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My name is Rick Sanchez.
An air vent opened up somewhere. Maybe it was miles below him. Distance seemed relative here.
I'm from dimension C-137.
The rhythmic, then suppressed gasps of inmates soon was filling the air. The prisoners who hadn't been reduced to vegetables with skin turned to each other, sharing foreboding looks. Guess it was time for their daily rounds of nutrient supplements.
I have a daughter named Beth, who married an idiot named Jerry.
Now, someone was gasping to his right. Damn, he thought he'd have a few more moments of solitude before he was poked like a pincushion.
I have two grandkids, Summer and Morty.
The next time Rick Sanchez looked up, the drones were coming down the rows of inmates in maximum security. One stopped right in front of him. They were a shiny black chrome, spherical, and had several appendages for various duties. One was raised up and scanned the exposed inside of his forearm, looking for the correct space to insert the supplements. Rick barely had any time to brace himself before a needle was jabbed into a vein and a burst of white hot adrenaline rushed through him. It was gone in a matter of seconds, leaving his thin frame wracked, and Rick found himself glaring at the drone as it hovered away for a new prisoner to take care of.
That specific drone buzzed from his wall of prison cubes to the one across from it. Rick's eyes darted back and forth, quietly observing those who'd been strapped and sentenced to the same fate as he had. The maximum security prison was lined end to end with hundreds of thousands of prisoners packed tightly like cans of processed food and shelved in aisles that went up and down for who knew how long. Prisoners surrounded Rick on all sides and went down and down and down. His specific wall was facing another group of inmates and separated by a drop so deep that Rick wasn't sure if it even had a bottom. It must've though, because the prison cubes that contained prisoners kept going down until they were swallowed by the darkness. Rick heard noises from the depths of the abyss before: pleas and prayers for mercy. Distance was relative; they could have been several rows or several miles below him, all pressed up by the never-ending black.
He tried to enjoy the lights above him and not worry about it too much.
If Rick had learned anything about the Federation in his time here, it was that they had a very systematic way of doing things. They didn't like mess, they didn't like free will, and they definitely didn't like the idea of social communication. Words were seeds, after all; it only takes a few whispers and suddenly you have a whole galactic resistance to deal with that would make the rebels in Star Wars blush. Rick's handlers that led him to his prison cube were the last time he'd seen any Gromflomites face to face. In their stead, they sent drones to serve as active guards. Floating around, constantly buzzing like flies over and under and all around Rick's head. If one thing was a hair out of place, a reaction from that pesky little free will thing, and a drone would be on your ass faster than you could utter the words "I'm sorry". Talking, trying to break free, even sleeping too long—all prohibited. But there were always flaws in the picture. The drones broke down easily, sometimes just falling straight down into the abyss before him and never to be heard from again. The absence of words was soon filled with the various sparking, clanking, and humming from broken drones desperately trying to make it to the repair stations before they met a similar fate.
Pathetic, really. Rick had built better drones with a toaster, five bobby pins, and the grease off his left elbow. But he couldn't anymore; not when he was trapped in some Federation prison light years away from his home and family. Strapped onto a wall and lined up with thousands of other aliens like they were cereal boxes on a grocery store shelf.
The place where the needle was inserted into his arm was starting to itch. Rick gritted his teeth and endured it like he'd done for the last several days, all previous efforts to scratch at it in vain. Or was it weeks? Months? A year, perhaps? Hell, he'd never know. Time was relative here, too; it always moved but never seemed to. Caught it some perpetual suspension.
The thing that ticked him off the most about the whole situation was just the complete uncertainty of it all. Rick hated a lot of things, but he despised being so uncertain all the time. Not knowing when his next round of supplements would come. Not knowing the next time he'd get interrogated. Not even knowing the fucking day. He inferred pretty quickly that that was the point. Try to get the prisoners as confused and defeated as possible. Let them rot themselves out until they were nothing but hollow chambers where life once had existed.
