Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/13896270.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con,
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Rick_and_Morty
  Relationship:
      Rick_Sanchez/Summer_Smith, Rick_Sanchez/Beth_Smith
  Character:
      Rick_Sanchez_(Rick_and_Morty), Summer_Smith, Beth_Smith_(Rick_and_Morty)
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Canon_Divergence, Alcohol_Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug
      Use, Incest, Implied/Referenced_Incest
  Stats:
      Published: 2018-03-07 Chapters: 1/? Words: 2552
****** Make It Feel Like Home ******
by virtueofvice
Summary
     Transdimensional travel is a funny thing. As far as Rick runs,
     consequences always manage to follow him home.
     From the train wreck that brought you Space Trash, a new multi-
     chapter full of the same garbage you've come to know and love.
     For arbitrarily related works, see my (still ongoing) collection of
     one-shots:
     http://archiveofourown.org/works/11892690/chapters/26862624
     Playlists here:
     https://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/space_trash
     https://8tracks.com/virtueofvice/n-o-t-_-t-o-d-a-y
Notes
     “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished
     masterpiece.”
     ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
In hindsight it was fairly obvious, from a scientific standpoint. A certain
number of things in every reality were truly randomized, unpredictable
variables thrown in by a meddling ex machina that even he could not predict or
control. In most cases, however, the same patterns repeated over and over again
- the same butterflies caused the same hurricanes, leopards couldn't change
their spots, and he was, almost without exception, a filthy drunk bastard.
Jerry recalled prom night as a glorious triumph, arriving at the high school
gymnasium with the homecoming queen stuffed into the passenger seat of his
station wagon, her oversized skirt in his undersized car like some sort of
outrageous sugary confection, spilling over in poufs of lace and stiff teenage
pride. Beth Sanchez had done him a favor by dating him; for reasons she now
couldn't recall - perhaps to make an ex jealous, or to subconsciously reinforce
her foster mother's unflinching belief that all men deserve a woman's emotional
labor - and whatever else they can carve out and carry away.
She entered the dance, head held high like royalty - her father's daughter;
scorn in her bones. Jerry gripped her arm clumsily, knocking a few petals loose
from her corsage, treading on the hem of her dress as he dragged her beneath
the arch of faux flowers for a photograph. Rather than stand still and smiling,
as she did, he raised a fist in outrageous triumph, the conquering hero. The
absurdity of it made her gut clench. Under the weight of all those eyes,
prickling over her skin like a chilly draft, she sensed the keen embarrassment
that only teenagers can feel and adults never forget.
Thankfully, blessedly, some thoughtful miscreant had spiked the punch.
The Sanchez genome strand carried with it a certain tolerance for alcohol, but
the Smith gene carried two left feet. After two or three failed attempts on the
dance floor and an aching instep, Beth excused herself to hover by the punch
bowl while Jerry presumably berated himself in the men's. With nothing to do
but sip punch, sugary-sweet "Hawaiian Red" flavor doing nothing to disguise the
burn of cheap vodka, the colored lights above the bandstand soon took on a
certain haloed effect. When Jerry emerged, she greeted him with a greater
degree of warmth, tottering a little on her heels and offering him a drink in a
languid hand. He smiled, the foolish doe-eyed smile that she could sometimes
trick herself into believing she loved.
The motel room he had booked for the occasion was spartan, to say the least; a
roadside motor court with only an ice machine and a cracked asphalt parking lot
for amenities. The en-suite bathroom was tiny, the quilt on the bed a rough
polyester blend that invited cigarette burns. A small sign rested next to an
empty plastic holder on the nightstand - Thank you for choosing the Sunset
Motel. Leave suggestions, questions and comments on these cards and enjoy the
complimentary mints. No mints. No cards. No comments.
The boy was drunk; fumbling at the fastenings of her dress incompetently before
she pushed his hands away with an almost inaudible sigh and hiked up her skirt.
He was overeager in the way that only youth can be, and so she really shouldn't
have been surprised at the outcome. Yet she was - slightly shocked and slightly
irritated, an emotion she would come to be very familiar with over the coming
years; stiff with revulsion at the sticky wetness already cooling in the crux
of her inner thigh as Jerry shuddered and twitched atop her, huffing out a
whine.
He rolled off of her, grinning widely, clearly unaware of his lackluster
performance past the glow of liquor and endorphins. She rose and went to the
bathroom, stripping off her rumpled dress and washing off the mess with her
brow slightly furrowed. Without the gown, she was left in the slip that had
been beneath it, a slim line of red silk and stockings of white, feet already
starting to hurt in red patent leather pumps. She pulled the pins from her
hair, leaving it a riot of tousled curls around her shoulders, the fancy up-do
she'd spent hours on undone in a moment. Emerging from the bathroom, she was
only a little surprised to discover her paramour already asleep, sprawled out
atop the duvet and snoring softly.
