Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The lab smelled like ozone and burnt rubber.

Rick was laughing, and it wasn’t that fake, grating laugh he used with Jerry when he wanted to make him feel self-conscious about one of his jokes, or the tired, half-hearted one he gave Summer whenever she said something she thought was witty.

This was different.

It was a wheezing, unhinged cackle that seemed to scrape its way out of his throat, the kind of laugh that meant something had gone catastrophically well… which, in Rick’s world, was usually indistinguishable from something going catastrophically wrong.

“Did you see his face, Morty?” Rick doubled over the control console, portal gun swinging loose in one hand. “Did you s-see it? I sold him a rock, Morty! A r-rock! I told him it was a-a Vindicarian memory core, worth like, forty million schmeckles, and he— he really paid me forty million schmeckles for a rock I picked up off the ground—!” He said laughing as he stumbled around a bit.

“R-Rick, they’re gonna notice it’s a rock,” Morty said, hovering by the door, watching the hallway behind them like it might start moving on its own. Which, given where they were, it genuinely might. “Like, p-probably pretty soon, actually.”

“Yeah, well, by the time they figure that out we’ll be four dimensions away eating pancakes at the interdimensional Denny’s, so.” Rick shrugged, tucking the gun into his coat. “Not really my problem.”

“You also blew up their… um—” Morty gestured vaguely. “Their whole storage thingy… T-Their vault.”

“That was an accident.”

“Oh geez Rick… I never could’ve guessed.” He deadpanned, “Sure didn’t sound like an accident when you laughed maniacally at the explosion.”

“I laugh at a lotta things, Morty, that does-uurp-n’t mean I did it purposely.” Rick was already moving, long strides down the corridor, not bothering to check if Morty kept up, which he did, jogging a little to close the gap like he always had to. “Besides, they had it comin’. Sk’lorvians have been runnin’ a counterfeit dimensional-tech ring outta this sector for years, I did the whole g-galaxy a favor.”

“That doesn’t make it better...” Morty muttered, mostly to himself; which unfortunately, Rick heard.

“Morty, if I wanted a lecture on intergalactic ethics, I would have a fuckin’ Shleemypants as a sidekick.”

Morty gave up. It was a stupid argument anyway.

Trying to convince Rick that something was wrong simply because it was wrong was like trying to teach a calculator about guilt or like– trying to explain that pi could be a food and not just a string of infinite numbers.  At least a calculator wouldn’t get drunk and yell at him for trying.

Rick didn’t see things that way. If something benefited him, or happened to produce the correct outcome, then whatever he’d done to get there was absolutely justified.

Morty had learned that a long time ago.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, irritated. “Whatever... It’s not like you care about what I have to say anyway…” The words slipped out before he could process that he was saying them out loud.

Rick didn’t respond though, he just kept walking like Morty hadn't said anything at all; He didn't really expect him to either.

Their footsteps echoed against the metal walls, Rick’s shoes striking the floor with quick, impatient beats while Morty’s sneakers dragged slightly behind. The adrenaline from the escape was beginning to wear off now, leaving Morty with the unpleasant realization that his hands were still shaking even while in his pockets.

They hadn’t even made it ten feet before the corridor behind them erupted with shouting.

Morty glanced over his shoulder.

Six Sk’lorvians were charging after them. They were chitinous and too-many-jointed, mandibles clicked where mouths should’ve been, and their voices, when they shouted, came out in a wet, layered sound that sounded like three people talking through one throat.

“That’s the human who sold us the Earth cobble!” one of them bellowed, pointing a segmented claw hand the length of Morty’s arm. “Don’t let him escape!”

“And kill the small runt!” another shrieked. “It was working with him!”

“Oh, great,” Rick said, already breaking into a run but before grabbing a fistful of the back Morty’s shirt and yanking him along, nearly throwing him off balance. “Congratulations, Morty. You’ve finally got a bounty on your head. I knew you’d amount to somethin’ someday.”

“That’s not funny, Rick!” Morty huffed, stumbling as he tried to keep pace, his breathing already coming faster as Rick practically dragged him down the corridor. The fist clenched in the back of his shirt pulled harshly against his neck, making it difficult to breathe. “A-And that’s definitely not my first ever bounty, anyways! I-I’m always getting people trying to kill me just because I associate with you!”

Rick barely glanced back at him. “Hey, I’m proud of you. Most kids your age are worth, like, three Greebybobes and a moderately functional tractor beam.”

Rick thumbed the portal gun’s trigger without breaking stride, and nothing happened. No hum, or rip, just a dead, useless click and a single red light blinking on the barrel.

“Rick—”

“Yeah, I— Hang on—!” He smacked the side of it against his palm like that was going to help. “Vault musta had a dampener built in, it’s readin’ the whole sector as locked, we gotta clear the perimeter line before it’ll—”

“You’re telling me that now?!” Morty wheezed, panic taking over his body.  

“I’m tellin’ you when I found out, which is just now, Morty!”

Up ahead, a heavy blast door was grinding down out of the ceiling, sealing off the side corridor that would’ve cut their run in half. Rick swore and yanked them both hard to the left instead, into the wider hall that ran along the outside wall– longer, but open, with the perimeter line visible as a faint blue shimmer maybe sixty feet out where the dampener field ended.

“Just gotta make the line,” Rick said, mostly to himself. “Just gotta— Sixty feet. T-That's nothin’, that’s a thing you do in gym class right, Morty, you’ve done a mile before—”

“I haven’t been in a gym class in months! Or any class because of someone—”

Something whistled past Morty’s ear, a bolt of blue-white light that punched a smoking hole clean through the wall beside him. He flinched so hard he nearly went down.

“They’re shooting at us!”

“N-No Shi-uurp-t, Morty! I can see that!”

Behind them came another burst of clicking, followed by the heavy, rapid clatter of too many legs striking the corridor floor.

“Don’t let them escape!”

“Yeah, yeah, keep screamin’, you dumba-uurp-ss shitholes!” he shouted over his shoulder. “You’re only this pissed because I outsmarted you, and apparently that’s a real difficult concept for you guys to process!”

A Sk’lorvian shrieked something unintelligible in response.

Another bolt flashed through the corridor. This one didn’t hit the wall. It carved past Rick’s shoulder close enough that Morty smelled singed fabric. Rick’s lab coat smoked where the edge of the blast had caught it.

“Rick!”

“I’m fine!”

“You almost got shot!”

“Better than getting shot!”

Rick kept running.

Morty stared at the scorched patch on Rick’s shoulder for half a second too long.

Then another weapon discharged behind them, its blast aimed straight at Rick.

There was no time to think. Something in Morty simply moved. He didn’t decide to do it. There was no conscious thought, no calculation of distance or trajectory, no moment where he weighed whether it was smart or stupid.

One second he was half a step behind Rick, struggling to keep up, and the next he was throwing himself sideways into the space where Rick’s chest had been.

The third bolt had caught Morty low along the ribs.

