Chapter Text
Prologue: Gravity and
Guess we both know we're in over our heads,
We got nowhere to go and no home that's left;
The water is rising on a river turning red,
It all might be okay or we might be dead.
If everything we've got is slipping away,
I meant what I said when I said ‘til my dying day;
I'm holding on to you, holding onto me,
And maybe it's all gone black but you're all I see,
You're all I see.
-Mat Kearney; All I Need
275 (relative) years ago...
He had never been more of a ghost, or more aware of it.
The waiting time between proposition and action hadn't done much to dull the shock of everything. For Rimmer, everyone on the ship died mere hours ago; in real time, it had been over three million more years. He couldn't slot that together in his head. He knew what he had been told -- that he and Kryten had been knocked offline, that Holly had set course for the time warp that had started this entire damned mess, that she had been all three million and some odd years working out a solution to the problem -- but much like the last time he'd heard the words, "Everyone's dead," it just didn't make any sense.
(The last time, Holly brought him back because Lister was going insane. Rimmer's briefing of the situation was initially Holly saying, "You flubbed up the drive plate repair, everyone's dead but Lister, and he's been drinking himself catatonic on the regular since I let him out of stasis. Been about three million years since then, y’know, radiation and all. Need you to keep him sane, right?" Needless to say, Rimmer hadn't reacted particularly well. Holly had to break it down for him a little more slowly after that.)
Problem. Problem. Everyone was dead and she said she had a solution to the smegging problem. She’d tried to revive Kryten first, which had led to the mechanoid spouting some kind of staticky gibberish before half of his head melted like a badly sculpted block of cheese left sitting on a dashboard in the sun. Then, probably because there hadn’t been another option, she had brought Rimmer back online and told him about it all, and that she had a solution to the problem.
He'd gotten a bit hysterical over that particular characterization of things. As if this was something for which there was a solution. It took some time after that, between him pleading with her to take him back offline and her trying to explain causality and how he could change it, for the message to get through the blind desperation.
It was only when she told him that he could save them that he finally calmed down enough to latch onto it.
Tell me how, Holly.
It wasn't that Rimmer disbelieved any of it. He just couldn't honestly get his head around it, not in whole. He could only bounce between everyone’s dead and you can save them. The rest couldn’t seem to get a look in.
What was the process for mourning when it was all now ancient history, anyway? Was there even a point to grief, when he was going to be undoing it all?
Somehow, though, telling himself that there wasn't really any point to going through the whole messy process didn't do anything to keep it at bay. Except, he wasn't sure which step he was on. Weren't there supposed to be five of them? And how much time were you supposed to spend on each, really? He wasn’t sure he had enough of it left to get a proper start.
Half-heartedly, he sat on his bunk and tried to remember what they were, chewing on a thumbnail until it was a ragged, sore mess. One of the steps was bargaining, he knew. Uhm-- denial? Acceptance, which he definitely wasn't anywhere close to. But he could try that one.
Step one-eighth, he thought, everyone’s dead and--
There was a cracked little noise of pain, and he realized with some surprise that he’d made it himself. He didn’t need to breathe, but it was curiously hard to do it anyway. And for a dead man who was made of light and who couldn’t actually process too many outside environmental factors, he felt cold down to the bone.
Denial would normally be his first go-to, unless it was particularly inconvenient. Arnold Rimmer was a masterclass champion at denial, he could fit it into almost any situation and hold onto it for any length of time necessary. Except, he was failing pretty badly right now at being in denial. He remembered the threat warning being broadcast, that was a fair piece of evidence that things had gone down exactly as Holly had said they had.
And the bunk above his head was empty and silent, too.
All right, he thought, everyone’s dead and--
He tried to drag in a handful of slow, careful breaths and then got to work ruining the other thumbnail.
--Holly said I can fix this.
That didn’t actually do much to calm him down any. And it had nothing to do with the whole stages-of-grief smeg. Shouldn’t there be some kind of-- of funeral? Or-- or a memorial service, at least. Some kind of acknowledgment of the loss?
