Rimmer looked up from the astronavigation book. The topic as a whole made no sense to him at all, and he had been gradually closing the distance between his nose and the book until the caverns of his nostrils were sucking in book-flavored air with every breath. His eyes now hurt abominably from the strain, and he was in no mood to deal with Lister.
"What are you blathering about, you stupid goit?"
Lister lay on his belly on his bunk, his head in his crossed arms, looking over at Rimmer. He tossed the two dangling braids over his grotty grey T-shirt and grinned. Rimmer's tight back and furrowed brow clearly showed that he was annoyed, and that suited Lister just fine.
"That stunt you pulled wit Harrison."
Rimmer sighed and rubbed the creases in his forehead with a long finger. "Lister, if you had ever actually read the bloody manual, you would know that JMC regulations clearly state that it is forbidden to pluck nostril hairs while on active duty."
"Rimmeh, nobody stinkin' cares. If you'd reported him, Todhunter woulda just laughed and tossed it out."
"We will never know, now, will we? Since he so sensibly offered to switch duty shifts with me..."
"Yeh blackmailed him to get outta cleanin' B deck."
"Just showing initiative, squire. Now, if you don't mind, I have a great deal of revision to do." Rimmer turned back to his book and popped the top on a little brown bottle of learning drugs.
"Dunno why you even bother to try," Lister grumbled as he flopped over onto his back and fished for a cigarette in his filthy boxers. He waved at the bottle of drugs. "Cheatin', that is. Why not just write the answers on the back of yer eyelids?"
Rimmer raised an eyebrow. Now there's an idea.
The sound of a door closing and steps climbing the stairs dispelled the calm serenity of the observation deck. Rimmer pulled in his lips and sighed, knowing who would be intruding shortly. A head of woolly brown hair popped into view, dragging with it Lister's eternally optimistic, chubby features topping a disgracefully stained set of clothes.
"All right?"
"No, not really," Rimmer replied. He stared pointedly out into space.
"Thinking about her, flyin' around somewhere out there?"
Rimmer folded his hands and pulled back farther into his chair. "She was..." he struggled to find words, but his soul was not a poetic one, and his vocabulary did not even come close. "Quite..." he scrunched his nose, "...something." He shrugged. "Brilliant."
"Yeh, well, she fell in love with you, how smart can she be?" The halfhearted quip fell flatter than a debutante's chest.
"Oh, what do you know, smeg-for-brains?"
"Mebbe it's all for the best, mate. I mean - you would have been able to touch and interact and all, but you're still the same Rimmeh, and they're a buncha stuck-up bastids flexin' their pects and flauntin' their brains. I mean, you cheated to get a chance at it at all. Yer not the Holoship kind."
"I would have done anything to get on that ship."
"Yeah, anything but actually deserve to be onnit, what? You always take the easy way out, Rimmeh. You gotta earn stuff, not just cheat your way in. I swear, if you was still Captain Emerald, I'd take those braces and wrap 'em around yer testicles so tight they'd pinch right off." By the end of this, Lister realized that he was almost in Rimmer's nonexistent face, one that was scrunched up with annoyance and... something else.
"Thanks for popping up to cheer me up, miladdo. Why don't you just smeg off?"
Lister looked down at his boots, then back up at Rimmer. And he left.
Starbug's cramped sleeping quarters were ill-lit, even by the standards of JMC housing. Lister, not a nominal reader under the best of conditions, was bent close to his comic book to read the words, even in their enormous font. The eyestrain was giving him a headache, and it was getting to the point where he was hearing a tinkling noise in his ears.
He finally realized that it wasn't in his head. He pulled back from the book, and looked over to where Rimmer lay on Cat's bunk in hard-light blue. He held his two tiny worry beads in his left hand, and was making a halfhearted attempt to grind them.
"Hey, quit playin' witcher balls. I'm trying to read."
"Delighted to hear you're broadening your mind, Listy. Up to three inches yet?"
"Nine, the ladies tell me."
Rimmer pulled a face. "Now that is not something I need to hear."
Lister threw aside the comic book. His eyes felt dryer than a petrol station hamburger. He rubbed them with the heels of his hands until they teared over. "Man, I'm half tempted to drop you back off with your clones."
Silence greeted this comment, and Lister lowered his hands and looked up. Rimmer had let his left hand fall back, and was looking up at the roof of the bunk, his eyes unfocused. "Am I..." his voice trailed off. He cleared his throat. "Am I really like them?"
"Mostly, yeh."
Rimmer turned his head to face Lister. "Mostly?"
"Well..." Lister spread his legs and slouched in his chair, thinking back. "They're more like how yeh used to be. Like the extra Rimmeh we made back when all of this started. Other folk bein' just like steppin' stones. You've changed a bit since then, I think."
Rimmer sighed and leaned back with his right arm crooked behind his head.
"Mind you," said Lister, "that don't mean you're not still a right bastard. Better'n an arsehole is still a jackass, if you know whot I mean." Rimmer glared at the top of the bunk. "And don't pretend yer not. You were willin' to abandon us to die just to make life easier for yerself."
"Going on that ship was your idea, Listy. I had no say in the matter. I didn't owe you anything."
"Yeah, it was my idea, but that's because we dinna have a choice! It was a chance at a quick death, sure, but I'll take that over a lingerin' one. It ain't about what you owe me or I owe you, it's about whot we gotta do to survive out here, man."
"Very touching." But Rimmer's eyes would not meet Lister's.
"Yeh, you just think about that, you yellow goit. My comic's got more of a spine than you." Lister picked up the comic book and once again set to the difficult task of reading it.
You know, Lister, you're right. I do always take the easy way out.
I know it's probably startled you that I would take this on at all, even with all of my whinging about not being able to play the part and getting cold feet. It would startle you more to know why I'm vacillating so much. It would startle you to know that I'm taking the easy way out by leaving.
I know I've always been yellow. I've been pretty damn proud of it, actually. It's the mark of a survivor. In real life, the heroic folk don't get the girl and live happily ever after; they get shot and buried while their yellow goit best friend gets it on with the girl once they're in the ground. Death has never been high on my priority list, even after I had already gone through it once, and it does no good to impress a woman if you're the wrong kind of stiffy afterwards.
Millions, billions, trillions of Rimmers, it must be, orbiting that planet. I'm an egotistical bastard, you know that, but I'm not egotistical enough to think that I am somehow better than every single last one of those other versions of me. I won't last long out there. Not exactly in keeping with the Rimmer directives, that.
But I think, at last, I have found something that scares me even more than the thought of death, even hologrammatic now-you're-really-dead death, does. I realized what it is when you held Ace's light-bee in front of me, your silly chubby guile-less face looking so earnest and hopeful. I couldn't look you in the eyes, then, and my gaze has dropped every time I have tried to look at you since. So, I am leaving, Listy; off to face untold terrors, take on lost causes, jump right into the thick of the most ludicrous danger.
It's easier than telling you I love you.