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In all the different dimensions, there were countless Mortys. Most Mortys had a Rick. Some had a Beth, and usually a Jerry. Some had neither, and were raised by a Rick with slightly darker circles under his eyes or slightly shorter hair.
Some Mortys had no Rick. Some didn’t even know Ricks existed.
This Morty thought that maybe those other Mortys were better off not knowing.
This Morty met his Rick when he was six months old. That’s what he was told, of course. Not even the grandson of a genius could remember something like that.
But Morty had grown up with his grandfather, and his Rick had been a semi-permanent fixture his whole life. Sure, he’d disappear for months at a time, or sometimes just for a night, but he’d always come back. His Beth only felt the slightest twinge in her chest when Rick didn’t show up for breakfast of a morning.
Morty thought he and his Rick were pretty special. He and his Rick were… friends.
Rick was bringing Morty down to the garage every weekend ever since he could stand on his own two feet, and by the age of five the garage and all of its hidden compartments were practically tattooed to the backs of his eyelids. By six, Morty was helping Rick with small experiments; by eight he was having laser gun practise sessions on abandoned planets.
By the time he was ten, Morty was only attending three days of school a semester and was driving Rick’s ship on every second or third mission.
“M-M-M-Morty! We gotta EURRRP-go!”
And Morty would go. If Rick moved, Morty moved. If Rick stopped, Morty stopped.
Morty and his Rick had a kind of understanding that Morty didn’t think all Mortys got to have with their Ricks. Hanging out together for as long as you can remember might do that.
Like many Ricks, his Rick was an alcoholic; his Rick still operated as if familial affection was his kryptonite half the time; his Rick still shot first and asked questions later.
But his Rick knew Morty wasn’t stupid – had made it so his Morty wasn’t stupid. And any insults thrown his way only got there because Morty wasn’t living up to all his Rick knew he could be.
Morty was eventually a permanent tool in Rick’s garage. He’d pass screwdrivers and hand over micro-scalpels; he fed the creatures in Rick’s subterranean lab and sometimes knew where different inventions were squirrelled away even better than Rick did. Sometimes, Rick would let him carry out experiments himself. Occasionally, he’d even let him do so unsupervised.
The only thing that was off-limits to Morty was Rick’s portal gun. Or, more specifically, making his own.
“Wouldn’t it be more useful if we both had one?” Morty asked once (the first time of many).
“One’s –URRP!— enough, kiddo,” Rick said dismissively, opening the door of his ship.
“But what about that time when we were running from those slug-things? If I’d had my own portal gun I coulda gotten out on my own! You wouldn’t have had to come after me!”
“M-M-Morty! Dude, can you imagine the earful I’d get from your mother? It’d be like giving you a car.”
He turned away from Morty as he said this, settling himself in the drivers’ seat. But as Morty climbed in after him, Rick wouldn’t meet his eyes, and Morty felt an uneasiness settle in his stomach.
It faded quickly, only resurfacing when Morty brought it up himself, so after a while he stopped asking. Maybe Rick was just waiting until he was older. That was it. Rick knew best.
His Rick had shaped Morty into who he was. He’d shown him his full potential. His Rick had shown Morty how to be a Morty – how to be a Rick. Morty was the smartest, the quickest, the Rickest Morty that a Morty could be. There couldn’t be a better Rick and Morty than Morty and his Rick.
So you can’t even imagine the shock he felt when he found out his Rick wasn’t really his at all.
Morty C-240 was almost fourteen when he found out that his Rick was really Rick C-137. C-137 didn’t even deign to tell Morty himself. Morty only found out once five Ricks with laser rifles and military boots were knocking down his front door, demanding to know the current whereabouts of the Rick who’d been using Morty’s dimension as a hideout for the last thirteen and a half years.
“What are you talking about?” Morty had asked, noticing a couple of the Ricks’ raise their eyebrows at him. He’d work out later, after meeting many, many Mortys, that he was one of the few Mortys that didn’t stutter like a steam engine.
“Rick C-137,” replied a Rick. “He’s been fu— off the radar for years. Never comes to council meetings. Some shit in F-23 went sideways and we wanted to talk to him about it before the Intergalactic Federation showed up, but he’s put a temp lock on his portal gun.”
“Looks like he’s not up for—URGH!—chatting,” burped another Rick.
