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Jane Nguyen thought it would just be a normal day.
She woke up at 6:30 am for school, like normal; her father dropped her off in the morning, as he always did; she went through her classes as if it were any other day; everything seemed totally uneventful.
But there was this strange, dull nagging sensation. One that had been pestering her for the last couple of days. It all started the other day, when she was going downtown to her favorite coffee shop. That strange boy came up to her, screaming and crying incoherently. It completely freaked her out, and she was on-edge for the rest of the afternoon. He looked like someone about her age. He had frantic, dark eyes and short hazel brown hair, as well as a solid color yellow t-shirt. He was...actually kind of cute.
Shame she had to pepper spray him directly in the face.
But ever since that day, she felt...odd. Empty. Like something was missing from her life. Oh well, she thought to herself as she walked home, it can’t be anything too serious, right?
When Jane got home from school, she was home alone. Neither of her parents would be home from work for a few hours. She got to studying immediately; she had an Algebra test the next day, and this new chapter was especially difficult. At around 6:00, Jane’s mother came home. She briefly came up to Jane’s room, offering her a cup of tea and chatting about her day.
By 7:00, Jane felt like she had a good grasp on the material for this test. She still had more homework to do tonight, and she would probably review her notes one more time before going to bed, but overall, she was feeling confident.
At which point, Jane’s day--which had been perfectly mundane up until now--suddenly took a turn for the strange.
A dull light stuck out from the edge of her peripheral vision. Looking in the direction, and out the window, she noticed a rapidly-approaching wave of very faint, blue light, the color of the sky. Jane froze. Was it some kind of firework? A trick of the light?
“What the hell is that?” she muttered. She took a step towards the window, ready to close her curtains and easily dismiss this as her eyes acting up.
Before Jane could react, the wave enveloped her neighborhood. Jane adjusted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She must have just been seeing things.
Jane went to go sit back down at her desk, but something else strange appeared in the corner of her eye. It was a framed photo of a teenage boy, cute, with brown hair and adorable dimples. As Jane focused on the sight, she realized it was the same boy from a few days ago, the one she pepper-sprayed outside of the cafe.
“Wait,” she whispered to herself, “what the…? Who is he?”
All at once, a wave of memories hit her. That wasn’t just some random boy her age.
That was her boyfriend of nearly 6 months.
“Morty?!”
Jane started to back up, eyes wide. She felt panicked, and her breathing increased until she was nearly hyperventilating. Her vision began flashing, and she felt a bead of sweat form on her forehead. How could she possibly forget him? Why did she pepper spray him? What HAPPENED?
A massive headache started to hit her. Not some kind of stress headache, but her brain felt like it was colliding with itself. Amidst a wave of memories that crashed onto her mind like an ocean wave, one stood out: the first time they met. He was just some normal boy, walking by. He noticed her going into the cafe and opened the door for her. On instinct, she invited him in to dine with her.
But...that doesn’t make any sense. Because just the other day, she was in the exact same position, and so was he, but that time, he ran up to her and began screaming and crying. Which one actually happened? They couldn’t have both occurred: the memories were on the same day, at the same time, and totally incompatible. Jane needed to sit down. More memories of their relationship came to her: their first kiss, her eating brunch with his family on a lazy Sunday morning, him meeting her parents.
She looked to her right, to her bedroom door. Hanging off the coat hanger was a thin, dark gray men’s sweatshirt, one he gave to her on her first date. “When did that get here?” she pondered aloud.
Looking to her left, on her bedside table, she saw a small stuffed animal, a plushie panda. One that he won for her at the State Fair. How could she forget that?
Jane grabbed the cup of tea her mom left behind and stumbled downstairs. She needed to clear her head. Was any of this real? Some kind of bizarre hallucination?
As she came down the stairs and into the living room, she remembered more specific details of Morty and his life. He had an older sister, Summer, who was about to turn 18; she always found Summer cool. He had a weird grandfather who was always pulling him out of school.
She remembered his address, his favorite foods, his phone number--
“That’s it!” she shouted ecstatically. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her phone. If this was some bizarre coincidence, and she was totally wrong, she would end up embarrassing herself; but how could she be wrong? All of these memories suddenly came to her, crystal clear. Jane needed to talk to him.
Jane was about to call Morty, but found that she had just recently called him. That didn’t make any sense; she just checked her phone when she got home a few hours ago, and it showed that the most recent call she made was to her mother.
