Chapter Text
His bunkroom on board Red Dwarf is vastly smaller than any sleeping quarters he’s lived in up until now.
It's compact, lacking space in a way that most people would find inconvenient, and coloured in a dull shade of ocean grey that makes the whole room appear somehow even more cramped than it actually is.
It's drab, clinical, positively depressing and, as far as Arnold Judas Rimmer is concerned, absolutely perfect.
Growing up, Rimmer had always been taught to keep his personal quarters immaculate. From his own generously sized childhood bedroom, to the large, open-plan dormitory he'd inhabited at boarding school, Rimmer has approached every place he's ever resided in over the years with an obsessive eye for cleanliness.
This fixation with keeping things immaculately clean and tidy had, it goes without saying, been drilled into him the same way most of his other lifelong habits had – through ridicule, discipline and the buckle-end of his father's belt against bare skin.
The way in which his father used to conduct room inspections still haunts Rimmer's dreams, sometimes.
He remembers being barely seven years old and cowering in the doorway of his bedroom, paralysed with fear as his father searched every nook and cranny for an excuse to fly off the rails at his least favourite son.
Less space is good.
Less space means less room for mess.
Less room for error.
It means that Rimmer can cultivate these uninspired quarters, shape them to his whims and leave his mark on them in a way that he never could in his family home, or under the harsh regulations of the world he had stepped into after it.
A world of boarding schools and dormitories; temporary places that hadn't felt like his own.
His world now consists of a set of drawers that aren't nearly deep enough to house what they need, a few rickety shelves threatening to collapse with the barest breeze, an old, beaten-up locker that doubles as a wardrobe and the bottom bed in a bunk built for two.
The bed in question is, of course, far too small for him; positioned as it is inside his built-in bunk which – even at a glance – is less of a "bunk" and more of an alcove with ideas of grandeur. Rimmer is far too tall to lay down in it at his full height, forever needing to contort his body into different elaborate shapes in order to jam himself snuggly into the small space.
Yet, despite waking with stiff joints, and frequently banging his head on the underside of the bed above, Rimmer finds that he doesn't mind this sleeping arrangement all too much.
He warms to it pretty quickly, in fact.
Being held hostage on all sides like the occupant of a tight, grey coffin is still a form of being held, after all.
It's strangely comforting, in its own way.
This space with its jerry-built furniture may be compact, claustrophobic and held together by the Jupiter Mining Corporation’s own brand of duct tape, but it's his.
And so, Rimmer covers the walls with handmade timetables and calendars, writing his plans into them with assorted, vibrant markers. He cultivates his book collection on wonky shelves; cataloguing it alphabetically by author, then rearranging it by subject matter, then by colour, then by size and then finally alphabetically by author once more. He fills the locker with care, making it the perfect haven for his neatly ironed shirts, immaculately polished boots, and meticulously organised shoe collection, all with their rightfully assigned shoe-trees lovingly placed within.
He hangs up his swimming certificates, makes his bed every day with hospital corners and cares for his space like a domestic goddess on a warpath.
As far as Rimmer is concerned these four walls are his, and he accounts for absolutely everything within them.
Everything, that is, except for David Lister.
Rimmer cycles through many roommates in his years on board Red Dwarf. Some of them transfer out, some leave the JMC all together and some simply request to move rooms, vacating without so much as a goodbye, which is their loss as far as Rimmer is concerned.
After all, it's not his fault that the JMC keep hiring folk who don't understand the merits of listening to Esperanto language tapes into the early hours of the morning, or waking up to a foghorn alarm at half past five on the dot, or engaging with their roommate in a healthy discussion about Morris dancing and/or 20th century telegraph poles.
Everyone leaves eventually and, as the years go by, Rimmer comes to expect it, becoming numb to the act of returning to his room after a hard day of work to the sight of the bed above his stripped, the locker next to his emptied of all garments, and his bunkroom free from signs that anyone other than Rimmer himself occupied it.
Lister is different, though.
In David smegging Lister – as much as the Ionian hates to admit it – Rimmer has finally met his match.
He doesn't know what they're feeding the people of Liverpool on Earth, but even cultural differences between himself and the Scouser cannot remotely begin to account for the level of filth that Lister deems "acceptable".
He leaves devastation in his wake like a rancid tornado; breeds messiness and disorganisation in much the same way that he breeds mold in all of his unwashed coffee cups.
His once white t-shirts are so stained, that he could go around claiming that they’re particularly inventive tie-dye designs and no-one would be any the wiser.
His dirty laundry pile in the corner of the room has grown in such an elaborate way, that it could pass for an avant-garde modern art installation.
His bedsheets are so rotten, that they're practically a petri-dish for new lifeforms to not only grow, but breed, thrive, evolve and set up their own functioning society with their own microscopic form of government.
At first Rimmer feels like he's under attack from a foreign army, unable to settle down at night with the knowledge that an enemy agent is trimming his toenails with his own teeth in the bed above.
Rimmer tries every military tactic he can think of to get Lister to crack.
He argues and he yells and he threatens to report the infuriating slob time and time again.
Once, he even borrows a book on "gentle parenting" and attempts to use the strategies in that to coax Lister into compliance. All this act achieves is the book in question ending its life as bog-roll, flushed down the toilet by a peeved-off Scouser, and Rimmer himself being saddled with a lifetime ban from the onboard library and nothing to show for his efforts.
