Chapter Text
Rick dragged Morty out of the portal into the middle of the garage, clenched his hand around his grandson’s upper arm for a wincing moment before he yanked it back sharp enough to throw Morty off balance. Morty stumbled and started to complain, but thought better of it when he saw how Rick stalked over to his table of gadgets, flung off his lab coat and tossed it over the back of his swivel chair. His back was too straight. His arms were too tense. Morty held his elbows and shrunk in on himself.
“... R-Rick?”
Rick didn’t look back at him, rifling through the mechanical bric-a-brac on his table until he found a can of WD-40 and a jar of Copaslip.
“Go upstairs, Morty. Go - go and get a shower.”
“Oh, jeez, Rick, we were just - I-I really didn’t mean to -”
“I said,” Rick snatched a torque wrench from its hook on the wall, wrested a socket organizer drawer from its toolbox with a metal-on-metal scrape-clatter-clang that had Morty cringing, “go take a fucking shower, Morty.”
He flinched back with an instinctive yessir, ducked his head, threw his palms up in supplication and backed up towards the fire door that led into the dining room. When his back hit the dryer, Rick called his name.
“Morty.”
Rick stared at his steel pegboard of rivet guns and screwdrivers, slip-joint pliers and claw hammers, white-knuckled the torque wrench in his hand. Morty swallowed and opened his mouth on a few false starts before he got out, “Y-yeah, R-Rick?”
And of course his voice cracked. Of course his knees knocked and his heart decided it was a fast-twitch electric motor instead of a hollow muscle and his stomach churned on chips and Coca-Cola and two shots of Johnnie Walker Red. He was going to be sick. He was going to -
“Don’t lock the door.”
Morty put a hand over his mouth, tripped over his pant leg as he stumbled to the fire door. He nodded at Rick’s back, mumbled out a stuttering assent before he was making his way to the upstairs bathroom as fast as he could manage with a light head and heavy feet.
His panic morphed the house, stretched out the den, steepened the staircase and collapsed the walls of the upstairs hallway into a claustrophobic triangle, but he made it. Not a second after closing the bathroom door behind himself, Morty lurched into a kneel in front of the toilet, yanked the lid up and vomited the contents of his stomach in two violent heaves.
The sight of the toilet water stained a revolting pastel brown was enough to send him into a fit of dry heaving that did nothing but cramp up his sides into figure-eight knots. When his gag reflex finally let up, he closed the lid and flushed the toilet, slumped back against the wall underneath the towel bar and struggled to get his breathing under control.
“ - yeah, just - no, see, it’s like this, watch me - you tilt your head back, you take a deep breath - an-an-and you just toss it to the back of your throat, easy as can - sim-simple as ABC, Mor-ty. C’mon, one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to -”
Thumping music kicked on from down the hall, bass-heavy and resonant. Summer must have turned on her speakers to drown out the noises he was making; she had trouble with sympathy gagging and couldn’t hear the sound of vomiting without nearly doing so herself. Morty pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his face in them, waited for his system to recover from the shock of forcing up every ounce of bile in his stomach. He quivered against the cool blue tiles, eyes shut tight against the brutal rush of blood in his head and the cold sweat sliding down his temples, down his back.
He wondered at how he could have been so fucking stupid, how all this could have been avoided if he had just stopped and thought for a second - but no, of course he hadn’t. All it took was an easy smile and a grandfatherly pat on the head and he was sitting on a barstool next to a Rick whose dimension he didn’t even know, chattering about everything from how amazing he thought the Citadel was to his favorite episodes of Ball Fondlers to the last place his Rick had taken him.
“- doing in the Okapi Nebula? Y-you for sure mean, with the wrecked Hardtack flotilla where all - all the Korblock raid-urrp-ers hole up? That place? Jeez, those sonsabitches don’t play - th-they’re - that’s a pretty goddamn rough spot, kid. What did your Rick bring you along -”
Morty’s trembling subsided to the point that his focus shifted to the sour-sick taste in his mouth, and the foul combination of scotch whisky and dark soda made him grimace. His stomach rolled on emptiness and his teeth felt tacky from the acid sitting on them and the thought of his enamel eroding away as he sat there clutching his knees made him groan. He needed to rinse his mouth out, he needed to brush his teeth, he needed to take a - take a fucking shower.
Bracing his forearm on the bathtub, Morty heaved himself up and stepped over to the sink. He filled his mouth with water directly from the faucet, swished and spit three times before he grabbed his toothbrush from the caddy on the counter and set about brushing his teeth, careful not to set off his gag reflex again. When he finished rinsing the foam from his mouth, he avoided looking at himself in the mirror and walked back across the bathroom to turn on the showerhead.
“- so you got - what - you lost your Rick? Fuck, a Council meeting. Yeah, he’ll be outta there in a - in a - ASAP, I’m sure. Here, why don’t you sit with me while you wait? Better than walking all over the Citadel, and - and hell, if I know my-eurgh-myself, this’ll be the first place he stops in after he tells those pretentious a-holes off -”
As the water heated up, Morty removed his clothes with something bordering on mechanical precision. His every move was a perfunctory jerk that had no awareness beyond the next step of undressing - unwork the double knots on his shoes, peel off his sweaty socks, turn his stained shirt inside out pulling it over his head. He tested the water temperature with his hands, let the warm water chase away the chill that had settled deep in them before he slipped his jeans and underwear off, tossed them in the dirty hamper behind the door with the rest of his clothes.
He grabbed a washrag, set a towel on the tank of the toilet and stepped under the spray of water. He was taking a shower. The door was unlocked. There was nothing else to do but wait, now - Rick had to come up soon, because between clearing his stomach and brushing his teeth, he had already been up here for fifteen minutes. What was Rick doing?
“ - go! Ah, he- no, you can’t breathe back out before you shoot it down - gagged you good, huh? Here, sip this - it’s - it’s just a soda chaser, jeez Morty. No, it - it isn’t mixed - do I look like - like I have to mix my shit? Like I’m over here sippin’ on raspberry cosmos and fuck-fuckin’ appletinis? There, see, have a little faith - I-I-I shoot ‘em - take all my shots neat. Now - now, you wanna try again? -”
He tried to scrub at his face, his chest with the rag, but his arms were so heavy he gave up after a couple of weak swipes, set it on the lip of the tub and stood under the water with his chin in his collarbone. Five minutes. Ten minutes. By the time a half hour had passed, Morty was struggling to hold his breathing in check, keep his heart from hurling itself topsy-turvy because this couldn’t be anything but bad. Rick never waited, and Rick never made him wait. The man had all the patience of a drill sergeant in charge of privileged millennials when it came to this. There had been zero hesitation on his part since the first night they had spent in this new dimension after bailing on the one they Cronenburged into ruin and this wasn’t what Morty had come to expect from him at all.
The nervous anticipation sent spikes through his intestines, crumpled up his stomach into a paper ball; if he had had anything else in there to throw up he would have started heaving again. He put a hand back over his watering mouth, hugged his other arm over his middle and tried not to repeat this is bad, this is bad, this is bad to himself. He wasn’t doing well.
