Chapter Text
Sometime later, and sometime ago…
Apotheosis, by definition, is a disease.
Apo-, a prefix indicative of movement. To cast off, to move away. Theo-, indicative of godhood.
And -osis, a suffix indicative of an abnormal condition. Some sort of rot that pulls away at the body. An illness.
Needless to say, Mortimer Chauncey Smith of Earth Dimension 7זト⊇V is really feeling it now.
It took a lot for him to end up where he is now. A lot of drinking, some self-reflection, then a little more drinking as the result of the self-reflection. Deeply shameful, he raises his fist. To save what little was left of his ego, he’d love to say that the tremor wracking his joints was just a trick of the light—but he’d made sure his eyes would never deceive him again a long, long time ago. He’d built them himself, he’d know.
The sickness was cancerous, really. A slow death that snuck up on someone, that went undetected until it was far too late. A crawling rot that burrowed deep within one’s ribs and festered until all that was left was decay. It was—
The door swings open, snapping Morty out of his thoughts.
In the doorway stands a mirror image of his own self, sans an eyepatch and some melodrama. Plastered all over his face is an obnoxious grin, and Morty already deeply regrets coming. Instinctively, he reaches for his portal gun.
“You’re so fucking dramatic,” Prime snorts, slinging an arm around Morty before his fingers can wrap around the handle. Morty scowls, shoving him roughly off.
“I told you to lay off the goddamn mindreading,” Morty scowls. “It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“I wasn’t mindreading, I was just watching you sulk there,” Prime says, the shit-eating grin never leaving his face. “You look stupid.”
“Your face looks stupid,” Morty mutters back.
Prime draws a golden circle in the air, and a bucket of water snaps into existence and empties itself all over Morty. He twitches, glaring balefully at Prime, who grins back.
“Just get inside, asshole,” Prime laughs, gesturing indoors. “And happy birthday.”
Morty reaches inside his jacket and wraps his fingers around a small, nondescript box. There's a small, golden, holographic bow projected on top. He flings it at Prime, and it bounces off his forehead and onto the floor.
“Happy birthday,” he mutters back.
The present
When Morty turns the corner in the grimy corridors of his school, what he sees knocks the breath out of his chest. Quite literally, too, since not even two hours ago he’d been sent flying across the room after an overly-heroic alien had caught him in the ribs with a trebuchet.
He shakes away the recent memory and lets the static fade from his ears. Rubs his eyes a few times, just to check that he’s not dreaming or still in the hole or stuck in a simulation or something like that. When the sight doesn’t dissipate or glitch into one of Rick’s holograms, Morty takes a cautious step forward.
Jessica, smiling serenely, is slipping a small white letter into a vent in his locker. Morty is about to duck behind the turn in the corridor, but before he can, she turns around, ginger hair flowing behind her, and looks at him with a smile.
And then she winks.
What the fuck.
“Rick,” Morty mutters under his breath. “This isn’t funny.” He drags a nail down the length of his arm, staring reverently at the white line it leaves behind. It doesn’t glitch, or flicker hologram-blue. It hurts a little bit.
When he looks back up, Jessica is gone.
Whatever, he can entertain this, simulation or not. He snaps into movement. In less than a second, he’s at his locker, fumbling with the combination lock and ripping it open. On the rusty metal, sitting atop a stack of untouched textbooks and worksheets, sits the creamy white paper of the letter. It’s sealed with red wax, stamped with a pretty little heart.
Morty feels like he’s going into anaphylactic shock.
With violently trembling hands, he peels the letter open. Inside is a sheet of cardstock paper, and Morty feels like his heart is trying to carve its way out of his chest with an ice pick. Eventually, he stills his hands enough to get a grip on the paper and slip it out of the envelope.
He looks at it.
His blood turns to ice.
And then he drops it.
It flutters to the floor innocuously, and Morty, through the static in his vision, can vaguely see that there’s writing on the back that he can’t quite make out. The lighting in the hallway flashes a toxic green for a second, and a gravelly voice joins the chorus of static ringing in his ears.
What the fuck.
