Chapter Text
Artwork by Mebssann
Somewhere right outside of the central finite curve sits a strange, abstract kind of nothingness. It’s the type that sucks the light out of anything warm and good and alive, giving way to a needlefingered cold that slices through skin in one clean, neat cut, allowing for white tendrils of frost to flood through one’s bloodstream like a long-denied vice.
It’s a nothingness that, in its metaphorical essence of isolation, makes complete sense: in the cold winter of space, heat is as tiny and miniscule as everything else is, impossible to exist where matter itself doesn’t. Space is devoid of light, of life, and of sound. In a place where only long-dead stars manage to sing their solitary songs, their lonely lights a million miles apart, it is deafeningly, suffocatingly quiet.
This is a timeless space, stretched out between all of the universes that had ever been and all that ever would be, filled with nothing but evolutionary horrors, transdimensional waste, and fleeting portals from the rare few across time who’d managed to discover cross-dimensional teleportation for the first time. It’s a crossing point, an in-between, in a sense: a timeline outside of timelines, where time itself snags still and the impenetrable darkness that pulls out towards infinity is truly fathomless.
It’d slipped under the Council of Ricks’ radar because there’d been nothing of value to be found within: no carbon lifeforms, no resources, and no real purpose. It’d been easy for them to forget all about its existence and discard it in its entirety after its initial discovery: after all, a dimension between all dimensions, including the ones where Rick wasn’t the smartest (hah!) man alive, hadn’t quite been aligned with the narrative they’d been so determined to push.
President Morty, on the other hand— although he’d figured that by now, that gaudy little title was hardly befitting to his person anymore— had been acutely aware of this in-between space long before he’d been able to put his plans to destroy the Citadel into motion. It’d been all thanks to his Rick, really, the knowledge of it buried deep within his psyche, somewhere between his favorite brands of bullshit space beer and the lies he’d told his grandson to keep an already-flimsy worldview intact. With time, he’d been able to craft himself a home within this styptic, existential void, taming it with nothing but a bit of elbow grease and a lot of brute force.
It was the ideal hiding spot. It was the perfect camouflage.
Out here, he had everything he needed to shed the heavy burden of his identity— of being yet another cog in an oppressive system, a Morty, about as replaceable as he was useless— and finally be left alone.
The last few weeks of Morty’s life had been an increasingly hectic and adrenaline fueled disaster. Namely, one defined by the near-infinite amount of memories he’d developed in he and Rick’s— well, mostly Rick’s— search for increasingly stranger and more obscure materials scattered across the galaxy. The parts of his brain that had once been dedicated towards cataloguing important things, like Jessica’s class schedule, the best way to suppress the knowledge of his mother’s affair with her own clone, and all of his favorite GETTIN’ TO A STREET FIGHT! combos, had since been traded out for jumbled coordinates, half-assed instructions, and more memories of him getting his ass handed to him by booby traps and space overlords alike than he cared to admit to.
All of these adventures had been Rick’s ideas, each and every one of them dedicated to retrieving one item or another from some fringe corner of the universe, but what those items had actually been for, Morty hadn’t been sure. He’d gone along with everything without question, but Rick hadn’t been too keen on explaining what exactly they were getting everything for. The few times Morty’d asked about it, he’d been brushed off and met with some irritated grumbling about how Grandpa had ‘a process’ and that Morty’s constant questioning was seriously throwing him off.
Truth be told, Rick’s lack of answers hadn’t actually needled at him as much as he’d been expecting it to. After the chaos that had unfolded before and after everybody had been thrust back into their original timelines, it’d been nice to get back into the swing of adventuring with Rick without having to deal with any terrifyingly high stakes, and it’d been nice to get in some steady practice with flying his cruiser, too. He’d just assumed that they’d been retrieving the materials needed to fix the portal gun, the process of which Rick had too much pride to admit was taking longer to do than either of them had been expecting.
