Now, I want to warn you ahead of time, there is a scene in this chapter which is very violent. It's there for a reason, so keep that in mind. If violence offends you, then read no further. If you think that the scene in question is worse than a PG-13 rating, I will update the rating.
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Space, the final... something or other. It sure as hell isn't a frontier. Fontiers are generally understood to be exciting.
You grow up watching these scifi shows, even slightly smeggy comical ones, and no matter how good the show is, you are never shown the boringness of space. For damn good reason. Boring doesn't win awards. There's no Emmy for, "The most boring show on television." So instead, you get diurnal anamolies, and temporal rifts, and dilithium crystals, and Klingons around every corner, and big smegging holes in the fabric of space-time.
It's not true. Not even remotely so. That four hour flight was the most boring trip I've ever taken. When you're in a plane, or even a car, there are things to look at. Scenery, landmarks, the clouds in the sky, the people around you. In space, you can only look at little twinkly bits for so long before thinking, Is that the same little twinkly bit as before? If it isn't, should I care? I wished I had my copy of Atlas Shrugged with me. That's a book you can definately sink your teeth into. There's no way you can finish that book in under two days, let alone four hours. There's just something about the Russian genome that makes it's writers long winded. Maybe there's a psychology thesis in there, somewhere...
Interesting side note. I've always been terrified of planes. It's not the flying so much as the possibility of falling from 50,000 feet. I can't even watch the news anymore because of all the plane crash stories. Gives me the heebie jeebies. But when I got onto the 'Bug with Rimmer and Kryten, I wasn't afraid in the least. When we left the ship, with black all around and a funny spinny sensation in my stomache, I was fine. Perhaps because there's nothing to fall towards?
In any event, we headed toward the planet at something like warp 4, but I was told (by Kryten, of course) that the warp drive didn't exist here. So we were just going really, really fast. Those were Kryten's exact words. So scientific...
We landed on the planet after an indeterminable time, by my thinking, anyway. I take back what I said of about being scared of flying in space. Space is fine. Entering the atmosphere sucks. I sweated like a cold glass full of lemonade on a hot summer day. Landing is no picnic, either. Especially with Kryten at the controls. Kryten seems to be of the school of thought that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I had no desire to be either. I said a quick prayer to Pete, God of Internet Nerds. Dear Pete, please let me get through this madness alive and I swear I shall make the sacrifice of an AOL user unto thee. I shall even use the word haxor in an upcoming fan fiction. Amen.
We landed. Kryten did a quick scan. Breathable atmosphere. Normal background radiation. No life signs.
Ergo: I could step onto a totally different planet. I was excited. I was thrilled.
I was disappointed. There was very little to see. (Of course, the fact that I'd left my glasses behind in my own universe didn't help things much. But even still...) A few scraggly bushes and rocks, and a dreary, open plain as far as the eye could see. Nothing else. Kryten wandered off towards an outcropping of rocks a few meters distant, his scanner beeping pathetically.
I sidled up to Rimmer. "This is fun."
He smirked at me. "Well, the life of a Space Adventurer can be quite grand at times..."
I heard the capital letters thunk into place. This was going to turn into, "Impress the female," time. I had to ask, "Rimmer, why are you trying so hard to impress me? I'm really not all that special, after all..."
Rimmer looked incredulously at me. "Not all that special? I've known you for, what? Less than a day, and even I can tell you're smart, funny, compassionate and above all, beautiful, Cee Dee."
I startled at his use of my assumed name. I hid it by saying, "Get over!"
Now, before you start yelling, "Mary Sue!" at the top of your lungs like a war-whoop, I'm not trying to engender sympathy here. I know exactly what I am. I sell my image every day as an actress. I'm the girl next door. I'm the sister of the glamourous star. I'm the slightly catty girlfriend of the hero, who leaves me behind to fall in love with the female lead of the movie. I'm Meg Ryan, without the charm that made her what she is. I smoke. (Even in California, where smoking is considered slightly above mass murder and slightly below incest.) I swear like a trucker and I dress like a ho. Sometimes, anyway. I love tight pants. And my figure isn't cut out for them. A bum the size of Manhattan. I remember one time, in grade school, when I was called, "Have another oreo, kiddo." By one of my teachers.
