Chapter Text
“Get up.”
The voice that cut through the featureless cloud of sleep was one that was just recognizable enough to be jarring, yanking Morty out of his own mind and thrusting him back into the world of the living with a start.
When he blinked his eyes open, he found that he was looking directly into a funhouse mirror of sorts. The version of him that stared back was almost him, but not quite: something about the way his reflection stared down at him made their similarities entirely irrelevant, his perception of himself suddenly shifted to the left and rendered off by the smallest of details. He still had the same smattering of moles across his face, but his hair was an inch longer. His nose hadn’t changed, but the dark eye underscored with even darker shadows staring back at him was far removed from the delicate blues he’d grown up seeing in the mirror.
The fact that there was only one eye instead of two was another dead giveaway that something was off. The other eye— although what little remained of it could hardly even be called that— was a heavy-lidded socket that exposed warm tissue and hints of wiring within, a small mass of scar tissue forming around it. Parts of the scar crept up to the outer corner of his reflection’s eyebrow, and another stopped just shy of the bridge of his nose.
It was an injury that Morty would’ve definitely remembered getting, but whatever that memory was, it was entirely lost on him. Bleary-eyed and half asleep, he couldn’t even try to piece together any potential context behind it save for the vaguest and most obvious option: Rick.
To the thought of his grandfather— the image of Rick standing in the warehouse parking lot, one thumb out in an attempt to hitchhike back to Earth, skidding along the surface of his mind— the memories of the previous evening slowly returned to him: Summer’s petty comments about Morty’s trust in Rick; the parts of himself that had been left behind in the Roy game console; Rick’s fists against the windshield of his cruiser, moments before Morty set his sights on the tear in the central finite curve and whoever was on the other side.
The fall.
The crash.
Everything that had followed.
Each event made itself apparent one after the other, puzzle pieces dropping and falling together in a Tetris-like fashion. Morty cringed before realizing that he’d done so, shame warming the tips of his ears as his expression contorted into a frown. His reflection moved on its own accord with a scoff, rolling an eye before pulling back and exiting Morty’s line of sight.
“Take a picture next time. It’ll last longer.”
Right. Not a funhouse mirror version of himself. Not literally, at least.
Morty sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with a groan. His exhaustion had hit him hard the previous evening, causing him to practically collapse the moment he’d been granted the opportunity to lie down. Now, he felt better, sort of. Tender all over, sure, traces of pain still lacing throughout his limbs, but definitely better so long as he ignored his bruises and the gnawing hunger steadily making itself apparent in the pit of his stomach with an audible growl.
It’d been a long time since he’d actually had an injury last this long. Most days, Rick just patched him up without question or snide comment. He’d managed to forget that being hurt actually, well, hurt.
He watched as Evil Morty moved to the other side of the conversation pit, establishing much more space between them than probably necessary. He was wearing a dark robe with matching slippers, a stark contrast to the patterned pajamas he’d been given. Preferences, clearly, but it was far from the most compelling difference between them.
He’d seen him without his eyepatch the last time they’d seen each other. After all, everyone knew how Ricks felt about pirates, and he didn’t need to be the smartest Morty in the room to recognize that Evil Morty wouldn’t have stood a chance in the presidential race had he resembled one, but it’d never occurred to Morty that there’d actually been something to hide underneath the black fabric. He’d gotten a brief glimpse of the scar on full display the other day, sure, but before that, his eye and the skin around it had been inconspicuously normal, and—
“Did you not hear me the first time?” Evil Morty’s voice cut through the silence as he raised an eyebrow, his expression carefully neutral as he folded his arms. He paused briefly, brows furrowing as he pieced two and two together. “What, did you think I had some sort of cyberkinetic implant or something?”
“Uh, no, I’m not that dumb.” Morty scoffed. “I-I thought you had an eye.”
“I do. It’s in the kitchen,” He said dismissively, as if an eye was just another thing to tuck into storage without so much as a second thought, no different from Rick’s neglected box of time travel bullshit he refused to touch or the mostly useless collection of scrap metal they’d salvaged from Gwendolyn after she’d malfunctioned. The fact that he was so casual about such a gnarly injury on full display almost made it all feel like some sick joke of sorts.
“Oh, but I didn’t… last time in the Citadel, you— I-I mean, your eye…” Morty stammered, fumbling for a way to word what he wanted to say without sounding too much like an inconsiderate jackass. He gestured vaguely to nothing in particular. “... You know?”