“Y-Y-You don’t think he’ll come back?” said a particularly panicky Morty, finger jumping restlessly across the trigger of his laser rifle.
“No chance,” said that Morty’s Rick. “He’ll have made himself cosy in some other dimension by now. He’s not even emitting a signal – he must have found another Morty already.”
“At least that means the Intergalactic Federation can’t find him either, for now…”
“But still he’d have to—”
The Ricks all exchanged a grim glance.
Morty could feel his heart pounding. “Another Morty?” he asked quietly, his skin crawling when three uniformed Mortys all turned identical, pitying gazes at him.
“Yeah, dumbass, one of th-th-these little f-ERR-uckers,” said a Rick with a grisly hole in his left ear, gesturing at the Morty beside him.
Morty wanted to chuck. He wanted to bend over, right there and then, and puke all of his guts onto the living room floor. Every breakfast, every experiment, every kind fucking word spewed out on the carpet in as many colourful phrases as he could manage. But he didn’t.
Instead he asked, flatly: “What happened to the Rick from this dimension.”
“Ate it years ago, before you were buh-born,” a Rick at the back croaked out, an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth.
“Got r-r-r-r-r-ripped apart by some mutants in G-2588, r-r-right?” piped up a Morty (a particularly stupid Morty, obviously starved for attention and looking for any tiny chance to prove he wasn’t a raging retard), turning a fawning gaze towards his own Rick.
Another Morty blinked in confusion. “You m-m-mean he never t-told you?”
Morty felt numb. But a new kind of pain set in when he heard a voice behind him.
“What the fuck did you just say happened to my father?”
The five Ricks and their quivering, senseless Mortys cleared out pretty quick once the wrath of Morty’s Beth was on them. She screamed and cried and threw things about the house while Jerry puttered along ineffectually in her wake. Summer quietly excused herself, eyes red-rimmed and lips trembling.
It was three days later that all of the rage seemed to flood out of Morty’s Beth all at once, and suddenly she wasn’t a heart surgeon for horses anymore, she was Rick 2.0 – all of the alcoholism, none of the will to live, all of the stress-induced hair loss.
She wasn’t Morty’s Beth anymore – she couldn’t be. She stayed in the house all day while Jerry floundered around trying to care for her. Morty could see that he was secretly happy to be living off carer’s benefits instead of working a real job. Summer started to spend all of her time at friends’ houses. Morty didn’t see her often.
Morty didn’t have any friends to hide with. Rick had been his friend.
Maybe Morty could go after Rick. Maybe he could track him down and make him come back. Surely if he just talked to him… But then Morty remembered. The portal gun. The only invention that his Rick had never taught him how to make. He had ensured that Morty could never follow him if he left. It was suddenly clear: he’d known all along that he would leave.
His Rick had used him. Kept him around as some sort of cloaking device. Morty was smart enough to figure that out from what the Ricks were saying. He was smart enough to know that everything Rick had taught him was just meant to make him a better tool. If he could whip up a smoke bomb, he could be a distraction when Rick was in too deep. If he could drive the ship, he could help Rick run faster. If he could fire a gun, he could make it so there was one less witness – every single time.
Morty was smart enough to realise that he’d never been Rick’s grandson. Or his friend.
He was smart enough to finally understand that Ricks didn’t care about Mortys.
And he was smart enough to work out how to build a portal gun all by himself. His Rick had never counted on that.
Once he had a portal gun (tagged back to Rick C-240, just to let the fucker know that someone was thinking about him), he got to see many different Ricks. And many different Mortys.
He saw some Ricks who abused their Mortys. He saw some that never found their Mortys at all. But the ones that infuriated him the most were the ones who stayed at their Mortys’ sides. He watched adventures in space and hangouts on the couch and shared experiments – all of them starring him and Rick but none of them starring him and his Rick.
He hated the happy ones.
That’s when he had his great idea. He’d build a new Rick. A Rick that could take all the blame.
His new Rick was a magnificent beast. It looked like Rick, it sounded like Rick, and it even acted like Rick. But it was more than Rick. It was as ugly and scarred on the outside as every Rick really was on the inside, with cuts on its face and purple bags dragging beneath its eyes.
It was more Rick than any Rick could be. And it would help Morty destroy all of the sickeningly happy Ricks that he could find. And that wave of destruction would bring his Rick all the closer. The fact that he remembered the tag-code for his Rick’s portal gun helped. The Council of Ricks would find his Rick for him.