She hit the “CALL” button, and held the small up to her ear, waiting for him to pick up.
“Jane?” her mother asked from the living room couch. “Are you okay? What is it?”
Jane looked over and found her mother watching the news. About to explain, Jane’s train of thought was obliterated as she saw what was on the TV.
Several groups of people (local law enforcement officers, SWAT teams, protesters, and...the NAACP?) were gathered outside of what Jane immediately recognized as the Smith household. Jane dropped her cup of tea, which shattered on contact with the wooden ground.
“Morty, what did you do?” she whispered to herself.
“Jane?” her mother asked, concerned. Mrs. Nguyen briefly eyed the broken cup. “Honey, what are you doing? Are you feeling alright?”
Jane didn’t have time to respond. She reached over to a nearby the keys to her mother’s car and dashed out the door.
“Jane!” her mother shouted after her.
_______
When Jane jumped in her mother’s car, she wasn’t thinking at all. Everything she was doing was out of pure instinct. Was she going crazy? Was this all some kind of bizarre psychosis?
If so, how did she know how to get to Morty’s house? How did she know each road and turn, without ever having driven here before?
But that was just the first of many things. As she drove frantically, completely ignoring the speed limit, other memories crystallized. They didn’t just date, they also broke up. He had become distant and bored, ignoring her. She eventually ended things.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jane muttered as she made a clumsy right turn, nearly hitting the edge of the curb. “These memories...we’d been dating for several months, so how did we only meet the other day?”
The sun was already beginning to set when she ran out. Her mother was probably worried sick; Jane barely knew how to drive anywhere, and only had her learner’s permit. But that was something Jane could resolve later; right now, she needed to get to Morty and figure out what happened to him.
When she arrived at his neighborhood, it was already night, the last traces of sunlight gone. She found she couldn’t even park on the same street as his house; protesters from a variety of movements (some of which had acronyms she’d never even heard of, but all of which with anti-Morty posters) gathered around, blocking any sort of vehicular movement. Jane parked the car and ran out, pushing her way past several angry rioters and a disgruntled police officer before arriving at the front yard.
Somehow, Jane recognized everything about this house; from the brief glimpse of the living room they’d spent so many hours watching movies in, to the open garage filled with dozens of gadgets his grandfather was making. But the one thing she didn’t recognize was the massive vat of acid in the driveway. That seemed new.
Just as Jane pushed past a judge (which she found curious, but didn’t stop to question), she got a clear glimpse of her boyfriend. Morty Smith--classic yellow shirt and all--walking past a much older man in a lab coat that Jane recognized as his grandfather, Rick...before jumping into the massive vat of boiling hot, radioactive acid.
Jane felt tears sting the corners of her eyes. She didn’t know what was going on, or why he did it, but her boyfriend just killed himself, mere minutes after Jane remembered that he even existed. What was happening?
Jane was certain that amidst this massive crowd of people who hated Morty Smith, she was the only one crying, the only one who was mourning his death.
She turned around, pushing past the same people. She needed to clear her head and get some space from all of this chaos.
_______
Morty felt one overwhelming emotion after the night’s events: regret.
After he crawled out of the vat of (fake) acid, he felt completely broken. All these months, he’d been fooling around with Rick’s technology for the sole reason being that there were no consequences. He’d never meant to hurt anyone. Sure, he’d done some stupid stuff, but he didn’t exactly consider himself some kind of sadist, for the sole reason that he thought he was rewriting his mistakes all this time.
To find out that everything he did was killing innocent versions of himself, and the only way to save them was to take full responsibility for every horrible thing that he’d done...it was a terrible choice. It hurt, but he deserved it. He wished that he’d never asked Rick to make the device. He wished that he’d made a save point when he was dating Jane. He wished that he’d just kept his fucking mouth shut. And he wished that Rick wasn’t such a vindictive bastard.
Morty walked through the garage door, leaving a small trail of fake acid behind him. If nothing else, he was grateful that his parents and Summer weren’t around to watch the entire situation. As he entered the house, he found Rick at the kitchen counter, pouring himself some shots.
“Hey, Morty, shame the vat of acid didn’t work ‘cause it was such a lame idea,” the scientist said with a shit-eating grin. He downed one shot, slammed the empty glass on the table, and pointed at his grandon triumphantly. “Oh wait! It did work! It was a good idea!”
