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Summer’s plane lands at 11:30 at night, too late for the car rental place to be open. She didn’t check a bag, so at least she doesn’t have to waste time standing around the carousel, though it does mean she doesn’t really have anything more comfortable than her work clothes to change into. At least she’ll be able to wash them once she gets home, maybe even borrow some of her mom’s yoga pants. Anything would be better than this too-tight pencil skirt she’s been sitting in for the past three hours and four-inch heels.
She flags a cab just outside the airport, tips the driver fifty bucks to get her to the hospital before midnight. He drives like a stuntman in a spy movie and makes it there with five minutes to spare.
Visiting hours are long past over, obviously, but the waiting room at emergency’s open, cold fluorescent bulbs buzzing against the viscous dark. Summer looks around at the families perched on the rows of hard plastic chairs, dusty reds and oranges and yellows that somebody obviously thought would be cheerful, despairing or determined faces. She doesn’t recognise her little brother until he raises an arm and waves.
Summer’s heels sound way too loud against the lino as she hurries over to join her family, and she can feel the stares boring into her as she drops into the empty seat beside Morty. He’s had another growth spurt, surprise surprise, gotta be six feet now if he’s an inch. Summer wonders vaguely where he gets it from. It’s not like they come from a family of particularly tall people. Maybe there’s some kind of artificial enhancement thing going on there, but - that’s not a topic they talk about. At least, it hasn’t ever been. Maybe it should be.
But this isn’t the time, or the place.
“Hey, pipsqueak,” Summer says, leaning around her brother. “Hey, Dad. Brian. Where’s Mom?”
“She’s on her way back from Switzerland,” Summer’s dad says, a frown creasing his forehead. “Caught the first flight she could get, but she still won’t be here until three. Of all the times for something like this to happen.” He shakes his head, like he’s gonna give the entire concept of time a stern talking-to. The mental image shouldn’t be so funny. Summer definitely shouldn’t laugh in this mausoleum of a room.
“I know, right?” she says, instead of laughing, kicking off her shoes and stretching her aching feet. “I never thought anything like this would happen. I guess I kinda just always assumed he’d keep replacing failing body parts with robotic ones until he was some kind of immortal cyborg or something.” She shrugs, like it’s a joke. It isn’t.
“I - I think he thought so too,” Morty says, quietly.
Summer looks down at her toes, splays them all out so that her pantyhose makes them look webbed.
“Do they know what it was yet?” she asks her feet.
Unsurprisingly, it’s her dad’s boyfriend who answers, all calm, steady sympathy. Thanks, Doctor Brian. “Well, they can’t be positive until they get the bloodwork back, and the lab’s running a skeleton crew this time of night, but - it looks like cascading organ failure caused by severe withdrawal.”
The nail polish on Summer’s toes is starting to chip, she notices, dully.
“That’s a death sentence,” she says, looking up at Brian. Her dad must see something in her expression he doesn’t like, because he’s frowning like he’s about to say something, but Summer ignores him. “Right? At his age, with his history - it’d take a miracle to get one transplant. Cascading organ failure is a death sentence.”
“Summer -” her dad starts, warningly, and Summer rolls her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest and slouching down in her chair like she’s a teenager again.
“I’m just being realistic, Dad.” She swings one leg, kicks the metal bar holding up her end of the row of seats as hard as she can in stocking feet. “That asshole! How could he do this to us?”
“Summer, I’m sure your grandfather didn’t plan to have all of his organs give out at once -”
“Oh, you’re sure. Great. That makes me feel so much better, Dad.” Summer kicks one of her shoes. It goes skidding across the lino and under another row of plastic seats. She’s going to have to walk halfway across the waiting room in sock feet to get it, but right now, she doesn’t care. “Grandpa Rick’s not an idiot. He knew what he was doing.”
