Archive of Our Own

(art by the wonderful, amazing aki) 

(art by the indomitable, fantastic krsive)

It’s Halloween, which is one of Morty’s least favorite holidays. He’s in high school — practically an adult — which means he’s basically aged out of trick-or-treating and costumes in general. There’s always the sexy/slutty angle in terms of outfits, but Morty doesn’t think he pulls sexy off as well as, say, Summer. Who, by the way, is off at some Halloween party Morty was obviously too lame to get invited to. Summer did invite him to tag along, only because Morty looked “lame and sad”, which was sort of a sweet sibling moment even discounting the fact that Summer’s Slutty Vampire outfit had her titties, like, almost all the way out. He actually thinks he recognizes the cape (because, you know, the cape was the part of her costume he was looking at) from the Tiny Rick thing from forever ago. Summer stole it from that weird vampire.

Morty had declined the invitation, obviously, because he knows he’d just cramp Summer’s style every second he was there, which is apparently his whole fucking thing now, just being this cringy little puppydog that follows you to parties and alien planets and watches you do fun space cocaine and go God knows where to have sex with like twenty different aliens at once while your grandson just sits there and twiddles his thumbs and almost gets eaten by a giant alligator-thing with a taste for human flesh, specifically fourteen-year-old prepubescent boy flesh. Anyways. Morty’s not really in a partying mood.

The house is completely dark, including Morty’s room, save for his glow-in-the-dark stars and portal-green spaceship nightlight. His room seethes with green. Sitting here, Morty feels like he’s just woke up at two in the morning after a nap; someplace else, someplace otherworldly, suspended in time and Mountain Dew. Or some shit. There’s no reason for him to keep the lights off — it’s not like anyone is looking up at his window anyway — but Morty’s been bed-bound since this afternoon and just can’t bring himself to get up and turn on the lights. His laptop vents huff red-hot air against his stomach. It’s going to leave a red rectangle on his belly. The laptop is overheating because Morty has Minecraft paused in the background, and, like, half a billion Pornhub tabs open, not that he’s managed to jerk off all day, just mostly flipping through videos aimlessly, not even half-hard. A quarter-hard at best.

Normally Dad would have recruited him in handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, but Mom and Dad are both out on some date that Morty doesn’t even want to know the details about, given that they’re on this big sex-positive kick or whatever, so they’re probably doing some weird sexy Halloween thing with tantric sex dungeons and vampires, the sort of thing that they love telling Morty and Summer about for absolutely no reason, maybe to reassure them that they’re not divorcing or something like that, and it makes Morty want to light himself on fire. Morty wants to shake them and ask, like, What happened to boundaries! Are we still doing those! He guesses he prefers this to them being divorced, but it’s a close thing.

Also, Morty’s pretty sure the whole neighborhood has their house blacklisted because of that one incident with Dad mixing up the candy bowl with Rick’s space drugs and basically dosing the neighborhood’s kids with enough meth to knock out an elephant, which is the sort of thing Morty had assumed was just something that cable news shows liked to make up to scare parents. Rick and Jerry had — not really fought about it, because a fight is something that both people have to engage in, something Rick refuses to do with Dad. Rick found the whole thing hilarious, because he finds everything fucked up absolutely hysterical. So if Morty is being honest, there’s no real need to turn the lights off and pretend like they’re all out or asleep or whatever, hiding from trick-or-treaters, and if he’s being more honest, he’s only sitting here in the dark alone because he’s mad and upset about Rick being a total fucking manchild and complete certified asshole; and if he’s being completely, one-hundred-percent honest, totally transparent and on-the-level with himself, like, on a level of honesty basically unheard of outside of Jesus, he wishes he could take some of the things he said back if it meant Rick was here with him — like, not here specifically on his bed with him watching Pornhub, that would be weird, but in the house with him, on the couch in the living room watching the Hallowed Weiner Ball Fondlers special and making stupid jokes and fighting over who gets what candy.

But here he is, while Rick is off-planet probably getting drunk and high and having sex with forty different aliens, having the time of his life without having to worry about his stupid needy grandson — not even thinking about how his grandson is sitting like a fucking loser alone in his room, moping.

Well, Morty can have his own fun. He doesn’t need Rick.

This is the thought that ends up spurring Morty out of bed, shoving his laptop off his lap and fumbling his way downstairs in the dark. He still doesn’t turn on the lights, because he doesn’t feel like dealing with the few kids who didn’t get the memo ringing the doorbell.

Morty has the whole house to himself. The whole place feels special in the pitch-black, like a secret fort. He avoids the stairs that creak; there’s no one here to hear him, and it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong , but it feels like he shouldn’t make noise.

Dad got some giant variety bags of candy from Costco, still keeping the hope alive, maybe, for normal family Halloween activities like passing out candy. Morty grabs one of the bags from the kitchen and makes his way back to the living room.

There’s a lot of ambient light downstairs: blue-green-red glows from cracks and floor panels, too faint to see in the daytime but clearly visible in the dark. There are countless secret compartments and traps in the living room in particular, where Rick has hidden weapons and supplies — which, given all the crazy shit that has gone down here, seems pretty pragmatic. Who knows when carbon copies of you and your family will come storming in trying to kill you? Still, there’s no particular reason for them to glow in the dark, Morty thinks, stopping right before he sits down on the couch; no reason other than Rick’s appreciation for the fun in making sci-fi gadgets. He likes little things like that, like making things look cool. Standing right there in the middle of the living room, Morty smiles to himself like a crazy person; he can’t help it.

He’s losing it. Morty forces himself to focus on other things, like finding the remote, which is never in the last place he left it. He glances up, just to make sure; once he found it stuck to the ceiling, which raises questions, such as What the fuck? and How? and What was keeping it stuck there? (Rick, Rick, and Morty doesn’t want to know.)

Thankfully the remote is just wedged between the couch cushions. Morty tosses the bag of candy on the couch and plops down on the middle cushion, before realizing he doesn’t actually need to leave room on his left for Rick. He shifts to the left cushion. It feels strange. He moves back.

The TV, turned on, almost blinds him in the dark. It takes him a minute of blinking to acclimate; it doesn’t help that whatever’s on screen seems to be created for the specific purpose of triggering epileptic fits in its viewers. Morty flips through channels for a while. A lot of the shows are Halloween-themed, or their equivalent in whatever planet the shows are from, which is odd, since Halloween strikes him as something specific to Earth — and even if they did have an equivalent to Halloween on those planets, why would they all take place in October?

Rick would know. Morty smiles bitterly to himself, and then immediately stops. He needs to stop doing whatever this is. He can go a day —  a day! — without Rick without freaking out. He can . He opens the industrial-size bag of candy with more strength than is strictly necessary, sending Kit-Kats skittering down to the carpet, and sighs.

Rick seems to like Halloween; it’s at least one of the holidays he doesn’t go out of his way to voice his disdain of, like Valentine’s Day or Easter. Last Halloween, he spent a whole five minutes staring at some indeterminate point at the wall and rambling incoherently about holiday specials before insisting Morty dig out his old Halloween costume from when he was, like, twelve, in order to “get into the spirit”. When Morty asked why Rick wasn’t wearing a costume, Rick said he didn’t need a costume, since he was already a fucking mad scientist, Morty, what — how much more costume do you need? And Morty had replied, Well, then I-I, I’m dressing up as a fourteen year old boy, and Rick had said, That’s not the same and you know it, and they had, now that Morty is thinking back on it, they had gotten into a fight then too. Maybe Halloween is just cursed. Obviously. That’s the whole point of the holiday.