“- to there for? Those guys are - are thugs, and I don’t mean like, common criminals, I mean like that Indian gang that strangled and robbed travelers for six hundred years. They’re fucked, kid - they gain your confidence, choke you to death in your sleep and call it a ‘sacred service’ - I know, like shit, thanks very much you fuckin’ headca-urrrp-ses. What the hell is your Rick doing in their territory? Let alone dragging you -”
Time was making less sense with every minute passed. In the grips of rolling nausea, a creeping headache and muscles sore from shaking, Morty just wanted Rick to hurry up and get this over with. He was painfully trained on listening for the sound of the door handle turning, tensed nearly to the point of pulling a tendon and unable to stop his mind from conjuring up every worst-case scenario imaginable. This limbo-like waiting game had to be worse than whatever Rick had in store for him - it just - it just had to be.
The water was listing toward the tepid side and Morty turned the cold tap down to correct it back to warm. That meant at least forty minutes had passed in total and the hot water was going to run out in another ten, and what was he supposed to do then? Did he turn the shower off, get out and get dressed, go over to his room? Rick had only told him to take a shower and leave the door unlocked - did - did Rick expect him to stand in the shower until it went cold? He dropped his hand from his mouth to join his other arm around his middle and sunk down to the floor of the tub.
“- shit, you’re with the rouge, kid? Christ, I’ve - I’ve heard that one is a real asshole. No wonder the Council or-eurrp-ordered him in, he’s probably - he’s - fuck, I bet he’s inciting a Korblock rebellion or some shit. Yeah, those big-wig Ricks would get their panties in a bunch about that - that’s some extremist anti-government shit and they don’t -”
Would he really just sit here until Rick came in? How long would he stay put after the water passed from mild to freezing? The temperature drop was getting closer every second and still, Morty couldn’t make himself move. Even as he tried to reason with himself that surely Rick wouldn’t be mad if he just turned the water off, that he didn’t say stay in the the shower, that this was utterly ridiculous, Morty remembered Rick’s furious grip on his upper arm as he dragged him away from the bar, the hard line of his mouth and the stony look in his eyes and -
Morty sat tight, curled up against the steadily blooming cold. God help him, he was going to wait. He was shifting away from the worry that Rick was going to show up and into the worry that Rick was going to leave him in here just to see how long he would stay.
“- the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it’s gone right to my head! C’mon, you-you know this one, M-Morty! Yeah, you do, don’t you remember Jaws, Morty? Listen, listen, it goes - wherever I may roam, on land or sea or foam, you can always hear me singin’ this song, show me the way to go -”
The lilting melody was stuck in his head, but it didn’t bring a smile to his face like it had when he first heard it. He had the clear realization that he would never be able to hear that song again without associating it with this moment, forehead touching his knees under an icy spray of water as he waited for Rick - his Rick to walk through the door. He was such - such an idiot and of course he was breaking down into tears, now, sinking into a cold, crying wreck and he just wanted Rick - he just wanted his grandpa to come in and tell him he could get out and dry off and warm up.
He wanted his grandpa. He wanted to say sorry and be forgiven. He wanted things to be okay again. It wasn’t lost on him how completely fucked it was that his idea of ‘okay’ involved makeout sessions and handjobs from his maternal grandfather, but those were preferable to this numb hang-fire by a long shot. He was used to Rick burning him, eating him up with hot hands and a scalding mouth, impatient and grasping and hungry. He didn’t know how to handle this, being left alone to fret in frigid silence, in the dark with no clue what to expect, worried out of his skull about how Rick was going to discipline him.
“ - your Rick - he - damn he lucked out with you, kid. Ye-eurgh-es I mean that - hey, I do! Fuck, he must - jeez, he keeps you down pretty hard, huh? He-hey, listen here, Morty, listen to a Rick tell it, here’s the truth - he treats you like that ‘cause he’s scared of - of you wising up and figuring out you don’t need him like he needs you. Don’t laugh, kid, I’m serious - I’m - like a heart attack, little buddy, I -”
He wasn’t laughing now. His shoulders shook and he bit his tongue to trap the sobs that wanted out. That other Rick had been kind to him, easygoing and glowing with good humor and openly glad for his company. He put Morty at ease when he found out he had been separated from his Rick; made him feel welcome instead of petrified like the Guard Ricks with their combat boots and plasma rifles and soldier-stern faces; answered his questions with minimal sarcasm and asked some genuinely interested ones in return.
He had been funny and engaging and so nice. His every turn of phrase made Morty smile, his every story made Morty laugh and Morty opened up to him like a book, happy to be read and dogeared and appreciated. The man had been well over halfway to plastered when he started in on the deeply personal compliments and Morty’s first instinct was to crack up like it was another joke, but something about the alternate Rick’s serious frown stopped him. There had been a moment where they looked at each other in silence and in it, Morty knew that the Rick felt sorry for him. Shame pinked his face, made him look down at the bar and clasp his hands together, and the Rick had put a light hand on his shoulder.
“- know it’s none of my business, but kid, you know you don’t have to - to put up with whatever he’s - I mean, if he’s - w-well, y’know. There are ways to - there are places you can go that’ll help. Y-y-you’re a good kid, Morty, you don’t deserve -”
And of course that’s how his Rick had found them, leaned close, faces spirit-red and speaking in a conspiratorial hush with a dozen empty shot glasses in front of them. Rick had come up behind him without a word, grabbed his arm and hauled him off the barstool hard enough to make him yelp like a startled dog.
Rick had shot open a portal right there, spared two seconds to glare murder at his alternate self before he dragged Morty through the neon green vortex and back home. The last thing Morty saw was the other Rick’s mouth lowering into a softhearted frown, and he had the urge to say wait, wait please, but the words lodged in his throat then, just like every other time he had wanted to say them.
Finally, after nearly a full hour had passed, Morty heard the door click and creak open, latch back shut and lock with a snick. He hugged his knees tight, bit his lip hard, breathed in deep through his nose.
Rick was here.
The pitter-patter of the shower and the thumping of his heart deadened down, left Morty hyper-focused on the sounds of Rick’s footsteps, the thunk-thunk of him kicking off his boots, the telltale rattle-jangle-ziiiip of him unbuckling his belt and unfastening his pants. He held his breath and Rick pulled open the shower curtain, twisted the taps off and tossed the towel from the toilet tank over his back.
“Stand up an-and get out of the tub, Morty.”
Morty gripped the towel by its edges and did as told without looking up. He stood, trembling and numb, staring down at the way the water dripped from his legs to form little puddles on the bathroom floor. Rick set his hands on his towel-covered shoulders and Morty exhaled shakily.
“You - you cold, Morty?”
Rick slid the towel down from his shoulders and rubbed it against his back, drying his chilled skin with light passes. Morty trembled and nodded, couldn’t bring himself to look up from his feet because then he would see Rick’s undone fly and he was going to avoid that for as long as he could. The smell of lighter fluid and motor oil permeated the room and he started to breathe through his mouth, strained and shallow.
“You wanna warm up, baby?”
Rick’s voice was sly and toothsome, edged with a mean sort of lust that locked up Morty’s muscles and turned his mind into a useless error message. Rick’s hands went to the bare skin of his hips and they were covered in something sticky and viscous but they were so warm. Against his cold flesh they felt like firebrands and Morty nodded again in silence.
“Tell - tell grandpa you want him to warm you up, Morty.”
