Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The water was really, really far down.  It churned and swirled around the stout metal legs of the bridge, frothy as a cappuccino.

Thinking about beverages made him realize he was thirsty.  His throat burned.  It seemed stupid to do this while he was distracted by how thirsty he was, but then, in another minute or so, that wouldn’t matter.

He’d spent most of the day driving through endless deserts and desolate countryside until he found the bridge.  He didn’t even know what river this was—he was drunk, he’d lost track of his location, and his cell phone was dead, so he couldn’t use the GPS.  But the bridge was high enough to do the job and isolated enough that no one would stop him, and that was all that mattered.  Scrub-studded desert sprawled around him.  Stars winked overhead, far more than were visible in the city.  On the horizon he could see the lower, redder stars of cell phone towers.

Pretty.

During the day the river’s water was probably a cheerful blue, but now—at night—it was an all-swallowing black.  BoJack started to get dizzy and closed his eyes.  His back was pressed up against metal, his chest heaving.  His car was parked on the bridge itself.

He peeked down at the water through half-closed eyes, then quickly shut them again.

Very far down.

But that was the point, wasn’t it?

It was a clichéd way to go, but if it was good enough for Secretariat it was good enough for him, and he didn’t trust himself not to wuss out when it came to pills.  He’d end up calling 911 before he blacked out, or jamming his fingers down his throat.  A jump was final.  Once your feet left the ledge there was no taking it back.

Sarah Lynn, are you out there?  I’m joining you.

Who am I kidding?  You aren’t anywhere.  And if you were, you wouldn't want to see me.

If all he did was hurt people, if his existence was a net negative, then this was the most moral course of action.  Right?  His life had been a series of mistakes, but he could at least go out with a noble gesture.

Of course, it was also entirely possible that that was a rationalization and that he was just being a pussy, unable to face the consequences of his actions.  But it didn’t really matter.  As Diane had once said, there was no deep down.  There was only what you did.  So if he’d decided to do this, his reasons (whether selfish or altruistic) were irrelevant.  There was only the naked brute fact of the action itself.

He lurched forward a little, then jerked back, hyperventilating.  Shit.

Come on.  Just do it.

A bit of debris—a beer can?—appeared briefly above the surface, glinting, then the water sucked it under again.

Would it hurt?  Would he feel anything at all?  He seemed to remember hearing once that when people jumped from a great height they usually passed out on the way down.  But how could anyone know that?  How many people actually survived falling from a great height?

Don’t think.  You’ll talk yourself out of it.

Shouldn’t he at least leave a note in the car or something?  Explain to his friends that it wasn’t their fault, that this was just his own shit reaching its natural conclusion?  No.  A note wouldn’t make anything better.  He was looking for excuses to delay this.  Because he was scared.

Do it, you fucking pussy.  Do it.  Do it.  Do it.  DO IT.

He leapt.

Shit!  NO! 

Bad idea!  BAD FUCKING IDEA.

The water raced toward him.  He opened his mouth to scream but the air ripped the sound from his throat.

His fall seemed to slow.  The world rippled strangely around him.  An odd, shimmering light rimmed his vision like a halo.

He’d heard about this happening.  Time distorting and stretching out in the brief seconds before death.  He seemed to be floating down like a petal.  It was almost…peaceful. 

This was it.  Another moment of consciousness and then—

What?  Heaven, hell?  Nothing?  Probably nothing.  No more bourbon, no more parties, no more hugs, no more sun and clouds, no more dreams or nightmares.  Not even peace.  Just an end.  Like a bug smashing itself into a windshield.  SPLAT and then swept away by the wipers.  That was what he’d wanted.  Wasn’t it?

No, no.  He did not want this.  He did not fucking want it.

Closer now.  He could see the individual waves cresting and lapping.  They looked hungry.  Even if he survived hitting the water, it was cold enough that hypothermia would probably set in pretty quickly.  There was no way to climb out of the river.  The banks were sheer stone.

He wondered who would find his body.  He wondered how long it would take.

He flailed, striking out at the air.  No, please, let me take it back—God, I—I know you don’t exist, but if you do, just this one time—

BoJack froze.  “What the fuck?” he said aloud, the words perfectly clear and audible, because there was no rush of wind.

It wasn’t an illusion, after all.  His fall had been slowing down ever since his feet left the bridge, and now—impossibly—he’d stopped.  He hung in midair just above the river’s surface, close enough that he could’ve reached down and grazed the water with his fingertips.  He looked at his own hand.  His entire body was enveloped in a faint, wavering light.

“Hey, uh,” a hoarse voice above him said.  “Can I get a selfie?”

Dazed, he looked up to see a silver aircraft—almost like a spaceship, but it had a cobbled-together, homemade feel—hovering overhead.  An old human was leaning out the window, his wild white hair catching the moonlight, slobber glistening on his chin.

BoJack flailed helplessly in midair.  He gulped.  “Wh—what?” he bleated.

“My grandkids like your—the show.  Your stupid fucking TV show.”

“What’s happening?”  His voice came out small and childlike.  “Why am I floating?”

“Because I stopped your fall.  Obviously.  H-hang on.”  He pointed what looked like a gun at BoJack and pulled the trigger.

BoJack tensed and opened his mouth to scream.  The gun shot out a beam of light.  “Oof!”  He felt himself propelled upward, back toward the bridge.  Up and up.  His stomach dropped.  His feet touched solid ground, and he stumbled.

Solid metal.  Thank God.  Except…

He was dreaming.  He had to be.  Or tripping, maybe.  He’d gotten a bad batch of acid.  The technology that man had just used did not exist.  Not outside of the movies.

The spaceship levitated straight upward and landed on the bridge next to BoJack’s car.  A man got out—tall, skinny, wearing a white lab coat.  He approached BoJack and pulled a cell phone from his pocket.  “This’ll just take a second,” he said.  He stood beside BoJack, slung an arm around his shoulders, held the phone out, and snapped a picture.  “There.”  He showed BoJack the results—the man grinning crookedly at the camera and giving a peace-sign, green-tinged drool dribbling down his chin, and BoJack staring straight ahead with a bleak, shell-shocked expression.  “Okay, thanks.”  He pocketed the phone.  “I’ll l-let you get back to it.  Sorry to interrupt.”  He started to walk toward his spaceship, then stopped.  “Oh, uh…where can I get a drink around here?”  And then, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “You—you-you wanna get a drink with me?”

“What?”

“I said do you w—”

“Who are you?”  BoJack spread his arms in helpless bewilderment.  “What is that thing?”  He pointed at the ship.  “Who just…shows up and prevents someone’s suicide with secret government technology, then takes a selfie with them, and then acts like they’re just going to walk away, then asks them if they want to go get a drink as though nothing just happened?”