Nothing works.
Eventually, Rimmer has to face the reality of the fact that his room – an extension of himself – has effectively become his adversary's territory.
He's been well and truly conquered.
Now, he has to tactically retreat, lick his wounds and do the unthinkable: he has to learn how to live in this new regime. A regime under which for Rimmer to simply dust his possessions is now an act of rebellion against his oppressor.
Imagining himself as a spy, skilled in espionage, deep undercover across enemy lines, lights a fire within Rimmer, and only serves to make him even more determined to continue exactly as he is in the face of Lister's vile slobbery.
At no point during his time with Lister as a bunkmate does Rimmer even remotely consider the idea of moving rooms himself.
To do that would be to admit total defeat, and although he may have lost the initial battle, Rimmer doesn't intend to lose the war.
So, they continue to share a room, and life goes on.
Life goes on, that is, until it doesn't.
Until there's a malfunctioning drive plate and a fatal radiation leak.
Then suddenly it's three million years later and nobody has thought to dust in a very long time.
The scutters are bad at dusting, but they're bad at everything, and so Rimmer can't say he's at all surprised by the way in which they damage everything of the hologram’s that they touch when armed with a microfibre cloth.
They leave Rimmer's framed swimming certificates askew, they don't understand the importance of hospital corners on a well-made bed, and they even manage to dent the Ionian's armillary sphere when they accidentally knock it off of its rightful shelf.
Lister, of course, doesn't understand why this action sends Rimmer into veritable hysterics.
("Why do you even have an armadillo sphere in the first place?"
"’Armillary sphere' you ignorant gimboid, it's an ‘armillary sphere’."
"That's what I said..."
"..."
"...Why?"
"Because smeg off, that's why!")
To give Lister some credit, he does begin to indulge Rimmer's little "Rimmer-isms" more frequently, now that it's just the two of them.
Three million years ago, Lister used to roll his eyes at Rimmer; forever teasing him for his habits of constantly rearranging the toiletries cabinet and fiddling with his trinkets non-stop. Now, however, whenever Rimmer asks his roommate to adjust a frame on the wall, or plump a pillow on his bed, Lister can see in the hologram's eyes just how frustrated and powerless he feels at not being able to do it himself.
Rimmer isn't very good at asking for help, so these moments are few and far between, but on those rare occasions when he does tentatively request the Scouser's assistance, it makes Lister's heart ache for the man.
They never discuss at length why, exactly, they've both continued to share a room despite now having the run of the whole ship. Any flimsy excuse the pair of them have voiced in the time since the radiation leak, such as: “it would be too much hassle to move now”, “I don’t trust you enough to let you out of my sight” and, Rimmer’s personal favourite: “why should I be the one to move? You move!” have sounded weak to both of their ears.
Instead, an unspoken truth settles over both men – a notion that neither of them would ever say out loud, but an undisputed fact all the same: they're both absolutely terrified of being alone and they'd miss each other too much if they were separated.
So much so, in fact, that as days continue to drag by endlessly on board the empty, derelict mining ship, Rimmer finds himself slowly starting to forget that there was ever a time before Lister.
That there was a time before he'd watch Lister's mechanical fish swim laps around their tank. Before Lister's orange moon boots were rotting in the corner of his locker. Before he'd fall asleep to the oddly soothing white noise of Lister snoring above him.
The hologram had also, somewhere along the line, started to think of this little room on board Red Dwarf as "their" room rather than "his" room.
He doesn't know when that mental shift had started, nor what make of it; of the undeniable reality that he now shares so much of himself with someone else.
Of the fact that he and David smegging Lister have a room and a ship and a life together.
They also, entirely against Rimmer's will, have a cat now too.
The Ionian doesn’t know when exactly that had happened either, but he doesn’t remember consenting to it.
It's not uncommon for Rimmer to return to his shared quarters these days and be met with the Cat curled up, sound asleep, on his neatly straightened sheets.
The first few times this happens, Rimmer attempts, very much in vain, to shoo the annoying feline with a disgruntled huff and a wave of his hand.
He soon learns from numerous failures however, that trying to get a cat to do anything it doesn’t want to do is a meaningless exercise in futility, and thus quickly has to come to terms with the notion that a space he'd once considered his own has, yet again, been unduly invaded.
He was starting to feel hopelessly outnumbered.
When the Cat wasn't lounging on his bed, the scutters were breaking his nick-nacks. When the scutter's weren't breaking his nick-nacks, Holly was disturbing his Esperanto lessons. When Holly wasn't disturbing his Esperanto lessons, Lister was rummaging through his locker, stealing his clothes and sauntering around the empty ship wearing a shirt so over-sized on his small frame, that it looked more like a shift dress on him than anything else.
And Rimmer does his best to feign discontent at this behaviour, praying that it doesn't show on his face just how much he enjoys the sight of Lister in his old clothes.
And if Lister takes note of the fact that Rimmer's eyes linger on him for a tad longer than usual when he’s dressed like this, he keeps it to himself.
In a way, their grubby, disorganised little bunkroom is more of a home than anywhere Rimmer has ever lived before – littered as it is with evidence of him and Lister.
Littered with dirty clothes, novelty souvenirs, empty food containers, well-loved books, exam paraphernalia and guitar picks; littered with proof that the two of them were here and that they were here together.
Littered with the memories of a life shared.