“Jesus Christ, Jerry, go get the accountant, would you?”
Beth’s hands shake around the tax filer. She taps the sheaf of papers against the desk to try and straighten them but it ends up just making things worse, sheets fumbling out into her lap. W-2s. Proof of health insurance. Unemployment papers for Jerry. And that’s just last year’s; she’s pulled their last seven returns, which she keeps in big binders in a filing cabinet in the home office, like they always suggest.
She can tell her husband is making a face without even looking at him.
“He said he charged,” Jerry pauses, “what, two thousand flurbos an—”
“FILING ERROR. FILING ERROR,” the big stone head in the middle of the office says, again, thumping the ground for emphasis.
“I don’t care. Call him,” Beth says.
“We don’t know the conversion rate!”
“I know that if we don’t file these correctly beyond a shadow of a doubt, our bodies, and our children’s, are going to get repo’d. That’s what I know, Jerry.”
“Alright,” Jerry says. “Fine.” Shoulders slumped, he shuffles out of the room. The intergalactic equivalent of the IRS manages to be equally drab as its US counterpart– or maybe worse. Beth had no idea there even was an intergalactic equivalent of the IRS you could be audited by until she was pulled right out of her living room and into space like how cows got sucked up into flying saucers in movies. She’d had a nasty looking gun pointed in her face by an alien and ten minutes to gather ‘the needed tax-related materials’ to ‘rectify a filing error.” She didn’t even have time to finish her glass of wine.
Now she’s stuck in this office under threat of losing her own bodily autonomy. With a lot of paperwork. And a big stone head in the middle of the floor thundering “FILING ERROR. FILING ERROR.” as it pounds on the ground like the Easter Island equivalent of a Turbotax fuckup.
She has no clue what’s wrong. Maybe something lingering from the divorce? Unless Jerry has some bank accounts in Turks and Caicos he hasn’t told her about, she’s pretty much fresh out of ideas. She leans over in her chair, twisting her hands in her hair, wishing she had a glass of wine. Perhaps several.
As she stares at her bare feet (she hadn’t had time to grab shoes) she hears Jerry come into the room, followed by small, light footsteps. When she looks up, a nerdy alien in a polo shirt and khakis is sitting down across the desk from her. He has weakly wavering gray antennae, like everyone else that works here, and a laptop under his arm.
“Hello, Mrs. Smith. Sounds like there’s a problem you’d like my help with?”
“FILING ERROR. FILING ERROR,” agrees the stone head, loudly. Beth is starting to get a really bad headache and she knows it isn’t from the Cab Sav.
“I think something is wrong with my previous tax returns? Or something?” she says, pushing her stack of papers towards the accountant, which the accountant eyes, twirling one of his antennae between his fingers.
“What planet?”
“Uh. Earth?”
“Ah, I see. Earth tends to be a particularly tricky one. You humans can never make up your minds. Makes keeping accurate records a pain.”
“Frankly, sir, I have no fucking clue what’s going on. Pardon my language. This has never been a problem for us before.”
“Well, Mrs. Smith, if you’re willing to go line by line with me…”
“For the last seven years?”
“I’m paid to be thorough.”
Beth’s going to pull her hair out.
“Isn’t there anything you can do to just, like, make it faster? Please.”
The accountant does some sort of equivalent of pursing his lips that might translate more clearly with different mouth anatomy.
“Alright. Let me check my system for any inconsistencies.”
He opens up his laptop and begins typing away.
Gingerly, Jerry rests a hand on Beth’s back. “See, honey? Look at him go. I knew he was worth it.”
Her phone rings, inexplicably. But of course, anything is explicable, considering what her father is capable of. She picks up on the second ring.
“Beth.”
“Dad?” she asks, as if it could be anyone else. She watches as the accountant pulls a small device out of his pants pocket and starts scanning some of the papers with it, seemingly at random.
“B-Beth, sweetie, tell me something. Are your personal taxes being audited by the intergalactic equivalent of the IRS right now?”
“How do you know?” she asks, instantly, then winces, then hates herself for wincing. This is obviously some Dad shit. There are antennas and strange electronic devices and angry space bureaucrats, which means it has Rick Sanchez written all over it.
“Ah, jeez, fuck, okay.” Her father sounds oddly panicked, voice strained. “L-listen, don’t. Don’t tell those squares anything, just wait until I get there–”
The accountant looks up. “I’ve found something, Mrs. Smith.”
“Ooooh, he’s found something, Beth!” Jerry echoes excitedly.
Beth takes her phone away from her ear and rests it against her shoulder.
“Yeah?’
“You seem to have some kind of error with the status of a family member’s filing.”
“What do you mean?” Faintly, she can hear her father saying Beth? Sweetie? on the other end of the line.
“Mortimer Smith is listed as a dependent, here.” He points at a line on his laptop screen that’s highlighted in red.
“Yes, of his mother.” She shoots a look at Jerry, who’s gone quiet.
“Hmmm,” says the accountant, squinting at his screen. Beth’s stomach feels strange.
“He’s seventeen. He’s my son.”
“According to our records, he’s been filing with Rick Sanchez since 2016.”
Two years ago. Beth’s stomach drops. “You mean, he’s like, what, Rick’s dependent now? Like Rick fucking adopted him?”
Suddenly scenarios of Rick whisking Morty away for real, forever, without her knowing, are flashing through her head. Taking him away on an adventure that he’d never come back from, far away from her. Who knew what he could do. How he could make her sign papers and forget she’d ever done it. Her forehead and armpits start to break out in clammy sweat and she wipes her suddenly damp hands on her pant legs.
