Chapter Text
Morty went flailing out of bed, slamming his elbow four times in two seconds, and he really was going to kill Rick this time, it had to be like two AM. He twisted around already yelling and came up short, squinting at the silhouette framed by the yellow glowing portal.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Morty demanded, “you’re supposed to be in prison!”
“I broke out,” Evil Morty said, hand casually resting on an obnoxious holster that matched his stupid eyepatch.
“Well o-obviously—why the fuck are you here now? Think round two is gonna go your way?” Something in Evil Morty’s face should’ve tipped him off then, probably, but—well.
“No. I’m done fighting. I’m just going to win,” Evil Morty replied, and then grabbed Morty by the front of his shirt and shoved him through the portal. The instant they came through, somewhere cold and vaguely purple, Evil Morty tossed down a disc that popped itself helpfully out into a weird, sleek spaceship and then he hauled Morty up one handed and threw him bodily into the back seat of it.
They made something like twelve jumps in quick succession, the portals shooting out in front of the ship from where Evil Morty had jammed his portal gun into the console, before Morty got busy throwing his guts up all over himself and lost count.
He was distantly aware of flashing colors going by behind the glass roof, and the speed of the spaceship ramping up and up, but a horrible pounding had started in his head and it was all Morty could do to grab the armrests and keep conscious.
“Wh-Where are we going?” Morty managed, gritting his teeth.
Evil Morty’s face was serious and his voice was weirdly hollow. “Away,” was all he said.
“But I mean, are you like, kidnapping me? A-as revenge for Rick blowing up your base and sending you to jail?” Morty didn’t think it was all that great of a plan if he was. Rick could find him anywhere in infinite worlds and would probably enjoy the challenge of tracking him down more than really being annoyed by the whole thing.
Evil Morty didn’t answer, just pushed more buttons on the console and then did something to the controls that made a bunch of golden portals appear in front of them, nestled inside each other like a stack of china plates. He shot half a glance back at Morty and then took them roaring through it, spacetime bending and stretching out around them like a rubber band, the pressure of it pounding violently at Morty’s head before it broke loose and sent them snapping down hard. The earth came roaring up at them, glossy leaves coated in rain intermixed with big boulders and shallow lakes speeding by too fast to really see.
“Fuuuuuck, ohmygod ohmygod!”
“Shut up, I’m fixing it!”
‘Fixing it’ turned out to be yelling while yanking backwards on the central joystick and narrowly avoiding crashing into rocks and taking them way the fuck too fast through a narrow mountain pass and slamming the ship into a horrible crash at the base of a pockmarked cliff.
Mortly coughed weakly and sat up in the seat, glaring at the shape of Evil Morty’s body slumped over the console. Great. Fucking wonderful. This complete lunatic had crash-landed them in the middle of fucking nowhere, and all that shit he did with the portals meant it was going to take Rick a week to find them—and damn it his head really did hurt.
It felt really nice all of a sudden to just lay his face against the cool metal of the ship. Morty felt really hot for some reason, and nothing really made sense.
“Oh god you fucking idiot you can’t hold on in a crash landing? This is going to—fuck!” Morty felt himself being dragged up and out of the ship, and there was a white flash and something smelled really bad, like burning tires.
—
These sheets were really nice. Too nice for his own bed, Morty was pretty sure, but his head felt like it was full of marbles and it was better just to go back to sleep, Rick would wake him up if it was important.
“Oh good you’re awake,” Morty said, except he hadn’t moved his mouth, and that didn’t make sense anyway.
“I thought I was gonna have to do actual brain surgery on you or something, all that garbage in your head was wired halfway down your brain stem. God, he’s such a fucking narcissist.”
Morty still wasn’t sure how he was talking, but someone had just wiped a cool cloth across his head which was very nice, and just listening was way easier than trying to figure it out.
“I mean what if he died or something? One of these things could fritz out any day and you’d be totally fucked, it’s like he wanted to be the only one who could fix you.”