Evil Morty watched him flail with that same flat expression, silence stretching out between the two of them as his unrelenting gaze bore into him for much longer than necessary, making him squirm.
“I mean…”
“What, I looked normal?”
“I didn’t say all of that, but you know, if— if the shoe fits?”
“Right. It was on the Citadel. You can hide everything there so long as you know the right people and have the right tech,” He deadpanned, as if the mere existence of the place served as an adequate answer to anything and everything, and turned his back to Morty. He watched as his alternate self made his way back to the door he’d disappeared into the previous evening. It slid open with an oddly satisfying fwwsh, and as it did, Evil Morty threw that same unreadable expression back at Morty. “Are you coming?”
“I am!” Morty rose to his feet in one swift movement, catching up to him. “I just… didn’t want to chance any booby traps going off in— in the case you didn’t want me following you. Duh.”
“Right,” He hummed halfheartedly, clearly taking Morty’s words with a generous grain of salt. “Don’t worry. None of this place’s booby traps would work on you anyway because we have such similar DNA sequences. I gave it a shot last night.”
“That’s… comforting?” Morty offered as they passed a nondescript door, choosing to ignore the underlying threat of his comment as his gaze lingered for a moment too long.
Evil Morty cleared his throat. “Don’t even think about it. Locked and booby trapped are two different things.”
“I know what booby trapping is.” He said quickly, his words coming out much more defensively than he’d meant for them to.
“Yeah, you’d know anything that has the word boob in it, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever you want it to,” Evil Morty said with that same practiced neutrality as they approached another door. With no visible handle, it slid open automatically, revealing yet another hallway: one that connected two disconnected buildings like a walkway of sorts, all palatial walls and a wide expanse of tastefully decorated space. It was a far cry from how Morty’d always imagined decorating a space of his own one day, reminiscent instead of the contemporary sections of all the HGTV magazines Jerry kept ‘forgetting’ to cancel his subscription for with an added splash of color.
The other side of the hallway was all window, glass panel stretching from corner to corner as buttery morning light sifted through the lush vegetation that formed the landscape of Evil Morty’s interplanetary oasis. Everything outside, from the timid streaks of cotton cady clouds bleeding into the endlessly blue morning to the vibrant hibiscuses blossoming on the other side of the windows, looked perfect to the point of feeling sterile, reminding him that the gorgeous vista the properly overlooked wasn’t real.
Something about that knowledge— the reminder that everything around him was little more than an illusion— made Morty feel unreal, hazily defined in the otherwise infinite stretch of space.
All that the artificial beauty that pulled out before him managed to do was make the dark tendrils of anxiety that had been creeping up his spine exceptionally worse. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, replaced instead by the dawning realization of just how badly he’d fucked up in his decision to come out here, the severity of his situation had become impossible to ignore. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing out here. He definitely couldn’t piggyback off of Evil Morty for long, that much had been made clear, but… then what? He’d been an idiot. He hadn’t been thinking when he came out here, and now, he had nothing to show for it: no plan, no way of traveling, and a pissed-off Rick waiting for him if he decided to go home. What the hell was he supposed to do now, bum a portal gun off of a version of himself who hadn’t been too keen on having him there in the first place?
But— but, when he really thought about it, it was only a matter of time before someone started hunting this version of Morty down, right? Some vengeful Rick that had survived the collapse of the Citadel, or a version of Summer who was determined to right the wrongs committed by a badass-dimension-hopping-old-man-killing version of the brother she’d known her whole life? Evil Morty was pretty much one of the only people in existence capable of holding a candle to Rick, wasn’t he? In that case, weren’t they both better off if Morty stuck around to cancel out his genius brainwaves with his shitty ones or something like that?
That shitty excuse of a plan fell flat the second it came to mind. The whole reason Morty had left in the first place was because he was tired of things like being Rick’s human shield instead of his equal. After what had happened the last time he’d run off with some rando who’d been wronged by Rick, he would’ve had to have been insane to try and embrace that same dynamic in a slightly different form. Being a leech wasn’t an option when he’d come out here to free himself from everything that came with being a malleable part of Rick’s constantly shifting narrative, and the last thing he needed to do was highlight how pathetic he was capable of being to a version of himself who was so undoubtedly… not like him.