“M—Morty!” His grandfather calls. “Morty-Morty-Morty, we gotta—we gotta move, Morty! We’ve got shit to do, Morty!”
With the same amount of effort it takes to pry Summer off a line of space crack, he turns to face Rick. To Morty's grave surprise, he's not alone.
There's a boy who looks just like him, given an eyepatch and a scowl, standing right next to him.
In Morty's shocked stupor, the only thing he can really note is that Evil Morty is wearing what looks like sci-fi prison scrubs, and also looks as though he's halfway through healing a nasty slash on his throat. Rick is probably still talking. Morty and Evil Morty make eye contact.
With an unaffected look in his eyes, Evil Morty raises an eyebrow, then seems to catch sight of the paper on the floor. Rick is still rambling in the background. It feels like slow motion as Evil Morty crouches down to pick up the sheet of paper, pursing his lips.
“You got a love letter? ‘Meet me behind the school at 3’.” He muses, reading off the back. “Cute.” He flips it over, checking the front.
Almost imperceptibly, his eye widens.
Rick is still rambling. Evil Morty elbows him in the gut. “Rick!” He hisses.
“What?” Rick snaps back.
Evil Morty tilts the paper towards him.
Rick, for once in his life, is stunned to silence.
Morty stares down at his own shaking hands.
On the front of the paper is a picture of an older him, standing in front of a burning field. In white gel pen, the initials M.S. are scrawled over top, with an apostrophe indicating ‘prime’ accented behind his name. The insignia of the citadel—post election, since there's an M on top that pierces the R—is stamped in red on the bottom corner of the image.
He's smiling faintly in the picture.
And he's wearing an indigo jacket that looks just like his real grandfather’s.
“Oh, shit,” Rick breathes.
Morty wanted to wait until three to meet Jessica behind the school, just like the note had instructed. He kept staring at the paper, flipping it over, reading the note, then flipping it over again, unable to tear his eyes off the picture. His line of thought was that maybe if he looked at it enough, it’d change, and reveal itself to be something less sinister. It never did.
Rick had wanted to just portal in and grab her. “No point in wasting time,” he’d said. “We’ve got infinitely better shit to do.”
Evil Morty had different ideas.
He’d seemed to have grown a little more of a flair for dramatics while in prison. And a knack for being far more evasive as well, since neither Rick nor Morty could stop him from kicking down the door to the math classroom.
It falls to the ground with a loud slam, and suddenly the classroom sounds like a generic horror movie. Everyone, barring Jessica, whose face becomes awash with disappointment, starts screaming their lungs out.
Evil Morty aims a gun—a normal, non-sci-fi pistol because he’d ‘wanted to be authentic’—at Mr. Goldenfold, chuckling under his breath like a maniac.
“I've always wanted to do this,” he says with a wolfish grin.
“Crazy thing to admit,” Morty mutters, stepping into the room. “Hey, can you, uh, make sure everyone sees the eyepatch? ‘Cause—cause this is not a good look for me.”
Evil Morty glares at him, before taking off the eyepatch and throwing it to the ground. “My name is Morty Smith—”
“Man, fuck you—”
“And unless Jessica comes with us right now, I'm blowing a hole clean through his skull!”
Mr. Goldenfold bursts into tears, putting his hands in the air and dropping the stick of chalk he's holding. “Please! Just go with Morty, Jessica!”
Rick stands in the back, taking a sip leisurely from his flask.
“Dude, this is completely unnecessary,” Morty protests. “We literally could've just waited. Or we could've just, you know, asked nicel—FUCK!”
Evil Morty fires a warning shot at Morty's feet. The entire class screams again, and Goldenfold falls to his knees, cradling his head in his arms.
“Please, sweet mother of Jesus, please…”
“Okay, okay!” Jessica snaps, crossing her arms. She stands up, stalking over to the two Mortys. “I had a time scheduled and everything, you’re throwing me off! Why are you so dramatic?”
“I wanted to come in peace!” Morty cried, pointing angrily at Evil Morty. “He's the one with a school shooter fantasy!”