The man faced him and wiped his mouth with one sleeve.  “I’m Rick Sanchez,” he said.  “And this isn’t ‘secret government technology.’  The government wishes it could do this.  That is my spaceship and this is my anti-gravity gun which I made myself with no help from anyone because I am the smartest being that ever was or ever will be.”

“And you expect me to believe that.”

“Dude, I just made you float.  So you want that drink or what?  You’re buying though.  Th-they won’t take my money here.  The currency all has f-fuh-f-fucking furries on it.”

“What is a ‘furry’?”

“You.  You’re a furry.”

A sense of unreality had slipped over him.  This was absurd.  All of it.  And yet he’d never had a dream this lucid.  His body was still flooded with adrenaline from the jump and the brush with death.  He felt—altered.  Shaky and detached.  He glanced at his car, then at the spaceship, then at the man.  “Look, I don’t—” he stopped.  Took a breath.  His mind latched onto something the man had said earlier:  something specific, something comprehensible.  “Your grandkids watch Horsin' Around?"

“Oh it’s not just Morty and Summer.  I wish.  My whole family e-e-e-eats that shit up like ice cream.  Jerry cries like a little bitch at every sappy, mass-produced, Hallmark card family moment.  Summer keeps talking about how hot you are.  I mean the younger ‘you’ on TV.  And I told her ‘that’s fuckin’ gross, he’s a horse,’ and you-you-you know what she said to me?  She said, ‘you sexist hypocrite, you fuck entire planets.  You fuck hiveminds.  You fuck aliens with three vaginas and penises for eyes.  I’ll thirst after a horse on TV if I want to.’  Smartass little bitch.  You-you-you’re not getting anywhere near her, by the way.”

“I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

“Oh, and Beth?  My daughter?  She-she-she-she keeps insisting she’s watching the show ironically and that she’s laughing at how stupid it is but you can tell even she’s really into it.  And Morty’s just…they’ve seduced him.  He’s part of their little horse-fucker fan club now, and you know what?  It pisses me off.  We have literally billions of channels at home—th-there’s a channel in this reality where the dominant species on Earth is gummy bears, like the candy, except they have nervous systems, and there’s this fucked up game show where they have to eat each other—and yet they keep going back to the sitcom where the gimmick is a horse raising human children?  How much mileage can you get out of horse-related puns?  Apparently eight hundred seasons’ worth.  It just goes on and on.  And on.  Like I’m staring into the mouth of hell.  But whatever.  M-my daughter is pissed off at me because she found out about the Mind Blower room.   A selfie of me and BoJack Horseman is just the distraction I need.”

BoJack was still trying to process the details about cannibalistic gummy bears.  “Okay, well.  You got your selfie.  Congrats.  I’m going to get in my car, drive to the nearest hotel, and get some sleep.  And tomorrow morning I am calling my doctor and scheduling a CAT scan.”

“Oh, s-s-s-so you’re not killing yourself?”

“Not tonight.  Probably.”

“Then check this shit out.”  Rick withdrew a small bag from his pocket and opened it up to show a sparkly pink powder.  “Kalaxian crystals.  You never had anything like this.  Wanna try it?”

BoJack eyed it suspiciously.

He should turn and walk to his car.  The keys were still in the ignition.

“What does it do?” he asked.

Rick smirked.  “You know that dark, aching void in the center of your being?  The one that never gets filled no matter how much attention or praise or material success you accumulate and that eats at you until you find yourself with your back against a wall, staring down over a ledge into the abyss of your own soul?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This makes that go away.  For a minute, at least.”

“So.  Future cocaine.”

“What’s this ‘future’ bullshit?  I’m not from the future.  I don’t do time-travel.  I’m not a hack.”

“Alien cocaine then.”

“It’s a full-body orgasm.  It’s a pair of rocket-boots for your soul.”

Everything about this screamed bad idea.  Whatever he had there might just as easily kill BoJack as get him high, and he shouldn’t want to be high anyway.  Not now.  He should go home.

Home to his guilt, his loneliness, his bad habits, his depression, his mistakes, the memories of the people he'd hurt…

Fuck it.  A few minutes ago he’d been ready to jump off this bridge and now he was being careful?  He was long past careful.  Nothing mattered.

“Okay.  Give me some.”  He held a hand out.  Rick sprinkled some of the powder in his palm.  “So then—I just—”

“R-right up the nose.”

He snorted the powder straight out of his hand.  It burned his nostrils, and he felt something right away.  A rusty scratch inside his head, a kick, a dry, crackling energy.  Pastel colors washed over the world.  A buoyant, clarifying energy filled his chest—like a grand symphony swelling in his soul, a doorway into a greater reality opening and sunlight flooding in.  “Whoa.  Okay.  Whoa.  That’s—yeah.  That’s better than cocaine.”

“What did I tell you, man?”  Rick grinned.

The world glimmered.  Every object thrummed with life and possibility.  The desert sang.  The deranged, drooling, babbling old man in front of him transformed into a magical, whimsical creature, a benignly eccentric spirit-guide, like the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life.

BoJack had sent up a prayer and it had been answered.  He'd been rescued from his own folly, found worthy and given another chance.  Now he was on a journey.  He would learn the true meaning of life, and nothing would ever be the same.

"Thank you," he said, tears in his eyes.  He gripped Rick's shoulders.  "Thank you."

"N-n-no problem."  Rick snorted some of the powder.  A blue tinge spread over the whites of his eyes.  His grin widened.  “Oh yeah.  Motherfucker.”  He climbed into the spaceship and gestured for BoJack to follow.  “C’mon.”

BoJack got in.  “Where are we going?” he asked, but he didn’t really care.  He’d go anywhere this man wanted, as long as he gave him more of that marvelous powder.

“Karaoke,” Rick said.  “W-w-we’re gonna find a karaoke bar.  Can you sing?”

“Uh—”

“Sure you can.  E-eh-everyone’s a musician.”  He cranked on the radio and flipped through the stations until he found something with a driving techno beat.  “Yeah!”  The spaceship rose into the air.  He yanked on the wheel, veering to the left and knocking over a telephone pole.  It crashed into the crowd, wires frayed and sparking.

“Whoa!”  BoJack flattened his back against the seat.  A razor of anxiety cut through the candy-colored haze of euphoria.  “Is—is that okay?”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”  The ship shot forward with enough force to make the skin on his face ripple.  “Yeehaw!  Give-give-give a yeehaw, BoJack!”

“Yeehaw!”

“Yeehaw!”  The ship veered to the right, then the left again, Rick laughing wildly as they careened through the sky.  “Hey where’s—which way is San Francisco?”

“Uh.  South?  I think?”

BoJack’s fingers dug into the upholstery.  The high was already starting to fade a little, the sharp edges of reality poking through.  Only then did it occur to him that he’d left his car behind on the bridge and gotten into an aircraft with a complete stranger, one who was currently tripping off his ass.