What did needle at him, though— and where the disaster side of things had come into play— was Rick’s insistence on locking in on whatever minor mistake he’d made and blowing it out of proportion. There’d been a few times here and there where Morty’d slipped up and dropped something important, or tried to look out for an innocent bystander, or grabbed the wrong type of bullshit space beer, and more often than not, Rick couldn’t— wouldn’t let it go.
Everything was supposed to have become better between them, and in theory, they had: Morty definitely had a lot more agency over things than he used to, much to Rick’s irritation, the latter of whom seemed to have settled back into having a whining snivelling brat tagging along on his adventures with unparalleled ease. They were supposed to be starting over with a clean slate, which was why Morty couldn’t wrap his head around why Rick was sliding back into his old ways over something so small, hammering in the fact that he was, in fact, a whining, snivelling brat as he dug through the cabinets of the kitchen, pulling out an expired box of eyeholes and shovelling a handful into his mouth as he continued prattling on.
“Don’t be such a self righteous little turd, Morty. At least Summer’s actually competent. The only reason I didn’t choose her to be my assistant over you is because she’s— she’s a lot harder to replace than you, Morty,”
“Okay, Rick, I get it. I-I thought we were done playing this stupid ‘Morty’s dumb’ game. You don’t have to keep rubbing it in,”
“Summers like her don’t grow on trees, you know. Especially now that the citadel’s been fucked sideways by the so-called ‘People’s President’,”
“Don’t say it like that. I didn’t even vote for him. It’s not like I have citizenship on the citadel,”
“Yeah, you don’t, and you’re welcome for that, by the way,” Rick scoffed, taking a loud, crunchy bite out of another eyehole. “You— you would’ve never even made it back to this dimension if you did,”
“Are you guys seriously arguing over how great I am right now?” Chimed a third voice, unbidden, from the living room. Moments later, Summer poked her head into her kitchen without really looking up from her phone, leaning against the doorframe as she texted away. “Maybe if you guys invited me to go out with you more often, then you guys wouldn’t be having this problem… but what do I know?”
“Nothing. That’s why nobody asked you, Summer,” Morty shot back with a dirty look.
“Uh, nobody has to ask me because I already do what I’m told. Clearly, you could learn a thing or two about that,”
“You— you know what? She’s right,” Rick chided, gesturing at his granddaughter with a half-eaten eyehole, green filling dripping down his fingers. “At Blitz n’ Chitz, all I had to do was tell her to pull her shit together one time and—”
“Come on, are we still going on about what happened at Blitz’ n Chitz?”
“And she did it no problem, without even watching the movie! She didn’t even know what pulling a Die Hard was! But you? I had to spend an entire in-game lifetime trying to convince your stubborn little ass that you were, you know, a fourteen year old boy!”
A rush of heat flooded Morty’s cheeks, faster than he’d expected. It’d all been petty, really, billions of separate little consciousnesses refusing to come together because Rick had some weird complex about showing affection, but he was tired of having the incident dangled over his head. Shame boiled underneath his skin, burning in the tips of his ears and up the back of his neck as it threatened to bubble over into anger. “Summer’s fucked up too, you know! Don’t you remember all of those people she like, super traumatized with your car?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault Grandpa’s car is a total sociopath,” She said flatly, finally pocketing her phone.
“You turned it into one! It could’ve gotten rid of everybody peacefully!”
“You and I both know that’s not true! We talked about it with Dr. Wong, and she said—”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘psychological torment is just as bad as physical torture’, I know! I was there!”
“Yeah, bitching about how you and Grandpa got to play pretend slavery while I sat and watched people die!”
“‘Got to’? We were living like animals in— in the woods! I ran away! Do you know how hard it is to be a fourteen year old boy leading a pack of feral freaks? I-I didn’t even have internet access! You—”
“Ugh, kids fighting,” Rick grumbled with a subtle eyeroll, shuffling towards the garage. Morty watched as he fumbled with the doorknob for a brief moment before pushing it in with his shoulder, throwing one last look at the duo over his shoulder. “All of that was four seasons ago. Get over it,”
“I just did what Grandpa Rick told me to do, and I turned out mostly fine. I’m not even scared of people dying anymore. You’re the one who fractured into a million little pixels while playing Roy because you would’ve rather died than trusted Rick,” Summer continued as Rick pulled the door shut behind himself, raising her eyebrows. She pushed herself off of the wall, drifting towards the fridge and digging through it for a few moments before pulling out a popsicle, tearing the wrapper in two. “Why do you even like that game, anyways? It’s a total mindfuck. I’ll pass.”