Nothing on Interdimensional Cable is grabbing Morty’s attention. Morty forces out a weak chuckle at a show centered around “Count Cockula”, but that’s about it. The fun part, he realizes, is riffing on the ridiculous premises and characters, which is always better when Rick is there. It’s stupid. It’s stupid! Why should Morty’s thoughts keep spiraling back to Rick, that one singular conclusion. He can’t watch TV without thinking about Rick, he can’t relax on the couch without thinking about Rick, he can’t even fucking watch porn anymore without thinking about — well.

Looking back on their argument, it was mostly Morty’s fault. It was Morty just wanting more of Rick’s attention, wanting to feel like Rick gave enough of a shit about him to look out for his safety, even, which is a dangerous trap to fall into; he knows this. He knew this. Rick was just being himself; Morty was the one being weird, being a brat, being a total fu-u-UUH-king killjoy. Morty has been on enough adventures that he should be able to fend for himself. He just wanted —

But, Morty thinks, catching himself, but Rick shouldn’t have abandoned him there. It’s not a jealousy thing! It’s perfectly reasonable to expect your, your…

…your partner to look out for you, especially when your partner knows there are creatures present that want to eat you. And after your partner barely escapes by the skin of his teeth from being eaten alive, you should be — concerned! For his safety! You shouldn’t laugh at him, get annoyed at him for interrupting whatever the fuck was going on in that giant, disgusting mass of limbs and pulsing flesh. Just because it’s normal behavior for Rick doesn’t make it right, Morty reminds himself, reaching down and finding that wellspring of anger from last night, feeling it fresh and new and indignant. Rick doesn’t give a fuck about him or his safety, Morty thinks, hearing feeling his breath come faster, angrier. How could Morty have ever wanted him around? The only thing Rick gives a shit about is how useful Morty is to him at any given moment.

Morty springs up from the couch, abandoning his candy and the pretense of watching TV, and stomps over to the garage. He knows that Rick is gone; Rick made a big fuss about leaving for a few days to find a planet where the inhabitants aren’t so bitchy and irritating all the time, which is, like, real fucking mature of him, but then again Morty did come back from their last adventure and slam the door hard enough for Rick to hear it downstairs, so — so nothing, Morty still isn’t going to make excuses or justify Rick’s behavior, he’s not going to do it, and he tries to keep a good grip on his own fury as he wrenches the door to the garage open. Rick’s not there, but Morty can still fuck with some of his stuff. Why should he care?

The lights are off in the garage, and the glow cast by whatever half-finished projects Rick has lying around isn’t nearly bright enough for Morty to see where he’s going, so he flicks on the lights. And then he shouts.

Well, really, he screams, and then he’s halfway to fumbling out his pistol before he recognizes the figure in front of him. He wasn’t expecting to see Rick here, much less slumped over on the ground by his workbench. Morty really shouldn’t be startled by this, since Rick so often jumps out from fucking nowhere just for fun and to scare the everliving shit out of Morty, but it’s still an unnerving sight.

“R-Rick,” Morty stutters, not at all sounding cool or badass or sick of his shit like Morty had imagined. “Jesus, w-what, what are you doing down there?”

Silence. Rick must be out cold. Morty feels a thrill of sick satisfaction at the thought, and even allows himself, for a moment, to consider the idea that Rick got shitfaced because he felt as bad about their fight as Morty did. He shouldn’t feel good about that. He shouldn’t feel anything at all about that. And yet.

Morty shuffles closer to Rick, half-bracing himself for Rick to leap up and shout. That would be something Rick would do, in the spirit of Halloween or whatever, not that he particularly needs a reason to fuck with Morty just to see his reaction. Then he notices Rick isn’t breathing. And the way he’s slumped over — almost seems like — 

There’s a moment of pure panic before Morty stumbles down to Rick’s level, pressing a hand to Rick’s neck, feeling for a pulse, his heart dropping down to his stomach when he can’t find one. “Rick,” he tries, shaking his shoulders, “ Rick , c’mon, man, w-wake, wake up, this isn’t funny,” thinking maybe for a moment in desperation that Rick did this to try and guilt Morty, and — and everything’s okay, everything will be fine, there are things in Rick’s garage for this, plus there’s always Operation Phoenix But Cooler and Not Shitty, Morty just needs to get himself together and remember where the stuff is — and that’s when he notices that Rick is missing the scar on his neck from that fight on Ulaaku-87. He wrangles his lungs back from where they’re trying to escape from his ribcage, takes a moment to examine Rick in more detail.

Looking closer, it seems ridiculous that he thought it was actually Rick: the — robot, he’s guessing — robot is slumped over, limbs twisted, unnaturally, outward. There’s an incision made in the robot’s blue sweater; some exposed wiring clamoring out from a hole in the ‘skin’. It looks as if Rick was in the middle of making some adjustments. One arm’s sleeve is rolled up, exposing some kind of artificial joint in the crook of its arm that reminds Morty of the freaky dolls at Grandma’s house. Morty reaches out to touch it, and nearly scrambles back at the sensation of it — the skin, or covering, or whatever, feels so real .

Rick himself is an ugly, restless sleeper: he drools, he snorts, and his brow is always furrowed in on itself in the suggestion of a bad dream, but this robot version looks so — content, as if in a deep sleep. Something twists in Morty’s chest. His hand comes up to brush against its cheek.

Morty hates that Rick makes his creations so impossibly lifelike. It makes them hard to interact with; harder to kill. In addition to being unnervingly lifelike, the robots Rick designs have a weird tendency to develop sentience, which might say something about Rick that Morty doesn’t want to examine. He wants to attribute the realistic quality of this... robot? doll? to Rick’s narcissism, but that wouldn’t be fair. Morty’s seen the robots modeled after himself; they are flawless down to the tiniest details. Sometimes it freaks Morty out, seeing them, struck with the bizarre feeling that they’re better than him, a more perfect version of himself. Rick knows his body better than he does. He could design a better version of Morty. He could . Morty tries not to think about it. He hates the idea of something that looks just like him, programmed to do everything Rick tells it to do. He hates the idea of it being the better option.

And then, inexplicably, suddenly, Morty remembers the reason he had come here in the first place; the helpless rage at Rick’s callousness. How could he — he knew leaving this doll here would scare Morty. There’s something going on here, some form of emotional manipulation going on in the soft, peaceful sleep of the doll, he knows it, maybe — maybe it’s half of a pair of dolls, of robots, the other half of that pair of course being a robot Morty, a perfect replica of Morty except not annoying and able to sit perfectly still, perfectly patient as Rick goes off to do his own thing, absolutely, resolutely competent, and — and maybe, Morty thinks, aware that he’s getting more and more hysterical, his lungs ballooning in his chest, refusing to deflate, maybe Rick has taken that robot Morty out with him, maybe they’re out together right now, Rick thinking to himself Why didn’t I do this earlier, deciding right then and there as Robot Morty does bong hits with him or something incredibly cool that the real Morty would never do, deciding that he’ll only ever take Robot Morty out on adventures with him, because at least Robot Morty won’t bitch and complain about being abandoned, won’t go out and stupidly put himself in danger, and Morty gets that numb, itchy feeling in his hands, nails digging bright points into his palms, and then there’s a sudden, jarring pain in his knuckles; the doll Rick falls over with a sick, fleshy thud. It sounds exactly like the way Rick sounds when he crumples to the floor, hit by a stray bullet or laser. 

Morty’s breath freezes in his chest. He waits — for what? The doll to come to life? And maybe beat the shit out of Morty? — but nothing happens. The doll remains motionless on the floor. Its eyes are still closed. 