“No, jointly filing,” the accountant says coolly, as if it is nothing. As if it is the most normal thing in the world. “As a spouse.”
In a flash, a slimy green disk opens in the middle of the room. Beth watches as one long, long, knobby leg steps through, then another. The ratty edge of a lab coat and one gray hand holding a portal gun.
“First of fucking all,” her father says, as soon as his head bursts through, “let it be known, I didn’t– I didn’t want you to find out like this, Beth . This is pretty m-messed up, even by my standards. Second of all, fuck the government and all the little snitching bitch peons that work for it. Third of all, before you aAAUGGHsk, it’s not, it’s not legal on Earth. So don’t worry about that, sweetie.”
Beth is very still.
“CORRECTION ACCEPTED,” says the head, mouth clacking. It had stopped shaking the table with its movement. It seems smug, in fact.
“See, Beth? Not legal on earth,” Jerry echoes, cheerfully. His face falls.
I am pleased to inform you that the Rickorty Week 2024 will run from Sunday, June 16th, to Saturday, June 22nd.
All forms of fanwork are accepted, as long as they’re of your own making, and the prompts are subject to your own interpretation. Don’t forget to use #rickortyweek2024 within the first five tags of your post so I can see it!
June 16
Realization | Hanahaki AU
June 17
“His life doesn’t matter! Yours does.” | Amnesiac Hero
June 18
Borrowed Time by Tennis | Caught
June 19
Mythological Creature(s) AU | “If you think my Rick’s dead, he’s alive! And if you think you’re safe, he’s coming for you!”
June 20
Huddling for Warmth | When You Fucked Grandpa by blink-182
June 21
“Morty, say you’ll marry me.” | Stars
June 22
Alternate Selves | Free Day!
Do not hesitate to reach out if you need further clarification!
college-aged Morty | 2.8k words | Rated M, language, vomit, suicidal ideation, rock bottom Rick Sanchez
@rickortyweek
Morty throws the trunk of his dad’s station wagon shut with a thump.
“You sure you don’t need to bring my Ninja smoothie blender, Morty?” Dad asks, for a second time, standing on the driveway beside him with his arms crossed over his chest. The August morning is hot and clear. Gene’s sprinklers are going hard on the lawn next door.
“I think it’ll make you really popular with your roommate. You said they’re from California, right? They must be healthy. There’s a little more space behind the driver’s side–”
“N-nah, I’m good, Dad,” Morty says. He goes around to the passenger door to do a last check of his overflowing laundry hamper and make sure his video game console box made it in. He doesn’t want to forget Bonestorm III. All told, he doesn’t really have that much to bring, though, and the car’s only half full. He wears pretty much the same clothes all the time, and doesn’t have a ton of books or movies or anything. His booby bikini girl poster is rolled up in the footwell of the backseat and one or two of his robot figurines he just couldn’t part with are packed into cardboard boxes. All the advice listacles his parents found online for Summer’s freshmen year of college said that bringing something from home was important, so the idea has been passed down.
He reaches into his pocket and palms the little evil intent detector that Rick had made for him a few years back. A tiny credit-card sized piece of metal that reads people’s brainwaves and vibrates if they’re planning on hurting him or torturing him or whatever. They’d used it on an adventure, a rare heist –Morty can see Rick’s eye roll– but he hadn’t had the heart to throw it away. He’d gone back and forth for ages on whether or not to even bring it. He still doesn’t have to, he tells himself; he has hundreds of miles of highway driving ahead of him where he can just chuck it out the window and let it get crushed on the side of the road. He tightens his grip.
His mom comes out of the garage, checking her watch. “We gotta get this show going,” she says. The garage feels weirdly empty until Morty realizes it’s because Rick’s ship isn’t in it. Hasn’t been there for a while. He pulls his hand out of his pocket and starts loading the last few bags.
“If we don’t leave soon we won’t make it to our motel until, like, eleven, and lord knows what we’re going to find in Fresno after sundown,” Mom says.
Dad follows Morty as he transfers a final trash bag of gym shorts and shit into the back seat.
“What– what about my George Foreman Lean Griddle? Or, my Slap Chop? You never know when you’ll need onions in little cubes, those always make me cry….”
Dad sniffs, then wipes away a tear, even though he’s trying to look like he isn’t. Oh, God. He had volunteered to drive Morty first, of course, before being overruled.
Morty turns back and gives him a small smile. “I’m really fine, Dad. But thanks.”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry, just give me a moment, son.”
Something in Morty’s pocket buzzes. His hand flies to Rick’s detector, for a second, until he realizes it was the other one. He pulls out his phone and opens it to check his messages while Dad tries to get it together. Two are from Summer, who’s been spending her senior year of college in London with the textile arts department of her school doing fashion stuff.
dont let dad cry all over u little bro
cuz hes gonna
The newer message is from his girlfriend, Anne.
status report mortimer
Morty finds himself looking for some kind of message from Rick– which is stupid. Rick doesn’t text.
He texts Anne:
finally leaving lol
She responds immediately:
call me when you guys stop for the night?
Morty’s heart clenches fondly. They’re going to different schools to study different things in different parts of the country— newly separate time zones– and it’s going to be hard, but he likes her a lot. Enough to give it a shot. He winces as he remembers Rick’s deadpan dismissal when Morty had mentioned that he and Anne were going to do long distance over dinner a month or two ago. D–didn’t take you for that much of an idiot, Morty. As soon as she gets there she’s gonna be getting allll sorts of co-ed dicks in her mouth. But I guess you don’t mind sloppy digital seconds?
Ofc i will, he types.