The fingers traced along the curve of his pelvis, down the front of his wet thighs and back up his sides, smearing around what Morty now saw was axle grease. The tar-like substance coated Rick’s hands, streaked up his forearms and splattered over his dingy wifebeater; Rick stained Morty’s just-cleaned skin black as pitch wherever he touched. It smelled like the garage, like handing Rick a drip pan while the man laid back on his mechanic’s creeper up under his ship, like Rick teaching him how to change oil filters and Morty pinched his eyes shut.
“I-I-I want you to - to w-warm me up, Rick.”
“What’s the magic word?”
Morty swallowed and flushed through the cold, head tilted down toward Rick’s khaki covered knees. “P-please.”
Morty opened his eyes back up when Rick took the towel from around his back to fling it out flat in front of the toilet. He followed its descent so he didn’t see Rick’s hands reach to grab his, tug them over to the waistband of his pants. Morty followed the lead with a stumbling step, looked down to see his hands pressed against Rick’s unfastened pants and finally looked up to Rick’s face.
Morty could only describe his grandpa’s expression as a mixture of irritable thirst and predatory affection and he felt tears pricking his eyes again, felt both the need to say sorry and the need to scream but his throat locked up so neither one was possible. Rick looked him dead in the eyes as he guided Morty’s hands through sliding his khakis and boxers down to his ankles. He sat down bareassed on the toilet, spread his legs wide and pulled on Morty’s wrists with a gradually increasing pressure until Morty kneeled in front of him.
Rick set Morty’s hands on his upper thighs and cupped his own under Morty’s chin, fingers brushing over the bone just under his ears, smearing grease there, too and Morty shuddered.
“You know what to do, baby.”
Morty clenched his hands over Rick’s thighs and heaved a quiet sob, and Rick shushed him and swept his wet hair back from his forehead. The grease slicked through his curls and Rick had now wiped enough of it off his hands that Morty could see the ashen skin underneath. Rick grabbed his cock with his other hand, already half-hard and twitching, pushed at the back of Morty’s neck until his grandson pressed his lips to the tip of it and he sighed out lowly.
Morty did know what to do. He had thought his first time giving head would be the worst, choking and flinching and getting his hair yanked for not being mindful of his teeth, but something about having experience added layers of humiliation that pulsed hot in his chest. He hated that he knew he had to get Rick’s cock soaked with saliva first, that he knew how to grip the base of the shaft with both hands and gently tongue the foreskin back and forth as Rick’s cock filled out. He hated that he knew how to hum and murmur and lick stripes from the root to the glans, that he knew how to tuck his teeth behind his lips as he slowly eased inch after inch of cock down his throat.
But what made him truly burn with shame was how his own cock stirred every time Rick groaned and mumbled his approval; how his legs squirmed tight together when Rick put his hands around his neck and manhandled him up and down his cock, just a little too deep, over and over again; how he ragdolled into the grip, relaxed his throat and allowed Rick to fuck his face like a pornstar, all while the warm-hot sucker punch of arousal spiked through his belly, shot up his spine and made his toes curl.
He scored five stars when it came to not thinking about how sucking his grandfather’s cock turned him on more than any fantasy he could come up with ever had.
“Ahh, fuck - well, aren’t you turning into a little blowjob queen? You - damn, you’ve gotten good at this. You think you can - you wanna find out if you take it all, yet?”
Rick’s hands grabbed his wrists, pulled his hands away from where they were securely wrapped around the base of his grandpa’s cock and Morty’s eyes widened. He couldn’t - Rick knew he couldn’t and he had said he wouldn’t - but before Morty could even finish that thought Rick had his hands back around his neck, pulling his grandson’s head down and angling his hips up, forcing Morty to swallow more of his cock than he ever had before. Morty’s nose touched wiry pubic hair and Rick - Rick held him there for four breathless seconds before letting him go. He flopped back on the towel, sputtering and gagging, retching up nothing but thick strands of spit that he wiped off with a jerky flick of his hand.
Tears ran down his face and watery snot dripped from his nose as he shook and gulped in lungfuls of air. When he leveled back out, he wiped his face with his forearm and glared up at Rick in abject betrayal.
“Y-y-you promised you wouldn’t -”
“You must have already puked.”
His reprimand died on his tongue and he wilted under Rick’s contemplative stare, wrapped his arms around himself; he was aware of the goosebumps prickling over his skin now he wasn’t preoccupied with giving his blowjob queen best. He nodded, and Rick’s lips curled back to flash yellow teeth in a mean smirk.
“Good.”
Morty’s mouth dropped open, hot blood flaming through his cheeks in something other than shame as understanding stole over him. Of course Rick wanted him to throw up. Of course Rick would try to gag him on his cock to get him to vomit, as if that could cancel out the fact that he had taken his first two shots of liquor with a Rick that wasn’t him. Morty balled his hands into fists, eyes narrowing into spiteful slits and mouth closing into a flat line.
“W-what, you think that changes a-anything? It’s a - it’s still a first you never get to have, now.”
Morty had a moment to enjoy seeing the smirk slip from Rick’s mouth, how his face went lax with shock to make him look lost and off-kilter for once - but only a moment before it was covered back up with a scowl and Rick was kicking his pants off from around his feet and Morty had to second-guess his nerve. He stood from the toilet to his full height, towering over Morty in nothing but a grease stained wifebeater and dirty socks, cock brutally erect and curving straight up towards his navel. Morty shrank under his shadow even as he took a sick little thrill in knowing that, with one smart comment, he could get under Rick’s skin like nobody else.
Rick leaned down to grab him under the armpits, hoisted him up and held him against the wall - it took Morty a moment to remember to put his feet under himself, and when he did, Rick stepped in close, pressed the line of his body flush against his grandson’s, tipped his chin up to look him in the eyes. Morty’s temper evaporated into a puff of smoke beneath the heat of his grandfather’s expression, and no sooner was he opening his mouth in apology than Rick was squeezing his chin between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to make him gasp in pain, bracing his other hand on the wall next to his head, driving a knee between his legs.
“Y-y-you wanna talk about firsts, Morty?” he asked, so strained and dark Morty could only whimper in response. “Because I remember the first time I fucked you, Morty. How you thought - you were so sure I couldn’t fit, you remember that?” Rick let go of his chin, curled that hand around his neck and Morty nodded stiffly. He closed his eyes against the memory Rick was conjuring because he remembered it just fine and needed absolutely no help with recounting details.
“But I did fit, didn’t I? Even though you - you shook like a fucking puppy and and moaned like a little bitch, you took every goddamn inch of grandpa’s cock up your ass, didn’t you, Morty?” Rick’s hand closed tight enough around his neck he couldn’t draw in air and he whimpered again, heart jackrabbiting against his ribs as his hands rose to grab at his grandpa’s wrist. He tapped on it twice and Rick eased back an inch with a chuckle, loosened his grip just enough to let Morty breathe in sharply before continuing.
“I-I remember the moment you relaxed into it. When you opened your legs and let me fuck you deep and filthy, Morty - when I - when you gave in and let yourself like it.” Rick leaned down to kiss the shell of his ear, lowered his voice to a rock-hewn whisper that punctured Morty’s lungs and pierced his guts clean through.
“The way you sunk into that bed, arched your back an-an-and let me fucking wreck you - goddamn,” he took the hand on the wall down to pinch at the base of his own cock, hot and heavy against Morty’s stomach, obscenely turned on by the memory of deflowering his grandson and Morty blushed, gripped Rick’s wrist harder.