Vegetables with skin was definitely an accurate term here. Rick, looking to the cellmates across the expanse, noticed how a few of them had gone limp and unresponsive. When the drones came around and poked them with their daily supplements, they just flopped uselessly like dead fish. But they weren't dead—not in body, at least. Broken was, again, the more accurate term. The Federation would never be the cause of someone's death in a physical sense; they held themselves too high for that. They thought killing lesser species was a mercy, but terrorists were another story. They couldn't be inhumane, not too much. Let themselves get hung on their own noose was the idea, then sweep in and clean it up, no mess involved, the blood on the back of their hands so they'd never have to reveal it when they showed their palms to rest of the universe.
When prisoners had met their ends, be it from death or from fragmented states of mind, the Federation decided that the best way to dispose of them would be the simple way: gravity. An option, in Rick's mind, that was the coward's choice. Whoever was the mastermind behind this system would press a button and the person was disposed of. The bindings around their neck and wrists and ankles would release and they would just fall. Plummet into the darkness. Rick had seen it a few times and his gut still clenched when he pictured it.
Clean. Harmless. Simple.
Just don't think about it.
Ha. Easier said than done.
With no stimulation of the body, that left stimulation of the mind as Rick's sole option. There was a reason he locked that thing up and threw away the key time and time again over the past several decades. Keeping all the shit he'd seen at bay was a job that could only be accomplished with copious amounts of alcohol. It was just easier to stuff all your demons down under an ocean of liquor and surround it with a wall of cynicism like it was some creature that needed to be contained. Of course, that was made all the harder in maximum security—apparently ethanol wasn't on the Federation's list of required supplements.
Going cold turkey had been interesting, to say the least. Almost like one last experiment, one final hurrah. Rick couldn't remember the last time he'd gone so long without a drink. Twenty years, probably, if he thought long and hard about it. A part of him knew that one of the reasons he kept drinking was because he was terrified of what would happen should he stop, and needless to say, Rick wasn't let down.
First came the headaches, which in and of themselves were easy enough to endure. A splitting pain between the eyes was hardly the worst thing he'd endured in his life; years and years of hangovers had let him built up tolerance.
But when he started to hear the voices, that was when things went downhill.
They pooled together, echoing through the prison like wind chimes, their only purpose to cause him misery. Beth, Morty, Summer, Birdperson, Squanchy. Others he didn't know and never would. Ghosts of his past or some bullshit like that. He heard them all, sometimes at once, others at various times, all of them screaming. They were sorrowful, mournful, furious, terrified, pained, tortured. They knocked and bounced around in his skull, desperate to spill out into the air.
The hallucinations brought more of the same, and none of them were pleasant. False scenes quickly dominated his hours, his days, even his dreams. Darkness bombarded Rick's vision, showing plenty of scenarios he never wanted to see, scenarios he never even thought he'd be scared of. Summer getting torn apart by aliens. Squanchy getting riddled with bullets. Beth shuddering and crying, bottles of wine littering the space around her.
Birdperson getting shot, over and over and over and over.
Morty lying on the ground, dead. Guts hanging out, eyes open and glassy and wide, the final traces of words on his lips that were never spoken. A cry for help, a plea for his grandfather to save him. And Rick would try, but he was always held back, restrained against a wall like the prisoner he was. He might have yelled out in his mind as tried to twist free. It did nothing, however, because he was still stuck for the rest of his days, trapped here in some fucking prison.
It came to a point where he was happy to be interrogated if it meant that he actually got some form of relief from the fucking hallucinations. They'd come in carrier ships and approach his prison cube, lowering it off the wall and carrying it to one of the interrogation chambers where he was dropped in and left there. Sometimes, an eternity would pass before they'd start to try and break him. The Federation sent drones, cyborgs, androids, that sort of thing. But never people. Instead, questions were demanded through an intercom. Where was the council of Ricks? What were the materials that made up his portal gun? Who was still in the rebellion and what were they planning?
If they would bother to send someone with an actual body, then maybe Rick would feel obliged to answer, so he kept his stony silence throughout it all. It was the only form of entertainment that he managed to get for a while, listening to the person on the other end of that microphone get increasingly more frustrated with each passing question he refused to answer.