“It’s only a mindfuck when you don’t go into it with a game plan, but why do you guys keep bringing up the Roy situation, anyways? It’s not— it’s not my fault the power went out,”
“True, buuut it was your fault that you were giving Grandpa Rick so much shit while I was out there fighting literal terrorists. I was waiting on the two of you for like, forever,”
“Imagine how I felt, then! You lost a few hours, but there was a whole new generation of people born in that save file!”
“All you’re doing is proving my point,” Summer raised her eyebrows. “How much of you did Grandpa Rick end up leaving in that game, anyways?”
Logically, Morty knew that she was only saying that to set him off further. The two of them had been like that for as long as he could remember, both of them dead set in pushing the other’s buttons in the way only siblings possibly could, but that knowledge didn’t stop his insides from curling with irritation anyways— a kneejerk response to her smug taunting.
“You think I wouldn’t trust him to piece all of me back together? Get real, Summer.” He scoffed with a chuckle that was all bravado, pushing himself away from the counters and folding his arms. “Rick would never leave any part of me behind.”
“Riiight. I’m sure that’s why Rick decided to keep that machine running in some old warehouse or whatever,” Was all he received as a response, paired with a rolling of the shoulders and a snort. “Because he’s just such a sentimental guy,”
“Ugh, be quiet, Summer. You never know what you’re talking about,” Morty shut her down with ease, shoving past her as he left the kitchen and made a beeline towards the stairs. Every step he took was deliberate, careful, each step paired with a breath used to calm himself down. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She never did.
Despite that, though, the notion behind her words had ignited a spark of something else, so faint and minute that he’d hardly recognized it in the moment.
Doubt, quiet and unassuming, sowed into the deepest part of his mind.
Winter had settled over the Smith-Sanchez household with ease, the gentle hum of the house’s central heating system serving as a soothing, subtle contrast to the early December weather: outside, the world had slipped into a stark silence, the nighttime air still and crisp as a series of lace-fine snowflakes fluttered towards the ground in a delicate, elaborate dance. By the time morning rolled around, the snow would’ve long melted, leaving behind nothing but damp grasses and sparse puddles to be swallowed up by lighter drizzles or heavier rain later in the day.
These days, winter had become far removed from the ones Morty had experienced as a kid: snow days had become increasingly few and far between, the late year accentuated instead by gloomy grey skies and heavy rainfall that made their unassuming lawn swell with life. The afternoons he’d once spent outside with Summer, snow glinting off every viable surface for miles as they hurled snowballs at each other and built snowmen, had since been replaced by them doing their own separate things indoors, holed up in their bedrooms. Somewhere over the years, their father had become the only one to give a shit about decorating their home for the holidays, which never went well.
And then, of course, there was Rick, taking up residency in their garage and giving as little of a shit as humanly possible about displaying any sort of ‘holiday cheer’.
Somehow, life had shifted. They’d all lost a small bit of their whimsy, replaced with cynicism to an unrepentant scale.
With a groan and a sigh, Morty gave up on the notion of sleep, rolling over to reach out for his phone on his end table. Had it not been for the dim glow of the screen in response to his double tapping— 3:37, it read— his bedroom would’ve been bathed in complete and utter darkness.
No new messages… but, Jessica had posted something to her story a few hours ago.
In another life, Morty would’ve been all over the post before he’d even granted himself the time needed to process what the notification scrawled across his lockscreen actually read, but tonight, he couldn’t be bothered. She was still the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, sure, but there was nothing about Jessica that felt truly enticing to him anymore. Not when she’d died twice, cronenberged once and frundled the other, and certainly not when his own dead body was rotting just a good few feet away from his bedroom in the backyard for the second time in his life, all desiccated, gruesome lesions and writhing maggots.