The hand absently petting Morty’s hair drew away, and the voice got angry. “But you like it that way. ‘Cus obviously he’s the greatest man in the universe so obviously he should be the one to fix you and who the fuck cares if you die anyway.”
There was a weird silence where nothing made sense and Morty thought maybe he should start getting nervous, but then the hand started petting him again and he went back to sleep after all.
—
The next time Morty woke up he got it immediately, in time to grab Evil Morty by the throat and slam him against the stone wall. For a second anyway, and then he was holding his ribs and gasping, staring up at Evil Morty from the floor.
“I think I liked it better when you were concussed,” Evil Morty said, so fucking casually that Morty started looking around for something to brain him with.
“I think I liked it better when you were in prison!”
“Really? I don’t.”
“Oh fuck you, this is still all about Rick, isn’t it? You can’t compete so instead you take away his toys, huh? Real fucking mature.”
Evil Morty straightened, looking like he might have actually meant it for once and said, “and that’s what you are? Rick’s toy?”
“Well you certainly act that way, getting me into your bullshit ‘cus it wasn’t enough to just, just—dangle Rick on a line, you had t-t-to drag him out in front of me too.” Morty had had plenty of time to stew on the whole Omega Device, blackmail, murder-your-family-forever thing and it seemed really fucking pathetic by now.
Evil Morty just stared at him. “I mean what are you really hoping to accomplish here? Y-you think you’ll rough me up and convince Rick to just come right out and fight you in wherever-the-fuck-we-are, and that will help? I thought your whole deal was fucking off.”
“That’s what I’m doing, moron.”
Actually now that Morty thought about it, where the hell were they? It had looked like Earth on the way in. Well, Earth when Rick was driving and it was mostly a green blur, but still. Morty didn’t think they had jumped a dozen portals at once just to end up on another Earth, Rick would’ve found them by now. He looked around the room, a small-ish square bedroom with no windows that was probably cut into the cliff face they’d pancaked into, good to know, but that didn’t help much with knowing what fucking dimension he was in.
“We’re on Earth,” Evil Morty said, obnoxiously. Morty could ask his questions himself, fuck you very much, and that wasn’t a real answer, so Morty just glared.
Evil Morty sighed and leaned against the wall. “Well, sort of.”
And now the fucking poser was going to make him ask, so he could explain the perfect genius of his plan in that grating voice.
“Fine,” Morty said, trying to make knives come out of his mouth spontaneously, “I’ll bite. Where are we and why hasn’t Rick found us?”
Evil Morty smirked at him and started in on it, even projected a helpful illustrated diagram out of his eyepatch. “The Ricks all think they’re so fucking smart with their Central Finite Playground but they never even looked at what they built. They just slammed the whole thing together out of bits of easy garbage and called it a day. It’s supposed to cordon off all the parts of infinity where Rick is the smartest being alive, cut them off from their lessers of themselves so he can play God—”
“Yeah, yeah I get it, Rick’s an asshole and he’s lazy and stupid; get to the point.” Fucking pompous dick.
That took some of the fucking smugness out of Evil Morty, finally, but he went on anyway, “but of course even a god can’t live forever. So he lined everything up, all the universes on the same timescale, where Rick is actually there to be the smartest thing ever, and slapped that cuff around infinity too, as a prerequisite.”
“Okay so w-what, we’re in a different time, great. I thought time travel was what got you locked up in the first place.” If he had fucked with time Morty was never going to shut up, Evil Morty was going to get busted again and Morty wanted to taste the look on his face when that fucker—
“No. I’m not Rick. I understand how to get what I want without making cheap-ass time stoppers. We’re technically still on the same timescale as Rick, just in a universe with a large time-well aberration near the center. Every time a new parallel dimension splits off here, it moves farther from the original well.” He paused to make sure Morty was following, moving the graphics on his stupid diagram.
“Y-you know I’m not a complete idiot. I keep up with Rick just f-fine even if I can’t do physics in my head.”