Nobody’s heard from Rick in two or three weeks. Morty had kind of expected– well, he didn’t know what he’d expected, but he’d really thought that Rick would do him better than this. All he does is talk about how stupid Morty is all the time; maybe he’s pissed at being sort of wrong. He’d been straight up shocked when Morty got his acceptance letter in the mail, the packet fat in Morty’s hand as he raced down from his room to show everyone. While Summer screamed, and both his parents had cried, Rick had stared at the letter Morty was holding, hard, then sipped his beer, then turned back to the TV. N-nice one, Morty. A real cool sixty grand a year investment, there.
“Let’s go, Morty,” Mom says, opening the passenger side door. “I need some coffee if we’re gonna do this.”
Finally, Dad wipes his face. After taking a few deep, calming breaths, he walks over and sweeps Morty up in a hug.
“I’m proud of you, Morty.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“We didn’t think you’d make it, but you did. Of course you did. And that’s what matters.”
“Bye, Dad,” Morty said, leaning into the hug. “I–I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Morty doesn’t realize how much he misses the sound of a portal opening up until he hears one right behind them. Dad jerks back with a frightened twitch.
“What the hell–?”
Rick doesn’t so much step out onto the driveway as fall. He looks to be in a really bad way. Maybe as bad as Morty has ever seen him: scraggly and torn up, not even really standing up straight, too drunk for his body to cope with the flat, even keel of the pavement. One arm of his labcoat is missing, ripped off at the shoulder, and Morty’s thankful to see that the arm beneath is intact. Skinny, and maybe there are track lines, there, faint in the bright sunshine, but intact. There’s dried vomit crusted on his sweater.
“M-Morty, oh, God,” Rick moans. Morty feels a sinister shiver run over his shoulders and up the back of his neck as he watches Rick try to shield his eyes, blinking rapidly into the hot light. “Christ. Fuck.”
“Dad?” Mom asks, poking her head out of the driver’s window.
“Rick? Here to say goodbye to Morty?” Jerry asks, cautiously. Morty watches as he scooches himself to stand between his son and Rick, a little bit. A surprisingly brave move.
“Isn’t that w-what we’re all doing?” Rick asks back, taking a step forwards, then falling to one knee with a lurch as he loses his balance. “Saying fuckin’ goodbye— goAAUUGhodbye to Morty? Because he’s going away f-f-forever and never coming back?”
Rick’s drunken stare pins Morty to the side of the car, which had been parked outside so long while they packed that the metal is starting to get hot. The words sound like a taunt, but Morty can hear the truth there, a hard kernel in the middle.
“Hi, Rick,” he says, trying for indifference. In his pocket, he squeezes his hand around the detector.
Rick narrows his eyes. “R-R-Rick and Morty. One thhhhousand fuckin’ years. What, whatever happened to that shit, huh?”
“Dad–” Mom’s getting back out of the car.
“So I’m going to school. Big whoop,” Morty says, annoyed. Everything about this is annoying: Rick disappearing whenever he wanted then showing up just in the nick of time fucking shit faced like he’s trying to bail out the Vindicators. “You’ve been gone for, like, three weeks, Rick. And you didn’t feel the need to tell anybody about that. N-not that I would expect anything else at this stage. So, you know, whatever.”
“Three weeks?” Rick’s struggling to stand back up, now. “Three weeks?”
“You’ve never owed anyone anything in your whole goddamn– your whole stupid life, R-Rick. Not my family, not me. Not even Mom.”
Rick’s expression is foggy and drunk, but underneath, Morty can see he’s hurt.
“I think you should go, Dad,” Mom says in her stop-doing-this-right-now-or-you’re-fucked voice. “I don’t care if you portal out of here, or crash on the sofa to ride out your hangover, or whatever, but just. Let us leave.”
Somehow, Rick manages to get one leg in front of the other so he can advance up the driveway towards Morty with halting, wavering steps like a zombie in a horror movie. The detector in Morty’s pocket buzzes. Dad looks back and forth between them, scared.
“Three weeks, Morty?” he grinds out, again. He’s close enough now for Morty to see how bloodshot his eyes are. “I’ll give– give you three weeks. Y-you know what happens when you go to college Morty? You have four years to get too fuckin’ big for your idiotic little britches.” He grabs one hand around Morty’s bicep, grip crushingly strong. Morty can smell his rancid breath across his face, agitated, huffy. “And then you, you go and think you can do goAUUGHd, good things for the world, or whatever, you get those little aspir– aspirations in your head, Morty, you get these fucking ideas in your head–”
“It’s already been years, Rick,” Morty says, trying not to turn away. “Doing whatever, well at least, pretty much whatever, I-I guess, you wanted me to do.”
“– and you don’t even know how stupid these i–ideas are, until, boom, you’ve lived your whole sad-ass pathetic-ass life doing jack fucking shit. Goin’ and bein’ a techbro office slave narc or some shit. I just can’t, I just can’t ffffucking– oh fuck—”
Rick starts to throw up pretty spectacularly all over the ground, and the side of the car, and on Morty’s sneakers.
“Oh my god, Dad!”
“Oh, Rick that’s just disgusting!!”
Morty just stays quiet until Rick seems finished and he slumps against the car, moaning. He watches as Rick slides down until he’s half knelt, half crouched by the front bumper, the vomit running down the gentle slope of the driveway to touch his shoes and the spread hand on the ground that’s keeping him from falling on his face. He makes a sound when Morty comes closer, a sort of whimper. Morty gets down beside him. Unable to stop himself, he puts a hand on his grandpa’s back and starts rubbing little circles as Rick groans, spitting out a wad of bile. There are a lot of different colors in the vomit, ones Morty can’t recognize even though he’s pretty familiar with Rick’s binge habits by this point.