“Well, I’m sorry for not always assuming the worst of people, little miss family court,” Summer’s dad shoots back, and Summer squeezes her eyes shut. They’re really doing this? Here? Now? “Maybe, if mental illness ran in my side of the family, I would have thought of -”
Morty doesn’t make a sound, just gets up from his chair, blocking Summer’s view of her father, and walks away across the waiting room towards the illuminated signs for the bathroom on the far wall. Something in Summer’s chest feels like it cracks, right down the middle. They’d been doing so well lately, too. She should’ve kept her stupid mouth shut.
“Now you’ve upset your brother,” her dad says, waving an arm in the direction Morty went.
Summer sighs, and lets her arms flop at her sides. They suddenly feel like they weigh a million pounds. “Dad, just save it, okay? We can have this stupid fight later, if we have to.”
“Summer -” her dad starts, like he’s about to dive into a lecture, but Brian puts a hand on his arm.
“Jerry? Hon? We talked about this.”
For half a second, Summer’s dad looks like he’s about to blow up and storm off, but then he lets out a long breath. “No. No, you’re right. Summer, I’m sorry. I’m just - I’m worried, and I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”
Summer blinks.
“Uhm, yeah,” she says, when she’s finished reeling. “I’m...sorry too. Uh, I think I’m gonna go see how Morty’s holding up.” She pushes herself out of the plastic chair, leaning over to grab her shoe.
“Oh! Good idea, I’ll -” her dad starts, but Brian keeps a hand on his arm, smoothly interrupting him.
“We’ll stay here, and if there’s any more news, we’ll come find you two.” He meets Summer’s eyes, and doesn’t wink, but only because he doesn’t have to.
Summer smiles back. “Thanks, Brian. We’ll get some coffees and bring them back for you guys.”
“An even better idea,” Summer’s dad says, leaning back in his plastic chair with a defeated sigh. “Looks like we’re in for a long night.”
...
“Hey, buttface,” Summer calls through the door of the single-stall bathroom Morty’s locked himself in, gently rapping the back of her hand against the wood. “Did you fall in?”
The response is muffled, but immediate. “Go away, Summer.”
“Yeah, like I’m gonna start listening to you now,” Summer says, leaning back against the wall beside the bathroom door. She still hasn’t put on her shoes; they’re dangling from one hand. “Dad and Brian stayed back, I told them we’d get coffee. My treat,” she adds. Her brother’s a college student, free coffee should have him out here in no time.
When there’s no response and the door doesn’t immediately creak open, Summer sighs, folding her arms over her middle and kicking one foot up to rest against the wall. “Look, I’m - I’m sorry. I was an asshole. I should’ve known better, I mean, you two were always so close -”
The bathroom door swings open, nearly clocking Summer in the face. Morty looks pale and shellshocked and serious, not the nervous kind of wide-eyed seriousness that Summer’s used to but a sort of grave, quiet, piercing seriousness that makes Summer a little afraid. She can’t tell if he’s been crying or not. “Stop talking like he’s already dead.”
Summer bites down on her tongue. “Okay. I, I can do that.” She takes a deep breath, manages to rally. “Coffee?”
...
The coffeeshop on the main floor of the hospital is closed along with the rest of the food court, but there’s a vending machine on the second floor that dispenses little cups of what’s somehow simultaneously the tarriest and the wateriest coffee Summer’s ever tasted. The little packets of powdered creamer and artificial sugar substitute don’t help the taste at all, but at least they mask it a little.
“So which major are you on now?” Summer asks, stirring furiously as she tries to get the powdered creamer to break out of its little individual lumps and incorporate with the rest of the coffee. “Third? Fourth?”
“Fifth,” Morty says, ripping the tops off of two packets of sugar at once and dumping them into the sugary sludge he’s calling coffee. “Game design.”
“Well, at least that’s cool,” Summer says. “I never really had you pegged for a political science kind of guy.”
Morty takes a sip of his coffee-flavoured pudding, makes a face, and reaches for another sugar packet.
“I think - I think this one’s gonna stick,” he says, with a little smile. “I think I’m really good at it. I - I designed an entire new physics engine to run this monster’s rigging, the professor called it ‘revolutionary’ and he’s - he’s shopping it around to some industry people.”
Summer resists the urge to say ‘well fuck me sideways’ in a maternity wing.
