Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

That was the wrong straw.

Incidentally, that particular one may also have been the last straw.

Although not special in any of its qualities, that one, small, insignificant little straw had singlehandedly killed 1168 people.
That may have shocked Lister, if you had told him at this particular moment. All he wanted to do right now with a straw was put it's vending- machine- nozzle- unblocking skills to work in one of Arnold J. Rimmer's smaller personal crevices.

Lister sighed and leaned further over the trolley. The hard plastic made a scratchy sound as one of his pin badges scraped across it. He dragged his cuff back and forth through the cleanest patch, and watched as the colour, which once was blue, but was now more like a dirty grey, came off and turned white. Making a face, he wiped the dusty cuff on his trousers, making them dusty, too.

Rimmer was now, once again, blustering about how that single straw being the wrong size, shape and colour. He was surely losing his marbles? As far as Lister could see, there was only one size, small, only one shape, long and rounded, and colour, white? Or dirty white? Maybe that was the difference Rimmer was waffling about. Lister rolled his eyes. Now he was shouting about threatening to report him again.

That was one of his most smeggy qualities- the ability to turn anything into report material.

He focused his eyes on the greasy stain under the vending machine's service hatch. It looked like it had been there for years, a darker grey that the crusty, flaky, regulation colour military grey that was meant to line the long corridors. Lister smirked to himself. That was one of Rimmer's greatest annoyances, that the paint on the ship was never perfect. Z shift had to put up with his demented rants and unpleasant whinging more often than not, when a skirting board had been chipped, of someone had drawn a quite unusual looking piece of male anatomy outside his bunkroom, with the even more unusual lettering, "StOO WaZ 3r3". Rimmer had complained for weeks after that, as now he believed that the JMC should offer basic courses in a language to the plebs they managed to employ.
That also drove Lister mental.
The learning.
The exams.
The complaining. Oh, and he nearly forgot, Rimmer's late night cramming sessions immediately before the exam, because he was too busy making a revision timetable, and had completely forgotten to do any revision at all.

“I bet you're not even listening, are you?”

Lister thought that was unfair too. He had been listening. Sort of. He had been humming a jaunty tune, and reminiscing about the good old days back in Liverpool. Rimmer's wittering hadn't even come close to piercing through his brain's automatic boredom defence shields.

He missed the pub.

He missed Earth.
He missed his home.

Lister sighed again, more loudly this time, and pulled his hat over his face, rubbing his eyes.

“Why's it even matter?” He groaned. “Its not like we're gonna hafta perform a live-savin' opration witha straw!”

“Even if we did have to, we wouldn't be able to. Not with the disgusting things you've been doing with them! God only knows where that grill cleaner has been going in between shifts! Unfortunately for you, Lister, I take great pride in doing the job properly, and even more unfortunately for you, I know how to do it properly!”

He was trying to be triumphant, to shut him down. Lister understood that one of the most important thing in Rimmer's mind was to have the last word. Even though he hated his bunkmate with a burning passion that all the water in the world would struggle to put out, Lister knew that most of Rimmer's downfalls, his hang- ups, were from his parents. He was trying to escape all his memories of being the small man, the victim, the oppressed. And the only way he could get the feeling of being bigger, being stronger and being better than everyone else was through making another person feel victimised.
It was one of Lister's least favourite things. Rimmer could never be truly happy unless someone else was unhappy. It made him sick. It made Rimmer sick too.

He had to get these thoughts out of his head. He couldn't admit it to himself, but he really cared about Rimmer

“Yeah, and unfortunately for me, you're a total smeg head!”

“That's it, millado, you're on report!”

Lister made a face like an exasperated mother watching her child stick crayons up it's nose, and a really animalistic noise, like an orangutan giving birth to something far larger than a baby orangutan, and leaned back, stretching, wrapping his fingers around the padded bar at the back of the trolley. Deep in thought, he put his feet onto the wheels and felt the whole thing rock slightly under his weight. He smiled quietly to himself as Rimmer flicked shut his report book with a contemptuous look his way, and changed the topic to take his mind off of Lister. He waffled about job numbers, cleaning blocked nozzles, and how his career had been on the up, he had been going places, until Lister had arrived. Lister had tuned him out completely.
He'd get him soon. Images of murder weapons and torture devices swirled through Lister's brain, before the images changed into something that he would prefer to keep firmly inside his head. Images of handcuffs. Images of ropes. Images of- "Lister? LISTER!!!!!!!!!!!" "Y-yyeah? What, What? What is it?"

-

Fifteen minutes later, they bumped into Todhunter.

Or rather, Lister had bumped into Todhunter.

Much to Rimmer’s dismay, and more correctly, knuckle biting horror, Lister had begun pushing the trolley faster and faster the instant Rimmer had finished the job and proclaimed, “Well done Arnie J! They really don't make ‘em like you anymore, son. Come on Lister, let's do the next one.”

