Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this fic, and I'm not making any profit from it. Hurrah!

A/N: Hey all! I decided to write a little something whilst working on my other fanfic, This is the First Day of the Rest of Your Death (Chapter 3 is well underway on that!), so I thought I'd choose a simple scene and setting. I love the bunkroom scenes between Rimmer and Lister, so I thought I'd have a go at writing some! If I do more of these, I will add them as extra chapters as a compilation of "Conversations from The Dwarf".

So here's the first one – I hope you enjoy! Please read and review – I have loved reading your comments on my other fics, and I will definitely be replying to them in my next chapter – the same goes for this fic, too!

Conversations from The Dwarf

--On Leadership and Light Bees--

A dirty blue light shone faintly in the bunkroom. Dave Lister lay on his bunk, half-covered in a blanket he'd found in one of the officer's quarters, and flicked through an old magazine. It was a little out of date. Three million years out of date, to be precise. But he didn't care; it may as well have been last week's. He flipped over a page and began to scrawl something on it with a half-chewed biro.

And then he started humming again. And it wasn't just any humming; it was a low, persistent sound, like the drone of a wasp when it buzzes too close to your ear.

Rimmer lay on the bunk below, arms folded across his chest. His eyes were wide open, and each was extremely bloodshot. He'd been humming for three hours now. Three hours. And just when he thought he'd stopped, he'd started up again! A strange sort of smile began to creep across his face. He twiddled his thumbs. He mustn't rise to him.

Lister hummed another line, and rustled a bag of toffees he'd nicked from the store cupboard. He chewed noisily (probably with his mouth open, Rimmer thought) and underlined something on the page. He then proceeded to cough as the sweet got caught in his throat.

That was it. It was time to rise to him.

"Right," Rimmer shouted, catapulting himself out of his bunk, "I've had enough." Lister looked up and wiped water from his eyes. "Don't give me that look," Rimmer continued, shaking his head in mock amusement. "I'm not going to put up with it anymore."

Lister coughed again, "Put up with what?"

"Your total contempt forauthority!" Rimmer paced across the room. "Oh, I may be dead, Lister, but I'm still your superior." Lister rolled over in his bunk. Not this lecture again. "Didn't you ever stop and think about leadership," Rimmer went on, "or respect?"

Lister thought for a while before giving his answer. "Not really, y'know. Not unless I was drunk," he shrugged, "and you count respect as having downed three pints of Mimian lager without your eyes frosting over." He underlined another sentence in his magazine, and turned a page. "What's the smeggin' deal, anyway? With all this leadership stuff, I mean. I never paid any attention to it, and I turned out okay, didn't I?" Without looking up from the personality quiz he was now tackling, he already knew what the expression on Rimmer's face would be.

"May I be the first to remind you," Rimmer replied, evidently taking pleasure in the fact that he was the first to remind him, "that you were the lowest rank on this ship?" He smiled a smug, self-satisfied smile. Lister turned another page.

"Yeah," he said, chewing on the end of his already half-chewed biro, "that's what I'm saying; I was okay!" He crossed a box in the quiz, studied the next question and looked thoughtful for a moment. "Rimmer, do you think I'm good in crowds?"

Rimmer ignored him. "That's what's wrong with you, Listy! You're too busy fantasising about some island that's half underwater – or even worse by now – what about the here, the now, the present?" Lister looked at him, one eyebrow raised in mock contempt.

"That's something I try to forget about," he said simply. He turned back to the quiz. "Besides," he continued, "I can't see you doing too well in war. Not unless it involves using Hammond Organ music to torture the enemy to death." He scribbled out a previous answer in favour of another.

"Oh, ha ha," said Rimmer, unable to think of a suitably witty comeback. He secretly resented the fact that he was nowhere near as quick as his brothers at clever retorts. But then again, his brothers were better at almost everything. Determined not to let Lister beat him, he rapidly cleared his mind of such thoughts and spoke the first thing that came into his head. "I'll have you know that I have a very good reason not to go into battle."

"Yeah," said Lister, "you're a coward." He grinned, anticipating the reaction.

"No…" Rimmer stressed the word with overblown rebuff, as if he had just been accused of a crime he could not have possibly committed, "what I am referring to, my curry-guzzling compadre, is that I am in fact a hologram." He sneered. "Or didn't you notice?"

Oh, I noticed alright, thought Lister. Enough to hear you whinging on about it every day. He kept his thoughts to himself, and hastily scrawled another blue X on the page. "And what does that have to do with cowardice?" he asked. "Nobody can touch you, remember? You're like Jim Bexley Speed in the heat of the game. Invincible."

Rimmer despised being compared to one of Lister's heroes; it was like comparing his bunkmate to Napoleon. He shuddered at the idea. As far as he was concerned, the only sentence which should combine the two should also concern a hot poker, a long plank and an ocean full of rampageous crocodiles. But that was just wishful thinking.

"On the contrary," he said, marching across the room like a member of a military parade. "One hit to my light bee, miladdo, and I'm out cold." Or worse, he thought. The fact that anybody could freely stick their hand inside his hologrammatic body, pull out what in effect was his heart, and leave him for dead felt like something out of his brothers' old horror movies made horribly real. It took the phrase 'reaching inside yourself' to a whole new level.

Lister harrumphed, and underlined another sentence, turning over into a more comfortable position. He adjusted his pillow. He knew Rimmer was making excuses – when did he ever do anything else? – but he also knew that there was no use in pursuing it further. Having Rimmer admit his cowardice was a hard thing to achieve. "So what's it like?" he asked, fumbling with the lid of his biro. It slipped from his grasp and flung itself wildly off the bunk, careened through the middle of Rimmer's forehead and skidded across the floor. "Sorry," he winced, with all the innocence of a schoolboy who'd forgotten his homework. Rimmer seethed with anger.

"What's what like?" He rubbed his head in an attempt to rid himself of that horrible tingling he'd come to hate.

"Being in your light bee," said Lister. "When your battery's gone, I mean." It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn't asked the question before. He folded up the magazine and threw it to the foot of his bed.

"It's like taking a trip to Siberia," Rimmer replied, still rubbing his forehead, "and finding the Germans have still taken all the sunbeds." And that was how it was; strange, but certainly not implausible. To be honest, he wasn't sure how to describe it. The sensation of not having a physical body, to have a consciousness that consisted only of fleeting impressions of light, sound and colour, was stranger than anything Rimmer had ever experienced. As an electronic entity, thoughts and feelings seemed to lose all meaning. Whatever could be called his world composed itself of numbers and codes. It was as if life suddenly made sense, as if everything in existence mapped itself onto one all-encompassing formula, and each equation in the puzzle became frighteningly visible.

"It's just weird, y'know," said Lister. "How a whole life can be squeezed into something that tiny."

"Well thank you for that little insight," Rimmer growled. He'd never actually seen his light bee – he couldn't see anything when outside his projected form, at least not in the conventional sense – but he knew from the few times he'd experienced it that it was excruciatingly small. "I tell you, Listy, you'd be a master at self-help courses. You could really help boost people's self-esteem." His words were laced with acid – but this, like many other things, lost itself on Lister.

"Cheers, Rimmer!" he said, grinning a wide, cheerful grin. He dug around in his bag for another sweet, found one, and popped it into his mouth.

Rimmer sighed, and sat down on his bunk. This was going to be a long night.

A/N: Please read and review – I'd love to hear your comments!