The cruelty of it all was striking, really. He’d adored Jessica. She’d been the subject of every maladaptive daydream and late-night fantasy for as long as he could remember, and yet, he’d used a love potion to deform her world instead of simply approaching her like a normal person. Even that hadn’t been necessary: accidental roofieing aside, the following dimension had clearly proven that she’d had some level of interest in him, time and time again.
Then, he’d accidentally caused that version of her to be a prisoner of eternity, horrifically aware of everything, everywhere, all at once, until she’d died from a parasitic infection unleashed by Rick’s weird pet thing.
Every single time he’d made some sort of progress with her, she’d ended up dead, or traumatized, or both. Every single time she died, another version of him had followed suit. It made it hard for him to want to get anywhere with her when he knew it’d result in him upending his life for the umpteenth time, taking the place of yet another version of him who’d never breathe or smile or dream of Jessica again.
And it wasn’t just Jessica, was it? Planetina, his own original father, hell, even Bruce Chutback— Morty’d left so many people behind to avoid facing the consequences he and Rick had, directly or otherwise, caused.
It’d been so easy to jump ship from the worlds they’d mutilated beyond recognition and act like nothing mattered. Rick had made it easy.
Nestled right next to Summer’s comments from earlier in the evening, the thought of how easily he’d left his loved ones behind refused to leave Morty’s mind.
It remained there, the thought slowly blooming— slow and steady, like cotton blooming on its vine— as he rose slowly from his bed, pulling his blanket with him as he draped it over his shoulders to preserve his warmth. Carefully, he made his way downstairs, the only sound cutting through the home’s suffocating silence being the old wood of the stairs, creaking and clacking underneath his unexpected weight.
He and Rick, despite Morty’s best efforts, never really fixed their mistakes, did they? They just turned their heads, swallowed their doubts, and ran away.
It’s what they were doing now, too, even if they were pretending otherwise. Following the Citadel’s first non-grandpa induced destruction, there’d been a gaping hole left behind— not just in the universe, but in the literal fabric of time and space itself: a sucking void of scrambled time and white noise, leading to somewhere and nowhere all at once. They’d left this awful tear in the— the finite central wave or curve or whatever it was called, who gives a shit, right out there in the open, and abandoned a bunch of feral, half-starved Mortys with no Ricks to look out for them on the last standing remnant of the citadel.
What if something from the outside of the curve crossed into their smattering of universes? What if all of those other Mortys followed the actions of their ex-President and crossed through, too? All of these Mortys— didn’t at least some of them have families to return to?
Fathers who missed them? Sisters who worried, despite their best efforts not to? Mothers who spent who-knew-how-long searching for any clue of whatever happened to their son at the bottom of a bottle?
Had it not been cruel enough for him to abandon his own family in such shitty circumstances? Did he really have to extend Rick’s level of nihilistic fatalism to other versions of himself, too?
Just because they were all, in theory, infinite and disposable?
That sort of mindset was awful. He and Rick’s actions were awful. The two of them, truth be told, made awful people.
And he— Morty wasn’t okay with being awful, but… well, he only got to call the shots every tenth adventure, right? How much of the blame sat on his shoulders, really?
He paused at the garage entrance, eyeing the subtle glow of the room’s overhead light shining through the crack of the door. He didn’t necessarily like to go into his garage in what he mentally referred to as after hours. Rick was almost always drunk by this time, that much was clear, and he was no different than Beth was with her bedtime wine: once the sun was down, there were lines Morty had begun to make a deliberate effort not to cross, and initiating interaction with his grandfather when there was more liquor in his veins than blood was one of those lines.
He raised his hand anyways, rapping the back of his knuckles against the wood. There was no response, but audible clattering of some metallic object or another, and so Morty sighed, placing his hand against the doorknob, and pushed open the door.
There was definitely some sort of gadget on Rick’s primary workbench, sure— and it definitely wasn’t the portal gun he was ‘close’ to fixing— but it was already out of Rick’s reach. He was squatting, one hand opening the trapdoor that led to the varying sublevels he’d added to their basement, and the other hand a gun pointed directly at him. Morty halfheartedly raised his hands to show that he was unarmed.