It didn't matter anyway. Rick was sure that the Federation was still going to torture him even if he spilled every dirty secret he'd accumulated over the past forty years. He just hoped that the experiences had been fucking cathartic enough for the lot of them.
Through it all, through the interrogations and the torture and the withdrawals and the endless, endless feeling of bleakness his surroundings had to offer, Rick stubbornly clung to life, a fucking tick in the Federation's furry ass. His body had grown frail and brittle from disuse, so much so that standing would probably snap his spine in two, and that was a best case scenario. There wasn't really a point anymore, was there? But Rick Sanchez was nothing if not a spiteful piece of shit. The longer he kept himself alive, the longer he could be the most annoying thorn in the Federation's side.
And the longer his family would be safe.
That thought would pop up occasionally, but Rick would shove it back down each time, because that was the worst memory of all. Each thought, each urge to speak, was always countered by one truth that he knew in this God-forsaken place; the Federation lies.
A loud hum was starting to fill the air, and a few drones began to scatter. Huh, speak of the devil.
The transport ship approached Rick's prison cube as if approaching a wild animal penned in it's cage, sliding its prongs into the sides to unhook him off the wall, and off they went.
The process was the same. Rick would be dragged through the prison only able to see the retreating path as they weaved their way in and out of the rows of prisoners. The path returned them to the front of the maximum security section, he inferred pretty quickly, but never back through it. Instead, the ship would descend, bringing his prison cube into a small box through the retractable roof that would shut as soon as he was in place, leaving him in a perpetual darkness.
When the fluorescents were turned on above him, that was when he knew they were coming. A red tint in them would cast an eerie light over the floor, the TV monitor and the lone table before him. And he'd sit. And wait. Preparing himself for another hour of the universe's most annoying fan boys.
The door opened after a while and, much to Rick's surprise, a woman stepped inside his holding cell. She looked human enough, mid forties maybe, dressed business formal with her long pencil skirt and her thin blazer and her graying brown hair. Rick's brain buzzed with confusion until he remembered Summer's fucking narc friend who'd posed as a ditzy teenage girl. Seemed more and more likely the Federation had seeds planted on Earth long before the wedding fiasco.
"Mr. Sanchez, I presume?" her voice was light and airy, but there was still an edge to it. A sharpness that threatened worse things than she was promising. "I've been eager to meet you face to face. You're quite the talk among the higher ups."
Rick furrowed his brows and held his tongue as the woman placed a briefcase on the table and drew out some files. "Not much of a talker today, Mr. Sanchez?" she teased him. In retrospect, it sounded more like a taunt. "That's fine. I'm sure that after our session, you'll have more than enough to say."
Rick couldn't help but quirk an eyebrow. The Federation woman laughed.
Don't worry, Mr. Sanchez, it's nothing like that," she assured him, her voice full of anticipation. From her briefcase, she produced a tape. "This is footage we've gathered recently that may seem to concern you," her smile was wide. Rick could count each of her disgustingly white teeth. She pushed the tape into the TV monitor, perhaps a little too eagerly. "Let's watch."
The Federation agent turned on the screen to reveal a snowy landscape. Dead Gromflomites lay all around, some of whom were still twitching, and they were all bleeding so heavily that the snow could have fallen blue instead of white. In the background, there was a small log cabin that seemed eerily familiar to Rick, though for the life of him he couldn't put his finger on it.
"We recorded this after an attack on our scouting ships. They were tracking someone when we found some peculiar footage," came the woman's explanation. With a swipe of her hand, the surveillance began to play.
The door opened promptly and a figure stepped out. It was wearing mostly black, with a heavy coat and thick boots. The figure hesitated for a second, but recovered enough to hop off the porch to the gruesome scene before them. They bent down and picked up a fallen laser rifle. When they turned to pick up another one nearby, Rick caught a sight of deep red hair tucked into a ponytail, and his heart did a somersault in his chest.
