When the shitty mobile phone he kept tucked in his back pocket started ringing mere seconds after he crashed his current spaceship into a tree with acid for sap on Placitide XIV, Rick knew in his gut that he wasn't going to like whatever was on the other end of the line. Burping loudly, he fished the vibrating phone from his pocket and picked up the call.

"Yeah?" He answered warily, wondering what nonsense his young daughter's idiot husband needed bailing out of this time. He'd given her the number to this phone the last time he saw her about five years ago, when she'd given birth to the chubby little gurgler, Summer. He'd made sure to stress that it was for emergencies only, not idle chitchat. Not that he'd blame her if she did call: she was seventeen years old with a newborn and an idiot for a husband. Rick left, expecting to be back in a month at most. She'd surprised him, though - a text here, a call there, usually on his birthday and accompanied by a picture of her kid, but otherwise she left him alone.

Apparently, Beth could handle herself just fine. Rick didn't know why he was surprised, she was his daughter after all.

Maybe - no definitely - it was stupid to still give a damn about his daughter and her little family after so easily abandoning them. God knows the Rick who offered him portal tech all those years ago had made it seem like Beth and Diane would do nothing but hold him back, and despite his love for his wife and daughter, he couldn't deny the pure and unadulterated thrill of being the smartest motherfucker in his reality.

Weathering the surge of guilt that occasionally swamped him was worth the freedom and excitement. Until Diane died.

Suddenly, he was back in the home he abandoned, the disappointed ghost of his dead wife staring back at him from the furiously accusing eyes of his now fifteen year old daughter. He stuck it out for two years, still adventuring but forcing himself to return to make Beth breakfast every morning, doing his best to make up for lost time with the daughter he hardly recognized, pondering the strangeness of Diane's death and how a woman like her could be destroyed so completely in a car fire. It niggled at him, but not so much that it overshadowed how unfit a father he truly was.

A fact that was only emphasized by Beth getting knocked up by that dumbass, Jerry. It galled him to realize that she was capable of making the same boneheaded mistakes as the rest of humanity. She was Beth Sanchez! She was supposed to be smarter than that! If she wanted to keep her baby, that was fine by him; hell, he'd even offered to babysit the kid if it meant she wouldn't chain herself to that simpering emotional vampire. But no, teenaged hormones and puppy love ruled the day, and Rick left Earth, contenting himself with the rare pictures of Summer and the even rarer calls with Beth.

He still had hope that one day she would call when she finally got tired of her loser husband and needed help getting rid of the body. He perked up. Maybe the time had finally come?

"Mr. Sanchez? This is Detective Knight from the Muskegon Police Department…" the voice, a tiny bit reedy from the lightyears' worth of distance between them, paused expectantly. The niggling nugget of foreboding sitting heavy in his stomach began to blossom into actual concern. Beth should have been the only person with this number, so why was a cop calling him?

"WhaaAAat is it? Where -eugh- where's my daughter?" He demanded, heedless of how tightly he was gripping the phone. Beth wouldn't give his number out for the fuck of it, so where was she? The detective sighed, and the sympathy and compassion he heard in that drawn out breath made his throat constrict. Beth…

"Your daughter and son-in-law were in a car wreck early this morning. I'm very sorry, but neither of them made it."

For a moment, for the briefest second in time, the detective's words didn't register in his mind. In that infinitesimally small moment in time, he was able to continue living in a dimension where his daughter, his baby, his bright eyed girl, was still alive. He'd only just seen her; five years wasn't so long. She'd just been here, tired and beaming at him as she carefully handed over her wrinkly infant who looked up at him with his own eyes. Sure he knew of other Ricks, older Ricks, who didn't have their Beths, but they weren't him, they -

"Mr. Sanchez?" The voice, female he absently identified, interrupted his thoughts.

"A-A-A-Are you sure? Are you sure it's my - my daughter?" He couldn't stop himself from asking, deja vu like a thick wave of nausea clogging his throat. Just like Diane, and what kind of fucked up cosmic symmetry was that? The detective hummed sadly, and Rick wanted to reach through the phone and snatch her eyes out.

"I'm sorry, sir, but her I.D. was found in the car. We will need you to positively identify her, but that can wait until after you've gotten settled for the night with your granddaughter."

Fuuuuuck, he'd forgotten all about Summer. What the fuck, what the fuck was he supposed to do with a child, Beth's child?

"I-I'll be there soon." He disconnected the call and dropped his head on the steering wheel. He stared blankly out the viewports, only absently aware of the tree acid beginning to eat through the reinforced plexiglass and metal body of the ship. He didn't care; he couldn't care. His daughter was dead, his baby, the only worthwhile thing he had ever made. She was gone, and his eyes were burning.

Later, he wouldn't be able to recall how or when he arrived at the hospital the detective's call originated from. He was operating on a detached autopilot as he identified his daughter and her shit husband's bodies, swiftly blanking out the sight of her mangled face from his consciousness. He didn't dare reach out and touch her ice cold flesh lest his numbness shatter like the thin wall of glass it was, shoving him into the spiral of endless, shrieking grief that threatened him with every breath. He woodenly filled out a mountain of paperwork and arranged things for their bodies, shock giving him patience he would've otherwise lacked. He was still sitting in front of that stack of paperwork, staring at the pen in his hand as if he couldn't believe it was real, when the social worker walked in, a sleeping child slung across her hip.

"Mr. Sanchez?" He looked up sluggishly, and the woman gently set the child in his lap. The little girl pouted in her sleep, the sour expression so similar to her mother at that age that it took everything he had not to portal out of there and never look back. He brushed a lock of red hair from her forehead with slightly shaking fingers instead.

"This is Summer. You're all she has now." The woman left, and he sighed, slumping.