Chapter Text
Some lab-grown Mortys never adjust to life at home, because home isn’t what they were taught in Citadel schools. You’re surrounded by yourself all your life, and then you’re dropped into a household of others, whose thoughts you cannot determine and actions you cannot predict. Like studying the deep sea and then actually experiencing that alien world in your little submarine, its titanium hull creaking as you descend closer and closer to the bottom. The only person who knows that you’re an imposter is another imposter—the foul and monstrous man who could throw calamity into your lap at any conceivable moment.
Like homegrown Mortys, they also experience anxiety like a rotten sludge pooling in their bellies. It’s from the terror of being a teenager. The terror of the tension your mother and father have carefully crafted at home. The terror of being perceived by people who don’t like you for eight hours a day. And, just for you, the knowledge that Ricks aren’t lying when they say you’re easily replaceable.
You’ve seen it in your foggy memories; the assembly line of your brethren–it’s placed deep below the implanted memories of home in your brain. And because of this, you know exactly what your purpose is. It’s not to give you a chance at life on Earth. It’s not to spare your parents from knowing their child has died. No, your purpose, your very life is to placate Beth and Jerry, because mom and dad with a dead son is a lot of trouble, and Ricks don’t need trouble. What Ricks need are tools that can be an extension of himself to carry around the universe, one little boy who is nothing and has nothing, who can be amazed and frightened of a man who can’t help but to wallow in his sorrow, calling himself God.
Except, every last one of the Citadel Mortys will tell you something different. That Rick blew up their Earth and now they’re stuck here, waiting to be rehomed like lost dogs. You know you’ve never spoken to a real Summer in your life. You remember being naked and numb with scrubbed-up Ricks standing over you, blackened by surgical headlamps that sear through your retinas. No one knows what the hell you’re talking about though, so you learn to not speak. You keep silent about the images that aren’t supposed to be there, in your head. You don’t want them to open it up again.
~
Morty learns fast that some Ricks don’t have lines to cross and that anything is in the cards. Four Ricks have either died or returned him to the shelter because he bites. His first Rick wasn’t bad, until the end.
THE FIRST RICK
“Y–oouUURGHu’re getting assigned to a Rick for the first time. Don’t throw up on my carpet.”
Morty’s mouth opens and he means for it to speak but nothing comes out.
Teacher Rick tucks his long, straight hair behind his ear and continues, “It’s uh, let’s see, Rick D69. Heh, nice.”
His voice cracks, “R-Right now? Can’t I bring some stuff first?”
“What stuff?” He puts his feet up on the deck and twists the cap off his flask. Morty’s thoughts are racing and the guy is chugging down alcohol like a nursing bottle. “Y-you’ll have everything there. This is a typical Rick-family type A arrangement.”
The blood in his veins turns to ice as he stands motionless in silent horror. He didn’t know it would happen so soon, the eventuality of it stalking behind him like an unseen predator. His attitude adjustment has to happen now rather than later. Or his new owner would do it for him (surgically, he guesses.)
Teacher Rick shoots a portal in the wall without looking, “Go on. Get.”
Shit.
“Shit.” Morty says it out loud.
“You fuck this up, don’t bother coming back.”
He walks through the portal and comes out in a garage, the same one he’s seen on the CRT television in class. It had always felt like a set in a studio but the garage door is wide open, the sky is bright blue, and he can hear the birds sing for each other, it’s real. Morty doesn’t bother looking at Rick–he sees thousands of them in the city every day. But not anymore, it’s just the one now, his Rick.
Rick swivels on the stool to face Morty, who keeps his eyes trained on the floor, following the patterns of mixed concrete.
“Oh, damn, they really did send me a new one.” The Rick stands up.
A new one . He forces himself to look up at the man and there’s nothing special about him, he looks just as boozed-up as the rest. It eases his mind in a roundabout way, but the physical signs of his stress remain; clammy skin, white knuckles. And of course Rick notices.
“Don’t throw up in my garage.”
“I-I won’t.” His voice doesn’t sound like his own. It sounds tinny, distant. Timid. Maybe he’ll vibrate out of his skin. Rick settles his hands on his hips and his expression remains unchanged.
“Don’t be weird. It’s the same as always. W-We’re not skipping a beat, Morty.”
“S-sure, Rick.” Morty says, but he doesn’t know the residents of this home. He doesn’t know where his bedroom is.
“You sure? ‘Cause the last thing I need is Beth on my—”
“Yeah, yeah, I-I’m good.” He interrupts before the man can say anything else.
A pause.
“Alright, then go say hi to your mom—er, to Beth. Make her stop whining.”