Yeah, put it that way.
He had to figure something out, and fast. He had no intentions of being any more like his father than he already was, and besides, it wasn’t like he was total dogshit at improv. He just… needed a moment to think.
With Evil Morty dead silent at his side, that wasn’t entirely impossible, so long as he put his attention towards more important things and stopped thinking about his reluctant host’s missing eye.
“So, the one in the kitchen, that’s— that’s a glass eye, right? Why?”
Great going. He really couldn’t have pulled that one off any better had there been a gun pressed directly to his temple.
“What.”
“I mean, I know you’ve got the technology to hide all of that, but the technology to fix it exists too, you— you know? I got my hand chopped off like, a little over a month ago, and I got it all patched up pretty much the same day,” Morty rambled, balling his hand into a fist before relaxing it to display that it functioned about as well as it ever had. “Wouldn’t you rather have two eyes instead o-of one? Doesn’t that fuck up your depth perception or like, give you away?”
“One, no. Two, you get used to it. Three, it doesn’t matter because there’s no more citadel to get ‘caught out’ in. I have a glass eye because it stops the socket from collapsing, and I need the socket for more important things,” He paused, a brief moment of silence passing between the two of them before he spoke again, as if he’d contemplated letting the conversation die there only to decide against it at the last minute. “Jeez, the way you talk about things is really fucked up.”
“W— huh?” Taken off guard by his bluntness and the subsequent feeling of scrutiny that followed, Morty blinked rapidly, turning to look at him with a fast-forming frown. “No I don’t, that’s— i-it was a perfectly normal question!”
“You just told me you got your hand cut off like it was nothing.”
“I mean, it is nothing. I-it’s fine. I can flip you off and everything, see?” He said as he offered Evil Morty the time-honored single finger salute, faltering slightly when he was met with nothing in return.
“Ugh, you’re just like Rick, but with less crop dusting.”
“Hey, don’t act like you’re better than me just because you disowned him or whatever. He’s still your grandpa, too.”
“Don’t say that. It’ll make our dynamic weird.”
“What?”
“And anyways, look how that ended. You’re not gonna like where this conversation goes if you start drawing comparisons between us now,” Evil Morty said with a scoff. Whatever comeback was forming in Morty’s throat fell flat on his face as his earlier dread began to return, threatened by his internal attempt to stomp it back down.
He stiffened, looking forward as they slowed to a stop in front of another door that slid within moments, revealing a kitchen— or, rather, a modernist’s wet dream impression of one, sleek and clean and lacking the typical amenities of a kitchen. There was no stove or microwave or even a fridge, all replaced instead by a featureless sci-fi something that Morty could only assume was a food synthesizer of sorts.
Evil Morty reached into an overhead counter, wordlessly pulling out a plate and thrusting it into Morty’s hands. He nodded towards the synthesizer with a clear message of you should know how to use this already before making his way to the sink and washing his hands. Morty swallowed once, watching him out of the corner of his eye as he approached the synthesizer.
A holographic screen flickered to life immediately, but it hardly responded to Morty’s touch: it stuttered and glitched on its own accord, alternating between screens before he had the chance to even read them, and when he offered up his plate, it synthesized a simple peanut butter and… banana… on half-frozen rye sandwich, which was exactly what a growing boy his age needed.
He didn’t complain as he made his way over to the only table in the room, the legs of his chair screeching unpleasantly against the tile underfoot when he pulled it out, and put his attention back onto Evil Morty when he sat down. He watched as he removed the glass eye from a cup sitting on one of the counters, pulling a few small wires out as he popped the eye into his socket, and watched as those wires attached to the black fabric that he fastened over his eye moments later. After making himself something much more appetizing than the culinary abomination Morty’d somehow managed to spawn into existence, he gave Morty’s breakfast a brief, likely judgmental once-over before sitting down across from him.
“Have you figured out what you’re going to do yet?”
“I-I barely even know what’s out here. Crashing Rick’s cruiser— t-that basically threw all of my good options out of the window, so…” Somehow, trying to act like he knew jack about shit was somehow worse than just saying the truth, which was: “Uh, so, no. Did— did you come out here with a plan?”
“More or less.”
“What was it?”
Slowly, deliberately, Evil Morty tilted his head backwards, looking up at the ceiling with an almost leisurely expression before making a show of looking around at their surroundings.
