Fic: Tension - PG-13
Title: Tension (because I'm a knitting geek)
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own any part of Red Dwarf, or make any money from fanfiction.
Notes: For roadstergal. It's pretty intimidating writing a story to a prompt set by such a brilliant writer. I hope I did ok :) Ten points to whoever spots the Mighty Boosh reference, too.
“Real men, Lister,” Rimmer clasped his hands behind his back and paced slightly in a manner befitting a lecture such as this, “real men don't knit.” He let himself enjoy the clip clip of his hard light boots on starbug's floor. Pacing just hadn't been the same when he was soft light.
Lister didn't even look up from his knitting. His tongue was stuck out of his mouth at the corner as he frowned in concentration. Obviously this was a difficult bit of the... whatever it was he was making. Rimmer thought it could have been a hat, or possibly a tea cosy. Then again, it could just as easily have been a jumper. Lister's “projects” had a tendency to end up as something far different than what they started out as, or, Rimmer suspected, what they were intended to be. Lister glanced up and Rimmer pretended not to be staring. “Nothin' wrong with knitting.”
“No, of course not. If you happen to be an elderly grandmother, or a member of the W.I., or pregnant.” Rimmer stopped pacing and looked Lister up and down. “You were pregnant, of course. Perhaps it had some strange hormonal side effect, and that's why you like knitting.”
Lister barely paused as he rolled his eyes. “Right.” The needles carried on their slow clicking.
Rimmer sniffed in a superior sort of way. Lister couldn't really blame his excessive girliness on the pregnancy, not really. Not when he'd been going around with hair like that for so long.
“When are you going to do something about your hair?”
Lister did pause at that. He frowned at Rimmer. “What's wrong with my hair?”
“It's getting obscenely long. Again. You should get Kryten to cut it.”
Lister shook his head. The clacking of his knitting needles was beginning to grate on Rimmer's nerves, he could feel a twitch building up behind his right eye and his nostrils starting to flare in annoyance. Knitting was a supreme waste of time. “Why don't you do something useful?”
“Why don't you?”
“I am doing something useful! I'm motivating you.”
Lister looked incredulous. “You what?”
“Clearly you need it. You're the last man in the universe and you while away your spare time knitting.”
“Oh yeah, and what should I be doin'?”
“Well, getting a haircut for starters.”
Lister slammed his knitting down in annoyance. “Rimmer, what the smeg is wrong with you?”
Cat chose that moment to burst into the midsection. “All hands on deck, buds. We're coming up on something, and it does not smell good.”
* * *
The room was dark and cold, and barely big enough to really count as a room. Still, it was a hiding place. Water slid down the walls and pooled on the floor, slimy and green, stagnant for centuries. Rimmer was distracted from several worrying thoughts about bacteria by Lister's tight grip on his shoulder.
“Y'don't think it'll find us in here, do ya?”
“How should I know?” Rimmer winced at the high pitch of his voice, and tried to tell himself to relax. All they had to do was hide and wait, Kryten had said. The thing, whatever it was, had been injured in the scuffle. Badly injured. Not-very-long-to-live injured. Rimmer had always been a master of hide and seek, so as long as Lister didn't smeg things up again everything would be fine. He repeated that to himself a few times. Things were going to be fine.
They crouched down, huddled in a corner. Lister seemed unwilling to let go of Rimmer's arm. Rimmer thought that he was lucky that he was a hologram, or those creases would never come out of his uniform sleeves. He noticed, with growing concern, that Lister was now quietly rocking back and forward on the spot. His free hand kept drifting to his face, before he caught himself and lowered it again. Rimmer coughed discreetly. “Are you all right there, Lister?”
Lister jumped at the sound of his voice. His face was creased in despair. “I can't see a smegging thing.” Rimmer frowned. Kryten had said the blindness was almost certain to be temporary. If you could trust a medical diagnosis from a glorified mechanical cleaning aid.
“Yes, well, if you hadn't insisted on poking around a particularly dangerous section of a particularly dangerous derelict...”
“Rimmer are you trying to tell me this is my fault?”
Rimmer snorted. “Well it's certainly not mine.”
Lister hugged at his knees with his spare arm. Rimmer wondered why he was still clinging to his sleeve like an infant with the other.
“You don't know what it's like, man,” Lister mumbled. “Losin' one of yer senses.”
