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He turned on the cot for the millionth time in the span of the last twenty minutes.
Even in the complete darkness and surrounded by silence, Rick still couldn’t fall asleep. He lay there, staring at the dark ceiling above his head, seriously debating whether or not it was the time to start counting figurative sheep.
He’d shoved three melatonin pills down his throat an hour before and downed half a liter of vodka right after, yet still, he hadn’t passed out. If anything, everything was spinning, making the liquid in his stomach swirl dangerously and the dull ache in his temples aggravate.
He shifted to the side again, making eye contact with the glowing screen of the clock on the nightstand, right next to his flask and the portal gun. If what the device claimed was correct, it was about to be three twenty-six in the morning.
You’d been gone for almost ten hours now.
He genuinely wanted to smash his head against a wall hard enough to fall unconscious. As much as he’d rather perish than admit it, he was worried sick about you. You never did a runner on him. Usually, you were the one to try to communicate, somehow tearing through the facade of bullshit he’d put up.
Not this time. You were nowhere to be found—no system, no device, nobody could track you down. It was like you disappeared across the multiverse, off every radar, out of reach. He even tried to search outside the Central Finite Curve, but to no effect; all that he got was a message that read “error”, which only flared up his anger.
He knew he went too far. Rick had thrown an absolute fit over the stupidest shit, reducing you to the dirt he walked on. He should’ve stopped when your face fell, by the time you started backing out of the house which was unusual for you he should’ve already been apologizing. Instead, he screamed until his throat was raw, blinded by unexplainable rage.
It was already a bad sign that you didn’t argue with him. Usually, you’d be standing up for yourself, but not today. You didn’t say a word, just stared at him with immense disappointment before the front door shut behind you with a loud thud. He flipped you off then and locked himself in the garage, impulsively destroying a third of all of his new inventions.
Just thinking about it made his stomach perform somersaults, one after another, and once the bile reached his tongue Rick decided it was the time to try again.
He slid off the bed and made his way into the dimly lit garage, blindly searching for the pack of cigs in his lab coat when he caught something in the corner of his eye.
There you stood, all battered, covered in ash, blood and dirt, trembling and visibly half-dead. You looked like a tank ran you over. Silence stretched between you, tension growing thick.
Rick was seething, gritting his teeth and struggling to stand straight.
You, on the other hand, were too scared to move, too scared to breathe. In all honesty, you didn’t think you’d bump into him that night—you assumed he’d be dead asleep after getting completely wasted. You didn’t know if you should just stay quiet in a desperate hope your dad would just turn around and leave.
But judging by his stance and expression… no chance. No way in hell he was letting you leave now that you were back. You didn’t speak yet, but began to look around, trying to assess how many chances you had to somehow run away again. The last thing you wanted was to speak to him now.
“Oh, now you’re a-a-a goddamned ninja?” Rick slurred, voice razor-sharp despite the vodka haze. He didn’t move from the doorway—just lit another cigarette with shaky fingers, the flame trembling like his patience. “Disappear for-for ten hours, leave your tracker in a dumpster in dimension X-9—congratulations, by the way, scraping that chip out of your neck takes fucking talent—and then waltz b-back in here like you’re auditioning for Breaking Bad?”
Smoke curled around his face as he squinted at you; the kind of look that could melt steel and summon interdimensional warrants. You wanted to physically recoil.
“You think I sleep? Nah, I calculate orbital decay patterns and-and worry about my d-daughter getting snatched by some space cultists wh-while drinking myself into an early grave.” A bitter chuckle. “But hey! Congrats. You finally made your old man feel something besides boredom.”
He dragged one last time from the third of the cig that was left, then crushed it under his boot without breaking eye contact.
“Where the fuck were you?”
Oh, so he was pissed.
You groaned internally, wishing the concrete below your feet would just collapse and swallow you whole so you wouldn’t have to have this conversation.