“We’re gonna—I want some fuckin’ waffles.  Are there Waffle Houses here?”  Rick snorted more pink powder out of his palm, then wiped it on his lab coat, sniffling.  “Are there porpoises?  Like hu-human-humanoided—sea mammals with legs?"

"Sure."

"I wanna, I w-wuh-w-wanna fuck a porpoise.”

“Why?”

“You mean—for what porpoise?”  He tilted back his head and laughed.

I’ve allowed myself to be kidnapped by a maniac, BoJack thought.  I am going to die.

And then he started to laugh too.  The sound echoed through the interior of the spacecraft as they blasted through the sky.

Chapter Text

“It’s the circle of liiiiiife

It moves us aaaa-UuuuUUurp-haaaaall

Through despair and hoo-oooope

Through faith and loooo-UuuRP-ooooove”

BoJack had never noticed how profound the lyrics of that song were—how all-encompassing.  Maybe a song from a children’s movie about monarchist lions was an odd choice for two drunken men to be belting out in a karaoke bar, to an audience of a few bored-looking people in a shabby lounge with stains on the carpet, but he didn’t care.  He wanted to stay suspended in this moment, this perfect, fragile soap bubble of time.

He was dimly aware that he and Rick had both belched thunderously several times throughout the performance, but that didn’t feel relevant.

“In the circle

The circle—of—liiiii-UUUUUURP-iiiiiiiife”

The music ended.  Panting, they faced the audience, who stared back blankly.  The world still sparkled in ethereal pastel colors.

“Thank you,” BoJack said to the silence, swaying a little on his feet.  “I just want to say—” a lump swelled in his throat, and he had to pause to collect himself.  “I know that we’re all strangers to each other.  All of us here.  And I feel kind of awkward getting real with you because we’re all so used to just…going through our lives passing each other on the streets and never stopping to see each other.  But I hope you all know what I mean when I say that…I love you.”

“He’s right, you know,” Rick said.  “We—urrrp-eeee-e’re all made of the same stardust—”

“Faaaaags,” a macaw in the audience droned.  A few snickers greeted this.

Rick stepped forward, dropping the microphone.  “Oh, you—you wish, buddy.  You want a piece of this c-cracker, Polly?”  He grabbed his crotch, sneering.  “You—you wanna come up here and—I’ll take your ass and shove it up your ass.  I’ll re-rearrange your atoms.  I’ll c-crush your pussy electrons together until you’re the size of an aphid.”

“He doesn’t mean that,” BoJack says.

“Oh I mean it.  He’s killing my vibe.  And the p-p-pen-penalty of vibe-killing is ass-kicking.”

“It’s okay.  It’s okay, buddy.”

“I’ll vaporize you all!”

BoJack patted Rick on the back, gripped his arm and awkwardly steered him off the stage to a scattering of boos and laughs.  They walked across the lounge and out into the cool, dry night.  Through the psychedelic haze the stars had a vivid Van Gogh quality, oversized and ringed in fairy-light.

“That parrot was a piece of shit,” Rick said.

“Eh.  I’ve been that guy.”  BoJack lit a cigarette.  His hands were a little shaky.  He exhaled a cloud of smoke as they walked down the street toward the meter where the ship was parked.  The sparkle was fading.  The stars were just stars—small, hard points of light.  Cold and far away.  “Did we humiliate ourselves up there?”

“I-i-in order to experience humiliation you have to give a shit what other people think.”  He wobbled down the sidewalk, bumping into BoJack.  “You sounded good to me.  You—you can really sing.  Like a professional.”

BoJack smiled, almost in spite of himself.  “Oh man you were—you hit those high notes so hard.  I couldn’t believe it.”

“That song is right in my range.  It’s like it was written for me.  Oh.  Oh.  Oh.  You know what we need?”  Rick poked a finger at BoJack’s chest and leaned in, puffing vodka-scented breath in his face.  “We need to—we’re gonna fuckin’—I gotta take you to Boob World.”

“Wait, what—what’s—”

“It’s all boobs.  The ground, the trees, the bushes.  Even the animals.  It’s nothing but boobs.  You can lay down in a field of boobs.  The sun is a boob.”

“That sounds…I don’t know.”  He blinked a few times, trying to orient himself.  The streetlights seemed too bright.  “I mean boobs are amazing but I prefer them on people’s bodies.  I don’t even know what it would mean for the sun to be a boob.  I don’t think I’m mentally prepared for that.”

“Okay.  N-no, it’s cool.  I get it.  Baby steps.  Let’s just cruise for a while.”

“In the ship?”

“Yeah.  Just—steady.  We can level out.  We hit—we hit the pink stuff pretty hard.  You gotta manage the come-downs.”

“Shit.  Am I gonna get depressed once it wears off?  Give me some more.”

“We’re out.”

Out?  No.  They couldn’t be out.

He felt panic closing in around him.  “Rick.”  He scratched his neck, his cheek.  “I don’t want to crash.  Not now.  I need something.”

“Take it easy.  If—if you crash really hard I’ve got some glorzons to take the edge off, but mixing that with K-lax is always kind of a dicey game.  Let’s just take it one minute at a time.”

“Sure.  Okay.  Yeah.”

“Don’t freak out.  If you f-f-f-freak out it’s gonna make it worse.”

“I’m not freaking out.  Shit.”  His chest felt weird.  He ran a hand over his face.  His nose felt weird, too.  “What’s glor—that thing you mentioned?”

“It’s a kind of nubby egg.  You put it up your ass and it hatches inside you and dissolves in your colon.  For the first twenty seconds it’s awful and then it’s amazing.  It-it-it calms you down.”

That didn’t sound calming.  “Let’s just…go somewhere.”

They got back in the spaceship, and it rose into the sky slowly.  They sailed over the city, over the desert.  The highway sprawled beneath them like a black ribbon.  BoJack could see the shadow of the ship gliding over the sand, and then they rose higher, into the clouds, and the world got smaller and smaller.  Tiny cars, tiny buildings.  The people weren’t even visible anymore.

He exhaled a slow breath.  He was coming down harder now, settling back into himself.  This is okay.  You’re okay.

“I’m okay,” he said aloud, trying to convince himself.  He scratched at his arms and neck.  “Actually, I don’t know if I am.”

“Sometimes you gotta just ride it out.”  Rick leaned back, one hand on the wheel.  “The brain, it’s a wild monkey.  Drugs or no drugs.  You gotta—you gotta know when to wrangle it and know when to let go of the reins.”

“Reins?”

“Sorry, is that—is that racist, in this world?  Talking about reins to a horse?  Whatever.  You get what I’m saying.”  He took a swig from his flask.  The ship drifted slowly through the sky.  “When I was a kid, I could never sleep.  I’d just—I’d lay there for hours, wide awake, bugs crawling under my skin and in my skull.  You know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And trying to fight it, to lock myself down, just made it worse.”  His fingers flexed on the wheel.  “Sometimes you have to let your brain have its way with you.  To let it sting you, jerk you around like a puppet on strings, until you can find that opening, go straight through the eye of the hurricane and ride it to the top, and then—in that moment, you’re god.  Know what I’m saying?”