The impact wasn’t a direct hit, but it was enough for heat to rip across his side, it was sharp and immediate, followed by a numb, burning sensation that made his entire body jerk. Morty spun sideways and slammed into the wall, his shoulder striking first before the rest of him followed. 

For a moment, everything seemed to go strangely quiet. He heard himself make a sound he didn’t recognize.

“Morty!”

Rick’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears.

Morty tried to straighten, but his legs didn’t seem interested in cooperating. He pressed one hand against the wall, fingers slipping slightly against the smooth metal as he tried to push himself upright.

“I’m—” His voice caught. “I’m okay.”

Rick didn’t answer. He was already moving toward him, crossing the distance in a few quick strides, his expression suddenly stripped of its usual amusement.

The Sk’lorvians were almost on top of them now.

Rick didn’t stop long enough to inspect the injury. There wasn’t time. He grabbed Morty by the collar of his shirt with one hand and hauled him upright so abruptly that Morty’s feet left the ground for half a second.

“Move!”

Morty stumbled after him, one hand instinctively clutching his side. Every step sent another hot pulse through his ribs, but Rick was already dragging him toward the portal.

“I can walk!”

“Then walk faster!”

“I’m trying!”

“You’re doing a shitty job of it!”

The corridor seemed to stretch in front of Morty. The green portal shimmered only a few feet away now, its surface rippling like liquid light.

Behind them, the Sk’lorvians shouted again.

“Stop!”

“Kill them!”

Rick didn’t bother answering.

He simply tightened his grip on Morty’s collar and hauled him forward with enough force to nearly pull him off his feet again.

They crossed the edge of the portal.

For half a second, Morty felt the strange weightlessness that always came with stepping through Rick’s portals, his stomach seeming to lag behind the rest of him as the world folded around them.

Then they were through.

Rick didn’t waste a breath.

The second both of them cleared the threshold, he swung the portal gun around, jammed his thumb against the trigger, and tore open another rip in space. The green light flashed across Morty’s face as Rick grabbed the back of his shirt again and shoved him through.

⋆✴︎˚｡⋆˚࿔

The portal spat them out into the garage.

Morty stumbled forward, catching himself against the edge of the workbench before his knees could give out. The sudden change in surroundings did nothing to settle the ringing in his ear. It was loud enough to drown out almost everything else, a high, steady whine that seemed to vibrate inside his skull.

He barely registered the portal collapsing behind them.

A moment later, the portal gun clattered onto the workbench.

“You wanna tell me,” Rick said, not turning around, “what the hell that was?”

Morty swallowed. His hand was still pressed against his side, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt where the heat from the blast lingered beneath it.

“I was trying to—”

“I had it, Morty.”

Rick rounded on him.

His expression still had none of the smug enjoyment from the chase, none of the sarcastic grin he’d been wearing while shouting at the Sk’lorvians.

His eyes had that flat, glassy shine to them, the way they got when he was somewhere past the point of anger, when whatever he was feeling had already burned through the part of him capable of expressing it normally.

Morty’s hand tightened over his side. The blood had gone tacky already, sticking his shirt to his skin in a way that made him want to peel the fabric off just to stop feeling it.

“I was trying to protect you,” he said, and it came out smaller than he wanted it to.

“I didn’t ask you to protect me, Morty.” Rick’s voice was flat and that was somehow worse than if he’d been shouting. “Do you think I need someone like you protecting me? Don’t insult me. I’ve had worse than six pissed-off bug people with pointy sticks try and kill me. I didn’t need you to jump in front of anything.”

“They were gonna shoot you!”

“So?” Rick spread his hands, and the gesture should have landed like a joke but It didn’t; nothing about his face was joking. “I get shot, I’ll deal with it. I’ve spent decades making sure my body can take things that’d put a normal person in a morgue. You, on the other hand—”

He jabbed a finger toward Morty’s side.

“—are not built like that.” Rick continued. “A-And what, exactly, was the plan there? You get yourself turned into a chew toy and I’m supposed to what? Build another Morty? Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass that is?”

Morty blinked as Rick threw his hands up.

“Genetic samples, memory reconstruction, making sure the clone’s actually you instead of some drooling lab-grown idiot who thinks Jerry’s funny—”

“I don’t care about what—!”

“Well, I do!”

The words came out sharper than Rick seemed to expect.

For half a second, neither of them said anything. Morty pressed his hand over the graze, trying to hide how badly it hurt.

“M-Maybe I don’t want you to get hit, ever— ever th-think about that?” Morty hated the way his voice cracked, he pressed his hand flat over the graze like he could hide it if he just held on tight enough. Blood was already sticking his shirt to his skin, warm and then cold, and neither of them looked at it. “Maybe I don’t wanna– a-a spare Rick lying around unlike someone!”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Mortys are expendable, right?” It came out faster than he meant it to, like it had been sitting behind his teeth for years waiting for a crack to get through. “Isn’t that like– the deal— the whole reason you keep me around, right? ‘Cause I’m just, what, a human shield with a heartbeat? You’ve got an infinite amount of me, so who cares if one Morty gets a hole put in him—!”

“Where the hell is this coming from—?!”

“I’m not stupid, Rick! I’ve seen what they did at the Citadel! I’ve seen what happens to a Morty when he stops being useful, I watched one Rick trade his in for a newer model like he was upgrading a damn iphone, and you’re telling me that’s not—“ Morty’s voice hitched, but he forced the words out anyway. “That that’s not exactly what I am to you, too? Just a— a tool you replace when it stops workin’ right?!”

Rick stared at him for a moment, his expression tightening. “I already told you those other Ricks have nothing to do with me.”

“Why not?” Morty’s voice cracked upward, and he didn’t try to stop it this time. “Why doesn’t it? Because you’re special or something? You’re still a Rick! That’s what Ricks do!”

Rick’s jaw worked. For half a second, barely long enough to register, something crossed his face that wasn’t anger. It was gone before Morty could name it.

“Don’t flatter yourself!” Morty shot back. “Because you sure as hell didn’t have a problem replacing my mom when we left my dimension. Or my dad. Or Summer. You just—” His voice caught, but he pushed through it. “You just found another version of them and acted like it was nothing. Like they were interchangeable.”

Rick’s expression tightened.

“But when it’s me?” Morty continued. “Suddenly it’s different? Suddenly I’m not replaceable? You’ve got infinite Jerrys, infinite Beths, infinite Summers, but somehow I’m supposed to believe there’s only one Morty that matters?”

He swallowed, his voice getting quieter.

“So what’s different about me?”

Rick opened his mouth but Morty didn’t let him answer. 

“You always have something to say about everyone else. You’ll sit there and tell me how some other Rick is a narcissistic asshole or how some other Jerry is the biggest idiot you’ve ever seen. But when somebody points out that you do the same shit, suddenly it’s different?!”

His breathing hitched. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, frustrated by the tears he hadn’t realized had started falling.

“D-Don’t act like you have some moral high ground above them. We both know it’s bullshit.”

“Don’t turn this around on—”

“You literally replaced me with two crows!”

The words dropped into the garage like something physical. Rick went still.

“You’re bringin’ that up now?”