“And yet,” Evil Morty bit back, gesturing at Morty’s entire self before continuing meanly, stalking up to stand over Morty on the bed. “Basically, by daisy-chaining down a long iteration of splits, you can get further away from the unusually increased timespeed at origin, to places where despite the same amount of time having passed, the flow has gone slower.”
“I-I’m about ten seconds from remembering how to turn into a car,” Morty said, feeling caged in.
Evil Morty just leaned closer, “see what good that will do you in the early Miocene.”
Fuck. That was bad. Morty had never paid enough attention in school to know if it was dinosaur-bad or just regular no-electricity bad, but any time ending in -scene was a completely fucked place to be stuck in.
Evil Morty smiled, a real smile, and Morty felt himself slump. “There are no other humans here yet, there’s no Rick here to be the smartest man alive, this dimension isn’t on the Central Finite Curve, not in any way Rick is capable of viewing it. But the timescale matches perfectly, and Rick will be a god here someday, so it’s not off the Curve either. I’ll be impressed if he figures it out before he dies, honestly.”
Morty just looked at him for a while. Then he hung his head in his hands, and tried not to pray to Rick to find him faster, please god. He might as well have started beating his hands against the wall.
—
After the second time Morty nearly killed himself trying to activate literally any one of the mods Rick had forced on him he wiped his bloody nose and gave up, storming into the other room. The compound they were in wasn’t very big, and compared to the lair Evil Morty had been all hard about showing off, it was pretty disappointing. If he was going to be kidnapped and stuck somewhere, he definitely preferred the retro-futurism space shit to four stone rooms and exposed plumbing.
Evil Morty was tinkering around with the spaceship wreckage in a corner of the main chamber, walls half made of carved stone like the rest of the place and half dripping cavern outcroppings, with a big hole in the roof to let out smoke. It was cool, in a weird prehistoric way, and Morty would’ve liked to have been attempting to short out his brain in here, where the openings and trickling streams made for a nice cold breeze, but Evil Morty had monopolized the place and Morty couldn’t get within ten feet of him without trying to choke one of them to death with that fucking eyepatch.
“Alright. Just fucking t-tell me. Why can’t I activate any of the mods Rick gave me? I-I’ve used that distress beacon before, I know how to pull it up.” Morty paused, not actually sure that was true, and tried a guess to make up for it, “is it because there’s no electricity here or something?”
Evil Morty laughed at him. “There’s electricity everywhere, not just where people show up and catch it.”
“That is so not the point and y-you—”
Evil Morty cut him off in a cold, weirdly level voice. “I broke them. I used a targeted EMP on your seat in the ship the instant you got in, and then I pulled them all out of your head while I fixed the hole in your skull.”
Fuck.
He knew Rick would still find him, but if he didn’t have anything to go off of it might take longer than Morty wanted to spend with this fucking asshole.
“I am sorry by the way, it probably made the head injury worse.”
Morty spent half a second confused and then realized what that meant and resisted homicide for the eight thousandth time that day. “That—that pain in my head was you? I thought it was from all the portals! You asshole!”
“No, the force from that didn’t kick in until we went through a bunch all at once at the end. And I did leave all the body mods that didn’t use any external signal, even the saber-arm and those finger gun things, by the way.”
The saber-arm and finger guns popped out immediately, like he’d just needed to know he could do it, and then the feet and hand rockets he’d made Rick put in after seeing Evil Morty’s. “Oh. Uh–th-thanks?” Morty didn’t see what he was getting at, leaving him armed, even if he didn’t think Morty was a threat. “Why are you being, uh–”
“I’m not being nice, if that’s what you were about to say. All the structural weapons are routed in with your skeleton, I can’t get them out without breaking your bones and I don’t have the refining or tooling capabilities here to make you new a new one. Plus, I knew you were just going to keep trying to kill me, and fighting you with no weapons is more boring than hitting a tree with a stick.”
