Chapter Text
He can picture it like a movie in his head as he dreams – Earth, beautiful from above, takes up his whole view. The whorl of clouds that wrap around the surface ripple here and there as tourist buses full of aliens slip in and out of the atmosphere. Further back, a space station slowly orbits, so that visiting aliens can observe the little planet from space, eating poorly approximated ‘Earth’ food at hideously marked-up prices. Earth gets smaller and smaller, the moon whooshes past his field of view, and then Rick can see the whole solar system, planets spinning around the sun.
Further back, way back, until stars become blurs, and he’s outside the Milky Way. The galaxies reveal themselves, neat ovals of billions, trillions of glittering stars around a fiercely glowing centre. In this black space between galaxies, far from civilisation, looms the ultramax-security prison. A monstrous hull of metal in sharply angled Galactic Federation design, designed from the start to be intimidating. Inside are the most deadly and dangerous shits in the galaxy – enemies of the intergalactic police. Among their numbers are murderers, sure. War criminals, mob bosses. Terrorists.
Deep in the center of the prison hangs Rick Sanchez, rogue scientist, guilty of every crime the Federation has a name for, and a few things that the law has yet to catch up on. His mugshot has graced the Federation’s most wanted list for decades. He’s locked in place by his wrists and ankles, bound to one cell among hundreds, stacked up floor-to-ceiling, head-to-toe, in the cavernous interior filled with the worst in the universe.
He's woken with a moan as a long thin needle punches into his back from the cell, just left of his spine, injecting him with the exact amount of electrolytes, vitamins and nutrients his body needs to sustain itself. Any lingering pain was quickly drowned out by self-hatred. How fucking gone was he, that even in his dreams he couldn’t escape this place?
The metal slid slickly out of him, leaving him panting, unable to itch that dull ache that radiated from the invisible entry wound. Energy in, energy out, the second law of thermodynamics, all that bullshit. It was the biggest insult of all, in Ricks mind. He was just a cell in a battery here, reduced from person, to meat. The body heat of the prisoners was even recycled to help power the prison. The Federation were humane after all. They didn’t kill their prisoners, not in body.
But Rick didn’t care about his body. They’re gristle and bone, chemistry – easily rebuilt, if you have the right equipment. But the mind… Rick has seen minds broken here. The hulking six-armed alien to his left gibbered to himself constantly when he wasn’t sleeping, decades of enforced stillness rotting his brain into a raw nerve, leaving him binary. Off or on. Silence or white noise chattering. Rick couldn’t decide if he was more annoyed by him – or terrified of becoming him.
He tried not to think about it too much.
This jail really was the kicker. With no outside stimulation, the only way for the mind to go was inwards. And Rick’s mind was the one fucked up place he never wanted to spend too much time in. He almost relished the moments they dragged him away for questioning. They really were his biggest fans, he would sneer at them, and they wanted to know everything. About his portal gun, his various inventions, the code to his safe. The whereabouts of his friends, the ones who escaped the wedding. (Squanchy had apparently killed dozens of the fuckers before commandeering one of their ships and vanishing. No trace.) Rick didn’t say shit, even as they kept asking.
Whatever, pain was a mental construct anyway. And nothing they did left any physical marks.
That itch was starting to bug him. He wriggled his back against the smooth surface of the cell, searching for a bit of friction, but everything was all so shiny and polished slippery. The Galactic Federation liked things to have a sheen to them. That’s probably why they thought they were the good guys. They were so goddamn clean.
The Federation would be crawling all over Earth right now, and no planet called Dirt was going to manage to stay the same once the integration started. All sorts of alien tourists loved Earth, Rick had seen it play out in too many dimensions to count. They had good intentions – the civilians, at least, thought humans were cute, if a bit simple. In a dimension where the average IQ of Earth was a few points lower, humans found themselves in the unfortunate position of not quite being able to meet the Federation’s minimum requirements for intelligent life. They were downgraded to first class sentient life, and became, if Rick remembered correctly, quite a fashionable pet. Earth became a sort of zoo.
Fuck the Federation.
The governing body behind the Federation was more sinister. They had a harsh record of police brutality, with little regard for species they saw as lesser, and humans always, always, counted as lesser. If Rick and his friends defending planets caught under the iron rule of the Federation was terrorism, then sure. They were terrorists. Birdperson preferred the term freedom fighter, the poor bastard. The poor fucking bastard.
But they cared about rules, and they'd promised to keep his family safe. That had to mean something, right?