“Why not?” Morty’s hands were shaking, and it wasn’t just adrenaline anymore. “You replaced me f-for months! A-And when those crows got tired of you, you j-just came back like nothin’ happened! Like I was just supposed to be there waiting, ‘cause where else would I be?”

The older man’s eyes narrowed. “So don’t— don’t you dare stand there and act like I’m the crazy one for thinking you’re not like every other Rick in the multiverse, when you’re literally not any different!”

Rick stared at him.

Morty’s chest rose and fell unevenly. The anger was still there, but underneath it was something worse: the quiet certainty that he had finally said something he couldn’t take back.

Rick looked toward the blood soaking through Morty’s shirt.

His mouth tightened.

“That was different.”

“How?!”

“Because I didn’t replace you.”

“How was you leaving for months to go on adventures with two crows not replacing what I do with you?!”

“I was pissed off!”

“You were tired of me!”

“I was pissed off!”

“You didn’t want me around!”

“Morty—”

“You replaced me just to prove the point about how replaceable I am!”

Rick’s face twisted.

“Would you shut up for five seconds?”

“No!”

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

“You keep telling me I’m wrong, but you never tell me why!”

“Because I don’t owe you a fuckin’ — “ Rick cut himself off, dragged a hand down his face, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something low and mean.  

“You know what your problem is, Morty? You think everything’s about you. You almost died out there tonight because you can’t stand still for five seconds without makin’ it about how much ‘I love you’ or ‘don’t love you’ or whatever the hell this is, and I don’t have time for it. I got aliens who want us both dead and a-a headache the size of Cleveland, and you’re standin’ here doin’ a whole thing about some fucking birds I trained months ago.”

“You know what...” Morty’s voice had gone strange and quiet. “Just– forget it. Forget I said anything.”

He turned for the door. He didn’t get two steps.

“Where do you think you’re goin’.” It wasn’t a question. Rick’s hand closed around his arm and hauled him back, not gently, spinning him half around so his side was facing the light.

“I’m fine, just let me—”

“You’re bleedin’ through your shirt, Morty, you’re not fine, quit tellin’ me you’re fine it's annoying.” Rick shoved him back against the workbench and reached past him without looking, probing along the shelf until his hand closed around a device about the size of a cordless drill, matte black, humming faintly the second his fingers found the grip.

A cracked screen down the side blinked awake with a string of numbers Morty couldn’t read fast enough to make sense of. Rick wrenched Morty’s shirt up out of where he was pressing down on his wound with none of the care the situation probably called for.

“Ow—! Rick, what is that—”

“Cellular resequencer. Stay still.” He didn’t wait for a response. He thumbed a dial on the side, and the tool’s tip split open into three thin prongs that clicked into place with a sound like a camera focusing. “It’s gonna read the wound, figure out what’s missin’, and print it back. Skin, capillaries, nerve endings, the whole— it’s basically a 3D printer that uses you as the printer.”

“That sounds like it should hurt less than it’s about to, don’t tell me it—”

“Don’t backseat drive my tech, M-Morty.”

He pressed the prongs flush against the graze without any further warning at all. The device let out a high ring that made Morty’s whole side light up with a sensation that wasn’t quite pain and wasn’t quite not-pain; more like a deep, itching, electric pull, like something was stitching itself together from the inside out, cell by cell, in fast-forward. 

He flinched hard and Rick’s free hand clamped down on his shoulder, holding him in place, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.

“Hold still.”

“I am holding still, it just feels like my ribs are on— it feels weird, Rick, it feels really weird—”

“Yeah, that’s the growth-rate throttle, it’s rebuildin’ tissue faster than your nervous system knows what to do with, that’s normal, don’t be a baby about it.”

Morty gritted his teeth and let him work. There was nothing tender about how Rick held the device steady with his eyes clinically locked on the readout scrolling up the side of it in a language that was probably still English but moving too fast to follow, muttering under his breath the whole time about: ‘reckless and ‘four seconds’ and ‘sub-basement full of backups.’ ‘I said that for a reason, Morty.’

But he didn’t stop watching the readout, and he didn’t let go of Morty’s shoulder, and when Morty tried to shift back before the whine had finished climbing down, Rick’s hand just followed him, keeping him in place until the display flashed green and beeped twice.

It didn’t feel like being cared for. It felt like being fixed. Like a component getting reseated by someone reading its specs off a screen, so the rest of the machine could keep running.

Except components didn’t get their jaw gripped and tilted sideways afterward, so Rick could shine a penlight across each eye and check for a concussion neither of them had mentioned out loud. 

Rick straightened up the second the resequencer’s screen blinked over to a flat, satisfied green, twisted the prongs back into the housing with a sharp click, and set the tool down on the bench harder than it needed to be set down, like he’d only just realized how close he’d been standing.

“There.” His voice had already snapped back to flat. “Fixed. You can go fuck off now.”

Morty stood there a second too long, shirt still shoved up, skin unmarked now except for a faint pink line that would be gone by morning.

“Sorry…” he said, quieter than he planned.

Rick didn’t look at him. “Whatever.”

“No, it’s fine.” Morty pulled his shirt back down and turned for the door again, and this time Rick let him go. “I get it. I was being dramatic. Sorry for almost gettin’ shot for you, my b-bad.”

“That is not what I—”

The garage door swung shut behind him before Rick finished the sentence.

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.

Morty’s room felt smaller than it usually did.

He sat on the edge of his bed with his knees pulled up, still wearing the same shirt. The collar hung loose around his neck from where Rick had grabbed it twice that night. There wasn’t any blood left on it anymore. The resequencer had taken care of that. If Morty lifted the hem, there’d be nothing underneath except a thin pink seam of new skin, already fading, already forgetting it had ever been anything else.

That was the thing about Rick’s technology. It never left proof. Rick could fix almost anything before it had enough time to become evidence that something had gone wrong.

Maybe that was why Rick never seemed particularly worried afterward. Maybe, to him, an injury only mattered while it was happening. Once it was gone, there was nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to remember. Nothing left to prove that Morty had ever been hurt in the first place.

Morty wished, a little bitterly, that it had. He wished there was something on his body he could point to and say, ‘See? This happened. What happened to him was real.’ 

Something that couldn’t just be fixed and forgotten, something that would keep the last twenty minutes from quietly disappearing into the pile of everything else that apparently hadn’t mattered enough to leave a mark.

He lay back against his pillow and stared at the ceiling, at the same water stain shaped like nothing in particular that had been there since he was nine. He tried to think about homework, or Jessica, or the show he was already three episodes behind on. Anything normal. Anything that belonged in his room instead of the garage but his brain wouldn’t hold onto any of it. 

Every thought slipped back to the garage, to the way Rick’s hand had clamped down on his shoulder and just stayed there, longer than the resequencer needed it to. Morty was pretty sure of that, even if he couldn’t have explained how he knew.

What he did know was that Rick had been acting differently lately. Not enough that Morty could point to one specific thing and say, ‘There. That’s what changed.’

It was just little things.