Morty clamped down on the urge to shoot everything he had at him at once, half caught-out and half afraid he’d lose and prove Evil Morty’s point, or worse, have to ask him to patch Morty up afterwards. This was humiliating enough already. He scrambled for something neutral to say and asked mildly about the spaceship. “A-are you going to be able to fix that after that explosion?”
Evil Morty got a look on his face like he was deciding how condescending to be, and then the edges of a smirk showed on his mouth and Morty knew that look, that fucker, and without really thinking about it he fired a volley at Evil Morty’s head.
It bounced stupidly a half-inch off the forcefield and then got absorbed into it. Evil Morty smiled at him again, that was getting really creepy, and laughed. “Oh finally, I thought you were gonna try that the instant you figured out the mods. You wanna take this outside? You don’t look too balanced on the jets yet and I kinda like this place.”
Fuck balance, fuck the cave, and fuck Evil Morty too really. Morty powered on the jets and slammed Evil Morty into the wall, shaking stone dust loose over them. Evil Morty tried to grapple with him but Morty wasn’t having it, and if he wanted to take this outside they would go outside.
They shot through the stone archway into the entrance room and straight out between the hanging vines into the valley where the base of the cliffs opened up. Morty paused for half a second to look around, he hadn’t been outside since he woke up. It didn’t look that weird to him, and the sun was setting behind the mountain pass at the opposite end, staining the whole valley kind of gold, so he missed it when Evil Morty slammed him into the dirt with a left hook. Morty blocked the next one on instinct and the energy saber thing popped out of his forearm conveniently, so he shoved back and managed to knock Eyepatch over there into the dirt himself. ‘Evil Morty’ was such fucking bullshit anyway, what did he know?
Enough, apparently. They traded maybe fifty more blows, back and forth, but it was obvious in about six that Evil Morty was just playing with him. He anticipated every single hit and came up with increasingly ridiculous moves to block them, like he was having fun showing off. He dodged the guns with a perfect backwards arc in the air, practically danced under the saber swings, and then actually twirled past Morty’s outstretched arm on a fly-by.
It was humiliating. And, okay, fine, he was a liability, Morty knew that. Rick had put in a thousand failsafes and threw armor on top of that, and sometimes armor on top of that. He had to blast Morty out of the line of fire ten times an adventure, and never let him forget it. But trying to keep up with Rick was so fucking impossible that Morty had mostly stopped trying. But this—losing to Evil Morty was like getting beat by Summer.
Morty was about to flag it in, at least that would be less embarrassing than the flashy showstopper he was sure was waiting for him, when he noticed Evil Morty going for another showy loop. It left his whole lower body open, and Morty managed to flip around at the last second and catch him across the leg with the saber. Evil Morty turned to try and meet the blow and check his injury at the same time and got twisted up in the air, turning his boot-rockets in different directions. He flailed into a partial spin and then crashed headfirst into the ground.
“Fuck you, fuck you! You think you’re better than me huh?” Morty was landing to stare at him, going almost drunk on victory, he was going to gloat so fucking much—
Evil Morty sat up like he’d been hit by a bus, all the fight gone out of him in a millisecond and Morty wasn’t going to feel bad he wasn’t, he’d won. That lasted until Evil Morty unblinkingly closed up the gash on his leg with a medical pop-out thing from his arm, stood up, and walked back to the cave without a word.
What the fuck was his deal, starting fights and then acting like he’d died when they ended? Actually, where did he get off doing any of this at all?
“W-what the hell man?” Morty asked, flying after him.
“I’m tired.” Evil Morty just walked past him into the cave, and then off to the side chamber he was using as a bedroom and lay down on the bed. Morty stared at him from the doorway, and stood there watching for like, half an hour as Evil Morty’s breathing settled down into sleep. Was this some kind of game? Evil Morty hadn’t tried to contact Rick, had actually taken out any ability for Morty to do it himself, it didn’t seem like he was going to offer a ransom. If the goal was just to toy with Rick as much as possible, why hadn’t he hurt Morty? Why the fuck had he nursed him back to health, left him with his weapons, and then gone to sleep in front of him? Why was he still here at all, when he could’ve left Morty to starve to death or be eaten by some prehistoric beast and fucked off?