That was all he said. And that was that. Litster had been off, running as fast as he could down the straight, and jumping onto the back to skid on two wheels around the corners.
Rimmer had been in two minds whether to run after him, or just go back to the cupboard and get another trolley, and just carry on.
Within a couple of seconds, he made the decision. Lister's trolley still had his clipboard on it from where he had put it down. He needed that clipboard. What if Lister crashed? What would happen to the clipboard? What if it slid back into the gunk they had harvested from a particularly nasty three- week- old blockage this morning? It would be ruined. All their hard work, all Rimmer's carefully managed paperwork would be destroyed.
He had to stop him.

"Lister! Stop!" He shouted down the corridor.

Complete silence came as his reply. He had been standing still for the better part of a minute thinking about whether he should go. He hadn't even moved.
He cursed, and began running.
Within thirty seconds, he had reached the spot where Lister had crashed.

The trolley was on it's side, wheels spinning aimlessly in the air. The box of straws had fallen some ten feet away, and had scattered it's contents halfway across the corridor. The bucket full of rotted chicken soup had upended itself, creating a giant green flick on the wall that was slowly dripping onto the floor. Rimmer bit his knuckle and tried not to scream. The paintwork!
The rest of the rotten soup was covering Lister's laughing form on the floor, but now Rimmer was confused. There was another soup- covered shape on the floor.
Then he realised. Lister had hit someone!
He sank his teeth even harder into his knuckle, and felt tears spring to his eyes. He sniffed, and felt a sob rising in his chest. He pushed it down, but felt it rise back up again with even more strength as he heard the second shape speak. He dragged his hand out of his mouth and gulped hard. He couldn't let Todhunter see him being weak.

"Having fun, were we Lister?" The shape laughed, and patted lister on the back. "I used to do that in my boarding school. We'd steal the cleaner's trolley, and tie the least popular boy to it. Then off it went, down the stairs!"
The shape made a gesture that looked an awful lot like a trolley falling down stairs. It grinned. Rimmer groaned. The sob welled itself up inside him and threatened to swallow his insides whole. This time he couldn't fight back, and it escaped like a flock of birds fleeing from their cage.

He immediately snapped a salute to the shape. He had recognised his voice. Lister was going to die.
Or at least, spend the next two years painting the ship.

"Todhunter, sir. I hope this absolute buffoon" He shot an abominable look at Lister. Lister paled and looked with trepidation at Todhunter's still smiling face. "Hasn't injured you, or damaged your uniform, sir?"

"Actually, I'm fine thank you Rimmer. Although, you could tell me, why was Lister, here, racing down the corridor on your trolley?"

"Yyyyyyeeessss sssiiiirrrrrrr. Oooooffff cccoouurrsssee ssssiiirrrrr. Rrrriiiiggghhhhtttt aaaawwwwwaaayyyyy sssiiiiirrrrrhhhhhh."

"Is'e alrigh'?" Questioned Lister.

"You know, I'm not sure. I, ah, I've never seen anyone do that before. It's like he's talking in, well, slow motion."

"Ah. Sahr, I, um, I, uh, think he's having a panic attack."

"Why would you say that, Lister? Have you seen him have one before?"

"No sahr, no sahr, its just that, well, it's Rimmer, isn't it? And he's sorta rollin' round on the floor cryin'?"

Chapter Text

It was only a matter of days.

That was the problem, Holly thought.
Anyone else, they would still be alive.
But it was him, so they weren't. Out of all the people on the ship, all the officers, all the engineers, all the high-flying, high-quality crewmembers, the weasliest, most self-obsessed, neurotic and narcissistic man on the entire vessel had been chosen. And now they were all dead.
It was all Rimmer's fault. Holly couldn't help but blame him. Although in his core programming, Holly wasn't really designed to have an opinion, he had spent so much time alone with himself that he had begun to develop one. He thought he was going quite strange, even if the only opinion he seems to have formed was about the pedantic fool that had put him so far away from his manufacturer.

Floating through space, without a direction, only away from Earth.

Floating through space, without a purpose, only to not poison the solar system.

168 crew members, and 1000 passengers had been wiped out, leaving just one man.

One man, alone with the universe.

And Holly, of course.

But he couldn't come out of stasis yet, at least not until some of the habitation levels were radiation free, but the stasis pods where Lister was wouldn't be clear for another three million or so years.
Holly sighed to himself and calculated how far away they were from the solar system.

48,935 light years.
By the time they got back, the human race might be extinct. He had to get Lister back, the fate of his species depended on it.
But he still had to wait for the radiation to subside.

How long might that be?

It was all very unfair, when you looked at it. All alone in deep space, and no-one to keep him company.

