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marypsue · 6 years ago

Text

things that didn't happen (here):

The portal that crackles open in the middle of the living room is a sickly, sinister red and somehow manages to look seconds away from collapse. Still, it hovers in midair long enough to spit out four people. It takes a moment to recognise most of them; Beth's shaved her head to the scalp, a smudge of something black smeared across both eyes and the bridge of her nose, Jerry's musclebound and sporting an extremely ill-advised moustache, Summer - well, Summer looks pretty much the same, just a little more tattered and a lot more comfortable with that pump-action shotgun she's holding.

"We're here for Titanic on Blu-ray," she says, giving it a pump, "and we're not leaving without it."

The full story comes out over dinner. After being abandoned in a dimension where every other living human had been mutated into Cronenbergian genetic freaks, they'd realised a few things: Beth and Jerry's marriage works best under outside stress from something they can punch; popularity doesn't mean much to Summer when the only people around to get it from are people she doesn't want to impress; and, they were living out their own personal I Am Legend.

"Like, the book," Wasteland Weekend Summer explains. "Not, like, the one with Will Smith."

"Wait, you - you actually read that?" Morty asks. "I - I - I thought the only things you read were Buzzfeed personality quizzes."

Summer shoots him a glare, and Wasteland Weekend Summer puts one hand threateningly on the shotgun leaned against her chair, but the other Beth just says "Summer, no deadly weaponry at the table," without looking up from her mashed potatoes. Both Summers huff out a sigh and fold their arms over their chests.

"Whatever," they say, in eerie unison, and then stare at each other like they've just walked into a fancy party and seen the other wearing the same dress.

"I...don't recall the plot of that one," Jerry says, casting a nervous glance at the person seated beside him.

"It doesn't matter," Wasteland Weekend Summer sighs. "The point was, like, the Cronenbergs are still people."

"Well," the other Beth says, delicately. "Most of them."

"We may have eaten a few before we figured that one out," buff Jerry admits. "And by 'may have', I mean 'definitely'." He shoots a defensive glare around the table. "Like I keep saying, it's not cannibalism if you have a completely different genetic makeup!"

"And like I keep telling you, Dad, that's not how genetics work," Wasteland Weekend Summer mutters, rolling her eyes. "Anyway. It didn't take all that long before we went, like, wait. Who're the real monsters here?"

The lump of misshapen flesh everyone's been trying to avoid eye contact with pulses in agreement, spattering Jerry with some kind of viscous, greenish fluid. He wipes it off with his napkin, shifting his chair away from its seat as surreptitiously as he can manage, which isn't very.

"Yeah, it's been weird, but once you get used to everyone being some kind of body horror abomination, nothing's really all that different?" the body horror abomination says, in a voice that's surprisingly normal - and familiar. "I actually kind of like things this way. I mean, now that everybody's equally disturbing-looking, at least I know people are actually interested in me as a person, not just because I've got the right flesh-lumps in the right places. Did you even know I was an honour student? Or that I was interested in astrophysics?"

It's hard to tell, since it doesn't exactly have a face, but it sure looks like its stalk-eye is looking pointedly at Morty.

In the end, the wastelanders leave with Jerry's special edition Titanic box set and a Blu-ray player that Wasteland Weekend Summer and Cronenjessica agree they can probably rig up to use solar power. They're gone before anybody remembers to ask if they've got a TV set.

"Oh, shit," the redhead says, looking from Rick to Morty and back again. "Not you two."

"O-oh, you've, uh, you've heard of us," Morty stammers. "M-maybe you've heard about all those times we, uh, we saved an entire galaxy, o-or..." He stops, trying very hard not to look like he's staring. "Uh, what...what're you -"

"Taking my top off," the redhead says, a little muffled by the fabric she's pulling over her head.

"That much was obvious," Rick says, not sounding at all impressed. Morty can't say he can relate.

