Work Text:
—— 7:00
The alarm went off at 7:00 AM. That usual, awful, rattling sound that made Morty’s teeth clench every single time. Outside the window, typical suburban noise hummed: a neighbor’s dog was barking somewhere, and a garbage truck’s tires rustled against the asphalt.
In the kitchen, the stench of burnt toast blended with the cheap aroma of instant coffee. Standard morning schizophrenia was in full swing around the table. Jerry, looking profound, was trying to shape a perfect triangle out of cereal bits floating in milk, agonizing over the meaning of life.
“Beth, have you seen my tie? You know, the beige one? I was thinking of wearing it for my resume mail-out,” Jerry droned, fishing out a soggy oat shape.
“Jerry, you haven't worked in two years. Your resume doesn't give a fuck about a tie,” Beth said, not even looking up from her glass of Merlot, though it was barely seven in the morning.
Summer sat glued to her phone, furiously typing a message and pouting her lips for a selfie. Morty sighed, poured himself some juice, and reached for the cereal.
Suddenly, the garage door flew open with a bang. Rick stumbled into the kitchen. A drop of green drool hung from his mouth, and in his hands, he was struggling to hold a heavy, metallic sphere pulsing with purple light.
“I did it. You hear me? Look at this! It’s a stable micro-core. A new era of energy. I can power an entire state with this shit, and I won’t have to pay those power grid bastards ever again!”
“Dad, we asked you not to bring radioactive trash into the house during breakfast!” Beth said calmly.
“Shh, you don’t know shit! Morty, let’s go. I need someone with small fingers to hold the terminal while I solder the inner circuit.”
Morty rolled his eyes, but got up: “Aw, jeez, Rick... I actually wanted to pass my history test today without getting an F for once...”
“Fuck history, Morty! History is being written right now in the garage! Move your ass!”
The day passed in a blur. The garage smelled of ozone, burnt wiring, and stale booze. Rick fussed around the core, humming some wild alien nonsense and constantly taking swigs of bourbon from his flask. Morty handed him wrenches, held contacts, and listened to the usual flood of insults directed his way. By evening, the core was mounted on a massive steel pedestal right in the center of the garage. It hummed quietly, emitting a soft purple glow.
“That’s it, Morty,” Rick wiped sweat and grime from his forehead, smirking his trademark crazy smirk. “At exactly nine PM, I fire up the secondary process. This changes everything.”
Time neared 9:00 PM. The whole family was gathered in the living room. Jerry was watching some cat show, Beth was finishing her second bottle, and Summer was video chatting. Rick stood by the open garage door, holding a remote detonator-activator.
“Witness genius, bitches!” he yelled and slammed the red button.
Morty didn't even have time to blink. There was no blast—just an deafening, absolute silence. The core's purple light switched in a second to a blinding, eye-searing white flash. Morty managed to see Rick’s body literally disintegrating into atoms, turning into gray dust. In the next fraction of a second, a wave of plasma swept through the kitchen, incinerating Beth, Jerry, and Summer before they could even scream.
Morty’s skin burst into flames, his lungs filled with scalding hell, and the world simply ceased to exist.
—— 7:00 —— Loop 2
The alarm went off at 7:00 AM.
Morty bolted upright in bed, gasping heavily and frantically. His chest heaved, and his t-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He desperately began feeling his body: arms, legs, face.
No burns.
No pain.
“Holy shit...” he whispered, wiping his face with trembling hands. “What the fuck... What a terrible nightmare.”
He went downstairs. The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and cheap coffee.
“Beth, have you seen my tie? You know, the beige one?” Jerry said.
Morty froze on the bottom step. His heart dropped into his stomach.
“Jerry, you haven't worked in two years. Your resume doesn't give a fuck about a tie,” Beth replied.
Summer was typing on her phone. And exactly a second later, the garage door slammed open. Rick stumbled in holding the pulsing purple sphere.