George McIntyre, bless him, wasn't cut out for space travel. Holly had understood the moment he had come aboard, that he either wouldn't last very long before he would go back to his day job, or he wouldn't go back at all. Sad to say for all the crew, and his poor wife, the vast number of problems he was having with his money stacked up, and it was the latter that caused his body to leave Red Dwarf on Thursday, 22nd of March 2181.

Holly thought back to the two weeks after the accident. McIntyre had been distraught, and blamed himself, and his death, for the annihilation of the crew. Holly had been quick to defend him, and told him that the leak was not caused by him being unable to perform his duties as normal. McIntyre still wasn’t able to cope and begged Holly to turn him off. Holly, polite as ever, explained that they wouldn’t be returning to Earth, and how this would probably be the end of McIntyre forever.

So, Holly had spent the time alone.

After another ten or so decades, Holly decided enough was enough. He had been alone for far too long already; he needed someone to stop him from going mad. Because of this deep-seated need for interaction with something, he had got the skutters to make a circuit board which would allow them to have intelligent conversation.
Unfortunately, it didn't really work out like that. Skutters are very difficult to command at the best of times, and the time alone had made them even more independent than before the accident. It didn't go well.

Somehow, Holly couldn't for the life of him work out, they had repaired themselves perfectly well when anything had gone wrong. Now they couldn't even install a simple piece of software without panicking about it.

He didn't think he would be able to cope with three million years alone with himself, and the skutters as company.

So, he turned on a hologram.

"What. The. Smeg."

"Alright, Arnold?"

In fairness to Holly, he didn't expect the reaction he got. He still could probably prepared himself better. Have some comforting words to say or something. He hadnt.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhggghhhhhhhhhhhggggggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"Sorry, I probably should have explained."

It was dark.

She didn't like that. It made her skin itch, and the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

It was one of the only things that scared her, the dark.

And not for any particular reason, either; she didn’t have any past experiences with the dark.

Something about it just sat wrong in her head, like some primal instinct was telling her that this wasn’t right, the world shouldn’t be this dark.

It shouldn't be black, encouraging your eyes to make fake patterns, swirls into the smog. It made her mind fold in on itself.

It wasn’t just dark where she was though.

It was cramped.

She didn't mind that, not really. She liked contorting her body smaller and smaller in her bunk; she did it to get more comfortable. But her bunk was quite large, and really totally different to the space she was currently inhabiting. The space was... well...

...it was just, well, small.

As long as it didn't get any smaller, she would be fine. Her stomach churned at the thought of being crushed, before she fought the thought out of her head. She hummed a tune, an old record her dad played in the bakery, and felt herself calm down.

She felt a tickle at her nose, and before she could help herself, she had sneezed, loud and hard, smashing her head backwards into the wall behind her. Which, to her horror, turned out to not be a wall at all, and opened outwards with some speed.

She laid, sprawled out on the floor of her bunkroom, not entirely sure which way was up, when she heard a voice. The voice was accompanying footsteps marching quickly down the hall. One person? Or two?

No, just one. She could hear them properly now. It was a woman, with a deep voice, and a thick West Jupiter accent. Suddenly, she realised. It was Alex! Her lungs felt like they contracted into her chest. Alex couldn't see her like this.

Scrambling to her feet, she slid on a wet patch of floor. Disaster. Alex had arrived.

“What you doing there, Ami?”

Ami gulped and tried to stutter out an appropriate answer. She couldn't get any words out, so smiled sheepishly at Alex. Her head spun and throbbed from where she had hit it. She was finding it difficult to look at Alex and form coherent thoughts at the same time.

“Aww, have you been sleeping in the lockers again? I told you, if you want somewhere small to sleep, you should use the bathroom. The captain never does bathroom inspections.”

There was an unusual jauntiness to Alex’s voice that Ami didn't understand. She coughed hard and tried to talk.

“Whyyyhhh... cough... are you so cheerful?”

Alex walked round the table to stand in front of Ami, kicking away t- shirts that had spilled out when the locker door opened. She put her hand on Ami’s shoulder. Ami found herself looking up into her bunkmate’s eyes with admiration.

Alex was an engineer, and a very fine one, at that. Ami was still confused at why she had wanted to room with her. She was in an entry level position after a year with the company. Ami was a researcher and an officer less than a day after she had been scouted.

Maybe she likes you, she had thought to herself on many an occasion. And Alex did give her reason to think that, frequently hugging Ami and inviting her into bed when they were cold. In the two weeks Ami had been on the research craft, she had become closer to Alex than she had with friends she had known for years. There was no question in their ranks being a divide between them. Alex would have probably still like Ami if she had been captain.

Ami grinned dreamily to herself as she felt her friend’s arms snake around her waist.

She could get used to this.