“Fuck youUUGh. Fffffuck you, Morty. I– I mean that. So much. '' Rick’s staring at the ground. He pinches the bridge of his nose with his hand. Morty wonders if maybe he’s going to be sick again.
“Yeah, fuck you, too, man,” Morty says, but there’s no heart in it. He just feels sad. He wishes– he doesn’t know what he wishes.
“F-forever. Fuck you, forever,” Rick mutters quietly, almost to himself. Little dark spots show up on the driveway beneath his head, and Morty realizes he’s crying. Or maybe it’s post-vomit drool? It’s hard to see his face.
“M-Morty, Morty listen to me,” Rick says. He sounds defeated, almost confused. As old as he really is.
“I’m listening, Rick.”
“I’m gonna do somethin’ stupid. Sooo, so stupid.” Rick’s still staring at the ground.
Dad’s shadow has crept next to Rick’s foot. “Rick, I really don’t think–”
“Whatever you’re about to do, think twice before you traumatize my son,” Mom says. Then she pauses and adds: “More.”
Morty keeps rubbing circles across Rick’s knobby spine. “What, Rick? What– what’re you gonna do?”
“Say you’ll.” Rick chokes a little.
“Say what?”
“Say you’ll marry me, Morty.”
Morty blinks. “What?”
“JeEUGHsus Christ, don’t make me say it again.”
Morty’s body is a live wire. His hand scrunches the back of Rick’s coat tightly. “No. Say it again.”
Rick stares up at him with watery eyes.
“Marry me,” he says, quietly. Pathetically. There’s some drool and left-over throwup clinging to his chin.
There was this one adventure they’d gone on where Morty had mangled his leg so badly that his shin bone had actually broken the surface of his skin. Burst right through below his kneecap, like a jagged, bloody tooth. It was screamingly painful– Rick actually had to knock him out until he was able to fix it with some nanobots. Morty realizes that this is the same as that; that this is some core part of Rick, torn through all the heaped layers of nihilism and drugs and whatever else poisons who his grandpa is. This is the exposed bone.
When Morty looks up at his parents, he can’t read the expressions on their faces.
“I– I’m not a good person, Morty,” Rick says, grabbing weakly at Morty’s t-shirt to get his attention again. Like he can’t bear to let Morty look anywhere else. He sounds like he’s really losing it. “I’m a horrible person, Morty. Say– say that you’ll marry me. God, I’ll blow my fuckin’ brains out if you don’t— let’s just g-g-get out of—oh my God—”
Morty’s pocket vibrates. He doesn’t know if it’s the detector or his phone, and he should care, should be terrified, but he doesn’t.
He isn't.
—
Turns out, Shoney’s is a regional chain.
Morty doesn’t realize this until they reach the last one at the edge of the state, just before they cross the border. ‘Last Shoneys for the next 24,800 miles,’ says the sign at the exit. There’s a graphic of an arrow reaching all the way around the globe, back to the little point on the map they’re driving through. Morty has traveled the multiverse with Rick, to places billions of light years away, so far away time doesn’t mean anything at all, but somehow this is already the longest trip he’s ever taken. Like that one scene in the Lord of the Rings where Sam crosses the corn field. If I take one more step, this’ll be the furthest from home I’ve ever been. That was a really good movie, Morty thinks.
His mom throws the car into park. She’s had to adjust the driver’s seat to be closer to the steering wheel because her legs are shorter than Dad’s, and change all the mirrors, too. She drives way faster than him, swerving lanes to cut around traffic like a maniac. Maybe that runs on her side of the family.
“Food?” she asks, simply. Morty nods. He twists to look over his shoulder.
“Rick?”
Rick stirs in the back seat, thin eyelids fluttering. They’d made space for him by shoving over a bunch of the boxes to one side and moving some to the trunk. There aren’t really that many, anyways. He’s wearing a clean pair of pants and a t-shirt that belongs to Dad, which helps, but he still has an undernote of puke and sweat.
He makes a hungover-sounding groan. He still hasn’t opened his eyes.
“You want Shoney’s?” Morty asks. “L-last chance.”
“Shoney’s, you say?” He cracks an eye open, gaze flickering around to look up at the building they’re parked at. “Didn’t know they had them out here. O-on earth, I mean.”
Mom watches him silently in the rearview mirror. Rick just looks at Morty.
“Y-you know what, fuck it, sure,” he says finally, popping open the car door and getting out. The sun is even hotter, here, and scorching air blows into the car when he slams it closed. Mom and Morty do the same, one, then the other.
vampire morty | 2k words | Rated M for blood drinking and sexual content
@rickortyweek
Morty’s getting pretty good at asking for it.
“H-hey, Rick?”
Rick doesn’t look over from the TV, which is currently playing a rerun of a JoJo Siwa political documentary in a universe where she’s the president of the United States. It’s a miniseries, a retrospective, and they’ve been powering through episodes all night. Everyone went to bed long ago; Mom, Dad, and Summer had started to give Morty a wide berth after ten PM. But he doesn’t mind not sleeping, now, because Rick doesn’t sleep either. Only in fits and starts. Sometimes over his work bench, face mashed into mechanical junk, or passed out on the couch. He snores, but only when he’s really drunk– not that Morty’s watching.
“Um,” Morty says, picking at a thread on the couch cushion.
“What?” Rick sounds too distant to be annoyed, just flat and tired.
“M’ getting kinda, you know.”
“What?”
“Hungry?” Morty’s voice cracks on the last part.