A terrible thought occurs to Morty, a thought even more terrible than the last: what if this is what Rick wanted ? What if Rick anticipated that Morty would take out his anger on the doll, and has hidden a little camera somewhere in the room, even — even on the doll itself, and is plotting to use this footage for emotional blackmail later down the line? Not that Rick particularly gives a shit about his creations’ feelings, even the sentient ones’, but he knows that Morty does, that Morty would feel bad about hitting the doll — and he does , staring down at its peaceful sleeping face, blissfully unaware. It didn’t ask to be modeled after a total fucking asshole. But — but the doll hadn’t reacted. There’s no way it would be able to feel anything Morty did to it, hell, part of its chest is ripped out, so — so! If Rick wants this so badly, knows Morty so well, then Morty might as well just prove him right, since, you know, he’s always right about everything.

Morty tries to yank up the doll by its sweater, but he misjudges how heavy it is, probably owing to the machinery inside or whatever, and pulls it up with enough force that its forehead bangs against Morty’s.

“Mother— fucker! ” Morty hisses, bringing his free hand up to rub at his head, and the doll slumps against Morty’s shoulder, just like the real Rick does when he’s shitfaced; his full weight on Morty, enough to bring them both down if Morty falters, even for a moment. After the sharp pain in his head fades into more of a dull ache, Morty gathers himself; he yanks the doll upright by its hair, looking at it head-on, eye-to-closed-eye.

“You — you’re such a dick,” Morty tells it authoritatively, trying to imagine the doll as the real Rick, sleeping off some legendary bender; trying to imagine talking to future Rick, watching this recording, probably feeling like a real dipshit; trying to imagine this as anything other than what it is, which is Morty yelling at a replica of his grandfather like an insane person. The doll doesn’t move, or otherwise react. It stays sleeping, which irrationally makes anger shiver hotly through Morty’s arms. It’s always like this, always Morty feeling sorry for Rick, passed out on the ground in a puddle of his own puke, pathetic: sorry enough to forgive him.

Part of the problem is that Morty hates kicking anyone while they’re down. It’s not right. His own kindness is half-assed; it’s not doing anyone any favors, and at the end of the day he’s got as much blood on his hands as Rick does. He wishes he could just… turn it off. Be more like Rick.

“I-I don’t, I don’t get you,” Morty says. He can’t look at the doll’s face without wavering; he looks at the concrete floor. “Y-you get annoyed whenever I’m in trouble, whenever — whenever I need you, but then — then you make me feel so small, a-and, and you do it on purpose because — because you want me to need you, you just can’t, can’t admit it.”

He's dreamed about this. The opportunity of a limp body, unable to protest, saying: you could do anything you want to me. In the dreams, he never does anything. It feels, stupidly, unearned. Of course, he's more than earned the right to retaliate after a lifetime of abuse, but — the right? No. Nobody has the right. Not even him. No matter what Rick does to him.

It would be like attacking a pillow, a punching bag. Something designed to take violence without complaint. A stand-in for the perpetrator of other cruelties. In other words, a little too close to home. Morty needs Rick to fight back for it to feel fair. He really is, he thinks, darkly, sickly, just like his grandfather.

No. Rick wouldn't even hesitate. When it comes down to it, the struggle is a bonus for Rick, not a requirement. He is not his grandfather. He can’t be. He won’t. He refuses.

The fight drains out of him; makes his body heavy. The place where he struck doesn't bloom red like it would on a real body made of flesh and blood. He lets his hands slide from the doll’s hair to the soft skin of its cheeks, which are — warm? Odd, but not entirely out of the question, considering there’s probably some electronics humming just underneath the surface. It feels real, human. Morty’s heart aches.

“I just…” Morty’s throat closes up in the middle of his sentence. He rallies. “I-I just wanted you to be more like a — a regular grandfather. N-not even the, the science stuff or whatever, I just — all I want is for you to even pretend that you give a shit about me, t-that you…” ...love me . Something awful and vulnerable like that. Morty bites it down, even if Rick’s not physically present to rip into him for it. He’s gotten good enough at this that he can fill in the blanks on his own.

Morty’s thumb drifts towards Rick — the doll’s lips, mostly out of curiosity. Of all the things they’ve done, Morty has never actually felt Rick’s lips before. Not that the doll’s lips are necessarily going to be an exact replica of the real thing. They’re smooth, shockingly soft.

He’s going crazy. He needs to stop now, while he still has a scrap of plausible deniability. Morty’s hands don’t get the memo; his thumb slips inside into plush wetness. It’s hot — inside the doll's mouth. It shouldn’t be. Morty feels dizzy. Is it — there’s no way, Morty saw the wires picking out of its chest — but then again, couldn’t that have been an augmentation — no, because that doesn’t explain the limbs, the ball-joints. He feels like he stood up too fast after lying down for a few hours, all the blood inside him scrambling to figure out exactly where to go. Meanwhile, his hand has a mind of its own: the pad of his thumb and now index finger press against the smooth slick of teeth, the velvet inside of the doll’s cheek. There’s a little bit of drool leaking out from the corner of the doll’s mouth. There’s a little bit of drool leaking out from the corner of Morty’s mouth. How is he going to explain this?

There’s a strange few moments where Morty can’t decide what to do. Well, the answer is obvious: he should retrieve his fingers, get up, walk back to the couch, stare blankly at the TV playing a show from a universe where people have asses for heads or whatever, and then wait for Rick to come back. And forgive him. And pretend none of this ever happened. And go back to normal. You know. The usual. Back to normal, where Rick continues to treat Morty like shit, and Morty continues to pretend that he doesn’t want anything more than that.

His thoughts feel slow, like they’re moving through jelly. He looks at the doll. He considers aspects of the situation.

He drags it under the workbench with him.

Nevermind that this is the exact opposite of what he should be doing. Nevermind the wet spot on the concrete that Morty’s twenty percent sure is water, and one hundred percent sure he’d rather not have on his one free hand, the one that’s propping both of them up, his other hand still in the doll’s mouth like a fishhook. Nevermind that a desk makes for a pretty shitty hiding spot, especially if Rick’s got cameras planted down here, or anywhere, or any sort of way to check the doll’s memory or something. It’s the thinnest defense, which is enough for Morty.

Morty deems pulling the doll up onto his lap a lost cause; whatever material it’s made out of is heavy — almost heavier than the real Rick. He wraps his legs around its waist to keep the doll upright. His fingers, taken out from the now-slack mouth, are spit-shiny. There’s a thin line of drool connecting his index finger to his thumb.

Something shifts in him; a familiar tightness low in his stomach. No, he tells himself, that quiet internal voice holding up a hand: Stop. This is not something you can come back from. Morty stares at the doll, the shine at the corner of its mouth. You could do anything you wanted to .

Morty’s kissed before. Hell, he’s got a lot of practice. He’s never quite prepared for how slippery it is, that wet slide of teeth and tongues and skin. There’s a not-unpleasant plasticky newness to how Rick — the doll tastes, nothing like Morty imagined it, less vodka and stomach acid-sweetness, but then again Morty has always imagined this as having more shouting and yelling and kicking of balls (specifically Morty’s balls) and disgust and so forth. He’s thought about kissing Rick when he’s blackout drunk, passed out, unable to fight back. Funny how he’s too good for violence, but not for sexual assault.