Give Morty a day or so to recover from everything that just happened to him, and he might respond to that differently, but for no, he was too emotionally numb to say anything. He walked past Rick without shooting the old man a second glance, as his grandfather flipped the bird and downed a second shot.
After taking a hot shower--that was neither hot enough nor long enough--Morty emerged from his room. He no longer stunk of fake acid, but he still felt like shit. He wanted nothing more than to play games for several hours, fall asleep and forget this ever happened.
When he walked in his room, he found an immediate obstacle to this goal. A framed picture of Jane at his bedside table, one that she gave him a few months ago.
...well, technically, with all the time-fuckery and his idiot dad stupidly hitting the reset button, she actually gave it to him... four months in the future in a different timeline? Morty groaned. Thinking like that made his head hurt.
“Wait a second…” he realized. After he accidentally overwrote the save and she pepper sprayed him (not a great day for either of them), all of the gifts she gave him just disappeared; by the very nature of the button, their entire relationship was erased, as were any material objects she gave him along the way.
But the reverse is true too. Now that Rick combined the timelines, he had some of this stuff back. Everyone remembered everything, so she must remember as well!
Morty didn’t even bother drying his hair. Changing quickly into a black t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, he grabbed his phone from the charging port. As he opened it, he immediately noticed the difference: his lockscreen was no longer one of the generic default pictures, but a selfie the two of them took on one of their dates.
Morty went to his “Recent Calls”, and found one from Jane, dated 7:04 that night. She did try to call him! She remembered!
Hitting the button, Morty started pacing around his room. “C’mon, pick up, pick up, pickuppickupickupic--”
The ringing stopped, and he heard a small click. “Morty?”
“J-Jane?!” he asked excitedly.
“MORTY!” she shouted. He could practically hear her grinning from ear-to-ear.
“JANE! O-oh my god, I’m so so sorry, I ne--”
“Morty, I thought you were dead! I watched you jump in that acid!” After a brief pause, she added, “Oh, and I’m sorry I pepper sprayed you,” as something of an afterthought.
He swore under his breath. “I-I didn’t actually!”
“...no, you definitely got pepper sprayed by me,” she replied.
“Oh,” Morty said, “well, uh, yeah. That too. But that’s not what I meant.”
“It looked like it hurt!” Jane exclaimed.
“It did! It hurt like a son of a bitch, but I was referring to-to-to the acid! It was...ugh, it’s confusing, but it was something my grandpa wanted me to do?”
“W-wait, what? What do you mean? Also, Morty, why were all those people in your front yard?” Jane asked.
He paused. He...didn’t even think of how she might react to everything he’d done. She pressed on, her questions piling up and rendering Morty increasingly unable to answer all of them. “What did you do to piss off a judge? Why did your grandpa want you to jump in acid? How did you survive? And what’s the ACLU?”
“I understand h-how you’re confused, don’t worry, there’s an explanation for all of this,” Morty assured her. “It just won’t make any logical sense.”
“Um...okay?”
Morty looked at the clock. “H-hey, actually, can you meet me somewhere? Are you just at your house?” Morty could still remember her house perfectly; all those nights they spent playing games and studying together, eating dinner with her parents.
“Uh, no, I was there. I was at your house,” Jane explained. Morty nearly fell over.
“W-wait, what?” he practically shouted.
“I’m in my car, over at a nearby field. I can come to you,” she explained.
Morty considered saying yes, but thought of Rick. He slowly stepped down the stairs, and found Rick passed out at the kitchen table, snoring quietly, drooling on the wood. He was surrounded by empty glasses and liquor, the keys to the spaceship next to him. Quite frankly, Rick had made his life pretty miserable, out of pure spite because he couldn’t handle criticism. Morty thought it best to return the favor.
“No, it’s okay, I-I-I can go to you,” Morty replied.
_______
Jane’s parents had been calling her all night, frantic and worried sick for their daughter. She sent them a brief text, explaining that the boy on the news was a classmate of hers that she was worried about. Her mother said that he looked familiar, and asked if he ever came over or had dinner with them; it seemed she was beginning to remember, too.
They were still worried sick, and still begged her to come home, but Jane couldn’t. She wasn’t a heartless girl, and she knew they were looking out for her; she felt horrible for causing this heartache, but she wanted answers about her relationship, about those missing months.
At the moment, Jane was waiting outside, leaning against her car, having just barely gotten off the phone with Morty. She was on a nearby hill, in the forests outside of Seattle. This was one of her favorite spots to think, and she brought Morty here more times than they could count.
