Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me, but to Mr. Grant and Mr. Naylor

The words belong to the Oxford English Dictionary

The Quagaars belong in Rimmer's unstable mind: they just came out for a sec to stretch their legs.

A/N: This is really sort of a middle without a real beginning or end. It's unlikely ever to get a proper end but it might get a bit more middle if inspiration strikes.

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"Lister?"

A rather strange thing just happened."

Lister turned his blurry, mostly asleep face to his roommate. He got an unwanted view straight up the left nostril. Sighing, he forced himself to try and wake properly.

"What is it Rimmer? Skutters hold you up at gunpoint again, making whoop whoop noises?"

Rimmer appeared not to be listening. He looked vaguely stunned and slightly…odd. But Lister couldn't quite put his finger on the difference.

"A pod just landed from an adjacent dimension to ours. A bunch of warriors, vaguely resembling poultry, emerged and proclaimed that they were the Quagaars, a nomad alien race who wandered the dimensions selling their wares.

They offered me a body."

Unpleasant images coursed through Lister's head.

"You don't want that man, you don't know where it's been." He muttered.

Rimmer ignored him.

"They quoted some ludicrous price, but I beat them down to a sack of Fun-size Crunchies, a sock and that mug of mould you were cultivating on the bookshelf.

They seem to have a very complex monetary system.

Then they saluted, gave me the body and vanished in a rather cheap looking puff of smoke."

Rimmer blinked and looked at Lister properly for the first time. The "H" was missing from his forehead. He reached out and prodded the bunk, the sheets and a protesting Lister experimentally.

"Whoa, hang on, you mean that actually happened? The chicken brigade actually showed up and gave you a body?"

Lister pinched Rimmer's arm which he seemed strangely not to mind.

"And you sold my mould? That was a thriving, nearly intelligent life-form, man. I was gonna teach it to play chess."

But he didn't protest too strongly. Rimmer had a body? Aliens actually existed? It was all too weird for half-past ten in the morning.

He led the ex-hologram down to the vending machines for breakfast and ordered them two vindaloos with a side of chilli sauce. Rimmer absently consumed a few spoonfuls before undergoing a strange colour change and unlikely facial movements With an alarming wrench of the forehead he snapped out of his trance for the first time.

"This is unbelievable! This is disgusting…"

He ate some more.

"I have a real body! I can touch! I can feel! I can eat!"

Kryten rushed in with an anxious look, followed by the Cat.

"Sirs, I don't wish to alarm you, but there is a large asteroid zooming toward us on a collision course. Suggest you brace yourselves."

There was a long, loud crunching noise.After a pause Holly showed up on the screen, looking a little sheepish.

"Sorry, it just sort of …snuck up on me. Damage to the ship's systems minimal. Is everyone alright?"

Kryten, running a self diagnostic, checked over the Cat, who was bruised but otherwise uninjured and Lister, slightly concussed. Together they dragged away the stray pieces of shelving that had come loose and landed right on Rimmer. For a new body it had managed to grasp the fundamentals of bleeding rather well.

"There's a pattern here somewhere."

Rimmer gingerly touched the bandage that encircled his head like a friendly tapeworm. He had escaped lightly, all things considered, with a gashed and broken leg, a nasty head wound and one strange little scar, shaped exactly like a penguin, over his ribs.

"I achieve a small, modest degree of happiness- and something smegs it up."

" You're never satisfied are you, Rimmer? You're not dead anymore, and yes, so you hurt a bit now, but you'll heal in no time. Then you'll have to find something new to complain about."

Lister idly doodled on Rimmer's cast. Good job he wasn't paying attention; between Lister and the Cat's contributions the cast now contravened seven separate obscenity laws.

"What's that supposed to mean? If I have any complaints it's only because I always get the…"

"Bad breaks, yeah, I know, I know. We've heard it all before Rimmer."

Lister stretched and stood up.

"You're not leaving are you?"

Rimmer surprised himself with his force of feeling. But even trading insults with the Arch Nemesis of Personal Hygiene was preferable to staring at the ceiling while the skutters made rude gestures without even the decency to wait until he wasn't looking. Lister hadn't seemed to notice.

"There's still a couple of repairs to finish off. I'll be back later."

A lot later, in the middle of a marathon poker session which Kryten was winning suspiciously easily- that newly perfected cheat mode wasn't going to his head now was it?- Lister felt a twinge of guilt.

"Maybe we should check on Rimmer."

He was met with blank stares.

"Check on Goalpost Head? When you could be enjoying yourself? Have you still got that concussion?"

"If you wish, sir, of course. But I'm sure Mr Rimmer will be quite all right."

Lister did have a great hand. It was almost unbeatable.

"He's not Goalpost Head anymore. No "H"."

"Hey, man, he'll always be Goalpost Head."

Well. Maybe after this game.