"Look," the redhead says, shaking out her hair and tying the shirt around her waist, "you two have a ridiculously high body count when it comes to random innocent bystanders. But hot girls usually manage to escape with only major psychological trauma. Especially if they're redheads." She gives her hair a fluff with both hands and then adjusts her bra. It's lacy, and pink. It looks satiny. "So my best bet for surviving the next twenty-two minutes is to get sexy and let the fourteen-year-old think he's got a shot."

"Aww," Morty sighs, deflating, and the redhead gives him a pitying smile.

"Hey, you've still got the next twenty-two minutes to convince me!"

She starts to turn, and suddenly freezes in place, her eyes half-closed, caught mid-blink with an extremely dopey look on her face. There's a faint, electric-blue aura clinging to her, and when Morty tries to touch it, he gets a zap, like a static shock but longer.

"Come on," Rick says, tucking some weird sci-fi pistol back into his coat. "Befouuurp that wears off."

"Aw geez, Rick! What - what'd you do that for!?" Morty protests, waving both arms in the redhead's direction. Now that she's frozen mid-bounce, it's painfully apparent what Morty's missing out on.

"Because she's a - a - a pain in the ass, Morty! A big - big genre-savvy buzzkill! Did you actually want that tagging along with us?"

"Well, no, okay," Morty admits, with a last, longing look at her bra, so close and yet so completely out of reach. "But -"

"You - you - you didn't actually think she was ever going to fuck you?"

"No, but - but she was gonna act like she was!" Morty yells, hurrying after Rick. "Twenty-two minutes! Rick! You - you just cheated me out of twenty-two minutes of real-life, in-your-face, 3D toplessness here!"

"You know Mom used to say that whenever she was mad at me about something? 'Bethany Ann Sanchez, you are your father's daughter'." Beth breathes out a laugh and shakes her head. "And she wondered why I moved out as soon as I turned sixteen."

"Wow, you sure - sure showed her," her dad says, with what seems like unnecessary sarcasm, not taking his eyes off the TV set.

Beth laughs again, because she's not sure what else there is to do.

"Look. I loved my mom. But - she was right. We were never going to coexist peacefully under one roof." She taps her pencil against the page of the crossword she's working on, takes a breath in. "I'm just too much like - well, like you."

The words fall onto what passes for a conversation like a couple of atom bombs on an unsuspecting atoll. Beth turns all her attention to her crossword to avoid counting the seconds of silence. Possibly no crossword square has ever been filled in with such careful deliberation.

Just great. Really genius, actually. Her long-lost father finally deigns to spend a little time in her company, and she has to go get her feelings all over it like some stupid - teenage -

"You kept my last name," her dad says, weirdly flat, and Beth breathes out. Okay. She can pretend that it didn't just happen.

"Well, it is on my birth certificate," she says, scribbling down 'EAVES'. "And not every high schooler can truthfully say they share a name with an intergalactic rock star."

For a minute or so, the silence is just silence, filled with the friendly nonsense noise of the TV. It's even, Beth dares to hope, a companionable silence.

Then her dad breaks it with an enormous belch. "If you're really so - so m-much like me, then I gotta wonder why you still - why you haven't dumped the chump yet."

"Dad," Beth sighs.

"Look, life is short and meaningless. I know that maybe - maybe better than anybody. You gotta - you gotta wring everything you can out of it before it's gone, because it - that'll happen sooner than you think."

"Well, that's cheerful," Beth says, turning over her pencil and furiously erasing 'NIETZSCHE'. "Listen, Dad, I really appreciate the advice, but -"

"The universe isn't fair, Beth. It isn't handing out favours to - to nice girls who wait in line." Her dad finally turns away from the TV to look at her, and Beth sets the crossword down on the end table. "If you aren't smart enough to have figured that one out yet, then you - then maybe you and Jerry really do deserve each other."

Beth takes another deep breath, lets it out through her nose, slow. Suddenly, absurdly, thinks of her mother.