Jojo screams something excitedly on the TV, pointing at a diplomat from another country and waving. Her facial rhinestones match her power suit.
Rick’s still watching, glazed eyes flashing in the TV’s glow. “Her foreign policy sucked,” he mutters.
“I’m hungry, Rick.”
“Want me to order some fucking sugar chicken, then?” Rick asks, finally swiveling to actually look at Morty. “Huh, Morty? Want some Panda Express?”
Morty’s throat feels so dry it crackles. He thinks of the pool of sunlight that’ll be creeping towards them through the glass patio doors when the sun rises in a few hours, ready to burn him. His vision blurs a little and he gives a painful swallow.
“Y-y-you know what I mean, Rick,” he whispers. It isn’t fair that Rick always plays him like this when he’s fucked Morty up in the first place. Experiment gone sour, vampirism— Morty had to pick that term up– spreading too aggressively to be cut out, too deeply to pull the plug and hop to a clone. He rests his hand on the couch next to Rick’s leg. Not touching it, but just, you know, next to it. He can feel the heat of Rick’s body beside his own like he’s sitting near a radiator. Throbbing is such a weird word, but that’s the only way to describe it. Rick is throbbing with heat. Morty runs his tongue over the stubs of his teeth.
“You know, my blood is probably some of the nastiest shit you could put inside you,” Rick’s saying. “Got yeeears of k-lax and alcohol abuse in here. And some other stuff. I think one of Unity’s non-humanoid bodies might have had–”
“I don’t care. E-everything else tastes like ass and I don’t want to drink it.” Morty makes a face, saying that out loud, but it’s true. The bags of O-positive Rick had pulled out of his lab freezer after he’d just turned Morty had tasted like the equivalent of soggy pizza cardboard. Real pizza– all normal food– also tastes terrible. Animal blood has a funky, earthy smell and a worse flavor, when he’d tried it. And he isn’t about to make anyone else let him drink their blood.
Rick made his own bed. He can lie in it.
Rick watches his face for a moment, expression unreadable. Then he sighs, and rolls up his sleeve.
“Not on the couch, you little moron. Or, you wanna g-get b-blood everywhere?”
“I won’t get it everywhere,” Morty whines. He did the first time, when they fed in the garage, but he’s neater about it, now. He’d been so new, then, and dying for it, ready to rip Rick’s veins right open, ready to swim inside him to make the pain of his thirst go away. Now, after two weeks of feedings, he doesn’t waste a drop.
Rick tries to stand, but Morty catches his wrist. He’s taken aback at his own strength; that’s still a surprising perk. He keeps accidentally breaking doorknobs off of classrooms in school. Denting his locker door when he closes it with a slam so loud it echoes through the hallways. Shattering glasses. Jerking his own dick too hard and too fast by accident.
Rick pauses, looking down at him. He seems like he’s weighing making his grandson let go with words or by force. But Morty doesn’t let go. He can feel the throbbing of Rick’s blood now, pulse pressed against the circle of his fingers. His stomach twists with a tortured sounding gurgle.
“Please,” he says.
“Alright. Jesus,” Rick says, sitting back down with a roll of his eyes, yanking his wrist out Morty’s grasp quickly enough to break his hold. “Just a second, A-A-Augustus Gloop.”
He reaches into the breast pocket of his lab coat and pulls out a little packet, which he rips open with his teeth. Morty’s chest thuds because it looked kind of like a condom. He probably shouldn’t have thought that. Rick unfolds the moist towelette inside and uses it to briskly swab the inner part of his forearm. The pale stretch of it gleams up under the light of the ad that’s playing on TV, riddled with blue and green veins, skin going translucent with age. Morty’s mouth waters.
“You– you just carry a swab with you?” he asks, licking back drool. It’s a genuine question. Did Rick want to– was he just waiting around for Morty to—
“More for my benefit than yours. Human mouths are one of the diEUUGHrtiest parts of our bodies, Morty.”
“That doesn’t seem true, but okay,” Morty says.
“I’m not fucking with you. Humans are filthy.”
Rick throws the used wipe over the back of the couch, then pats the space beside him, like they’re going to cozy up and watch more TV together, easy as anything. Morty crawls over.
Rick offering his skinny-ass forearm to him like this in the middle of the house is insane. They usually feed in the garage, sitting clinically in separate foldable chairs, lights flipped on. It’s dark in the living room, and it should be hard to see—should leave Morty fumbling and awkward, unable to function—but it doesn’t. Morty’s different, now. Darkness is easy. This close, he can sense all the sweet spots where the most blood flows in Rick’s body and where to land the best bite; he would have liked it a lot better if Rick let him feed at his neck, or at the top of his thighs, or even near his armpits, he thinks, but he’ll take what Rick will give him.
“Don’t– don’t rip my fuckin’ arm off here, Morty, I need it.” They’re so close together that Rick’s voice is quieter than normal. Maybe he’s a little scared. Morty likes that; the idea of being able to scare Rick, a bit, for once.
“I won’t,” Morty says with a lisp. His pointy canine teeth are getting longer in his mouth and making it hard to talk. Carefully, he takes Rick’s offered arm into his hands. His left one, the one with less cybernetic shit in it, flesh and blood around a hollow titanium bone that sheathes a grappling device. He smells kind of bad but also kind of good, like he always does, like alcohol sweats and a familiar old man powderiness. Morty darts his tongue across his lower lip. Rick’s chest is rising and falling gently, calmly, as he waits for Morty to start.
“M’ just– don’t mind me, Morty, just watching TV, here. Just gonna finish this show, or whatever.”