“I got your cherry, baby. I am your first, so - so if you think I fucking care about you choosing to get your toes wet for the first time with some bootlicking sheep-Rick, you’re an idiot.”
“Then what -?”
“Jeez, you really don’t pay atten-eurgh-tion, do you? You didn’t - fucking think for a second about w-w-what could have been in that shit he poured you. He could have spiked it with ketamine and portaled outta there with you when you - when you vegged the fuck out. Do you - don’t you have any sense of self-preser-urrp-preservation?”
“O-oh,” Morty looked down at Rick’s hand on his neck, the way his own hands hung on to his grandpa’s wrist as if he were hanging off the edge of a cliff and it was a saving bough. He fought down the urge to laugh humorlessly. “I dunno, Rick - he seemed so - he didn’t seem like th-that type.”
Rick leaned back to shake his head and roll his eyes. “What the fuck do you know about types? Y-y-you think the Rick who wants to kidnap and torture a Morty is always gonna have a scarred up mouth and black eyeliner?”
Morty shrank under the reminder of dozens of Mortys huddled together in a foul, cramped cell, emaciated and terrified and wailing in misery. He hadn’t been thinking of that at all and Rick ran his free hand back through his own hair in exasperation.
“Christ, you couldn’t have just stayed by my side, Morty. You had to wander off - get fucking distracted by a cowboy hat or-or-or a version of you with cat ears or some other dumb shit -”
“I didn’t wander off!”
Rick blinked down at him, curiosity peaked by his outburst and Morty swallowed. He was flooded again with his earlier desire to make up, felt a twinge of shame for purposefully trying to upset his grandpa when the man had just been concerned about him getting roofied and picked up by a monstrous version of himself. Morty wasn’t totally oblivious; he knew there were some Ricks out there who wouldn’t think twice about using him as a disposable lab rat or selling him to a trainer or much, much worse. He had to explain.
“I swear, I was tr-trying to stay with you. I got - it was when that company of Guard Ricks walked out of the - the bar you found me in. They cut me off and when they cleared out, y-you were gone. I didn’t know how to get to the Council Chamber so I-I-I just stayed put.”
Morty let go of Rick’s wrist as he lowered it from his neck, and Rick grabbed his hips, kneaded into them and ground his thigh up between Morty’s legs; Morty squirmed, worried at his lip and took the slow frottage as a sign to go on.
“That - that other Rick - he noticed I was lost and offered to let me sit with him. I think he, um, I don’t think he had a Morty...” he frowned, remembering the alternate Rick’s insistence that he knew a song he had never heard before, how concerned he had seemed about Morty’s safety and wellbeing. His gut told him there was an unhappy story there. “He was nice to me.”
Morty felt Rick start to go rigid again and he hastily grabbed his upper arms, looked up at him with wide eyes and went on in a rush. “I don’t mean - I’m saying - pl-please don’t be mad. Y-y-you’re right, I shouldn’t have trusted him and I’m - I’m sorry for worrying you. It won’t happen again.”
Morty slid his hands down to Rick’s elbows, under his forearms and came to rest over Rick’s hands on his hips, pressed down on them until Rick relaxed with a scoff and redoubled his grip. It was so tight it ached and Morty whined from the back of his throat.
“Oh, that’s - I like it - w-when you do that.”
It took Morty a second to realize what he had said, and more than that how he had said it, and when he did he blushed cherry-red and thunked his head back against the wall. Rick’s face flicked from startled to aroused to amused and he grinned, squeezed Morty’s hips again just to make him wriggle. “Well, that’s pretty fuckin’ obvious. Never - never thought I’d hear you say it, though.”
A warm rush surged through Morty’s chest - a sort of embarrassed pleasure at his ability to calm Rick down, to redirect his attention. He was coming to realize he had a sway over his grandpa just like his grandpa had over him, and while it still made him wallow in self-reproach he couldn’t deny how good it felt to sometimes take advantage of how attractive Rick found him. He wrapped his arms around Rick’s neck, leaned forward to kiss at the stubble lining his jaw.
“I-I like it - when we kiss, too.”
“Yeah?”
Rick returned the embrace by sliding his hands around to Morty’s lower back, supported all his grandson’s weight on his thigh. He sounded completely distracted and painfully turned on and Morty nodded, stroked his fingers through the thin, wiry hair under them.
“I always have,” he admitted against Rick’s chin, and Rick groaned like his vanilla-shy confession physically hurt him, caught his mouth, licked into it greedy and wet and sweltering. Morty opened up under the salvo of tongue and teeth, moaned when Rick dropped his hands to squeeze his ass, couldn’t resist the urge to curl his legs up off the ground and around Rick’s waist. Rick kissed him until he was dizzy and spinning before he broke off to speak in his ear.
“Tell me - tell me what else you like, baby.”
Rick sounded hell-bent interested and Morty was so far from cold now, entire body held up against the wall, boxed in and closed off and lightheaded. “Oh, w-well… oh, jeez, uh, ah...” he mumbled uselessly, overwhelmed by the weight of Rick’s carnal tone and intense focus; he sensed that he had perhaps stepped into some dangerous territory, divulging what he was partial to in their - this part of their relationship.
“Um, I-I think you could do without the encouragement,” he settled on, a little worried Rick would get upset with his refusal, but Rick just snickered, ground up into Morty’s cock with his thigh and kissed the front of his neck, right over his Adam’s apple.
“W-what gives you that idea?”
Morty tilted his head to the side, huffed out an ill humored sigh and Rick fit his right hand in between their bodies to fist Morty’s cock. “Doesn’t matter, though - if you encourage me or - if you tell me or not. I can make some educated guesses.”
Morty looked down at Rick’s hand, saw it was still stained with axle grease but no longer thickly coated enough to smear off on his skin. He frowned at the chafing sensation on his cock, worried about irritation and allergic reactions. “C-can’t you wash your hands?”
“I could.”
“... Please, then?”
“Tell me one other thing you like, and I will.”
Morty groaned. “I-I-I like your hands to be clean.”
“Cop-out answer. Try again.”
He flushed to the roots of his hair and halfway down his chest, casting around for a suitable answer as Rick squeezed his cock, dirty and tacky and rough. It wasn’t the most pleasant sensation and he took a hand from Rick’s neck to grab his grandpa's wrist and pull up on it.
“I, um - the way you - when we’re - y’know, doing... it, how you always make sure I - come first, and you k-keep on going through it, even though I get all squirmy. I-I like that.”
He ended with a weak shrug, felt stupid for having to use a vague euphemism instead of something more adult (having sex, fucking, making - no, no, stop it) - but judging from the way Rick’s face colored to match his own, how he let his hand be pulled away with no resistance, Morty guessed Rick both hadn’t been expecting that answer and thought it was hotter than sin. Morty closed his eyes and dropped his head because that wasn’t the best comparison and if there was a hell, he was headed there in a go-kart.
“Well, fuck, baby,” Rick set Morty back down on the floor, stepped back and said nothing else. Morty looked up when he heard the sink running, saw his grandpa lathering up his hands with the bar of soap from the dish on the counter and bit down hard on his lower lip. He felt a wave of appreciation that he knew was irrationally out of proportion with the small act of courtesy, had the thought that this must be something victims of Stockholm syndrome dealt with; fixating on a tree of kindness so they missed the forest of abuse surrounding them.