Morty stood rooted to the spot. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. The exact angle of the drool drop on Rick’s chin. Everything was repeating with mathematical precision.
Morty was completely out of it all day. He kept telling himself it was just deja vu, that he was going crazy. At 9:00 PM, Rick pressed the button again. Again, the blinding flash.
Again, the pain vaporizing flesh in a millisecond.
And darkness again.
Loop 3. Loop 4.
In the fifth loop, Morty snapped. When Rick walked into the kitchen, Morty rushed him and grabbed him by his lab coat: “Rick! Stop, you asshole! Throw that piece of shit away! That core—it’s gonna blow up at nine PM sharp! We’re all gonna burn! I’ve already seen it!”
Rick gave Morty a contemptuous, alcohol-fogged look and shoved him off: “Morty, shut the fuck up and don’t teach me physics. It’s a micro-core with three-phase insulation. I control this process one hundred percent. You just watched too much of your stupid anime and lost your mind. Go help me with the grounding.”
At 9:00 PM, the house turned into a nuclear wasteland once again.
—— 7:00 —— Loop 10–30
By the tenth loop, shock had turned into feverish panic. Morty realized: this wasn't a dream, a hallucination, or a joke. He was genuinely trapped in the exact same day, which inevitably ended in his agonizing death.
In Loop 12, Morty decided to take drastic action. While Rick stepped away to use the bathroom, Morty grabbed a heavy pipe wrench and smashed it into the purple core with all his strength, hoping to break it. The wrench bounced off with a deafening clang, dislocating a joint in Morty’s finger, while the core didn't get a single scratch. Sensing the vibration, Rick burst out of the bathroom, covered Morty in a tirade of curses, slapped him on the back of the head, and locked the lab with a keycode.
At 9:00 PM, the core detonated.
In Loop 18, Morty decided to save the family. “We need to leave! Right now!” he screamed during breakfast, grabbing Beth’s hands. “We’ll buy tickets, go to the movies, go to another city, go to the edge of the world for all I care!”
“Morty, sweetie, what’s wrong with you? You’re acting so twitchy,” Beth asked with concern.
Jerry perked up: “Oh, a family trip! Let’s go to the paperclip museum!”
Morty begged, cried, and eventually forced them into the car. They drove fifty kilometers out of town. Morty kept staring at the clock on the dashboard. 8:59 PM. 9:00 PM. On the horizon, coming from the direction of their house, a giant, expanding purple-and-white dome expanded into the sky. It swept away trees, hills, and the highway in a fraction of a second. The core’s explosion was so powerful it wiped out the entire state.
Flash—and 7:00 AM again.
In Loop 25, Morty tried to steal the portal gun to escape to another dimension. But Rick had installed a biometric sensor on his coat. The moment Morty put his hand in the pocket, a robotic arm shot out from the garage wall, slammed a tranquilizer into Morty’s neck, and he woke up a minute before the explosion, duct-taped to a chair.
On the evening of Loop 29, Morty tried to leave a note for himself. He took a pair of compasses and carved painfully into his forearm until it bled: THE CORE BLOWS UP AT 9:00 PM. He hoped the scar would remain. But at 7:00 AM in Loop 30, his arm was completely smooth. Time kept resetting the physical state of the world to the perfect matrix of 7:00 AM. The only thing that didn't reset was his own consciousness, which was turning into an overloaded hard drive.
—— 7:00 —— Loop 50-100
By the fiftieth loop, something inside Morty broke. The panic burned out, leaving a dry, cold rage in its place. He realized that emotional outbursts were useless. Rick didn't care about tears. The family didn't care about warnings. He needed to become analytical.
Morty started a virtual diary in his head. He began tracking Rick’s every move down to the second.
14:10 — Rick picks up the soldering iron. 14:12 — Rick turns away for 4 seconds to take a sip from his flask. 14:15 — Rick drops a screwdriver and curses. 15:30 — Rick calibrates the garage security system.
