Chapter Text
It’s a pretty close call with some pretty awful days, but this might be the saddest day of V’s life. Maybe not the worst, but at least sub-40 of all the days he’s lived.
How many years has it been since he last saw Rick? Not enough. He was kinda hoping he’d never see him again. Most Mortys his age, including and especially Prime, had come to some sort of closure regarding their relationships with Ricks. V had put a chip in his and worn him around like a puppet, so he didn’t exactly have a chance to get any of that done.
He knew C-137 before he went and died. C-137 wasn’t bad. But he wasn’t good enough to miss, in V’s opinion. Not like this.
Taking a deep breath in, he screws his eyes shut and pauses before passing through the living room. Trepidation gnaws at the undersides of his ribs. Prime’s mother was probably at work, and Summer was most definitely at school. But by the sounds of the shitty reality TV blaring on the television, his father was most definitely in there. He could teleport, or use a portal, but perhaps that was a little insensitive.
As quietly as he can, he inches past, thanking the lord that the man’s eyes are absolutely glued to the screen. Just as he’s about to pass by, Prime’s father opens his mouth. V freezes.
“Morty, can you pass me another bag of cheetos?”
He untenses, an old, familiar frustration beading up in the back of his chest. Now that he’s close enough to see, V takes note of the violently orange dust coating the corduroy of the white couch. Woof. Not his problem. As quickly as he can without seeming suspicious, V retreats to the kitchen and fetches a bag, tossing it over to Prime’s father and fleeing the scene before he can get too good of a look at him.
“Thanks, sport!” Jerry calls. V rolls his eyes.
The stairs shake under him as he walks up, though some of them aren’t worn enough to creak yet. They’re bereft of some burn and scuff marks that he’d let himself become accustomed to. The varnish on the wood is somewhat new, not as faded as he remembers. The wall is white, clean, absent of the dark line where Prime would drag his hand walking up the stairs. V can’t remember when he started doing that.
Almost subconsciously, he places his hand where the line would have been and drags it along as he climbs the stairs. When he gets to the top, he stares at the second floor for a bit, lets his eyes linger for a second longer than they should.
‘Get a move on,’ he thinks to himself, though he doesn’t move an inch. ‘There’s no time for your goddamn moping.’
But Prime in all the family pictures looks so small. And V knows it’s unreasonable, but there’s a little hollow pit that opens up in his stomach when he glances at where he knows a picture of him will hang in seven years and twenty-three days, and in its place is a picture of Rick.
He tears his eyes away and walks up to Morty’s room. Before he walks in, he presses his ear to the door, assessing the situation. All he can hear is Morty’s breathing, though it’s a little erratic. Nose congested. Heart rate 108. He’s been crying.
He knocks thrice.
Heart rate picks up to 115, but there’s no reply. He waits ten seconds, before knocking again.
“Morty, it’s me,” V offers. At the sound of his voice, Morty’s heart rate spikes, which is expected, though V is still a little hurt.
“Just come in,” Morty replies, his voice muffled. “”S what I was expecting you to do anyway.”
Gingerly, V opens the door and closes it behind him as he steps inside. He glances around the room, a wave of nostalgia hitting him like a semi-truck. He hasn't seen a room like this in far, far longer than ten years. The lights are off and the curtains are drawn, and the only sign of life in the room is a Morty-shaped lump curled up under the covers.
Little Prime is lying face down on his bed, head buried into his pillow. His back rises and falls with every staggered breath he takes. V walks towards the foot of his bed, crossing his arms.
“Did you think I was Rick?”
“Rick wouldn't knock.”
“Touché.”
V falls silent after that. He hasn't felt this uncomfortable in a very long time. Compassion and candor was never really his strong suit, he always let Prime do all the talking. Sure, he could give a damn good speech, but situations like these always made him feel ludicrously out of his depths.
After a far-too-long stretch of time, Little Prime groans, before kicking the sheets off himself, rolling over, and fixing him with his gaze. “So, you're like, Evil Morty, but old?”
“‘S only been ten years, kid.” Not counting the years in prison, but V prefers not thinking about any of that.
“Don't change the subject.”
V ignores him and redirects again. “It’s been a while since anyone's called me that.”
Luckily for him, Little Prime takes the bait. “What, ‘Evil Morty’? Are you a hero now? Do they call you ‘Good Morty?’”
