Chapter Text
Rick comes back to consciousness on a floor slick with blood and coolant.
For one disoriented second he thinks that the ceiling above him belongs to the wrong garage. Then the pain arrives, dragging the rest of it in behind it: Slow Mobius disappearing into a bright green light, and the fight that had ensued with Prime after.
Also his own voice, yelling something. He isn't thinking about that part.
Rick rolls onto one elbow with a groan. His ribs shift under his coat, warnings crowding the edge of his vision as his damaged cybernetic implants try and fail to reconnect to one another. He waves them all off without reading past the first line, because thanks, yeah, he's aware. Now sitting upright, he weakly glances up ahead at the view before him.
Across the chamber, Rick Prime is restrained in a transparent field.
Evil Morty built the whole setup out of the wreckage of Prime's own equipment, which Rick might have found funny under literally any other circumstances. A reinforced chair, bolted through the floor into whatever the floor is sitting on. A neural interface running into the base of Prime's skull on a segmented arm. Six independent restraints across his arms and legs, and underneath the platform a dimensional lock, cycling through frequencies fast enough that nothing wearing implants is going to adapt to it in time.
Prime is still badly injured from the fight. Blood covers most of his shirt, one side of his face is badly swollen, and several wounds that should've closed remain open, which means his regeneration has been disabled. Probably at the hands of the fourteen year old standing four feet away from him with a console open.
But Prime doesn't look even slightly concerned about any of it.
Evil Morty stands at that console, one hand moving idly through various streams of holographic data while information pours into his eyepatch. Regular Morty hovers behind him, bruised and pale, clutching his side where Prime had thrown him.
Rick stands up, his own body having regenerated just enough to allow it and not one bit more.
"Try not to fall down again," Evil Morty says, without looking over. "Your spine is still reconnecting."
"How about you try not to talk like anybody asked?" Rick grumbles back. Evil Morty looks up at him then, a deadpan expression on his face.
"I'm frying his backups," he says, glancing back down to his console. "You're welcome."
Rick looks at the display.
On the console screen and on the holographic one mounted behind Prime, hundreds of markers are going dark across a map of the Central Finite Curve. Out in the branch dimensions, clone bodies die in their tanks, Phoenix Protocols become compromised, and remote receivers burn out. One network after another goes black as Evil Morty walks backward down every connection leading away from Prime's implant architecture and shuts each door behind him.
It's the most beautiful thing Rick has ever seen and he hates every second of it, because it's not him that's doing this but Evil Morty of all people.
Prime watches the destruction with somewhat of a mild interest.
"Four more resurrection networks under the decoy layer," Evil Morty announces, dragging a branch open with two fingers. "Three of them are isolated from the main grid, which is cute. Really. It's like finding a wall safe behind a wall safe."
Prime raises his eyebrows. "Only three?"
Regular Morty just stares at him. He's been staring for a while now, and Rick can see him trying to make it fit in his head: that the thing strapped into that chair is technically his grandfather, that his mom exists because of this man, that his entire life is downstream of a decision this guy made before Morty was ever born.
"Geez," he says finally, "how many backups does one person need?"
"Depends on how annoying his enemies are."
Rick can only observe the interaction with a muted expression. He has imagined finding Prime more times than he can remember. In some of them he'd had something prepared to say. In others he hadn't said anything at all, which he's always privately considered the more dignified option. Most versions ended with Prime dead before anybody else entered the room.
None of them included Evil Morty methodically dismantling him while Rick just stood there dumbly from being beaten unconscious.
Prime tests one of the restraints. Electricity moves through his arm, shocking his muscles before he can apply any force to it.
He has to admit, the chair is good.
It certainly isn't Citadel work. Citadel work runs redundancy on everything, which is precisely why Citadel work always has a weak point somewhere. This one doesn't. Evil Morty removed the systemic redundancies entirely, kept the dimensional anchor isolated from the surrounding grid, and engineered the containment restraints to prevent cascading structural failure. He can see the modifications clearly, every one of them based on knowledge collected from hundreds, if not thousands of scanned Ricks.
But that's the problem. Prime's grin widens.
The knowledge came from scanned Ricks.
He runs the timing idly while the kid works. Eleven layers above the decoy lattice, moving fast, careful in the places where careful is expensive and reckless in the places where it isn't. Four minutes. Maybe five, if the loop in the third layer surfaces on schedule and slows him down.
Not that it will slow him down. It will just make him faster.
That's rather the point of it.
Rick studies the code flowing out of Prime's implant cluster and into Evil Morty's console. Most of it looks like what he expected. Backup protocols, remote signals, biometric encryption, and underneath all of it the deeper architecture connected to the Omega Device.
But something is off. Prime isn't watching the networks die anymore. Instead, his face has donned a sardonic smile as he watches Evil Morty himself.