The way Rick’s hand lingered when he pulled Morty out of the way. The way he seemed to notice every little injury, even when he pretended he didn’t.

Because Rick had never acted like that in the past. 

Morty could still remember what it was like at twelve, the first year Rick decided to reenter his and his family’s lives. When he was so unaccustomed to the ship’s sudden lurches that he’d thrown up over the side of his seat before they’d even made it to the ground.

There’d been an adventure gone wrong on some junk planet, a rockslide, and Morty had gone down under it with his arm bent somewhere it wasn’t supposed to bend. He remembered lying there in the rubble dust with his ears ringing, waiting– actually waiting, for Rick to come dig him out.

Rick had leisurely climbed down eventually, like he was picking his way down to check on a busted engine.

“You’re not dead,” he’d said, more observation than relief, hauling Morty up by the good arm hard enough that Morty had yelped. “Good, ’cause I am not carrying you to the ship.”

And he hadn’t. 

Morty had walked back on his own, cradling the injured arm against his chest while Rick complained the entire way about having to slow down. Once they got home, Rick had finally healed it—

Not with the resequencer, that wasn’t something Morty even knew Rick had until today.

—but with some half-used medical compound he’d dug out of a drawer.

He’d barely looked at Morty while he did it. Rick just grabbed his wrist, grumbled something about holding still, and slapped the compound over the injury with all the tenderness of someone patching a hole in a tire. There had been a brief flash of heat, a sharp sting, and then the pain had started to disappear.

Another time he’d accidently stepped on a live wire that should’ve killed him outright, and Rick’s only reaction had been a flat, ‘Watch where you’re steppin’, Jesus,’ already turning back to his readings before Morty had even caught his breath. 

A week Morty had spent limping around after a bad landing because Rick hadn’t thought it was worth his time to a heal it, and he had just told him to ‘walk it off, you’re fine,’ and gone back to work.

There’d been worse than that, too, if Morty let himself go looking for it.

There was the thing on the fungus planet, the one with too many teeth and not enough of a jaw to bother chewing, that had swallowed him whole up to the shoulder before Rick got a shot off. Rick had cut him back out of it with a hunting knife built into his wrist, elbow-deep in ichor, muttering the entire time about how it was going to ruin his good lab coat.

He hadn’t asked if Morty was okay until they were already halfway back to the ship, and even then it came out flat, more procedural than anything: ‘Let's go Morty. I don’t have time for your bitchin’.’

There was that other time with his eye. Morty didn’t like thinking about the eye.

Something with too many legs had taken it during a scuffle over a shipment of quantum crystals on some planet Rick had insisted was ‘basically uninhabited.’ Rick had grown Morty, a replacement from a spare bio-vial in the ship’s med kit, jamming the thing into the socket with the same put-upon irritation he might’ve had screwing in a lightbulb that refused to sit right.

It had taken three tries.

Morty remembered the raw, wet ache of it. He remembered crying. Remembered Rick holding the vial between two fingers and saying, without looking up, ‘Quit squirming, you’re just makin’ it harder for me.’

And there was the one time– Morty still wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined some of it, the fever from blood loss doing something strange to the memory, where he’d been pinned under debris on a burning transport with maybe ninety seconds of air left in the room, and Rick had spent most of those ninety seconds arguing with the ship’s AI about rerouting power instead of digging him out by hand. 

He had gotten him out. 

Eventually…

With eleven seconds to spare, by the ship’s own count. Rick had never brought it up again, and Morty had never asked, because some small, cowardly part of him hadn’t wanted to hear the answer.

He hadn’t been unkind, exactly. He’d just been… uninvolved. Like Morty getting hurt was less something that scared him and more another inconvenience he’d been forced to deal with. Like Morty was a machine that occasionally needed a part replaced, and replacing it was tedious, but leaving it broken was more of a pain.

Which was fucked up, sure. But Morty could handle fucked up. He was pretty used to it.

What he didn’t understand was why it hadn’t stayed that way.

Morty couldn’t remember when it had started changing. There wasn’t a moment he could point to, no single adventure where Rick had suddenly become different. It had happened gradually, so gradually that Morty had looked up one day and realized that the flat, unbothered: ‘you’re fine’, he’d gotten used to had started turning into something completely different.

There had been a night, a couple months back, when Morty had caught some kind of flu from a Gazorpian shuttle bus. He’d been throwing up every twenty minutes, sweating through his sheets, too miserable to even sleep properly. 

Around three in the morning, Rick had come into his room without knocking. He’d set a mug of something glowing faintly blue on the nightstand and told him, “Drink that if you want to live… or don’t. I don’t care.”

Then he’d sat down in the desk chair.

…For hours.

Morty had been too sick to keep track of the time, but he remembered waking up around six and seeing Rick still there, scrolling through something on his tablet. He hadn’t even been looking at Morty. He’d just been sitting there, like he needed somewhere to be and, for some reason, that place had been Morty’s room.

Why?

Morty had never asked.

Maybe Rick had just been bored. Maybe he’d been waiting for Morty to get better because it would’ve been annoying to have a sick Morty slowing them down. Maybe he’d been worried and just didn’t know how to say it.

But that didn’t sound like Rick.

Not the Rick who’d jammed a new eye into his skull like he was fixing a busted headlight. The old man didn’t worry about things. 

Not in that way, at least.

There was the customs thing, too. A few months before that, at some checkpoint on a moon Morty couldn’t even remember the name of. An officer with too many eyes had grabbed Morty by the arm to search him, which was apparently standard procedure, and Rick had done something Morty’s never seen him do before or since.

He’d just taken his flask from his coat, unscrewed the cap, and taken a slow drink while he said something low enough to the officer that Morty couldn’t make out the words.

Whatever it was, the officer let go so quickly he nearly dropped his own weapon. Rick took another drink like nothing had happened, tucked the flask away, and motioned for Morty to keep walking.

They were back at the ship before Morty could work up the nerve to ask what Rick had said.

“Nothin’ important,” Rick had told him, taking another drink from his flask.

But that wasn’t it.

Morty knew it wasn’t. He didn’t know how he knew, exactly. Maybe it was the way Rick had refused to look at him when he said it, or the way the officer had suddenly stopped looking at Morty like he was something that needed to be searched.

Maybe Rick really had said nothing important.

Maybe Morty was just looking for things that weren’t there because he wanted there to be something.

It was kind of like the water stain on his ceiling. Morty knew it wasn’t shaped like anything in particular. He’d known that since he was nine.

Except sometimes, if he stared at it long enough, he could make it into whatever he wanted.

Morty rolled onto his side, facing the wall instead of the ceiling. The water stain was still there if he looked back over his shoulder, so he just… didn’t look up.

And now there was tonight. The resequencer, about the sound it made, that thin electric whine, and how Rick’s hand hadn’t moved from his shoulder until the screen went green. Two minutes, maybe three. 

He could almost see it if he laid everything out in his head like a graph. Before, Rick had treated a broken arm like it was nothing. Something to quickly fix before moving on. 