My husband was the first person ever in my life to tell me that I was beautiful. Really beautiful. And he really meant it. I love him dearly for that, but I know that he's saying that through rose colored glasses. He loves me. For what reasons, I don't think I'll ever really know. But I know what I am. Beautiful? Really, mind bogglingly, knock-your-socks-off beautiful? Nope. Not me. I'm vivacious. I'm agressive. I'm loud and domineering. Which can be mistaken for self-esteem and beauty if the beholder doesn't know me that well.
Rimmer fit this category perfectly.
He looked me over for a brief moment, and said, "Yes. You're very beautiful. Even that costume doesn't detract from it."
I grinned at him. "Lister dug this up. Not me. Besides, I happen to like purple. My wedding was all purple."
Rimmer paled. Then, he croaked out, "So you are married? I wasn't just imagining that you said you had a husband?"
I gulped. Well, there it was. No avoiding it now. "Yes, Rimmer, I am married. Just two months ago."
We stared at each other for a moment. I wondered if Rimmer would have the guts to declare that he loved me. True, he didn't know me very well, but then, he hadn't known what's-her-face on the Holoship Enlightenment all that well either. And had gotten it on with her. So what he did next was totally unexpected. For Rimmer, anyway.
He smiled. "I'm happy for you," he said. And turned and walked away, towards Kryten.
I was stunned. I expected a scene. Whining. Tears, even. I knew that he wanted me. He said I was beautiful. That was usually what men said when they wanted to get in my pants.
One young man, a young man by the name of Bradley, had told me that in high school. At the time, he was "going out" with a friend of mine, a gal by the name of Manny. She was swell, and I loved her company. Then, one afternoon on the football field, Bradley and I were alone, and he told me he thought I was very beautiful. And, being a silly sixteen-year-old, I was enamored. He broke it off with Manny, which effectively ended our friendship.
Then, about a week after he and I were, "together," he tried to rape me.
It was my own silly fault. I let him get me drunk at a party and take me away from generally everything. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that he was pretty drunk too. That, and a well placed knee to that certain area can do wonders for stopping an attacker. I fled. I ran like the devil himself was on my tail.
I never told anyone about it. I told my husband of course, but much later, and I've never really gotten over it. I suppose justice was served in a way, because the bastard tried to get back together with Manny, who told him to piss up a flagpole. She and I even worked things out and became friends again. And word spread that Bradley was a right prick who shouldn't ever get a date. So he didn't.
Now here I was, some 3 million years into the future, faced with another man who told me that I was beautiful. Who was walking away from me.
MEN!
I didn't have time to vent my frustration and confusion, however. I heard a sound coming from below my feet that sounded like a train and a mac truck getting into a fist fight. The ground started to rumble like it was Lister who had eaten too many curries. Being a California girl, I knew what was going on.
"EARTHQUAKE!!!" I yelled at the mechanoid and the hologram. They were mere steps from me. I struggled over the dancing landscape towards them. Then, to my complete horror and astonishment, the empty, grassy plain on my left side began to bubble. Trees, looking centuries old, covered with liana vines and other various pests, erupted from the ground. There was the stench of sulfer and brimstone. And wet muck. Off in the distance, a castle began to form. Nearby rocks sailed up into the sky and towards the newly budding (ominous, eerie) structure. To my right side, I saw glaciers and snow magically appear, as if this were one of the sets from Titanic. For some reason, it was this landscape, and not the swamp that terrified me the most. And dead (ahem, oops, bad choice of phrase, there...) ahead, I saw Kryten fall over, overcome by the powerful bucking of the ground. This was no ordinary earthquake. This was personal.
My arms windmilled as I tried to keep my balance. I saw Rimmer running toward me at full tilt, while Krtyen struggled to get up. How on Earth Rimmer was running, I'll never know. He should have been flat on his back. But somehow, he reached me, and to my even greater astonishment, wrapped his arms around me and drove me to the ground!
But Rimmer was a hologram...
Then, it hit me. I had seen Lister's robe before. To my knowledge, he only wore it in one episode. And Rimmer being able to touch me, pre-Legion. And a planetoid that altered it's surface to welcome guests...
Terrorform. I was smack dab in the middle of the episode Terrorform.