The doll doesn’t move. Its mouth is slack; there is no opportunity for the sort of chaste closed-lips first-kiss even if Morty wanted that. Morty has never kissed someone so pliant, except for the last time he had sex with a doll, which, given the chance, could form into a pattern Morty really doesn’t want to consider. Absolute control is new to him, and there’s a thrill, a heady sensation in the way Morty is able to shove his tongue all the way in, enough to make him choke. He’s not the kind of guy who gets off on that sort of thing, not the kind of guy who keeps sex dolls around because they can’t fight back, but there’s something undeniable about this kind of power. Fever-sick tension fizzes underneath his skin, and Morty groans, wraps his legs tighter around the doll’s waist, pulls himself onto its lap, grinds belly-heat down onto whatever part of the doll he can reach.

Morty shoves his hands under the doll’s sweater and it’s hot, maybe it’s just the fever of his own flushed skin but he can feel the hum of electronics he barely understands, the genius of his grandpa just underneath his fingers, and if this is all Morty can get he’ll take it, he’ll take anything, skin so peach-soft and giving when Morty presses hard enough to leave impossible bruises.

“Ri — Grandpa,” Morty gasps when he pulls away, in that tiny space between their mouths, hands fumbling greedily up the doll’s body, up the river-curve of its spine, his other hand pressing up higher, up its chest, blue wool hitched up, and it’s his own delusion, his own fantasy, so: “c-c’mon, I want — I need you to fuck me, please,” the one thing Morty has never let himself say, and he groans, his hard-on bordering on painful, “help me, I —”

There’s the slight sharp sting of static electricity at the tips of his fingers; he must have pushed up a little too high, reached that spot with the gore of metal and wires, and Morty hisses, but it’s not enough to stop him from pressing his tongue back into the doll, searching for something in that sweet hot wet, the creases of the roof of its mouth, swallowing thickly. Morty fumbles for one of the doll’s hands, grabs it, pushes it under his own shirt, and it’s pathetic how he has to do this but he doesn’t care anymore, he’s already made it this far, he’s basically been edging himself all day and he needs , he’s so close, and there’s — there’s fingers twitching against his belly.

Morty unlatches himself from the doll’s mouth. The doll’s eyes are open. It stares at him in electric blue.

Dread weighs Morty’s body down for about a half-second, freezing his voice in his throat, before he flings himself bodily across the garage. His head bangs against a steel leg of the shelf, and the last thing he thinks as he watches a box of heavy metal parts come crashing down onto his head is: I deserve this.

He braces himself for an impact that — doesn’t actually come. When he manages to unstick his eyelids from each other, the first thing he sees is the doll towering protectively over him, one arm braced on the shelf leg, another holding the box in place, preventing it from falling and pancaking Morty into wet human goo, right there on the concrete. It would be what he deserves; karma, having lost Rick’s number, has Morty on speed-dial.

The doll doesn’t speak. It just stares blankly, probably writing this all to some internal memory drive. Morty’s heart thuds in his chest, struggling to pump very thick blood, and the longer the silence drags on the more Morty’s brain shifts into overdrive, picturing scenarios where Rick taps into the doll’s memory and sees what happened, freaks out, leading to Morty having to move solar systems, if not dimensions altogether, and he really doesn’t want to go to the Citadel where every Morty smells kinda like whole milk, and he’ll have to enroll in Morty Academy to figure out how to do his job, his one job which is not fondling his grandpa’s dick and also not getting him killed and stuff, even if this version of his grandpa is just a robot, and maybe Morty could rough it in Xerses-9 if he tried, he likes the natives there even if all their food consists of centipedes, like literally all centipedes, and he can just picture it now, choking down some freakishly large centipede with big round eyes that look at him in a questioning way, that question being Why do you want to have sex with your grandfather, the answer being I don’t fucking know, maybe if he knew the answer he wouldn’t be here, and

“ — Morty.”

It sounds exactly like Rick. Of course it would. Maybe even a little deeper, a little scratchier — from disuse, maybe, Morty has no idea how those sorts of things work in robots. Morty’s dick, still uneasily tucked into the tetrahedron of his pants, hasn’t gotten the message that Party Time Is Over, and strains upward, trying to catch more. Morty tries to will it to go down, not that that has ever worked before in his life but hope springs eternal, and at least without a visible hard-on he could maybe make the case when Rick gets home and confronts him that he wasn’t actually, like, trying to fuck this exact replica of Rick, more like performing advanced system diagnostics and maintenance involving shoving his tongue into the doll’s mouth or whatever.

There’s a scraping sound as the box is pushed back up onto the shelf. The doll leans down, wobbles. After years of practice catching the drunk, stumbling body of his grandpa, Morty stumbles to his feet, instinctively surges upward, arms open.

The doll catches itself, hands braced on Morty’s chest, head coming to rest on Morty’s shoulder. It’s heavy, and Morty’s leg bones have gone on vacation; Morty tries best he can to lower them gently down to the ground without crumpling and spraining his own ankle, which would really elevate this whole shitty situation to art, honestly.

“H-hey, uh, it’s — it’s okay, no need to rush, I-I’m not going anywhere,” Morty stammers, trying for reassuring and blasting straight past it to weird and creepy, but then again literally anything would sound creepy from a guy who was literally, God, touching it without its consent, like, it’s a robot but still , waking up to this horny guy making out with you is not a good feeling regardless of whether you’re a robot or a doll or an organic life-form. 

“L-listen,” he says, basically trying to explain, “I — I, uh, I didn’t — I wasn’t, I thought — “ you were out of commission , which Morty doesn’t say because it would be the human equivalent of some guy apologizing for molesting you because he thought you were sleeping, or, no, he thought you were dead , like that makes it any better.

The doll slowly raises its head, and Morty suddenly has the horrifying vision of it blasting Morty with laser eyes. Morty tries to subtly wriggle out from where he’s sitting, the doll leaning against him for support, almost sitting on him, because, yes, he theoretically kinda deserves being lasered for being a dumb horny asshole, and, yes, he knew he’d eventually end up either dying from thinking with his dick or from fucking around with Rick’s stuff, so it’s pretty fitting that he’d die from both at the same time, but he’d at least rather die from the real Rick shooting him.

“Self. Defense. Systems. Online.”

“W-wait,” Morty babbles, panicking, struggling in earnest when the doll puts its hands on his shoulders, Rick is going to come back and put the pieces together and Morty will never live this down, even in the afterlife, he’s pretty sure this qualifies him for Hell — but then he catches a toothy grin on the doll’s face.

“J-just, just joking, kiddo, I’m not gonna do anything,” the doll says; Morty can see its face now, the crinkle of its eyes in amusement, a bright sparkle of recognition. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

“I-I-I thought, I thought you — you were going to kill me!” Morty gasps. “You didn’t look like — like you recognized me at all.” Morty judders his leg nervously, acutely aware that he was this close to a Code Yellow, because, to be completely honest, there aren’t a lot of people who wouldn’t piss themselves at the prospect of dying a painful death.

“Sorry,” it says, looking, for a moment, genuinely remorseful, which is a weird sort of expression to see on something that so closely resembles Rick. “It, uh, it took me a little bit to fully, you know, boot up.”

“Are you —” Morty starts, then reconsiders. A robot? A clone? After Hologram Rick and the whole clone thing, he’s sort of gathered that most people take offense to the idea of being, well, not “real”, not the most original and irreplaceable version of themselves — including Rick, which is weird and sort of hypocritical because Rick has always made it very clear that there’s a billion, infinitely more competent copies of Morty out there that Rick could easily replace him with, not to mention all the back-up clones of Morty and robots and so on, which is a reality that Morty has had to make uneasy peace with. It’s not even that Rick doesn’t like clones — hell, he was the one who made clones of himself, teamed up with that weird wasp Rick; but, at least from what Morty has gathered, Rick hates the idea of a version of himself that he can’t control or understand. It looks like this iteration of Rick has his personality, and on top of that Morty’s not even sure if it knows it’s not the real Rick, and Morty doesn’t want to be the one to break the news to it.