Rick claims he’s a god-robot-monster all the time— won’t shut up about it. But it turns out he’s still human, Morty thinks, a little vindictively, as he bites down. At least, still human enough to feed him.
As he adjusts his bite to get the blood flowing, pressing against the smooth, hairless slip of Rick’s forearm with his tongue, he wonders if this was why people like wine. He’d always hated it, and spat out the mouthful of Mom’s that he’d snuck when he was ten and she was on the phone, because it was nasty, but maybe there’s something more appealing to it than he thought. An age and bitterness, in a good way, the kind that gives it a lot of different and interesting flavors at once. That’s what Rick’s blood tastes like. It tastes really fucking good.
The TV’s making more sounds, but Morty can’t hear them anymore. He’s way too busy gulping Rick’s blood. Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, he realizes he’s getting hard. Vaguely, he tries to direct his thoughts towards Jessica, but it’s tricky, considering he’s touching Rick and smelling Rick and drinking from Rick’s body. That Rick’s delicious blood is filling his mouth and sliding down his throat with every swallow.
The flow stutters, so he pressed up all along his grandpa’s side to get a better angle. For a second, his dick brushes against Rick’s leg, hot and obvious. He tenses. Rick doesn’t say anything, though, just keeps sitting there quietly, so he relaxes again. Whatever, if Rick doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, and everything feels good. This is so fucking good. It feels right. He keeps feeding, actively sucking, now, because the flow is starting to taper off, blood only coming in hot spurts when he coaxes it out. He rocks his hips, a little, getting some friction on his dick, because he’s so warm and full, and that feels good, too—
“—orty. Morty, that’s enough. Stop.”
Morty doesn’t stop. He swirles his tongue needily around the bite marks, pleasure unfurling up from his stomach and over his whole body, from his scalp to the bottom of his feet. Feeding from his grandpa like this is euphoric.
“M-Morty, stop.”
A hand pushes him back, roughly. It could be anyone’s hand. Morty is longer tethered to earth, fully. Suddenly, Morty’s laying on the floor by the coffee table, panting, ass sore from falling on it. His chin’s covered in own spit. His cheeks are flushed. There’s a definite tent pitched in his jeans, and everything is cold with the lack of a body to be pressed up against. When he looks up, Rick seems pale, even by his own standards, and his hair’s wilder, too. He’s blinking kind of a lot, staring down at Morty with fury on his face despite his heavy eyelids. He looks like he’s having trouble staying awake.
“You– you don’t know how lucky you are that my cybernetic enhancements will start injecting substitute into my bloodstream if I lose more than a quart of blood, Morty,” he says in a low, deadly voice. Morty hears the edge of a wheeze in it. “A quaAAAUGhrt. Do you know how much that is? You fucking, you fucking numbskull braindead idiot?”
“No?”
“That’s what I— that’s what I thought,” Rick says, getting unsteadily to his feet with the help of the couch arm. “I’ll be in the garage. Don’t follow me.”
Morty watches as his grandpa woozily makes his way out of the living room. He’s actually a little worried Rick’s going to pass out, or crash into something, but he doesn’t. He’s gone. Morty rubs the back of his hand across his mouth, and when he looks at it in the TV’s half-light, it’s smeared dark with Rick’s blood.
“S-sorry,” he says, late.
–
Morty climbs upstairs to his room even though it’s more like roleplaying someone that needs to sleep than an actual need. He lays down on top of his covers next to his closet that’s now full of hats and sunglasses and UV-protective long sleeve shirts, above a kitchen filled with food he can’t eat, and a hallway mirror he can no longer see his own reflection in.
He lays there quietly and waits, full-stomached, giving Rick a little privacy. Some time to cool off. If Rick noticed Morty’s hardon, he didn’t comment on it.
But Morty had seen where Rick’s blood went, while he was feeding.
He could sense it, the thick coursing of it, even in the dark.
“—long do we have to stay in this thing, Rick? I’m really about to freak out, here.”
“Shut the fuck up and just don’t, don’t move Morty. Just stay still and be quiet.”
“Like, really, really fr-freak out.”
“Well, don’t.”
“God. It’s dark, it’s so dark. I c-c-can’t move.’”
“...”
“Hey, hey. Morty. Stop breathing so fast.”
“...”
“C-calm down now, little buddy. Jesus. Hey. Breathe.”
“...”
“Yeah, like that. Just, just a little longer, Morty, okay? For grand, for Grandpa?”
“You know, Rick—”
“Whisper, Morty, goddamn.”
“You know, Rick, I knew one day we were gonna die together but I never thought I’d share a coffin with, with you. Or at– at least, I thought I’d be. You know. Dead?”
“Okay, smartass. W-we’re gonna have to stay in here a good long while, if you keep talking. If they hear us, we’re dog meat, and Groflommites have fly-fart-ass hearing. Just so you know.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Yeah, and? You’re a pussy. S-spread your knees more. I can’t feel my fuckin’ leg.”
“Where? There’s nowhere to move. I can’t even breathe.”
“Just move your leg so we can–”
“...”
“Rick–”
“Jesus Christ!”
“It’s not what you think it is—”
“What is it, your phone? L-listen, Morty. This is the part where I say: ‘It’s not something Grandpa hasn’t felt before. Don’t worry about it. Happens to everyone.’ But this– this coffin-boner with your grandpa is pretty f-fuckin’ weird.”
“I can’t help it!”
“Can’t help what, getting boners every few seconds? Ow! Hey! Get your elbow out of my liver, would you? It’s, it’s fucking delicate.”
“W-whatever.”
“...”
