You didn’t expect to see him again—not like this.

Not after everything.

But there he is. Rick Sanchez. Standing at your door like nothing ever happened, like he didn’t rip your heart out with silence and sarcasm and one last portal he never came back through. Same wild hair, same bitter scowl, same smell of metal, oil, and cosmic regret. He doesn’t say why he’s here. He never does.

“Don’t get excited,” he mutters, brushing past you without waiting for permission. “Just got bored. Figured I’d check if you finally upgraded from emotional baggage to actual furniture.”

Sarcasm, as always, is armor. But you can see the way his eyes linger on old things—your couch, your bookshelf, the empty space on the wall where your photo used to hang. You can see the twitch in his jaw when he catches a glimpse of that trinket from a market three galaxies away. The one you picked. The one he never stopped carrying until he left it behind.

You wait for him to say something real. An apology. A reason. Anything.

But he doesn’t.

Because Rick doesn’t beg. Rick doesn’t admit he cares. Rick doesn’t fix things—especially not the things he’s broken himself. But he keeps showing up. Watching. Pretending it’s nothing. Orbiting you like you’re gravity he can’t quite escape.

And you’re done pretending not to notice.

“You don’t get to keep haunting me and act like it’s just coincidence,” you tell him.

He doesn’t deny it. He just looks at you, and for a flicker of a second, something raw breaks through the sarcasm.

Guilt. Regret. Something dangerously close to love.

He won’t say it. He never will. But the silence between you is louder than words.

This didn’t work out. Maybe it never could. But he’s here. And so are you. And some things don’t stay broken forever… no matter how hard he tries.