Morty started experimenting with physically eliminating Rick. In Loop 62, Morty approached from behind while Rick bent down for a screwdriver and slammed a heavy hammer into the back of his head with all his might. Rick collapsed, dead. Morty stood over his corpse, breathing heavily, the bloody hammer in his hands. For the first time in a long while, he felt relief.
However, at 15:35, the lab’s automated turret reacted to the drop in Rick’s heart rate. The computer flagged it as an attack, switched to emergency mode, and while trying to reboot systems... restarted the core. The explosion happened five hours early.
In Loop 78, Morty tried slipping sleeping pills into Rick’s bourbon. Rick passed out at 16:00. But without Rick’s constant manual adjustments, pressure built up inside the core, the stabilizers overheated, and at 21:00 the house burned down again.
Morty realized the horrific truth: Rick was the only one who could control the core, yet Rick was too arrogant an idiot to see that his design was fundamentally flawed. It was a perfect, inescapable trap.
—— 7:00 —— Loop 150
By loop one hundred and fifty, the fourteen-year-old boy's mind had completely shattered.
Morty stopped caring about death. He had watched his family burn alive a hundred and fifty times. He had seen their guts, seen their skin melt, heard their dying screams as the core detonated with varying degrees of slowness. Human life lost all meaning to him. They were just NPCs in a shitty game, getting redrawn every single morning.
In Loop 153, Morty didn't even bother going down to the kitchen. He stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling.
In Loop 160, he went downstairs, silently took a can of Jerry’s beer from the fridge, walked out into the backyard, sat in a lawn chair, and started drinking. Jerry ran outside: “Morty! You’re fourteen! And that’s my last Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
“Fuck off, Dad,” Morty replied coldly, without even turning his head.
“What did you just say?!” Jerry yelled. “Beth! Did you hear how your son just spoke to me?!”
Morty just drank his beer and stared at the sun. He couldn't care less. At 21:00, the white hell was coming anyway.
Morty began hallucinating. The surrounding world seemed to lose its textures. In the hum of the fan, he swore he heard Rick’s laugh. In his grandfather’s eyes when Rick looked at him over the workbench, Morty looked for hidden signs, convinced Rick was mocking him.
“You know, don't you?” Morty whispered in Loop 180, sitting in the corner of the garage, twisting a lock of his unwashed hair around his finger. “You’re doing this on purpose, you old piece of shit? You’re playing with me?”
“Morty, what the fuck are you rambling about?” Rick grunted without looking up from his welding. “Hand me the twelve-millimeter wrench and shut the fuck up.”
—— 7:00 —— Loop 213
Loop 213. Morty was no longer the same teenager. He had the dead, heavy stare of a hardened killer; his movements were swift, precise, devoid of unnecessary emotion. He had memorized every corner of the house, every access code, and all of Rick’s habits.
At 14:12, when Rick turned away for his designated four seconds to take a drink, Morty didn't hit him with a hammer. Instead, he subtly injected a neural inhibitor into Rick’s neck—a microscopic dose he had learned to synthesize from household chemicals over the previous forty loops.
Rick went limp and hit the floor. He wasn't dead, but completely paralyzed, able only to roll his eyes.
“Mmm! Mmmm!” Rick grunted through clenched teeth.
“Shut up, Rick,” Morty said flatly. “We don't have much time. I’ve got about fifty minutes before the core starts overheating due to lack of calibration.”
Morty walked over to Rick’s main terminal. On normal days, Rick never let him near the servers, but Morty had spent loops 190 to 210 just memorizing the 64-character password Rick typed at lightning speed.
Morty’s fingers flew across the keyboard.
Enter.
The screen lit up in black and green. Morty began digging deep into the file system, cutting through encryption. He was searching for the cause: why was time resetting? Why specifically 7:00 AM? Why not a second before the explosion?
Then he stumbled upon a hidden logic log of temporal protocols.
Morty froze. The lines of code on the screen told a story that turned his blood to ice.
