Well what do you know? I've managed to upload another chapter without the gap being three years long! I'm so gosh darn proud, I could weep, I really could. This next chapter hopefully thrashes out some issues between our friends Lister and Rimmer. And yes, before you ask, this was written whilst slightly drunk to help with research. Yeah....research....
Please, read and review. The only reason I felt like continuing before was because of the lovely feedback I've had. Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed so far. I am indebted to you.
He had to admit, the third swig had gone down far easier than the first two, Rimmer thought to himself as he slowly handed back the hipflask to the imperceptibly swaying form that Lister had become. The first slug had an overwhelmingly pungent smell suspiciously similar to a cocktail of cleaning products that karate-chopped the back of his throat, causing him to cough and wheeze all in one frazzled breath. Egged on by Lister with a mixture of encouragement and personal insults, the second swig had echoed the same foul taste, but with a reassuring hot kick. And as the glowing warm sensation resonated from his belly and soothed his mind, he needed no verbal encouragement from Lister beyond a gesture with the hipflask to accept a third. My, my, he giggled inwardly, as he watched Lister take a fourth slug and sigh a long contented sigh, that third swig went down easier than a $£20 Titan hooker.
A sudden spark of light indicated that Lister had flicked open his lucky silver Zippo and was attempting to light up. His face resonated a drunken expression of concentration that somehow intimated he was simultaneously trying to determine the 42nd digit of Pi. After a third attempt, Lister was successful in his epic task and took a reassuring drag on the cigarette, paused for dramatic effect, and exhaled a smoky sigh. He glanced over at Rimmer, who seemed to be revelling in some private joke according to the slight grin on his face, and held out the cigarette to his companion.
"I seen you when youse doin' your revision," Lister slurred in response to the wrinkled nose that Rimmer sported, "you sssmoke when you're nervous." He giggled to himself, "or pished," he added. Lister waggled a conspiratal finger in front of his lips. "I won't let on, you sssmegger, don't worry."
Rimmer let out a breath he didn't realise he was holding, but rather than the non-committal sigh he'd planned, his now booze-numbed lips gave a rather strange horse impression. Inwardly somewhere, he bristled at the fact that Lister had cottoned on to his nervous habit. But for the larger part, at this precise moment in time, he really couldn't give two smegs. He accepted the offer gratefully, took a clumsy drag of his own, and passed it straight back to Lister.
"Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhttttaaaaaaaaa very much," he exhaled, a combination of thanks and the expulsion of pent-up stress that until that point had retained tyrannous hold on his temples and bowels.
Lister sniggered as he returned the cigarette to his own lips. "Never could hold your booze, could ya man?" he chided as Rimmer smiled. He giggled for a few moments at a far-off memory before remembering to share it with Rimmer. "You remember -?" he began, before correcting himself with the grating of gears, "I remember Kryten's leaving party when our Rimmer drank so much that we all had to help 'im back to the officer's quarters before we all zonked out." Lister shook his head, trying to catch his breath. "He - he couldn't stop singing #New York, New York# - " the rest of Lister's story was lost to giggles.
Rimmer, however, failed to see the funny side. With an expressionless face, he leant back and supported his weight on his bandaged hands, allowing his head to roll back to face the ceiling. If he heard any more stories about how chummy Lister and his other self had been before he'd come along and spoiled all the fun, he was going to puke. He screwed up his eyes and released them again, trying to ignore the churning in his stomach. Ugh, that was if the hooch didn't have the same idea first.
Trying to distract himself with something, anything to fight off the hooch-fuelled nausea, he gazed up at the shards of light strewn across the rock ceiling. He noticed how the single beam of light from the torch arched up the wall beside them before hitting a jagged collection of stalactites and refracting into three seperate streams of light, each cast in a different direction. It was a seemingly meaningless image to the average, perhaps sober, onlooker. But in Rimmer's alcoholic state, it conjured up a question that, after these last six long months, he simply couldn't keep to himself any longer.
"How did it happen, then?" he asked, his words slipping out before he'd had a chance to check them. Somewhere deep inside, a voice screamed at him to stop, to spare Lister's feelings about his predecessor. But now, fuelled by the alcohol and the nicotine, he no longer cared about social etiquette or the stupid smegging unspoken vow not to mention him.
Even in the addled state that his brain was in, Lister knew exactly what Rimmer was referring to, and dodged it with little grace.
"I told you when I first saw you, man," he mumbled quickly in reply. "The radiation leak wiped all of you out, you know that." He took a long drag from the cigarette, in a visual attempt to indicate story over.
Rimmer, however, was not to be put off. He shook his head, which seemed to feel ten times heavier than he remembered it being before. "No, no, no. Don't give me that crap anymore," he pleaded mournfully. He caught Lister's eye unsteadily, who returned his gaze sadly. "That was merely Act One in your grand, wonderful adventures, wasn't it?" he continued bitterly. "Come on if it's so damn special," he goaded, lifting his right arm to beckon forth to Lister before quickly putting it back to keep his balance. "I wanna hear the finale."
An awkward silence hovered in the cigarette smoke that swirled between them. When no reply came, Rimmer drew a hand across his nose. "Screw you," he slurred flatly, as his arms gave up supporting his weight and he sank back to lie down, gazing at the ceiling in a sightless stare. He simply lay there, feeling the invisible waves that seemed to emanate from every pore, pulling and pushing at his body as his world silently span.
"Worst day of me life."
The mumbled words cut through the silence. Rimmer's ears leapt to attention, but his body remained still. He wasn't too sure if he was capable of moving at that point.