Rick limps towards Evil Morty and Morty. "He--"
"I see it." Evil Morty doesn't even bother to look up.
"You don't know what I'm talking about."
"No, I see it. The recursive authentication loop in the fourth network. It tried to classify my scan as part of the source system." He isolates the loop and deletes it without skipping a beat. "It was sloppy and I'm insulted."
Rick, frustrated now, points sharply to an area on the console display. "That wasn't the attack."
Evil Morty's visible eye narrows. "No. That was the part he wanted me to notice."
Hearing this, Prime tilts his head to the left, as far as the restraint on his head lets him. "Look at that," he coos, mockingly. "You two are bonding!"
Rick walks over and punches him in the face.
The chair ends up absorbing most of the force, but Prime's head still snaps violently sideways. Blood spurts from his mouth, coating the grey metallic wall behind him.
Evil Morty looks up at Rick, mildly annoyed, and sighs. "Not yet, C-137. I need his brain intact."
Prime works out a loose tooth with his tongue and spits it onto the floor, blood now streaming out of every orifice on his face.
"Yeah. Chill out, wife guy."
Rick catches the front of his shirt and hauls him forward against the restraints until the chair groans against the force.
"You killed her."
"I killed a lot of people."
Rick can feel the bloodlust rising up in his chest again, his vision beginning to redden at the edges. He tightens his grip. "You killed her."
"You're repeating yourself."
"You erased her."
"Yeah." The restraints don't give Prime room to shrug. He tries anyway.
Rick hits him again. The restraint field flashes as Prime's shoulder strikes the back of the chair, and for the first time actual pain breaks visibly across his face, though it disappears almost immediately.
This moment has felt surreal to Rick to begin with, with Prime restrained and bloodied beneath his hands, but his utterly guiltless admission of erasing their wife across the multiverse shatters whatever restraint Rick has left.
He hits him again. And again. Somewhere behind him Morty is saying his name and it doesn't matter, none of it matters, and he keeps going until the chair's anchors start to whine in the floor.
Prime lets his head hang for a moment and runs the numbers through the ringing.
Orbital fracture, probably. Two teeth. The shoulder is worse than it was thirty seconds ago and the regeneration still isn't answering, which means the kid's isolation of the power feed is holding even under structural stress. Genuinely good work.
C-137 is breathing hard. Knuckles open across all four fingers, weight forward, still swinging blindly with rage all over his face, still looking for something he is never going to find in wrecking a man's jaw.
Nine layers. The "Evil" version of his grandson has stopped being careful, because the kid now believes he's ahead of the architecture, which is exactly what the loop was built to make him believe.
Three minutes. Maybe less.
Prime needs him to keep digging for all of it, which means Prime needs to be interesting for all of it.
Fortunately, that has never been difficult.
The console chimes twice. "Purge is done," Evil Morty announces. "I'm into the weapon schematics."
Prime's attention shifts off Rick and onto the kid. It's subtle, barely anything at all, but Rick has spent forty years learning to read this man off of secondhand accounts and the shapes of rooms he'd already left, so he catches it.
Evil Morty, who has clearly been waiting for exactly that, catches it too.
"This design improvement sure is something," he says. "No single-use limitation. Modular target selection. Remote activation. And an automated calibration process, which is honestly the only part I wanted."
"Careful, kid. Grown-up schematics."
"Uh-huh."
Rick watches the extraction bar climb and feels vaguely sick about it. He doesn't want the plans. He has never wanted the plans. He doesn't want Evil Morty to have them either, but that isn't a fight he's in any position to pick, seeing as the kid has the room, the chair, and Prime's skull wired into his console, and Rick has broken ribs and an opinion.
The plans aren't really the problem, though. The clock is. Six minutes of extraction is six more minutes Rick has to stand here with his hands empty while the guy breathes, and if it were up to him the kid would rip the drive out and melt it and they'd get on with the part Rick actually came here for.
It isn't up to him though.
"How long."
"Six minutes."
"Make it four."
"Make it six," Evil Morty says flatly, "and stop hitting the drive while I'm reading it."
Prime laughs, and then coughs, and then keeps coughing for considerably longer than he clearly wants to. When he finishes there's more blood on his chin than before. He lets his head fall back against the frame.
"You wanna know the funny part?"
"No."
"You will."
"Rick." Evil Morty's voice has changed. "Don't let him talk."
"Oh, now you want him quiet."
"Now I want him quiet."
But Prime is already talking, in the same lazy conversational drawl he's been using since he opened his eyes, except now it's going somewhere.
"You built all this out of what you learned taking Ricks apart," he says to the kid. "Which is correct, by the way. That's the right approach. I'd have done exactly the same thing, and I want you to hear me say that, because I don't say it a lot and you've earned it." His jaw shifts with a small wet click. "You learned a lot from Ricks."
Evil Morty's hand stops over the console. He gets there about a second too late.