Rick finished rinsing his hands off, shook them once and held them up to his grandson as if to say, ‘Good enough?’
Morty nodded, said thank you with sincerity and got the sneaking suspicion that he was seriously damaged goods at this point. Rick pulled him over to stand in front of the sink, opened the medicine cabinet to get out a container of Vaseline and Morty set his shaking hands on the counter. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, saw the black oil marks around his neck, on his chin and cheeks and disliked how they looked like deep bruises. He wondered what Rick had been up to to coat his hands in the substance in the first place.
“What were you doing, anyway?”
“Lubricating -eurrgh- machinery.”
“Oh, my god,” Morty rolled his eyes when Rick wiggled his Vaseline coated fingers at him in the mirror and put his face in his left hand. “It’s like your sense of humor never developed past tenth grade.”
“Y-you asked for that one.”
Before Morty could correct him that no, he hadn’t asked for anything, Rick was pinning him tight against the edge of the counter, pressing two - Jesus, three fingers in his ass and reaching his other hand around to stroke Morty’s cock, slick and deft. “A-aaah, ah, h-hey! Slow down!”
“Eh, aren’t you a little bored with foreplay by now?”
“N-no! Jeez, Rick, ease up, please - that’s too -” but then Rick crooked his fingers just so and dragged them out slow and white fireflies sparked behind Morty’s closed eyes. He curved his back in, shoved his hips back, wanted to move to Alaska and never see another person again when Rick laughed knowingly at him.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
And then Rick was palming his cock fully, pumping his long fingers in and out at the perfect angle and by the time Morty figured out his grandpa was driving at making him come as quick as possible, his abdomen was already seizing up, cock spasming and knees buckling as an orgasm blindsided him because he had all the sexual stamina of a - well, a fifteen year old boy.
“Oooh, god, R-Rick, what -?”
Just as his cock started spurting out ropes of semen into the sink, Rick removed his fingers and replaced them with the head of his lubed cock, tugged Morty back onto it by the hips as he thrust forward and -
“Ho-aah! H-holy - shit, Rick, wait, wait - uhn, hold up, I can’t -”
“Yeah, no. Pretty - pretty sure you can. Thought we clarified that.”
“B-but the angle, and I’m - Rick, god, c’mon, this isn’t gonna -”
“Shush, Morty,” and Rick rocked him up high on his tiptoes and bent his own knees just enough to get the leverage he needed to force his cock all the way in, and for reasons Morty would contemplate never that intensified and drew out his orgasm into something world-rocking and blackout pleasurable. It left him trembling and lost in the moment, unable to remember what had led up to this point or consider what might come next and it was terrifying - or - maybe terrific fit better.
Why were those words so similar?
Rick braced an arm across his chest to press him back against his own, settled his hand around his neck, kissed at his shoulder with a deep, pleased hum.
“W-w-what was that you were saying, Morty?” he asked, as if they had been having a casual conversation interrupted by a phone call and Morty had the urge to punch him in his smart mouth or at least tell him off. He was, however, far too preoccupied with sorting out how to breathe again to do anything about it. All he ended up doing was clinging to his grandfather’s arm as he tried to come down from floating somewhere in the ceiling.
At least Rick waited for a few minutes to let him adjust, held still and kissed at his neck and started talking. He told him he was doing so well and how fucking tight he was and how pretty he looked stretched out on his cock, and no matter how much Morty wished it didn’t, it brought him back from the border of pain he had been tripping over, set him back down firmly in blissful territory. Rick knew how to key him up so his pain tolerance spiked, how to blur the line between pleasure and pain so he had trouble telling the difference between them - but mostly, he knew all the right things to say to make him open up.
When his shaking evened out, Rick tilted his chin up to see their reflection in the mirror and he followed along limply. His cheeks were scarlet, his eyes heavy lidded, his mouth spit-shiny under the incandescent vanity lights and Rick looked like he had never seen anything sexier.
“Look at - you see that face, baby?” Rick kissed behind his ear and Morty nodded in drowsy agreement, half listening and half gone. He lolled his head back onto Rick’s shoulder as he tried to lower down from his tiptoes to the balls of his feet, but he only ended up shifting Rick’s cock deeper inside him and making them both groan like they’d been slugged in the kidneys.
“Ahh, you - damn, y-you’ll be the death of me, Morty.”
“... H-how’s that?”
He didn’t usually respond to Rick’s pillow talk, let alone ask go-on questions, but in his giddy post-orgasm haze he felt like engaging a little. Rick pulled out a couple inches and pushed back in, started a series of short strokes that had Morty pressing back harder into Rick’s shoulder and struggling to even touch his toes to the linoleum every time Rick bottomed out.
“You try the fuck outta me - thought I’d lost you on the Citadel - and I find you in a safety meeting with some candy-ass Babbitt Rick - like fuck, you were practically in his lap, Morty.”
“Was - was not.”
“Close -urrp- close enough, Morty. Y-y-you make such a goddamn show of telling me no every time, but the second you’re with another Rick it’s like - like you fucking forget how.”
“Kinda like all your conditioning is backfiring or something,” Morty shrugged, unthinking - but when he noticed that Rick had gone still and his words caught up with him, his eyes widened and he put a hand over his mouth. That couldn’t be taken as anything but goading and - and what the hell was wrong with him? Rick tightened his hand over his throat, just enough pressure to make him worry he couldn’t breathe, and spoke against his temple.
“Y’know, I’m-I’m getting the feeling you wanna see me jealous.”
He shook his head, took his hand from his mouth to set it feather-light over Rick’s on his neck because no, no he did not. “That’s not what I -”
“Shut up, Morty.”
Morty did, and Rick twisted his own hand around to shove him down over the counter by the back of his neck, dragged his cock out just to push in back in hard enough to knock the air out of Morty’s lungs. Morty had to brace his forearms on either side of the sink, spread his legs wide and rock back into the thrust so his thighs didn’t bang into the edge of the counter, and he gasped out a carrying sob.
“Backfiring, huh?” Rick grabbed his hips again and dug into them like anchor bolts. “Not what it looks like from here. Looks more like - more like you can’t get enough of me, M-Morty. Is that - is this not enough? You wanna let some Ricks run a fucking train on you?” Morty twisted on his toes and arched further into the sink, face so close to his ejaculate he could smell its saltiness and he turned his head away from it with a flinch. “There are clubs I could take you to for that, y’know - chain you to a bed and let Ricks line up out the door to ride you like a goddamn bicycle, baby, one right after the other.”
Morty shook his head no, no, no and Rick chuckled unkindly.
“Gotta say I’m - I’m getting some mixed signals, here. You say no, yet here you are, pitching a tent not five minutes after I took one down for you.”
Morty was horrified to feel that he was, indeed, getting hard again, and he moaned in mortification. “It’s - jeez, Rick, it’s an au-autonomic reflex - it doesn’t mean -”
“Oh, autonomic, so you can’t control it and yadda yadda, whatever.” Rick bore down over his back, hands coming up to overlap his on the counter, and he whispered in his ear, “Rationalize it however you want, you’re getting hard because the idea excites you, Morty.”
“It scares me, Rick!”
Morty’s voice was a shaky, broken snap, tears sliding freely down his cheeks as he tried to convince himself that there was enough oxygen in the room and he wasn’t about to suffocate. Rick eased back, peppered kisses along his hairline, held his hands, stroked his thumbs over the backs of his bird-bone wrists and Morty shuddered violently, helpless anger manifesting itself in bitter sobs that butchered his voice.