Oh now, wait a minute. That really did take the proverbial biscuit. Rimmer wasted one of his most scathing looks on the hideously annoying man at his side. “Well, do enlighten me Listy. What could that loss possibly be like, hm?”
“I...” Lister gestured a bit, as if trying to find the right words, then seemed to give up. “I dunno. It's just smeggin' awful.”
“It's not a good feeling? What a shocking revelation.”
“Not a good feeling?” Lister's voice was growing dangerously loud, tinged with anger.
“Look for heaven's sake keep it down. Unless you want a little visit from the homicidal, test tube-wielding zombie maniac out there?”
Lister's hand tightened almost imperceptibly on Rimmer's arm. They sat in silence for a while.
“Does it still hurt?” Rimmer muttered eventually.
“Yeah,” Lister muttered in return. “And worse than that's the itchin'. It itches like crazy. Makes me wanna scratch my own eyes out.” He scraped his short fingernails along his cheek as if to emphasise the point.
Rimmer tried to think of something to say, something useful and important, something helpful. “Right,” he said, eventually. The slow dripping of the water was starting to give him a headache. He'd never realised what an annoying sound it was before. He started to long for the click-clack of Lister's knitting needles, anything other than that drip that tickled his brain like the tick of an exam room clock.
“I do, you know,” he said.
“Eh?”
“I do know what it's like to lose one of your senses. More than one, in fact. Or had you forgotten? Did that chemical do something to your sorry excuse for a brain when it splashed all over your face?”
“Oh,” Lister said, his expression changing to something Rimmer couldn't decipher. “Right. Yeah, you do an' all, don't ya.” His eyes were blood-shot and vacant. Rimmer swallowed and looked away.
He jumped as he felt Lister's hand clumsily touch his face. He would have jerked away entirely, but Lister's hand on his arm held him in place. “What the smeg are you doing?”
“It's weird, not bein' able to see ya.”
“Yes, Lister, that's what's weird.”
Lister's hands continued their cautious exploration. He bit his lip in concentration, although Rimmer wasn't sure what he was concentrating on. Certainly not on being careful with where he was sticking his fingers.
“Ow!”
“Oops.” Lister grinned, and for a moment the sight of it was so reassuring that Rimmer was almost glad. Almost.
“That was my eye you goit!”
Lister giggled, briefly, and Rimmer wondered what it would take to actually depress him.
“Your hands are cold,” he informed him sullenly.
“Sorry.”
He wasn't sorry at all, Rimmer thought. If he was, he would stop this... whatever it was he was doing. Lister brought both hands to his mouth and huffed warm breath on them, rubbing them together to heat them up, and resumed touching Rimmer's face a little more boldly than before.
Rimmer was frozen in place as those gentle fingers found his hair, traced the curve of his ears and the flare of his nose. He considered the murky water again, and made a mental note to ask Kryten whether there was any chance that holograms could be susceptible to some kind of paralysing space bacteria.
“Aren't you worried?”
Lister frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That it's permanent, that you won't be able to see any more.”
Lister paused, considering. “Kryten'll be able to fix it,” he said, confidently. Too confidently, perhaps, but Rimmer let it go with a snort and a shake of his head. “Why d'you always have to look at the down side of things?”
“We're in a dank and dirty, freezing cold room, hiding out from a psycopath that blinded you and seems intent on somehow ripping out our guts, with no better plan than to wait until it drops dead from it's own injuries. Where's the up side?”
Lister's hands were at his neck now, in his hair. It actually felt rather nice. Rimmer suppressed a shiver and was glad that Lister couldn't see the look on his face. Lister smiled again suddenly, seeming for a moment just as chirpy and gerbil-faced as ever. Nothing ever seemed to phase him.
“Well,” Lister said, edging even closer than before. “Gave us some time to talk, didn't it. Some time away from the 'bug. It was gettin' a bit claustrophobic.” His fingertips traced Rimmer's cheekbone. Rimmer tried to remind his body that he didn't actually need to breathe, so could it stop breathing quite so hard, thank you very much. “Look, man, I know we've been getting on each other's nerves lately. Even more than usual.”
“I... suppose.” Rimmer wasn't quite sure where Lister was going with this. They always got on each other's nerves, didn't they?
“D'you ever wonder why?”
“Why?” Rimmer echoed.
“See, I think I've worked out why things've been so tense lately, y'know.”