The loop hadn't started today. The core experiment had failed in the very first, original reality. Rick had made a mistake. But in that exact instant, 0.001 seconds before the detonation vaporized his brain, Rick had managed to activate an emergency protocol: "Chrono-Anchor."
This emergency protocol was hardwired into his subconscious. It created a localized time loop, resetting the entire sector of space back 14 hours to give Rick a chance to... fix his mistake.
Except Rick hadn't accounted for one thing. Resetting the day wiped the memories of all carbon-based lifeforms. Rick’s brain was wiped back to its 7:00 AM state. He woke up with zero recollection of having built the core or that it had exploded. He’d start working on it all over again, thinking it was his brilliant new idea, and make the exact same mistake.
With one exception. Morty. Because of Morty’s brainwaves—the very "stupid waves" Rick used to mask his genius signature from enemies—the temporal reset wave resonated differently in his neurons. Morty’s memory was never erased.
Rick had created this hell himself. He had trapped his own GRANDSON in an endless torture chamber, condemning him to watch his family die hundreds of times, simply because his own bloated ego couldn't accept defeat and let go of life.
Morty turned slowly toward the paralyzed Rick. Rick stared back with wide, bulging eyes filled with fear and confusion.
“You’re... a complete, selfish piece of shit,” Morty said softly, almost devoid of emotion. A single tear rolled down his cheek, but he wiped it away instantly. “You don't even know what you’ve done. You just locked me in here. With you. Forever.”
Rick mumbled desperately, but Morty stopped listening. The core’s explosion tore the house apart at 21:00
—— 7:00 —— Loop 214.
Morty woke up at 7:00 AM. He no longer felt fear. All that remained was a dry, crystalline clarity.
He didn't argue with Jerry. He didn't look at Beth. He spent the entire day in absolute silence, preparing for the final move. He knew every decibel of the house, every single one of Rick’s movements, every command on the temporal terminal.
20:50. Ten minutes until the blast.
Rick stood by the toolbox, finishing the detonator. “Alright, Morty, almost done. Now let's make this bad boy work...”
“Nothing's ready, Rick,” Morty said.
Rick turned around and froze.
Morty stood in the doorway of the garage. In his hands was a heavy, modified plasma blaster that he had quietly assembled from spare parts throughout the day whenever Rick was looking away. The barrel was pointed straight at Rick’s chest.
“Morty? Have you lost your fucking mind? Put the gun down before I—”
“Shut up, Rick. Just shut your fucking mouth for at least five minutes,” Morty said in a voice that sounded nothing like a fourteen-year-old’s. “If you take one step, I’ll blow a hole through your liver. You won't react in time. I checked in loop 94.”
Rick narrowed his eyes. For the first time ever, a flicker of genuine confusion passed over his face: “What are you talking about... What 94th loop?”
“We’re in a loop, Rick. Loop 214. Your core is a piece of unstable garbage. It detonates at nine PM sharp. You triggered a localized Chrono-Anchor a fraction of a second before dying the very first time. But your stupid genius brain wipes its own memory every morning, while mine doesn't. I’ve seen you burn 213 times. I’ve seen Mom, Summer, and Jerry burn. I remember the smell of your charred flesh, Rick.”
Rick swallowed hard. He slowly shifted his gaze to the server terminal, then to the pulsing purple core. “Morty... if that’s true... I can recalculate the formula! Give me access to the terminal, I’ll fix the calibration!”
“No!” Morty barked, tightening his finger slightly on the trigger. “You won't fix shit! You tried in loop 40, you tried in loop 110! You’re too arrogant and full of yourself to admit this thing is fundamentally broken! You won't save us. You’ll just reset the day again!”
“Morty, if I don't fix the core, we all die!” Rick yelled. “For real!”
“For real is better than being with you,” Morty snapped.
The clock read 20:57. The core on its steel pedestal hummed louder. The purple light began shifting into an ominous, pulsing white.
