"It's no use. It's not working."
"Shut the fuck up, Gwen, it'll work 'cause I'll make it fucking work!"

I shot Rick a dirty look before tightening my fists again around the old leather belts Rick provided me. I nodded at him again with such subtlety that it took Rick a good while before flipping the switch again.

The pain was piercing, like something I've never felt before.
Is this was knives to the back felt like?
Is this what bullets to the head felt like?
Is this what being on fire felt like?
It was so brain numbingly severe, it might as well have severed every last nerve ending in my body. I'll spare you the details. I did my absolute best not to think about it, closing my eyes and giving it my all to think of something, anything, other than what I was going through then.

Once I achieved it, it felt like I had left my body.

My mind must've been playing tricks on me because that's exactly what I saw when I opened up my eyes.

There was Rick. Feet apart, back straight, face dampened with sweat and eyes flooded with tears. The look on his face was terrifying. He didn't want to go through with this anymore.

I was down there, teeth gritted as I waited for this round to finish.

I watched Rick pull his face away from me for a split second before focusing again on me.

We had to do this. We had to.

Then the pain stopped. I felt and heard the whir of the machine wind down as my eyes started to open. Did—did I hallucinate what I'd just seen?

Rick ran to my aid to untie me down from angled wall, loosening my straps and pulling me into his arms. I melted like caramel in his arms, I was so physically exhausted. We had been trying all morning and all afternoon trying to get the effects of the timeline to reverse the aging process, but to no success.

With each new try, with every attempt, the pain would only worsen. Rick noticed this. I told Rick to just push through it, I promised him I'd do my best to cope with it. I didn't want to die here. At least, not yet.

"Gwen." Rick breathed, patting down the strawberry blonde wisps standing up on the back of my head. "Let me find another way."

"How long would that take?" I whimpered, caressing his back with both hands. "You told me the longer we wait, the faster the process develops."

Rick paused, putting his hands on the back of my thighs and picking me up to sit me down on the countertop.

"Please don't let me keep doing this to you." He had his hand flat on the countertop besides me, leaning in with one hand on my cheek as he stared into me. I look away, my eyes wander, landing on the angled wall now empty.

"If I die here, in this timeline, what will become of my original universe?"

Rick evaded my gaze, his right hand still on the counter with his left now on the small of my back. I forced him to look back at me, putting both of my hands on either of his cheeks, pulling his face close to mine.

"What'll happen to me?"

He wouldn't answer me. I searched his eyes for an answer, a clue, a hint, anything. Something that would give me some insight. He struggled, but his eyes swelled again and filled to the brim with tears. His face was warm in my hands as I pulled him in closer to rest my forehead on his.

He's told me enough.

I pull away, stepping very carefully off of the counter before hobbling over to the angled wall, shackling myself in. Rick reluctantly trudged over to the flip switch and activated the wall once again, sending a searing heat through the tips of my fingers down to the toes of my feet.

I couldn't bear it, so I had thought less of it. I was abuse to leave my body again, but this time, I couldn't go back to it.

Something wasn't letting me.

I watched as everything started to go blurry. Below, I watched Rick start to panic and switch off the machine, running over to me again to pull me off of the wall. I noticed the changes to the body Rick held. I couldn't identify myself. For a split second, I forgot that that was me.

From above, a few feet above, I watched as Rick tried to get me to respond to him but I couldn't hear him. Things started to blur even worse and soon enough, an enormous black hole swallowed the floor and began to suck me down into it.

It frightened me, but it was so incredibly strong and there was no one to call out to, I accepted the fate but that didn't calm me down from my panicked state.

The hole felt bottomless, like I had been falling for hours. I couldn't breathe. It was astonishing to me that I was still conscious, considering the fact that I was engulfed in darkness.

I felt my body jolt when I hit the bottom, but I was no longer in darkness. Instead, I was greeted in blinding white. I was in a gown, in a bed, in a room at a hospital. My heart kept pumping like I had finished the most strenuous run of my life, the breathing and gasping had caught up to me.

I was... fine?

In the struggle to gain back my eyesight, I caught sight of a man in a teal button down with brown slacks and light blue spiky hair.

"R-Rick? Where... am I?"

Everything's still very blurry. I'm starting to feel a bit dizzy as I reach out to the familiar outline of a man who appeared to have rushed to my side.

"Winnie? Oh, thank goodness you're all right. Honey, you passed out just after our little Elizabeth was born."

Oh.

Rick's face was close enough for me to focus in on him and start to see all the other things around me. This looks like a very intricate dream. I can't relate my surroundings, but it felt so familiar like I was reliving such a cherished memory. It was warm, it was fuzzy, and most of all it was so welcoming. I felt the sudden urge to sleep, it was so overwhelming that I nearly did. My eyelids grew so heavy that it surprised me I could keep them up for as long as I did.

"Don't fall asleep."

I open them up wider to see Rick staring at me with a deadpan look in his face. It made me jump at first. He was so close to me.

Baby Beth was in his arms, quietly sleeping. She wasn't there before. Rick said to me, "Go back."

The weight of my body tripled as I felt myself sink into the hospital bed and fall once again through the dark depths of the bottomless hole.

I fell for an eternity until landing flat on my back and jolting awake with another blinding light to greet me.

"Gwen? Gwendolyn?"