With each new word leaving his lips the guilt blooming in your chest began to take over any other emotion that previously was there. The hoarse voice, shaky fingers, visible exhaustion; it was all your fault.
You ran a free hand through your hair, brushing them away from your face while bringing the other to your lips—you were trying to wipe the blood that dripped lazily from your nose onto your chin. You knew how risky it was to show him you were bleeding, there was a chance he’d take a sudden interest in the cause of your nosebleed and, what followed, find out what you’d been snorting when you were gone.
At that moment, you couldn’t care less. You were aching, terribly, but at least the high was gradually evaporating from your body.
“My tracker is with me,” you started, reaching into the back pocket of your jeans to take it out. You threw it unceremoniously across the garage, making it land on the workbench. “It’s just pretty impossible to detect that place.”
You fell silent for a moment, fighting to keep up your stoic facade, scratching your arm and smearing the fresh blood all over your skin. “I was just…” you hesitated. “It doesn’t matter where I was. I’m here now, but I gotta leave soon.”
“Bullshit.”
Rick snatched the tracker off the bench, flicking it on—screen flashing red: Signal Blocked, Quantum Cloaking Active. His fingers twitched.
“You-you think I can’t tr-trace a cloaked frequency? Hell, I-I reverse-engineered this piece of crap from a-a toaster in a backward savage dimension before breakfast!” he tossed it aside like trash. “You’re-you’re not back. You’re stalling.”
He stepped closer, close enough to notice the tremor in your hands, the smoke-stained guilt clinging to your voice. His guts twisted. Not rage now. Fear again. That damn quiet, gnawing thing that made him want to drink until reality blurred… or punch a hole through space time just to keep you safe.
You stared at him, letting him speak for now. You didn’t know what to say, anyway.
“You don’t-you don’t get to do this,” he said lowly, voice cracking like old vinyl. “You don’t g-get to van-vanish and come back half-dead with some… cryptic-ass martyr routine while I…” he cut himself off, jaw clenching so hard that his bones might’ve shattered.
“While you what?” you picked up immediately, voice careful.
If you were an android, and sometimes you truly doubted you were an actual human made from blood, flesh and bone, there’d be at least ten critical warnings flickering red in front of your eyes.
He didn’t answer. A beat passed, during which you tried to evade his glare and he stubbornly tried to meet your gaze. Then, he noticed something which made his brow curve downward.
“Where’s your jacket?” he tried to make his voice sound less attacking and more soft.
Because you weren’t wearing it—the one he’d stolen from a post-apocalyptic NATO bunker, just because you said black leather looked cool on motorcycles—and he knew damn well you never went anywhere without it unless something was seriously wrong.
You were fucked.
He noticed you didn’t have your jacket. You let out an entire litany of curses internally, repeated it backwards then recited a whole another stream of cursewords, all of it without making a sound. You just stood there, thoughts racing, staring at your dad like a deer in the headlights enveloped tightly by the smell of cigarette smoke and the metallic scent of blood.
“I didn’t take it with me when I was leaving,” you decided it was a necessary lie. “Why do you ask?”
“Dont play dumb,” Rick muttered, voice dropping to a venomous snarl. He stepped farther into the garage, his eyes narrowing. “You al-always wear that thing, it’s fucking bulletproof, you didn’t just for-forget it. So where is it, smartass?”
You physically didn’t have the heart to tell him you traded it for coke and k-lax.
“I’m not playing dumb,” you couldn’t even bring yourself to look at him.
Your gaze traced all of the discarded devices scattered on the workbench—did he try to track you down? Probably.
He wouldn’t be able to find you, not in a million years. And not because of the Quantum Cloaking feature you installed on your tracker a while back, but because you vanished from the Central Multiverse, even farther than the edges of the Central Finite Curve. You were pretty sure only you and one other person were capable of overstepping that boundary.
But your dad couldn’t know. At least not yet.
He was asking questions you didn’t like. You weren’t ready to answer them, either.
“Look,” you started with a suppressed sigh. “I need to leave soon. Can we have this conversation later?”