Rick opens the door to the kitchen and lets Morty pass under his arm. A smell so hazardous leaks out of the man’s breath that it gives Morty pause, and he pushes back the instinct to react with disgust. Like the house would explode if he lit a match. Rick follows, clicking the door shut behind him. Beth stands in front of the stove top, sweat clinging to her neck, face flushed. She dumps rotini into a boiling saucepan with one hand and sips wine out of the other. When she sees Morty, she stops in her tracks.
“Morty!”
Morty feels a strange exhilaration from their direct eye contact. Not a Rick or a Morty; another person. All at once, Beth shifts from the second dimension of the television screen into the third dimension. She has mass now, she exists, with entirely different postures and expressions that are only unique to her. And she looks angry.
“H-Hey mom—”
“You weren’t in the house, you weren’t answering my texts, you weren’t picking up my calls!” She gesticulates with the slotted spoon. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“Sorry—I-I lost my phone. Want some help? W-with the dishes?”
As soon as Morty says it, he regrets it. The slideshows were clear on Mortys’ inclinations, none of which included offering to do chores. He won’t backtrack; he’ll just simply go to the sink, but the slotted spoon stops him.
Surprised, he asks, “Wh-what’s up?” Did I fuck it up already?
Beth searches his eyes for something he can’t possibly know. Fear takes hold of his heart. Does she know? Can she tell the difference? Even Rick, in his periphery, is immobilized like he’s waiting in line at the gallows, and a wave of nausea crests over him, she definitely knows. If anyone could tell, it would be the Mother, right? Beths should back away in horror and revulsion as they notice the imperfect resemblance. There has to be something.
Beth frowns. “No laptop for the weekend.” She announces and returns to the stovetop, “Leave it in my bedroom on top of the dresser.”
It’s as if Morty forgot the English language. Laptop? Weekend? He goes back and forth between the two words to decipher their meaning, both of which have nothing to do with his status as an imposter. In a strange bid for discovery, he opens his mouth to speak. To ask her if she really can’t see, to tell her how the world truly works, that this life is a playground for the men who treat universes as their inconsequential fantasies and that her son is the object of their obsession.
There’s eyes on him. He turns his head towards Rick and his glare feels like a threat.
Morty cannot stand against the fickleness of God. Face burning, chest tight, he looks away from his creator and washes the tupperware first.
~
One year passes.
Morty learns how to be Morty. How to live with other people, how to navigate Earth schools, how to hold his temper, how to let Rick do what he wants so it can be over. This version of Rick keeps it classic Rick and Morty style with expected amounts of excitement and trauma—trauma that underwhelms him in the beginning.
“Morty, you’re in shock. I’m gonna give you a little something that’ll make you pass out.”
“I might be bleeding out, but you don’t have to make me pass out. I’ll be fine.”
“Really? Your intestines are hanging out of you. Your legs are over there.”
“Okay. You’ll fix me, right?”
As long as the brain isn’t damaged, he can be destroyed over and over again. At the time, Rick seemed unnerved by his composure. Now, Morty makes sure to adjust his reactions appropriately. It’s dangerous for him to know what he knows, and even more dangerous if Rick knows. So he toils away, letting his second self take the lead. He does it so much that it starts to overtake his original self because it’s easier that way. The new life he leads is almost charming and he knows it could be much, much worse. His parents go to marriage counseling sessions. His grades are decent. He gets along with his sister. And sometimes, in the dead of the night when the moon shines across his room, he wonders if he got it all wrong, if the paranoia he felt before was invented by his anxiety and isolation on the Citadel.
Maybe he’s just a normal kid and maybe he had parents of his own long ago. The Citadel feels like a dream. Until the day Rick fucks everything up.
THE DAY RICK FUCKS EVERYTHING UP
The spaceship parks in the garage and Rick is sloshed, absolutely fucked up. Morty opens the door to leave but fingers snag his shirt collar to violently pull his ass back into the seat. Now he’s pissed—they’d been fighting like cats and dogs the whole way home about some insignificant shit. He whips his head around to ask “what the fuck” but the linguistics part of his brain stalls out. In a stark contrast to his hateful countenance, Morty watches tears fall down Rick’s sunken cheeks. And then, for the first time ever, he talks about his Morty, the original one. He can’t believe what he’s hearing; the intensely tender verbiage, the blood rushing in his ears, but this fit of vulnerability? It’s too important to miss. Too vital. Pay attention.
“I m-miss him. I-I-I knew… I fucked up.”
“I-I’m sorry, Rick.”
