Lister slicked his close-cropped hair back unnecessarily as he entered Starbug’s mid-section from the cockpit. As expected, Kryten stood there by the table, a covered dish of what was presumably Lister’s dinner in his hands. The mechanoid was clearly trying his best to appear cheerfully disposed, but the way his left eyelid kept fluttering up and down in time with the tapping of his leg on the same side easily gave him away. Lister sighed, and mentally steeled himself. This wasn’t going to be easy. “’Evening, Krytes,” he grinned, sitting down. “What’s for dinner?”

The mechanoid gave a fleeting smile, and set the dish down in front of Lister, lifting the cover with some ceremony. “Tuna casserole, Sir,” he mumbled. We found quite a few cans on… On the… Where...” Giving up on words, he briefly resorted to hand-gestures, before deflating slightly, his rectangular lower lip quivering.

“Hey now, man,” Lister said in carefully measured sympathy. “What’s the matter?”

“Well…” Android feet shuffled themselves with some difficulty. “It’s just… You and Mr. Rimmer, Sir.” The latter’s name was pronounced with clear distaste, as though Kryten were apologizing for the lack of quality garnishing on tonight’s meal.

Lister picked up his fork, and speared a good chuck full of what would doubtlessly turn out to be tasty foodstuff. Kryten was a capable cook. “What about us?”

The shaking of Kryten’s lower lip increased, and Lister felt a little guilty. No matter; this had to be done nonchalantly, or not at all. There was an art to these things, after all. “You…” The mechanoid stuttered, “you…”

“Oh, that!” Unable to stand any more, Lister leapt to the rescue. Adopting a shocked and confused expression, he exclaimed, after a measured pause; “Hang on… You didn’t think we was… Oh smeg, Kryten, tell me you didn’t think that!”

“Oh, no, Sir!” Kryten almost shouted happily. “I wouldn’t dream of… erm… whatever it was you think I was suggesting!” Hope mixed with curiosity, tinted with a helping of fear adorned his features.

“Well, I know you heard Cat explain what the place was for, and I just thought you might’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion, like,” Lister explained, radiating innocence.

“Why, pshaw! Whatever gave you that crazy idea?” Kryten, while obviously relieved, did still not seem entirely placated.

“Well yeah,” Lister said, moving in for the kill, “could you imagine me kissing Rimmer, eh? Much less,” here, he gave an almost exaggerated shudder, “anything else…”

Kryten shook his head. “As you say, Sir, it is quite unthinkable.”

“Too right! Of course, we did try to fool the sensors. You know, that they tricked us into thinking was there?”

“Oh, yes?” There was nothing but keen interest in the mechanoid’s eyes now, and Lister, encouraged, trudged on.

“So we tried to make it look like we was kissing, you know, by standing close and,” another shudder, “making the motions and that. Didn’t work of course, but we weren’t to know that.”

“And was that how your clothes were damaged?” Ah, now the suggestions came. Lister had all but won. It’d be easy to just accept the presented scenario, but Lister took his lying seriously.

“No, that was afterwards, when we started fighting.”

“Fighting?”

“Yeah, you know me and him; put us in close quarters and we go for each other’s throat sooner or later.” Lister ate another forkful, feeling rather less than hungry.

“I see,” Kryten mused. “What were you fighting about?”

“Oh, just some stupid thing, I can’t even remember. He was probably trying to raise our spirits by singing one of them Hammond tunes he likes.” Lister gave Kryten a knowing wink. These tended to do the trick. “You know what he’s like; doesn’t take much for him to annoy a man!”

“That’s certainly true, Sir,” Kryten nodded, opening one of the cans of beer he’d been fidgeting with at the end of the table, and handing it to Lister. And that was it. Mission accomplished. The two of them spent the rest of the meal chatting amiably about Rimmer’s bad habits and quirks, never noticing the silhouette of a tall, slightly hunched-over man watching them from the hallway.

Certainly, when Lister turned that way as he was leaving, there was nothing there anymore.