But then there had been the flu. The shot wound Rick had called insignificant and still took the time out of his night keeping Morty until he was sure it was healed. Little things that shouldn’t have meant anything. Little things that somehow did.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t consistent. It had an uneven slope to it. Had been getting worse or better… Morty didn’t have the answer for that. 

It didn’t make sense…

And that was the part that kept bothering him.

Rick had told him why he took him as s sidekick, once. A long while ago. 

Something about brain waves… Something about how a Rick traveling alone lit up like a signal flare to anyone looking for one, while a Morty standing next to him muddled the reading just enough to disappear into it.

Camouflage.

That was the word Rick had used.

‘You’re a coat I wear so nobody can see me, M-M-urrp-orty. Don’t flatter yourself.’

Morty had believed him….

…For the most part.

He’d had to, because it was the only reason Rick had ever bothered giving him.

Except now, at two in the morning, Morty kept circling back to it. Turning it around and around until the explanation started to feel less like an answer and more like something Rick had said because he knew Morty would stop asking afterward.

Because if that was really it—

if that was the whole reason, the only reason

—then why hadn’t Rick just built something?

A watch. A pill. Some little device that scrambled a brain signature so nobody could find him. Something that did the same job without needing a fourteen-year-old following him around.

Rick built everything else.

He’d built a device that turned a garbage bag into a wormhole once. He’d built a gun that could alter a person’s entire memory like it was nothing. If he needed something, he’d just made it. Usually in an afternoon, usually out of whatever happened to be lying around the garage.

…So why not this?

Rick wasn’t some low-effort version of himself who hadn’t figured out portal travel yet and needed a kid because it was easier than doing the work himself. He was the Rickest Rick. The one every other Rick in that horrible citadel had apparently spent years being afraid of, jealous of, or trying to become.

And Rick Prime hadn’t bothered with a Morty at all.

Morty knew that much. He’d heard Rick say it himself once, offhand and bitter, like the fact barely mattered. Rick Prime moved through everything alone. No Morty. No camouflage. No kid following him around.

So it clearly wasn’t impossible.

It probably wasn’t even that hard.

Which meant there had to be a version of this where Rick built the watch, or the pill, or whatever the hell would’ve worked, and never needed Morty again.

He could’ve made it so Morty never had to follow him into another dimension. Never had to slow him down. Never had to get dragged into gunfights or patched up in the garage at two in the morning. Never had to listen to Rick complain about him being a liability, or a distraction, or a pain in the ass.

Rick could have made something that meant he didn’t need Morty.

But he hadn’t.

Morty stared at the wall.

That was the part he couldn’t figure out.

If Rick really only needed him for camouflage, then why keep choosing him when Rick could have built his way out of needing anyone at all?

But, he hasn’t.

Morty frowned at the wall.

Why not?

Morty wasn’t smart. He wasn’t useful, not in the way Rick clearly wanted him to be, and not in the way anything in that garage full of tech was useful. He’d said it himself, standing there with blood still tacky on Morty’s shirt:

‘—You get yourself turned into a chew toy and I’m supposed to what? Build another Morty? Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass that is?’

Those words bothered Morty. When he’d first heard Rick say that it sounded logical enough but the more he thought about it…

The more it didn’t fit no matter which way he turned it. If Morty really was just a pain in the ass, a chore, a thing that existed because it was marginally less annoying to keep around than to replace.

Why had he cared enough to get angry in the first place?

Rick wouldn’t have stayed in the desk chair until six in the morning over a stomach flu that wasn’t even contagious to him.

He wouldn’t have said something to a customs officer that made a nine-eyed alien let go of Morty’s arm like it had caught fire.

He wouldn’t have kept his hand on Morty’s shoulder until the resequencer finished.

Would he?

Morty didn’t have a word for any of it.

He’d tried a few on for size.

Guilt, maybe.

Except Rick didn’t believe in guilt. He’d said it a million times. Guilt was just: ‘a chemical state caused by a messy cocktail of neurotransmitters, hormones, and whatever the hell your brain’s neural networks are doing.’

Boredom didn’t fit either.

Rick got bored of everything eventually. Relationships. Inventions. Entire planets he’d built out of nothing. Morty had watched him lose interest in things that had seemed important five minutes earlier.

But not this.

Not someone like Rick.

And the more Morty tried to find another explanation, the more they all seemed to fall apart.

So maybe there was only one that fit.

The ugliest one. The one Morty almost wished he hadn’t thought of.

He only does it when he’s already in some form of pain or discomfort.

Except that wasn’t even right either. Not all the way.

Morty had cried in front of him before. Actual crying, too not the angry, hiccupping kind from tonight, but the real kind. After the incident with his and Beth’s alternate selves. After the whole mess with Jessica. After enough things that Morty had stopped keeping count.

Rick had never looked at him the way he’d looked at him tonight.

He’d gotten annoyed. Not even subtle about it. Like it was immediate, like something in Morty’s voice flipped a switch in him. He’d shift his weight, jaw tightening, eyes narrowing like Morty had just done something deliberately wrong.

‘Aw, jesus, Morty, c’mon,’ he’d snap sometimes, sharp and impatient, like Morty was wasting time on purpose. Like the sound itself was an accusation.

Other times he’d laugh, but it wasn’t the real kind. It was thin and mean and too quick, like he was trying to cut the moment off before it could land.

And when that didn’t work, Rick would just turn away. Fiddle with his portal gun. Check readings that didn’t need checking. Anything to not look at him.

‘Don’t start that crap, Morty,’ he’d mutter under his breath more than once, like he was bracing for something. Like he was already angry at what he thought was coming next.

So maybe it wasn’t that Rick only cared when Morty was upset.

Maybe it was that Rick only seemed to know what to do when Morty was hurt.

The physical part was different. Blood. Bruises. Broken bones. Anything a resequencer could read off a screen and fix. Those things Rick understood. They had causes and symptoms and solutions. They could be measured. Repaired. Crossed off.

Whatever was happening underneath, the part that had made Morty cry in the first place, Rick never seemed to notice it was even there.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe that was the problem.

Morty lay there with that thought for a long time, turning it over slowly and waiting for it to feel wrong in the way it should have.

It didn’t.

If anything, the more he thought about it, the more examples he found.

There had been the salvage run last spring, when Morty had twisted his ankle jumping a gap he could’ve easily walked around. Rick hadn’t said one word about how stupid it was. He’d just knelt down in the dirt and wrapped it himself, muttering the whole time about ligaments and tendons like Morty was a piece of equipment he was annoyed at for breaking on him.

Except his hands hadn’t been rough.

Morty remembered that.

Then there was the crystal splitter. Morty had gotten his hand caught in it halfway through a run, and Rick had shut the entire machine down without hesitation. The run had been making him money every second it was operating. Rick had been in the middle of something important.

He’d stopped anyway.

Just to get Morty’s fingers free.

Rick didn’t stop for anything else.

That was what kept bothering Morty.

He’d seen Rick walk away from explosions. Leave entire planets behind. Abandon machines he’d spent weeks building because they’d stopped being interesting. He’d watched him ignore things that other people would’ve called important because, to Rick, there was always something else to do.