She felt her phone buzz slightly, and looked down to see a message from Morty: “I’m here.”
Jane raised an eyebrow in confusion, and heard a small, electronic hum. She looked up to find a massive spacecraft, descending from the night sky. Her eyes went wide as dinner plates.
The ship reached the ground with a slight thud. The door opened, and a vast amount of beer bottles and gadgets fell out, followed by Morty.
Jane didn’t hesitate. She ran to her boyfriend, pulling him into a tight hug. Once he sunk into her arms, she knew she made the right choice; she wasn’t hallucinating, or going crazy. This was real, and she was grateful.
Jane pulled away from the hug, looking down slightly at Morty. She hesitated for a moment, before putting her hand behind his head and pulling him in for a deep, longing kiss, her other hand going to his shoulder for balance.
When he finally broke the kiss, she had a wide smile on her face.
“W-w-wow, we haven’t done that in a while,” he muttered. “Technically, we haven’t ever done that, period.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Morty, I think now’s about the time you tell me what the hell is going on.”
_______
Sitting down on the grass, overlooking Seattle, Morty told her everything: the reset button, all of the alternate timelines, all of his mistakes, and, of course, the vat of acid.
By the time Morty was done explaining everything, Jane was speechless. On the other hand, this idea that someone as ordinary as him had a dimension-hopping, time-traveling, reality-warping mad scientist of a grandfather was almost unbelievable, but then again, he did arrive in a spaceship he claims to have stolen from said grandfather.
He took a deep breath, looking out at the night sky and all the stars scattered throughout them.
“Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“How much do you remember? A-about us, I mean?”
The more Morty was talking about them, the more those gaps and inconsistencies in Jane’s memory filled. It was still strange to remember them meeting in two completely different, mutually exclusive ways, but with the explanation of timelines resetting and converging, at least now she knew why.
“Everything,” she answered simply.
He couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Do...do you hate me?”
Jane looked at him, shock written on her face. “Hate you? How could I possibly? After everything you did for me?”
“But I-I-I was a shitty boyfriend!” he exclaimed, frustrated at himself for his own incompetence, his mistakes. With how the timeline reset that night, he’d lived months worth of memories and mistakes in merely a few days. “I ignored you! I played games all the time! W-when I got you those tickets, we ended up crash landing! You nearly died!”
Morty’s voice was growing louder, more agitated, and closer to breaking; his eyes became misty, tears clouding his sight of her.
“A-a-and then I told you about all of my mistakes! The people I offended, those I hurt!”
Wordlessly, Jane reached over, pulling him into a hug. “Morty, you told me you brought the reset button on our vacation, right?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” he told her, wrapping his arms tighter around her.
“Why didn’t you use it when you found it?”
Morty had thought long and hard about that day; unambiguously the worst day of his life, and he was including all of his adventures with Rick. “I mean, you said you found it with your phone at the crash site,” she continued, “so why would you call for help instead, not knowing if it would actually arrive?”
As she asked, she remembered the feeling of the cold, all-encompassing, ever-consuming; the icy wind bit at her skin, eating away at her nerves, until she never had any feeling left, anywhere. The doctors said that by the time they found her, she was minutes from death, and that she might never truly recover the feeling in her hands. Whatever Morty endured to get them help must have been dozens of times worse; as he hiked through the Arctic Circle, he had no shelter, no food or water, nothing. How could she have forgotten all of that? How could all of those weeks and months just been erased, like they never even happened?
“I...I didn’t want our relationship to end,” Morty mumbled as he buried himself in the embrace, a blush consuming his face. “If I reset it, we wouldn’t have ever met. Even if I died before help arrived...I guess I thought that’d be better than never having been with you at all.”
Jane felt a smile creep up on her face. She wanted to make up for lost time; or, rather, time that never was, but could be again.
“See? You did do something for me. You saved me,” she gently replied. “You saved my life.”
Morty’s gentle cries grew louder, and he struggled to form a coherent sentence. “I-I’m just so glad you’re okay,” he told her between sobs, “and I’m so sorry. I don’t want to lose you.”
“It’s okay. You made mistakes, but we all have; you thought you could rewrite them, so no one could get hurt. I don’t want you to think about the past. Just be with me, in the now.”
Jane thought of the crazy roller coaster that was her boyfriend’s life. She hadn’t been a part of it for long, but she was glad she found someone like him.