BoJack had no idea what he was talking about.  And in another sense he knew exactly what he was talking about.  This man was nothing at all like him, yet BoJack couldn’t shake the sense that they were essentially the same person.

The night had gone by in a misty, sparkly blur as they hopped from bar to bar, doing shots.  He vaguely recalled stopping at a restaurant and Rick ordering two pancake meals and putting away more food than it seemed possible for one scrawny human to consume in a sitting.  If Rick ate like that all the time, he must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.

As long as they were still moving, he’d been okay.  Now he was still, and the dark fog was closing in on him.

“You never asked me why I tried to kill myself,” BoJack remarked.

“D-didn’t strike me as something that required an explanation.”  Rick tilted his head, looking up at the moon.  “Have they gone there yet?  In this reality, I mean.”

“The moon?  Yeah.”

“Who got there first, us or the Russians?”

“Russians.”

“C-c-clever commie bastards.”

He stared at the sky, chest rising and falling.  Looking at the stars like this, sitting next to another person, it reminded him too much of what had happened with Sarah Lynn.  The sinking ice in his stomach when she didn’t reply.  The haze of static that crept over his brain.

He sucked on the end of his cigarette.  His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.  “Can I ask you a personal question, Rick?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to another person?”

“Uhh…single act, to a single person?  Huh.  That’s hard to quantify.”  His face had gone blank.  “Abandoning my daughter, I guess.  I didn’t see her at all for almost twenty years.”  He took another swig from the flask.  “Actually that’s p—probably not the worst.  But it’s the one I think about the most.”

BoJack stared down at the desert.  He’d talked about this with Diane, sort of, but she didn’t know the full story.  He opened his mouth to start explaining about Sarah Lynn—about her role on Horsin’ Around, about how she saw him as a father figure, the terrible advice he’d given her, how he helped mold her into the lost, broken person she became, how she got clean and then started using again because of him, and everything, and everything…

“You?” Rick asked.

He could explain and explain how it got to that point but none of the explanations really seemed to matter.  It all came down to the same thing.

“There was…someone I cared about,” he said.  “Someone important.  She trusted me.  And I killed her.”

They drifted, silent.

“She overdosed,” BoJack said.  “I was with her.  And…”

Rick waited, silent.

Fuck.

“And I…”  He felt like he was starting to choke.  “I waited almost twenty minutes to call the ambulance.  Even after I realized I couldn’t wake her up.  My mind just…went blank.  I mean, I was high and drunk, but not so far gone that I couldn’t understand what was happening.  Maybe I was hoping that the problem would fix itself so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.  Wouldn’t have to face the consequences.  I don’t know if calling right away would’ve made a difference.  Maybe not.  Either way, it’s my fault.”

Still, Rick’s face betrayed no emotion.

“And even now,” BoJack said, “all I can do is sit here feeling sorry for myself.  Trying to stop feeling.  I’m in a spaceship.  Everything I thought I knew about reality is crashing down around me.  And yet I keep going back over everything leading up to that moment.  Wishing I could do it over.  But even if I could…would things be any different?  Or would I just make the same mistakes?”

Rick stared at the flask in his hand.

“She never had a chance at a normal life.  Not that a normal life is all that great either, but…fame…it was forced on her.  At least I had a choice.  She was always—”

“I wanna show you something,” Rick said.  He removed a gun—or something resembling a gun—from his lab coat, leaned out the window and zapped a glowing green hole into the air.  It rippled and shimmered strangely, expanding, circling.  A whirlpool.

BoJack stared.  “What is that?”

“A portal.”

Rick steered the ship into the hole, and suddenly they were in another place.  Still the desert.  Still nighttime.  But a strange, low warble filled the air, like countless overlapping voices speaking in some incomprehensible language.  Darkness pressed in around them.  In the distance, where the lights of the city should have been visible, was just more darkness.  There were only the stars.

Rick flew lower.  His ship’s headlights swept over the desert.

The ground was covered with creeping, groaning monstrosities.  Things with tentacles, things with too many eyes and too many mouths, things resembling huge, bloated insects.  Melting things.  Green and black and pink and orange things.  Things with vertical tooth-filled mouths like zippers.

BoJack gasped, recoiling.  “Jesus!”

Countless mutated appendages reached for the ship, straining upward as the headlights briefly illuminated them, and then the darkness swallowed them again as the ship floated upward.

BoJack’s heart thundered in his chest.  His brain couldn’t make sense of what he’d just seen.  “What…were those?”

“They’re people,” Rick said.  “Or they used to be.”

BoJack pressed a hand to his stomach, which suddenly hurt.  He could still hear that growling, undulating warble below.  The chorus of the damned.  “What happened to them?”

“I did.”  Rick took another swig from his flask.  “This entire planet—everyone, billions of human beings—I changed them all into those monsters.”

Billions.  BoJack’s brain got stuck on that word.  It was such a funny little word, billions.  Like bullion.  Bullion cubes.  Soup…

“It was an accident.  I, uh.  What I was actually trying to do was make a love potion for my grandson, because there was this girl he liked, but she happened to have the flu, and—doesn’t matter now.  Things got out of control.  We abandoned ship—Morty and me.  Left this reality behind and started over.”

“This…was your home?”

“Yup.  We switched to another, virtually identical reality where our alternate selves had just died, and we slipped in and took their place.  So I guess…I mean if you’re asking about the worst thing I did to an individual, it’s the daughter abandonment thing, but if you’re asking about the single worst act I ever committed…th-this is probably in the top five, at least.”

BoJack felt himself shutting down.  Going numb.  Retreating into himself.  He gripped his knees.  This wasn’t a dream, but if he kept telling himself it was a dream maybe he would eventually wake up in his own bed.

“You and I,” Rick said, “we’re on different scales.  You—you gotta keep some sense of perspective.  You know?  I realize that in the context of your own reality, you’re powerful.  You’ve got money, fame.  All the things that people think matter.  But you’re still limited.  You’re talking about being in-innn—indirectly responsible for the death of a single person as though it’s this—this irredeemable thing.  For me, that’s a good day.”

His fingers dug into the upholstery on the seat.  “I think I want to go home now.”

Rick contemplated him in silence for a moment, then zapped another hole in the air and flew through it, and they were above the empty desert again, city lights glowing on the horizon.  Rick flew back in the direction of Los Angeles.

The last of the high had faded.  BoJack stared out the window, heart still pounding.

“You’re afraid of me,” Rick said.  He took a swig out of his flask.  “N-not sure what outcome I expected.”

BoJack clutched his arm.

