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No one had noticed, somehow.
They had all simply assumed Rick had gone on some offworld trip or something, and it wasn"t odd for him to be gone for a few days. Usually he would at least let them know about it first, but he"s a grown man and a genius - he can go wherever he wants and come back without a word of explanation, and has done exactly that so many times before.
But he"s never been gone for so long.
It takes the family a full week for the discomfort to reach a breaking point. They send Morty to investigate the garage more closely, since he"s the one most accustomed to it. He should know what to look for.
The garage seems tidy, everything in its proper place, other than the empty bottles of whiskey on the ground that Morty steps around. No surprise there. In front of Rick"s chair, there"s an ominous-looking machine that no one knows how to work or what it does, broken red lightbulb shards and... a pile of blackened ashes resting on the worktable. Upon closer inspection, some of it has poured down the edge and into Rick"s chair, as if--
Morty stops thinking. He takes the portal gun off the table and just starts shooting it and running and running.
Butt world, Blips And Chitz, the place with megatrees, any dimension, any world, any place at all - he searches and searches but Rick is nowhere.
Morty ends up at the Citadel and it"s-- empty? The whole place looks desolate and unhappy, like Mortytown. He sees some Mortys nearby, standing around or walking aimlessly. Only Mortys. No Ricks. There"s a sense of both waiting for something and loss. Everyone looks like they"ve just cried or they"re about to. He stares at them all openly, not wanting to ask what he"s going to.
"H-hey, um. D-do you know-- where are all the Ricks?"
A Morty sitting on a bench covers his eyes with his hands.
"See... see all those ashes on the ground?"
The Morty sitting on the bench"s voice is quiet and comes out like a croak, unused and sore. Now that it"s been pointed out to him, Morty notices that there are burnt spots on the grass and roads and sidewalks, and on top of them are ashes looking like the ones on Rick"s worktable back at home. Morty feels his stomach drop.
"All the Ricks, at the same time-- they just... disappeared. Like they all just b-burnt up."
Morty"s face twists into a frown as he wonders at that, how is that possible? Every single Rick at once? What does that mean-- Is it just the citadel? Or is it everywhere? But it can"t be--
"What do you mean? Like th-they"re all--?"
He can"t even say the word. He doesn"t want to believe it.
The Morty on the bench doesn"t respond to him. Just starts sobbing into his hands.
"Grandpa," he chokes out hoarsely.
Morty backs away from him slowly, and he"s running again. It can"t be. No, it can"t be, how could it? Rick is so smart and strong, how could anyone get to him, how could he--
Morty doesn"t understand what"s happening at all.
He"s lucky to return back home in one piece somehow, unable to think about anything, unable to speak, the portal gun with just a sliver of charge left.
"Oh hey, you"re back, we were about to start looking for you too, kiddo. So, did you find out where Rick might"ve gone?" Jerry asks. The question is so innocent that his answer feels unspeakable.
Morty"s in the living room and his mouth moves automatically, but it feels like he"s really somewhere else, silent and far away and controlling his body like a stiff little robot. He expects telling the truth to be like moving through molasses or pushing a boulder or falling off a cliff, but none of those things happen and he speaks normally.
"Rick... Rick is d-dead. All of them at once."
"...Uh, what?"
"At the Citadel too, every single Rick is gone, they"re--"
Beth starts panicking, Jerry"s in disbelief, Summer starts questioning if Morty checked every place Rick could possibly be, they all start fighting, and he can"t take this.
Morty heads to the garage, having reported what everyone needed to know. He doesn"t want to speak anymore than absolutely needed. Maybe never again, if that"s possible.
The garage is familiar, full of things he"s looked at a hundred times before, but he starts pacing around as if he"ll find something new. He looks at a board filled with photos and equations. A box of files in the corner. Test tubes full of liquid on the worktable. Machines and deskchairs. All sorts of things that he still doesn"t know the purpose of. He won"t ever learn about them now.
In a storage closet, there"s spare equipment: goggles, gloves, a few spare labcoats. Morty takes one and puts it on. It"s oversized and he drags it on the floor when he walks. It doesn"t smell like anything or have any stains whatsoever. It"s perfectly clean and white and he wishes it weren"t.
He takes the spare deskchair and drags it closer to Rick"s worktable, where his ashes are. Some of them have been blown away in the wind from the family opening and closing the garage randomly. He stares at them.
Beth comes in to look at them too. She cries, and Jerry comes in when she wants to discuss the funeral. Morty wishes they would be quiet or get out. They yell at him when he doesn"t leave the garage for days. Summer comes in eventually, trying to comfort him because she knows something is wrong, and she really can be sweet sometimes, enough to make him smile for the first time in days, but still, he stays in the garage.
"Grandpa Rick was always pretty mean to both of us, but he loved you, Morty. More than anyone. I"m sure of it."
"Y-yeah. Thanks, Summer... I-- I--"
She leaves when he starts wailing in pain from the heartache, not because she"s a bad person, but because she knows she can"t help him.
He sleeps with his head on the worktable once he"s passed out from crying. Sometimes he hears a voice and doesn"t question it at all.
"Hey, you little shit, if you"re just gonna hang around here, how about you hand me the screwdriver? The one with-- th-the small one..."
Morty gets up, dizzy on his feet, and reaches for it, hearing some more chatter about what an exciting invention the voice is working on.
"Yeah, sure thing, here--"
He hands the screwdriver off, and it falls to the ground.
"Oh," Morty says, looking around the garage in a daze, and no one"s around.
It"s frustrating how a person"s good traits are more painful when they"re gone. The bad traits almost get forgotten, when they don"t deserve to be; Morty knows Rick didn"t exactly treat him well. He was an alcoholic, but that was just a part of who he was. He had been violent, but Morty had always accepted that without a word. He was childish, irresponsible, selfish, irritable, just a horrible person-- but Rick was his first and only friend. Morty wants to see his smile again despite it all.
His brain seems unable to do anything but flip through a photo album of his memories non-stop: watching TV on the couch together and Rick getting excited, Rick praising Morty then pressing a knife to his throat, going to the arcade and Rick walking out carrying an armful of rewards, Rick buying Morty ice cream on another planet, Rick shouting over an incapacitated Morty lying on the ground.
"Rick and Morty, forever and forever, a hundred years...!"
That was one of the few things Morty had been able to hear while in that megaseed-induced fit. Maybe hearing that, he had just assumed that that was what would happen. That they would always be together.
But now, Morty will never leave earth again. He will never learn a single significant thing from now on. He will never see his best friend again. No one can understand what they went through together.
Beth comes in to tell him that they"re planning for the funeral, that they have a date ready, that the ashes are going to be put in an urn, and wouldn"t Morty like to come out of the garage and pick a nice suit to wear for it? Her presence makes him feel even more alone.
She looks really tired, her eyes are red, but she"s smiling at him. A strained smile. There"s an anger in her that only stings Morty now where it once bruised him, but he was never in control enough to be able to avoid it. It"s not his fault, he thinks as Beth turns around and leaves, that Rick decided to spend his time with him. And not her.
He hopes that his mother can find some peace in all of this. He needs it just as much. Everyone does. Morty wonders how that one Morty on the bench is doing, how everyone left on the Citadel is going to run their new society, how every universe is going to change without its Rick.
Morty wonders how he is going to survive.
But he knows the answer is simply day by day. Just like the painful entirety of his life before they met.
Morty knows he"ll expect it to be like every world has stopped its rotation or the universe has burnt out every last star or time has simply given up and collapsed into the mud, and it won"t be like any of those things.
But he wishes it was, because that"s exactly what it feels like.