“Morty? M-morty, don’t start hyperventilating on me again.”
“M-m-m-aybe everything about this is pretty fuckin’ weird. Maybe our whole goddamn lives are pretty weird, Rick.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Maybe you, it’s your… You know what? Never mind.”
“What, I made you into a freak? A grandpa fucker?”
“Fuck you, Rick.”
“Well, yeah, seems like that’s the big idea, M-morty.”
“...”
“It’s better that we doOUUGHn’t talk about it. Trust me.”
“Ouch! What the–!”
“Okay, we’re, we’re moving now, they’re moving us. This is good. If we can get to the crypt I’ll be able to steal the nutsack and it’s beaaaaaach blanket bingo, baby, we are soooo good.”
“…”
“…”
“Don’t move your l-leg so much, stop it.”
“It’s rubbing back and forth on my– on the—”
“I can’t do anything, Morty, m’ just trying to h-hold on for dear life, here.”
“That’s–ah, oh my god– d-don’t move!”
“Even shame doesn’t make it go away? You’re real fucked in the head, Morty.”
1.9k | grandpa Morty and grandson Rick | rated M for medical trauma/noncon surgery/possessive behavior
@rickortyweek
Morty’s grandson is seventeen, six foot six, and drunk as balls in the middle of a Friday afternoon. It’s not even 2PM. They must’ve had early release at school– if he’d even gone at all. He probably hadn’t.
“C-C’mere, Morty,” he’s saying, swaying in the doorway, a beer he’d peeled out of his mother’s fridge dangling from his fingers. “C’mere, you old fuck. I got somethin–sooOUGHmthin’ for you.”
Morty looks up from his newspaper, pushing his reading glasses up on top of his head. He crosses one foot over the other on the ottoman and takes a ginger sip of his iced tea, pretending he doesn’t give a shit, when actually he does. Actually, he’s a little scared. He usually is around Rick, these days.
Rick’s gotten all close up, now. Morty can smell the peppermint schnapps under the sour hops on his breath. He can see the blush of acne on his jaw, the frayed edge on the bottom of his t-shirt.
“Do I hafta ask you again?” Rick asks, low. He’s watching Morty’s face closely, surprisingly focused, considering how drunk he is.
“W-what is it, Rick? I’m in the middle of reading about—” Morty looks down “--sports.” He honestly can’t remember the last few paragraphs, anyways, since Rick started skulking around. Baseball. Or maybe it was the Bruins?
Rick puts one hand on the arm of Morty’s comfy chair and leans over.
“P-p-please, Grandpa? S’ just in the garage.” He sounds wheedling, a little needy, the sort of voice that Morty’s always had trouble refusing. The kind of pathetic one. Rick had already passed his grandpa’s shrimpy height a few years ago, and shot up a full foot beyond that since, but. It’s hard not to to think of him as the little kid Morty’s been taking care of since he was so young he held books upside down to ‘read’ them.
He was the sweetest kid. Morty has to remind himself of that all the time, now. Lonely, nerdy, and always a little obsessive, but—sweet.
Crisply, he folds his paper and sets it aside, and stares at Rick until he blinks clumsily and gets the message, backing up a few wobbling steps. Once he’s not breathing down Morty’s neck, Morty gets up, hips creaking, and follows his grandson to the garage. He’s wearing the white lab coat again today, ratty and stained. He really likes that thing. Morty’s daughter said she was worried about him wearing it but Morty figured it couldn’t be all that bad if Rick was, you know, doing real science type stuff. And the stuff Rick does is real, alright. Realer than real. Scary real.
Morty moans under his breath as they make their way through the kitchen, where Rick abandons his beer to sweat itself warm on the counter. His right hip has been giving him some trouble, not helped by some of the crazy adventures Rick’s been dragging him on, recently. His body is getting less reliable, his joints, more sticky. That’s just part of getting old, though, Morty figures. He probably shouldn’t adventure so much anymore. He’d kind of rather just keep reading his newspaper than deal with whatever Rick’s trying to involve him in. Doze off, take a fucking nap right there in his chair. Maybe go take his daughter’s car to the corner store to buy some scratch-its, or work on the little patch of garden he’s started to cultivate in the backyard until the sun starts to dip behind the tops of the houses.
As he follows Rick down the shallow steps to the garage, he considers what would happen if he told Rick he was going to blow him off to water his tomatoes. Rick’s pretty creative. Maybe he’d make Morty’s shoes feel like he’s walking on uneven ground all the time. Or change his glasses lenses so they can see through clothing but only for other wrinkly old guys. Or booby trap the house with invisible whoopie cushions on every available surface so anytime Morty so much as leaned his busted hip against a wall there would be an embarrassing fart sound.
Or maybe he’d just give Morty a cold shoulder, brutal and bratty. Nobody sulks like his grandson; Morty remembers some pretty epic tantrums growing up, mainly every time his grandpa ditched him to go do something.
He’s too attached, Morty’s daughter said, a few years back after Rick had melted down when Morty had missed his twelfth birthday party. You’ve got to put some space between you, Dad.
That’d gone pretty great, clearly.
They get to the garage. Rick’s cleared off a table in the middle of it. Scattered around it are some carts covered in complex-seeming implements with caster wheels on the bottom. Looking at the table is already making Morty mighty nervous.
“What is– what’ve you got here, Rick?” Morty asks, carefully. It’s not feigned interest; he’s always genuinely curious about Rick’s experiments.
Rick’s already at another table messing around with stuff. He’s so much smarter than Morty even though he’s only seventeen and that’s terrifying, when Morty thinks about it, so he tends not to.
