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It starts with a screwdriver.
Rick wanders aimlessly around the garage, searching high and low for something unnamed, cursing angrily, slurring with intoxication as he rummages through drawers and boxes, getting more and more frustrated with each passing second until, finally, Morty asks him what he’s looking for.
When the scientist turns to glare at him, Morty hunches down a little bit, expecting to get scolded for interrupting the search but apparently Rick got tired of searching alone because he snaps, quite harshly, that he’s looking for a screwdriver and Morty feels his eyebrows pinch together, creating that little wrinkle above the bridge of his nose that Rick constantly teases him about before saying, with no small amount of hesitance, that Rick put the tool in his lab coat a few minutes ago.
Rick stares blankly at him, as if he’s searching for a memory that he can’t seem to grasp before sneering at the teen and turning back to his work, pulling the object from his coat and moving on as though nothing ever happened.
The next time it happens, they’re in the ship.
As the years passed and Morty became more competent behind the wheel, Rick designated him as their driver. He might not be as good at science as Rick is, Morty doubts anybody ever will be, but if there’s anything Morty excels at it’s getting them out of sticky situations when the need arises. It keeps Rick from accidentally flying them into an asteroid belt or an inconveniently located sun when he’s especially sloshed and it comes with perks.
The biggest of which is that, unless Rick is in a truly foul mood, the teen has control of the radio.
Before Rick, Morty’s musical education was severely lacking but the duo had discovered early on that there was still hope for Morty yet. Surprisingly enough, he ended up liking the majority of the music Rick listened to. Not because he wanted to impress his grandfather and gain his favor, but simply because he enjoyed it.
The Grateful Dead, Guns N’ Roses, Queen, AC/DC, Dire Straits, Scorpions, Eagles. All of it, Morty loved all of it, but if there was one thing, one band that he loved above all others, it was The Flesh Curtains.
Rick’s music touched the curly haired boy on a level that he couldn’t properly express, one that he never failed to praise the older man for but, on one not so ordinary November evening, as they’re flying back from an adventure, listening to Morty’s absolute favorite song from Rick’s glory days, The Continuum , Rick says something that makes Morty’s heart drop like a stone.
“Hey Morty, who are these guys? This shit is -- is fuckin’ awesome, dawg.”
Morty’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel and he doesn’t have the courage to tell Rick that they’re listening to him, to his music. Instead the brunet tells him that he doesn’t know, that it’s just some band he found on Youtube while he was bored.
Rick’s expression never wavers.
Morty pretends that he doesn’t hear it.
In the dead of night, when his parents think that he’s asleep and Rick is passed out drunk in the garage, he can hear them arguing in soft tones. It wasn’t like before, wasn’t like when his mom would scream at Jerry for being useless or his dad would respond by telling Beth that she was heartless. That type of fighting he could deal with. It’d been going on long before he was born, but this somber arguing, the kind that always ended with his mom sobbing too loudly for the door to block out and his dad holding her tight, trying to reassure her, it leaves Morty hollow and empty.
In the end, Morty decides to start wearing earplugs to bed.
It still doesn’t help him sleep.
As time goes on, Rick begins to drink less and forget more and the scientist doesn’t seem to realize that he’s forgotten anything at all.
The garage goes untouched for longer and longer periods of time. Rick can no longer remember how to make concentrated dark matter. He forgets that BirdPerson is dead and buried. The fight against Galactic Federation becomes a shapeless figure of an idea. The Citadel is a myth. Rick can’t recall the lyrics to ‘Get Schwifty’.
Morty can’t can’t remember the last time they went on an adventure.
There are good days and bad ones, days where Rick seems to remember who and where he is, when the older man is drunk as a sailor, swearing up a storm and pulling witty comebacks and references out of thin air as though he’d never left. On these days they portal to other worlds, ones that don’t demand constant attention and they just explore, walking through neon forests and fields brimming with flowers that don’t seem to understand the meaning of gravity.