Morty almost means it, he’s never seen Rick cry, and it’s a horrible expression, almost too ghastly to look at. And yet, Morty feels himself giving over to the soft, unfamiliar notions of sympathy. Those feelings cease when he notices the man’s gaze looks too intense for the situation. He doesn’t like when Rick stares. Rick used to stare a lot more in the beginning, and something gross would creep down Morty’s spine. Eventually, it happened less and less, like he could sense discomfort emanating off his fake-grandson.
Rick leans towards him, lifting the armrest to get closer. There’s something wrong with him.
“T-Tell me that you…” he hiccups, “tell me you s-still love me.”
Still?
“Yeah, I-I love you, Rick.” It comes out meekly and he wonders if that was the right answer. Most people in the world would say they love their Grandpa, so when Rick’s expression darkens, Morty’s understanding of the situation becomes muddled. Rick curls Morty’s shirt collar in his long fingers and yanks him forward. This kind of animalistic roughness isn’t in Rick’s M.O. and it scares Morty. They condition Mortys to be timid and fearful of their counterparts but he was resistant to it. He feels it now and it’s alarming. Nauseating.
What happens now?
Suddenly, Rick brings their lips together, and the taste is shocking. Like the high-octane contents of Rick’s intestines came back up to settle in his gums. Time slows down to a crawl and Morty still doesn’t know what’s happening, failing spectacularly to understand the traumatic advances of his own Grandpa. Rick’s slimy, putrid tongue forces its way past his teeth and the repulsiveness of it makes Morty dry heave, not that Rick notices, he’s still slobbering on Morty’s face like a bullmastiff. A horrible imitation of a sensual kiss. He apologizes between sobs, bruising Morty’s lips and doing worse things to his brain.
“I’m sorry.” He says.
“Should’ve done more.” He says, and now Morty can see the iniquity for what it is, though his understanding alone can’t get his muscles to work again.
Empty bottles clink as Rick crawls onto the passenger’s seat. Morty’s shirt is still in Rick’s death grip. He’s lifted by the fabric and shoved against the see-through glass dome. He slides down until his shoulders reach the door handle; Rick hovers directly above. The acrid stench of his saliva and his breath stops Morty’s breathing.
“I love you, Morty.”
He hears the dreadful clinking of Rick’s buckle, the sound of his zipper tugged down. Rick sinks his hips between Morty’s legs and something hot and grotesque pushes against the bottom of his jeans. His hands return to Morty’s head to crane his face upwards. It hurts his neck.
“An’ I never said it… but you knew, right?”
The image of a specific phase pistol appears in Morty’s mind, small and sleek in hues of blue. He remembers, on distant planets, Rick reaching into his lab coat for it, intent on imminent use. C’mon, think. Inner pocket… on his right side.
“Just…”
Morty is startled to feel something cold in the palm of his hand. It’s the grip of the pistol. His body had moved without permission.
“Let me do this.” Rick says.
The grip Rick has on his face makes his endeavor perilous, but his self-preservation demands satisfaction, and he holds it like a surgical instrument. In the small space left between their bodies, he guides the pistol up as far as his arms allow. The barrel collides with the underside of Rick’s jaw and Rick goes still, knowing the shape of that cold metal. Good. Morty jams the muzzle firmly into Rick’s trachea, making him gag. He pulls the trigger.
~
You sit there with Rick’s dead weight on top of you, soaked in his blood and brain matter. You felt the heat of the pistol when you fired it, and you wouldn’t be surprised to see first degree burns in the mirror. Rick is so fucking heavy when he’s a corpse. What’s the first thing you should do?
Open the passenger side door and twist out from beneath him. Once your back hits the cement, keep your eyes and lips shut tight. Try your best not to think about the gore pouring out in chunks landing hot on your chest—just wait for it to stop. Get to the garage door and put the garage in family therapy mode. There were rumors back home about Ricks’ backups, and it started with the subterranean lab. You pull the hatch open and a chilly breeze envelops you, cooling the blood on your face, it feels good. The ladder descends into darkness and you see the faint outline of a man standing at the bottom: pale, wet, naked, looking at you with a crazed expression. It startles you, a little. You still have the phase pistol in hand.
“Morty, what the fuck did you—” You fire and he falls to the floor like a doll.
A robotic voice comes from the back of the room below.
R E R O U T I N G . . .
“Fuck.” You scale down the ladder with your finger off the trigger. Glass shatters and Rick is released from the vat onto all fours, coughing up whatever mixture of amniotic fluids and perfluorocarbons he has in his lungs. You don’t let him look up.
You stand stock still, waiting for the next reroute.
