Work Text:
When Lister got ill with space mumps, Rimmer hid away in the Diesel Decks. Not because he couldn't bear seeing Lister like that – he would love him even if he was just a brain in a jar.
Not because he was afraid he'd contract the illness himself; not even Arnold J. Rimmer was that big a coward.
He hid away from the one thing he could not face, the one thing that hurt too much to bear: seeing Kryten look after the man he loved the way he, a mere noncorporeal hologram never could ...