She studied him for a long moment; appearing to arrive at a decision. She
pulled his black tux blazer from the one uncomfortable chair in the room,
shrugging it on and slipping the room key into the breast pocket, and, taking
baby steps on her heels to avoid breaking the silence, left the room.
The motel was in a seedy district of town, near an empty factory that
reverberated with sound. In an alley between the two, she imagined she heard
the thud of heavy footsteps, and a woman's loud but quickly muffled gasp - a
mugging? Her peering eyes caught a swirl of shadows, hulking silhouettes, the
glint of red hair. She hurried onward, drawing the blazer tighter around
herself. No hero, was Beth Sanchez.
The factory loomed ahead. As she drew near to the large, blocky concrete
structure, she noticed people milling about outside, smoking and passing
bottles wrapped in brown paper back and forth. They ignored her almost
entirely, a few eyes passing over her curiously but no hands reaching out to
bar her way, as she passed through them and beyond the yawning threshold.
It was dark within, but not as dark as she had imagined. Several large
floodlights had been set up and connected to generators. A stage had been
fashioned from assorted, doubtless stolen, construction materials, mainly
plywood and spray-paint, and some instruments that looked as if they had seen
better days rested atop it, awaiting the hands that would play them. A small
crowd milled about, and the number of them wearing leather and the general
aroma of anti-establishment in the air made her suspect she had stumbled into
an underground punk concert.
She wandered up an old steel staircase to what had once been the foreman's
office and listened at the door. There were voices within, indistinctly male,
likely a little inebriated. The edge of her mouth quirked. Her own buzz was
wearing off, and the part of her that was reckless and defiant thought she'd
see if these fine fellows had anything to share. Raising her hand, she
hesitated for only a moment before knocking.
"Alright, alright, that's the escort," said a rough but somehow intriguing male
voice. 'You guys get the- get the fuck out of here! Haa, Squanchy, you freak,
come back for the show man..." A weird piercing sound interrupted the
conversation, as if a high-pitched vacuum had been switched on, then off, and
after another long moment the door opened.
Beth looked up into slightly bloodshot, grey eyes under an unruly mane of
silver and stumbled back a step, her hand gripping the rail instinctively lest
she tumble down the stairs. The years narrowed to a pinpoint and vanished, and
she found herself whispering through barely parted lips, "Daddy?"
The man, tall and lean and looking exactly as her father had the day he'd left
her, caught her wrist and pulled her in. "Damn, they sent a freaky one this
time. Nice." He left her standing in the doorway and went to pour another
measure of scotch into a red solo cup. The office had apparently been converted
into a dressing room; home to an old couch, a rickety mirrored vanity, a coffee
table and a sideboard littered with tiny white parcels. Turning around and
leaning against the shoddy doorframe, he looked her up and down. He offered no
pick-up line or attempt to impress her, only "Huh, usually get a redhead.
Blonde's okay I guess. You do blow?" Beth nodded jerkily, afraid to do anything
else, and he chuckled roughly before shutting the door on her childhood.
It was impossible, of course - there was no way he could be the same man, the
same Rick that had walked out the door and never looked back ten years before.
It was impossible, that he hadn't aged a day in the interim. And to be fronting
a punk band here, of all places, on this night, in this time? It beggared
belief. She put it from her mind, and put her lips to the bottle he offered her
gratefully, welcoming the burn. Welcoming the oblivion.
"Whoa baby slow down; I'm paying for you awake not passed out on the floor.
Though I guess it doesn't matter that much." He shrugged, tapping out a rhythm
on the sideboard before bending at the waist - hipbones lean and sharp above
his low-slung jeans - and snorting up a line of white.
"Can I have some?" She heard herself ask, as if in a dream. He grinned
wolfishly.
"Now we're talking. C'mere blondie."
She rose to her feet and stepped closer, the room swaying like a ship in a
storm, and she reached out a hand to steady herself. He caught her wrist and
drew her fast against himself, body long and hard and smelling of liquor and
leather and ozone. She opened her mouth to speak but no words came out, only a
breathless squeak.
"You remind me of someone I used to know," he muttered, bitterness on his
tongue in scotch and cigarettes, and before she could reply, could say that the
feeling was mutual, he was pulling her thin slip over her head, ripping the
white lacy rayon panties that were supposed to be for Jerry. She was gasping
and drunk, and when he turned her back to him and bent her over the sideboard,
she complied, trembling as she felt him fumble with his belt buckle behind her,
long fingers brushing her heat. His cock pressed against her backside, semi-
hard, and she felt a sprinkle like snowflakes on her skin, the scrape of a
fingernail down her spine, and shivered.