"Your granddaughter, right?" the Federation woman pressed on, sounding like she was barely keeping a hold on her giddiness. "We found her here in what you call Colorado, with another wanted fugitive and what appears to be her younger sibling. We're still confirming this, however."
Son of a bitch, Summer, what the hell had you and Morty gotten yourselves roped into? Despite his irritations, Rick kept his mouth shut and his face even, wondering where this little interrogation was going.
With a shrug, the agent waved her hand again and the recordings took on a new scene. The log cabin had now been blasted with gunfire and the small windows were shattered. A surge of Gromflomites were converging on the house, ready to seize it. There was no sound in the video, so Rick let his mind fill in the quiet. A gun poked its way through one of the shattered windows and fired a few shots. One or two Gromflomites fell but they forced the door open in the end. They dragged a man out, kicking and screaming mutely, looking like he was still ready to put up a fight.
One of the Gromflomites raised it's claws in a signal.
And then the house was on fire.
Rick didn't see what fired or how much. He guessed he just blocked it out, maybe he turned away. But suddenly the cabin was obliterated, leaving nothing but a pile of toothpicks and a pitiful campfire. Someone must've been screaming, probably the man they dragged out. His mouth was opening wordlessly and he was trying to break free but the Federation's goons had a tight hold on him. The Gromflomites raised their arms and weapons in victory. Rick felt the color slowly drain from his face.
"Mr. Sanchez, I'm sorry to report," the Federation agent didn't sound sorry at all. "but your grandchildren didn't survive the blast."
It was like someone had shot Rick in the stomach again.
"We recovered their bodies after the fires had died."
The Federation lies.
"We've sent reports and apologies to Mr. and Mrs. Smith."
The Federation lies.
"We offer our sincerest condolences."
The Federation always fucking lies.
"You think I give a shit?" Rick snapped after a moment, stopping the Federation bitch dead in her words.
"I…I'm sorry?"
She blinked; through all the whirlwinds of turmoil going through his mind, Rick felt that tiny, distinct prick of satisfaction. "I said, do you think I give a shit?" he repeated. "All my grandchildren were to me were fucking useless pains in my ass, one of them too bitchy to take anything the way it was and the other too dumb to realize that everything we did could have, would have, and should have resulted in his death. God forbid a man could get some fucking peace without two worthless teenagers tailing around behind me like they were lost fucking puppies. It was only a matter of time before they got themselves killed and the only thing I regret is that I wasn't there to see it happen and laugh when the dust that originally was their sorry asses got blown into the wind. So if you think I give a shit, then you're going to have to try a lot harder. Maybe find something I actually care about."
Each word was squeezed out of Rick by force. Conflicting emotions clashed in his mind, those of false bitterness and very, very real grief, and for a moment he thought that somehow they had gotten mixed up on his face. The expression he gave the Federation bitch must've been the right one, however, because there was no mistaking her look of pure revulsion. "You…but you take your grandson with you to hide your brain waves from us," she countered, voice quivering with uncertainty. "You're telling us you didn't make any emotional attachment to your grandson?"
Weakest rebuttal ever. Rick would have laughed in the face of devastation, but he wasn't in the mood to entertain her anymore. "This isn't biology; I didn't imprint on the fucking kid. He is a tool. You said it yourself. The boy is and always will…always would have been a human shield. Why else do you think I dragged him along? I'll tell you why; so other beasts would have something to chew on while I escaped. Ever think of that?"
The expression on her face said it all. She looked so disgusted with Rick that she turned around and practically flew out of the room, slamming the door behind her, leaving Rick strangling on his own thoughts and fears.
His eyes flew over to the small camera in the upper corners. The green light was blinking down at him, as if it too were watching him curiously. Those fuckers were still monitoring his every move, waiting to see if he was going to break down. Rick's fingers curled into his palms and out again, an effort to calm himself down again until he could be placed back on his row where he could think in solitude.
The Federation bitch entered his room once a few minutes had passed, desperately trying to recompose herself. She tucked a graying piece of hair behind her ears and gave him a hard stare. "You're a monster, Mr. Sanchez," she told him, sounding choked up.