Rimmer sat on a flat foam pallet in the narrow rectangular gash in the stark grey wall that served as his bunk, rubbing his hands together and worrying his lower lip with his teeth. He looked at the bare, grey walls of his quarters, feeling equally bare and equally grey. He stared at the solitary chair and table, all right angles and the same shade as the walls, and dared them to try to talk him out of his foul mood. Unsurprisingly, they did not try. Rimmer decided that he really should not feel surprise at the conversation he had just overheard. After all, that was Lister's way, wasn't it? To dangle affection like a lure on a rod, then flip it out of reach when you took a grab. Boredom in space will do that; others' emotions really are terribly amusing playthings, aren't they?

Git.

He rubbed his hands together and stared at the bare grey walls. His mind was stuck firmly in a looptrack, and with every loop, his ire at Lister grew, for sticking him in such a bloody dull looptrack.

The track was disrupted by a staccato knock. He flashed an irritated look at the featureless sliding door to his left, matching it with an equally irritated query.

"What?"

"Hey, man..." a familiar blasted chirpy voice sounded from the other side of the door. "'s me."

"Yes, I do very well in voice recognition, Listy," Rimmer growled.

"Go on, open up, then." The cheerful tones grated down Rimmer's spine like some wretched kitchen implement intended for cheese.

"I'm terribly busy right now." Rimmer did not move from his bunk, and instead contemplated the many things he could say he was doing that would be preferable to a conversation with Lister. Ripping out his toenails one by one ranked very high.

"Eh?" came the somewhat confused reply.

"Don't you have something you very much need to be doing right now?" Rimmer wondered if he would have to attach a hint to a very large sledgehammer to get it through Lister's skull.

There was a slight hesitation. "No..."

Perhaps he would. "Oh, I doubt that." Rimmer could not keep an unmanly whine from creeping into his tone of voice, and decided that could be Lister's fault, as well. "I'm sure you can while away another few hours discussing my faults. So diverse, they are. Fascinating, I know."

Lister sounded very confused. "Wha? Rimmer, come on, man! Let us in!"

Rimmer sighed and chewed on his lip for a few more seconds. The git was not going to go away until he spit out whatever was on his mind. Well, barring an impressive balancing act, Rimmer decided, it would not be something terribly large. He hauled himself to his feet, stomped to the door, and slapped the worn red Door Open button with unnecessary violence. He stood in such a way as to block entry, and brought out Glare 754 - eyes narrowed, lips slightly sucked in and leveled to a perfect horizontal, forehead furrowed, neck muscles tense. It was a doozy, and he kept it tucked away and polished for special occasions.

Lister grinned widely as the door finally opened, not really surprised by Rimmer's expression. Who could keep track of the man's moods, anyway? Well, he could probably think of a thing or two to cheer him up... That's why he was here, after all. It'd only be natural for them to be bunking together now, and Kryten wouldn't think twice if Lister threw him a line about something or other. This evening's success had rather invigorated Lister, who felt a renewed sense of accomplishment.

The git was wearing the stupid chipper grin that sang a note of talons on blackboard to Rimmer. "What is so bloody smegging important?"

Lister couldn't help but take a step backwards at Rimmer's harsh tones. This was somewhat worse than expected. Still... "Hey, there ya are!" He tried his best to keep cheerful. "I just wanted to talk. You know, figured we ought." Yeah, talk... And then later... God, the man turned him on. He'd been aching to get his hands on him again ever since they left the Cat city.

"Talk?" Rimmer heard his voice grow high-pitched with indignation. What the smeg? "You want to talk? I thought it didn't take much of me to annoy a man, squire."

Lister craned his neck to catch a glimpse of what little could be seen of the room. As the doorway was filled with a taller man with his arms crossed, that was very little indeed. "Hey, I haven't even seen yer room before, at that."

"It's a room," Rimmer snarled. "Four walls. A ceiling. A floor." No windows.

"A... Ri.." Lister tasted the names, uncertain of what would fit the situation. Certainly Rimmer's demeanor did not invite intimacy. Well, there went this evening's entertainment. "Rimmer, what's wrong?"

So Lister was going to play this out. He was pretending that he hadn't schtupped Rimmer in one breath and derided him to Kryten with the next. Rimmer put on a plasticine grin and a patently phony cheerful voice to match "Nothing! Everything's lovely, I hear, miladdio!"

Was Rimmer being serious or not? Even after spending years in close quarters with the man, Lister found himself unable to access his, as Lister saw it, wholly alien thought processes at times. This was certainly such a time. "Oh, eh?"