Morty both loves and hates these days.
They remind him of the man he loves, the man who saved him from loneliness and showed the brunet what it meant to live outside of societal norms, the man who taught the curly haired boy to think for himself when nobody else would..
And when the day is gone, when he goes to bed and wakes up to what Rick has become, Morty begins to understand why his grandfather found solace in the arms of alcohol.
The last good day, though Morty doesn’t know that at the time, comes on a Thursday.
There’s nothing especially special about it. He’s sitting in the garage with Rick, watching the cyan haired genius tinker with something too complex for Morty to understand and the elder is babbling on about all the things wrong with Star Trek. It’s a long list, one Rick goes into extreme detail to convey and Morty listens with the focus of a hawk. The days where Rick keeps his facts straight, where he’s once again a scientist are few and far between and Morty can’t remember the last time his grandfather rambled with such accuracy.
There’s a pause, one that makes Morty look up into Rick’s face and, for the first time in what feels like years, his startling blue eyes are vibrant and alive, clear, and Morty immediately knows that Rick is all there, that the older man is one hundred percent aware of his surroundings, of who he is and suddenly Morty can breathe.
For days, weeks, it felt like his ribcage was shrinking in size, like the ivory bones had become a prison around his lungs, around his heart, containing the organs and steadily squeezing the life from his body.. But when Rick looks at him, sees him, Morty can feel the difference. He can feel the air inside of his lungs, making them expand, making his heart beat faster and though the chance is a rare one, Morty finds himself holding his breath, waiting for Rick to continue, to say whatever is on his mind, and the older man doesn’t disappoint.
Blue meets green, eye to eye, and Rick suddenly speaks.
“There’s some things we’ve all gotta do, Morty. Some adventures have to be experienced no matter how much we don’t want to. I regret a lot of things, Morty. A lot. But I don’t regret loving you. I don’t regret protecting you and I’m sorry that I can’t protect you from this.”
It’s the first and last apology Morty ever receives from the man who somehow became more of a father than his own.
It finally comes to a head the day Rick forgets Morty’s name.
They’re sitting on the couch, watching Ball Fondlers and Rick no longer seems to realize that anything about the show is strange. He doesn’t seem to grasp that it isn’t normal for alligators to talk and walk on two feet, let alone shoot a gun, but Morty doesn’t comment.
Rick is quiet and subdued, lounging on the couch beside his grandson in a way that’s become the norm between them when suddenly the blue haired man looks his way.
Morty pulls his eyes from the TV, always on alert for anything Rick might need but when the older man just stares at him, unibrow scrunched in thought, Morty feels his stomach twist uncomfortably, almost as if he knows what’s about to happen before it actually does.
“Hey Martin, can you grab me another Dr. Pepper?”
The words slice Morty to the core, rip him open in ways that he never thought possible and suddenly the brunet knows that he’s let this go on for too long. He’s let Rick’s mind turn to mush and he’s done something unfathomable.
Something Rick would never forgive him for.
Forcing a smile that could never dream of reaching his eyes, Morty looks to Rick and says in a far steadier voice that he should be able to conjure, “Sure, but I was actually thinking that we might, y’know, go somewhere. Interested?”
The older man’s smile is immediate and Morty knows instinctively that he’s already forgotten about the soda, “Lead the way.”
The walk from the couch to the garage weighs heavy on Morty’s soul and as he reaches for the portal gun, the curly haired youth feels something break inside of him, something that he held on to for far too long and suddenly he’s dialing in a set of coordinates. They’ve been circling his mind for some time, he realizes. Morty doesn’t know how long and it doesn’t really matter, not in the long run, but as he shoots the eerie green doorway onto the wall, stepping through it with Rick close behind, Morty knows that he will never be able to come back to this particular dimension again.
Not after this.
The world they step into is a beautiful one. It’s uninhabited. One of the few planets where sentient life never grew alongside evolution and it’s one of the only places that he ever visited with Rick merely to visit. There’s no smog to obstruct the view of the stars and the closest sun is miles away, leaving the planet in perpetual darkness.