But he stopped for Morty.

Just never before there was a reason he couldn’t ignore.

And maybe that was the part Morty had been getting wrong.

Maybe Rick did care.

Or maybe Rick just thought caring meant getting mad at the parts he didn’t understand like if Morty cried, it had to be some kind of trick, some kind of pressure, some way of making him feel something he didn’t want to feel.

Morty stared into the dark.

That should have made him feel better.

But, it didn’t.

It was almost funny. Somewhere out there, some other Rick had swapped his Morty for a couple of crows and apparently hadn’t noticed the difference for months. His Rick had done that too, once.

And yet this Rick, this exact one, had sat in a desk chair all night over a fever. He’d lied to a nine-eyed cop with his own mouth to keep Morty from being searched. He’d shut down a profitable machine because Morty’s hand was stuck in it.

The difference between those two things should’ve canceled each other out.

Instead, they just sat there next to each other, both true, refusing to add up to anything Morty could actually hold onto.

Unless the hurting part was what did it.

Unless that was the only time whatever was buried underneath all of it was allowed to come out. The thing Rick would never just say. The thing Morty kept trying to find without knowing what he was looking for.

Maybe somewhere underneath ‘replaceable’ and ‘pain in the ass’ and ‘I don’t have time for this,’ there was some small, buried part of Rick that only let itself care when the alternative was watching Morty disappear.

But if that was true, then it wasn’t really about Morty.

Not entirely.

It wasn’t about anything Morty did or said or even was. It was about Rick not being able to stand the watching-it-happen part. The part where something was taken from him before he could stop it.

Morty didn’t know if that made him feel better or worse.

He turned the thought over one more time, and it still didn’t come out even.

His side didn’t hurt anymore. There wasn’t even a mark. He pressed his fingers against the spot anyway, right through his shirt, like he could still find some trace of the memory if he pushed hard enough.

Like the resequencer had gotten rid of the wound but somehow missed the part underneath it.

The part where, for about four seconds in that hallway, with a bolt of blue-white light screaming past his ear, Rick had looked at him like he was something that mattered.

Morty couldn’t remember the last time Rick had looked at him like that.

Maybe that was the problem.

He stared at the wall until his eyes stopped focusing on it, until the whole room went soft and gray around the edges. Somewhere in that strange space between thinking and almost sleeping, one sentence surfaced and simply sat there, plain and quiet, like it had been waiting its turn the whole time.

He could always find out if it’s true.

Morty didn’t let himself finish the thought.

Not yet.

He rolled onto his back and faced the ceiling again, finding the water stain where he’d left it. 

It still didn’t look like anything.

He fell asleep before he could decide whether he was upset that nothing came to mind.

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.

The scrapyard reeked of hot metal, with a hint of something sweeter beneath— the smell of rot that Morty had long decided not to question. 

The air tasted like rust. Every so often, something shifted somewhere in the enormous piles surrounding them, sending a hollow groan through the stacked hulls.

“Grab the blue one,” Rick said, barely looking up from the console bolted to the side of the crane. 

Morty let out a sigh before he followed Rick's instructions and reached for one of the blue orbs amid the rubble.

“Not the— Morty!” Rick stopped him as he touched the orb. “The blue one, the o-one that’s blue, are you colorblind, is that a thing you’ve never told me—”

“They’re all blue, Rick!”

“No, that one's obviously teal, not blue Morty!”

Morty growled in frustration and picked up the slightly bluer orb. It hummed faintly in his hand, warm like it had a pulse. He looked back at Rick with an impatient look. “This one?”

“Yeah, sure, w-whatever, just put it in the bin.” Rick said, barely looking up to see before returning to his device.  

The scrapyard stretched three levels above them, stacks of gutted ships and broken machinery piled on top of each other like someone had started building a city out of wreckage and abandoned it halfway through. Rust streaked the hulls in long brown lines. Cables hung between the platforms. Somewhere below, a piece of loose metal knocked against something else at irregular intervals.

Rick was here to pull a navigation core out of a wreck that, according to him, still worked well enough to use: “Gotta get the navigation core. Ours is dying, and I’m not exactly interested in getting stranded in some interdimensional hellhole because you can’t read a map, Morty.”

Morty had stopped listening.

His attention had drifted toward the gap between their platform and the next stack over.

It ran between the platform they were standing on and the next stack over, maybe four feet, maybe five, with nothing under it but two hundred feet of scrap and shadow. There was a walkway that looped around the long way, past a crane-type-object… and past Rick.

Morty didn’t think about it the way he’d thought about the corridor with the Sk’lorvians.  

Back then, there had been something obvious to react to, something loud enough that his body had made the decision for him before he even had a chance to argue.

This wasn’t like that.

There was no blue-white flash. No weapons. No aliens yelling at him. Only a plain old gap in the wall, dark and ordinary and waiting for… well he didn’t know what exactly.

He stared at it.

For the past two days—

since the water stain on his ceiling started to bother him and Rick had barely looked up from whatever he was building in the garage—

Morty had been carrying the same thought around like it belonged to someone else. He tried to ignore it. He really did. He let school blur into TV blur into sleep, let Rick’s errands and last-minute: ‘Morty, grab this’ distractions stack up until he didn’t have room to think about anything else.

But it always came back when things got quiet.

Like now.

It wasn’t even much of a thought.

It felt more like pressure behind his ribs or a persistent suggestion that refused to go away, no matter how hard he tried to shake it off.

He swallowed, feeling that familiar tightness settle in his chest.

He could find out if it’s true…

He’d never actually done anything about it before. It had always been just a thought. One of those kinds of questions he turned over at two in the morning, when everything felt heavier and more important than it did in daylight, only to fold it away again by breakfast and pretend he’d never had it.

He didn’t decide to jump the gap so much as realize, a half-second too late, that he was already moving. Like the thought had been sitting quietly in the back of his mind all this time, waiting for an excuse that could be mistaken for an accident.

His foot caught the far edge wrong, and for one strange second, Morty couldn’t make sense of what was happening. The world seemed to drop away beneath him, his stomach lurching as cold air rushed past. Somewhere below, metal clanged against metal, sharp and distant.

His brain caught on the sound before it caught on anything else.

That’s pretty far down.

And suddenly, the thought didn’t feel like a thought anymore.

Something moved in the dark of the gap before he even landed. Morty didn’t see it so much as register the wrongness of it: a shape shifting in the shadows between the hulls, too many joints unfolding from a nest of wiring and rust.

It lunged at him. The scavenger was low to the ground, segmented and covered in mismatched plates, with too many small yellow eyes catching the little light there was. It came straight for him, reacting to the sudden intrusion into its territory.

Morty hit the lower ledge hard, on his side, the impact driving the air out of him in one ugly punch, and before he could even get his good arm under himself the thing was on him.

Claws… or maybe more so hooks? They curved and segmented, closing around his forearm and pulled at him.

Morty felt something in his wrist give with a small, wet-sounding pop as his whole arm was wrenched at an angle it wasn’t supposed to go. 