“That? Is awesome,” she pronounces instead. “And it sounds like that speech therapy’s going really well, too.” She gives her brother a punch in the arm with the fist that’s still holding her shoes. “I’m proud of you. Just don’t, like, ever ask me to repeat that in public.”
Morty actually laughs at that. Summer counts it as a win.
She gives her coffee another halfhearted stir. Those lumps of powdered creamer are just gonna stay lumps, then. Okay. It’s not like it can make the coffee any worse. “It’s weird, you know? When I was a teenager it felt like nothing was ever going to change and we were trapped in the same miserable cycles forever. And now I’m an adult and Mom and Dad are finally divorced and they’re actually starting to get along, and Dad’s, like, trying to be self-aware and emotionally intelligent, and you’re turning into a real person instead of a little troll...” She smiles at Morty, who narrows his eyes at her but smiles anyway.
“Only because you started turning into a real person instead of a dated Valley Girl stereotype,” he teases back, and Summer rolls her eyes.
“Please. You can take the girl out of the uptalk, but you can’t, like, take the uptalk out of the girl.” She takes a sip of her coffee, and grimaces. “Ugh. Okay, I think I’d rather fall asleep with my face in a puddle of vomit than have to drink that.”
“Your own vomit, or - or somebody else’s?”
Summer sticks out her tongue. “Ew. Okay, I’ll take the coffee over sleeping in somebody else’s puke.”
“It’s - it is pretty bad though,” Morty agrees. “Definitely not fancy law school coffee.”
“Oh, shut up,” Summer says, but she’s beaming. So she’s proud of herself too. Nothing wrong with that.
Somewhere in the hallway, something starts beeping, loud and furious. Summer flattens herself against the wall as a nurse speeds around the corner, soft-soled shoes squeaking against the lino, and disappears into one of the rooms at the far end of the hall.
“...I think maybe we should head back,” Summer says, eyeing the grey-brown slurry filling her cup. “Do you think we should even bother bringing Dad and Brian back coffee, or...?”
Morty looks into his own cup. “I think this stuff might come to life and - and try to eat their faces,” he says.
Summer nods in agreement.
“It’s strange,” she says, tipping the contents of her cup carefully into the drain under the vending machine’s dispenser and crumpling the cardboard cup in one hand. “None of this feels really...real. Like, Grandpa Rick should be here complaining about how hospitals are breeding grounds for superbugs and how sitting in waiting rooms is pointless because unless you’re a doctor, there’s fuckall you can do to help anyway.”
Morty suddenly looks uneasy, but Summer’s not sure if that’s because of what she said or because of the coffee.
“I’m glad he’s not,” he says, and then looks horrified.
“Me too,” Summer says. “I mean, this sucks enough already, it’s not like a running commentary about how useless and outdated Earth medicine is is going to help.” She sucks in a deep breath, squeezes the crumpled cardboard cup between her fingers as hard as she possibly can. “Then again, this would be way easier if there were, like, alien robots we could shoot, or something.”
At least that gets an amused snort out of Morty.
“Seriously, though, how weird is it to have alien robots and plagues of weasels and, like, accidental bodyswaps not be part of regular, everyday life anymore?” Summer asks, more to hear the sound of her own voice than anything else. “It’s weird enough for me, and I was the one who always got picked last for the adventuring team.”
Morty rubs his upper arm with one hand, nervously. “I mean, I dunno, it’s a lot calmer...”
“And a lot less interesting and exciting,” Summer grumbles. “Not that I’d know from experience.”
“Trust me. You - you’re not missing much,” Morty says. He’s all locked up, his shoulders stiff and nearly around his ears, his arms tucked in tight to his sides, and Summer gives herself a sharp mental kick. She’s gotten so used to her brother being anxious and uncomfortable that she didn’t even notice the effect her words were having on him.
“I guess you’re right,” she says, apologetically. “Besides, I mean, like, life is really good now.”
She scuffs a stockinged foot against the linoleum.
“Oh, so good,” Morty echoes, hollowly. “Really - really good.”