It didn’t make any sense, and he kept standing there like an idiot, until he unwillingly got the idea. A horrible, gut-wrenching feeling like watching a planet get blown up moved Morty’s feet across the floor, back into the center room, and over to the pile of space crap Evil Morty had been messing with. He poked at it a little, and then a piece of the hull or something fell aside and there it was.
Morty picked it up gingerly, trying not to break it into any more pieces, and then set it gently on the floor in front of the pile. He tried to remember the last time they’d gotten stuck, he thought it had maybe taken Rick five or six days to get one going entirely, but they’d been on some freaky cyberpunk asteroid, and Rick had been able to buy most of what he’d been yelling about.
Morty did a little mental math, trying to make a scale to compare Rick’s genius to Evil Morty’s, their comparative speed of engineering or something, and then just gave up and cried. Even if Evil Morty was every bit as good as Rick, he couldn’t build a portal gun from scratch with stone-age tech in any reasonable amount of time.
He really was going to have to pray to Rick to find him faster.
—-
Morty successfully pretended he didn’t know about the horribly broken portal gun for all of two and a half days, pacing in circles around the cave and trying to figure out what the fuck he was going to do. No matter how big a game Evil Morty talked, Morty was sure Rick would find them eventually, and if it was before or after he fixed the portal gun didn’t really matter. Either Rick found them first and killed the fucker or Evil Morty got on with his plan, and that would lead Rick to them anyway.
Unfortunately, that left Morty with nothing to do but wait, so he resorted to toying with the few mods he could actually figure out to keep from dying of boredom. It turned out to be insanely easy to shoot yourself on accident though, so it wasn’t a particularly fun distraction.
For his part, Evil Morty hadn’t spoken any more than a few words, and hadn’t provoked Morty at all. He mostly just rested, and occasionally poked at the spaceship wreckage or went out of the cave for an hour-ish at a time, returning with the gathered plants he’d been using to make their weird food. When he left the fourth time, Morty tried to surreptitiously check on the portal gun, to see if he’d started fixing it, but it wasn’t with the rest of the stuff. Morty figured maybe he’d hidden it somewhere, and went sneaking around to go look. There weren’t a lot of places to put things, it had to be somewhere.
Morty didn’t find it in either side bedroom, or anywhere in the main chamber. He wasn’t really sure why he was looking in the first place, it’s not like he could do anything to help if he found it, but there was a low-level panic boiling in the back of his head, and it was either this or fight Evil Morty again. Or blow his head off with the gravity darts.
He ducked behind the rough curtain into the narrow hallway that served as a bathroom. It had a set of channels cut into the back wall, with cool water flowing through and draining away across the floor back toward the valley. Morty poked his head into the opening for the outflow, and stood up on his toes to peek at the niche above the top channel, but there was nothing there.
He wondered if there wasn’t some trick to it all—not just the missing gun, this whole fucking cave lair base thing. Evil Morty didn’t seem like a hippie type, there had to be an actual civilized lab or something somewhere, but Evil Morty hadn’t disappeared anywhere for a long enough period to prove it. Morty slid his hands along the channels, trying to find a trick lever or something. There was no fucking way that high-tech asshole was actually planning on camping out here forever, it had to be—Morty caught the outline of a door in the left wall, and after tracing his fingers around it, pushed the whole thing in.
A cloud of billowing steam hit him in the face, and Morty spent way too long panicking about dying of nerve gas before it cleared out and he got a good look. “Oh that motherfucker!” He wasn’t sure if it was better or worse than a secret lair, but at that point Morty had been deprived of anything decent for almost a week and he didn’t really feel he had a right to complain about the lack of tech.