He kicked blindly into the darkness. His foot connected with something soft enough to make it shriek, a wet, layered sound that set his teeth on edge, and it let go of his arm only to rake a second set of claws down the other one, tearing a long gash from elbow to wrist that welled dark and immediate.

For a second there was no pain at all. Just a strange, ringing silence, the creature scrabbling back into the dark hissing, and the sky tilting the wrong way above him.

Then it came all at once, a white, nauseating wave of it starting in his wrist and rolling up through his shoulder, and Morty heard himself make a sound that didn’t sound like it belonged to him.

“Morty!”

He hadn’t even heard Rick turn around.

“I’m—” Morty tried to push himself upright, immediately regretted it, and sank back against the ledge, his stomach rolled uncomfortably. “I’m okay, Rick. I think– oh jeez– I just—”

He wasn’t okay. Some distant, detached part of him already knew that. The same way he knew the sky was still tilted and his arm was lying at an angle arms weren’t supposed to go.

Rick was already across the gap. Morty didn’t see him take the walkway. 

One second he was alone; the next, there was a sharp crack of a laser behind him, followed by the scavenger’s screech cutting abruptly short, and then Rick was on his knees on the ledge, hands hovering over him without landing anywhere, like he couldn’t find a place to touch that wasn’t already wrong.

“Don’t move— Morty, look at me, do not move that arm—” His voice was already too loud, pitched somewhere between panic and rage, and it kept climbing. “What the hell was that, huh? What the fuck was that, I turn my back for four seconds—”

“I-I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“I don’t wanna hear sorry, I wanna know how you miss a five-foot gap you’ve cleared a hundred times, are you— were you even looking, Morty, or were you just—” He cut himself off, jaw working, hands hovering over Morty without landing, like touching him might make it worse and not touching him was somehow worse than that. “Jesus Christ.”

“It hurts—” The words came out smaller than Morty meant them, cracking wet at the edges. “R-Rick, it really hurts—”

“Yeah, no shit it hurts, it’s broken, I can see that it’s—” Rick stopped again, visibly forcing something down, and when he spoke next it came out low instead of loud, which was somehow worse. “Okay. Okay. Don’t look at it. Don’t you dare look at it.”

Morty looked at it anyway. He wished, immediately, that he hadn’t.

Rick got an arm under his knees and lifted him in one motion, and even that small jostle sent a fresh, blinding spike of pain up through the wrist that made Morty’s vision go white at the edges and a strangled noise tear out of him before he could stop it.

“I got you, I got you, quit lookin’ at it, look at something else instead, c’mon—” Rick’s voice had lost every trace of its usual flat sarcasm; it had gone quick and low and almost unrecognizable, the words tripping over each other in a way that had nothing performed about it at all. “You’re fine, you’re gonna be fine, I’m not gonna let— just hang on.”

He didn’t wait for the ship. He didn’t wait for anything. He fired the portal gun one-handed, still holding Morty tight against his chest, and the green light swallowed them both before Morty had even finished flinching.

⋆✴︎˚｡⋆˚࿔

The portal spat them out into the garage hard enough that Rick’s hip caught the corner of his work bench on the way through, and he didn’t so much as grunt about it.

“Quit squirming.” Rick muttered. He kept one arm locked around Morty’s back, while the other was bracing him against his chest as he shoved the portal gun back into his lab coat. “Just gotta get you on the bench.”

“I can walk, Rick, you don’t have to—”

“Shut up.” He set Morty down on the edge of the workbench, not gently, and Morty’s vision went white again for a second as the movement jolted his wrist.

“Ow— okay, ow, that one was you, that wasn’t even the arm’s fault—”

“Then hold it still.” Rick was already yanking drawers open, one after another, shoving aside tools that clattered and rolled off the edge and onto the floor, muttering the whole time in that low, fast voice that didn’t sound like it was actually meant for Morty to hear. “Where’s the— I had the brace thing in here, I know I had the— Morty, did you move my stuff—”

“I didn’t touch your stuff—”

“Well, somebody had to have touched my stuff—”

“It’s probably just under something, Rick, you never put anything back correctly when you get drunk—”

Rick shot him a look over his shoulder that would’ve had more heat in it if his hands weren’t visibly unsteady, and went back to digging. He found the brace three drawers later, a thin silver cuff that looked more like jewelry than medical equipment, and crossed back to Morty in two strides.

“Give me your arm.”

“Which—”

“The one that’s pointing the wrong direction, Morty, Jesus Christ, which arm do you think—??”

Morty held it out. His stomach turned looking at it head-on for the first time in the light, the wrist bent at an angle that made his whole body want to flinch away from itself, and he made the mistake of watching Rick’s face instead, because Rick’s face did something too. 

Just for a second, something tightened around Rick’s eyes that had nothing to do with irritation. His jaw shifted, barely noticeable, and then it was gone, folded back beneath the familiar scowl so quickly that Morty almost convinced himself he’d imagined it.

“This is gonna hurt,” Rick said, already fitting the cuff around Morty’s wrist. “A lot. Probably more than the actual break did. I’m not gonna lie to you about that, because you’ll just wince less if you know it’s comin’, so.”

“Oh jeez, thanks, Rick. T-that’s really comforting.”

“I didn’t say it to comfort you. I said it so you don’t jerk your arm outta my hand halfway through and make me start over.”

Morty swallowed and braced himself against the edge of the workbench. His good hand curled around the metal until his knuckles hurt. He tried to focus on the clutter scattered across the garage instead, the tools Rick had left everywhere, the half-disassembled machine on the other side of the room, the blinking lights on the portal gun charging station.

But it didn’t help.

The cuff hissed as it sealed around his wrist. The metal was cool against his skin, almost cold enough to numb it. For one merciful second, nothing happened. Rick’s fingers stayed wrapped around the cuff, holding it steady while a thin blue light traveled around its edge.

Then the device activated. The sensation started as a strange pressure beneath the skin, followed by a steady warmth that seemed to travel up his arm. His whole body tensed instinctively.

“Ow–! R-Rick—”

“I know.”

The first jolt was sharp enough to make Morty’s shoulders jump. He tried to pull back instinctively, but Rick’s grip tightened immediately, keeping his arm still.

“No, I don’t think you—” His voice broke off into something wordless as the cuff pulled, some kind of internal current cinching down where the break was, easing it back the way it was supposed to sit. It felt like being tightened from the inside, like a screw turning through something that wasn’t supposed to have threads. “Rick—”

His voice broke, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Rick didn’t let go.

“Almost there. Stop lookin’ at me like that, I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s— The cuff doesn’t know how to be gentle, Morty. I didn’t build it for comfort.”

Morty winced hard, a small, strained whine catching in his throat. His fingers curled against the edge of the table, searching for something to hold onto, but he couldn’t make himself speak. Every breath came out shaky.

The cuff gave one last pull, sharper than the rest, and something inside his wrist settled into place with a small, deep click that Morty felt more than heard. The pain didn’t vanish, but it dropped all at once into something more bearable.

Rick let out a breath through his nose that might have been relief, if Rick believed in that kind of thing out loud. 