I wriggled in Rimmer's bearhug, trying against try that we'd be able to get back to the 'Bug before...
Too late. The explosion that Kryten described in the beginning of that episode, well...
It happened.
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Blackness...
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I came to, surrounded by the color blue, and cold, and penguins. The penguins weren't paying that much attention to me. They were gamboling and frolicking as if there wasn't a human in their midst. It seemed familiar, and then I realized why. I recognised this set from the movie Fight Club. If one of those penguins said, "Slide," to me, I was going to go totally bonkers.
If I hadn't already.
This wasn't in Terrorform. This was from Fight Club. So why the hell was I here? And where the hell was Rimmer?
As soon as I thought of Rimmer, a wave of nausea swept over me. It was odd, but it was as if the imagined sight of his face made me ill. So I tried an experiment. I thought of my favorite scene from Terrorform. You know which one I mean. It involves oil and a scantily clad Rimmer. Instantly, I gasped in pain, as my lower abdomen cramped up. I felt as if someone had wrapped their hand around my spleen and squeezed. I sat down with a jarring bump on a nearby chunk of ice.
I took a few deep, calming breaths and tried to blank my mind. It was apparent to even me (I can be a tad slow on the uptake) that the thought of Rimmer caused me pain. Cautiously, I tried thinking of Lister. Nothing. The Cat, nothing, Kryten, nothing. Of course. This was a psi-moon. So people I was indifferent to, or at least wasn't attracted to, wouldn't have an effect on me.
Then, my mind jumped to my husband.
This time, it wasn't just my spleen, but my liver, lungs, asophagas, brain and all the rest of my organs that cried out in pain and panic. I think I may have screamed. Then...
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Blackness...
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I came to a second time, once again surrounded by penguins. But this time, the penguins had human faces. And they were all faces that I knew. Ex-boyfriends, friends I'd lost touch with, people I'd met in my travels and tribulations. Even the faces of a few celebrities were tossed in for good measure. As I scanned the... crowd... there was only one face missing. That of my husband's.
Ok. Now this was getting quite bizarre. Would someone please call Glinda, the Good Witch of the North? I wanna click my heels together and go home, now.
A penguin waddled up to me. It bore the face of a woman that I had briefly worked with when I was just out of high school. Annie? Amy? Alice? I couldn't remember her name. But I knew who she was. And she knew who I was.
"Cee Dee, what are you doing here?"
A talking penguin that had the face of an old aquaintance who just happened to know my assumed name...
"I don't know." I'm not going mad I'm not going mad I'm not going mad I'm only talking to a penguin.
"Cee Dee, we're afraid that there's been a cock-up. You aren't supposed to be here. This Psi-moon wasn't meant for two minds at once. It was built for therapy purposes. One patient at a time. Dump him here, make the psychosis real, and then come down to cure him. With the two of you both here at once, the mechanism went into overload. So now the planet is a conglomeration of both your minds."
"Me and who?"
"Arnold Judas Rimmer, of course."
I flinched, waiting for the pain to hit me again. It didn't. Amy/Annie/Alice noticed.
"Yeah, sorry about that. It's fixed. It's meant to be a tool to help the patient let go of images that hurt them."
"Then why...?"
"Did you get the response when you thought of your husband? That's something you have to figure out. That's why the planet's here, after all."
She turned away from me, and the group of human-faced penguins all turned at the same time to go. Like robots. It was creepy.
"Wait! What'm I supposed to do now?"
The one who had been speaking to me turned around. Her face was slowly morphing back to that of a normal penguin. Her mouth was the last to shift.
"Find yourself. And go home."
The human mouth became a beak, and the only noises that I heard then were the creaking of the warm wind against the cold ice, and the occasional bleating quack of penguins. I was alone again.
I could only do what the penguin told me to. I had to find myself. Whatever the hell that meant. It sounded like a bunch of tree-hugging hippy crap, to me. But going home. That sounded promising. And if I had to, "Find myself," along the way, well... whatever.
So I stood up from my chilly perch on the ice and moved towards where the warm wind was seemingly coming from.
And came smack dab up against a wall of ice.