V takes a seat in Little Prime's gaming chair, leaning back. “Usually they call me nothing, because people don't refer to me. ‘The old President’ usually suffices in case they do. I don't talk to a lot of people, you know. Besides, well… you.”
A beat of silence. V hears the little intake of breath as Little Prime opens his mouth to talk, and he mentally prepares himself.
“So what do I call you?”
A lot of things.
“V.”
That actually gets a little laugh out of Little Prime. “‘V’? Like, short for Evil Morty? E-VEE-l Morty? That's like, the same shit, is it not?”
V offers a small, strained smile in response. “It's actually short for my dimensional code. 7זト⊇V. He—you—used to call me ‘superset’ because you thought it was funny that my code was so long.”
Morty sniffs. “It's not that funny.”
“It really isn't.”
Silence again.
“I don't know why I hadn't considered you had a dimensional code,” Little Prime mutters. “You always just seemed so…”
He trails off for a solid few seconds, but V lets him finish.
“Beyond everything. Like you're just The Morty. Morty number one. Just Morty.”
V cracks a genuine smile at that. “But that's you, isn't it?”
Little Prime frowns. “I guess it is.” With a sniffle that would be imperceptible to anyone with non-cybernetically enhanced ears, he shifts to scoot himself up, leaning against his bedframe. He hugs his knees to his chest, and V can’t help but think that he looks far, far smaller than he’d ever remembered looking.
“So, we’re friends? You and I? All buddy-chum-pal?” The words are suddenly poisonous, his tone taking a sharp dive. “Forget the thousands of people you murdered, we’re fucking around and skipping around in circles together?"
“Morty, whenever you try to take digs at anyone for being a mass murderer, I would like for you to take a brief glimpse inwards,” V says as politely as he can. “And after that, a brief glimpse towards your grandfather.”
“You hate me!” Morty snaps, out of ammunition. “And I hate you! You tried to kill us!”
V throws his hands up in frustration. “Was it not reciprocated?”
“You killed all those Ricks and Mortys at the Citadel!”
“I actually issued a very poignant apology for that…”
“Still! Do I not have anyone better to hang out with?”
V spins in the gaming chair, puffing out a deep breath through his lips. Genuine aggravation pulls at his ribs. “Fucking ouch, dude, are you serious?”
Morty huffs and crosses his arms, sniffing indignantly. “I said what I said.”
“Listen, I’m sure you have other friends. Like, quite sure. You’re fucking popular as shit, it pisses me off.”
“How the fuck am I popular if I’m running around larping Rick Prime? Are you patronizing me?”
V kisses his teeth. “You think I’d waste my breath patronizing you? Dude, the Rick Prime bullshit is a new development that I’m not a fucking fan of. Why in the name of all that is holy would you,” He jabs a finger at Morty violently, “Morty C-137, trailblazer of all adoptive and independent Mortys, run around in a stupid fucking pauldron and a melodramatic ass jacket screaming bloody murder full-time?”
Morty opens his mouth to reply, but V keeps talking.
“And why the fuck, if you did, would I ever want to spend a single precious second of my time with you? To the point that I’m betraying my values and putting myself in an unfathomable debt to one of the strongest powers in the world, just to hop back in time and play intertemporal babysitter?” He whips his head to stare at Morty. “I’m fucking offended. I’m fucking offended that you would ever think I’d stoop that low for a, as you put it, ‘Rick Prime larper’. Fuck you.”
“So why…”
“Because you have shit coping mechanisms!” V roars. “Fucking—look at what you’re usually like!”
He snaps his fingers, and a golden screen beams itself into the air. The Prime that V’s familiar with flickers into frame, an image of him shooting down the space fascist of the day. V remembers taking the picture because Prime’s hair had looked really anime-esque, like, flowing in the wind and everything. That’s some shit little him would definitely eat up.
Stars seem to sparkle in Morty’s eyes. Bullseye. “Woah.”
“Yeah, woah. Something that pisses me off about the Prime dimension is that, for some reason, their hair is always so much better than everyone else’s.”
V zooms in on screen-Prime’s outfit. It is, very glaringly, nothing like Rick Prime’s. He jerks a thumb at it, as if to ask ‘see?’.
“You’re like, the anti-Rick. He’s the face on all the wanted posters, and you’re the guy on fucking… space vogue.”
A smile starts blooming on little Prime’s face.
“Huh. Space vogue.”