Rimmer didn't quite know what to say. Lister was about as insightful as a baboon, there was no way he could have identified some problem or pattern in their behaviour when Rimmer himself hadn't noticed anything. Right? Although, come to think of it, Lister had been particularly frustrating lately. Always there, smiling his inane smile, soft brown eyes shining as if he polished them nightly with Rimmer's best shoe polish, just generally winding him up by his very presence and even, sometimes, his absence. What did it all mean? Rimmer tried hard to think, because otherwise he'd have to let on that he was totally clueless and Lister had worked it all out before him.
Lister's fingers moved to Rimmer's lips, as if trying to work out where they were in relation to the rest of his face. Seemingly satisfied, he leant closer and pressed his lips clumsily to Rimmer's.
Oh, thought Rimmer. Yes. Indeed. Quite. So that's what Lister had been prattling on about. Well, if that's what he thought then he was quite mistaken, yes indeed. Just because two grown men had a perfectly normal, healthy obsession with each other, just because they had the ability to drive each other mad with the merest look, that did not mean that there was some kind of molten sexual tension underlying all their behaviour.
Rimmer had just made up his mind to inform Lister of this, with a few choice insults thrown in and a mention of how things were very different where Rimmer came from, just for good measure, when he realised that while his mind had been occupied his hard light body had taken matters into it's own hands. Matters, in this case, being Lister's arms, which, he realised with embarrassment, he was now clutching hold of tightly. All of a sudden Rimmer became aware of his lips - just what exactly did they think they were doing, responding to that gentle pressure and actually kissing Lister back! And Rimmer didn't even want to think about the various other parts of his body that were also quite clearly feeling rebellious today. “Mutiny,” he muttered against Lister's mouth, making a mental note to put himself on report as soon as they got back to Starbug.
* * *
Later on, when they finally were safely back on the ship, Kryten was, predictably, as guilt-ridden and fussy as a sociopathically over-concerned parent.“What were you doing in the laboratory in the first place?”
“Don't look at me! It was all Lister's fault, as usual. He wanted to check it out.”
Lister was staring disconcertingly off into the wall. “Thought there might've been somethin' useful in there. You said they were working on somethin' to do with propulsion, right? I thought there might've been something there that could've helped us get home.”
The lights, little red dots on any number of pieces of medical equipment in the medi-bay, blinked peacefully. Rimmer thought about the laboratory on that ship, how the equipment there had been dark and silent. He thought about the shape, vaguely human, lumbering towards them out of that darkness, the scuffle that ensued, the almost musical clink of broken glass test tubes and Lister's screams of pain and horror as he clutched at his suddenly chemical-coated face. Why did all their excursions seem to end in disaster? Rimmer was sure it was all Lister's fault.
“Well, the good news, sirs, is that, as we thought, the damage to the eyes is not permanent.”
“And the bad news?” Rimmer snapped.
Kryten looked almost startled for a moment. “Well, sir, there isn't really any. Of course, it will take a few days for the vision to fully return, but...”
“Yes yes, all right,” Rimmer interrupted. “Now we've established that Lister's just fine and dandy, can't you just shuffle off and deal with the laundry or something.”
“But sir, Mister Lister...”
Lister fidgeted on his chair.
“I'll be fine, Krytes. I'm not going anywhere.” He grinned cheerily at the wall. Kryten flinched at that, but finally agreed to leave, muttering something about gussets not scrubbing themselves. Rimmer shuddered at the thought. He moved around so he was standing in what should have been Lister's line of sight. He wasn't quite sure why, but it seemed somehow appropriate. He tried not to think about the fact that, from where he was sitting, if Lister had been able to see, he would be currently gazing directly at Rimmer's crotch.
Lister's hand reached out and touched Rimmer's hip lightly. Rimmer flinched, and Lister must have felt it because he sighed. “Look, Rimmer, are you okay?”
Rimmer didn't reply. He had no idea what to say. No, I'm not okay, I've just been molested by a blind Liverpudlian man with standards of personal hygeine that would embarrass an orangutan. The truth was, he didn't know if he was okay. Lister's thumb was rubbing small, warm circles on his hip. He felt like he didn't know anything anymore. He was only glad Lister couldn't look at him, because otherwise Rimmer was pretty sure he'd be running from the room by now.
“Me?” He said, eventually. “I'm not the one who nearly had his face melted off.”
“Ah, I'm fine. Just got a few days to kill and I'll be sorted. Course,” Lister licked his lips suggestively, and smiled, “we'll have to think of some way to pass the time 'til then.”