Now, this made no sense. I could feel the warm breeze on my face, and it was coming directly from the wall. To all available evidence, there should be no wall there. But there it was. I tentatively put a hand against it. Very solid, and very cold. I pushed a bit. It didn't give and, strangely enough, the wind pushed back at me a bit. I placed both hands on the wall and leaned against it as hard as I could. The wind howled at me, and got so strong that it shoved me back forcibly from the wall, sending me sprawling.
Odd.
I turned my back to the wall. I was frustrated. I was even feeling a cry begin in the back of my sinuses. As soon as my back was to the wall, however, the wind got warmer. I felt as if dozens of tiny, warm hands were stroking my naked neck, arms, ruffling my hair, making my legs move away from the wall. I was being led. Led towards what, I had no idea. I walked for about fifty feet, through twists and turns and ups and downs, the whole time being gently pushed from behind by invisible hands. At the end of my brief journey, I came upon an opening in the cave, which seemed to reveal a great expanse of lush green bamboo. I stepped out of the cave. I turned just in time to see it seal itself up.
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"Thanks..." I said weakly. To no one in particular. I was talking to the wind.
To my surprise, the wind answered me. In the voice of Arnold J. Rimmer.
"Look, I don't know who you people are, but if I don't get my right to a phone call, you'll be sorry, mi'laddos."
I spun around. There was no one there. I was alone in a forest of bamboo trees. But for the briefest of moments, I caught a flash of darkness, little men that looked like Jawas, and Rimmer, clad in a white toga, strapped to what looked like a crucifix. Our eyes met. And then it was gone.
I knew that scene. It was after Kryten had been damaged in the explosion, had used his detachable hand and eyeball, gotten the thing into a homing pod, which then met up with the Dwarf. And after Lister was down on the planet to fix Kryten. So I must have been out for a long while. I only had a short time before the crew was back down here, and mounted the Rimmer Rescue operation. Which would, incidentally, save my bacon, too.
I set off through the bamboo shoots. It was quiet, and peaceful, and more than a little eerie. I could hear birds calling out, and the occasional rustle of underbrush as I startled a small animal with my walking. It was strange, but I felt very... content. Yes, that's the word. Content to wander this forest until I died. It was magical. I could sense it.
God, talk about a bunch of tree-hugging hippy crap... Where were these thoughts coming from? It sure as hell wasn't my mind coming up with these feelings. And I doubted that Rimmer had known a day of contentment in his life. So? Where was this coming from?
"You're mistaken. It is your contentment you feel."
My head jerked back and forth, tring to spot my surprise guest. ("Tonight, coming to you live from Cee Dee's brain...") There was no one around.
"Pssst. Up here."
I glanced up, only to be waved at by a man, dressed in white robes, who was fifty feet up in the air and balancing himself on one single piece of bamboo.
No way. First Fight Club, now Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? This is getting surreal...
My new friend took a single step to his left, and, instead of falling like a brick, he floated down. I shrieked when he made his move, only to gape in silent wonder as he performed his levitaition trick. I should have known better. The man could fly after all. Master Li Mu Bai was a character that could do many amazing things. He settled down next to me.
"Hello."
"Hello yourself. Shouldn't you be fighting Sha-Long right about now?"
"She'll come along shortly. Right now, I'm your guide. After a fashion. The only real guide through your mind is yourself."
"Profound." He smiled wryly at me. "So, essentially, you're a manifestation of my inner calm?"
"No, nothing like that. You just think I'm very cool."
I had to giggle. It was true. A very cool guy in a very cool movie.
"So what am I supposed to do now? I've seen the cave, and I've seen the forest, and I have to get to the swamp and the castle beyond if I'm going to meet up with the guys." Wow. All of a sudden, I'm in really bad D&D game...
"You can't get there from here."
Oh, wonderful... "So I'm basically screwed?"
"No. It's just that you can't get there from here."
I sighed. Obliqueness has never really been one of my favorite things in the world. I'm an up-front kinda gal. So here I am, confronted with a part of my own mind, and I'm being oblique as hell. Not good.
"Can you give me any advice? Anything that could help me along?"
Li Mu Bai reached into his robes and handed me a small knife of the Swiss Army variety. "I've found that these are quite helpful. That, and duct tape." I could only raise an eyebrow at him. Thank you, Mr. Cliche...
