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When they first started, it was good.
He’d met her at her faculty Halloween party. Some other schmuck had also crashed the party and was trying to chat her up, but he got there first. He saw the surprised but also murderous glare the other guy shot him when he said, “Yeah, I’ve got a spaceship outside, wanna see?” He understood the murderous glare when he saw another ship stashed a few yards from his. Oh. So that wasn’t a parrot in a cage on his shoulder. What an asshole.
He wondered just how many realities had fractured from that party. If she’d gone with the other guy, if she hadn’t gone at all. Eh, best not to think about it. Especially not while things were getting good, and they were.
He introduced her to his band. They blipped around space, having adventures, having sex in crazy places. She ran merch at their shows. She shared their concern when the Federation started getting weird. As stated before: things were really good.
So good that when she got pregnant, it filled him with a warm happiness, the kind he usually only got from hyper vodka and K-Lax crystals.
It was really, really good. Like, move back to Earth for a while and teach at the University with her good. They even got married.
And it didn't even turn to shit all at once, either. It was a gradual slide of too many flirtatious undergrads and too many off-world trips to fight alongside Bird Person and the others.
"You can't go off playing Intergalactic Freedom Fighter anymore, Rick. You have a daughter to think about. You have classes to teach. You have research to publish," she said in one of their early fights that still had enough calm to be classified as a discussion. She tried to appeal to as many extensions of his ego as she could.
And then he got the intel the Earth was about to be destroyed to make room for a Hyperspace Bypass. He was able to grab Beth, but not her mother.
Beth was young enough that he was able to just find another reality where he was married to her mom, and where he and Beth were about to die in a freak accident. No one would ever know but him.
What he did not take into account was that the new reality's Rick was an even bigger asshole than he was, and the marriage was even less stable. Things got very bad very quickly.
After dodging a thrown fax machine, he’d had enough.
“Fuck this. I’m ou-uuu-t. Love you, Beth.”
She was ten.
A week later, a robot showed up at the door with divorce papers.
Beth missed her dad terribly.
He showed up a few times over the years. Birthdays, Arbor Day. The occasional science fair. That wasn’t the most important though. Who needs your absentee science schmuck father when your mom is an astrophysicist? It’s not like she needed his science more than she needed her mom’s. In a tiny corner of her mind, she admitted it would have been nice to have the choice anyway.
Things got really terrible just as Beth was coming down home stretch on junior year. He came back again just as she was starting to narrow down her college list. The fight her parents had was tremendous. Even as it was happening, she was aware that while she may have been the starting point for the fight, she was by no means the substance of it.
“You really want our da-auggh-ter to go to your University?”
“What, like that’s a problem? We not good enough for you since you left?”
“No. You’re not.” Years in space had clipped Rick’s sentences to their barest concepts; it made for harsh commentary.
“Fuck you! You think what you do is so special? I’m at least trying to get this planet to the point where we can go off world. What do you think would happen if I tried to show anyone your quote-unquote work.” Their last fight had been over the quantity of extraterrestrial hallucinogens he’d brought with him, and tried to pass off as research material.
“You know exactly what would happen. This backwater shit show couldn’t handle it.”
“That’s why I’m trying to help them!”
“Whatever. It’s not like it’s horse su-urr-gery.”
The fight went on for another hour. Rick stormed out, never to return.
They didn’t know Beth was in the next room.
Years later, after Rick left again, and Beth and her family were safely back home, she was channel surfing. As an activity, that had gotten way different since the Galactic Federation had claimed Earth. You could spend hours clicking through, never landing on the same channel twice. She settled in on the Federation's answer to MSNBC, halfway bored to sleep anyway.
And then suddenly her mom came on the air, reading a headline and letting her know they’d be back after these messages.
“Nope.” Beth turned off the TV. “I will never be drunk enough for that.”