Rimmer sighed. At least he wouldn't be knitting.
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own any part of Red Dwarf, or make any money from fanfiction.
Notes: For roadstergal. It's pretty intimidating writing a story to a prompt set by such a brilliant writer. I hope I did ok :) Ten points to whoever spots the Mighty Boosh reference, too.
“Real men, Lister,” Rimmer clasped his hands behind his back and paced slightly in a manner befitting a lecture such as this, “real men don't knit.” He let himself enjoy the clip clip of his hard light boots on starbug's floor. Pacing just hadn't been the same when he was soft light.
Lister didn't even look up from his knitting. His tongue was stuck out of his mouth at the corner as he frowned in concentration. Obviously this was a difficult bit of the... whatever it was he was making. Rimmer thought it could have been a hat, or possibly a tea cosy. Then again, it could just as easily have been a jumper. Lister's “projects” had a tendency to end up as something far different than what they started out as, or, Rimmer suspected, what they were intended to be. Lister glanced up and Rimmer pretended not to be staring. “Nothin' wrong with knitting.”
“No, of course not. If you happen to be an elderly grandmother, or a member of the W.I., or pregnant.” Rimmer stopped pacing and looked Lister up and down. “You were pregnant, of course. Perhaps it had some strange hormonal side effect, and that's why you like knitting.”
Lister barely paused as he rolled his eyes. “Right.” The needles carried on their slow clicking.
Rimmer sniffed in a superior sort of way. Lister couldn't really blame his excessive girliness on the pregnancy, not really. Not when he'd been going around with hair like that for so long.
“When are you going to do something about your hair?”
Lister did pause at that. He frowned at Rimmer. “What's wrong with my hair?”
“It's getting obscenely long. Again. You should get Kryten to cut it.”
Lister shook his head. The clacking of his knitting needles was beginning to grate on Rimmer's nerves, he could feel a twitch building up behind his right eye and his nostrils starting to flare in annoyance. Knitting was a supreme waste of time. “Why don't you do something useful?”
“Why don't you?”
“I am doing something useful! I'm motivating you.”
Lister looked incredulous. “You what?”
“Clearly you need it. You're the last man in the universe and you while away your spare time knitting.”
“Oh yeah, and what should I be doin'?”
“Well, getting a haircut for starters.”
Lister slammed his knitting down in annoyance. “Rimmer, what the smeg is wrong with you?”
Cat chose that moment to burst into the midsection. “All hands on deck, buds. We're coming up on something, and it does not smell good.”
* * *
The room was dark and cold, and barely big enough to really count as a room. Still, it was a hiding place. Water slid down the walls and pooled on the floor, slimy and green, stagnant for centuries. Rimmer was distracted from several worrying thoughts about bacteria by Lister's tight grip on his shoulder.
“Y'don't think it'll find us in here, do ya?”
“How should I know?” Rimmer winced at the high pitch of his voice, and tried to tell himself to relax. All they had to do was hide and wait, Kryten had said. The thing, whatever it was, had been injured in the scuffle. Badly injured. Not-very-long-to-live injured. Rimmer had always been a master of hide and seek, so as long as Lister didn't smeg things up again everything would be fine. He repeated that to himself a few times. Things were going to be fine.
They crouched down, huddled in a corner. Lister seemed unwilling to let go of Rimmer's arm. Rimmer thought that he was lucky that he was a hologram, or those creases would never come out of his uniform sleeves. He noticed, with growing concern, that Lister was now quietly rocking back and forward on the spot. His free hand kept drifting to his face, before he caught himself and lowered it again. Rimmer coughed discreetly. “Are you all right there, Lister?”
Lister jumped at the sound of his voice. His face was creased in despair. “I can't see a smegging thing.” Rimmer frowned. Kryten had said the blindness was almost certain to be temporary. If you could trust a medical diagnosis from a glorified mechanical cleaning aid.
“Yes, well, if you hadn't insisted on poking around a particularly dangerous section of a particularly dangerous derelict...”
“Rimmer are you trying to tell me this is my fault?”
Rimmer snorted. “Well it's certainly not mine.”
Lister hugged at his knees with his spare arm. Rimmer wondered why he was still clinging to his sleeve like an infant with the other.
“You don't know what it's like, man,” Lister mumbled. “Losin' one of yer senses.”
Oh now, wait a minute. That really did take the proverbial biscuit. Rimmer wasted one of his most scathing looks on the hideously annoying man at his side. “Well, do enlighten me Listy. What could that loss possibly be like, hm?”