God, this guy was nothing if not good at making him feel dumb as hell.
“Right.” Morty offered hesitantly, humiliation surging through him. “And this place, then, where are we? I know it’s outside of the central finite curve, but it doesn’t really look like… anything.”
Evil Morty shoveled a forkful of well-seasoned eggs into his mouth, taking a moment to chew and swallow before speaking. “It’s not, to be honest.”
“It’s not what?” He prompted.
“Anything. This is all nothing. We’re literally in between timelines right now, which is why there isn’t any real life out here. No family, no cute girls,” He pointed to him with his fork. “No easy internet access like there is back home,”
Morty blinked. The sacrifices he’d have to make were perhaps the most compelling points Evil Morty had made yet, but… “What, you think that’s gonna make me pack up and go home? I-I can live without porn.”
“What, forever? What if the dimensions in the central finite curve are the only dimensions where porn exists?”
“I have a brain to imagine things with, you know, and you’re doing just fine. Clearly.” He crossed his arms. “Besides, who— who says that I wanna be floating out here in nothing forever? There’s like, infinite universes. Since you wanna be left alone, I’ll just find something that’ll work for me. Maybe there’s a universe out there where my family’s totally normal and I’m dead in that universe, so I can just slip in and take dead me’s place without a problem,”
An odd look painted Evil Morty’s face in response to his half-baked plan. “God, you’re lame.”
“Why, because I don’t want to be stuck with my own thoughts in the middle of nowhere for the rest of time? I like cute girls and the internet and porn, so I-I wanna end up with those things eventually. Besides, I already told you, I— I’m done with my dimension. Anything that isn’t coated in a thick layer of Rick’s shit is good enough for me.”
“And I already said that I think you’ll change your mind, so…”
“Well, you’re wrong and— and I’m a little stuck on what to do now, but all I need is my ship to prove it. You weren’t my only plan.” He took a bite out of his sandwich, willing himself not to grimace at the dryness of the bread or the clumpiness of the peanut butter, and really hoping that Evil Morty didn’t realize that his confidence was all bravado. “You were just… the one I thought would be the most welcoming,”
“Your ship?” Was all Evil Morty offered in response, his expression finally shifting as his mouth curled into a small, sardonic smile— a movement of his lips that didn’t quite seem to match the darkness of his eye.
“I mean… do you see Rick anywhere? It’s pretty much my ship now. Not like he can catch up to me when his portal gun’s all fucked up.” He set the sandwich back down before adding in a smaller, much more thoughtful voice: “Hey, would— if he showed up, w-would your booby traps really take him out?”
Evil Morty regarded him for a long moment, the smile falling from his face as his features became impossible for Morty to read again. He shrugged noncommittally. “Probably. I don’t want to put it to the test.” His fork scraped against his plate again, causing the two of them to react at the same time— subtle, uncomfortable winces flickering across opposing expressions simultaneously. “We can find your ship.”
The offer had been made so casually that Morty hardly even had time to question the intentions behind it. For all the pushback he’d been giving him about literally everything, it felt almost… wrong that he’d offer help so easily, even when the reason why he was doing so was purely for his own benefit. We can find your ship.
“If you’re not dead set on going home, I mean, but I’m sure everyone would be really happy to see you.” He got up with his empty dish, making his way back over to the sink he’d been washing his hands in earlier. “You’re Jerry’s favorite.”
Just like that, Morty’s thoughts stuttered to a stop, and whatever goodwill he’d thought had begun to form between the two of them disappeared in an instant.
He met Evil Morty’s gaze, brow twitching as he held it, an air of… something lingering around him. Condescension, maybe. Like Summer in the kitchen, he knew that he was being provoked simply for the hell of it, but it had managed to bring him to a pause much faster than anything else Evil Morty had said.
He scoffed, but something in him tilted sideways, hackles rising in defense. “Yeah, well, Summer’s mom’s favorite, so—”
“So she’s probably drinking herself to death over the fact that she just lost the only kid she could actually trust to beat teen pregnancy right about now.”
Morty gawked at him. “Holy shit, you really are a dick.”
“Yeah, I realized that the first time you called me one,” Evil Morty set his dish aside to dry.
“Your mom’s probably doing the same thing too, you know. Maybe even worse since— s-since you’ve been gone longer!”