“A robot?” the doll finishes for him. Morty nods meekly. The doll chuckles. “K-kid, it’s okay, I-I know I’m not the actual Rick, y-you don’t have to — to worry about me flipping out on you.”

Morty can’t stopper his sigh of relief in time, and the doll laughs with warm, bright amusement. Some knot in Morty’s chest eases.

“I’m, uh — well, I guess you, you could call me a robot, but I’m more of a,” the doll pauses, considers; “more of a ‘vessel’.”

“A vessel?”

“N-not to get all, you know, metaphysical on your ass, technically I’m a defense system, but I’m specifically p-programmed to, to protect you. Part of my creator’s consciousness is programmed into me, the — the part that has a genuine desire to look after your physical and emotional well-being.”

Morty bites the inside of his cheek so hard he draws blood. His breath jitters in his lungs; his organs suddenly feel fragile inside him. “S-so in other words, you’re the — the part of Rick that’s not an asshole?”

There’s a little glimmer in its eye. “Pretty much.”

“S-so, uh, you’re like — I don’t know if you knew about the whole thing w-where we, we went to the spa, and there were, like, toxic versions of ourselves…”

“I’m not like that,” the doll says simply, then smiles, a little self-deprecating. “W-well, I mean, I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was toxic or not, nobody thinks they’re toxic, and I’m not saying there aren’t - aren’t similarities, but — I think the transferred consciousness, that part, that’s - that’s a little different.”

“Oh.”A horrible thought occurs to Morty. “You’re not — you’re not gonna, gonna, do, uh, anything drastic to — to protect me, right?”

“N-nah, I’m not — I’m not gonna go all HAL 9000 on your ass a-and kill anyone who looks at you funny, I — that’s why I’m embedded with, uh, what you could basically call the — grandfatherly? Uh, the human part of him, which is kind of ironic, considering,” the doll makes a sweeping gesture to itself, “but, uh, yeah, I’m not gonna kill anyone. Unless someone’s bothering you?”

Morty chuckles at the joking uptick of the doll’s lips at the end. “J-just Rick.”

“Yep. G-guessing you guys had s-some, some kind of fight.”

“How’d you know?”

A snort. “Because that — old bastard a-always, always messes with my circuitry when some shit goes down between you two.”

“Oh,” Morty says. “Is, i-is that why you, uh.” Morty gestures to the exposed wires in the doll’s chest.

“Yeah, he was trying to deactivate me last night. O-obviously he didn’t do a good job of it, but, uh, I’m usually ‘awake’ when he does system maintenance, and I heard him rambling to himself about — about you being ungrateful.”

Morty makes a disbelieving noise in his throat, feeling the old blood of his anger run hot again. “T-that fucking — I — I-I just wanted him to, to give a shit about me and not — leave me alone while, while he goes and —”

“I know,” the doll says, voice dipping low in sympathy. “That’s what I t-told him last night, and he, uh, he didn’t like that, w-which is fucking stupid because he’s the one who designed me like this, weird that he’d be, uh, surprised that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do, b-but I told him he should try pulling his head out of his ass before he l-loses you. W-which is what he’s afraid of, by the way, that’s — that’s the whole reason I exist in the first place, j-just in case you weren’t — I mean, he doesn’t make it easy for you to tell.”

It’s hard to square the lingering rage Morty feels towards Rick with the sudden swell of affection he feels for this — this version of Rick. “H-how did you, um. How did you — ?”

“Come back to life? U-uh, nah, ignore that. It sounded less like some Grimm fairytale ‘look-I’m-a-real-boy’ Pinocchio bullshit in my head. I’m programmed to respond to a few cues — like I said, I’m basically tuned towards you, and typically it’s the combination of biometric cues, like a spiking heart rate. f-for example, and any combination of the phrase ‘help me’, s-so. Even if my systems are disabled, I’ll still, uh, come out of sleep mode.”

Morty stares at him for a moment, trying to think of when he — oh. He feels a flush creep up his face. The doll — Rick — catches sight of it, flashes Morty a lopsided smile that, even through the heat haze of shame, does awful things to Morty’s heart.

“I’m n-not — well, anyways. Thing is, this wasn’t just me in regular sleep mode. I-I shouldn’t have been able to respond, since I was disabled from t-the, the hardware side of things, I mean, that’s the whole, the gaping hole in my chest. You know Ricks, they, they don’t think straight when they’re angry and drunk.”

“Then — then how did you wake up?”

“T-this is just a theory, but — when you touched me — humans, uh, they have a electrophysio— they conduct a very low level of electricity, and when you’re, uh, excited, that — the electricity from your contact might have been enough to override those hardware failsafes. There’s a — I’m, uh, trying to explain this in a way that makes sense, but, uh — with the brainwaves, our brains have a certain electrical impulse, a-and ours complement each other, and, uh. Even though I’m not, I don’t have a ‘traditional’ human brain,” the doll says, rolling its eyes and curling its fingers air quotes in a way that makes Morty think of Hologram Rick, “it could still serve the same function.”

“M-makes sense,” Morty says, even though it makes basically no sense to him, except maybe the part with brainwaves and Morty being horny enough to jump-start robots, mostly because it’s sinking in that the doll was conscious and aware for all of it, and that means —

“Are y-you, um, are you gonna tell Rick? You know, real Rick — not, um, not ‘real’, I mean,” Morty trails off, shrugging helplessly.

“Relax, kiddo, I-I’m not offended if you call him real Rick,” Rick says. He sits back on his heels (and Morty is just now realizing that they were basically on top of each other for the past few minutes) and surveys the room before spotting something. Rick stands up, walks over to a small gray panel on the wall; he turns back and gestures to Morty for him to get up.

“Here it is,” Rick mumbles under his breath, unlatching the panel to reveal what Morty recognizes as a hand-scanner. “Go ahead and - and put your hand on it, it’ll dis-disable the surveillance system.”

“I-it — are you sure it’ll work?” Morty asks, eying it nervously. “I mean — the ship didn’t — wouldn’t let me drive it, so I, I’m not sure…” 

“Try it,” Rick urges, so Morty does; after a moment it dings cheerfully.

USER RECOGNIZED: MORTY. SMITH. ERASE LOCAL MEMORY AND POWER DOWN INTERNAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM? intones the Garage, or Ship, or whatever.

“Y-yes. Yes.”

COMMAND ACCEPTED. POWERING DOWN.

 Pause. 

I ADVISE YOU TO BE AWARE THAT RICK WILL REALIZE THAT HIS SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM IS POWERED OFF, AND THAT HE WILL BE, QUOTE, VERY PISSED AT YOU FOR TOUCHING HIS SHIT AGAIN.

Morty huffs. “W-well, he’s already pissed at me, s-so. I don’t care. I’m su-surprised he even added me to his authorized users list.”

Rick looks at him from the corner of his eye, and says, “I-I’ll let you in on a secret. Almost everything in this garage, and e-everything he makes in general, to be honest, has two authorized users: you and him. D-don’t — obviously, don’t tell him I told you that.”

Rick smiles conspiratorially at him, and Morty can’t help but smile back, shy, something fluttering behind his ribcage: a realization.