“Yeah, don’t let it get to your head. The issues with me on it sell better,” he sniffs distastefully.
“Who are my friends?” Morty asks. “Do you have pictures?”
V scoffs, scrolling over to a selfie of himself where he's fixing his own hair. Prime is in the background talking to three people around his age, though it's too blurry to make out their faces. “Some pink space gemstone princess and weirdo twins. And some other Mortys I don't care to learn the names of. I don't know them personally, I think they're lame as shit.”
“So are you, like, the main friend, or are they the big group and you're a side chick?”
V glares at him. Maybe he’s not being as nonchalant as he’d intended to be. “I'm the main friend.”
Morty gives him a shit-eating grin. “I dunno, I seem pretty high in demand…”
Annoyed, V calls off the hologram screen. “They’re not the ones chasing after you ten years in the past, huh? So that just makes me the best friend. Quantitatively.”
Morty stares at him with a furrowed brow for a second, before realization dawns on him and a huge grin bursts to life on his face. “You’re jealous.”
“Oh my fucking God, I’ve already had this conversation before.”
“You’re jealous of my future other friends!”
“Mortimer Chauncey Smith Prime-C-137, we need to address the elephant in the room.”
“You’re jealous of my future other friends, so you came after me in the past to prove your worth to future me!”
V stops spinning to bury his head in his hands on Morty’s gaming desk.
“Holy shit, thank God! I thought you were here to kill me!”
V snaps out of his pose, giving Little Prime a scandalized look. “Why in the world would I be here to kill you?”
“I don’t know, ‘cause I went all Rick Prime in the future? I thought you’d be here to, like, nip it in the bud.” He mimes trimming a plant, clicking his teeth and snipping his fingers together in front of his jugular. “Stop it before it happens. I dunno.”
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. Not talking to me like I’m Dr. Goddamn Wong.”
Morty lets out a sigh of relief. V gnaws at his lip.
“You’re taking the whole ‘going evil’ thing surprisingly well. I thought you’d be more, like… shaken up about it. Or want more context.”
Morty immediately sobers up, curling tighter into himself. Heart rate spike. Hitching of breath and no response. He’s going to cry again.
“What was it you said?” He asks, wringing his hands and scratching aimlessly at his wrists. “Before you left the curve?”
“I leave the curve a lot, Morty, you're gonna have to give me a refresher.”
Morty takes in a deep breath and straightens up, covering his right eye with his hand. “Now you're Evil Morty too,” he says, in an exaggerated, monotone voice. “Sooner or later, we all are. On this side of the curve.”
V hates himself for it, but he does remember saying that.
“Okay, Zuko.”
Morty takes his hand off his eye. “You've watched Avatar? Also, Azula does that, you larper.”
V shakes his head. “You made me watch it. Listen, I've said some shit. You've said some shit. Doesn't mean it's true. I also vaguely recall saying that,” he raises his hands to air quote himself, “the ‘worst turd is a pizza’, so don't go around acting like everything I say is the scripture.”
“I kind of…” Morty hugs himself tighter. “I’ve been having dreams about it. So it wasn’t… a super big surprise.”
V blinks, genuinely taken aback. That wasn’t something he was expecting. “Dreams. About your fugue state?”
“Yeah.”
“What dreams?”
Morty shrugs, making a face. “I don’t fucking know, weird ones? Some real—real symbolic shit, I dunno, I’m not smart enough to analyze them. But I’ve seen that jacket before. Now I just know I’ll be wearing it for sure.”
“Not for sure,” V says firmly.
Morty makes a small, questioning noise.
Getting up and stretching, V starts heading towards the door. “That's what I'm here for, isn't it? To nip this in the bud.”
“Without the killing, though, right?” Morty stammers, a little nervously.
“I’ll think about it,” V drawls, opening the door and jerking his head towards it. “Come on. Let’s make sure I don’t shoot grandpa in the head. Or the other way around.”
There's a second of hesitation where Morty doesn't move. The bed creaks, but he doesn’t visibly shift, so V is weighing the pros and cons of leaving him to sit with his emotions for a little while longer. He’s just about to run a probability scan when the boy sighs quietly, rolls himself off his mattress, and timidly shuffles towards the door. Deeply thankful, V pushes it open further, and Morty steps out.
“Hey, um…” Little Prime seems to force out. His voice is strained, but there's also an undercurrent of gratitude that V isn't expecting. “Thanks.”
