Author: Roadstergal.
Title: Kryten.
Censor: PG.
Pairing: Implications of Rimmer/Lister.
Commentary: Please. roadstergal@gmail.com
Disclaimer: They don’t belong to me, and I make no money off of them.
Note: A gapfiller for Blue.
Kryten sighed and shook his head at himself. His courtesy protocols prevented him from swearing at anyone, even himself, but he twitched once in a while and spat a syllable of attempted invective. How could he have been so silly? Ah, yes, Mister Rimmer might have fewer in-and-out bits than Miss Kochanski, and was missing the one that was most easily accessible, but he had two! Well, two that, from his limited research, might potentially appeal to Mister Lister. Kryten shook his head. That was just two too many, thank you!
He was shuffling through the messy piles of rubbish on Starbug's cargo decks. Ah, yes, one more thing to feel upset about! He had let the storage area fall into disorder; he had not been down to clean in months, and between the shaking Starbug would take when being shot out of the sky, or crashing on a small and unoffending moon after being shot out of the sky, and Mister Lister's tendency to toss what did not interest him haphazardly aside while looking for what did, the storage area was simply a shambles. It was a sign of Kryten's agitation that he did not settle down right then and clean it; he had to promise himself, over and over, that he would do so the moment he finished this task. But this task was vital.
He did not believe for one moment that Kochanski's psychobabble had cured Mister Lister. Mister Lister still looked sad and lonely - like he was missing Mister Rimmer! - when he finished speaking with Kochanski. Oh, how Kryten longed for the good old days! The days when Mister Lister and Mister Rimmer would fight all of the time, and Mister Lister would talk about putting Mister Rimmer's light bee in the trash compactor, while Mister Rimmer would try to insert major appliances into Mister Lister. Or even better - back when Mister Rimmer was a soft-light hologram, and his in-and-out bits were completely useless. Oh, those were the good days! Days when Kryten did not have to constantly be on the alert for whoever might try to steal Mister Lister's affections - all of those 'whoevers' being so completely undeserving of them. Oh, no, Kryten would not allow anyone to take Mister Lister away! He gave a metallic sigh, thinking of the Nova 5; another thousand years or so of watching reruns of Andriods, while someone else gallivanted across the galaxy with Mister Lister, would surely drive him mechano-batty.
The corner of something worn and dirty and blue appeared as Kryten moved a box, and he pounced on it like a starving African tiger who has just found a tin of cat food. He dusted off the faded, tattered dark-blue cover, and opened the small book to the flyleaf. In a painstakingly neat hand was written:
"The Most Impressive Diary
of
Arnold J. Rimmer
Hard-Light Hologram
and
Space Adventurer."
Kryten let his rubbery features settle into a small smile. Perfect.
He sat in a grey, featureless chair at a grey, featureless table in Mister Rimmer's old room to transcribe the diary. He had a notepad in one hand, and tested the nib of his pen before opening the diary. The only way out of this was to make Mister Lister hate Mister Rimmer. Then Kryten could focus on Miss Kochanski. He nodded. An excellent plan. He opened the book and began to read.
"September the twenty-eighth. Lister's snoring is loud enough to penetrate the radiation-proof room dividers and still wake the dead. Well, it bloody well woke me, didn't it? Am considering crossing to his room and shoving pencils up that twat's nose. A box of them. Rubber-end first."
Kryten smiled as he began to take notes.
After an hour's work, however, Kryten was beginning to be disturbed at the increasing number of entries he had to skip. Entries like:
"January the thirty-first. Lister's chipmunk-cheeked cheerfulness will be the death of me. I am about ready to take a laser scalpel and cut those grinning pouches right off of his face. Still, they are endearing, in a way, and so I only threaten to do so."
Kryten grimaced. He skipped the rest of that entry and moved on to the next.
"February the thirtieth. I had to take control at the joystick when Lister spilled his mutton vindaloo on his crotch and started leaping about the cabin, knocking Cat unconscious. He claims that simply because there were no space bodies of detectable size within three light-years, we were perfectly safe. I disagree. I think we would have hit... something bad if it had not been for my valiant commandeering of the helm."
That would do. With a little tweaking. Kryten turned the page, and his syntho-mote chip made his eyes widen. The next page was a long entry, in a shaky script that showed excessive attention to control of the hand, a scrawl that was almost unrecognizable as Mister Rimmer's handwriting.
"Some month.. some day. Who cares. It is SIX HUNDRED FECKING YEARS since my last entry. Yes, I'm a little behind.