Tell me something I don't know. "Bite me" he spat.
And then the roof was opening again. The sound of a carrier ship filled the space around them, severing the connection. With a metallic clang, Rick Sanchez began to ascend back into the air. He held the gaze of the Federation bitch the entire way out until the roof closed before him. Only when he was in the privacy of his own thoughts would he allow himself to close his eyes and reflect.
The way back was over with way sooner than he'd expected. It wasn't long before he was plugged back into his place on the wall, listening as the carrier ship zoomed away. Pretty soon, he was wrapped up once more in silence, and Rick allowed himself a moment of respite. To breathe and collect himself. And with it, the weight of the situation came crashing back down until he thought his shoulders were going to snap.
They were dead.
They were dead.
God fucking damnit, they were both fucking dead. Both of his dumb, stupid grandkids were dead because of the fucking Federation. And here he was, powerless to intervene through the whole thing. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, oh fuck.
Tap tap tap tap.
Rick gritted his teeth. He wished that this annoying sound, whatever the hell it was, would stop. He wanted noise, true, but Rick yearned for conversation. Real human interaction. Not white noise that was akin to static.
Tap tap tap tap.
There it was again. A tap, a drag, three more taps, another drag. There was a sort of rhythm to it, almost like…
Tap tap tap tap.
Shit.
In a flash, the gears of his head began to creak again, sparks of stimulation creating coherent thoughts for the first time in months. Rick tried to recall everything he knew about Morse Code. The memories were dusted, a little faded perhaps, but he could work with it. He waited for the rhythm to start up again, and tried to piece each letter together.
R…I…C…K…Rick.
Huh. Easy enough. At least Rick knew that the message was for him.
There was very little room for Rick to move, aside from his hands, fingers, and a small space for the neck. Rick could only twist so far, but that didn't stop him from giving the walls a quick glance around. The sounds seemed to be coming from his right, just across from him. He scanned the walls intently, trying to see who would know him. He found that while he recognized most of the species here, he couldn't pin down any single being that he knew personally. But on the third row above him, about seven inmates to the right, Rick finally saw his mystery conversational partner.
It was the man from the screen, the one the Gromflomites had dragged out. He was human, so he stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the different colors, limbs, and sizes of their alien prison mates. He was so far away that Rick couldn't really make out much of him, yet what he could see told him everything. Tall, maybe six foot five-ish at his best guess. A shadow of a former beard that had been shaved recently to keep up with prison regulations. He had cropped black hair that was quickly graying and a scar over the right cheek. General Weisenhurt, in the flesh, after almost ten years. Rick would have laughed had he found the situation even the slightest bit amusing (or if he could get away with it without attracting a drone). Instead, he tapped out a quick greeting.
Hola, General. Welcome to hell.
The silence of the prison made the sound of the taps carry over the entire gap. Rick was sure Weisenhurt could've been on the other side of the building and he still would have heard the code. To his right, the Lomthorpling groaned in subdued agony. To his left, the Jequilthian was breathing heavy with sleep. Rick paused for a moment, holding his breath to see if a drone was buzzing its way over, but nothing ever came.
There was another message coming through again. Rick strained as far as his bindings would allow, trying to pick out the coded words.
Heard you got yourself into a scrape. Feds finally caught up with you?
For the first time in a long time, and despite how distraught he felt, Rick nearly forced out a laugh. A lifetime's worth of memories began to well upwards. But he could sort through that pissshit later.
You could say that. Bureaucrats don't catch up with me unless I want them to.
Rick caught movement from Weisenhurt. A jerk of the head, it appeared to be. He wondered if the general was laughing, for some odd reason. Maybe it was the feeling of familiarity. That acknowledgement that you weren't really alone here anymore. For now, at least.
You're just as arrogant as you were ten years ago. How was Earth treating you?
Rick allowed himself a moment to stifle his pang of confusion. How did you know I came back?
A pause.
Kids told me.