“I...” Lister gestured a bit, as if trying to find the right words, then seemed to give up. “I dunno. It's just smeggin' awful.”
“It's not a good feeling? What a shocking revelation.”
“Not a good feeling?” Lister's voice was growing dangerously loud, tinged with anger.
“Look for heaven's sake keep it down. Unless you want a little visit from the homicidal, test tube-wielding zombie maniac out there?”
Lister's hand tightened almost imperceptibly on Rimmer's arm. They sat in silence for a while.
“Does it still hurt?” Rimmer muttered eventually.
“Yeah,” Lister muttered in return. “And worse than that's the itchin'. It itches like crazy. Makes me wanna scratch my own eyes out.” He scraped his short fingernails along his cheek as if to emphasise the point.
Rimmer tried to think of something to say, something useful and important, something helpful. “Right,” he said, eventually. The slow dripping of the water was starting to give him a headache. He'd never realised what an annoying sound it was before. He started to long for the click-clack of Lister's knitting needles, anything other than that drip that tickled his brain like the tick of an exam room clock.
“I do, you know,” he said.
“Eh?”
“I do know what it's like to lose one of your senses. More than one, in fact. Or had you forgotten? Did that chemical do something to your sorry excuse for a brain when it splashed all over your face?”
“Oh,” Lister said, his expression changing to something Rimmer couldn't decipher. “Right. Yeah, you do an' all, don't ya.” His eyes were blood-shot and vacant. Rimmer swallowed and looked away.
He jumped as he felt Lister's hand clumsily touch his face. He would have jerked away entirely, but Lister's hand on his arm held him in place. “What the smeg are you doing?”
“It's weird, not bein' able to see ya.”
“Yes, Lister, that's what's weird.”
Lister's hands continued their cautious exploration. He bit his lip in concentration, although Rimmer wasn't sure what he was concentrating on. Certainly not on being careful with where he was sticking his fingers.
“Ow!”
“Oops.” Lister grinned, and for a moment the sight of it was so reassuring that Rimmer was almost glad. Almost.
“That was my eye you goit!”
Lister giggled, briefly, and Rimmer wondered what it would take to actually depress him.
“Your hands are cold,” he informed him sullenly.
“Sorry.”
He wasn't sorry at all, Rimmer thought. If he was, he would stop this... whatever it was he was doing. Lister brought both hands to his mouth and huffed warm breath on them, rubbing them together to heat them up, and resumed touching Rimmer's face a little more boldly than before.
Rimmer was frozen in place as those gentle fingers found his hair, traced the curve of his ears and the flare of his nose. He considered the murky water again, and made a mental note to ask Kryten whether there was any chance that holograms could be susceptible to some kind of paralysing space bacteria.
“Aren't you worried?”
Lister frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That it's permanent, that you won't be able to see any more.”
Lister paused, considering. “Kryten'll be able to fix it,” he said, confidently. Too confidently, perhaps, but Rimmer let it go with a snort and a shake of his head. “Why d'you always have to look at the down side of things?”
“We're in a dank and dirty, freezing cold room, hiding out from a psycopath that blinded you and seems intent on somehow ripping out our guts, with no better plan than to wait until it drops dead from it's own injuries. Where's the up side?”
Lister's hands were at his neck now, in his hair. It actually felt rather nice. Rimmer suppressed a shiver and was glad that Lister couldn't see the look on his face. Lister smiled again suddenly, seeming for a moment just as chirpy and gerbil-faced as ever. Nothing ever seemed to phase him.
“Well,” Lister said, edging even closer than before. “Gave us some time to talk, didn't it. Some time away from the 'bug. It was gettin' a bit claustrophobic.” His fingertips traced Rimmer's cheekbone. Rimmer tried to remind his body that he didn't actually need to breathe, so could it stop breathing quite so hard, thank you very much. “Look, man, I know we've been getting on each other's nerves lately. Even more than usual.”
“I... suppose.” Rimmer wasn't quite sure where Lister was going with this. They always got on each other's nerves, didn't they?
“D'you ever wonder why?”
“Why?” Rimmer echoed.
“See, I think I've worked out why things've been so tense lately, y'know.”