“No, she’s not.” He said impassively as he wiped his hands down on a towel, hanging it up to dry underneath one of the cabinets afterwards. Morty opened his mouth to protest, shitty sandwich all but forgotten on the plate before him, but there was an odd sort of finality to Evil Morty’s words that made him falter, half-cooked retort dying in his throat.
For once, he simply used his brain and held his tongue instead, watching as Evil Morty turned to face him once more with crossed arms. Whatever the implications behind his comment had been, it seemed that Morty had been the only one who’d been made uncomfortable by it.
“Are you gonna finish that, or can we go?”
Morty glanced down at his dish, brows furrowing together. It was too late to acknowledge the warning flare that had been shot off in the back of his mind, but the moment had passed. With a sigh, he pushed his chair back, rising from his seat as he picked up the plate.
“No,” He shook his head. “Probably not.”
The only sound capable of cutting through the stifling silence of the void was a quiet, barely audible schwoop that split reality in two, a shimmering, humming vortex of honeyed light forming in the nothingness that’d been filled with empty space moments prior. There was something stifling about leaving Evil Morty’s paradise behind that made stepping into the void feel like breathing air for the first time, cut from an artificial cord. Whatever filled Morty’s lungs every time he inhaled— because it definitely wasn’t air, that was for sure— sent a run of ice crystals blooming down his spine with a shiver, his headache from earlier returning instantaneously, and the overwhelming thrum thrumming inside of his skull was quick to make him question if he’d sustained brain damage from the crash, or if that was just another side effect of standing outside of reality itself.
Evil Morty, on the other hand, illuminated briefly by the portal before it closed behind them with a distinct pop, seemed entirely unaffected by the weight of the extended universe pressing down on their shoulders.
The two fell into step with ease, walking side by side as their breaths rolled out from them in short, frosted puffs. It was a while before either of them finally spoke.
“So if there’s no life out here, what— w-what the hell was that thing we killed yesterday supposed to be?” It was odd, the way Morty’s voice got swallowed up by the silence, as if nothing was supposed to be capable of penetrating it. A good portion of Evil Morty’s face was obscured by the protective glass of his space helmet, and when Morty looked at him from the corner of his eye, he was met with nothing but his own warbled reflection.
“Bio-waste.” He said simply, continuing to walk. “Have you spent a lot of time in the citadel?”
“Not really.”
“There used to be a pretty big perma portal right outside of citadel grounds that was used to dump garbage. Turns out we were just littering the whole time, and this is where everyone’s used car batteries ended up.” He deadpanned, staring ahead. “With that comes biological bacteria left to fester and form, and, well, you know what they say. Life always finds a way.”
Morty nodded slowly, tilting his head back and looking upwards. All that surrounded them was the infinite landscape of shimmering lights housed within the black void of space, appearing and disappearing at a moment’s notice with no real rhyme or reason. Portals, he assumed, and as if on cue, one opened overhead, a lone yellow sock with no pair drifting unceremoniously through before floating away into nothingness.
“Nothing’s meant to come through since nothing is supposed to exist, not even time. Everything that does either does so through a poorly-calculated portal or some tiny gap in reality. So, again.” He gestured out to the grand nothingness around them in a sweeping motion. “Bio-waste. We’re pretty much standing on one big trash asteroid right now.”
A trashteroid. Morty nodded again, feeling small underneath the endless expanse of the sky. Now that he wasn’t running for his life like a panicked animal, all sweat and tangled limbs. Now that he had a steady light source that wasn’t a minute of screentime away from dying, the trashteroid was almost beautiful in its strange desolation. The ground still rumbled beneath their feet every so often, a tower of trash collapsing somewhere out of sight, but it was nice in its simplicity and the view it had to offer.
It was easy to get lost in what he was and wasn’t seeing, nothingness a concept difficult for him to fully comprehend, and a part of him couldn’t help but worry that if he stared out into the void for too long, something might end up staring back.
“That’s also why you feel like shit.”
“Huh?” Morty blinked, the statement pulling him out of his thoughts in an instant. “Is it really that obvious?”
“Uh… kind of, but no time just means there’s literally no way for you to heal. Everything out here is stagnant in a sense, including you. So, you know, unless you’re ready to go back where you came from—” Evil Morty tapped the sides of his eyepatch as he spoke, a yellow grid stretching out before them as he scanned their surroundings in a practiced manner, the ship’s outline appearing behind a couple of trash towers that had collapsed in their absence. “You’re gonna want to get used to all of those little bruises or whatever.”
