Chapter Text
The yard sale thing only takes a few more days to stop being a recurring nuisance at the forefront of Morty’s mind. At first he thinks he’s finally inherited whatever combo of disassociation and apathy it is runs in his family that makes them all so blasé at the sight of their own graves in the backyard. Of course, because nothing in his life is ever that fucking straightforward, that’s when the nightmares start.
It’s been a while since Morty’s had any weird dreams. Maybe it’s the nonsensical shit he faces on his and Rick’s adventures, maybe its because he’s been a light sleeper just in case he needs to drag his mom or Rick back to bed after they turn up in his bed, mumbling, then yelling out drunken apologies, maybe it’s the constant mindblowers that remove any potential night terror inducing trauma before his brain can catch up.
This night is different from his usual unremarkable ones, and he knows it when the dream wraps around him with sudden clarity, when he barely realizes that he’s crossed the line between asleep and awake, because his fingertips instinctively move to brush against the soft padding they’ve been rested on, and his eyelids flutter slightly as a gentle hand slips them closed. His chest, however, doesn’t rise and fall to inhale the stale air of the casket he’s in, and-
Ah fuck. The casket? Morty grimaces and yanks himself out, not quite gasping for air but still panicked. He thinks he can hear as his undead heart patters on in a valiant, phantom effort at a heartbeat, but he knows if a hand were to brush against his neck there would be no sound; no skittering, nervous pulse to be felt. He should be scared. He should be fucking terrified. Instead, an odd sense of peace overtakes him as he slips out of the casket, though what counts as him is questionable.
When he peers down into the scarce gap of the casket, he can see his own body, a blue tinge in his carefully arranged hands as the blood pools to his extremities. When Morty takes a step back, fueled by something that’s not-quite-horror but too somber to be anticipation, his footsteps are nonexistent, his shadow gone with it.
He has a vague sense that he should be screaming once he figures out what he’s looking at. But perhaps he’s way too messed up to flinch at the sight of his own corpse anymore. Thanks, Rick, for the practice run.
His family appears then, a crowd undone by grief, by grief over him, and his breath catches in his fake lungs. This time, they’re not humanoid slices of bread or weirdly committed to a gothic aesthetic or an upper-middle-class caricature of a family. They’re the achingly familiar set of people he shares a house with. Summer steps forward, a faint smudge of marker still visible under her cheekbone from that godawful camp they both went to last week. Space Beth is there, one hand on her kind-of-daughter’s shoulder, while Morty’s mom and dad huddle into each other. His mom still has that healed nick on her finger from where she cut it making dinner last night, and his dad is still wearing that godawful hat, and—
Rick, his Rick, Morty C-137’s very own sociopathic nutjob of a grandpa, looks just like every other copy of himself floating around in the multiverse. Except there’s something about his eyes, grim and shadowed like when he was hunting down Prime. That, and his flask is slightly chipped from when Morty knocked over his distillery, and he never bothered to repair it out of spite. Yeah, this is his Rick, alright. The same Rick who is more drunk than Morty’s ever seen him, which is saying a lot, and is on his knees, hands digging into the soil as if to anchor himself.
“We’re sorry, Morty,” they’re all now practically gasping, an amalgamation of sadness in perfect sync, the force of their combined grief sending them to their knees, hunched over his casket. “We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re so fucking sorry—”
Morty should be disturbed, by all accounts. He should be pleading to his non-denominational Christian god to wake him up, he should shudder and turn away as he watches his mother wail with an intensity that sends her careening over the oak-wood surface of his final resting place, kissing the plaque and leaving a smear of bile and blood from bitten lips. Instead, Morty steps forward and revels in the screaming and crying, his hand brushing along the casket tenderly, wondering if the Morty inside knew how lucky he was to have this. Instead, he shimmies the lid off, drinking in the sound of the apologies, bargains, pleas made far too late, and slips inside. No one sees him, which he chalks up to dream-logic, though a bitter part of him muses that them not noticing his presence is a disturbingly realistic detail.
The plush padding of the inside seems even more welcoming now that Morty knows just how chaotic the world outside his cocoon is, and he lies flat to get comfortable, a hand brushing against his own corpse that’s laid right beside him. It’s a tight squeeze, the corpse and him, its soul, he supposes— squished in a space only made for one of them, but Morty kind of likes how he can watch the peaceful stillness of his face, likes the way the lid creaks shut with a finality that doesn’t manage to drown out the mourners. It’s dark and cold down here, but Morty has never felt so at ease in a long, long time. Outside, his mother wails once more for him to wake up, and the rest of the mourners join her chorus.
Wake up, Morty.
Please, just wake up. Hey, can you hear me?
Wake up, wake the fuck up, Morty!
‘‘-Morty! Wake the— eugh- wake the fuck up, you little shit!’’
Morty’s eyes fly open despite his best efforts to cling onto his dream-induced bliss for a few moments more. It’s practically muscle memory at this point, his body more used to the adrupt wake-up calls than his muddled brain is, so he doesn’t flinch as his grandpa’s wasted body slumps unceremoniously onto his bed.
‘‘Ugh- Rick?’’ Morty sighs, though its no longer a question. Morty’s life is pretty fucked up, but there’s not a surplus of drunk intruders stumbling into his room at 3AM.
‘‘Jesus, do- do we really have to do this whole thing again? You- you know why I bothered to drag my ass up here, so be a good kid for grandpa and get out before I gotta- gotta drag your skinny ass outta’-’’
‘‘I get it, Rick,’ Morty huffs, already groggily extricating himself away from his duvet by the time Rick’s only mid drunken-ramble, ‘‘Jeez…’’
‘‘Jeez,’’ Rick mimics in a crappy falsetto that Morty is very sure is exaggerated and nothing like him, ‘‘L-like I said, this isn’t a playthrough of Oblivion, we- we can skip the shitty dialogue.’’
‘‘I actually like those games,’’ Morty says, mostly just to rile Rick up, before he slinks out of his room with one last, longing glance at his bed, the dream already half-forgotten.