Behind the door was a large natural cavern full of softly bubbling pools of clear, steaming hot water. Morty stripped immediately and almost threw himself into the nearest one, groaning out loud. He hadn’t realized how fucking cold he had been up to that point, but he felt warm now. All his muscles unwound and he relaxed, settling onto the smooth stones beneath him, enjoying the just-shy-of-scalding water and the humid air. Morty thought maybe he’d start crying it was so good.
“I see you found the hot springs.”
Morty jerked around and tried to sink as low as he could while also yelling at Evil Morty, who had apparently come in at some point and was watching him while leaning against the wall. “You asshole, were you ever even planning on telling me about these?!”
Evil Morty huffed a broken laugh. “Were you ever planning on telling me you found the broken portal gun?”
Morty felt his face get hot. “I–I didn’t think–”
“Obviously.”
“Fuck you! What the fuck is your problem dude? Why are you being so–” Morty waved his hands around to indicate this whole fucking thing, “what’s going on?”
Evil Morty’s face stilled, and he dropped his arms. He just looked at Morty for a second, and then sighed. “I guess there’s no point just watching you freak out anymore,” he said, and then started taking off his own clothes.
“Whoa, w-what are–”
“Dude it’s not like it’s anything you haven’t seen before, I’m you.”
And okay, that was technically true, but Morty still didn’t know what the fuck Evil Morty’s deal was and he didn’t exactly want to sit next to him naked. Morty edged away awkwardly as Evil Morty splashed down into the pool and leaned back, spreading his arms out across the ledge behind him and breathing out through his nose, long and slow.
“Uh, hello? You were going to explain, finally.”
“It should be pretty obvious if you think about it.”
Morty had thought about it, has been thinking about it the whole time, it didn’t make any sense. “What’s obvious?”
Evil Morty cracked his eye open and just looked at him again, eyebrow cocked like he was so much better than Morty and Morty was gum on the bottom of the universe’s shoe. “The only thing th-that’s obvious is that you crash landed us here and now have no way of leaving.”
“Yep, that’s pretty much it,” Evil Morty said, casually.
“W-w-what the fuck? That’s not an explanation.”
“Sure it is,” Evil Morty shrugged, “you just don’t want it to make sense. It’s okay, I expected it.”
“Fuck you. Y-you think being patronizing makes you better than me. It doesn’t. If you’re not gonna tell me your plan then fine. Rick will be here soon enough anyway.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. I meant what I said about this place being undetectable.”
Morty looked around a bit and thought about that. Not the undetectable thing, he was sure Evil Morty’s explanation about the curve thing was real enough but, so what? Either Rick would crack it soon or he wouldn’t. But about this place—it was, it was weird.
Even with machines or whatever it had probably taken a long time to cut the chambers out of the rock, and do the plumbing that was looping around the room. And to just find it, Morty guessed. This place was in like, the backwoods of the backwoods of the middle of nowhere. And apparently displaced in time.
“H-how long ago did you build this place?”
Evil Morty smiled a little, in a way that made Morty distinctly uncomfortable. “A long time ago.”
“W-why here? If this is as good a hidey-hole as you say, why are you spending it on me? You know this’ll bring Rick down on your head.”
Evil Morty shrugged carelessly, “if he finds us he finds us, I’m not really worried about it.”
Morty didn’t like agreeing with him, and his callousness about Rick made him nervous. He turned away to study the wall, kicking his feet back and forth a little. “Well w-what about the portal gun? Aren’t you at least worried about being stuck here?”
Evil Morty leaned back again, smirked and pulled one knee up into the ledge he was sitting on. “No, this place is built for long-term use. The water runs year-round, the hot springs keep it warm enough in winter, and there’s plenty of forage that keeps well.”
Oh my fucking God he was so fucking evasive. Morty wanted to throttle him. “C-c-can’t you ever just answer a question?”
“You can’t seriously be this stupid. I wasn’t.”
“This doesn’t make any sense! You’re not ransoming me to Rick, y-y-you’re not using me for weird creepy science testing—as far as I can tell—or for bait, or to torture me, o-or anything else! The only possible way you’re getting what you want out of this is if all you wanted was to take me away from Rick for a while!”