“Okay, I-I got it. You want me out of here as fast as possible. You don’t have to keep rubbing it in.”
Evil Morty hummed, the sound muffled by his helmet. “No comment.”
Together, they maneuvered around one of the trash piles and over another as they approached the ship— or, rather, what was left of it: a wreck with bits and pieces of internal hardwire sticking out at odd angles, broken glass, and twisted metal. With a proper light source in tow, it was much easier for Morty to make out what had survived the crash, which wasn’t much. Shining his flashlight through a part of the windshield revealed Rick’s Earth wallet resting on the passenger seat, the worn leather covered in a layer of cosmic dust as if it’d been sitting out in the void for much longer than a single night.
“Holy shit, did you aim for the ground or something? It’s like you wanted to die,” Evil Morty commented as he hoisted himself up onto the top of the cruiser, resting his hands on his hips as he tried to gauge… something that Morty clearly wasn’t as keen on noticing. He looked over to him. “How are you alive right now?”
“Rick does childproofing stuff to me when I’m asleep,” Morty said simply, gesturing to his lack of a spacesuit.
“What a sentimental guy, that Rick.” He drawled, sarcasm practically dripping from his words. Morty tilted his head in a brief contemplation as he tried to figure out how to access the passenger seat, but Evil Morty’s comment, like the one about Jerry, had brought him right back into that internal standstill, an all-too-familiar feeling settling in his stomach like molasses, syrupy and vile— one that he reluctantly, finally, recognized as guilt.
He felt… bad. Naturally, of course, because at the end of the day, he had turned his back on someone he’d claimed to love and nothing could change that, but that guilt was kept in check by the knowledge that Evil Morty was wrong. Rick wasn’t sentimental, not in the ways it mattered. Only in the ways that benefitted him in one way or another.
Hadn’t the one-on-one clone of his mother been the perfect example of that?
Hadn’t the fact that he’d been left behind to rot in the Roy machine been an even better one?
Rick could’ve been the most sentimental, soft-hearted fucker of his kind, but at the end of the day, that lingering sentimentality hadn’t been enough for him to ensure that Morty came back whole, not when it came at the cost of being able to manipulate and push his grandson around with ease. He’d been all too happy to leave the parts of Morty that hadn’t served him in storage. After everything they’d been through and all the sacrifices Morty’d made for him— hell, it felt like yesterday that he’d almost gone full suicide bomber in that weird version of Rick’s overdramatic death trap only a few weeks ago—, everything came right back to Rick and what he wanted in the end.
Poor, sad Rick, with his dead wife and tragic, self-imposed hunt for justice, sure, but Rick nonetheless. Everything else was just noise to him whenever he needed it to be. Whatever love he had for his family was clearly limited by his own narcissistic worldview and exemplified by the fact that he’d quite literally trapped an infinite amount of timelines in his own narrative.
He swallowed around the lump that had formed in his throat. He only felt bad because it was a recent event. Like everything in his life, he simply had to do what he did best, which was to not think about it. “Do you think this is salvageable?”
“Oh, for sure. It’s just a matter of getting all this other shit that’s on top of it off.” Evil Morty pulled out his portal gun, shooting open a portal just wide enough to fit the cruiser through a few feet away. The outside source of life made the glass on his helmet slightly less opaque, revealing his face as he looked down at Morty. “How’d you get out of this mess the first time?”
“Oh, through the top.”
Metal shifted overhead as Evil Morty squatted, and Morty hoisted himself up onto the roof of the cruiser with him. “Right there,” He pointed towards a small gap in the wreckage. “See?”
“Huh. Think you can fit through it a second time?”
“Uh—” Morty looked down through the gap, claustrophobia surging at the thought of trying to squeeze back in there. “T-this feels like a trap. Are you gonna let me get stuck and leave me behind?”
“Yeah, but if you don’t get stuck, then you can put it in neutral and we can push it through the portal.”
“Why not just open the portal underneath it?”
“Because the last thing this piece of junk needs is more damage.” Evil Morty rose to his feet, jumping off the roof of the vehicle moments later and standing upright. He was right, Morty knew, but the thought of squeezing him back into that wreck of a ship wasn’t something he’d wanted to experience again anytime soon.