"You were pissed off at us all," Lister began quietly. "A version of you from another dimension had showed up again. You hated him 'cos," Lister rubbed his eyes, trying to remember the exact words, "he supposedly had all the breaks that you didn't get in life, you know?" he waved his hand loosely in dismissal, as if that was of little importance. "You were off by yourself, sulkin' around the cargo decks, when a knight escaped from the AR machine." Lister seemed to pause, whether this was due to the difficulty of the recollection or for dramatic effect, Rimmer couldn't quite put his finger on it. "It was 'im," he added, mournfully. "He killed ya, and it was my fault."
With great effort, Rimmer hauled himself to sit upright to face his companion, but Lister looked away. After a moment, Lister took a deep breath, which he released in a heavy sigh, locking onto Rimmer's blank stare once more. "I'm sorry, man, I'm so sorry," he offered.
Lister watched as Rimmer's eyes flitted left to right, almost imperceptibly, looking first into one eye and then the other. Rimmer's brow finally furrowed, a mixture of confusion and betrayal.
"Bullshit," he replied quietly.
Lister clasped his face in his hands, exasperated. "Rimmer, please, I'm sorry OK? I really am, I just-"
"That's not what I meant," Rimmer retorted, silencing Lister's verbal diarrhoea. "What you're telling me. It's bullshit, isn't it?"
Lister's hands dropped slowly from his face as he stared in pure, undilated shock at Rimmer. He tried to catch his breath. "W-what did you say?"
"You're lying," Rimmer replied simply. There was no longer any malice or desperation in his voice, merely a need to know the truth.
Lister was stunned. Cat, Kryten, Kochanski, Holly - they'd all taken his word as if it were gospel. Yet it only took one of his most despised companions to give him one drunken glance, and he could see straight through the facade that he'd kept hidden for over a year now. Lister felt himself on the precarious edge, the precipace of truth. If there was one time to confess his sins, it was now. Trapped in an underground maze, most likely to die from dehydration, starvation, madness, perhaps all of the above.
Lister took a hard swig from the hipflask and shook his head, sorrowfully. "The others, they don't -"
"It's OK," Rimmer reassured quickly, "I won't tell 'em, I promise."
Lister's eyes met Rimmer's. His eyes were pretty dilated, and his breath was so pungent that he had to blink at the fumes. Rimmer was most definitely drunk. But even still, Lister knew that he meant every word. He proffered the now half-empty hipflask to Rimmer.
"Trus' me," Lister slurred. "You're gonnaneed it."
Rimmer needed no further encouragement. He took as large a glug as he could stomach to brace himself for the worst as Lister lit up a second cigarette.
Then Lister told him everything. About the legend of Ace Rimmer, how Ace had confided in him, how he'd trained Rimmer to be his replacement before he'd sucumbed to his deathbed, and Rimmer's eventual departure as the new Ace Rimmer.
On the last few drags of the cigarette now, Rimmer exhaled a plume of smoke into the air above him, watching it swirl into a galaxy of his own devising. "So, he's still out there somewhere?" Rimmer mused, holding the cigarette out to Lister, his arm swooping unsteadily from side to side.
Calculating as best he could, Lister managed to retreive it on the fourth attempt, despite his own swaying hand, and he returned the cigarette to his lips. He watched as Rimmer returned his arm to cradle his head, as he lay back, one leg crossed on the gritty floor, just as he used to in the bottom bunk.
"I guess so," Lister half-slurred, half mumbled, the cigarette still hanging loosely from his mouth. He honestly didn't know where he was. He felt a stab of sadness. He didn't even know if he was safe. Accomplished. Maybe, finally, even happy.
Rimmer offered nothing in reply, but merely sighed contentedly. He pulled out his right arm from under his head and lay it across his eyes, blocking out the light of the torch. Eventually, he spoke, with a conviction and gratitude that he'd never heard even his Rimmer use.
"Thank you."
And with those two words, the guilt that Lister seemed to have harboured for fourteen long and lonely months, disapated. He smiled to himself, sinking back against the craggy wall and took a final drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out on the floor.
Long-lost memories, half-buried under the sands of time, seemed to be teased out from the recesses of his mind by the scarily potent booze. Randomly, Lister remembered skipping 20th Century History one bitterly cold November afterrnoon to go drinking under the canal bridge back in Liverpool. He must have been twelve, perhaps thirteen, hanging out with society's teenage dregs; the youths that Liverpool's education and care system had long since forgotten. Passing around the large plastic bottle of cheap cider one way and the single precious cigarette the other, it was one of those treasured times where he'd still felt a degree of normality and belonging. His nan would have killed him if she'd found out. She was always banging on about the importance of his education, rest her soul. But young Dave always found that his mind wandered when he was at school, not for lack of trying to concentrate, but it all seemed such a useless waste of his time. After all, if he was going to be a mechanic like his stepdad had always hoped when he was still alive, he would have to wait until he was sixteen, and then go back to the garage on Sturberry Road to try and persuade them to give him an apprenticeship. Lister absently took a final sad swig of his hipflask and gave a shuddered sigh. Shame that plan never worked out.
He turned his heavy, treasonous head to Rimmer, who was still on his back with his arm lying across his eyes.
"When..." he stopped suddenly to stop himself from retching and swallowed defiantly before continuing. "Whennnyou was a kid," he slurred to Rimmer quietly, "what did you wanna be?"
Rimmer was silent. Lister, thinking that he'd missed the question, was about to either repeat himself or kick Rimmer's leg, whichever felt simpler with the amount of alcohol in his system, when he finally replied. With his final breath before sinking into a deep and satisfying drunken sleep, he mumbled a single word.
"Happy."
Lister didn't reply, but simply nodded. His head slumped back against the rock as he listened to Rimmer's gentle snoring. Happy? He mused. He could go with happy. He closed his eyes and blissfully drifted to sleep.
For the first time in three million years, his dreams of the cold, rough streets of Liverpool were vivid enough to bring a smile to his face as he slept.