"Dad," she says, like it's some kind of charm that will keep his attention until she's finished. "I've always looked up to you. Maybe even idolised you a little, not that there's anything wrong with that, it's a perfectly normal -"

She stops herself, twists the pencil in her hands. It feels like she's trying to choose each word, carefully, from a set of fridge magnet poetry that doesn't have anywhere near the words she needs to say what she wants to say.

"I saw the mistakes you and Mom made," Beth says, finally, deliberately. "I don't want to make the same ones. I have people in my life I care about. It's important to me to try for them."

"Oh yeah, how's that one wouurrpking out for you?" her dad asks, that deadpan sarcasm again, turning back to the TV.

Beth chews the inside of her lip.

"I didn't say it wasn't a mistake," she admits, finally. "Just not the same mistake. At least my kids won't hate me for abandoning them."

"Nope," her dad says, flat and casual, like he's completely unaffected, not looking at Beth as he pushes himself up off the couch. The tinny sound of a commercial jingle gives his next words a weirdly jaunty air. "Lucky you, they hate you for a - a whole different set of reasons."

The sharpened end of her pencil isn't even, Beth realises. There's much more graphite visible on one side of the point, while the other is almost completely wood.

"At least you - you - you proved your mom wrong," her dad says, as he heads into the kitchen. He doesn't so much as glance behind him.

Maybe it's terrible. Maybe it's just one more sign of how she's broken as a person. But Beth can't help the little smile that forces itself onto her face.

"Yeah," she says, quietly, picking her crossword back up. "Yeah, I guess I did."

Jerry shoves the door open, flips the lightswitch - and nothing happens.

It's the last straw. It's been the last straw for a while now. First losing his job, then the divorce, and everything that came with it. This shitty motel, his own shitty cooking, the misery wolves, the overwhelming, debilitating loneliness, the mold, the bed bugs...and now this.

Jerry’s running out of last straws.

“Are you fucking kidding me!” he yells, into the empty, hollow darkness. “Is this some kind of - of sick fucking joke? Have I not suffered enough? What, was I some kind of evil dictator in a past life? Does somebody up there just hate me? What did I ever do to deserve this? What do you want from me?”

“Your help, Jerry Smith,” a voice says from somewhere inside the darkness of the motel room.

“Holy shit!” Jerry yells, backpedaling out of the room and slamming the door. He stares at it, breathing hard, like it’ll suddenly come to life and try to eat his face. Hey, stranger - and worse - things have happened. To him. Recently.

He’s just starting to catch his breath, his heart rate gradually ticking back down to normal, when he hears it. A shadow falls across the door as, behind him, out past the balcony, there’s a swoosh and a thunderclap boom, like an enormous bird beating its wings.

Jerry stares at the number on the motel door for what feels like an eternity, frozen in place. He’s never noticed before that two of the digits are black-painted metal, but the middle one is clearly just painted right onto the wood where the metal number clearly fell off. There are still holes from the screws. What a piece of shit motel.

“Don’t be scared,” that same voice from inside the motel room says, behind him. Jerry wishes he knew how she’d gotten behind him. He also wishes he could remember where he knows that voice from. “I don’t want to hurt you. Believe it or not, I’m actually trying to help you.”

“I thought you needed my help,” Jerry manages. His feet don’t want to turn him around. He makes them do it anyway.

The person - people, technically, though Jerry isn’t sure how much the term applies to somebody who’s more robot bird than person - standing behind him on the balcony is the last person he’s ever have expected to see.

“Aren’t you that friend of Summer’s?” he asks, and the slight brunette’s eyes narrow. “We went to your wedding, you married some alien - wait. No. You’re -”

The brunette smiles. It is not a very nice smile.