Still, a few minutes of discomfort for a lifetime of whatever this cruiser could offer him…
Morty sighed, sticking one foot into the gap he’d forced himself through the day prior, and then another. He took a deep breath before lowering himself in slowly, finding himself with somehow even less space than he’d remembered having. Pressing a series of buttons on the side of the flashlight he’d been given, he turned up the brightness, shining it around until his attention landed on the gears. Sure enough, although the cruiser itself remained entirely unresponsive, he was, in fact, able to shift it back into neutral. Good thing he’d left the keys in the ignition.
Getting to the wallet on the passenger seat proved to be the harder task of the two, and Morty wasn’t quite sure why he’d had the insane compulsion to try and grab it in the first place. With the way the vehicle had practically crumpled in on itself, the interior had warped to form a wall of fucked-up interior and metal, giving Morty just enough space to squeeze his arm through and feel around blindly for a worn, leather wallet.
Shifting closer in an attempt to get better leverage, Morty stretched out his arm until he was incapable of stretching it out any further, spreading an open palm out. His fingertips found spiderweb cracks in the worn leather, tightening in towards the center until they skimmed over something soft and plush with an oddly sharp thing poking through.
He yelped, attempting to jerk his arm through the hole. He failed, knocking his head in the process. “Fuck!”
Outside, something shifted. Moments later, whatever’d been blocking a part of the windshield moved, the warm light of Evil Morty’s portal shining through the shattered glass and illuminating the interior of the cruiser in a hazy gold. His mostly obscured face greeted him through the window, and in a move that felt uncharacteristic of him, he cocked his head and offered a thumbs up, as if to ask if he was alright.
Morty only nodded faintly, turning his attention back to the wallet. He’d touched nothing more than exposed stuffing and seat springs, he knew, but it still psyched him out to reach back into a space he couldn’t quite see.
Moments later, wallet in hand, he hoisted himself out of the wreckage, letting out a sigh he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Sweet, sweet success.
“Why’d you scream?” Evil Morty asked as he finished clearing off the cruiser, tossing who-knows-what into the ground pile of garbage that surrounded it.
“I-I thought I touched, uh, I don’t know, really. Something alive, I guess.” He tucked the wallet into the pocket of his jeans. “It’s in neutral.”
“Okay.” Was all Evil Morty said as he made his way towards the back of the cruiser, giving it one strong push to gauge how heavy it’d be before putting his entire weight into the vehicle. Morty followed suit, bony shoulder pressed into the back end of it, and after much resistance, the wheels of the cruiser slowly began to roll. The two of them were silent as they pushed it through the portal, the hard rock underfoot turning into delicate marble within moments.
The portal shut behind them with a distinctive pop, and Morty wiped the salty beads of sweat that had begun to form on his forehead with the back of his hand. “Hey, you know… i-if all of this was preplanned and this place has fuck all, why did you even come out here? Why didn’t you like… go to a world where Mortys rule or something?”
A slight delay passed before Evil Morty snorted, but when he spoke, the condescension from earlier was nowhere to be found. He took off his helmet, setting it aside. “I gave you a whole monologue the last time I saw you, and that’s what you think of me?”
“I don’t really know what to think of you, to be honest. You basically just pulled a 9/11 two back home. Most— m-most of us aren’t really used to watching ourselves die like that, I think. It was… pretty brutal,” He sucked in air between his teeth. “I-I was thinking maybe you destroyed everything to make, like, a badass point or something?”
“And what point would that have been?”
“How should I know? I’m not you.” Morty said in an attempt to appear dismissive, no longer wanting to play into Evil Morty’s subtle provocations, but the moment those words left his mouth and clattered in the empty space between them, the two of them froze, their conversation brought to a sudden standstill.
It was a statement that was wrong in every sense of the way, and yet, it was right— an inherent paradox to an ironic extent, Morty realized, as he stared at his doppelgänger and his doppelgänger stared back.
One of them started to snicker, and the other followed suit moments later, the underlying tension to their interactions all but forgotten as their laughter rang out into the surrounding silence.
They were the same person, except for where they weren’t. It was the one sole unifying trait they shared and the only reason either of them was out here in the first place.
For a moment, just one, that undeniable truth made the silent imbalance of their interactions mean absolutely nothing at all.