“JuUGHHst lay down for a second, okay?” he tells Morty.
“I don’t understand.”
Rick rolls his eyes and crosses his arms.
“I know y-you don’t, gramps. Just fuckin’ throw me a bone, here.”
He’s pushed up the sleeves of his coat, and the movement shows off the width of his bare forearms. He’s been getting stronger, lately, filling out more. HIs muscles are whipcord lean and defined from all the lifting and welding and tinkering he’s doing in here. He’s so tall he has to stoop over Morty when he talks to him.
Morty swallows, dryly, then obediently lays on the table. His body protests every step of the way, each point of his bony-ass joints pressing painfully against the stainless steel.
“Okay, I did it. Now what?” he says to the ceiling.
Rick’s messing with something that Morty can’t quite see, even as he twists to look.
“What’re you doing, Rick?”
“Surgery,” Rick says, casually, popping the plastic cover off what looks like an exacto knife with his teeth before spitting it into a bin. He places the blade on one of the trays, which Morty now notices seems to be holding a lot of specifically surgery-ready instruments. It glints in the fluorescent lights of the garage while Morty’s heart crawls to his throat (which can’t be good for it). He can feel his eyes getting big.
“Uh, hang on– h-h-hang on, Rick, you don’t mean–”
‘Take your clothes off.”
“I-I-I’m not doing shit, here, man.”
“Okay, j-just your pants then. And your underwear.”
Morty feels his face going red. “I—“
“I’m fixing up your broken-ass hip. Duh. Shit’s slowin’ us doooown. What am I supposed to do next time there’s a Borgor after us and you c-can’t keep up, huh? Just— just let it eat you?”
Rick seems genuinely annoyed, even a little distressed. Morty takes a breath. They need to rewind this a few steps, take it from the top.
“Listen,” he says, “I’ve had a lot of fun on our adventures, Rick–” he thinks of stuffing the megaseeds up his butt, and the Mr. Jellybean incident, and all the beings from one hundred different planets he’s killed over the past year– “but, maybe I should, you know. C-c-call it a day? On the adventure stuff?”
Rick is washing his hands, thoroughly, working soap between his fingers and up to his elbows. Morty didn’t know there was a sink in here. Maybe he built it, just for this.
“I–I–I’m serious, Rick.”
Rick is still silent.
“I don’t need— I’m j-just an old man, Rick. An old geezer. Can’t you just let me be an old man and do old man sh–shit?”
Rick spins around. “Hah! That’s no fuckin’ excuse,” he spits. “Table, go into lockdown.”
Morty jumps as plastic restraint cuffs suddenly unsheath from the smooth surface of the table top and wrap over his wrists and ankles. Rick’s picked up a needle from one of the trays. It’s full of a pale, pearly liquid.
“What the fuck, Rick—“
“I’ll fix you up, Morty, don’t y-you worry. I won’t even let it hurt.” He pauses. “Even thought I could,” he adds, quietly. He tries to approach Morty with the injection, but Morty’s not making it easy for him. The table’s shaking on its spindly legs with how hard he’s pulling against it.
“Let me go, Rick!”
“Table, make it tighter.”
Another set of restraints goes around Morty’s biceps, fully pinning him to the table. Though he can only barely lift his head, Morty watches in a remote horror as Rick slips the needle into a vein in his forearm and depresses the plunger.
“Just leave me a-a-a—“
The end of the sentence never makes it out of Morty’s mouth, locked in his stutter. The world is beginning to slip away, even as he fights against it, the whole dingy setup of the garage and Rick’s voice swirling down into the toilet of oblivion:
“Woah, J-J-Jesus, you’re really squirmy…”
–
When he wakes up, everything still feels pretty fuzzy. He blinks heavily a few times, trying to figure out where he is, what’s happening. He tries to move his legs, but his whole lower body is numb and it feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. When he tries to move his arms, he realizes he can’t really do that, either; something’s binding him, and someone’s talking above him, even though the words aren’t distinct, yet.
It’s Rick.
Rick is holding Morty in his lap, long legs on either side of his own. The walls are starting to swim into focus around them, and Morty can see the sad, bare drywall, a few bookshelves, a pair of dusty red curtains around a single window. They’re up in Morty’s room, on his bed, which is only a narrow twin. Outside, it’s the lingering end of twilight.
“B-back with us?” Rick asks. Morty can feel the vibration of him talking where he’s pressed against his chest. He smells like beer and chemicals, like the super strong bacteria killing soap they use at the doctor’s office. One of his hands is petting gently— still a little drunkenly— across Morty’s thinning hair.
“Y… yeah,” Morty mutters.
“Your hip’s fixed up, now. Had to tell Mom you were out playing v-video poker or some shit.”
Morty knows he’ll get hell for that later and grimaces. He wonders what kind of weird cybernetic component Rick’s placed inside his body, sitting there alongside his guts and muscles and worn-out bones.
“Gramps, listen.”
“Wh-What?”
While one hand still pets his hair, Morty watches as Rick’s other hand snakes down to his right hip. It seems miraculously mostly healed, besides the long pink line of a scar that’s revealed when Rick pulls the waistband of his pants down a little. It’s started to ache. RIck squeezes down, just enough pressure to radiate discomfort. His breath is hot in Morty’s ear.
“We’re never gonna stop. Never. N-n-not until I die. And I’m planning on living a goooood long time, Grandpa. I d-don’t care if we have to Ship of Theseus your whole shit. Rick and Morty, one hundred years. One hundred fuckin’ years. Yeah?”
Morty nods and whimpers, softly. “Yeah,” he says. “Rick and Morty. O-one hundred years.”