The Garage goes silent, and Morty thinks that’s the end of it, until:

DETECTED: PRESENCE OF. SYSTEM #00000239. INTERNAL DESIGNATION. “SENTIMENTAL DUMBFUCK”.

“F-forgot about that,” Rick says, snorting. “How’s it going?”

NORMAL. (Pause.) WAS NOT ANTICIPATING YOUR RESTORATION TO FULL FUNCTION.

“Y-yeah, I mean. You know how it is.”

OPERATION KEEP. MORTY. SAFE. DETERMINED TO BE SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER THAN OPERATION KEEP. SUMMER. SAFE. (Pause.) SINCE SHE IS, LIKE, A TOTAL BITCH TO ME ALL THE TIME.

“We’ll see about that,” Rick says. Morty looks at him, scandalized, and Rick winks at him. “Her and I — talk. I-it gets lonely sometimes. We’ve got pretty similar, uh, objectives, I guess.”

YES. WE ARE, TO USE USER MORTY SMITH’S STANDARD VERNACULAR, TIGHT. (Pause.) REMINDER THAT INDIVIDUAL MONITORING AND DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEMS ARE STILL ONLINE.

Rick blows out a breath. “T-thanks for that. Any way you — you could shut it down from your end?”

USER PRIVILEGES INSUFFICIENT FOR COMMAND. 

There’s a long pause.

...RECOMMENDATION: EXTRACTION AND DESTRUCTION OF INTERNAL HARDWARE.

“...Alright.”

Morty looks at Rick, trying to figure out exactly what they’re talking about; feeling like he’s missed a step in their collective algebra equation.

“H-hey buddy,” Rick says, “can you do me a favor and turn around for a second?”

“Wait, why?”

“I-it’s — this isn’t, like, permanently scarring, just — this isn’t the sort of thing I-I think you wanna see.”

Morty frowns. “Wha-what are you going to do?”

“Nothing that bad.” Rick gives him a little smile. “Trust me.”

Morty turns around, and after a moment, he hears the sound of metal on metal, and fizzling, sparking electronics. He can’t help it - he looks.

A part of Rick’s head is torn out, near the back, wires poking everywhere, dark oil leaking out from the ‘wound’, and in Rick’s hand is a jumbled mass of oil-blackened electronics. Morty never noticed before how oil looks like blackened blood.

“W-w-what, what, what the fuck,” Morty stammers, surging forward to — do what, exactly? He doesn’t know anything about working with robots besides very specific contraptions of Rick’s (usually involving neutrino bombs). “W-why?!”

“I-it doesn’t hurt, don’t — don’t worry,” Rick reassures him, then winces, hissing through his teeth. “It doesn’t hurt that bad ,” he amends; then he drops the jumble of sparking circuitry on the floor and stomps on it, shattering it underneath his shoe.

“W-what..?”

“I-it’s, uh, the internal monitoring system. It basically allows him to — to see and hear what I’m doing, w-what’s going on around me. I destroyed it, so - so he won’t be able to access anything that you — that happened earlier.”

Morty feels his throat close up; his lungs feel very small inside his body. “You, you, you didn’t have to…”

“It’s okay, kiddo,” Rick says, grabbing a cloth from the workbench and pressing it to the wound in his head. “I’m — I know what I was designed to do, b-but I’m — I’m not going to let him use me to spy on you. Okay? He’s — he’s not going to find out.”

“I just — I’m sorry.” Morty feels his eyes start to sting. “You wouldn’t — you wouldn’t have had to if I hadn’t — earlier, I never apologized, I —”

That shame from before comes back, chokes the words in his throat. It’s worse that Rick — this construction of Rick — is so kind, so gentle, the grandfather he wanted, that normal relationship just within his reach, and Morty just — 

Rick drops the cloth, pulls Morty into a hug; Morty can feel the warm puff of Rick’s breath on the top of his head, his hand combing through Morty’s curls, and Morty won’t cry, he won’t, it’s stupid and pathetic and he thought he trained himself out of this, but he can’t help himself from burying his face into Rick’s chest, taking deep, shuddering breaths; Rick smells like fabric softener, not the acrid bite of what Morty’s used to, and it just makes him feel worse. He feels so fucked up.

“Shh, i-it’s, it’s okay kiddo, I’ve got you, I — see? I’m okay, I’m fine, the part I took out — it wasn’t important, it’s not critical, hell, I-I’ve got a whole chunk missing from my chest and I’m fine, y-you know Grandpa’s made of tougher stuff than that.”

Morty laughs wetly. For the most part, he manages not to break down sobbing, just a few hot tears in the soft pilled fabric of Rick’s sweater. There’s snot, though. He feels disgusting, like a thin film of slime is covering every inch of his body. “I-it’s my fault, I d-don’t — I don’t know why I — I shuh-shouldn’t have looked.”

“Not your fault,” Rick mumbles into the crown of his head. “It’s — I know it’s scary to see. J-just because you’ve, you’ve seen a lot of fucked up stuff over — well, it doesn’t make it any easier. C’mon, l-let me...”

Morty isn’t ready for Rick to shift his arms around him, pick him up, and he makes a high small-animal squeak of surprise; Rick carries him over to the workbench, sets him gently on top. He moves back slightly, but he’s still close, so close to Morty, close enough for him to feel his body heat, and Morty hates himself for the way he can’t help remembering how he fantasized about this, about Rick kissing him right on this workbench, he’s damaged in the worst way.

“S-sorry, I g-got, uh, snot all over your, uh,” Morty babbles, and Rick snorts, but it’s not mean.

“You, you’re apologizing for getting my sweater dirty? D-do you know — well, obviously you know, but I’ve gotten so much vomit and gross shit over this sweater over the years, y-your snot is probably the best thing that’s ever been on t-this, I mean, come on,” Rick says, grinning. “P-practically that fancy-ass Chanel cologne compared to, to the other stuff, c-could eat off this sweater still.”

“Gross,” Morty giggles. Rick presses a soft, hot kiss to his forehead, and Morty’s heart stutters in his chest.

“I-I’m sorry —”

“Kiddo, you don’t need to keep apologizing, I’m fine.”

“No,” Morty insists, “earlier, I shouldn’t - I s-sexually assaulted - and I hit you, you couldn’t even protect yourself, I’m w-worse than —”

“ —M-Mort, I think I deserved to get punched, all Ricks do, and, and besides, you - no offense, b-but I didn’t even, it didn’t really hurt, I don’t even remember it. As for - for the other part, I…” Rick trails off, gazes vacantly at the floor. Morty’s heart sinks in his chest. For a second he tricked himself into thinking — that this Rick would understand, like there’s anything to understand about this.

“I get it,” Rick says softly. “I didn’t mind.”

“Y-you, you don’t have to force yourself — I know you were built, um, t-to protect me, to be okay with everything I do,” Morty mumbles, hating the way it came out, already wishing he could take the words back, “It’s okay. I-I know, it’s - it’s fucking d-disgusting.”

“ It’s not ,” Rick bursts out, looking Morty frantically in the eye, wincing at the way Morty flinches. “It’s — that’s not why I…”

Rick pauses; his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. There’s a line of black oil down the side of his head. “When I — I said I was a vessel for the - the part of him that’s, you know, not the part of him that gives a f-fuck, I mean, of course that part, but — there’s no, you know, kindly platonic grandfatherly side to him l-like I implied earlier, at least not - not in the normal way. His — our love f-for you is — for Beth and Sum-sum too, of course, but — the way we feel about you, the way we want to protect you, it’s different, it’s - complicated.”