Summer looks down at the linoleum. There’s a long black scuff mark just by her toe, and she rubs it out with her foot.
“You know, it sucks that this happened,” she says. “But in a way, it’s, like...almost a relief?”
Morty’s eyes flick from Summer’s face to the door at the far end of the hallway like a cornered animal.
“Okay, that came out wrong,” Summer hastily corrects herself. “Just, you know...since we got out of the house, things have been almost too good.” She looks her little brother up and down out of the corner of her eye. For all that he’s looking like a scared rabbit right now, she knows his anxiety has been way down since he left for college. And maybe it’s not great to switch majors as many times as he’s done, but at least now he’s figuring out who he is and what he wants to do, instead of just being jumpy and angry and parroting Grandpa Rick all the time. It’s been good for him, to have his own life. At least Summer’s pretty sure it has. It’s definitely been good for her. “It just kind of felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Yeah,” Morty says, quietly, looking down into his coffee sludge. “A relief.”
“You know? Like, something like this had to happen because otherwise the universe would’ve been, like, out of balance or something.” She cracks a grin in Morty’s direction. He still won’t meet her eyes. “Or like, if something really bad didn’t happen, we might figure out we’re trapped in a hologram or a dream sequence or something. Do you ever get that feeling?”
Morty looks up, and Summer instantly wishes he hadn’t. His face is still pale and worried, but his eyes, oh fuck, his eyes -
“All the time,” Morty says, as his face glitches and melts down his front, his eyes boring through Summer as the hospital walls begin to bleed pixels all around them - “All the time.”
Summer wakes up screaming.
“Wow!” a voice she doesn’t recognise exclaims. It sounds genuinely shocked and upset, and a little too excited about that. “Your family is so fucked up! Try trapping you in a vision of your deepest desires, and you freaks give me that? And you still think it’s too good to be true? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“What is happening,” Summer demands, taking in her own bedroom, looking like it hasn't been touched since she left for college, her old boy band posters, her mirror across the room reflecting her own frightened, teenage face. The pulsating metallic tentacles wrapped around every surface are new. “Where are my shoes?”
“And that’s your first reaction when you wake up out of a vision of your deepest desires that’s equally as horrifying as your real life!” the voice says, thick with malicious glee. “You’re almost as bad as -”
The voice is cut off by a high-pitched whine, and there’s a burst of light from the doorway that explodes against the thickest and most unsettling of the tentacles, the one lying along the ceiling and disappearing somewhere over her head. There’s a flash, and a burst of noise, and an unearthly howling, and when Summer lowers the arm she threw up to protect her eyes, the tentacle’s been blown apart and there’s a huge black scorch mark on her ceiling.
“Grandpa Rick!” Summer all but shouts when her grandfather appears in the doorway, firing off four more quick shots from the blaster he’s holding. Three more tentacles burst apart with a shower of sludgy black goop that reminds Summer oddly of the coffee from the hospital vending machine. The rest all start to creep slowly backwards, along the walls and the ceiling, out into the hall. “You’re all right - wait, and I’m -”
“It was a - a - a shared hallucination, Summer,” her grandfather snaps, not looking at her as he blasts the retreating tentacles. “Took you long enough to figure that one out, did you really think you were - were Harvard Law material?”
“I think I liked you better when I thought you were dying,” Summer says, slipping out of bed. "Got a spare blaster, old man?”
...
The root of the tentacles throttling their house like some weird sci-fi Sleeping Beauty bramble bush, when they find it, is an ugly, enormous metallic bulb with a single, rolling, neon eye in its very centre. Personally, Summer thinks it's one of the uglier alien monsters she's ever seen, but hey, she's human. Maybe she looks horrifically ugly to it.
The ugliest thing about it, though, are definitely the three fat tentacles her brother's struggling in his sleep to pull off of him, and there's nothing about that that Summer's gonna chalk up to differing cultural standards of beauty.