“I had a lot of time to think about my past in prison,” Evil Morty sneers. “Where's Brad? I haven't forgotten Brad.”
Morty wrenches the gun out of Evil Morty's grip, throwing it across the room. “Let's just go, you're embarrassing me. Rick, can you fix that door?”
Not moving a step, Rick unholsters a small remote and fixes the door. Morty opens it, gesturing for Jessica and Evil Morty to step outside.
The three of them make their way out, and Evil Morty slams it so hard that paint flakes chip off the doorways. After a split second, he turns tail, wrenches it open, steps inside, and picks up the chalk that Goldenfold had dropped.
He erases a line on the board and rewrites it.
“Bad form,” he clarifies. To add insult to injury, he gives Goldenfold a harsh kick, who's still shaking on the ground. A sob wrenches itself out of the man's throat.
Morty storms in and grabs him by the wrist, dragging him out again.
“You fucking asshole, I'm going to get expelled!” Morty snarls.
Evil Morty acts like he didn't even hear him. A satisfied smile stretches across his face. “Mmm.”
“Do you get off on pissing me off?”
“Keep talking. I might.”
Morty elbows him in the gut, then hisses in pain when his elbow feels like it hits metal. “Fucking gross, dude!”
Jessica drags a hand down her face. “Get a room, you two.”
“And what the fuck is going on with you?” Evil Morty cries, whipping around to face her. “What was that all about?”
“What, going along with the school shooter who threatened to blow my math teacher’s brains out?"
“No, fuck you. I mean walking into time prison and acting like that shit’s normal!”
Jessica crosses her arms, giving him a once-over. “Is that what I get for bailing you out? What happened to being polite? ‘Thank you, Jessica’. ‘I don’t have to serve another thousand years in time jail, Jessica’. ‘I’m sorry for leaving you in Narnia to become enlightened to the horrors of the infinite and ascend beyond the limits of the fourth dimension, Jessica’.”
“That last one wasn’t me.”
“Sorry,” Morty mutters, ashamed.
Jessica waves him off. “You want to serve out the rest of your sentence? Because I can send you back, you know. I guarantee you, that'll have no effect on what I'm trying to get done here.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Morty whispers, staring up at Rick. Rick just shrugs and takes a sip from his flask.
“What are you trying to get done here?” Evil Morty snaps. “What is going on? Why is he,” he points at Morty, “wearing some knock-off Rick Prime outfit?”
Jessica holds up a finger. “First of all, everyone agrees Morty Prime's outfit is way cooler. Rick looked really unflattering in that zip-up. Second of all…”
She turns around to face someone behind Morty, crossing her arms even tighter.
“You owe me,” Jessica suddenly growls, “so many goddamn favors.”
“What?”
A golden portal opens behind the two of them, and a deeply upset looking man who looks like Evil Morty, except taller and with a white lab coat, walks in. He pulls what looks like a demonic octopus with legs off his torso, tossing it to the ground with a wet splat.
“Sorry,” the man mutters under his breath. “I… appreciate it.”
Jessica turns to Evil Morty, jutting a thumb at the man. “You could learn some things from him.”
Evil Morty furrows his brow, squinting at the man like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
Jessica hums, crossing her arms. “I’m stepping out from here, okay? No messing around.” She turns to point an accusing finger at Tall-Evil-Morty. “And no trying to change anything. I’ve already given you a lot of leeway, fuck up again and I won’t be able to bail you out. Got it?"
Tall-Evil-Morty salutes. “Yes, ma’am.”
Evil Morty keeps staring at him, an undercurrent of horror beginning to seep into his expression.
Jessica gestures at the man. “He’ll explain everything. I’m going back to class. Good luck.”
“Have fun,” Tall-Evil-Morty says with an awkward wave. Jessica waves back, before walking back towards the classroom. Tall-Evil-Morty clears his throat, scratching the back of his neck.
“So,” he says.
Rick, Morty, and Evil Morty blink at him.
Tall-Evil-Morty sighs heavily, before dragging his hands down his face.
“Long island iced tea,” Rick comments.
Tall-Evil-Morty groans into his hands.