Rick scoffed, lowering the gun after a moment. There was definitely the scent of alcohol in the air, but he didn’t seem drunk, only his normal, functional amount of inebriated. He was, however, starting to have noticeably gone a few days without sleeping. There was an uncharacteristic amount of stubble starting to grow along his chin and jaw, though, his thin mouth bracketed with lines of disapproval. Morty’d noticed it before, but the fluorescent lights of the garage had made it especially obvious.
Rick looked worn. Haggard. “Fuck, do you mind knocking next time? I thought everybody was asleep,”
“I did knock,” Morty said softly as Rick lowered the gun, pocketing it and rising from the floor. The trapdoor dropped shut with an audible clang. “You just didn’t hear me,”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Morty nodded, pulling his blanket closer to himself. It was colder in the garage than it was in the rest of the house. He watched as Rick’s gaze slowly travelled from him to the door behind him, left slightly ajar. Whatever thought crossed his grandfather’s mind, it wasn’t expressed, leaving Morty to have to initiate further conversation. He shifted awkwardly, trying to find the words he wanted to say, and with it, express the explicit reason he’d come down to the garage so early in the morning in the first place. “Um… about Blitz n’ Chitz. I, uh… found some old tokens we never got around to using. Do— a-are we gonna go back again, uh, soon?”
“You already wanna go back? Rick raised his unibrow, eyes trained carefully on Morty as he crossed his arms before suddenly relaxing, rolling his eyes and blowing a raspberry. “I mean, it— it doesn’t matter. It’s gonna take them forever to rebuild that place, so if you wanna reprise your score for Roy, you’re— we’re gonna have to play somewhere else,” He paused briefly, contemplating something. “I mean, there’s a casino run by Gnarpians that has the original arcade machine, but—”
“W-what about the one with my high score in it?” Morty asked, and then, after a moment, added: “Summer said it’s still around. Un— under your name.”
Something odd flickered across Rick’s faltering expression before he rearranged his features into a careful blank. “You mean the shitty one those nerd ass terrorists basically fucked over for good? Yeah,” He shrugged noncommittally, turning his back to Morty to instead absently fiddle with the strange contraption he’d left abandoned on his workbench moments prior. “I thought it’d be fun trying to see if I could fix it. You— you know, in my spare time, which I don’t have a lot of, so I haven’t really gotten around to it.”
Morty didn’t say anything, an elongated pause stretching out between the two of them.
Rick’s contraption let out a series of chrr-clks in his pale hands.
“Rick, did you leave parts of me in the Roy machine?”
His shoulders dropped. “No,” He looked over, his sharp features narrowing into a distinct frown. Morty jabbed a finger at him.
“Liar! Summer told me everything!” He snapped, stepping forward. “Things— they’re supposed to be better between us now, but you’re just lying to me! We’re supposed to be a team! We’re supposed to be equals!”
“Equals is pushing it,”
“It was supposed to be a fresh start, Rick! It’s not fresh if parts of me are— are trapped and miserable in some dumbass game!”
“Hey, Roy is a good game!”
“Mom said that you have to start treating me with respect!” Morty shouted, anger turning his words into a snap of teeth as he stomped his foot on the cement flooring of the garage, only vaguely aware of how childish he was acting.
Rick watched him carefully, but something in his demeanor shifted, ever-so-subtle. He groaned, dropping his contraption, and sighed. “Fine. Yes. I left parts of your stubborn little ass in a ‘dumbass game’.”
“I want to see the machine,”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” He waved Morty off, turning his back to him again.
“Just— just give me the coordinates and I’ll go by myself,” Morty pushed, making his way towards his spacebike. “I don’t need a chaperone,”
“Come on, Morty, it’s three in the morning. I’m too tired for this shit. Your stupid bike isn’t designed for long distance space travel,” He grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and his index finger. After a moment, he made two motions— one to open the garage door and one to grab his cruiser’s keys— and held them up. “Come on, let’s go.”