Evil Morty cocked his head, smug as fuck.
“What?! That’s it? W-w-what the fuck good does that do? You’re risking Rick killing you to just—steal his shit? Temporarily?”
Evil Morty scoffed, “of fucking course you think about it like that. I didn’t steal you from Rick, I don’t own you.”
“R-R-Rick doesn’t own me.”
Evil Morty raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “I know that! You think I don’t know that? You’re the one who called yourself his toy.”
“You fucking are jealous! I knew it!”
“Of you? Because fucking Rick picked you over me?”
“Uh yeah, obviously.” It was completely obvious. The fucker had kicked around in time prison stewing, realized he’d lost, and decided to just break him and Rick apart as revenge. It was stupid and petty and mostly pointless. Morty wondered if he hadn’t gone a little insane in lockup. Something about him was off, even for fucking Evil Morty.
He hadn’t answered, was just sitting there with his face completely blank. Morty waited to see if he was going to say anything for a long time. “Uh, dude?”
Evil Morty climbed up out of the pool and walked back to pick up his clothes. “Close the door behind you when you’re done,” was all he said before leaving and pulling the door shut. It made a low scraping noise that echoed weirdly in the chamber and slowly disappeared into the bubbling soundscape.
What the fuck?
—
Rick got like this occasionally, but it was fucking weird seeing it on Evil Morty, on himself. Also, Rick usually just ended up drinking more than normal and disappearing, so Morty didn’t actually have to watch up close. This was unsettling.
Evil Morty seemed to have vanished somewhere inside himself. Somehow he’d gotten more boring. He slept all the time, literally only getting up to go to the bathroom or cook the weird grain porridge they ate twice a day. Morty had no idea what to do, either with himself or about Evil Morty’s apparent depression. I mean what the fuck was there to do?
Morty had soaked in the hot springs, explored the entire extent of the caverns where they poured from, taught himself to fly loops and turns with the rockets (not as hard as it seemed, but he was bruised pretty horribly from slamming into the walls), figured out how to bounce pebbles off the walls and shoot them out the air (hard, but cool when you didn’t catch ricochet in the face), fucked around with the broken spaceship (just burned out scrap metal, Evil Morty must’ve stashed the wiring and computer bits somewhere with the fucking gun), organized the stores in the entrance room (boring, mostly stone tools and plants in various stages of drying and processing), counted the stalagmites and stalactites in the central chamber (one hundred and twelve and sixty two, but he didn’t know which was which), made a thousand bad guesses about how long it would take Rick to show up (they kept trending to ‘in an hour’ which was a bad way down), and intermittently tried (and failed) to activate some secret failsafe emergency beacon that Evil Morty hadn’t disabled. So now he was confused, annoyed, very carefully not scared, pissed off, hungry, alone except for his suicidal evil twin, and fucking bored out of his skull.
Morty wanted to go outside, but he didn’t have any fucking clue what was out there and he didn’t really feel like running into a fifty ton dinosaur or a pack of giant scorpions or something. Although, he wouldn’t be completely useless against them, probably. He’d gotten okay at aiming and dealing with the recoil on his various projectiles, and he could just fly away from anything too bad. Unless it also flew, but Morty thought he could evade well enough. Maybe.
The only real issue was that he didn’t have any way to block consistently, at least nothing he remembered how to work. There was some kind of basic armor in his skin (it deflected everything but his lasers and the sticky gravity dart things, and it blocked the explosions from those once they went off), but he didn’t think it would stop him from dying if he got stepped on by like, a wooly mammoth—or if he fell off a cliff or got stuck in an avalanche.
He couldn’t remember if there was anything else, he had vague memories of a forcefield or something, but Rick had put so much shit in him. Eventually Morty had gotten sick of his body doing random bullshit without his permission and told Rick to quit using him as a guinea pig, but he knew Rick was still fucking with him in his sleep. He wasn’t going to ask Evil Morty to explain his own body to him, but he couldn’t figure it out himself.