"That's the problem," Prime says pleasantly. "You learned it from Ricks."
Evil Morty is fast. Rick will think about that later, in the dark, and he'll keep landing on the same conclusion, which is that nobody alive could have been faster. He severs the primary connection before Prime finishes the sentence. The segmented arm detaches from the base of Prime's skull and retracts smoothly into the ceiling.
The data keeps moving anyway.
Morty takes a step backward. "Uh. Is that supposed to happen?"
"No."
Evil Morty starts closing systems faster than the code can open new ones, cutting the eyepatch out of the chamber, killing its portal interface, isolating it one layer at a time. When that doesn't work he tears the outer casing off of his own face and hurls it across the room, and the display stays lit in his hand and keeps scrolling anyway.
Prime watches him do all of it with open approval. "Hey. Give yourself some credit. You got farther than most."
"You put a counter-intrusion layer in the backup architecture." It comes out considerably sharper than Evil Morty means it to.
"I put several."
"The networks were real."
"Mostly."
"You let me destroy them."
"I was busy. And listen, because this is gonna bother you later and I want it to." Prime's voice goes pleasant again. "I didn't build that for you. You're not important enough for me to have predicted. I built it forty years ago for whoever eventually showed up who was good enough to get inside, and it only makes one assumption, which is that anybody smart enough to get in is gonna think getting in and taking over are the same thing."
Evil Morty doesn't answer for a second. Then, quietly: "You knew how I'd think."
"No," Prime corrects him. "I know how I'd think."
Rick isn't listening.
He's looking at the restraint on Prime's right wrist, where a thin line of white light has appeared along the joint.
Prime's hand hasn't moved.
Rick draws.
The cuff opens with a sound smaller than a cooling pipe, and Prime's hand comes out of it and catches Rick's wrist and forces the shot into the ceiling before the barrel has even cleared his coat. The beam goes through a support beam and drops a section of the ceiling over the chair in a shower of molten slag.
Evil Morty fires from behind the console. Prime rips the detached neural arm off the back of the chair, one-handed, out of a mount rated for eleven tons, and swings it into the path of the shot. The beam goes through the arm, into the restraint housing, and blows half of it apart. The whole platform twists sideways off its anchors.
Rick drives his shoulder into Prime's chest before he can stand. The chair goes over backward and they hit the floor together, Rick on top, and Prime catches his fist an inch from his face and twists. Rick rolls with it, drives an elbow into the wound in his ribs, and reaches for the weapon on his belt. Prime traps his arm under the broken frame.
Evil Morty adjusts his aim and fires again. Prime drags Rick bodily across into the line of fire, and Rick bends backward hard enough that his spine makes a noise, feels the beam blister his chest through his shirt, draws the knife out of his sleeve and buries it in Prime's side to the handle.
Prime grunts. Rick leaves the blade where it is and slams the heel of his hand up under his jaw.
The last restraint releases around Prime's ankle.
Every light in the chamber goes out at once. When they come back they're red, and the low hum that has been running under the floor for eleven minutes stops.
Rick knows exactly what that means about half a second before it happens, because he built a room like this once. Not this room, but one with the same bones, in the same spirit, at roughly the same age, and it had the same instinct, and the instinct is that the building takes your side.
A circular section of the wall behind Evil Morty rotates inward. It isn't a portal, but architecture, folding open onto a containment shaft that drops further down than the light goes. Evil Morty fires at Prime and the shot vanishes into a dimensional baffle before it crosses half the room. He shifts his stance and the floor splits open under him. He manages to clear the first opening, and then the wall comes around behind him and hits him anyway.
Rick gets up and goes for Prime.
Prime meets him halfway, catches the front of his coat with a hand that still has a knife somewhere above the wrist, and throws him into the console.
"Rick!"
Evil Morty has one hand hooked over the lip of the shaft. His other hand has closed around Morty's wrist, because the floor is going out from under both of them now, and the extraction module is jammed into his coat with the storage hard-sealed and sixty-one percent of the only remaining copy of the Omega Device schematics inside it.
Rick pushes himself off the console and looks at him.
Then he looks at Prime. Upright, barely. Knife still buried under his ribs, regeneration failing, one shoulder hanging lower than the other, blood tapping steadily off his fingers onto the floor.
And free.
It wasn't really a question, and Evil Morty doesn't wait around for it to become one. He's already got the answer. He always does, and it's the single most irritating thing about him. Rick watches him do the math, arrive at the answer, and accept it without any bitterness whatsoever, which is somehow worse than if the kid had screamed at him about it.
Evil Morty lets go of the edge on purpose. He gets an arm around Morty on the way down and turns so that his own back takes the wall, and the shaft seals over both of them before Prime's system can separate them into two problems.
The chamber goes quiet.
Prime reaches down and pulls the knife out of his own side, examines it with something like professional interest, and lets it fall.