Woohoo, now that Yule etc is all wrapped up I finally have some time to sit an write. If I'm honest, I'm not entirely sure about this chapter, but I did have to get things moving, so apologies if it seems clunky :S As always, please R+R guys!
Over the ensuing days Anneke and Rimmer began to settle into something of a routine together. In the mornings he would hover while Kryten took his medical samples, trying to distract her from the needles with benign chatter, then they would pass a few pleasant hours playing chess, Anneke hammering him every time, no matter how many times she let him mulligan. All the while they would exchange snippets of information about themselves with one another and gradually Rimmer was beginning to build a picture of her; she had a soft spot for dairy and old British comedies; she could speak three languages; she'd not wanted to join the Space Corps originally but instead be a teacher, she'd only joined up to pay for her university tuition fees. Each day became an opportunity to peel away another layer and today, three weeks exactly after she had arrived, was no exception:
"An elder sister, Liv. You? Your move. You're in check, by the way."
"Three older brothers. John, Howard and Frank. They were all Space Corps captains. Erm, I'm a bit stuck."
"That's the danger square, that white one. Were you close?"
"Yes and no. I tended to be their source of cruel and unusual entertainment. Can I move the knight there?"
"Mmhm, it'd be covered by your rook. Good idea." Anneke rest her chin in her palm as she gazed at the board, crossing her legs. "Liv was a pianist. She was lovely. She'll be dead now, won't she? They all will. She was so clever. Bugger…" The girl stared vehemently down at the pieces, then pushed her king over after a few seconds, the black polished wood rolling a couple of inches before coming to a stop next to a pawn.
"I resign," she murmured. "You win."
Rimmer blinked as she got up from her seat, rubbing her face and coughing a few times. Then the penny dropped.
"I lost my father a couple of months ago," he said carefully, getting to his feet, his hands tucked in his pockets. "I mean, I knew that he had been dead forever, but I got this letter informing me when the post pod eventually caught us up. It was horrid, as though it was happening there and then."
Anneke peered at him over her fingertips, voice muffled as she asked,
"What did you do?"
He shrugged, shaking his head slightly.
"I accepted it for what it was I suppose. I talked to Lister about it, which was frankly a little bizarre. It may have been three million years ago but it may as well have been the day before."
Anneke nodded slightly, settling back into her seat, folding her hands in her lap.
"Did it help?" she asked.
"Actually, yes. Ish."
She managed a weak smile, tucking her pale hair behind her ear.
"What was he like?"
"Who, my father?"
Anneke nodded, clearing her throat as she scooched forwards on her chair. Rimmer took a deep breath out of pure habit, contemplating for a moment, his hands curling into fists in his pockets.
"An absolute bastard," he said finally, sinking back into his chair. Anneke's mouth opened slightly in surprise, her bright eyes widening.
"Oh…" she breathed. Rimmer held his hands up quickly, stammering,
"Don't get me wrong, I, I respected him and I suppose I did love him, but… well…" He was getting flustered, his face reddening. Anneke shook her head slightly, tapping her fingers on her knee.
"You don't have to explain yourself to me, mister Rimmer," she said. The hologram leant forwards, running a hand through his mess of curls, embarrassment threatening to swallow him up.
"Look, he… He wasn't a good man. I'm not even sure he was a sane one," he muttered, avoiding her gaze. "He had these impossible standards. He couldn't join up because he was one smegging inch below regulation Corps height, so he decided to live vicariously through my brothers and I. They were able to meet his expectations but I couldn't do it. I could never do it. If he wasn't satisfied with my progress to potential officer hood, he wouldn't let me eat, he'd use the belt. I could never be what he wanted, even when I tried and I tried. I'm still trying now. He terrified me as a boy…"
SMEG! Since when did you develop verbal diarrhoea, you neurotic, emotional retard! Stop talking before you make a namby-pamby twat of yourself. Like she is going to care?!
He could hear Anneke speaking, her voice soft and serious;
"Oh my God. I am so, so sorry. It was none of my business, I shouldn't have asked…"
He didn't want to look at her. He'd opened his mouth when he shouldn't have. The pseudo-friendship he had cobbled together with her was safe, preserved by four inches of shatter-roof glass and thus far the careful avoidance of feelings. Why did he have to compulsively ruin things for himself?
She was tapping on the glass rapidly, trying to get his attention.
"Arnold?"
Dear Lord, she used your name…
He looked up at her then, awkward and ashamed, to find her kneeling before the window, hand outstretched on the glass, reaching for him. He didn't know what to make of this. Was this pity? Guilt? Either way, he couldn't help himself; he lifted his own hand till his fingers hovered a few millimetres over the glass, over hers, unable to make contact but trying none the less. She smiled up at him, a sympathetic, apologising smile, coughing behind closed lips a couple of times, her eyes watering as she did. The crouping sound broke the spell and Rimmer snatched his hand away quickly, getting to his feet and hitching his belt.
"I should go," he blurted, all pomp and pride once more. "I left the skutters to their own devices touching up the paintwork on level eighty four, goodness knows what they've done to it without supervision, I-"
A low tone from Holly's interface behind him cut the hologram off, giving him the perfect opportunity to break her gaze and turn away. The screen before him briefly showed the computer's visage, who announced unceremoniously,
"Incoming video call from Kryten, patching him through."