He could kill me.  Easily.  But of course, anyone could kill you.  Anytime you got into a car with someone, you were trusting them not to kill you.  It went beyond that.  Rick could do things to him that he couldn’t even comprehend.  It was just starting to sink in.  He had brushed the edge of the unknown.  The universe was vaster and stranger and more terrible than he had ever imagined.  He felt like a small child in a fairytale, a child who suddenly found himself in a forest filled with witches and murderous wolves and dragons.

“I p…probably shouldn’t have showed you that,” Rick said.

Moving on autopilot, BoJack lit another cigarette.  “Those things,” he said.  “Can they still think?”

“I mean yeah, probably.  They have sitcoms in their world.  I’ve seen them.  Th-though I guess that doesn’t take a whole lot of intelligence.”

BoJack couldn’t tell if he was joking.  He didn’t ask.  Less talking seemed safer.

Rick watched him from the corner of his eye.  “Your friend.  The one you killed.  What was her name?”

He swallowed, throat dry.  “Sarah Lynn,” he whispered.  “Her name was Sarah Lynn.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“She was on the show.  With me.”

“Oh yeah.  The kid.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Another pause.  Then—in a flat, unreadable tone—“Would you like to see her again?”

He tensed, drawing the breath in through his teeth.  He felt a small, poisonous, treacherous seed of hope take root somewhere in his chest.  “That’s impossible.”

“Yes and no.  I mean…the version of her in this reality is dead.  That, I can’t undo.  I could clone her, but the clone wouldn’t have her memories.  What I can do is take you to an alternate reality where everything else is the same, but she’s still alive.”

BoJack stared.  He’d barely had time to absorb the whole “alternate Earth populated by tentacle monsters” thing, and now…

“That exists?” he whispered.  “You’ve been there?”

“No.  But I can promise you it exists, because every conceivable reality exists.  There are infinite Sarah Lynns.  Infinite BoJacks.  Infinite…whatever that, that fuckin’ dog, his name is.  Mr. Nut-Nutella—nutbutter.  There’s a reality where Mr. Nutterbutter is a depressed alcoholic sad sack and you’re the obnoxiously cheerful empty-headed one.  There’s a reality where you and Mr. Nutterbutter are married with hybrid abomination dog-horse babies or however it works here.  There’s a reality where you become someone else because your show never happened, a reality where Sarah Lynn is a high-ranking official in a fascist dystopia and she’s vowed to hunt you down because you’re a member of the rebel faction, etc. etc.  Because every fucking thing exists.  It won’t be the same ‘her.’  But there are thousands of her that are similar enough that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.  You want me to show you?”

This was too much.  All of it. 

He should go home.  Try to forget he’d ever met Rick Sanchez.  This man had destroyed an entire planet and didn’t even seem to feel that bad about it.  He was quite literally and objectively the worst person that BoJack had ever met.  He was terrifying.  And the fact that BoJack still sort of liked him in spite of all that was something he didn’t care to think about too deeply.

“Show me,” he said.

Rick plugged his portal gun into the ship and scrolled through some coordinates on a screen, then nodded and said, “This one.”

He landed the ship in the desert and got out.  He opened another portal.  And they went through.

Chapter Text

They emerged into BoJack’s house, his living room.  He looked around, dazed.  The TV was on, but there was no one around.

Then he glanced down and saw his own dead body near his feet, eyes half-closed and dull, tongue hanging out.  He stared blankly.  “That’s…me.”

“Yup.”  Rick lay a hand on his shoulder and said, “I r-r-ran a scan on the specs of this reality.  Pretty much identical to your existing one, except—here, you don’t wait twenty minutes after Sarah Lynn loses consciousness.  You call an ambulance right away.  She survives.”

BoJack just kept staring at his own body.  The solid piece of meat which had once housed his thoughts, his memories.

“It’s a rough wakeup call for both of you,” Rick continued.  “You make a promise to each other never to touch hard drugs again.  You call up a therapist and make your first appointment.  And then a few days later you die of a brain aneurysm.  Which, of course, is fantastic timing for you.  I mean, you-you.  I can dispose of the corpse.  And you can take his place.  Slip right into his life.”

BoJack lifted his gaze to Rick.  Then looked down at his own body again.  There was a glass of spilled drink—whiskey, judging from the smell—close to dead BoJack’s hand, a stain on the carpet.

BoJack went into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey.  He drank it quickly, hands shaking, then poured himself another.  And then he got out his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts, and dialed Sarah Lynn’s number, which he hadn’t deleted yet.

It rang twice.  Then someone picked up and her voice said, “Hey BoJack.”  She sounded a little subdued and rundown, a little hoarse.  But it was unmistakably her.  “What’s up?”

Sarah Lynn.  Alive.

He’d seen her body in the casket.  He’d watched them lower her into the ground.  He’d wrestled with the reality that he was never going to hear her voice again, and it was his fault.  And now she was here.  Talking to him.

“I, uh.”  He cleared his throat.  “I just…wanted to check in.  See how you’re doing.”

“Oh.  Thanks.  I’m okay.  Just watching Game of Thrones.”

“It’s—” he stopped.  Breathed.  “It’s really good to hear your voice.”

“We just talked this morning, silly.”

“Yeah.  I know.”  He swallowed.  “I’m sorry.  For what happened.”

She sighed.  “You’ve already apologized a million times.  It’s fine.  We’re fine.  You didn’t force me to do anything.  I was just waiting for an excuse.  Anyway…I think a scare like this is what I needed.  What we both needed.  This was the only way we were gonna get serious, you know?  So maybe it’s for the best."  Her tone brightened.  "Hey, you wanna come over tomorrow?  We could have breakfast at that vegan place.  The one with the good smoothies.”

“I’d like that.”  He opened his mouth, closed it.  “When I said I was sorry, I…I don’t just mean for ruining your sobriety this last time.  I mean, I’m sorry for being a shitty friend to you all these years.  I’m sorry for not being there when—”

“Oh, stop.  Let’s just focus on getting better, okay?  Anyway, I wanna finish this episode.  Catch you later.”  She hung up.

He stared at the phone in his hand.  Slowly, he set the glass of whiskey down on the counter.

Behind him, Rick said, “So waddaya think?  This dead guy on the floor, he’s got your fingerprints, your social security number, whatever scars or birthmarks—all identical.  Ninety-nine-point-nine percent identical memories, right up until the moment he dialed 911 in the planetarium.  Hasn’t been that long.  No one’s gonna know the difference.”

BoJack stared at the dead version of himself on the floor.  Poured more whiskey.  “Rick…I…I don’t…”

“Ugh, let me guess.  ‘I don’t deserve another chance.  I’m not the one who chose to make that call.  I let her die so therefore I deserve to suffer the consequences.’  Bullshit.  He’s the same person you are.  Who knows why he dialed right away and you didn’t?  I can tell you this much:  it’s not because of some deep and essential difference in your souls.  It’s not because he was better or because he worked harder or cared more or anything like that.  It was a random electrical impulse in his brain, because that’s what choices are.  The idea that anything in this universe is a reward or a punishment for anything we do is just a convenient fiction n-n-necessary to prevent people from killing, raping and eating each other.”