“I think we might be able to help each other,” Tammy says, folding her arms and leaning back against the railing her robot bird husband is perched on. Was he a robot the last time Jerry saw him? Jerry doesn’t think so, but he’d had a few more important things on his mind at the time.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Jerry says, pressing his back flat against the motel room door. “Last time I had anything to do with you, I ended up stranded on a planet smaller than this motel suite.”

“Oh yeah. That. No hard feelings,” Tammy says, examining her nails. “It wasn’t anything personal.”

“Nothing personal? You turned my entire family into intergalactic fugitives!”

“No I didn’t,” Tammy says. “I think you know who did.”

Jerry opens his mouth, and then shuts it, slowly.

“I’m listening,” he says.

Tammy gives him a thoughtful look. The red glow from her robot bird husband’s one eye is casting some very sinister shadows on her face.

“We’ve got more in common than you realise,” she says. “I lost everything when the Federation collapsed. You lost everything after your divorce. And you and I both know the same person was responsible for both.”

“Wait, how do you know about that? And for that matter, how did you know where to find me?” Jerry looks around the balcony. There aren’t any signs saying “Hidden Camera Here” or anything that have sprung up in the last three minutes, but you can’t blame a guy for trying. “Have you been spying on me?”

“Can you please try to focus here,” Tammy snaps. “Rick Sanchez ruined both of our lives. I want the same thing you want.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” Jerry says, crossing his arms over his chest. “And what’s that?”

Tammy smiles that smile again. It’s no nicer than it was the first time.

“Vengeance,” she says.

- and something that did:

“Just stand in the middle of the room, don’t move, don’t breathe, and don’t fucking touch anything,” Morty’s grandpa says, turning his back to rummage through a metal cabinet under the counter.

Jessica turns a slow circle, taking in the garage, strange devices stuffed onto Ikea shelves and hanging next to the weedwhacker.

“I think I’ve been out here once before?” she says. “Somebody threw a party. There were either some really good drugs going around, or aliens were there.” She locks eyes on a glowing blue orb stacked behind a bottle of ant killer and a jug of antifreeze, decides the prohibition against touching is probably a good idea. "If everything you just told me is true, then I'm going to say maybe both?"

“Whatever helps - uurp - you sleep at night,” Morty’s grandpa says. “Thought I told you not to breathe.”

Jessica looks over at him, decides that he’s not joking. She actually does hold her breath for a second before realising just how stupid that is and letting it go.

“There was a galaxy,” she says, slowly, as more memories arrive in bits and pieces. She’d ended up drinking to forget that night. And possibly got her memory wiped, if there really were aliens involved. “A hologram galaxy? Morty brought me out here to show me.” She hugs her own arms, making eye contact with the blinking red light on something that looks like the love child of the Terminator and a sewing machine. “It was beautiful. Almost like really being up there.”

“Yeah, hold that - hold that thought, you can use that,” Morty’s grandpa says, dropping an armful of beeping and whirring machinery on the counter. “And give me your phone.”

Jessica hands it over, with no small amount of trepidation. Morty’s grandpa gives first her ombre teal phone case with its calligraphic-script motto Ad astra per aspera!, then her, a flat, sarcastic look. Jessica crosses her arms over her chest and returns it.

In the end, the phone case passes without comment. Morty’s grandpa just plugs something flat and silver into the bottom of it, dials Morty’s number, and then hands the phone to Jessica as it’s ringing. She takes it, holds it to her ear, listening to the rings.

“You - you gotta keep him on the line for at least thirty seconds,” Morty’s grandpa says, pulling out a silver box that matches the thing he plugged into Jessica’s phone and flipping up a screen.

Jessica nods.

“Is - is he going to be all right?” she asks, the phone still ringing in her ear. “I mean, I barely know him, but -”

Morty’s grandpa shrugs, just as there’s a click on the other end of the line.

#rick and morty #this is mary's fic tag #*man gesturing to butterfly* is this a fix-it fic?#I'm aware that s3 did a 'jerry revenge arc' episode but dammit I thought of it first

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