The Day Every Diane Died
It began with a smell.
Acrid, faint, but wrong—like burning copper laced with ozone. Rick had been soldering a stabilizer coil in his garage, halfway through a bottle of Glenfiddich, when the first tremor hit.
Tools rattled against the workbench.
The walls groaned. The air shimmered, and for a moment, he thought it was just another instability in his prototype portal array. But then the shiver of reality didn't stop.
A pulse swept through the multiverse, not a sound, not a light—something deeper.
It hummed inside his skull, vibrating in a way his brain hated.
He staggered against the bench, vision flashing between infinite versions of his own garage.
Some looked pristine. Others burned. Some had walls painted in colors he'd never pick.
In all of them, Diane was there—until she wasn't.
Her absence hit like a vacuum. One heartbeat she was in the kitchen, humming and making coffee.
The next, the sound cut out. Rick stumbled through the garage door and into the kitchen.
The coffee mug on the counter still steamed. The door to the backyard hung open, wind curling through. But Diane was gone.
Not walked-away gone. Not bathroom gone. Gone in a way the air still trembled from.
Rick knew, instantly, it wasn't a coincidence.
---
Somewhere else—across all the wheres and whens—Prime Rick smiled.
His hand rested on a console that wasn't so much a machine as a cruelty given shape.
Thousands of small holographic windows hung before him, each showing a version of Diane Sanchez in her own universe: pouring cereal, feeding a bird, sleeping, laughing, fighting with a different version of him.
Prime Rick didn't blink. His fingers tapped commands into the system, each input another nail in an infinite coffin.
"No more distractions," he murmured. "No more attachments."
He hit the execution sequence.
---
Rick—the Rick—had enough sense to grab his portal gun before the second pulse hit.
His own tech screamed warnings in garbled bursts: "Quantum sync breach… Memory anchor collapse… Target—Diane Smith—multiversal erasure in progress."
Multiversal erasure.
He'd theorized it could be done, but only with a kind of precision bordering on obsession.
Someone wasn't destroying universes; they were threading through them, ripping out a single constant—her.
Rick jumped through a portal into another reality.
In this one, Diane wore her hair short, and they'd never married, but they still had lunch together every other Sunday.
He landed in her backyard.
The swing set swayed, empty.
Gone.
He didn't stop moving.
Portal after portal, universe after universe.
Diane in a floral dress. Diane with tattoos. Diane in a lab coat. Diane in a wheelchair. Diane in a spacesuit.
All gone.
The loss wasn't quiet—it screamed at him from every place he landed.
The coffee mug still steaming.
The car door still swinging shut.
The book still lying open mid-page.
No bodies. No signs of struggle.
As if she'd been carved out of existence in one clean motion.
By the fiftieth jump, Rick's breathing had gone ragged. He finally stopped in a scorched wasteland where nothing lived except a skeletal building that used to be a Citadel of Ricks.
And Prime Rick was waiting.
He didn't look older. Didn't look younger. He looked like Rick in a mirror where the reflection hated you.
"You're late," Prime Rick said, voice flat.
Rick's grip tightened on his portal gun. "You did this."
"Of course I did."
Prime Rick stepped forward, hands clasped behind his back.
"Do you know how many times you've ruined yourself over her? How many inventions you didn't finish? How many breakthroughs you walked away from because of that woman?"
Rick's jaw clenched. "You erased her from every universe—"
Prime Rick cut him off with a sharp wave.
"Correct. No distractions. No emotional crutches. The multiverse doesn't need your grief. It needs clarity.
And you?
You need pain. It's the only thing that keeps us sharp."
Rick's stomach churned. He'd seen a thousand shades of evil in a thousand different versions of himself, but this… this wasn't random chaos.
This was personal, deliberate, methodical.
"You could've killed me," Rick said.
Prime Rick smiled faintly. "Oh, I will. But you? You need to understand. You need to live with it first. Let it sink in. Let it burn."
Rick launched at him without another word.
Portal gun in one hand, plasma cutter in the other.
Prime Rick was faster.
His counter-tech flared, freezing the portal gun mid-fire and snapping the cutter's energy feed in half. The fight wasn't even close.
Prime Rick didn't kill him. He leaned down, close enough for Rick to see his own reflection in those cold, calculating eyes.
"Every Diane. Every timeline. Every possibility. Gone.
And you?
You're going to keep going. You're going to wake up every day knowing you were too slow."
Prime Rick turned, opened a portal, and walked through.
The wasteland wind howled around Rick, dust stinging his face.
For weeks after, he hunted.