“God, that’s bleak.”  He rubbed the back of his neck.  “I guess I’m usually the one saying this stuff to other people.”

“If you already know it’s true, then w-w-w-what’s the problem?”

It couldn't be this easy.  Could it?  “I just—what?  Abandon my own reality?  Abandon the consequences of my choices?  Abandon everyone?”

“You were about to.  When I found you.  This way, you get to kill yourself and still live to enjoy being dead.  Best of both worlds, right?  They’ll find your car on the bridge and draw their own conclusions.  Meanwhile, you get another shot in a fresh new world.  I mean, still mostly the same mistakes, but.  Your worst mistake never happened.”

BoJack paced, gripping handfuls of his mane.

“Look," Rick said, "I don’t give a shit what you choose, but—”

“Then why bring me here at all?  Why do any of this?”

Rick frowned.  “Do they have the phrase ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ in your world?  Seems appropriate here.  I’m telling you, if you reject this chance you’re going to spend the rest of your life regretting it.  The woman you love is alive.  And you’re going to run back to a reality where she’s dead?  Why?  B-buh-because you’re afraid of being happy?”

“It’s not even like that!”

“Like what?”

“I don’t love her.  I mean, I do, but not like that.  She’s—”

Who was Sarah Lynn to him?  Friend didn’t seem to cover it, but he couldn’t exactly say she was like a little sister or a daughter…or at least, he hoped to god that wasn’t the case, considering they’d had sex.  And yet he wasn’t in love with her.  They were just…part of each other.  They had been for so long.

“Look, it’s complicated and hard to categorize, but that’s not the point!  She’s getting her life on track now, and if I stay here in this world I’m going to fuck it up for her again.  I mean—yeah, she’ll be upset when they find me dead on the floor, but honestly, in the long run?  This is the best possible thing that could happen to her.  And to a lot of other people.  This guy just did everyone a huge favor, even if he didn’t mean to.  I can’t just barge in and undo it.”

“Shit,” Rick said.  “And I thought I was dark.”

“Besides, I’d be living a lie.  I’d know this wasn’t my world.  I would never be able to forget that.”

“I mean…I could edit your memories.  If that’s what you want.”

Jesus, he could do that too?  Was there anything this man couldn’t do?

So why the hell not?  Was Rick right?  Was he just afraid of happiness?

No—this couldn’t be the right choice.  Running away, abandoning everything and everyone to grieve—

But if he didn’t take his dead self’s place, the people of this world would lose him.  It was the same outcome, just in a different place.

God, this was confusing.

He paced.  “I need time.  To think this over."

“I mean…take a few minutes, I guess, but your corpse is g-g-gonna start stinking up the place pretty soon, and once the world finds out you’re dead, that chance is gone.  And I’m not going to spend all day shopping around for another reality where the timing works out.  I was lucky to find this one so fast.  W-we can’t just—”

At that moment, Todd walked into the room.  He looked down at the corpse version of BoJack, then at the living BoJack, then at Rick.  He opened his mouth, closed it, and pointed at the dead body.  “B…B-B-B-Bo—”

Rick reached into his lab coat, pulled out a gun-like thing, aimed it at Todd and pulled the trigger, and Todd froze in place, mouth open.

“You asshole!” Rick said, turning toward BoJack.  “W-why didn’t you tell me you had a roommate?!”

“You didn’t ask!”

“Whatever.  It's now or never.  Choose.”

BoJack looked down at his own body.  He’d never written a will.  What would happen to all his money?  What would happen to Todd?  This was his home, after all.  Would he be kicked out?  But if BoJack stayed here, what would happen to Todd in the other world?  Either way…

Too much.  Too much.  Too much.

Rick sighed.  “Y…you’re not gonna do it, are you?”

He hung his head.  “I can’t.  I’m sorry.  Take me home.  Please.”

Rick shrugged and said, “Whatever.”  He blasted a portal into the air.  “J-just let me erase his memory of seeing you.  I'll catch up in a second.”

* * *

The portal led BoJack back into the living room of his own house.  He sat on the couch.  The sight of his own corpse still hovered behind his eyes.  He thought about going to get another drink, but he didn’t even feel like doing that.

Rick emerged from the portal and closed it behind him.  “Okay.  Done.  Feel better?”

“I feel…”

Sarah Lynn was alive.  At least somewhere.  There were infinite versions of her going about their days, each one believing that she was unique, each one oblivious to the countless other permutations of her life.  Same for himself.  For everyone.  He wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or if it made everything worse or if it even mattered.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Outside the window, dawn painted soft peach and pink stripes across the sky.

“I wish there was a way I could keep talking to her,” BoJack said.  “Without leaving my whole reality behind.  Just—something.  But I guess it doesn’t work that way.  Does it?”

“I mean, that—that’d be complicated.  I'd have to upgrade your Wifi.  And introduce her to the idea of the multiverse and a reality where she was dead.  And you'd probably just end up obsessing over it in a way that made you feel worse.”

"Probably."

Rick sat down beside him on the couch.  “So, uh.  Wanna watch some TV?”

“I don’t think so.”

They sat in awkward silence.

“Wanna play videogames?”

“No.”

“Get some breakfast, or—” at BoJack’s silence, he said, “Okay.  I get it.  I gu-guess I kinda overstayed my welcome here.  I should—sh-should probably be getting back anyway.  Maybe Beth’s cooled down by now.”

“You’re leaving?”

Rick shrugged.  “I wasn’t planning to stay this long.  I was just gon-gonna get the selfie and go back.  This whole thing was sort of an impulse.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.”

BoJack opened his mouth, then closed it.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I really want to know something.  About you.  And this is the only chance I’ll get to ask.”

“Ask what?”

“How do you live with yourself, Rick?  How do you get up every morning and keep living, knowing you’re the man who transformed a whole planet’s population into blob monsters?”

“I drink.  I do drugs.  I try not to think too much about the past.  And I try to keep some sense of perspective.”  He shrugged.  “Con-considering everything I’ve seen—I mean, even an entire planet is just a grain of sand.  One day the universe will collapse in on itself and none of this will matter.”

“That’s it?  That’s your answer?  ‘Everything is meaningless anyway?’”

“Yup.”

“You don’t feel any remorse?  Any shame?”

“Eh, probably.  In the withered recesses of my soul.  But I just repress it.”  He took a swig from his flask.  “So what do you do?”

“I obsess constantly over what a terrible person I am.  There’s a voice in the back of my head that spends all day calling me a piece of shit and replaying all my worst decisions and the ways I’ve hurt the people who care about me.  The big things, like what happened to Sarah Lynn.  But the little things too.  The disappointment in someone’s eyes when I forget their birthday, or—just everything.”

“S-so…does that make you a better person?  The guilt?”