“Oh, there you are,” that annoying voice says, and it seems to be emanating from that eye-orb. Summer jumps and yelps when something lands heavily on her shoulder, and she pushes away the tentacle that’s flopped onto her. “Well done for breaking out of my mind-prison, yadda yadda, but the rest of your family’s still trapped in my web! And if you lay a finger on me, well, who knows what might happen to them! Not that you two sociopaths care, sheesh.” The tentacles draped around the room give a shiver, and Morty’s face screws up like he’s in pain.
Summer exchanges a glance with her grandfather, before turning back to the eye-orb. Its bottom lid is scrunched up, like it’s grinning.
“So! Who’s gonna step on up and venture back into the dreamworld to wake these other schmucks up?” The voice laughs, the room shaking in the tentacles’ grip. “Of course, once you get back in, you won’t remember it’s a dream, but hey! You figured it out once, you ca-”
Summer shoots first, three bolts square in the middle of the obnoxious orb’s spiralling eye before her grandpa can get a shot off. She keeps pumping laser bolts into it until the orb, with an awful screech, splatters like a popped zit. It sprays sludgy black goop all over Summer’s front, and all the tentacles twined around the house spasm, once, before flopping down to the floor with a series of wet, heavy thuds.
“Yeugh,” Summer says, trying and failing to flick some of the slime off her tank top. “Okay, that guy was officially the worst. I liked these pyjamas.”
A hand bursts through the pile of black goop covering the bed, and what looks like a humanoid figure made of living tar surfaces with a gasp. Summer grips her blaster tighter, but the figure raises an arm and rubs goo away from its face, revealing her little brother. “What - what’s going - Rick? Summer?”
He looks down at himself, and his face falls. “Aw, geez, did I get incepted again?”
...
Cleaning up the mess left by both tentacles and blasters looks like it’s going to be a major chore. Summer’s pretty sure her room’s going to need to be repainted again. Maybe this time she’ll go for pale lavender on the walls. Or maybe that’s too little-girly.
“I don’t know why the alien brainworms keep pairing me off with imaginary men!” her dad’s complaining, loudly, as he stuffs bits of tentacle into a garbage bag. “Not...that...there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s not like I’ve ever wondered about...what it would be like...with some strong, sensitive, kind-eyed...” He stops, shoves a chunk of tentacle into the bag with more force than necessary.
“No, go ahead, Jerry. Finish that sentence,” Summer’s mom says, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall she’d been scrubbing scorch marks off of with a little knowing smile.
“Dad, it’s okay to be bisexual, it doesn’t mean you’re cheating on Mom or anything,” Summer says, and then, because she can’t resist teasing a little, or a lot, presses one hand over her heart and says, “You owe it to yourself to live your truth.”
“As soon as your room has four solid walls again, you are so grounded, young lady,” Summer’s dad grumbles, tying off the garbage bag like he’d rather be wringing a neck.
Summer catches her mom’s eye, and they both have to smother a burst of laughter.
“You know, if I could, I’d ground both of you,” Summer’s dad snaps, before turning and dragging the bag of tentacle chunks away.
Summer’s mom looks over at her, and Summer loses her shit.
“Oh my god,” she gasps, when she can finally get a breath in.
“He makes it so easy,” her mom agrees, with a snort of laughter.
“Right? Like, it was all a dream,” Summer says. “Speaking of, how was Switzerland?”
Her mom’s eyes go a little wistful in the corners. “It was everything I ever hoped it would be,” she says, and then adds wryly, “I thanked all of you guys in my Nobel acceptance speech.”
Summer nods. It's only fair.
She picks up slimy tentacle bits in silence for a moment or two before asking, “Hey, have you seen Morty since he went to wash off all the alien guts?”
“Hmm? No, I think he went with your grandfather to try to figure out how that thing got into our house in the first place.” Summer’s mom scrubs the back of one hand across her forehead, turning back to the scorch mark on the wall and attacking it like it’s a murderous alien itself. Summer gets the feeling that she’s not really included in this conversation anymore. “‘Severe withdrawal’. Just like him, to jump in headfirst, refuse to accept help, and think he can dodge all the consequences because he’s just - so - smart.” She swipes the brush down the wall one last time, bends down and dunks it into the ice cream pail full of soapy water that’s quickly turning black from all the gunk rinsed in it. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve wished my dad would actually try and sober up?”