Blinking the light out of my eyes, I cane face to face with Rick, his spiky hair shielding my eyes from the overhead light. I was lying in the floor in the garage, my head in Rick's lap as I came to. I couldn't believe it at first that I was actually conscious. I believed for a good second that I was instead in yet another dream, ready to be flung back into reality. But nope, I was really awake.

"Did—did it work...?" I smiled weakly.

"It worked, sweetie. It worked." Rick pulled me into a hug as I sighed a long breath of relief. Rick spoke to me in the embrace,
"I was able to slow down the aging process by 40 percent. You've been having body aches that a 80 year old would feel but I've got you down to that of a 40 year old woman."

"Rick..." I breathed. "I need to tell them."

His eyebrow raised in surprise, quickly lowering again when he drifted off into thought. He picked me up onto my feet, slowly and gently, letting me walk side by side with him to the door.

Rick wanted to take me to the bathroom mirror first. "Don't freak out." He told me.

When I first saw myself, I noticed immediately that my hair colour had weakened into a pale orange. My hair was thin, my face was puffy in some places and wrinkle in others. I looked so tired overall.

I thought to myself.

Look how much I've grown.

****

"Summer. Morty. Jerry. Sweetie, you know Gwen is a lot more to us than just our neighbour."

I cut in, stepping out from the hallway and into the living room where the whole family had been waiting.

They saw my face, they noticed the changes almost immediately.
"I'm Gwendolyn Sanchez, your grandma."

It was the reactions of Summer and Beth I loved the most. Morty just looked really sick to his stomach but he soon came around to it. Summer was screaming with joy and excitement, running up to hug short little old me. Beth was a teary-eyed version of Summer's reaction and I just couldn't get enough of it all.

Jerry... I couldn't care less about what Jerry thought, call me bad but whatever.

I stood in the centre of the family hug, it just felt so warm. So loving. Like I had earned it, after all these years, the truth finally came out. And I couldn't imagine a better outcome.

"I-I can't believe this is real. You—you're really here... Mom!" Beth whimpered, her voice breaking as she hugged me tightly. "I'm..."
Something feels out of place.
Something's not right.

I want to embrace Beth with all of me, it's just...

"I'm not your real mother, Mrs S—oh, Elizabeth."

This took her aback. I've gone and confused her. "What...?"

"Beth, sweetie, come sit down. I'll explain this to you." Everyone obliged, sitting near and around Rick and I on the couch as he began to speak.

"You know that there are alternate dimensions where alternate copies of us exist in worlds of their own. Gwen here is not from one of them. She's from a different wave all on its own. In her universe, she invented a way to travel through time, meaning she found a way to jump through different time periods rather than through different dimensions.

"Gwen travelled through time accidentally landing here. Her journey designed a script for her to follow so her experiences would not rip the space time continuum and this destroy the multitude of alternate dimensions that are all aware of each other's existence. So the Song Family never existed. Gwen was stuck as a teenager for a long while before discovering that we live right across from her. Once she found out who she was, the illusion broke and she began to revert back to the age that she was supposed to be in this timeline."

The family was attentive, hanging off of every word that Rick was illustrating for them.

"That's why... Gwen has to go back to her own universe."

"What? You—you tell us that our neighbour is our grandma and you want us to just—"

"She's dying, Morty. What more do you want to hear? If we keep her in our time, she'll grow older faster and she'll kick the bucket. If she dies in our time, you, your mother, and your sister will all cease to exist." The room went silent again.

Rick sighed, "I've found a way to slow down the aging process until we find a way to send Gwen back home, but that doesn't mean she won't stop aging."

I watch as the faces of each of my family member's drop, still and silent from the depressing atmosphere. I can't help but translate their reactions to disappointment, I feel absolutely awful for making them feel that way. I didn't mean to get anyone's hopes up, I just want them to be happy and safe.

"Wait. Please tell me you still have that box of old time travel stuff...." I pushed myself up off of the couch. Rick looked up at me, his arm flung up over the back of the sofa. "Well yeah, I have it kept safe in the garage for keep sake—"

"Well that's all I need to get me back! I did it once before and I sure as shit can do it again—!"

"Hey, hey, whoa!" Rick jumped up to his feet, towering over me as he started over again. "Coming from the girl who got sucked forward into time the first and last time she tested it out..."

I grumbled, making a running start into the garage, ignoring the calls of the family from the living room.

Bursting through the door into the garage, I search frantically for the dustiest box specially marked in black permanent marker. Time Travel Stuff. Time Travel Stuff. Where's the Time Travel Stuff?

I search high and low, every corner, every nook and cranny, but I can't seem to find that wicked box.

"Gwen!" Rick bursts in through the door coming from the house. This, of course, startled me. "I won't let you put a finger on the fucking death trap! It malfunctioned once, it can malfunction again."

I pleaded with him. "But I know how to work it properly this time! I-I-I swear!"

"I don't care! I am not going to lose you again."

A loud eruption disrupted us, blowing through the garage door to the driveway as well as the roof on top. Plenty of debris of brick and plaster collapsed onto the garage floor. Rick had caught me by the hand just in time to swing me around and shield us from the falling debris.

I looked out to see who it could be and gasped when the outline of a figure appeared in the smoke, hovering above the mess.

"No, I thought you were—" Before I can even finish my sentence, I feel the pressure of something squeeze my sides and pull me up towards them.

I black out.

I'm done for.