You were supposed to live to a hundred and seventy-one, he thought, somewhere between plaintive and bewildered, to another dead man, the one who was supposed to snore like a congested baboon above his head.
“Oi! I think I got it!” Holly’s voice crashed through his thoughts like a runaway train; when Rimmer jumped half out of his simulated skin, her face on the monitor fell into something that looked dangerously like sympathy. “Sorry, Arn,” she went on, more quietly, “Forgot that it’s been a few more million years on the clock for me, but only a few hours for you. But I think I got it compressed enough that it won’t short out your lightbee.”
Holly had been doing something with a program she had written -- he only remembered disconnected pieces of her explanation, something about gravity and nanites and gravity being the key -- and he supposed the reason she hadn’t compressed it before now was that she was angling for Kryten to be the one to deploy it. Which, he supposed, made sense; Rimmer tended to willfully forget the fact he was only really software, ultimately, and preferred to live in the denial that was failing him now. And he had always hated -- really, deeply, bitterly hated -- when circumstances added up such to remind him that he was nothing more than a really technologically advanced ghost.
It made sense Holly wouldn’t want to remind him. At least, he thought it did.
“Okay?” he ventured, once he was able to pry his hand off of his chest, over his heart.
Holly glanced around uncomfortably, but then sighed out and looked back at him. “It’s a one way trip. If it works, there’s no coming back. We both stop existing, and so does this entire timeline. The one that gets restored in its place will have alternate versions of us, and we’ll cease to be.” A beat. “I figured I’d walk you through it once you make a choice.”
There was a long moment there where they stared at one another. Didn’t I already? Rimmer wondered, baffled. He didn’t have any--
Except, he did have choices. He could just not go through with it, of course. Or he could insist on holding a memorial service, buying time to talk himself out of what was, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission. Or he could suggest getting the skutters on trying to fix Kryten; maybe the mechanoid could come up with ideas beyond what a senile computer and a second technician could. He could--
He could--
On the wall of Lister’s bunk, there was a picture of the man himself, holding the twins and beaming at the camera while Jim and Bexley bawled their lungs out, only days before he would lose them to their father’s universe.
The man Rimmer had been told to keep sane, even if that had often meant them driving each other crazy. The man who thought curry was a food group unto itself. The man who could wreck any room within five minutes and render it a biohazard area.
The man who had gotten Rimmer completely smashed after he came back from the Enlightenment, smashed enough to talk about it, and had then looked him dead in the eye and told him that he was a better man than he thought he was.
The last human.
Rimmer looked at that ridiculous, gerbil-faced grin, then closed his eyes and tried to remember that he didn’t actually need to breathe.
He had choices, but there was only one choice he could have ever made.
“Kryten probably would have been a better pick for this,” he said, ruefully, waiting in the hallway outside of the airlock. “I’m not sure I’ll remember these internal command prompts right, when the time comes.”
“You’ll remember them. And I’ve already disabled the audio-feedback for your footfalls, so that’s one less thing you have to worry about.” Holly paused a few seconds, then said, “It was always going to be you. I just wanted to wake him up first so you wouldn’t wake up all alone.”
That actually startled Rimmer out of his contemplation of what the Cat would call a ‘shiny blue swirly thing’; he blinked a few times and looked over at Holly. “Really?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate, but there was an expression he might have labelled as ‘fond’ on her face. She pressed a thin smile, then. “We’re as close as we can afford to get.”
It wasn’t as if they couldn’t take more time on it. It was that neither of them wanted to.
He only nodded; as he passed his hand over the light-sensitive control for the first door, he asked one last question: “Do you think they’ll be all right, in the future?”
“I don’t know, Arnie,” Holly answered, tilting her head in a shrug. “But at least they’ll be together.”
He carried that with him to the end of his world.
274 (relative) years later…
“I go where you go.”
The Shikra was getting hammered.
“T’Vel! Release the panel, I’ll take nav,” Arnie said, sliding into the bridge seat and having to grab the top edge of said panel to stay in that seat when another volley of fire rocked the little ship and the artificial gravity and inertial dampers couldn’t keep up with it.