Moments later the mechanoid's angular face faded onto the screen, his square jaw serious. His backdrop was the off-white cabinets of the medibay and he held a ribbon of stripy printout paper in his nodular hands.
"Mister Rimmer, sir, I've just completed today's analysis of Lieutenant Thorne's samples. I'm afraid I have extrapolated some positive results. Sending them over to you now."
A few clicks and a mechanical whirring came into life from a slot below the screen, beginning to spit out a strip of paper similar to the one Kryten was clutching. Rimmer looked down at it, Anneke tapping on the window again behind him, calling out to him.
"Mister Rimmer, what is going on please?"
The hologram stared at the narrow slip, feeling his stomach drop past his boots as he read it. When it was done printing it fell from the slot and sunk to the floor in a graceful curve, resting in a tight curl. Unable to pick it up, Rimmer squatted to read what he could, then looked up at Anneke who was on her feet now, both hands resting on the glass as she peered down at him anxiously.
"What?" she said.
"You're sick…"
Anneke sat with a blood pressure cuff wrapped uncomfortably tight round her arm, huffing into a peak flow tube, Kryten noting down the number from the plastic casing. Outside the quarantine bay window Lister stood with his arms crossed over his chest, tapping one foot, watching.
"This is ridiculous," the girl mumbled through a mouthful of glass thermometer as Kryten slipped it between her teeth. "I feel fine."
"I believe ye," Lister said with an attempt at a jovial smile. "But Kryten found a spike in ye temp'recha, we can't be too careful. It's important that three weeks from now you walk outta here fit an' well."
"I will! I'm alright, it's warm in here that's all, you're making a fuss over nothing…"
At the very end of the corridor, Rimmer stood just within earshot but well away from the quarantine room's view. He couldn't look at Anneke. He could hear her protesting but he knew, he -knew-, she was sick. She'd kept coughing, a dry, wheezing sound, and they'd both ignored it. Kryten's samples had been coming back clean so they'd both silently brushed it aside, never even giving it enough merit to mention it.
She'd called him by his first name. No one did that, not for years and years they hadn't. Rimmer or Bonehead or Oi-Git-Features maybe. No one called him Arnold.
He had to get out. He couldn't think in the dark corridor of the quarantine deck, catching snippets of Lister and Anneke's conversation. He turned sharply and virtually ran up the stairs to the next floor, barking an order for an Xpress Lift to open. He needed to be outside and the closest thing he could get to that was the Observation Deck.
Back in her narrow room, Anneke looked out of her window at Lister, taking a sip of water from a plastic cup after Kryten relieved her of the thermometer.
"Thirty seven point eight degrees, ma'am. That's a point two increase in the last hour," the droid said, looking at her levelly. The girl shook her head, voice pleading as she called to Lister,
"Please, Dave, tell him to stop dithering would you? I feel fine, I-"
She was cut short as her breath caught and she burst into a dry, painful cough, the water lapping over the rim of the cup and splashing onto her leg. Kryten took the drink from her hurriedly, setting it to one side and massaging her back in a wide circle. Lister looked at her with arched eyebrows, slipping his hands into his leather jacket pockets.
"You were saying?" he said gently as Anneke took a deep breath, Kryten steadying her shoulders.
"It's a cough. Air recyc, it's bad for your chest. Everyone had it on Andromeda," she said hoarsely.
"Ma'am, with respect, I think it best you take this seriously," Kryten said in a tentative voice. "I suggest that you at least begin a course of antipyretic treatment to lower your temperature if nothing else. And I think it may be worth my taking some fresh samples as well…"
Anneke snapped her gaze sharply to the mechanoid, her violet eyes widening.
"You must be joking?" she said softly, defensively crossing her arms over her bust. "You only took some this morning!"
Kryten looked at her slightly nervously, his voice increasing in pitch in the way it usually did when he displeased someone.
"I know ma'am, I'm sorry, but given the rapid increase in your temperature…"
Anneke sighed despondently, rolling up the sleeves of the light cotton shirt she was wearing.
"Fine," she mumbled. Outside the room Lister leant on the glass, giving her a sympathetic smile.
"Just you watch, when it turns out to be all just a cold or sumthin' you'll be laughin' about this," he said, tucking one ankle behind the other, his shoulder resting on the window.
"Oh, I'm sure, hardy har har," Anneke muttered, wrinkling her nose. She hissed through her teeth as Kryten punctured the back of her hand with a needle, filling up a bright yellow plastic vial with dark, sticky looking blood.
"All of this for less than a degree change," she said with a sigh.
"Like I keep telling ye, we're here to look after you," Lister said. "You're important to us."
"Mm…" Anneke looked up at the window, her gaze trailing to either side of Dave. "Erm, what happened to Mister Rimmer by the way?"
A pair of hologramatic hands hung over the rails of the Observation Deck, Rimmer scowling in frustration as he glared down at them. He felt as though someone had lined his skull with concrete before deciding to take several well aimed knocks at it with a cricket bat. He couldn't shake that moment when the computer had produced that slip of paper, the words stamped on it in grey dot matrix type horribly clear:
PROBABILITY OF VIRAL CONTAGION: 96.6%.