Morty sighed and banged his head back against the wall, staring across the open cavern to the curtain half-obscuring Evil Morty’s bedroom. The fucking lump hadn’t moved in eight hours, which Morty knew because he’d been sitting there watching him doing nothing for eight hours.
Morty considered meditating and trying to feel the mods out that way somehow, or maybe going to soak again, but he’d done that yesterday and it took too long to dry off without towels anyway. He gave up the vigil. “Hey f-fuckhead, a-are you awake in there? I’m getting kind of hungry out here.” Morty hoped to god he would get up, yell back, shoot him, do anything, and also maybe make something that wasn’t effectively gruel for dinner.
The sideways lump under the blanket that was Evil Morty turned to face the ceiling. “I’m awake. If you want to eat you can make it yourself. You’ve seen me do it enough times.”
“N-no dude! C’mon I-I don’t want to eat that stuff anymore, what were those plants you were getting before? I-I’d even take a salad over more weird oatmeal.”
“It’s not oatmeal, there are no real crops here. I told you, no people yet.” Evil Morty said, and continued staring at the ceiling like he didn’t really care if—if anything really. Morty had been trying for nice but fuck him anyway, he obviously had enough energy to be a dick, he could take it.
“D-Do you have to be so fucking, fucking—pedantic all the time?” Morty asked. He thought about tacking on the obvious ‘like Rick,’ but the last mention of Rick had been what fucked him up to begin with. He knew when not to poke the bear.
“It’s not pedantic to want to understand things. If you understood where we were you wouldn’t be too scared to go outside.”
Morty glared across the cave at him harder. “Y-y-you haven’t told me anything! How am I s-supposed to know how dangerous it is out there?!”
Evil Morty sighed. “That’s… fair I guess. But you could’ve just asked, you know. I never said I was going to keep anything from you, you’re the one acting like you need permission to speak.”
Morty felt himself getting hot and embarrassed but fuck that, he was just doing the bit he was meant to be doing here. “Y-y-you kidnapped me! How am I supposed to be acting?”
Evil Morty replied in that same, smooth, ‘I don’t really care fuck you’ tone Morty hated. “However you want. I mean, you could’ve flown halfway around the planet by now instead of fucking around in here doing… whatever.”
Fucking pot calling the kettle lazy. Whatever. Morty stood up and stalked over to the entrance of Evil Morty’s room. “And get killed by a, a fucking brontosaurus or a weird e-elephant or get s-stuck in a poison lake or something, yeah right.”
He’d bet Evil Morty would fucking love that. Then he wouldn’t even be lying to Rick when he said it wasn’t his fault Morty was dead.
It wouldn’t stop Rick from killing Evil Morty anyway, but it would make Morty a fucking idiot who died by being stupid. Not ideal.
Evil Morty somehow screamed bemusement without moving his face. “The drift here makes the equivalent time around 18 million years ago. That’s not actually that long in the grand scheme of things.” He shrugged a little, and then sat up, leaning back on the headboard and glancing over Morty with his one stupid eye. “There’s no dinosaurs, or anything like them really, except crocodiles. It’s pretty much the same as you’re used to, just the animals are bigger and kinda weird looking.”
“Oh.” Morty squirmed a little, embarrassed. He could definitely handle himself then, with the mods and weapons. And flying away. He could leave right now. Evil Morty kept talking though, so he listened.
“I mean, there’s like, some pretty scary pig-things, and these fucked up dogs, and there are weird elephants, but they mostly leave you alone. Oh, and the saber-tooth cat things. I don’t think they’re technically ‘real’ saber-toothed cats but they’re mean enough to count. The horses are cool though.”
Morty was kind of surprised Evil Morty was actually talking to him, and even sounded a little engaged, but he swallowed that and forged ahead. He had started this, and beggars on the verge of inactivity-induced psychosis can’t be choosers, so Morty asked, tentatively:
“Horses?”