T’Vel had been managing both functions from helm until the battle heated up; on Arnie’s other side, Nance was rooted to the floor, gripping the top of the nav console, her teeth bared as she kept shoring up network connections against the Chilo onslaught and directing the Cobalt Crew as they did their best to engage the enemy.
“Are you qualified?”
Somehow, T’Vel managed to sound fairly cool even while the klaxon was wailing and they were being beaten to hell and back. Arnie barked a half a laugh at that one. “Failed my astronavs thirteen times, but since I don’t have to calculate the coordinates and just input them, I’ll manage fine, thank you very much.”
The panel lit up as she transferred control back over and when Nance ground out a course-correction, he input it as fast his fingers could fly; the descending sequence keys reminded him of something almost familiar, making it easy for him to adapt.
Below, Scotty was calling out that their number one phaser array was going into the red. Somewhere out there, Hank Harrison was doing god only knew what, after he’d decided to go sacrifice himself. Someone named McGregor -- T’Vel’s and Stan’s captain -- was involved now. Hell if Arnie knew what was going on, beyond the Shikra.
Below on Sanctuary, the rest of this madcap crew was supposedly going to save the universe. Arnie had his doubts; admittedly, though, he was still a little bitter that only Berat had bothered to say goodbye to Nance. The rest of them should have at least thanked her for saving their lives multiple times since this mess started. Rudeness shouldn’t be rewarded with universe-saving credit.
But they weren’t going to be able to try to fix anything if the smegging fishbait broke through the blockade, so here the ShadowKnights had stayed, together, outgunned and outnumbered and not for the first time.
“Lost the first array, shield emitters are goin’ offline faster’n I can reroute,” Scotty was saying, voice tight and sharp. “We’re gonna lose ‘em within the minute.”
No one really had time to answer, but Arnie did anyway, even as he was adjusting the Shikra’s trajectory on T’Vel’s orders in an attempt to evade the worst of it: “Just do your best. We’re at least making them work for it.”
What else could he say? Their best was hopelessly outclassed. And when one of the Cobalt Crew went spinning across the screen in flames, Nance flinched.
All that was really left for any of them was holding the line until it dissolved out from under them.
And then, it did.
“Shields are down. Second array’s goin’ red.” A beat. “I’m divertin’ everything we’ve got into impulse and maneuverin’ and I’ll keep her together as long as I can. We can dodge. Or not.”
Another hard slam made the lights flicker; even Nance, held in place by her hardlight tech, staggered against it. It wasn’t a mortal wound yet, but yet was fast-approaching.
“Set course for 2851 point 2,” T’Vel said, in the wake of it, sounding decidedly grim for a Vulcan.
Even having failed his astronavs thirteen times, Arnie knew what she was aiming at. He glanced over at her; took in the almost fierce look in her eyes as she looked back, and then he nodded and turned back to do that.
For a split second, he remembered why the descending sequence was familiar and what the Linotype’s keys felt like under his fingers as he plotted in the course, and even in the midst of all of this, he smiled to himself for it.
e-t-a-o-i-n s-h-
“Collision course?” Nance asked, voice still strained, hologram flickering sharply and passing her hand through the console before she yanked it out and managed to shore up her hardlight drive.
“The timeship,” Arnie and T’Vel answered in unintentional unison; the former hoping she wouldn’t order him to belay that. And also hoping she would. Either way, he’d do whatever she said.
If the motley crew below managed not to cock it up, they would see the other side of this eventually. It might just mean sacrificing their lives first.
Nance didn’t countermand the order, though; instead, she said, “I’m ordering Elaine and the Cobalt Crew to back off.”
Arnie wouldn’t remember much of what happened next; wouldn’t remember what actually got them, the enemy’s weapons or a collision. Whether they took the timeship out with them. Wouldn’t remember the process of actually dying again, though he was entirely aware that he did. That they did. And that it was, appropriately, explosive.
But he wouldn’t ever forget reaching out and grabbing Nance’s hand, and her holding on back.