Behind her, he grinned salaciously, holding a hundred up to his nose. "Oh,
yeah, this is gonna be awesome," he informed her, and bending, inhaled the
eightball of cocaine he had railed up her back. He gripped her hips with large
hands, long fingers biting into tender flesh, and ran his tongue over her
delicately protruding vertebrae, all the way up to her neck, where he sank his
teeth in and she cried out. Reaching in front of her, he pulled a small hand
mirror scattered with the white powder beneath her face; then tangled his
fingers in her hair, palm firm at the base of her skull. His breath was hot in
her ear as he panted and pressed her face down to the mirror. Beth gasped,
squirmed, then gave in, breathing in the drug and welcoming the burn in her
sinuses and the sudden spinning behind her skull. He thrust into her with a
grunt, much bigger than anything she'd been prepared for and apparently unaware
that he was fucking a daisy-fresh schoolgirl and not the escort he'd ordered.
Beth gripped the edges of the sideboard, nails biting into the worn wood as
tears blurred her vision, and held on.
It would have been easier, she would think later, if she had derived no
pleasure from that night; if it had been simply a mistaken encounter that she
emerged from a little tattered and worn but otherwise unchanged. But such was
not the case. Her mind recalled, as if on a film loop that grew faded with time
but refused to stop replaying, the way her legs had trembled and then failed
her as she clung to the sideboard and wailed out the only word she could think
of - "Daddy!"  The way she'd been flooded with molten heat as he cursed and
came inside her, hips jerking hard and erratic.
He'd withdrawn in as businesslike a manner as one could imagine, slapping her
backside companionably and tossing her a towel as if they had been involved in
a sporting event together. He pressed a wad of bills into her palm, handed her
her clothes and showed her to the door. Walking as if in a daze, Beth wandered
back to the motel room and let herself in, finding Jerry still passed out in
the bed they had shared. She slipped in under the blankets, suddenly chilled to
the bone. In the morning, the only evidence that the previous evening's events
had not been a dream was the money clutched in her hand and the sticky leavings
between her thighs. She showered to forget the one and bought textbooks for
college to try and move past the other.
Of course, there was one more souvenir, which showed up six weeks later, in two
little blue lines on a plastic stick in the bathroom of the animal shelter
where she volunteered for credit on her college transcripts.
Suddenly Beth was tired. Tired of fighting for love, for achievement, to
transcend the bonds of the mundane that had been foisted upon her the moment
she became another statistic - fatherless mixed-race child raised in the foster
system, intelligent but doomed to mediocrity. She broke the good news to Jerry,
who had no difficulty whatsoever in believing that the happy accident was the
result of his heroic biological contribution, and they were married in short
order. The convenient lie was slightly less shameful than the unimaginable
alternative.
The rest, as they say, is history.
~~~~~~~
The intervention wasn't necessary in every universe. In most dimensions, Jerry
had managed to seal the deal on prom night, ruining his daughter's life the
old-fashioned way, without any additional assistance from Rick himself. The
Rick responsible - a younger version of himself, from a dimension where he'd
stayed in the Flesh Curtains longer and played the punk scene rather than
joining the fight against the Federation - was long gone. C-137 had looked him
up after discovering the genetic... discrepancy... In this particular
household. But the doppelganger had been found dead in a hotel on Klaxon 7
years before, a needle in his arm and a ginger hooker in his bed to no one's
real surprise. C-137 developed a synaptic dampening drug that kept Beth's
firstborn docile and her intellect suppressed, dosing her consistently from an
early age, confident that the child would grow to be more or less identical to
all the other Summers in the multiverse - redheaded, comely, and hopelessly
mundane.
But then he had destroyed his dimension of residence, left it so dramatically
fucked that it was simpler to just bin it entirely... And found himself there.
Of all places. In that garage. In that house. In another man's shoes. Filling
the voids he himself had left, by dying or leaving or getting drunk and
impregnating a teenage girl. It wasn't him but it was, and the burden of that
knowledge - of all his knowledge - settled even more firmly on his shoulders
like the weight of the world on Atlas. His brow furrowed, he sighed, and
withdrew his flask as he left the yard and its freshly packed graves, entering
the house with Morty trailing, dazed, along behind him.
"Hey, Grandpa Rick-"
"Fuck off, Summer." He snarled, and stalked past her into the living room,
intent on getting gloriously drunk.
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