“No.  Not at all.  I keep making the same bad choices, no matter how much guilt I feel.”

“So just stop feeling guilty then.  If you’re gonna make the wrong decisions r-regardless of how much guilt you feel or how much you beat yourself up, then why bother with all the angst?  Exist without remorse.”

“That’s—” BoJack stopped.  “I honestly can’t tell if that’s the best or the worst advice I’ve ever gotten.  But it doesn’t matter.  I don’t know how to do it, anyway.  My guilt is too much a part of me.”

“The way you do it is by accepting deep in your heart that nothing matters, that everything is random and meaningless, and that there is nothing—absolutely nothing—you can do about it.”

“I already know that.”

“No you don’t.  If you really believed that, you would’ve seized that chance I gave you without thinking about the consequences.  You know in your brain that nothing matters, but your heart can’t accept it.  You’re still looking for some kind of meaning to cling to.  And as long as you’re searching for that something more, the pain and guilt is always going to be there.  It doesn’t stop until you let go.  Really let go.”

“Of what?  The hope of ever being a good person who deserves happiness?”

“Of the idea that there’s such a thing as ‘good.’”

“And…then what?  I become like you?”

Rick chuckled and said, “You’ll never be like me.  No one is.  It’s like I said—we’re operating on different scales.”  He took a swig from his flask.

“I don’t know,” BoJack said.  He lit a cigarette.  “I don’t know anything.”

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Rick—despite all his bravado—was in pain, too.  That maybe he was hurting even more than BoJack, even if he didn’t know it.  That Rick was trapped in a dark and cold place and had lost even the memory of the world beyond.  He couldn’t even conceive of a doorway out.  For him there was just the darkness, the solitude, the infantile narcissism of a universe that knelt before the power of his mind and yet had no meaning or coherence, just moving parts that could be manipulated, always and forever and forever.

Was that freedom?  Was that truth?  Was it better than the guilt, the longing, the confusion?

He supposed it all depended on your perspective.

Rick stood.  “Right, well.  I’m gonna go—m-maybe fuck a planet or something, go home and watch interdimensional cable with my grandkids, then drink myself to sleep.”

BoJack’s ears pricked up in alarm.  He was leaving.  Slipping away.

“Rick.  Wait.”  He stood, dropping the cigarette.  “I changed my mind.  I want to go to that other world.  With Sarah Lynn.  I want to take dead BoJack's place and live there.”

“It’s too late.  Todd’s seen the body by now.”

“Fine, then take me to another world where she’s alive.”

“Seriously, dude?  I thought you made up your mind.”

“No, no.  You were right.  About everything.  I can’t keep living this way.  I’m miserable.  I have to let go, like you said.  Fuck this, fuck everything.  I’m done punishing myself.  I want a fucking do-over.  What, am I gonna pass that up?  Am I insane?  Take me there!”

“Fine, whatever.  But l-look, if we’re gonna do this, I can do better than that one.  Hang on…”  Muttering to himself, Rick fiddled with the coordinates on his portal gun.  “Oh.  Oh, oh.  Here’s one.  I sk-skipped past this one earlier because I was aiming for as seamless a transition as possible, but look—in this reality, things are reversed.  You’re the one who ODed in the planetarium, and she’s alive, but she blames herself for your death because she waited too long to call the ambulance.  Think about that.  You—you wanna come back from the dead?  You can start a new religion or something.  Have a-a-a buncha crazy people worshipping you.”

“Sure!  Great!”  He could tell Sarah Lynn that he forgave her.  That it was okay.  Everything was okay, because nothing mattered.

Rick zapped a portal in the air and pulled him through, and they found themselves in another version of BoJack’s apartment, but one covered with empty beer bottles and empty pizza boxes.  The TV was on, tuned to what appeared to be a Japanese game show where people in giant rubber blueberry suits were rolling around on the floor, bumping into each other, fighting to grab a wind-up toy rabbit zipping around them in circles.  Rick frowned.  “This, uh—these should be the right coordinates, but this doesn’t look how I expected.”

“Wait.  Listen.”

BoJack heard a short, sharp cry from down the hall.  His own voice.  He sounded as though he were in pain.  His stomach muscled tightened. 

“Hang on, I think it’s the reality next door—”

“Something’s going on here.”

“I don’t think you wanna—”

But BoJack was already striding down the hall, toward the bathroom, where the sounds were coming from.  More strained cries.  He could hear someone else in there too, talking, though the words were indecipherable.  Rick?  Another version of Rick?

He stopped outside the door, heart pounding.  Another sharp cry.

Was he about to walk in on himself being brutally murdered, or something?

A hand settled on his shoulder, and he gave a start.  Behind him, Rick muttered, “I wouldn’t go in there.”

BoJack hesitated…then flung open the door.

“Uh!  Shut up and take it, you twisted, remorseless little bitch!”

“Unnh!  Fuck!  I’m sorry Horse Daddy!  I'm s-s-s-s-so sorry!”

“Say you’re my mare.”

“I’m your mare!  I’m your mare!”

“What the fuck?” BoJack said.

“W—Wrong reality, assholes!”  The Rick in the shower threw a bar of soap at BoJack.

BoJack quickly shut the door and walked down the hall, into the living room, and back through the portal into his own reality.  Rick followed.  “Told you not to open that door,” he said.

“Were we just—?”

“Yup.”

“Was I—?”

“L-look, I don’t know what the mask was about.  I’m not—not even going near that.  You’re not my type, anyway.  J-just so you know.  Though, uh.  Obviously he felt differently.  But y’know—different Ricks.  Different BoJacks.  Or maybe we just got really drunk…”

“How are they—why—?”

“Honestly, I’m more surprised that I was bottoming.  I mean…it—it’s a mess down there.  The things I’ve subjected my asshole to, over the years—the things I’ve hidden up there—”

“I get it.”

“It’s fucking carnage.  It mean at this point it’s—it’d be like driving a firetruck into the Mariana Trench.  That’s n-not an insult to the firetruck, you know?  It’s perfectly serviceable for the job it was designed for.  But it’s not equipped to conquer the Mariana Trench.  It’s j-just gonna be—swallowed up in the ab—in the deep abyss.  Filled with, you know.  Dead whale bones and shipwrecks and eyeless albino sea-life.”

“Yeah.  I get it.  I mean the last part is a little confusing, but.”

“That’s a job for like—Zeus or Cthulhu, or no one.  Anyway.  Hang on.”  He started to fiddle with the controls on his portal gun again, then his cell phone buzzed.  He checked it, scrolling through text messages, and winced.  “Beth is still pissed off at me.  Even after I sent them the selfie.”

“What’s she angry about again?”

“I, uh.  I erased some of my grandson’s memories without his permission.  Mostly of me doing stupid shit.  And she found the room where I kept them.  The memories.”

“That is pretty bad.”

“Now she’s calling me a ‘mind molester.’”

“Shit.”