There were no adventures here, only the soft voice of his grandpa telling him about the stars and constellations that have no meaning on Earth. It was a good memory, one of less than a dozen where Morty can remember Rick sober and calm, his mind at a rare point of peace, and the brunet knows that he’s about to soil the memory of this place, that it will never be the same.
Beside him, Rick says nothing, looking around as though he’s seeing it all for the first time and, Morty realizes with a heavy heart, that perhaps he is.
“C’mere Rick, sit down and relax.”
Obedient and docile, Rick does as the boy says, dropping down with a fluidity that old age should not permit and he crosses his legs, looking content, and for a moment, Morty doesn’t think that he’ll be able to do this. He doesn’t think his heart can take it and he knows that it’s wrong, but all he wants is to collect the man in front of him and take him home, but he can’t.
Rick would never have wanted this, and the brunet knows it.
Mechanical and detached, the curly haired boy pulls a small blaster from his pocket and levels it at the man who means the entire cosmos and more to him, pointing the weapon right between Rick’s eyes.
He should never have let it go this far, should never have allowed Rick to go on not knowing who he was or what he meant to the galaxy. Morty couldn’t help but to feel ashamed at his own cowardice and as he stared into the docile eyes of his best friend, the brunet feels his heart twist. Rick never would have allowed him to do such a thing. Rick would’ve had him disarmed and on the ground before Morty could ever get the weapon anywhere near the elder’s brain, and that’s how Morty knows that it’s over, that he’s looking at a shell with nothing left.
Swallowing his heart, forcing it down from his throat, Morty rests his finger on the trigger, trying to press it but unable to summon the courage necessary, not when Rick is looking up at him, so trusting and open, completely unaware of the danger that he’s in and suddenly, Morty remembers another situation, one that was very different and still essentially the same.
He remembers standing in the garage, blaster in hand with Rick on his knees. He remembers the confusion, the way he was unable to tell if his grandpa was actually real or if he was just a delusion in the boy’s mind brought on by an unchecked swarm of brain parasites and as Morty stared down into Rick’s oblivious features, the brunet can hear his grandfather’s words from that night echoing in his mind.
“Do us both a favor and pull the trigger! Do it! Do it, motherfucker, pull the fucking trigger!”
Just as he’d always done when Rick was still himself, Morty obeys and a choked sob pulls from his throat as the recoil travels up his arm and the man he loves slumps to the ground, unknowing and still.
Morty felt a sob rip from his throat and he didn’t even try to hide it as he dropped the blaster and backed up, trying to look at anything but the smoldering hole in Rick’s forehead, the red stained grass or the glassy sheen in his companion’s eyes. It was an ugly sound, something tainted with years of neglect before Rick had come into his life, something dredged up from the darkest, loneliest and most hollow parts of his heart.
It was a sound of misery, of remembrance and pain and as Morty reaches back into his pocket, grabbing the portal gun, he feels the weight of his mercy settle upon his soul like a festering sore, open and infected, unable to heal. He doesn’t think about what his mom will say, doesn’t think about the fact that he’ll have to clean the garage eventually or, god forbid, Rick’s room.
All he thinks about is the fact that Rick would be proud of his grandson, that the naive boy he’d dragged out across the multiverse at all hours of the night, the boy he chose to share his wisdom with, had eventually learned life’s harshest lesson, one that Rick had tried often enough to teach him but proved unsuccessful in: That life was, indeed, fair in the way that it was unfair.
Millionaires got cancer just as easily as those without a cent to their name, bad people skated outside the law while good ones were made to suffer, and genius scientists who should have gone out in a blaze of glory fell before the hand of the person who loves them most.
And Morty can’t help but to think that it’s ironic.
The lesson Rick could never seem to teach him is the last bit of knowledge he’ll ever bestow on the boy whose life he changed forever without ever really having to try.