"Now if you'll excuse me..." With that, he turned and ran up one of the nearby bamboo trees, drawing his sword and leaping away towards the horizon. If I listened carefully, I could hear the clink of blade against blade. Looks like Sha-Long finally showed up...
I glanced down at the knife in my hand. Instead of it being red, with the cross-in-shield logo, it was purple (again with the purple!) and bore a yin-yang on it. It was slightly raised out of the resin that made up the sheath. I ran a finger over it. It was cold to the touch, and appeared to be made out of moonstone. Pretty, yes. Helpful to my, "quest?" How?
I sighed again. I had no pockets, (stupid leather pants) and I couldn't tuck it in my decolletage ('cuz it's pointy, that's why!). So I'd just have to carry it. Meh. Whatever.
As I continued my amble through the forest, I was struck by the realization that I hadn't seen any more flashes of Rimmer since leaving the cave. I concentrated for a moment. After the scene on the cross with the Jawas, Rimmer had been taken to that castle, where he was oiled down by the blondes with the gold fingernails. It was a yummy thought for me. I felt a small smile come to my lips as I pondered it.
Well, that did the trick. I was not standing in the forest anymore. I was standing directly across from a bound and half-naked Rimmer. My mouth opened in shock. How the hell...? He looked right at me.
"Cee Dee? Where the smegging hell did you come from? Get me out of here!"
I blinked.
And I was back in the forest.
Dammit!
How in Hades had that happened? I tried thinking of that scene again, but I couldn't get the wanted miracle to occur. I was back where I started.
Then, a thought burrowed it's way up into my brain. The penguin back in the cave had told me that the world was now a conglomeration of my mind and Rimmer's. And Li Mu Bai told me I couldn't get to Rimmer from where I was now. So, logically, it wasn't a conglomeration, per se, but more of an overlap. The world I was in wasn't the same world as Rimmer. We were taking up space in our own private minds, but the psi-moon was overlapping them. Probably because it couldn't handle two minds at once. The flashes I was seeing of Rimmer were moments when the membrane between our minds shifted. Or possibly when we thought of each other at the same time.
And no amount of concentrating was going to get me there. I had to figure out a way to not only clear a path in my own mind, but to clear a path into Rimmer's mind as well.
No wonder I couldn't get there from here. I'd have to be a smegging psychic.
Well, nothing to do but go forward. If I was lucky, another solution would present itself. In the meantime, I had my own baggage to handle.
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I took a step forward, and tripped. And landed face down in slightly squishy, foul smelling, dramatically lit swamp.
I raised my head, confused. I wasn't drenched, thank Pete, but I was covered head to toe in rotting leaves and moss. And my knife had fallen out of my hand and disappeared. I stood up, disgusted and perplexed. I moved about in circles, looking around for my knife. How had I gotten from that beautiful forest from Crouching Tiger and ended up here? In a swamp that had very little water in the ground? With strange popping noises every few seconds? Strange popping noises? What the...
Instinct took over as I sprinted away from the clicks and pops. Wheeling back around, I saw that where I had been standing, there was a pillar of fire. And it was shooting out of the ground.
I was in the Guilder Fire Swamp.
I stopped in my search for my missing knife. To hell with it! If I took so much as a misstep, I could fall into a pit of snow sand, and there would be no Westley nearby to save me. Now, ok, was this going to be the Fire Swamp from the book? Or from the movie? It looked like the movie, but only because I'd read the book after I'd seen the movie, so my imagination was tilted in that direction.
(Oh brother. I shoulda read less fantasy and more... I dunnow. John Grisham perhaps. At least most of those take place in nice, warm, clean courtrooms. Of course, people die in those... but you can't have everything.)
A figure was moving towards me from the other side of a shadow. I saw a flash of red, and a sweep of golden hair.
Princess Buttercup.
"Hello. I believe you dropped this." She handed me my knife.
"Thanks." I blinked at her as she sat herself down on a protruding tree branch. "So, is this now, what? The second in a series of movie characters designed to show me the inner working of my mind? Shouldn't you and Westley be fighting R.O.U.Ses?"
"All in good time. Now, you have questions again. I'm going to answer them for you."
Questions? Yeah, a couple...
"Why me? I mean, why did I end up here in the first place?"