Morty turned to step forward, pausing briefly as his brows furrowed. “I’ll drive.” He said instead, holding out his hand for the keys. “You give me directions.”
“Fucking hell, Morty,” Rick grumbled, tossing the keys in Morty’s hand and pulling on his labcoat. “Y-you’re a pain in the goddamn ass,”
“So you keep telling me. I’m gonna go grab my jacket. And some shoes,” He moved back to the garage door. “Don’t change your mind.”
“Whatever,” Rick dropped into the passenger seat of his cruiser with his arms crossed, reminiscent of a toddler ceding on their tantrum, and slammed the door shut behind him. Morty ignored his antics, stepping back into the house with a shiver and letting out a sigh of relief before scribbling a quick explanatory note as to where he and Rick had disappeared, leaving it behind in the kitchen before seeking out his parka, his winter boots, and racing to meet Rick outside, hopping into the driver’s seat.
Rick was short with him for the entirety of their drive-slash-flight and near ridiculously vague with his directions, clearly irritated with having been dragging out of the house when it was inconvenient for him— funny, how the tables between them had turned so easily— and honestly, Morty hadn’t been sure where he’d expected the arcade machine to have been stored. The ruins of Blitz n’ Chitz had felt like the most obvious answer to him. The strange, floating asteroid reminiscent of where he’d brought Gwendolyn a lifetime ago, housing nothing but a metallic, sun-bleached warehouse and an empty parking lot was not.
Even with the protective layer of his winter clothes, the air surrounding the warehouse was icy and cold, frost cutting through the fleece lining of his red coat as he stepped out of the cruiser. He was careful to examine his surroundings, taking in mostly the infinite emptiness overhead: stars were spread out across the darkness of space like a scattering of diamonds, framing the tear in the sky with glittery whispers of far-away lives, and when Rick led him up to a small and unimpressive receptionist’s desk, the sole alien on the clock seemed half asleep and utterly disinterested in their job. Offering an explanation in an alien language that only Rick seemed to understand, they offered them a key with a set of numbers engraved into the brass and a hand trolley so that they’d be able to wheel the machine back to their vehicle if needed.
There was something odd in the air: the tension between Morty and Rick was palpable, a heavy dose of tension wafting in the air, but Morty could hardly stew in his thoughts like he had on the way to the warehouse. Instead, all he could focus on was the strangeness that rippled through his body, so subtle that he’d hardly noticed it at first: everything in the warehouse was unrecognizable to him, but something within felt oddly familiar, in some tugging sort of way. It was odd, like some supernatural force that suddenly pulled him off course, Rick bitching behind him but following without question. With no explanation as to what he was doing, Morty stayed silent, wriggling through varying boxes, lockers, and long-abandoned machines, allowing this odd, supernatural force to guide him through the warehouse’s internal maze.
“Is that it?” Morty asked, pointing towards an old arcade machine that had been awkwardly backlit by the warehouse’s fluorescent lights. The glass of the machine had been shattered, leaving behind a flickering lit screen and a smear of unidentifiable blue gloop along the side of it, obscuring the game’s logo.
“Do you see any other fucked up arcade machines in this place?”
“Okay, dick.” He grumbled as he carefully approached it. That strange pull only got stronger, the aching in his chest giving way to a weirdly palpable form of nostalgia, like a part of him had gone missing, removed from his body.
And, he supposed— as he placed a delicate hand on the machine, feeling a tingle of electricity jolt through his being with a sudden intensity— a part of him had.
Morty jerked his hand back, the feeling buzzing like old electric wiring underneath his skin. “How’s this thing still on?”
“Gave it its own power source. It should keep running for the next century,” Rick explained halfheartedly, clearly disinterested. “Should be good for the people in it,”
“You mean the me that’s in it,”
“Whatever. They’re all different identities. They’re barely you at this point, anyways. You know that parts of you were like, Black and Jewish in there, right?”