“There. All set. Cuff’ll hold it together while the resequencer catches the rest up.” He didn’t let go of Morty’s arm even though the cuff was already doing its job on its own. He kept two fingers pressed just above it, like he wanted to feel it working.

Morty didn’t say anything about that. 

Rick reached past him for the resequencer again without looking, found it by feel among the mess he’d dumped out of the drawer, and dragged Morty’s other arm, the cut one, into the light.

“This the only one, or you hidin’ more of you back there I should know about.”

“Just—” He winced and stopped, squeezing his eyes shut again. “Just those two, I think.”

“You think.”

“I’m pretty sure, Rick, I would probably notice if—”

“You didn’t notice a five-foot gap, Morty, so forgive me if I don’t just take your word for it.” He said it flat, already thumbing the resequencer’s dial, but something about the way he said ‘five-foot’ gap had an edge on it that hadn’t been there in the garage the last time. Not so much annoyed, but more so like he was chewing on something and hadn’t decided yet whether to spit it out.

He pressed the prongs to the gash without any more warning than that, and the same electric itch-pull sensation crawled up Morty’s arm from elbow to wrist, skin knitting closed cell by cell under a whine that climbed and climbed before cutting off clean.

Morty watched it happen instead of watching Rick’s face this time. Watched the torn edges of skin pull toward each other like something rewinding, watched the raw red fade to pink and then disappear, until there was no proof left that a claw had ever been there at all.

It should have felt like relief.

Instead, something in his chest did that thing it had been doing more and more lately… that strange, aching little warmth that showed up whenever Rick stopped treating him like an inconvenience and started paying attention. 

It was embarrassing how quickly his body seemed to recognize it. Like some neglected part of him had learned to take whatever scraps of concern it could get and hold onto them before they disappeared.

Rick’s hand was still wrapped loosely around his forearm, thumb pressed against the inside of his wrist as though he were checking his pulse even though there was no real reason to.

Morty noticed every second it stayed there.

He hated how much he wanted Rick to keep checking.

“Y’know,” Rick muttered, still staring at the readout, “for somebody who’s supposedly got a brain in there—” He finally looked up and tapped two fingers against Morty’s forehead. “—you sure don’t seem too interested in usin’ it.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, and I heard you the last six hundred times. Sorry doesn’t reset bones, Morty. It’s just a noise you make after you screw up so I’ll stop being pissed about it.”

“Then what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen, and maybe next time you look where you’re stepping.”

The resequencer beeped twice and went dark. Rick didn’t immediately let go of Morty’s arm. He turned it over once, checking the underside, his thumb dragging slowly across the newly healed skin like he didn’t quite trust what he was looking at.

Then, like he realized he was still doing it, he dropped Morty’s arm.

“There. Fixed. Again.” He set the resequencer down harder than necessary. “Cuff stays on for two days. Don’t take it off. Don’t get it wet. And don’t put anything stupid on it. And if you were about to ask whether you can—”

“I wasn’t gonna ask anything.”

Rick just rolled his eyes before grabbing some random items on the bench and tinkering with them, no longer interested in facing Morty. “Whatever. Go to bed.”

Morty slid off the workbench slowly, testing his weight, half-expecting his legs to feel as unsteady as the rest of his body did. 

But to his surprise they didn’t. It was just his chest that felt strange, tight and warm and a little too full, the way it always did after… this. After the too-careful hands and the too-loud complaining and Rick’s fingers lingering somewhere they didn’t need to.

He got two steps toward the door before Rick’s voice caught him.

“Hey.”

Rick still didn't face him, though he seemed to have put down the items he was holding in exchange to arms crossed over the front of his coat like he was cold; But the garage never really got that cold.

“What were you doin’ out there?”

The question came out slower than usual. Careful, almost. Like Rick had thought about asking it and still wasn’t sure how.

“I tripped.”

“Yeah I understand that much but…” The old man paused for a moment. His eyes stayed on the workbench. His jaw shifted once, then again, like he was chewing on whatever he actually wanted to say and couldn’t quite swallow it.

“You might not’ve seen me watching, but I was. I got eyes all over the place, Morty. Cameras, scanners, drones– fuck, half this garage could probably tell me what you had for breakfast if I asked it to.” He shrugged, like that made the whole thing sound ordinary. “I watched you just stand there. Just staring down that hole like you were trying to figure something out.”

Morty’s stomach dropped somewhere around his shoes. He hadn’t thought Rick had seen that part. He’d been sure, actually, that Rick hadn’t been looking at all, that was sort of the point, that was the whole reason he’d—

“I don’t know,” he said, which wasn’t a lie so much as it was the only piece of the truth small enough to hand over. “I just — I wasn’t thinkin’. I zoned out or somethin’.”

“You zoned out? Starin’ at a two-hundred-foot drop?”

“I guess.”

Rick’s jaw worked. For a second Morty thought he was going to push it, the way he’d pushed the resequencer readout, the way he pushed everything until it gave him an answer he could use.

But Rick just shook his head, short and sharp, like he was shaking something off rather than letting it go.

“Whatever. You’re a piece shit, Morty, don't forget that. And don’t fall in a hole again, and we’ll call it even.”

“…Okay.”

He made it to the door before Rick spoke again, quieter this time, low enough that Morty almost missed it.

“You’re not— you’re not gonna do that again. Right?”

Morty stood in the doorway with his back to him. His new skin still felt strange, too smooth, like it belonged to someone who hadn’t earned it yet.

“No, Rick,” he said. “I’m not gonna do that again.”

“Ok good because I'm not going to help you again for being stupid.” He said going back to tinkering with the stuff on his workbench.

He wasn’t sure, walking up the stairs with the cuff humming faint and warm around his wrist, whether that had been a lie.

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.

His room felt too quiet after the garage. It always did.

Morty sat on the edge of his bed and held his arm up in the dark, turning it slowly so the cuff caught what little light slipped through the blinds. 

 There was nothing left to see. No gash, no bruise, no proof, same as always… except this time there was the cuff, silver and warm and humming so faintly he could only feel it and not hear it, a small mechanical reminder strapped to his wrist that said someone thought this was worth fixing right.

He pressed two fingers against the inside of it, right where Rick’s thumb had been.

Morty didn’t know why that made something in his chest go warm and stupid and full, like he’d swallowed something too big for his throat. 

He didn’t try to examine it too closely. 

He’d learned, somewhere in the last few weeks, that examining it too closely made it go away faster, made it curdle into something closer to shame…

He shouldn’t feel good about this, this wasn’t a good thing to feel good about 

So instead he just let it sit there. Let himself have it, for a little while, before he had to think about what it meant that a busted wrist was the best thing that had happened to him all week.

He lay back and looked at the ceiling. At the water stain was still shaped like nothing.

He turned it over slowly, the same way he’d turned the thought over in his head, searching for an edge he could hold onto, something that would make it make sense.

He fell asleep with his hand still curled loosely around his wrist, fingers resting over the cuff like he was afraid it might disappear if he let go.

He dreamed about nothing at all.