“W-w-what do you wuh-want to h-hear? What am I - am I suh-supposed to say? Do - do you want me to beg you to not let alternate Ricks r-rape me? Do you - what - do you want me to tell you I-I only want you to do that?”
He was expecting Rick to tense up, to yank his hair and slam him against the counter and call him a stupid boy that didn’t know how to keep his fucking mouth shut, but of course Rick defied his expectations by gently sliding his cock out of his ass, pulling him upright, turning him around to pick him up and set him on the counter. His grandpa stepped between his legs, held him up and open by the knees, touched their foreheads together as he pushed his cock back in him slow and calm; Morty clutched the straps of his wifebeater and cried even harder when his anger deserted him, left him so empty he was illogically grateful for Rick being there to fill him back up.
“Yeah,” Rick answered, so soft Morty could hear his age, so sincere he could feel him aching. “If that’s what I can get, baby, then - then yeah.”
Even through his tears and their proximity blurring his vision, he could see Rick’s desperate longing and it wasn’t fair for Rick to look so broken and tender while he was doing this. It wasn’t fair for him to strip away all the callousness and cruelty, for him to expose the moonstruck need and fierce endearment that belied it all. Rick hoisted his legs up and Morty wrapped them around his waist as if through muscle memory, hugged around his neck when Rick started thrusting sweetly and he keened because nothing else his grandfather ever did hurt more or felt better.
“O-oh, please don’t, Rick -”
“What?” Rick kissed him through a wet hiccup and he pinched his eyes shut, held on even tighter. “What, sweetie? Make love to you?”
“Oh god, this is not m-making love, Rick - it’s not - it’s not -”
“It is, baby - it is, if you just let me - hey there, now, shh, shh,” Rick brought his hands up to hold him by the lower back and Morty shoved his face into the crook of his grandpa’s shoulder, his crying quieting down into little, breathy moans. He let Rick comfort and soothe him, let himself be taken apart and put back together as if he were more a collection of machinery than a human being with autonomy, let himself like how Rick felt moving inside him and it was no different from the first time. It was like losing his virginity all over again.
“I al-always let you - it’s n-never enough -”
“I know, baby, I know - just - hey, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
“Saying it a-a bunch doesn’t make it true - ooh! R-Rick, Rick, oh, damn it -”
“Shh, yeah, there’s a good boy, there you - there you go, Morty. Y-you feel that? How much I - how I - just let me show you, let me - just let me -” and Rick fit his right hand in between them to firmly stroke Morty’s cock, even and practiced and slipping just right over the head on every upstroke and it didn’t even take a dozen passes before Morty was clenching up in another orgasm, dryer than the first but even more intense because Rick kept on driving in and out of him as he squirmed and seized and struggled to not scream out. Rick pulled his head up to kiss him again, moved his hands to squeeze his hips as he thrusted shallow and mild, over and over and over -
It registered that Rick was doing the three things he had told him he liked, and Morty’s heart pulled itself to pieces and reassembled itself into something that could better handle this. He remembered the dozens of times Rick had asked him what he liked, Rick telling him he was proud of him, Rick drunkenly swearing that they were all one another had and would ever have and he - and he - well -
He let Rick have him.
He kissed back and held on for dear life because it was easier, because that’s what he had been built up to do, because what was the alternative?
“Y-y-you’re a good kid, Morty, you don’t deserve -”
The alternate Rick’s last words surfaced in his mind for a moment, but then his Rick was coming inside him with a sharp groan and kissing him so hard he had to lean his head back against the medicine cabinet mirror and the words sunk back down into cloudy memory water.
That other Rick didn’t know anything about what he deserved, anyway.
They caught each other’s breath, sunk down syrup slow into an oxytocin cradle that forbade clarity and precluded caution. Rick kneaded into his hips, eased his cock out and pulled him down from the counter onto legs as wobbly as a newborn colt’s. He clung to his grandpa’s shoulders and Rick waited for him to regain his balance, pet up his sides, held the back of his head and hummed circular nonsense tunes until Morty’s vertigo passed.
When it did and Morty could stand, Rick walked him over to the edge of the tub and turned the shower back on. He stripped off his wifebeater and socks, waited until it was warm before stepping in and leading Morty in behind him by the hand. Morty followed, docile as a lamb, and slotted into Rick’s offered embrace under the warm spray of water.
Rick picked up the washcloth Morty had set on the lip of the tub earlier, poured Dial body wash on it and set about wiping away the axle grease on his grandson’s face and neck, silent and zeroed in on the task. It was when Rick was starting to get the stray marks on his sides that a knock sounded on the door.
“Morty?”
It was his dad. He tensed up, but Rick just kept on washing him, working up a lather and redirecting Morty under the water to rinse it off; he was so unaffected he might not have heard Jerry at all, but Morty knew from the tick of a frown on his face that he had. Still, he was relaxed enough that Morty settled back down and called out, “Y-yeah, dad? What?”
“Just checking on you, son. You feeling okay?”
His dad sounded concerned and Morty felt his stomach twist guiltily. “Uh, yeah, I’m - I think I had something that disagreed with me, but I-I feel better now. I’ll be out soon.”
“Your stomach’s been bothering you? Would you like some Pepto or -”
“No, no - it’s, um, it’s fine now. I’m good.”
“Well, alright,” his dad said, a little put out. Morty assumed his date with mom hadn’t gone terribly well; his dad often wanted to baby him after a disagreement with his mother. “If you’re hungry, there’s some takeout from Benny’s in the fridge.”
“O-okay, thanks dad.”
They heard his footsteps retreat down the hall and Morty pressed back up against Rick, tucked his head into the divide of his sternum. He started tracing the fingers of his left hand over a knot of cauterized tissue below his grandpa’s ribcage, and Rick cracked the hell up as he rung out the washcloth behind him.
Morty rolled his eyes, but didn’t pull away or look up or stop delicately touching Rick’s scar. “Stop it, Rick. It’s not funny.”
“Oh, it’s fucking funny, Morty.”
“It’s mean. You’re mean.”
“So?”
Morty’s silence answered for him. He kept on placidly outlining the starburst mark and Rick leaned into his touch invitingly and even though nothing was okay, he was getting better at pretending it was.
“He’s - he’s just worried about me, Rick.”
Rick tilted Morty’s head back to work shampoo through his hair, washing out the last of the grease in it. Morty allowed the cleaning a little impatiently, antsy and frowning for Rick to finish; as soon as he did, Morty fit himself back against his chest as if he were simply adhering to the laws of magnetism, and Rick laughed, dropped his chin to rest on Morty’s head, slid his hands down to cup Morty’s ass. He spread the cheeks wide to rinse his come out and Morty shivered despite the water staying warm.
“What’s to worry about, baby?”
Morty huffed, but said nothing.
…
Jerry walked into the master bedroom, where Beth was taking off her wedge heels and turquoise earrings. He sat down on the bed with a sigh, untied and kicked off his dress boots and flopped back to stare at the ceiling.
“I think Morty drank for the first time today.”
Beth’s hands froze in the middle of putting her earrings back in their place in the jewelry armoire opened on the dresser. “Oh? What are you - what makes you think that?”
“Summer told me she heard him throwing up in the bathroom a little while ago.”
