may lose something. Yes indeed, he was still armed and dangerous. His arm snaked out into an unsteady Rimmersalute, the circles of his twirling hand resonating in his hips and shoulders in time to the beat. He closed his eyes. He may be pissed but he was pretty gosh darn happy.
"Woah, that's mental."
Rimmer's head swung back to reality in a loose arc, as if it were ten times heavier than before. He noticed with a strange sense of detachment as his extended saluting arm was currently ghosting through the outstretched arm of a bloke stood swaying before him. The man's eyelids blinked slowly over hugely dilated pupils as he wiggled his fingers inside Rimmer's arm. He was mostly likely tripping on pills, and not of the painkiller sort. Their gazes met unsteadily.
"Who the hell are you, man?" the guy slurred, each word hitting a different note.
Rimmer pulled away his arm with a subtle thwip as his image disentangled itself. He straightened his hat defiantly, his dignity slightly marred by the way he was swaying from side to side. He bit his straw as he slurped loudly from his bottle.
"I'm the lord of the sssstarfleet dontyouknow?" he slurred flatly.
Lister cast back his head and closed his eyes, the flitting lights still dancing behind his closed eyelids. He took a long hard swig from his lager and merely stood, letting the sounds and smells wash over him. Despite keeping still, the booze in his system swayed him to and fro as his world silently span. He revelled in the snatched moments of awareness that part of him knew he wouldn't remember in the morning.
Before she'd hung up her tiara and off-lined for the night, Holly had warned them that they shouldn't stay in the living photographs for more than an hour to avoid the risk of getting locked in. Whilst at this moment in time his drunken self was trying to dredge up a good reason why the hell they shouldn't just stay here and party for eternity, something at the back of his mind niggled, telling him that his sober self wouldn't be overly pleased if they didn't get home.
Through the confines of his party mask, his eyes scanned the heaving crowd for a quick headcount. Cat, Rimmer....
"Where the hell is Kryten?" he slurred.
Chugging from a bottle of sake he'd picked up in Chinatown, Lister's younger self tried to tap him on the shoulder but missed and ended up falling into him.
"Hey, isn't that your mate up there?" he managed before dropping to the floor.
Lister followed his other self's swaying arm as he pointed to the dance podium suspended above them. Still in his black tie suit and devil party hat, Kryten was happily demonstrating his helplessly jerky dance moves to the thrill of the writhing crowds below; his new-found fans clearly thinking he was re-inventing The Robot.
Lister raised his lager in silent salute, a grin etched on his face. Maybe just five more minutes.
By this point, Lister's younger self was almost catatonic on the floor, yet curiously still managing to clutch his sake bottle so that it remained upright in time-honoured drunken tradition. His three remaining drinking buddies hauled him upright. They'd lost two comrades somewhere along the way, most likely somewhere around Trafalgar Square.
"Come on, Dave," one of them chided, "we can't stop now, fella." He dragged his hand across his nose. "Let's get a cab to King's Cross Intergalactic Station. The WHSmiths might still be open, we could get a Monopoly board from there and work out where the smegging hell we're supposed to go next."
A second one looked like he was no longer endowed with the power of speech. In fact, he seemed to be doing everything in his power not to be sick.
The third staggered over. "Ahhh bugger. I'm never gonna get this thing in the cab," he slurred, gesturing to his traffic cone. Spotting the masked Lister, he grabbed his sleeve and pulled him over towards him conspiratorally. "Hey mate, will you look after this for me?"
Lister merely grinned back, watching the group disappear into the heaving crowd. He balanced the traffic cone onto his head like a wizard hat and whooped as he thrust his arms into the air, losing another quarter of his lager in the process.
It wasn't a good night unless you got a traffic cone.