It's all Lister's fault. He wanted to board the bombed-out husk of the simulant ship to steal supplies. And he had neglected to tell us for weeks that we were running critically low on fuel! He made me board this creaking skeleton of a pile of a wreck of a ship. We couldn't talk or fire bazookoids, he told us. So when a simulant appeared, I bolted for the escape pod. I figured the rest could take care of themselves. Lister brought them aboard; he could bring them back safely.
I crash-landed on an inhabitable planet, and used flares from the seeding pod I had nabbed to terraform it. I cloned myself off to make myself company.
Big bloody mistake.
Lister may go on about what a weasel I am, and I have to admit that he's right now and then, but you never get a true taste of what a real bastard you are until you have to live with your own clones for a few years. A few centuries. They locked me up for FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FECKING YEARS. Five hundred years without food or water. Five hundred eighty years of them trying over and over again to kill me in all kinds of interesting ways. And why? Because I wasn't as much of a bastard as all of them were. Only on a planet of clones of me would I turn out to be the noblest one of all. What a thrice-damned bunch of sadistic gits.
For fifty years, I decided that being locked into a stone jail was better than being locked into a Starbug jail with a trio of losers. After one hundred or so, I started to miss Lister. After three hundred, I was longing for the sight of Cat. I think, by the end, I would even have been happy to see Kryten."
Kryten sniffed.
"I am only writing this down because I know I will have editorial control over the contents of this diary when a time comes for a film to be based upon it. But I started to [a few words were scrawled out] really [several more were scrawled out] miss Lister. When you're locked in a dank stone jail with no light and no entertainment other than a pair of worry balls and a pack of clones who come down to hang, burn, eviscerate, behead, whip, or garrote you when the whim strikes, about all that one can do to make the centuries pass is to grind one's balls or... grind one's balls. I tried to fantasize about the girls I had had in life - all right, the girl I had had in life - and all of the ones I had lusted after in life or in death, but I could not keep Lister's face from coming - pardon the pun - to mind. Over and over, more solidly the more I tried to drive him out and put someone else in his place. Eventually, I began to enjoy it, and had him in such vivid detail in so many ways over the years that, when he actually appeared, in person, to drag me out, I almost asked him if it was to be the chicken or the rabbi suit this time.
I am back on Starbug, and slowly getting used to eating and drinking and not being assaulted on a regular basis. I find it odd that my fear of... well, everything... is greatly diminished. I suppose I have discovered there really are a few things worse than death.
And any lingering sexual desire I might have had for Lister is rapidly being cured by the fact that he is picking bits of curry out of his teeth with a set of medical forceps that I am not sure if he washed first."
Krtyen frowned. This entry was not a useful one for his purposes. He looked to the notepad next to him, now nicely filled with his notes of Mister Rimmer's horribleness, and flipped through the rest of the book. A note on the last few non-blank pages, in a larger hand and red pen, caught his eye.
"Listy.
I won't say goodbye, because I've probably already said it by now, in person. I'm fairly certain I will not be able to say anything else. I'm still a coward, after all!
I'm trying. God, you know how much I hated Ace. Both Aces. I feel like a twit in this gold foil flightsuit that wouldn't be out of place in a lineup of the Village People. What the smeg am I doing? I'm still plenty frightened of the whole idea. Going out and being brave for people who will forget me when I'm gone, and only remember the suit and the wig, so the next me will be just as good as me when I'm long smashed and circling for eternity around that godawful pink planet.
But I can't leave and not leave... some hint for you. Here it is - all of me, the good and the bad. Plenty of the latter. Maybe you'll find some of the former. It's your choice what to do with it when you find it.
I am still as yellow as a dandelion next to a fire hydrant in a dog park, so it's only now, when there are years and dimensions between us, that I can say I love you and not run from the room before I get halfway into the 'I.' If you're happy with me gone, and find your skin trying to crawl off and hide in a corner when you read this, well, I'm long gone. If you miss me - well, I probably miss you, too.
Toodle pips. Whatever you do, don't smoke me a bloody kipper. I hate them."
Kryten walked to the midsection, made sure that Lister was intently focused on his magazine, and dropped the blue book into the waste disposal unit. He pressed the Eject button with a satisfied mechano-sigh. The material he had transcribed from it would do - with a little editing. He walked purposefully back to the AR suite, his notes clutched in his hand. Yes, he would take care of things. Mister Lister would see the part of Mister Rimmer that he needed to see - the part that would make him glad the hologram was gone - and as for the rest, well, what good would it do Mister Lister?
He shook his head. How dare Mister Rimmer try to make poor Mister Lister so blue.
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