“At least as many as I wished my mom would?” Summer mutters, under her breath. It’s obviously not quiet enough, judging by the way her mom pauses.
“Summer,” her mom says, cautiously, pulling her hand out of the bucket of water and drying it off on a rag as she turns to face Summer. The rag’s made out of one of her dad’s old t-shirts, Summer remembers the faded red and fun run logo from the times he’d taken her to the driving range when she was little. “Honey, something you’ll learn as you grow up is that the people you care about are going to let you down.” Summer’s mom huffs out a bitter little laugh. “And you’re going to let down the people you care about. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Wow. Some life lesson,” Summer says, halfheartedly letting a chunk of greasy tentacle flop into the garbage bag she’s holding. “Tune in next week, when we teach your kids all about how death is the great equaliser and all human accomplishments are, like, meaningless.”
Her mom sighs, running a hand through her hair and brushing it back from her forehead as she straightens up. “I just mean that people are going to hurt you. And you’re going to hurt people. You can’t avoid it, you can’t hide from it. All you can do is try to learn from it.”
“Whatever,” Summer says. The hall is still carpeted in sludge where the tentacles she and her dad have already picked up were lying, and she knows that all the rooms off the hall are full of more tenta-chunks. “I’m actually getting kind of hungry. I didn’t eat breakfast. I’m gonna go and - go.”
Summer’s mom doesn’t say anything, just goes back to furiously scrubbing at the scorch mark on the wall.
...
When Summer finds Morty, he’s sitting on the couch in the middle of the carnage, staring blankly at the TV set. It’s not turned on.
Summer flops down on the couch next to him, digging under the cushions until she finds the remote. She flicks through the channels until she lands on something about turning disused nuclear submarines into adorable underwater homes, and pointedly doesn’t look at her brother.
“You know, I think that alien guy was lying about the whole ‘vision of your deepest desires’ bit,” she says, after the submarine tiny homes designer’s voice gets a little too grating.
Morty doesn’t move, but his eyes flick to the glass patio doors like he’s looking for a way out. “O-oh?”
“Yeah. He was totally getting off on what terrible people we all were, he just wanted to make us feel bad about ourselves,” Summer says, trying to get comfortable on the couch without sitting on the suspicious black stain on the cushion next to her. “It was definitely one of those evil-genie scenarios. You know, where they take your real wish and, like, twist it so it backfires on you? Trust me, I worked at a place where they did that for like a month, I know that scam when I see it.”
On the TV, the wife expresses concern that their brand-new submarine home might be radioactive. The designer wins her over with a sparkling crystal chandelier from the designer’s own collection for Home Depot.
“Oh,” Morty says, and Summer thinks she sees his shoulders relax, just slightly.
“Like, Dad wished for a hot brunette who cares about his feelings, but whoops, forgot to specify gender.” Summer’s rambling, now, but she can’t seem to make her mouth shut up. “Nobody wants Grandpa Rick to be dead.”
“Uh, yeah. O-of course not. R-right.”
The couple on the TV show, completely won over by their new tiny underwater home, are now quibbling about where to anchor it to get the best backyard. The designer suggests the Great Barrier Reef.
“Do you actually care about game design?” Summer asks, finally looking directly over at her brother.
Morty shrugs one shoulder, without looking away from the TV screen. “I - I - I dunno, I mean, maybe if - if I ever had a chance to try it?”
Summer nods.
“Okay, this is getting boring,” she says, grabbing the remote and the other remote. “You see one submarine reno episode, you’ve seen them all. Wanna see if we can find some Ball Fondlers reruns?”
...
(Somewhere in the future, after she's finally left for college and gotten as far away from her crazy family as possible, Summer will collapse crying on a frathouse couch at three in the morning in the middle of frosh week, and no one will be able to understand what the hell she's talking about when she says "Oh my god, he's still just a kid and I just left him there!", but for now -
- everything is normal.)