Not for Diane—because he knew there was no finding her now—but for the man who had taken her.
Prime Rick wasn't hiding. He was leading him, breadcrumb by breadcrumb, into darker and darker corners of the multiverse.
Rick stopped sleeping. Stopped eating unless it was whatever he could grab between jumps.
His hands shook when he calibrated his portal gun, but he didn't care.
---
The space between stars used to feel infinite to Rick.
Now, it feels claustrophobic. Like every light out there is another unopened wound, another reminder of the lives he's chased and the ones he's lost.
Weeks have bled together—days without sleep, meals forgotten on counters, alcohol bottles floating weightless in the ship's cabin.
His hair's a mess, his eyes a little more sunken every time he catches his reflection in a viewport.
He's never stayed in one emotional place long enough to rot before. Now, it's all rot.
He thought chasing Prime Rick would feel like purpose.
An answer to the question that's been burning holes through his brain ever since that lab explosion took everything.
But the longer he follows the trail, the more it feels like he's dragging himself through wet cement.
Every lead he picks apart is empty, every jump through the portal gun another reminder that he's still alone in whatever universe he lands in.
At first, the grief came quietly.
It was background noise—easy to ignore if he kept his hands busy and his mind sharper than the ache in his chest.
He'd sit in the pilot's seat, scanning coordinates, running through hypotheses, telling himself that if he moved fast enough he wouldn't notice the silence where her laugh should be.
But grief isn't patient. It doesn't wait politely until you're ready to feel it. It seeps in.
It started in small ways.
He'd find himself setting two cups of coffee out instead of one.
He'd start talking mid-thought and turn his head to see nobody there. He'd think of a joke, something she would've smirked at, and his chest would tighten because there's no one to smirk anymore.
Little absences—sharp enough to cut, dull enough to ignore until they pile up into something crushing.
And then came the bad days.
Some mornings, he wakes up on the floor because he drank himself into unconsciousness somewhere between starlines.
His head is pounding, his mouth dry, and the ship feels too big.
Too empty.
He tries not to think about the fact that he's been here before—too many times, in too many universes.
But this is different.
This isn't a drunken mistake or a fight he'll make up for later.
This is permanent. Prime Rick made sure of that.
Rick's mind has always been a machine for moving forward.
Now it's a scrapyard.
The hunt was supposed to give him something to build toward, but the longer it drags, the more it feels like he's holding together a collapsing bridge with his bare hands.
One night—if you can even call it night in deep space—he sits in the pilot's chair, staring at a frozen star chart.
He hasn't touched the controls in hours.
The coordinates on the screen mean nothing. His eyes keep drifting to the glass, watching planets pass by like cars on a rainy street.
He's not sure how long it's been since he said anything out loud.
That's when the memory hits him. Not one of the big ones—not the explosion, not the moment he found her gone.
It's something stupid.
They were in the garage, and she was trying to get a stubborn bolt loose from some engine.
She swore under her breath, and he laughed because she was using the wrong wrench.
He showed her the right one, and she rolled her eyes but smiled. That's it. That's the whole memory.
And it's enough to wreck him.
It's the small, stupid moments that cut deepest. Because you can imagine a world where they still happen.
Rick grips the edge of the console until his knuckles go white. He doesn't cry—not the way people expect.
No sobbing, no wailing.
His breathing hitches, his vision blurs, and for a few minutes he forgets what he's even doing here.
The ship drifts, untended, and all he can think is how much of his life is now made of ghosts.
Weeks of chasing Prime Rick have taught him one thing: there's no satisfaction at the end of this road.
He'll find him, sure. He'll pull the trigger.
But what then? The universe doesn't hand out closure like candy.
You don't get her back. You don't get the mornings where she's still half-asleep and mumbling at him to stop tinkering with dangerous machines at the kitchen table.
You don't get the quiet comfort of someone who knows every scar you've got and never asks for the full story.
Hunting Prime Rick is the only thing keeping him from collapsing completely, but it's also the thing making him bleed every day.
Because every planet he scans, every face he interrogates, every corner of the multiverse he tears apart—none of it brings her closer.
All it does is stretch out the time between losing her and having to admit she's gone.
And maybe that's the worst part.
He catches himself, sometimes, almost turning back.
But he can't. Because if he turn back, then all this pain means nothing. And he's not ready for it to mean nothing. Not yet.
So he pushes on. He sets new coordinates. He drinks enough to keep the edges soft, but not enough to lose focus.
He pretends the ship isn't too quiet.
And every now and then, when he's alone with the hum of the engines, he speaks to her like she's still there.