“I-it’s fine.  This’ll blow over.”

BoJack paused and said, “You haven’t erased any of my memories, have you?”

“W-would be pretty stupid of me to tell you if I had, wouldn’t it?  But no.  I mean, unless you want me to erase what we just saw—”

“No thanks.  I think that’d be a slippery slope.  I'd end up asking you to erase most of my life.”

“You—you still wanna go find a living Sarah Lynn?”

“I don’t know.  I’m confused again.  About a lot of things.  What you said, about me coming back from the dead...it's kind of intimidating.  I don’t know if I’m ready to start a new religion in another world.  I'd probably just fuck that up.”

“Okay.”  A pause.  “Say, uh.  You wanna have dinner with my family?”

“What?”

“They like your show.”

“You’re trying to distract them from the memory thing, aren’t you?”

“Yup.  I mean, I like hanging out with you too.”

“Gee.  Thanks.”

“So…”

He sighed.  “Sure.  Why the fuck not?”

Rick zapped a hole in the air and they stepped through, onto a quiet suburban street.  Before them stood a house.

“Oh,” Rick said.  “Before we go in there.  Some ground rules.  No sleeping with my teenage granddaughter.”

“Jesus, Rick, I wouldn’t—”

“Or my daughter.  Or my grandson.  They’re all off limits.  I, uh.  I guess you can sleep with Jerry if you want, I mean if he consents.”

“I’m not going to fuck your family.”

“Okay.  Great.”  Rick glanced at the house and shouted, “Hey!  I’m back!”

From the house emerged an average-looking, brown-haired man, a teenage girl, an adolescent boy in a yellow shirt, and a blond woman with a scowl on her face, hands planted on her hips.

Rick waved his arms.  “Wubba-lubba Dub Dub!  Look who’s here for dinner!”

The girl’s jaw dropped.  “Holy shit, is that—”

The boy broke into a wide, beaming smile.  “BoJack Horseman!”

“Oh my god!” the man (Jerry?) gasped, hands on his cheeks.  “You’re everything I’ve always wanted to be!”

“No, wait,” the woman said frantically.  “We all agreed not to let him distract us from—”

The man, the girl and the boy all ran, laughing, toward BoJack.  And he felt the old thrill of recognition.  Of being seen.  Of mattering.  Even knowing that it was just another drug, that the high would fade leaving him emptier than before, it never failed to warm him for that brief moment.

He grinned and said, “Hey, yeah, it’s me!  It’s BoJack!”

“Hey everyone, look at the big funny horse-man!” Rick said, pointing.  “F-forget about everything else!  BoJack, do a little dance for them!  Say your catchphrase!  Y-you have a catchphrase, right?”

“I’m not your trained monkey.”

“W-w-we watch your show all the time,” Morty said.

BoJack chuckled.  “Guess I’m a little older than you’re used to.”

“You actually look better with gray hairs,” Summer said.  “They’re like, dignified.”

The three of them walked inside with BoJack, all laughing and talking, leaving Beth and Rick facing each other out on the lawn.  Beth stood with her arms crossed over her chest.  “This doesn’t change anything, you know,” she said.  “We are going to have a long talk about you.  And my son.  And boundaries.  I mean—even setting aside the creepiness of manipulating someone’s memories, some of the things I saw in there—the danger you put him in, the recklessness, the sheer insanity—”

“Morty agreed to it all.  He knew what he was getting into.  And—m-most of those memories were things he asked me to erase.”

“He’s fourteen.  He’s a child.  And he sure as hell didn’t agree to have you erase his memory of you mispronouncing the word ‘granted.’”

Rick winced.  “A lot of people pronounce it as ‘granite.’  It’s just easier to say.”

“That’s the relevant issue here?  Really?”

“C-can’t it wait until after dinner?  He’s only gonna be here one night.  BoJack.”

“I don’t care.  I don’t know why you thought this would work on me.  I’ve told you a hundred times, I don’t even like that stupid show.”

“You love it.  You just pretend to hate it because you think it's beneath you.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.  Why are we talking about Horsin’ Around?  Why do I even try?”

Rick stood awkwardly, shifting his weight.

She sighed tensely.  “How did you even get him to come with you?  Or is this like…a clone of BoJack, or an android, or—”

“No.  It’s the real him.  One version, anyway.  He—he was, uh.  He was about to jump off a bridge.  I stopped him.”

She stared.  “Seriously?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.  Kinda personal.  But yeah, uh.  His—his friend overdosed.  He took it kinda hard.  I think he n-needs—needed the distraction, you know?  I thought it would help.  Bringing him here.  Reminding him that there are lots of people out there who love him, even if he's never met them.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “So you’re claiming this has nothing to do with the fact that I found the Mind Blower room.”

“I mean.  Yeah.  That too.”

They stared at each other.  Beth’s expression crumpled.  She hung her head and said quietly, “Later.  We’ll talk later.”  She turned and walked back into the house.

Rick hesitated, then followed.  He took a seat at the kitchen table, where the rest of the family was already eating.  BoJack was there too, smiling, looking oddly comfortable and at ease with this group of strangers who had no connection to him save for their love of his TV self.  But then, this was probably a common experience for BoJack.  Interacting with fans.

“Wow,” BoJack said.  “So—you’re saying this version of Earth is all humans?”

“I mean, horses exist,” Summer said.  “But they walk around on all fours.  And they don’t talk.  Or wear clothes.  Or have legal personhood.  Humans ride them around and force them to race each other.  It's kinda fucked up.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, l-lots of realities are like that, actually,” Morty said.  “It’s—p-pretty common for a planet to have just one dominant species, and for most versions of Earth it’s primates.”

“That’s so weird.”

“Ha-ha—y-yeah.  I guess it is, now that you mention it.  Y-your reality is cooler, I think.  Just—so many different kinds of people, you know?  Here, furries are just a made-up thing.”

“My wife is actually a horse doctor,” Jerry said.

Rick and Beth took a seat at the table, served themselves up some spaghetti.

“So—does no one eat meat on your world?” Beth asked.  “I mean, since all the animals are…verbal and bipedal.  With legal rights.  Or, um—is that sort of a taboo question?  It’s just, your show never addressed it, and I thought it was odd, so—”

“Oh, we still eat meat,” BoJack said.  “Certain members of certain species, mostly chickens, are force-fed special drugs in infancy so that they never develop the ability to speak or think complex thoughts.  They’re raised to be consumed.  But we still have chickens who are people too.  They just kinda won the coin toss.”

“Wow.  That’s…unexpectedly dark,” Jerry said.  “How do you deal with that?”

“We mostly don’t think about it.”

“W-wow,” Morty said.  “I guess our worlds aren’t so different after all, huh BoJack?”

“I guess not.”  BoJack looked around at the table, then at Rick, and said, “Thanks.  I…think I needed this.”

“Anytime, buddy.  Anytime.”

THE END