Rimmer didn't quite know what to say. Lister was about as insightful as a baboon, there was no way he could have identified some problem or pattern in their behaviour when Rimmer himself hadn't noticed anything. Right? Although, come to think of it, Lister had been particularly frustrating lately. Always there, smiling his inane smile, soft brown eyes shining as if he polished them nightly with Rimmer's best shoe polish, just generally winding him up by his very presence and even, sometimes, his absence. What did it all mean? Rimmer tried hard to think, because otherwise he'd have to let on that he was totally clueless and Lister had worked it all out before him.
Lister's fingers moved to Rimmer's lips, as if trying to work out where they were in relation to the rest of his face. Seemingly satisfied, he leant closer and pressed his lips clumsily to Rimmer's.
Oh, thought Rimmer. Yes. Indeed. Quite. So that's what Lister had been prattling on about. Well, if that's what he thought then he was quite mistaken, yes indeed. Just because two grown men had a perfectly normal, healthy obsession with each other, just because they had the ability to drive each other mad with the merest look, that did not mean that there was some kind of molten sexual tension underlying all their behaviour.
Rimmer had just made up his mind to inform Lister of this, with a few choice insults thrown in and a mention of how things were very different where Rimmer came from, just for good measure, when he realised that while his mind had been occupied his hard light body had taken matters into it's own hands. Matters, in this case, being Lister's arms, which, he realised with embarrassment, he was now clutching hold of tightly. All of a sudden Rimmer became aware of his lips - just what exactly did they think they were doing, responding to that gentle pressure and actually kissing Lister back! And Rimmer didn't even want to think about the various other parts of his body that were also quite clearly feeling rebellious today. “Mutiny,” he muttered against Lister's mouth, making a mental note to put himself on report as soon as they got back to Starbug.
* * *
Later on, when they finally were safely back on the ship, Kryten was, predictably, as guilt-ridden and fussy as a sociopathically over-concerned parent.“What were you doing in the laboratory in the first place?”
“Don't look at me! It was all Lister's fault, as usual. He wanted to check it out.”
Lister was staring disconcertingly off into the wall. “Thought there might've been somethin' useful in there. You said they were working on somethin' to do with propulsion, right? I thought there might've been something there that could've helped us get home.”
The lights, little red dots on any number of pieces of medical equipment in the medi-bay, blinked peacefully. Rimmer thought about the laboratory on that ship, how the equipment there had been dark and silent. He thought about the shape, vaguely human, lumbering towards them out of that darkness, the scuffle that ensued, the almost musical clink of broken glass test tubes and Lister's screams of pain and horror as he clutched at his suddenly chemical-coated face. Why did all their excursions seem to end in disaster? Rimmer was sure it was all Lister's fault.
“Well, the good news, sirs, is that, as we thought, the damage to the eyes is not permanent.”
“And the bad news?” Rimmer snapped.
Kryten looked almost startled for a moment. “Well, sir, there isn't really any. Of course, it will take a few days for the vision to fully return, but...”
“Yes yes, all right,” Rimmer interrupted. “Now we've established that Lister's just fine and dandy, can't you just shuffle off and deal with the laundry or something.”
“But sir, Mister Lister...”
Lister fidgeted on his chair.
“I'll be fine, Krytes. I'm not going anywhere.” He grinned cheerily at the wall. Kryten flinched at that, but finally agreed to leave, muttering something about gussets not scrubbing themselves. Rimmer shuddered at the thought. He moved around so he was standing in what should have been Lister's line of sight. He wasn't quite sure why, but it seemed somehow appropriate. He tried not to think about the fact that, from where he was sitting, if Lister had been able to see, he would be currently gazing directly at Rimmer's crotch.
Lister's hand reached out and touched Rimmer's hip lightly. Rimmer flinched, and Lister must have felt it because he sighed. “Look, Rimmer, are you okay?”
Rimmer didn't reply. He had no idea what to say. No, I'm not okay, I've just been molested by a blind Liverpudlian man with standards of personal hygeine that would embarrass an orangutan. The truth was, he didn't know if he was okay. Lister's thumb was rubbing small, warm circles on his hip. He felt like he didn't know anything anymore. He was only glad Lister couldn't look at him, because otherwise Rimmer was pretty sure he'd be running from the room by now.
“Me?” He said, eventually. “I'm not the one who nearly had his face melted off.”
“Ah, I'm fine. Just got a few days to kill and I'll be sorted. Course,” Lister licked his lips suggestively, and smiled, “we'll have to think of some way to pass the time 'til then.”
Rimmer sighed. At least he wouldn't be knitting.