Lister woke up, his morning headache, for once, not the result of over-indulgence. His thoughts drifted over yesterday. He ought to have remembered, he thought ruefully, that almost unbeatable meant beatable.

Holly came on screen.

"Morning Dave."

"Morning Hol. No large chunks of rock sneaking up on us, today?"

"I'm at peak alertness today. Not even a pebble could get past m…agh!

Oh it's you Kryten." She blushed.

"Hi Kryten."

"Good morning, Mr Lister, sir. I brought back your laundry. Well the parts that didn't escape."

Lister jumped out of bed.

"Thanks, man."

He paused to look at the neat, folded bunk below his.

"How's Rimmer?"

Kryten frowned. There had been something subtly odd about the man this morning. He hadn't called Kryten novelty condom head once.

"He seems ok, sir. Adjusting to having a body again. When you've been dead that long certain things probably come as an unpleasant shock."

Being a mechanoid, Kryten didn't share the human distaste for some natural bodily functions, but he understood that this was an area that they were just plain weird about.

"I'd better go say hello."

Rimmer stared at the ceiling. Not all of it, just a patch on the left hand side of vision. He was giving this patch a nice long stare and then, when its excitement palled, he would switch to a wholly fresh area. He hoped it would have cracks.

He had been thinking about his conversation with Lister. The gimboid had been right of course, Rimmer was only too aware of his own destructive thought processes, but that didn't mean he couldn't resent it.

Still he was feeling different this morning. It was good to have a body again, even a sore and temporarily disabled one. The cool feel of the sheets against his skin, the sensation of breathing in deeply, even that bloody itch down his cast, all were appreciated in a way they hadn't been before he had died.

Even that awkward business with the bedpan couldn't dim his sense of well-being. But, being Rimmer, he couldn't shake off the feeling that something would happen to spoil things. And, deep down, he was worried it would be self-inflicted.

"Hey, Rimmer, how's the new body?"

"Agonizing. So glad you could drop by Lister, make a hole in your packed schedule of slobbing, eating and slobbing some more."

"Well, you're such pleasant company."

Lister sat, unoffended, on the side of Rimmer's bed and offered him some grapes.

"The Cat only ate half."

"Where is the Cat anyway? And Kryten?"

"They're…busy. So, talk to me man, really. What's it like being alive again?"

Rimmer couldn't stop himself smiling.

"It's amazing." He admitted. "I'd forgotten how much realer things sounded, smelt."

He plucked one of the grapes and chewed it slowly.

"When you're made of light you feel…insubstantial. Impermanent. Remember when the holo-projection room was damaged and I kept losing bits?"

Lister snorted, remembering Rimmer's legs wandering forlornly through the corridors without the rest of him. He earned himself a glare.

"Yeah, that must have been * cough * very upsetting."

 He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his smirk.

"Well, now I feel solid. Like a real person again. Permanent."

"But you aren't, not really. None of us are. Sooner or later, we all get turned into a million little worm desserts."

Rimmer raised an eyebrow. He was supposed to be the negative one, surely?

"What a delightful image. You should do talks on children's television."

Lister rubbed his aching head and continued.

"But that's ok, I mean, that's what makes it so good. We've only got this for a short amount of time. Better make good use of it."He sounded a little uncertain.

"So, if you had a chance at immortality…you'd say no?"

Rimmer knew he wouldn't. But being a hologram was close wasn't it? And he wouldn't go back to that, given the option. Lister was murmuring something to that effect.

"But that's immortality for the dead." Rimmer paused to think about the words coming out of his mouth, before continuing regardless.

"Would you accept an immortality for the truly alive?"

They both sat in thought for several minutes, surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. Lister threw a couple of grapes into his mouth to aid thought.

Rimmer sat up stiffly and, to Lister's astonishment, tried to do the same. His grape bounced off Lister's head and rolled out into the corridor.

"How do you do that?"

Lister stifled his mirth once again and demonstrated.

The Cat and Kryten came by a little later to a peculiar sight.

"Smeg. Smeg. Smeg. Okay one more time. Anything a half-witted chipmunk-face can do, I can damn well do."

"You've got to let your instincts guide your mouth. There you nearly had that one…Half-witted what?"

"It must be the way you throw it…here, try and catch this…oh."

"Look, I'll throw a couple of easy ones. There, man, you did it! He shoots, he scores!"

They turned guiltily as Kryten coughed in the doorway.

"Er, sir, if you remember you had agreed to go exploring on that planet we just passed. To search for supplies. Unless you would rather toss small bits of fruit around…"

"I'm just coming Kryten. Um, see you later Rimmer. I'll bring some more grapes, you're nearly out."

"Yeah. Bye."

Laying back, Rimmer picked a whole fresh patch of ceiling to stare at, a large one with flaky bits, that he'd been saving.

Somehow, though, the thrill was gone.