He was halfway through his wave of destruction when they finally did. Rick C-137 had returned to his original Morty, of all the Mortys to choose from, and Morty felt the sting of his own idiocy. He should have seen that coming.
And Morty C-137 was a hell of a pick. He had to be one of the dumbest Mortys he’d ever seen. He was like a brain-damaged dog with an abusive owner. Every time he dropped the ball, every time Rick lambasted him for being such an idiot, he wagged his tail and placed the ball right back down at Rick’s feet.
Morty hated Morty C-137.
He wanted nothing more than to obliterate the two of them. But he resigned himself to wait. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out how to amplify a Morty’s camouflage abilities, and he had plenty of Mortys stockpiled now. Once he had the Rick he really wanted he could spend some time with him in peace. No Council of Ricks would come barging in with bad news again.
And when Rick C-137 was caught in the flytrap he’d show him. Make him feel every ounce of guilt that he could squeeze out of him, replay every blurry, whiskey-edged memory of what he’d done back to him and watch him squirm.
And he did. He had Rick C-137 strapped in that chair, tears welling up in his eyes, but still, Rick just didn’t seem to get it. He still thought he was there by chance. That Morty was just some random Rick with a chip on his shoulder. He needed to make him see the big picture, see the Morty behind the mask.
He hadn’t counted on Morty C-137’s idiocy being so contagious.
With over a hundred Mortys tearing his new Rick to pieces (he felt a twinge at having caused C-240 to suffer the same indignity all over again, even if he wasn’t really there to experience it), Morty felt his first twinge of panic. The first sliver of doubt to come knocking at his ribcage since Rick C-137 had disappeared.
No, he couldn’t stop now.
With his eyepatch sparking in the dust and his wires pushed safely back behind his eye socket (maybe his Rick had taught him a little too well), Morty was safely hidden, cloaked by all of the Mortys around him. He muffled a giggle. Rick C-137 thought he was the Rickest Rick of them all. Maybe that Rickness was contagious. Maybe he’d go grey and lose all of his hair and develop a drinking habit just like Rick. Just like Beth C-240.
Maybe the next time he met Rick C-137, they’d be indistinguishable.
Made in God’s image. Huh.
---
“H-hey, Rick?”
Rick didn’t even look at him, turning the ship in a sharp swerve to avoid some kind of alien-goose monstrosity flying over the planet they were circling. “What?”
“W-w-what’s happening to all the Mortys from that crazy guy’s place?”
Rick huffed in frustration. “You got ears, M-Morty? The Council of Ricks said they’d—ERRP—be going back to their home dimensions.”
“But what about the Morty that belonged to… the c-crazy guy? With the eyepatch? They wouldn’t like, i-i-imprison him or anything, right?”
“Fucked if I know,” Rick said with a shrug, sucking in a line of drool. “Kid was probably too dumb to know anything about the whole thing, y’know? Total victim-t—ERRP—type.”
Morty looked down at his hands. “I dunno, he seemed kinda different. He didn’t even stutter or anything…”
The ship swerved again, mashing Morty’s face into the window, and he looked up. But there was nothing in the rear-view mirror to suggest Rick was trying to miss anything.
He glanced at Rick, whose eyes were suddenly glazed, staring out into the distance. A few bugs hit the windscreen of the ship, their yellow blood oozing down the glass. “Hey, R-R-Rick. You okay?”
Rick blinked. “S-fine, Morty. I-I-I-I’m fine. Y-You remember what I said about cocky Mortys? Quit overthinking things. It just makes real big pro-ERRP-blems for everybody.” He flicked a couple of switches on the dash. “Let’s land, I’m hankering for some Jalapesian Sandwiches.”
“S-Sandwiches?” Morty echoed, unimpressed. “We came all the way out here for sandwiches?”
“Dude, they have sand in them! Jalapesian fucking sand, M-M-Morty. It’s like sugar had sex with tabasco sauce – it’s amazi—BUERRP!!”
Morty huffed a little and waited for the ship’s feet to hit the ground, wondering if there was a Morty out there that could ever actually understand what was going on inside a Rick’s head. He shook his head. Maybe the Mortiest Morty just couldn’t get the Rickest Rick. Maybe he didn’t need to.
Maybe that would just cause big problems for everybody.