She scoffed. “That doesn’t mean he was drinking, Jerry. He could just be -”
“Call it a dad’s intuition, Beth, but I am sure Morty had alcohol today.”
He didn’t sound angry or like he was raring for a fight, but Beth’s hackles were already raised. She closed the armoire, tugged her dress off over her head and threw it in the direction of the hamper, started fiddling with the back hook of her bra but her fingers kept on slipping over the satiny material. “Well, be clear, now. I can’t tell if this is a dig at me or my dad yet.”
She threw her hands up in frustration with the hellish contraption on her chest and sat on the bed, went to start snatching it over her head without unhooking it, but Jerry stopped her with a gentle hand on her lower arm. She stiffened, but when all he did was sit up to undo the bra clasp for her and stroke her arm plaintively, her anger died down like a fire doused with water.
It had been a long day, and they were both so tired.
She slid the bra off and let it drop to the floor, and Jerry put an arm around her naked shoulders. “It’s not a dig at anyone, Beth. I’m just concerned about our son. We’re not - we’re barely in his life. I have no clue how he’s doing.”
Beth looked like that struck a nerve, her face contorting in discomfort and her arms crossing over her breasts, but she nodded and leaned into her husband’s embrace. She was quiet for a moment, before she sighed and admitted, “I don’t, either.”
The agreement hung heavy between them, bonded them with parental love and guilt. After a few beats, Beth stood to walk over to the closet and picked out a nightgown; when Jerry saw it was the powder blue one with a silver galloping horse design across the chest, he felt a sharp pang of sympathy for his wife. She had gotten that nightgown for Morty’s baby shower and had worn it for much of the first year of his life, too exhausted to change out of sleep-clothes most of the time. He could still make out baby food stains.
She came and sat back down next to him, tucked her feet under and to the side of her thighs and looked a little lost. “What do we do? I mean - if we want him to feel like he can come to us, we can’t interrogate him about whether or not he’s been drinking.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “That’d be a little rich coming from me, don’t you think?”
Jerry tilted her face up, pecked her twice on the lips and caught the smell of red zinfandel on her breath. He was so used to it by this point it was pleasant. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t think we should ask him if he’s done it - by the sound of it, I’m guessing he didn’t like whatever he had all that much, anyway.”
He leaned back and started loosening the knot of his tie, but Beth shooed his hands away and did it for him. “What’d you have in mind, then?”
Jerry wrung his hands, couldn’t meet her eyes and Beth frowned in understanding. “This is a dig at my dad.”
She didn’t sound too upset, and she didn’t stop undoing his tie, so he took a chance and tried mildly, “No, not a dig, but - I was thinking it’d be good if you and me sat down with Morty to have a talk about alcohol...”
Beth slid the tie from around his neck and waited for the other shoe to drop. Jerry lowered his shoulders and went on in a careful tone, “And maybe, you could tell him why your father’s drinking is nothing to want to… to imitate?”
Jerry was expecting anger, but what he got was much worse. Beth looked hurt. He quickly took the tie from her hands and grabbed them, brought them up to his chest and tried to explain his thinking so the pain on his wife’s beautiful face would go away.
“Look, I accept that Rick is a big part of Morty’s life and he looks up to him. I just want to make sure our son is looking up to him for the right reasons. Because he’s a -” Jerry couldn’t help rolling his eyes here, “- a genius scientist or whatever, not because he’s a - well -”
“A reckless alcoholic?”
Beth took her hands back, laid them in her lap and stared into the middle distance, or maybe into a memory, and Jerry was worried he had triggered something bad, something Beth wouldn’t talk to even him about, something that would have her sitting alone in the kitchen floor until four in the morning. When he started to apologize, though, Beth came to a conclusion. She put a hand on his thigh, looked at him with resolute eyes and nodded once.
“Okay, Jerry. We can talk to Morty tomorrow evening.”
Jerry blinked, thrown by the reversal of his expectations. “What, really?”
“Yes, really. You’re right; it’s time for an alcohol safety talk, and Morty needs to hear some things about my dad’s drinking that would best come from me. Tomorrow after dinner seems like a good time.”
She patted him on the thigh and crawled over to her side of the bed, pulled the covers down and turned the TV on with the remote on her nightstand. She looked over at him questioningly. “You gonna come to bed?”
“Well - yeah. Of course.”
He changed into his Star Wars pajamas and settled down in bed with his wife. She pulled his arm over her stomach and fit her hips against his and it was like their argument on the ride home from Benny’s hadn’t happened at all. Beth must have noticed his confusion, because she snorted and swatted his hand.
“Don’t question a good thing, Jerry. Just say thank you.”
Jerry let the advice put his tension to rest and relaxed back into the pillows, breathed in his wife’s floral scent and kissed her cheek.
“Thank you, Beth.”
…
Morty sat on the couch in sleep pants and a loose fitting yellow shirt, his hair drying into tight curls around his forehead as he flipped through TV stations and sung quietly to himself.
He wasn’t really paying attention to any lyrics, more focused on melody, the way the it felt to produce notes and how the sounds reverberated in his chest. He would loop on three or four bars, go back to the beginning without finishing, let the words fade out into humming and pick them up again later on.
He was so absorbed in mindless channel surfing and singing to himself that he startled forward when a hand touched his shoulder over the back of the couch. He looked back to see Rick, standing in a clean wifebeater and khaki pants and bare feet, a towel around his neck, a frown on his face and his hand held out in the open air.
Morty smoothed out an imaginary crease in his pant leg, leaned back into the touch and gestured to the spot next to himself by the armrest. Rick made full contact with the uncovered skin of his neck in what felt like retribution, waited as if he were checking his pulse before he let go and stepped around to slump down in his spot. When Morty offered up the remote and Rick snatched it silently, sprawled out so his right knee dug into his grandson’s thigh, Morty realized he was miffed.
After the way Morty had spent the past two hours of his Saturday evening, that did not sit well with him. He tucked his legs under himself, set his hand on Rick’s knee and determined to see if he could work on his grandpa’s mood. He cupped his other hand around his mouth and leaned into Rick’s personal space, broadcasted a sort of shy warmth.
“H-hey, you - you wanna know something else I, um, I like, Rick?”
It came out quiet and airy, more playful than he was going for but from the way Rick perked up from his slouch, threw his right arm over the back of the couch and looked at him intently, Morty assumed his tone was perfectly suited. Now that he had Rick’s attention, however, he couldn’t help losing hold of his nerve and squirming his feet under himself, because maybe he hadn’t thought this through very well and maybe it wasn’t the best idea to tell Rick this one - but then Rick was wrapping his hand around the back of his neck and pulling him in closer and saying, “Yeah, Morty?”
And Morty caved, glanced around the darkened living room to make sure they were alone, to strengthen his resolve before he cupped his hand between his mouth and his grandfather’s ear and told him, “I-I like it when you - put your hands around my neck… e-especially when I’m, um - go-going down on you, how you can - the way you, um… guide me up and down.”
Rick’s hand on his neck spasmed and he whimpered softly, shifted his thighs against one another and Rick groaned hard, leaned his head back against the couch and ran his left hand over his face. “H-holy shit, baby.”
“G-good?”