"I can't answer that now. Next question."
Oh, so very helpful...
"Fine. Where's my graveyard?"
"Beg your pardon?"
"My graveyard. Where all my old personality traits are lying dead in my mind. Rimmer had one. Where's mine?"
"Rimmer never saw his. The others found it. Same for you."
Made sense...
"Ok. Try this one on for size; Why is it that, in the episode of Terrorform I saw, Rimmer is held captive, and yet with me in the equation, I can wander about as I please?"
"You know the answer to that one. Think about it."
Grrrr...
And yet, she was right. Rimmer was terrified of not being in control at any given time. So of course his mind would manifest a prisoner situation.
Wait a cotton pickin' minute. That's one of my fears too...
I turned to Buttercup, but she was gone. And the Fire Swamp was slowly fading out of my vision, as well. I blinked to clear my sight. A foul smelling wind whipped up from nowhere, coughing dust into the air around me. I sneezed and choked, waving my hand in front of my face, trying to get a clean breath of air. Suddenly, the wind was gone as fast as it had come. I cautiously opened my eyes again.
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I was no longer in the swamp. I was in a room, decorated with posters of The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and Pearl Jam. There was a bed, and a television with a nintendo, and a few half-assed candles, and piles of dirty clothes strewn about.
I knew this room. This was the room where I was nearly raped.
And just to make me feel even better, my would be rapist entered the room.
Almost 10 years later, and this son of a bitch still had the power to make me nearly shit my pants. He moved towards me, smelling of cheap booze and pot and cigarettes. He looked exactly as I remebered him. Adolescent acne, long greasy hair, long black trenchcoat covering his black clothes, everything. And here I was, a mature, happy, grown-up woman... No. No I wasn't. I was sixteen again. My hair was long and pulled back in my omnipresent ponytail. My glasses hung off the end of my nose, the frames having been chosen out of the bargain bin, and subsequently being very large and ugly. I could feel the braces wrapped round my teeth again. My dress were drab, and baggy, and horribly out of style. I was no longer the confident (ha!) woman I projected to the world. I was the awkward, gawky teenager I always tried to keep hidden. Because of this night.
"Hey, baby. Great party, huh?"
His words came at me as if from a great distance, like I was hearing him speak through a cardboard tube. There was an aura around him. Mostly because I was seeing double. I was drunk. I remembered that I had had a forty of Micky's, and various other shots, mostly mixed in with Jello to hide the taste. I shook my head, trying to clear away the drunkeness. He mistook this for a denial of his question.
"No? Aw, I'm having a great time!" He moved in towards me again, and started kissing my neck, my cheek.
Revulsion. There are no words to describe the absolute revulsion I felt run through me. I ducked my head away from his seeking mouth. "Brad, no. I'm not feeling so great. I think I'm gonna barf."
"That's only 'cuz you're drunk, kiddo. Don't worry, I won't let anything happen to you. I love you."
"I love you too." I felt my mouth speaking the words, no matter how hard I tried to stop them. I was reliving this scene, word for word, exact in every detail. I couldn't change it, no more than I could change the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. It was a fixed event in my past.
That thought gave me a bit of hope. I knew how this was going to turn out. He wouldn't be able to follow through with his attack. He was too drunk.
He moved in again, and said, "Baby, if you love me, then let's do it."
I gently moved his hand from my breast. "No. I really don't feel good tonight, Brad. Another time, I promise."
"You're such a tease." He placed his hand back on my breast again, only this time, he squeezed. Hard.
"Ow. Brad, that hurt. Cut it out." I grabbed his wrist and pushed it away from me.
That's when, in my memory, he tackled me, pinned me to the bed. He grabbed at my dress and flipped it up, clutched at my panties, trying to get me naked. I struggled away from him, and in the process, put my knee into his groin. He yelped like a stuck pig and slipped off the bed, giving me more than ample opportunity to run back to the party that was going on upstairs.
That was my memory. What happened next was the psi-moon.
Instead of trying to tackle me, he gave me a vicious backhand to the face.
The room spun around me, my cheek throbbing in agony.
What the hell...?
"You know you like it, bitch. You're such a slut. I've heard about you. You put out for every man that comes along. And now you're gonna get it from me."