Without taking his sight off Rick, Morty reached his left hand out to a hidden panel beneath the main workbench. In loop 213, he had studied the mechanics of the Chrono-Anchor.
“What are you doing, Morty?! Don't touch the locator settings!” Rick screamed, taking a step forward.
BOOM!
Without hesitating, Morty fired. A plasma discharge passed an inch from Rick’s ear, scorching the wall behind him. Rick stumbled backward and fell to the floor.
“One more step, and the next one goes into your head,” Morty hissed coldly.
Morty’s fingers entered commands on the Chrono-Anchor panel with frantic speed. He wasn't trying to shut it off—that was impossible.
He was reconfiguring the temporal wave vector. Instead of resetting time across the entire house, he collapsed the anchor's radius down to a single object—the core itself—while shifting the phase of the temporal field from "loops" to a "localized chrono-rift."
He was going to push the blast out of their reality's timeline, diverting all destructive energy into a closed spatial pocket. But to pull it off, someone had to hold the manual phaser directly next to the core until the exact moment of detonation.
20:59. The core screeched. The air in the garage ionized, making their hair stand on end.
“Morty, no! That’ll destroy the garage and tear matter apart!” Rick yelled, attempting to crawl toward him.
“Get the fuck out of the garage, Rick,” Morty said. “Take Mom, Summer, Jerry, and get outside. Right now!”
“Morty, you’ll die!”
“I’ve already died two hundred times, Rick!” Morty screamed, a raw, desperate pain breaking through his voice for the first time in ages. “GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!”
Morty rushed to the core, grabbed the heavy metal phaser, and pressed it tight against the pulsing sphere. His hands immediately blistered from the intense heat. Morty screamed in agony, but didn't let go of the handle.
Rick stared at his grandson. For the first time, something resembling terror and deep, burning shame flashed in his eyes. He realized Morty wasn't bluffing. Rick bolted out of the garage, burst into the living room, grabbed Beth and Summer, and kicked open the front door: “Out of the house! Hurry, move, fucking move!”
21:00.
Morty stood alone in the roaring, blindingly white hell of the garage. He squeezed the red-hot phaser. The white light began burning away his vision. The pain was absolute.
“Fuck... you... Rick...” Morty whispered.
And slipped into absolute nothingness.
The alarm didn't go off.
Morty woke up to the sharp smell of burning and cold air.
He was lying on the lawn in front of the house. The sky was dark—a deep, night-time blue-black. The clock on his phone, lying nearby on the grass, read 21:05.
Tuesday was over. Wednesday had arrived.
Morty slowly pulled himself up. His left arm was covered in severe, real second-degree burns. They throbbed with unbearable pain, but Morty smiled. The pain was real. It wasn't disappearing. Time was moving forward again.
Where the garage had been, a smooth, perfectly hemispherical crater now gaped in the earth. Rick’s lab had simply vanished into thin air, as if carved out with a surgical scalpel without damaging the neighboring houses.
Jerry, Beth, and Summer sat on the lawn in shock, breathing heavily, completely unable to comprehend what had just happened.
Rick stood a short distance away at the edge of the crater. His usual cocky smirk was gone. He stared into the pit, then slowly turned his head to look at Morty.
Morty met his gaze. There was no childish fear left in his eyes, nor the blind adoration he used to hold for his "genius grandfather." There was only an endless, icy void and the heavy, bitter wisdom of someone who had seen the truly hideous underside of a god.
Beth ran over to Morty, crying and wrapping her arms around his shoulders: “Morty! Oh my God, your arm! What happened?! Dad, what was that?!”
Morty didn't answer. He didn't even move in his mother’s embrace. He just kept staring silently at Rick.
Rick took a step toward his grandson, opening his mouth to utter a typical snarky remark or excuse, but the words caught in his throat. For the first time in his life, he cast his eyes downward.
Morty turned around and walked slowly down the dark street. Time was flowing once more. But Morty Smith would never be the same again.