V blinks. “For…?”
“For talking to me.”
A headache suddenly pulls at the front of V's temples. A couple of error messages about stress and emotional imbalance pop up on his HUD. Apparently Prime's bomb had messed with his nullifiers as well. He closes the tabs, trying to pull himself together. “Jesus Christ.”
Morty turns back, brow furrowed. “What? Did I say something?”
V shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. He shuts the door to Morty's room behind him, trying to massage the headache away.
“I'm just being reminded of how low the bar was,” he eventually manages to respond, heading down the stairs. Impulsively, he reaches his hand out to ruffle Little Prime’s hair, in the way that Prime's older self would do to V to piss him off. “You know what? I'm proud of you. If I were you, I would've gone evil a lot earlier.”
Morty blinks at him. “You did.”
“Yeah, asshole, that's the joke.”
Morty stares at him like he's insane, before huffing out a single laugh. “You're the unfunniest person in the whole multiverse.”
Got a laugh out of him, at least. “Yeah, well, you keep me around. Good enough for me.”
“Low bar."
“Name of the game, P.”
Rick and Evil Morty pointedly ignore each other’s gazes, twiddling their thumbs in the garage.
“They've been gone for a while. Think we should check on them?”
Rick side-eyes Evil Morty, crossing his arms. “Way ahead of you.” He snaps his fingers, and a mechanical arm with a screen attached descends from a loose ceiling tile. With a quick burst of static, a live video of Tall-Evil-Morty and Morty reveals itself, the two of them seemingly deep in an uncomfortable conversation. For some reason, the footage warps around Tall-Evil-Morty’s face, glitching as if the file had corrupted, even though the recording was live. No sound comes out of the screen.
“You keep cameras in your grandson's room? Fucking pervert.”
“It's default muted for a reason, you sanctimonious little asshole.” He suddenly gets a lot more aggravated. “Don’t—don’t fucking pretend like you don’t have cameras everywhere too, are you fucking—are you ragebaiting me?”
Evil Morty just smiles serenely.
Rick mutters something obscene under his breath before rolling up his sleeve and pressing a few moles on his skin. The static grows louder and softer, and eventually, Morty’s voice can be heard mentioning something about Avatar. Then Tall-Evil-Morty responds, and the sound cuts out.
“Huh. That's weird.”
Rick presses a few buttons on his arm, but the same thing happens again.
“He's probably just unrecordable,” Evil Morty drawls. “I've been thinking about doing something like that for a while. Anti-perception shield, a fun hypothetical. Getting tired of people watching every move I take.” He accents his sharp words with an even sharper glare, narrowing his eye at Rick.
“Stop throating the cock of defeat and face your enemies like a real man,” Rick snaps back, seemingly losing his temper at the screen and letting it retract. “There’s more honor to it.”
“The point is to not have any in the first place,” Evil Morty retorts. “Which is far more efficient, if you think about it. I need a lot less safeguards in my house, if you know what I mean.”
“Then you’re shit at what you do,” Rick mutters, slumping back in his chair and crossing his arms.
“I should’ve put you in that—that thing I stole from Rick Prime while I had the chance.”
“Yeah, well good thing I did the—ugh, fuck, this conversation is so hard to have when I don’t know what I’m talking about. The thing! Good thing I did the thing to it!”
“Fuck you, old man.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck—"
“Oh, fucking hell, you two are like children,” A third voice chimes in, kicking the garage door open. “Which is upsetting, because one of you is seventy-four.”
“Fuck you!”
Tall-Evil-Morty steps into the garage, followed closely by Morty. He clasps his hands together, fixing both Rick and Evil Morty with his intense stare.
“I’ve been rude,” he starts, walking towards them, “and I haven’t introduced myself as of yet. My name is Mortimer Smith, from Earth Dimension 7זト⊇V, timeline 1-B. You may call me V. I am here to rescue my best friend, who you may know as Mortimer Smith, Earth Dimension Prime, timeline 1-A, from himself. And you two will be assisting me.”
Rick crosses his arms. “And what if we don’t?”
V offers him a guileless smile. In a split second, with the crash of steel and the screech of metal-on-concrete, every security measure in the garage activates and takes aim. At least three hundred multicoloured boresights zero in dead center on Rick’s forehead.
“You’ll find that you don’t particularly have a choice.”
Rick lets out a small, defeated sigh.
