AN: Reusing Surgeon Rick (and Lab Rick) again. Still not apologizing!
Warnings: a little angst/sad/hurt
Summary: Lab Rick and Surgeon Rick are faced with the mystery that is Dumb Rick. Will they unravel his past or will they find an even better solution?
Finally Ricktober, Bitches! – Chapter 11: Dumb Rick, Lab Rick, Surgeon Rick – Inrickable Idiocy
Surgeon Rick entered the facility of his colleague, longtime friend and (not-so-secret) admirer: Lab Rick.
"So, what's the big problem here?" he asked as he looked around for that tricky patient that the other had claimed he had so much trouble with.
Lab Rick grinned at seeing the fellow medic and led him in the backroom where his patient was seated on an examination table. It was a Rick.
"This is the one." Lab Rick only said.
The other medic lifted one side of his eyebrow. "A Rick?"
He looked over the old man whose features were a mirror image to his own.
However, his face looked slightly spaced out and a little confused as if he wasn't sure where he was or why he was here.
It was also interesting to note that this one wore only a simple t-shirt and pants, but no lab coat.
The strange Rick seemed to notice the newcomer. "H-hello. My n-n-name is Rick. Wuz-what is yours?" he babbled, sounding a bit childish and certainly not like a Rick.
"I got him from the higher ups and am supposed to "fix" him. Guy's as dumb as a Morty… if not even worse." Lab Rick answered the surgeon's question, both of them ignoring what the weirdo had just said.
"Whoa. How did that happen?" Surgeon Rick asked clearly having not expected that.
Dumb Ricks were extremely rare to come by after all.
"No idea, honestly. Couldn't find any brain damaged that would suggest an accident or something like that being the cause." Lab Rick stemmed his hands on his hips, looking utterly puzzled by the poor, dumb animal that was sitting on his examination table.
Surgeon Rick hummed and held his chin in one hand as he ran possible solutions to the problem through his head. "Maybe it was caused by a mental trauma. Have you tried memory recovery yet?"
"Of course I already tried that." The other medic replied indignantly. "Didn't do anything though. It's almost as if this one was always this dumb…"
"Hmm… well, that can't really be. I mean sure, they are some pretty dumb Ricks, but even a Doofus Rick is still intelligent enough to come up with the creation of portal gun technology. To think that there is a Rick who looks like he can't even tie his shoelaces on his own…"
"He can't." The other cut in again. "Trust me. I had to tie them for him."
Well, this looked bad.
"W-w-when can I go home again?" Dumb Rick asked, fiddling with his fingers nervously as he stared back and forth between the two doctors who looked at him as if was a mere lab rat and not a human being.
He didn't really like doctors. They were scary and made him hurt sometimes.
But the other men in the white clothes made him go here, so he really didn't have a choice. He still didn't like it though.
Both medics still continued to look at him, lost deep in thought.
"So, any bright ideas?" Lab Rick finally broke the silence.
"Hmm… let's run some tests first." Surgeon Rick suggested, obviously also at his wits' end.
With those words, poor Dumb Rick was forced to endure hours of tests and experiments. Somewhere in between all the needles being stuck into him and the weird and bitter medicine that he was forced to swallow, he had started to cry.
It still didn't make the two doctors stop what they were doing.
Dumb Rick just wanted to go home!
At home were nice people like that blonde woman. What was her name again? Um… uh… oh, right! Beth!
Beth was a doctor, too but unlike all the other doctors, she was really nice. He missed her.
He also missed that boy, Morty who looked so much like many other boys that he had seen in this place. They were also called Morty, he thought.
Maybe it was because they were also boys. Boys probably all looked like that and were all called Morty. Yeah, that must be it!
Many hours later, Surgeon Rick and Lab Rick collapsed on the chairs that stood in the room. They had run every test that they could think of and tried every method that they knew of to fix this Rick, but nothing.
They couldn't find anything wrong with him. Nothing that suggested what could have happened to him that caused him to become so degenerate.
It was as if he never had been a genius as Ricks usually were and was now only a senile old man, who needed elder care.
Dumb Rick had also collapsed from the exhaustion of what he had been put through as well as his constant crying and laid sleeping on the examination table.
"I've got no idea what to do with him." Surgeon Rick admitted. "He's got no brain damage, no trauma, amnesia or anything like that. He's just a plain idiot."
The doctors had to admit defeat now. There was no way to fix something that wasn't broken to begin with.
"Sorry, Lab, but I have no idea what we should do with him."
"Hmm…" Lab Rick was thinking over everything they had done and tried again while also scanning the papers that were strewn around the room on which the results were written down. "…maybe, I do have an idea…"
The surgeon perked up at that. "Well, let's hear it."
"You remember the scan we did on his brainwaves?" he only asked. "Take a look at this again."
He held up a paper on which a curvy line was drawn and Surgeon Rick looked over it. "Doesn't this pattern ring a bell to you?"
The surgeon looked closer, trying to figure out what his colleague meant before his eyes widened. "Isn't this-?!"
"Morty waves." Lab Rick finished for him. "His brainwaves are complementary and could be used as camouflage for another Rick."
That certainly wasn't the solution that they had been looking for, but it was an interesting revelation.
"So what about it?" Surgeon Rick asked, wanting to know what the other had in mind about this now.
"It's pretty simple." Lab Rick explained. "I'll hand him back to the Council with this information together with the idea to pass him off as a Morty…"
"…so they put him in the Morty reassignment program. And then he'll just get assigned to another Rick." The surgeon finished for him.
He wasn't entirely sure if a Rick would be really okay getting paired up with a dumb version of himself, but if it meant that they got him of their backs then he was all for it.
Dumb Rick meanwhile was slowly waking up again as the two doctors stood up and approached him.
"Can I go home yet?" he asked sleepily.
"Sure, you're gonna go home." Lab Rick answered him. "Tall Morty."
Dumb Rick smiled dumbly even though he didn't understand why the doctor called him Morty. After all, he wasn't a boy.
Unfortunately, he wasn't allowed to go home immediately. They made him visit a school, which was called Morty Academy.
"When can I go home?" he would ask every so often.
"Tall Morty, you get to go home once you graduated." The Teacher Rick, who was forced to take care of him, answered.
The answer was a bit upsetting, but he tried not to be because all he would need to do was to "gratutate" and then he would be able to go back home to the nice lady and the other nice people again.
"…okay." He said and hoped that it would be soon.