Rimmer grated his teeth and kept up the faux cheer. "You're out of that room and back on Starbug; what could be better?"

"Yeah, well done us, eh?" Lister grinned. He shuffled his feet.

This was just too much. He expected Rimmer to play along. "Yes, very self-sacrificing of you," Rimmer snapped. He couldn't look at that smegging chirpy gerbil face anymore. He turned and flopped on his bunk with an aggravated sigh.

Sulking, now? What was he; a menopausal woman? Lister swore under his breath, and welcomed the opportunity to storm inside the room. Rimmer stared firmly at the ceiling of his bunk, and Lister glared at him, irritation flooding his system. "Look, what's the problem?"

"There's no problem at all, matey!" Rimmer was scraping the bottom of the barrel of false cheer. The dregs were very sour.

"Clearly there's a problem, because..." In mid-sentence, Lister noticed something odd about the surrounding area, and his voice faded. He frowned, trying to place what was wrong. His eyes took in the bare, blank, uniformly grey walls, broken only by the door, the bunk, and the undecorated stark grey lockers. The gaping, glaring absence of anything non-utilitarian was a punch in the gut. And frankly, there wasn't much that was utiltarian, either. Rimmer's eternally read and un-understood astronavigation book sat next to the electronic book he had used when soft-light on the stark grey table, both lined up to the edges of the table with anal-retentive precision. No other possessions were visible, not even the timetables and No Smoking signs that he surely would have been able to re-create by now. It was like being inside a empty cardboard box of doughnuts, knowing someone else had eaten them all. There was the same, hollow, deprived feeling. Lister could only stare, dumbstruck.

"You made the motions..." Rimmer snarled.

Lister did not hear a word. He slipped open the locker, seeing the one pitiful attempt at 'decoration' - a picture of Rimmer's family, his parents and three brothers, at some fancy-dress event, all staring disdainfully at the unseen camera-holder. Lister's face fell more and more. Who could live like this? How could anyone live like this? He felt tears welling up in his eyes, blinking them back, not confused by the mixture of anger and sadness.

Rimmer flopped his head over to look at Lister, irate at the git's intrusive poking. The bum's back was to him. "What do you want, Lister?"

Lister turned and looked Rimmer in the eyes. "What's with this place, man?" Maybe it was a mistake. It had to be. This couldn't be someone's room; it had to be a spare. Somewhere there had to be a room where Rimmer's infantile newspaper-clippings adorned the wall above his bed; Lister knew they had magazines, and a host of scissors. This had to be wrong.

Rimmer frowned. "I live here, Lister. Despite what you might think, I do not sleep in a coffin and only emerge at night."

This place is a coffin, Lister mused. "Have you been here all this time?"

"No, I've been in Murmansk. The weather isn't much to brag about, but the culture and historical heritage are simply marvelous!"

"Here?" Lister repeated, as if he had not heard. He swept the room with his eyes again, clutching his forehead, and biting his lip. This was Rimmer's room? This... soulless place?

He could ramble on about Rimmer's failings if he wanted, but Rimmer was damned if his was going to let the gimboid insult his room in the bargain. "If it doesn't suit your aesthetic sensibilities, bugger off to somewhere that does."

Lister's voice could have been caring or could have been pitying. Neither of which went with Rimmer's mood. "No, that's not what I mean..."

"Are you going to get to what you mean, or are you going to nanner on and waste my evening?" He had sod-all planned this evening, but he reserved the right to do sod-all without disruptions of a Listery nature.

"I mean... It's not right, a man... living like this." Lister reached out and touched the gray surface of the locker with a hesitant finger. Nothing, he thought, absent-mindedly. Nothing at all. It was as insubstantial as Rimmer's soft-light body had been.

"It's not living, Lister!" How many times did he have to remind the goit? Was the stupid smegging H stuck right on his forehead not enough?

Too right, Lister thought, on the verge of crying now, his voice a croak as he blurted out; "I know!"

Rimmer sighed and sat up. "Lister..." he said, taking a breath. "What the smeg do you want?" he shouted.

This was too much. Lister stumbled back, trying to clear his head. Why was he so upset? Not that this room couldn't do that to someone... "Look, yer obviously upset..."

Rimmer's annoyance brought the pitch of his voice up close to the territory where only canines would hear it. "Really??"