Rick looked at him like he had never heard a dumber question and when Morty saw that his grandpa’s face was flushed, a rush of gratification warmed every inch of his body. He smiled and laughed, flustered and pleased with the reaction he had gotten. He went to lean back, but Rick kept his hold on his neck, squeezed with his thumb and forefinger over his jugular veins to make him gasp out suede-soft.
“Fucking Christ, y-y-you will be the death of me.”
Morty stilled, looked at his lap and wondered if he had made a mistake. “You’re not - I didn’t - I thought -”
“Shush, Morty. I’m not mad,” Rick stretched his legs and adjusted his pants with his free hand, hissed air in through his teeth. “Faaar from it.”
Morty relaxed into the hold on his neck, let himself accept that it made him feel centered and secure and felt at once emboldened and subdued by Rick’s frustrated arousal. He moved the hand on Rick’s knee up his thigh a few tentative inches, brought his other hand up to lay over Rick’s upper arm on the back of the couch. “Just - please don’t, um, ch-choke me again, Rick. I really don’t like that.”
Rick’s face flickered with a low-key ruefulness and he grabbed Morty’s hand on his thigh, brought it up to his mouth to kiss the inside of his wrist. It felt like an apology, and Morty let it be one. “Okay, Morty. I can - I can do that.”
“Thank you,” he said, thought for a moment and then added, “and I won’t - I won’t take drinks from alternate Ricks again, I promise.”
Rick snorted against his palm and hauled him in close by the back of his neck; without his hand on Rick’s leg to balance himself, Morty only caught himself from falling completely over Rick’s lap by the hand on his grandpa’s upper arm.
“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” Rick chuckled in his ear, squeezed his neck again and didn’t let up even when Morty whined a little too loud for comfort in the open living room, and whispered, “Next time we go to the Citadel, I’m putting you in a fucking collar, sweetie.”
Morty couldn’t decide if he wanted to go ghost-pale or brick-red so he middled on peach-pink, and he snatched his hand from on top of Rick’s arm to cover his face. “Oh, jeez, Rick.”
“Green leather with a big black buckle, baby.”
“Oh, my god, Rick.”
“Nope. J-just your grandpa, Morty.”
Morty muffled a groan into his hand, but he didn’t try to pull away or say no. He only shifted his legs out from under himself so they wouldn’t go numb, leaned into Rick’s shoulder, melted when Rick started massaging his neck. He tugged his right hand back from Rick’s grip and stroked it up and down his grandfather’s thigh and felt unreasonably satisfied when Rick sighed out and pressed up into his touch.
“So you - just to be clear, you don’t wanna sh-share me… with other Ricks?”
Rick went still for a bated moment, long enough for Morty to start worrying that he had asked an off-limits question, that he had ruined the good mood he had just cultivated, but then Rick was bringing his other hand up to hold Morty’s neck, setting one on each side just like he did when Morty was sucking him off. Morty moved both his own hands to hold his grandpa’s wrists and knew if he hadn’t just come twice in the past half hour he would have been getting hard right now, could tell by how feverish and fluttery his lower body felt.
“Fuck no.”
Morty got the impression that if he had asked that question without Rick having brought it up earlier, the man would have been insulted. Since he had said something about it, though, Rick went with an emphatic refusal and left it at that. He actually seemed a little irritated with himself, as if making Morty doubt his desire to keep him to himself was a failing he was working on fixing.
“Oh, th-that’s - that’s good,” Morty said, and he meant it. He tilted his head up, slid his hands up to lay over Rick’s, closed his eyes. “I really couldn’t handle a-any other Ricks doing - uhm... this,” he applied light pressure to Rick’s hands by way of explanation and Rick groaned again, so similar to the sound he made when he orgasmed that Morty stopped breathing. Echo sensations pulsed through him, the memory of how it felt to have Rick come inside him so lucid his toes curled and his gut twisted and a skittish laugh bubbled up from his throat.
“Hey, now, shh - gotta - gotta keep it down here,” Rick was quick to hush him, and taking his own advice he returned his hands to the back of the couch and the armrest. Morty’s neck was left cold, so he warmed it with his own hands and couldn’t meet Rick’s eyes when they went savvy and dark and much too clever.
“The things I am gonna do to you tomorrow night, though.”
Morty flushed and stared firmly at the TV. “Shut up an-an-and pick a show already, Rick, jeez.”
Rick did, and Morty went back to stroking his thigh in appreciation. He liked the way his grandpa softened his edges when he touched him, tempered down into something easy and companionable, and his mind went halcyon-clear.
... Well, except for one thing.
“- me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago and it’s gone right to my -”
That song was going to be stuck in his head for at least a week.
...
Rick Sanchez of dimension AG-107 lost his taste for liquor after the Morty he had been keeping company got dragged away by his Rick like a disobedient dog.
Even after he settled his tab with the barkeep (a grizzled Rick sporting an eyepatch and suspenders) and walked back to the Citadel’s residential annex, he couldn’t get the boy’s stricken look out of his mind; the way he had looked back at him in obvious distress, about to call out but thinking better of it and catching himself before he did.
AG-107 knew the boy had wanted to beg his Rick to wait, and it made his stomach churn with pity. He felt ill at the thought that that Morty had gotten in trouble just for sitting with him, couldn’t stop himself from wondering what had ended up happening to the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed in his high-rise studio apartment and stewed over the encounter as his buzz faded into painful sobriety.
He didn’t consider himself terribly nice, but he knew he fell on the righthand side of the most-evil-to-least-evil morality spectrum for Ricks of the Central Finite Curve. He was in the top twenty echelon, which was occupied mostly by true neutral and neutral good versions of himself, and he was aware that his idea of nice was different from that of middleground and left-leaning Ricks.
While he was leery of the notion that morality could be classified with something so simple as a point on a line between two extremes, he had seen the ethical gamut Ricks ran. About two out of every five were downright malevolent, capable of beyond the pale atrocities that made him seem like a saint in comparison.
It was when he met the Mortys that belonged to Ricks in this bottom forty caste that his relative goodness was made plain to him. He was a selfish, bitter and nihilistic drunk, but Mortys from dimensions with left-leaning Ricks made him feel like he was a compassionate pillar of virtue instead. They typically responded to him with a sort of tentative hope and quiet need that he had a soft spot for; they reminded him of attention starved puppies and he took the opportunity to cheer one up whenever he could.
And he had cheered that Morty up. He had gotten him to laugh and shoot the breeze and unwind for a little while, and all it had taken was a welcoming expression and a pat on the head. He didn’t have to be a genius to gather that the boy was criminally mistreated by his Rick; everything about his posture and body language screamed gun-shy and abused, and AG-107 couldn’t refrain from trying to give him some encouragement and advice. When he found out he was speaking with the Morty paired to the rogue, he had tried even harder to do him a good turn and let him know he had some options.
He clutched his head, pushed his hair back as he felt a splitting headache coming on. This ruminating wasn't good for him, but he couldn't stop thinking about that boy's terrified face as he had been dragged through the portal. His well-worn conscience told him it was because he felt responsible for putting the Morty in a compromising situation for his Rick to find him in. He had badgered the boy to drink with him, asked too many questions, gotten decidedly personal and that poor Morty had paid the price for his good intentions.
He never remembered what they said about good intentions.
So he decided, come what passed for morning on the Citadel, he was going use the Council’s pan-dimensional atlas to find the rogue's coordinates, and he was going to check on his alternate self's Morty tomorrow night.
The road to hell...