“I was?” He blinked, looking back to Rick with a raised eyebrow. His memories in there were still all… jumbled. He only really knew the lore of Roy, who’d been left as clean of a slate as possible for the game’s playerbase. He’d never given much thought to the NPCs within before he’d become them. “Who exactly did you leave in there?”
“Ugh, I don’t know?” Rick shrugged. “Some annoying dude named Timmy; that one convert, Marta; some old yoga instructor who pissed me off—”
He continued to drone on, offering names and descriptions of Roy’s auto-generated NPCs that fell on deaf ears as Morty wracked the confines of his mind for any recollections of the names being offered to him, to no avail. He recognized all of them as familiar, sure, but he’d been living millions, if not billions of lives that day, all starting and ending in rapid succession. Trying to identify each and every individual memory was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It felt almost suffocating, impossible, the hum of so many different distinct identities that were just him in a different flavor, and then—
Marta. Grandsonism. Mom.
Vague recollection hummed deep within Morty, overpoweringly unsettling, like the feeling of standing too close to power cables. A solitary fragment of memory skidded over the still waters of his mind, leaving behind oddly-shaped ripples for him to examine, patches of his mind rendered glass smooth while others remained jagged-edged.
He remembered Marta, somewhere amidst a sea of people, but only vaguely. The nostalgic scent of shea butter combined with a smell that could only be described as her, embedded deep within blemished, brown skin. A stifling absence, but a powerful force. A desperation to be seen and understood by someone who’d loved deeply, but had always had her attention centered on the greater good, whatever that was.
The realization settled, soft and subtle, bestowed unto him gently. He knew Marta, recognized her well, but only through the eyes of her daughter.
Nothing remained of Marta but his observation of her through the memories of others, and she’d been prominent in nearly everybody else’s lives. She’d been a good friend to grow up with. A loving yet lacking mother, but not by choice. A reliable and revolutionary political leader.
And she’d been by Roy’s side for the entirety of her life. She’d been an avid believer and supporter of Grandsonism since she’d been a teenager, and that had led her to become his right-hand man, spreading gospel as far as she possibly could to anyone who’d listen.
She’d turned on Roy at some point of her political career, but she’d ultimately recognized who she was. She’d never stopped believing in Grandsonism. She’d even changed her mind, sending the entirety of her supporters with Roy to leave the game, once and for all.
So why hadn’t she come?
Morty jerked his head up and back to the arcade game. The screen displayed a still-running game that flickered on and off, but the contents of it were entirely indecipherable amidst static and broken glass. A strange lump formed in his throat against his will, a wave of grief crashing over him.
He’d been abandoned, too, an unknowable amount of lives being lived outside of his reach. This was what he and Rick did, time and time again.
Why was he so surprised that it’d finally happened to him, too?
He attempted to blink the sudden hotness that had started stinging in his eyes away, turning back to the machine and running his trembling hands over the controls. “You left me behind,” He said finally, his voice picking up a quaver of uncertainty as he looked up to his grandfather. “Things were supposed to be different, but you left me behind,”
“Morty, it’s not that deep. You— parts of you refused to come. What was I supposed to do, force you at gunpoint and give you brain damage? All of the parts of you who died in there probably already did that to you. I told you that if I ran out of time—
“I remember. I was there,” He said, his frown deepening. “What parts of you did you leave in there? What did they have in common?”
What parts of him had been disposable enough to leave behind?
Rick rocked back on his heels with another loud, melodramatic groan, unwilling to address the situation head on. “You really want to know, Morty? Or are you gonna blow up at me like you can’t seem to stop doing lately?”
“I-it’s not on purpose!” He snapped. “But you’re the one giving me reasons to!”
“I’ve got reasons to snap at you too, but I try to keep my shit together at least most of the time!”
“Can you act your age and just fucking tell me already?!” Morty slammed his hand down on the arcade machine.
“It was all the parts of you who didn’t follow that dumbass Grandsonism bit! All of the parts of you that didn’t believe they were you, or all of the parts of you who hated the idea of you so much that they didn’t want to believe they were you, or all the parts of you who didn’t give a fuck either way and just really wanted to give me shit while Summer was fighting for her fucking life!”