I could only tremble at him. How did he know? How did he know that that's what I thought of myself when I was 16? So when he moved toward me again, I shrank into a ball against the headboard of the bed, turned my face away from him. He grabbed at my ponytail and yanked my head down. My arms flailed away from my knees, my legs spasmed apart. It was the pain. I couldn't control myself.
He wedged his body between my now open legs, and gave me another slap across the face. I tried to struggle out from under him, trying the same trick that got me out of this situation the first time. But I was too well pinned. I had no control of the situation. He had me.
His hands moved to the hem of my dress, and he ripped it right up the front, leaving me in my panties and bra. He shifted himself, grabbing my arms, and pinned them under his knees. I couldn't so much as wiggle. I saw him move his hands toward my crotch. I screamed out, "NO!"
He moved his hand away from there, balled it up in a fist and punched me in the solar plexus.
I grunted and gasped, the wind knocked out of me, and the feeling that I was going to puke tripled. I looked up at my attacker. His eyes were shining with malice. I couldn't stand to see him. I closed my eyes as he moved back towards his target. I heard his zipper come down. I felt his hands groping at me, his hips subtly bucking in anticipation.
He was really going to rape me, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I clenched my fists, giving in to the inevitable, steeling myself against this outcome.
And felt the knife in my hand. It had never left. I had it the whole time.
Duh.
I felt along the edge of the knife until I found the little groove in the biggest blade. I struggled for a moment with it, it wouldn't immediately open. So I wedged the bottom of the knife against Brad's calf, and the blade flicked free with an audible, "Snick."
He heard it. His head swiveled toward the sound, just as I poked him in the hip with it. He jumped off of me, yelling. He looked terrified. Good.
"Now, don't get crazy, babe. It was just a little fun."
I pushed myself off of the bed, clutching at both halves of my dress with one hand, the other hand waving my little knife in front of me like a banner.
"Hold on now, baby! Don't think I was gonna hurt you. I just thought..."
"With your prick. Which is what you are!" I moved in closer, and he shrunk away from me.
"Oh, God, don't hurt me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him as badly as he had hurt me. For years after this attack, I was terrified of it happening again. Even when I was first with my husband, before we were married, I was scared of him. So I did something incredibly stupid to hold him at arms length. It still haunts me... But that was neither here nor there.
I stared at Brad for a moment, and dropped the knife to my side. "You don't deserve it. Not even you. I won't hurt you."
"This is all your fault anyway, bitch!" He made a move as if to stand, thinking that he had disarmed me. The knife was nuzzled into his neck before he knew what was going on. He froze again.
"No. It wasn't my fault. I trusted you. You attacked me. This is your fault."
At these words, he began to melt away, as did the rest of the room. I felt my torn dress morph back into my leathers, my hair shorten, my ugly glasses disappear.
I was back in the Fire Swamp, and Princess Buttercup sat in front of me again.
**************
I panted for a moment, trying to re-orient myself. I blinked at Buttercup.
"What the smegging hell was that?"
"It was yourself. You accepted that that situation wasn't your fault. You've moved on."
She was right. I felt shaken, but better. I gazed at her for a moment. "Man, this place sure packs a wallop. Are there any more nasty surprises in store for me?"
"That depends entirely upon you. Is there anything else that you feel you need to move past?"
I took a deep breath. "Yes." I knew what was coming. I was about to be faced with a scene that would nearly kill me. I was going to have to face the day that I told my husband that I cheated on him.
Buttercup looked at me peacefully. "You can't face that here. This is your adolescence. That took place in your adulthood."
"Wait, you're telling me that each of the places I've been so far is symbolic of the stages of my life?"
"Of course."
"It wasn't with Rimmer..."
"Rimmer is screwed up in ways that defy description."
And with that true remark, she stood and said, "You're on the right path. You're adulthood is right through that grove of trees." She pointed. "Good luck to you." And she went as silently as she had come, to meet up with Westley and an R.O.U.S.
I was alone again. And walking into a place that I really had no desire to go...
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AN: Wow. That was traumatic. First, I want you all who may worry about me, that that scene did not ever happen to me. It's fiction people. Second, sorry that that chapter didn't have a whole lot of Red Dwarf stuff in it. But the next chapter will.