Rick froze.
Weisenhurt's eyes burned into his head, waiting for the next response, but Rick refused to continue, allowing himself to process it. The memories were still far too fresh in his mind. He wondered briefly if when he slept he'd dream of snow and explosions and Gromflomites. Of Morty and Summer now charred and burned like bad barbeque. Probably be a welcome change, if he really thought about it.
In the absence of a response, Weisenhurt persisted. They spoke fondly of you. For some reason. They will be here soon.
Rick bowed his head. Too late, he tapped at last. Kids dead. Blown up when they found you.
The silence that followed was the most agonizing silence over Rick's time in prison. He thought he was going to go crazy over the course of those six seconds, lost within the void of whatever hellhole the Federation was trying to make him fall in.
And then…
Not dead.
His breath got caught in his throat. They're not dead. What was he saying? They're not dead. Had he heard that right? They're not dead. They were still out there trying to find him. They're not dead. They're not dead. They're not dead. His heart began to beat faster at the sound of it, so much so that Rick imagined the heart monitor against the back of his prison cube was getting quite the workout. He tapped out a flurry of question marks, demanding answers. Weisenhurt's response was long and drawn out.
Came four days before they got me. Sent them away next morning.
Where? Rick hoped that his desperation couldn't be conveyed through taps against a block of cold metal.
FR-
Fronulen galaxy. Not Rick's first choice of sending two inexperienced kids on the run from the Feds, but certainly not a bad one. That galaxy was home to several dozen collections of dwarf planets, most of them inhospitable or barren, or both. The Federation never set their sights there, mostly because they had nothing to offer and even less people to conquer. There was no fun in taking over planets they could never use.
-0284
FR-0284. Rick knew that one, and it took him a moment to recall which one it was. It must've been the moon off of FR-4839. Nothing but snow and ice twenty-four seven. No cities, no indigenous species. Nothing but a few colonized holes in the ground. It wasn't any colder than Minnesota at this time of year, so that was good. He'd holed up there himself for a few months when he was younger and fighting with the rebellion. Out reaches, too. The Federation would overturn every rock on the northern sides of the Vertion systems before they'd even think about looking there.
The tension that Rick felt building up in his shoulders dissipated, leaving him weaker than he'd felt in a long time. He would have said more had a drone not rounded the corner and turned its lights and sensors to his wall. He shot one more glance to Weisenhurt, considering tapping out a warning, but the general seemed to have sensed the danger for himself and kept his fingers and opinions to himself for once.
One side of him felt relief, the other dread. Morty and Summer were coming to rescue him like the dumbasses they were. They still had a long way to go, that was for sure. The mere fact that they found his old gunrunning partner (how they did was beyond Rick) was commendable enough. Well, he hoped they had their fun, because they were about to shoot straight to the top of the most wanted list faster than a Bin Laden-Zodiac Killer power couple.
The Federation lies.
Humph.
Fuck the Federation.
How desperate were the Galactic Federation, the biggest power in the whole universe, that they needed to outright lie and hit him in his sore spots in order to get information out of him? It was almost pitiful, in a way. In a sick, demented, respectable sort of way. Rick, the most notorious and elusive criminal of the Federation for the last thirty-some years, was in fucking prison and still the biggest pain in their ass. The Federation was so frantic to complete their plans that they'd go through hell and back to fabricate a story to say that his grandchildren were dead. Which was only thwarted by Morty's idiocy and Summer's stubbornness.
Mission fucking accomplished, right?
And this time, Rick Sanchez chuckled for real as he pressed up against the cold hard metal of his prison, a promise held behind a curled lip and a disgusted smile.
To be completely honest, this is the most fun I've had writing in a very long time. I love writing from Rick's perspective (I've done it before in some of my older fics), and this was a super fun chance to practice with character analysis. Unfortunately, this only makes me want to write more Rick chapters, and I probably will. I have some things in mind, but they'll be few and far between. I just thought this would be fitting given the recent few chapters.
Thanks for reading and please follow, fav, or review if you enjoyed!