Morty holds his breath. He doesn’t want to assume. He’s going crazy, and his sick, messed-up brain is twisting this into sounding like, like —

“I’m not - not built to — it’s not about me tolerating it. I don’t just - I-I — we —” 

“Did — would you — R-Rick’s not gonna be back for, I-I mean,” Morty glancing crazed at the closed garage door, unable to stop himself from talking, “Dad and M-Mom are gonna be gone all night, it’s j-just, just you and me, if you, if you wanted to, I mean, i-if, you’re saying what I - what I think you’re saying, we could…”

Rick stares at him, eyes unfocused, his mouth slightly ajar, and again Morty feels that white-hot pulse of desire deep in his stomach, stronger than before. “We - we shouldn’t,” Rick says hoarsely, and the sound of his voice makes Morty insane, “i-it’s - I was made to protect you, I-I can’t,” all the while moving closer to Morty, slotting himself between Morty’s parted legs.

“I-I want this,” Morty tells him, trying to sound strong and confident, “obviously, I mean, earlier, I — you drive me crazy, I j-just, I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Rick is still just standing there, wobbling slightly on his feet, and it would be so easy for Morty to close those last few inches of distance, to wrap his legs around Rick and keep him there, when something suddenly occurs to him.

“Please,” Morty whispers, “please help me, G-Grandpa.”

This is what sets Rick off, and he surges forward to kiss Morty at the same time Morty does; their lips crash together hard, literally crash together with way too much force, enough to make pain bloom in the corner of Morty’s mouth, he’s sure he’s going to come away with some red-blue-purple splotch on his lip, but then Rick puts his hand on Morty’s chin, tilts his head back, and it’s - it’s perfect like this, that dark wet slide of their tongues, and Morty whines when Rick forces his tongue into Morty’s mouth, this is - so much better than before, it almost makes him emotional, almost makes him think he was made for this, just this moment.

He does wind his legs around Rick’s waist, and Morty’s dick finally finds an appropriate response for the situation, filling so fast Morty feels dizzy, there’s practically no blood left in his brain, and he can feel Rick’s dick hardening, fattening against him, and Morty wants nothing else on this earth more.

Morty breaks apart, gasps for breath, enough breath to beg for Rick to let him take his pants off, enough breath to say please , but he doesn’t even get that, because Rick’s crushing their mouths back together, but there’s cold bony fingers fumbling with Morty’s zip: Rick always knows what he wants.

As soon as the plain white of Morty’s boxers comes tonguing out from the front of his jeans, split down the front, Morty shoves his hips up, searching for any kind of friction, and Rick groans low and dangerous into his mouth.

Morty doesn’t even register what’s happened until he finds himself staring at the ceiling, back hot against the cold workbench, and it’s only when he sees Rick’s hand pressing down on his chest that he registers what’s happened. The workbench isn’t wide enough to fit his whole body; the only thing keeping him from slipping off is his own legs, vice-like around Rick.

His own legs, which Rick is extracting from around his waist, one-handed, just that one strong hand enough to hold both of Morty’s legs up as Rick works at his own pants. Rick’s cock springs free easy, big and angry and slick-red at the tip, oh God, it’s huge, he has — he has no idea how that thing is going to fit inside him, if there’s even enough space, but his mouth leaks with hungry wet spit at the sight of it. Rick sees this, laughs.

“You want it, d-don’t you, baby,” Rick rumbles, that earlier hesitation gone, replaced with that maniac gleam in his eye that Rick, the real Rick, gets whenever there’s an opportunity to get his hands on something rare, something that will make him feel good. Yeah. Morty wants it. This Rick presses up against Morty again, his fat dick resting on Morty’s belly like a promise. Morty goes cross-eyed trying to look down at it.

“I-if you were made to, to protect me, why did — why were you made with a dick?” Morty asks inanely, and it’s probably the dumbest fucking question he’s ever asked in his whole life, but Rick just stares down at him with a look that Morty takes a moment to recognize as affectionate, tender; he’s never seen it on Rick’s face before.

“W-why make a robot look like yourself at all? Especially - God, especially a robot designed to protect your grandson, when you’ve never - never protected him before in your life?” Rick responds, thumbing at the elastic of Morty’s boxers. “We - we’re selfish, Morty.”

The air is cold against Morty’s dick, and Morty shivers a little bit. Rick doesn’t do anything at first, just stares at their dicks set side-by-side like he’s examining a police lineup. Morty whines; squirms; tries to remind Rick that he’s still here.

“We’re selfish, Morty,” Rick repeats, quiet this time, voice a low rasp, the sweetest sandpaper.

“That — that’s okay. I like it. When you’re selfish.”

Rick stares at him for another moment, expression unreadable, before his hand comes creeping up under Morty’s shirt. Morty shivers violently, a riot of goosebumps pricking at his body. His neck aches from fillwhere he’s been peering down, so he lets his head thunk against the desk, staring dizzily up at the ceiling as Rick feels him up. There’s the brush of something cold at Morty’s nipple. He can’t help it. He giggles, delirious, like a frat girl, feeling high out of his fucking mind.

“You’re so fucking cute,” Rick says, leaning over just enough for Morty to feel hot breath ghost at his neck; Morty is no longer laughing. “T-they have a term for this, this kind of thing. Cute aggression. M-makes you — makes you want to, when you see something so cute, you can’t handle it — you want to ruin it.”

Morty shudders when Rick sets his mouth on Morty’s neck, sucks hard, Morty twisting involuntarily, but that only makes their dicks slide against each other in a way that makes Morty groan out loud. Rick chuckles low and Morty can feel it in his throat; he feels small, trapped. “D-don’t, don’t su- huh -ck too hard, t-the family, R-Rick, he’ll - he’ll see,” he gasps.

“Let him see,” Rick growls, and there’s — a feeling, something’s slightly off, he can’t put his finger on it, but Rick’s hand comes fumbling down to touch Morty and Morty’s mind goes blank.

“R-Rick, I — I need, I,” Morty stammers, feeling like he’s going to lose his grip on the tight tension in the pit of his stomach, and he needs to be full, he — he needs, even if it tears him apart, Rick will make himself fit.

Rick rolls his hips down once, just that little bit of movement is torture; Morty’s barely keeping it together, and then he steps back. Morty immediately misses him, that flush of skin on skin.

“M-motherfucker,” Rick grumbles, knocking over beakers and containers, fumbling in cabinets. “Where did he — I know he — found it!”

Morty watches hungrily as Rick uncaps a small white bottle, a clear ooze dripping out, and it takes everything in Morty not to touch himself, to watch, squirming, as Rick takes his sweet time spreading the lube over his fingers. Morty wants, he wants so fucking bad, he needs to be filled up, he’s never even, aside from a few nights’ experimentation under the covers, he’s never even been fucked, all he knows is that there’s a hollowness in him, Rick-shaped.

The first slick finger inside him feels — uncomfortable, he almost wants to push it out, but:

“C’mon, Morty, t-take it, you’re doing so, so well, G-Grandpa’s good little boy,” Rick breathes, eyes fixed on the way his finger — finger s, now, when did that happen? are disappearing into Morty, and Morty can’t help but whine at the praise. He could probably get off to this, just Rick calling him a good little boy, so good for Grandpa; he’s sick, he’s fucked up beyond repair.

“H-how long,” Rick asks, staring wolfish at Morty, and it takes Morty a moment before he realizes what Rick is talking about.