This was no use. Drying his eyes on his sleeve, trying very hard to make it look like he was only scratching an itch, Lister resigned. "I'll get out of yer hair..." He couldn't keep the hurt out of his voice. This was, after all, exactly what he'd feared; what he'd dreaded and at the same time had known, deep inside, would happen. Rejection. Denial. "I just wanted to... Well. Never mind." He half-turned towards the door, and stopped for a minute to clear his mind.

Rimmer flopped back on bunk and stared pointedly at the ceiling. Yes, please, he thought. Get out. I could not care less about what you want.

Unfortunately, clearing his mind only meant Lister began to dwell on the unpleasant truth of his situation. All for nothing. That whole ordeal; hours of cajoling and convincing, reassurance and re-reassurance, and what? Nothing? How did Rimmer's mind work? How did his heart work? "Just one thing..." he said, then swallowed. "You never said anything." He looked helplessly at Rimmer. Lister didn't like to give up on hope, even when it seemed like the most stupid and pointless thing in the universe to do so. "I don't know... I mean... do you still..."

Rimmer's voice was flat and emotionless. He had nothing he wanted to put into it. "Do I still what."

Lister searched Rimmer's profile for confirmation of any kind of positive feelings. He bit nervously at his lower lip, almost nibbling.

Rimmer flopped his head over again to face Lister as the silence persisted. He waited for the rest of the sentence.

Nothing. As empty and soulless as the walls around them. Fair enough. Well, no, not bloody fair, but what could you do? Lister's voice went as flat as Rimmer's had, feeling as though he were made of dull, grey metal. "Right. Never mind. I'm off then."

"Have fun," Rimmer grated. He felt he deserved a parting shot. "You always do."

"Whatever."

"Go have sex with something. Something less annoying, preferably."

Lister turned, his hand hovering over the Door Open button. "What?"

Rimmer sulked in his bunk.

Lister pulled off his hat, tearing at his hair. What was this, an emotional roller-coaster competition? "Look, yer giving me rather mixed signals here, guy!"

The conversation up to that point had fretted Rimmer's nerve-strings, and that pluck sounded a perfect chord of fury. He leapt off of the bed, enraged, and stomped to where Lister stood. "Mixed signals?" he bellowed. "That's rich, you know, really bloody rich."

Startled and not a little afraid, despite himself, Lister backed up until his back met the door.

"Coming from the man who said he loved me on the psi-moon and then said it was all a huge joke."

"Wha?" Lister stuttered, completely taken aback. They'd been over that! He was about to say something to that effect, when Rimmer's voice boomed again.

"Coming from the man who shagged me and then whinged to Kryten about what a bloody pain in the arse I am."

Lister's expression quietly changed from "What?" to "Oh, sodding smeg," as his coloring changed from pale tan to light olive green.

"Who he wouldn't dream of kissing me unless it was a particularly bad dream. Let alone..." he stammered to a halt, the words sticking in his throat. The lying, two-faced bastard just wanted to make sure that his double-dealing was OK with Rimmer, did he. Well, it was not. It was at a place where OK was not even visible. He glared at Lister with his fists clenched, his body trembling. He took two choking breaths.

"Oh..." Lister said, lamely. He had not been prepared for this.

'Oh.' What a lovely response. Explained everything, it did. Made it all better. Rimmer regained enough motor control to stalk back to his bunk and flop on it, stiff as a board. "Smeg off, vindaloo brains."

Lister was at a complete and utter loss for words. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but looked at Rimmer and thought better of it. This was something even he couldn't talk his way out of.

Rimmer bit his lip as he stared at bunk's ceiling. Damn it, he would not cry. How old was he? Thirty-four? Two hundred and thirty-four? Three million, two hundred and thirty-four? Too old for adolescent mush, certainly. And far too old for these adolescent games Lister was determined to play.

Lister sighed deeply, turned, and put his finger on the Door Open button. He desperately wanted to say something, but was too shaken by that last outburst of Rimmer's. What could he say, anyway? He shook his shoulders and pressed the button.

"See ya around," he said, trying not to think about anything in particular, lest it color his voice. "Arn..." he added, with a hitch in his voice that sounded too much like the hitch he had when he had breathed that "Arn," into Rimmer's ear in the Cat-room. He left, and Rimmer let out a shuddering breath and closed his eyes.