He tells her about the leads he's following, the places he's been, the idiots he's run into.
He tells her he's close, even when he's not. Especially when he's not.
Rick sat in his car, elbows on his knees, a glass of untouched whiskey sweating on the table.
His eyes stayed fixed on the empty chair across from him.
"I went to another Earth yesterday," he said, voice low.
"One of those corporate dystopias.
They had Ricks in suits.
Thought I saw him there—Prime Rick—but it was nothing. Just another smug asshole who thought he was the smartest in the room."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Before that, I hit a desert wasteland. Whole planet looked like somebody nuked it and forgot why.
No people. No leads.
Spent the night talking to myself under the stars. You would've hated it. Too quiet."
A faint, bitter laugh escaped him.
"Then I also ran into some other Ricks last week. Dumb as bricks, the lot of them.
One kept trying to sell me self-improvement tapes. Another wouldn't stop talking about his bird-watching hobby.
Prime Rick wasn't there either. Of course he wasn't."
He leaned forward, elbows digging into his thighs, eyes fixed on some invisible thread in the air."I'm close," he whispered.
"I can feel it. Every jump, every wrong turn—it's all getting me closer. Closer to him."
His jaw trembled. He swallowed hard. "Even when I'm not. Especially when I'm not."
The words hung there, like he'd run out of oxygen. He stared at the chair again, his vision blurring.
"God, Diane… I just—"
His breath caught.
His voice cracked.
"I just want you back."
He dropped his head into his hands, shoulders shaking. The sound that came out of him wasn't words—just a low, broken sob that wouldn't stop.
---
Current timeline.
The tremors stopped, but the air felt heavier, as if every atom in the multiverse remembered something it wasn't supposed to.
It began slowly. A flicker here. A whisper there.
And then—like a virus that didn't need time to spread—his name surfaced across every reality.Roderick Sanchez existed again.
The knowledge came uninvited.
Gods, tyrants, parasites, even mindless cosmic behemoths paused, their thoughts snagging on the image of a boy they should've never recalled.
Some blinked, startled. Others froze, confused.
Rick wasn't spared.
He groaned, pressing his palm to his temple, stumbling as the ache lanced deeper than any hangover.
"What the—ugh—" His voice died when the flood hit.
Not memories surfacing.
Memories erupting.
It was like someone pried open a hidden vault in his skull—one he didn't even know existed.
Rick's mind was a fortress; he could deep-dive into his core memories at will, erase what hurt too much, bury what got in the way.
But this… this was deeper than the core. It was beneath it. A hidden well carved into the bedrock of his mind.
And it wasn't empty.
Roderick's face flashed.
Little hands tugging at the hem of his lab coat.
That high, unfiltered laugh when Rick showed him the guts of a planet-killer. The warmth of a small shadow always two steps behind.
A boy standing beside him during the Bug War, grinning in the middle of chaos like destruction was their private joke.
A boy who matched his pace, his madness, step for step.
The same way Morty did now but different at the same time.
Rick's breath caught.
For a second, the lab was gone. The present was gone.
He stood in a memory—his ship roaring overhead, Rod at the controls, eyes bright with the kind of fearless curiosity only a Sanchez could have.
Rod's lips curved into a sharp grin. "Hi, old man. Long time no see…"
Rick didn't answer right away.
His eyes were shut, his breathing deep, as if swallowing the last fragments of a dream. The last streams of memory slipped into place, and then he lifted his head.
When his gaze locked on Rod—Roderick Sanchez—his face twisted, not with joy, but with something heavier.
"Kid…" Rick's voice cracked, then roared, "YOU MOTHER-FUCKING BRAT!"
His boots flared with a blue-white glow, thrusters igniting, throwing dust into the air.
"HOW DARE YOU ERASE MY MEMORIES WITHOUT ME KNOWING! COME HERE!"
Rod blinked. "Oi, oi… oi oi oi oi—shouldn't you be happy, old man?!" He pivoted and bolted, boots skidding on the metal floor.
"You should be happy your son came back, you senile geezer!" Rod shouted over his shoulder.
"And what? Lose my memories of you?!" Rick shot forward, engines screaming. "Come here, you little brat! I'll make sure Diane spanks your ass after we revive her!"
Rod's chest tightened at the name, but his lips betrayed him, curling into a smile. He laughed—loud, unrestrained. "Hah! You wish, old man! I'll ask Mom to spank your ass instead!"
Rick's glare never softened, his teeth clenched, but somewhere beneath the fury, hidden deep where no one could reach, something warm and dangerous stirred.
Only he knew what it was.