“Summer was having a nerd-off with some guy who writes Die Hard fanfiction!” Morty retorted, throwing his hands up. “All of me believed that we were Morty! Even the parts that didn’t still went with it because of herd behavior or peer pressure or so— some stupid shit like that! And you left us behind because we…” Morty trailed off as the puzzle pieces made themselves prominent, falling into place one single piece at a time.
There’d been a war in there, after all: one caused by differing ideologies and a general distrust in Roy. Nobody had actually questioned the legitimacy of Grandsonism. A few logical fallacies had easily done away with all of their questions. Instead, they’d simply questioned the intentions of the man who’d been feeding them their beliefs.
It’d been a cult of Morty, after all. Rick had been their leader. Those who’d desisted had been the parts of him who didn’t trust Rick. The parts of him that didn’t like Rick. The parts of him who’d seen him for what he really was: a selfish, cruel asshole.
The little shards of memories that he’d formed in all of those little lives all cracked, simultaneously. One hairline fractured followed by another, and then another, before the illusion finally shattered, his trust dropping to the floor before shattering into millions of little pieces.
For a brief moment, Morty stared at his grandfather with nothing but a heavy, silent tension hanging between them in the air, like a held breath.
“You have to fix this,” He said quietly, his voice barely audible. Rick’s irate expression contorted, his lips curling into a deep, distinct scowl.
“I can’t,”
“Why not.”
“Why else do you think I saved this dumb fucking machine instead of trashing it like Summer kept telling me to?” Rick’s voice was steady and flat, but his words were wrapped in barbed wire, cutting sharply into Morty. “I was getting to it.”
Morty said nothing. He paused before he turned on his heels, making a beeline for the warehouse’s exit.
Then, without warning— and ignoring the distinct pull that worked its way through his body, gently tugging him back to the machine— broke into a dead sprint.
“Morty!” Rick screamed after him, taking off after him, but Morty had the benefit of being younger with better joints than his counterpart could ever dream of. He practically chucked the warehouse keys to the alien at the front desk, now asleep, digging through the pockets of his parka. He pulled out a parking ticket that definitely didn’t belong to him and an empty gum wrapper before his hands finally landed on the keys to Rick’s cruiser, initially tucked away for safekeeping.
With trembling hands, he jammed the key into the car, pulling open the door and slamming it shut behind him just as Rick caught up to him, banging his hands on the glass of the cruiser.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Morty?! Unlock the door!” He slammed on the glass one more time before struggling with the now-locked door handle, the cruiser shifting with his strength as Morty jammed the keys into the ignition and slammed onto the acceleration pedal, careening straight off of the ledge of the asteroid and leaving a pissed off Rick behind.
Morty yelled incoherently as the cruiser nosedived, struggling to regain control before jerking the steering wheel upwards, speeding towards the direction of the stars. His mind was a scattered mess, a tornado of emotions having knocked everything over, and the guilt that squirmed through his gut was as cold as the infinite space that surrounded him was.
He’d abandoned so many people, and now, he’d been forced to abandon himself, too.
But… none of this was forced, was it? He could’ve stood up to Rick like this a lifetime ago by now, and he should’ve: he’d always tried to help people, but he fell short whenever Rick got involved. The hot shit he’d landed himself in now was nothing more than karmic justice, a universal punishment for the dimensions he’d been complicit in destroying and leaving behind.
He couldn’t go home now. Nobody would understand— in fact, if Rick was being honest, Summer had clearly voted for those undesirable parts of him to be trashed entirely—, and everybody else would take his grandfather’s side when they found out he’d abandoned him on a foreign asteroid and make Morty go back for him.
Rick would be the last person he’d possibly want to see in this situation, but there was no one he could turn to.
Around him, space stretched out in every direction, lacking a definitive up or down. Everything around him was black and illegible save for the new-forming constellations that surrounded him, shimmering with iridescent colors impossible for him to explain.
Between it all, that gaping void in the central finite curve, threatening to swallow everything whole.
He couldn't trust anyone else. Maybe it was time for him to start trusting himself.