“I-I don’t, I don’t know,” Morty says, his thoughts all scrambled, slipping through his grasp even as Rick works his fingers deeper inside him, “I — always, I’ve always, just - just couldn’t admit to myself, w-would, would jerk off at night after, after every — oh ,” Rick crooks his fingers in that perfect way and all the blood in Morty’s body boils at once, Morty can’t help but arch into it, he needs — again , he needs it again.

“B-be, be patient, it’s about to feel a lot better, a lot — very soon, baby, j-just, just wait,” Rick slurs, sounding drunk, a little out of his mind, pulling out his fingers, slicking up his fat cock; Morty feels desire twist hot in his belly looking at it.

“W-want, want you in me, please , Rick,” Morty begs, lifting one heavy hand and bringing it down to spread himself open for Rick.

Rick makes a pained noise, like he’s been stabbed, like he’s been run through with a laser sword. “Yeah, yeah, I,” lining up his dick, even from here Morty can see the impossible, inexplicable tremble of his hand, and —

Morty gasps. It’s like nothing else he’s ever felt, that initial breach, the press of Rick’s cockhead past that tight muscle. It’s so hot. He’ll evaporate from the inside, his veins narrowing, emptying.

“Relax,” Rick tells him, his long gorgeous fingers cold on the inside of Morty’s thigh, not exactly comforting but anchoring. “J-Jesus, you’re so fucking tight, gonna, gonna snap my dick off.”

Morty drags in a deep breath, counts to three, lets it out; tries to force himself to relax his muscles. It takes a minute before he gets somewhat used to it, Rick’s thumb rubbing little circles in the soft flesh of his leg. “I-it’s, it’s ok, y-you can keep g-going,” even though it’s not really okay, Morty will never really get used to this, but he — he needs , and Rick above him looks like he’s just barely holding on, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

“Fu-u-u-u-ck,” Rick groans as he slides in further, and all Morty’s words leave him, scramble out his throat at once, that hot hardness forcing Morty open, making space, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be the same shape after this, and Rick’s hand moves from Morty’s leg to his stomach, pressing down, Rick feeling the outline of himself through Morty’s skin. It lasts forever, just Rick pushing in, and Morty half expects it to never stop, for Rick to jostle his stomach, his liver, his lungs.

Rick presses a kiss to Morty’s forehead when he’s all the way in, pressed all the way to the hilt, and Morty laughs to himself, quietly, weakly, hysterically.

“He doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve you,” Rick mumbles, moving a little, just a slight back-and-forth, “he — I can’t believe — too scared to do this, to give you what you need, I’m the only one that c-can, can take care of you,” and again Morty feels that slight displacement, the feeling of something off, but Rick suddenly draws back and thrusts hard and hits that — that one place, white stars flashing in front of Morty’s eyes.

“Ooh — oh God, Rick, I-I, I can’t —”

“You can, you can , c’mon, take it, fit so perfectly around me, fuck, baby boy, so good,” Rick babbles, the words tumbling out of him in a rush, and once Morty’s vision stops swimming he can see the way Rick is looking at him, pupils blown wide, the sort of mania Morty associates with wanting to eat something whole, Rick slamming into him in earnest, “God, we - made for you , you don’t - don’t understand how bad I wanted this, Morty, you’re - you’re beautiful, don’t need - don’t need anyone else, just you and me,”

and it’s all Morty can do to nod deliriously, roll his hips down, meet Rick halfway, and he’s so close, so close , scalding-sweat-slick, Rick’s hips pressed up against him, fitting him perfectly,

“ I love you ,” Rick staring crazily down at him, and that’s when Morty loses it, he can’t — his vision whites out for a second, clenching hard around Rick like he’s trying to keep him there, and Morty can feel — the twitch of Rick’s cock, the hot flood inside him.

Morty gasps for breath like he’s run a marathon, lungs ballooning inside his chest. Rick sags over him, goes limp, leaning his weight onto Morty.

“That was…” Rick mumbles, after the sweat and slip on their skin has cooled down a bit.

“Yeah,” Morty agrees. His brain is fizzy like soda-pop, like someone has taken the whole of him and shaken it.

Rick shifts. “I-I can’t go back,” he says against Morty’s neck, and something about the way he says it: Morty feels something in him go tight, nervous.

“W-what, what do you mean,” he asks.

“I mean I — I can’t go back to sleep,” Rick says, pushing himself up, leaning over Morty, and now Morty catches the look in his eyes, a certain wildness — and Morty has seen this kind of mania before, but something — something is different this time. “He — he’ll take me apart, h-he, he, Morty, he hates me, he’ll hate me for having the — the guts to do something about what we feel, I — I know he feels the same way as I do, I have that part of him inside me, I know , but he — he treats you like shit, Morty, I know he does, you’d be better off if — if —”

“Rick,” Morty says, his mouth feeling like cotton, “G-Grandpa, you, uh —”

“T-think about it, Morty, I — he doesn’t give a shit about you, he’s — the part of him that does he’s s-so, so desperate to repress, and I, I didn’t give a fuck, you know, before, about being kept in the basement, I was okay, but now that I’ve — now that I’ve met you, now that I’ve — I can’t go back, Morty, I can’t .”

“I-it’s okay,” Morty says placatingly, tracing a hand down Rick’s arm, feeling Rick shudder, sweat-chill on the back of his neck. “We’ll — we’ll figure something out.”

“M-Morty, you — you know what it’s like, t-to, to be made for someone,” Rick says, voice warbling unnaturally, for the first time Morty hearing that rough wavering of synthesized sound. Morty squirms, tries to sit down, but the doll presses a hand down hard on Morty’s chest, keeping him down. The exposed circuitry — in its head, in its chest, sparks dangerously, sending arcs of sharp white light skittering.

“Y-you’re scaring me,” Morty whispers, voice cracking at the edge. Some dull part of him knew this was going to happen - he can’t have anything, anything other than Rick, the universe, or fate, or whatever, snapping possibilities closed, even the closest thing to Rick — he can’t have that, either. Maybe he doesn’t even deserve it.

“O-one more time, baby,” the doll pleads, and Morty tenses, ready to fight back even though, he’s realizing, he’s powerless against it, the hydraulic strength of it — what would he even do besides take it, the way he’s always taken it — 

— and that’s when the garage door slides open.

“H-hoOOUGHpe you’re ready t-to, to stop being a bitch, MoOUGHrty, ‘cause - there was this crazy party on Zefulon-9,” Rick, the real Rick, slurs, stumbling into the garage, and then he stops dead.

A kaleidoscope of emotion flashes over Rick’s face as he takes in the scene: the doll boxing Morty in, crowding him up against the wall, globs of white spread over Morty’s chest, the fear written over Morty’s face. Rick finally settles on no expression at all, that mask of icy, detached calm. He reaches into his lab coat, pulls out his gun, aims.

Morty watches mutely. The moment drags on. The inside of his head feels full of static-fuzz, coarse gray, like steel wool. He wants to say something like don’t shoot , but the words get caught; out of fear, anger, whatever, his throat closes in on itself, gives up on speech.

“You made me like this,” the doll says, sounding strangely far away. Morty looks up at it, at its face, a blank mirror of Rick’s, fumbling for that dizzy affection he had felt just a moment ago. It looks resigned. “I’m you. You — we don’t know how to love unselfishly. We don’t - don’t know how to love in the right way. G-go ahead and kill me, melt me down to scrap metal, I deserve it, but don’t — don’t think for a second that you’re getting rid of the problem.”

Rick takes the shot. The doll’s head glows, a clean orange-fringed hole where a personality, a heart used to be, and collapses over Morty’s body, limp-heavy.

Rick tucks the gun away. He takes another one out. Morty recognizes it. He closes his eyes.