“No,” he barked sharply, slamming his palm down on the workbench; metal groaned, sparks popped from a half-dismantled portal gun.
Tools rattled like bones in a coffin. His voice didn’t rise, but it cracked through the silence like a quantum whip.
“No, sweets. You-you don’t get to bleed in the sh-shadows, ghost-dance across dimensions I can’t even name and then come back here ask-asking for later,” even from where he stood, he could smell the smoke and blood on your skin, close enough to see tremor in your hands a normal person wouldn’t catch.
You opened your mouth, ready to argue, but he anticipated you.
“You th-think I don’t know that look?” he whispered. “That I’m-fine-really bullshit? Your mom had it too. Right before…” He stopped himself before he would say something he’d regret later.
His hand twitched—like he wanted to reach out, grab your shoulder or slap some sense into you—but instead he just lit another cigarette with numb fingers and exhaled over his shoulder.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he added flatly. “Not until you t-tell me who the fuck hurt you.”
You were silent.
The second Rick, the most emotionally pent-up person you knew mentioned your mom, the sacred topic you both danced around not once touching it, you knew you were done for.
He must’ve been either impossibly exhausted or not paying attention to what he was saying at all, or he genuinely lost his mind somewhere in the process of looking for you.
Independently of the scenario, you felt the overwhelming guilt pierce through your soul once again. Soul, if it even was still in there after the argument you had earlier. Because it sure felt like he’d sucked it out of you and stomped over it with the heel of his boot.
“Nobody hurt me,” you protested weakly, shaking your head lightly. It sent a whole lighting of pain down your spine and you winced. “Everything’s fine, promise. It was just a tiny disagreement.”
While watching him light up another cig, you felt the rest of decency melt away. Despite being very much underage, you shoved your hand into the pocket of your bloodstained jeans and whipped out the same thing.
Not long after, you drew a sharp breath, inhaling the smoke as if it was ambrosia. At least he didn’t watch you snort k-lax mixed with coke and whatnot barely an hour earlier, but the shock on his face told you he wasn’t ready to see you smoke.
“You think I’m-I’m fucking stupid?” Rick snorted as you pulled out a cig. He watched with narrowed eyes as you lit the cigarette with steady hands and took a deep drag. Too steady. Too much composure.
He’d raised you—knew you like a book. This was an act. He scoffed, letting out a bitter laugh.
“You’re a-a terrible liar. Always have been,” he circled to your side, gaze raking over the bruises decorating your arms and legs. “What kind of a ‘disagreement’ le-leaves you beaten bloody and hi-hiding like a hunted animal?”
You quickly crossed arms over your chest, at this point praying that he wouldn’t see the deep, fresh cuts on your forearms.
“I was hiding from you,” you said in an ice cold tone, your sharp gaze snapping instantly from the empty space ahead to your father’s face.
Your own expression was devoid of any feelings or signs of fatigue; your stoic facade was very much still up, shielding your true emotions from the outside world. You finished the cigarette and crushed it beneath your heel, your dirty boots leaving bloody stains on the concrete now that you moved.
“And for the record,” you added, “I came back here because I forgot something important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother.”
Rick pretended it didn’t sting.
“Bullshit,” he spat. “You c-came here because you knew you were safe here.”
His lips tightened into a bitter smirk, but you didn’t react.
“You think I’m just gonna buy your little act and let you walk out-out of here with those wounds?” he scoffed, leaning casually against the workbench, crossing arms on his chest. “Think again, Angie. You’re stuck with-with me until I s-say otherwise.”
Angie. In that stupid drug slang you’d picked up when he would drag you around space clubs, it meant cocaine. So he figured it out. You sighed.
Meanwhile, Sanchez’s eyes drifted to your bloody shoes, then back up again. A mixture of emotion flickered across his face: anger, concern, something else. He masked it quickly.
“Safe here,” you echoed with a humorless smile, the look on your face rather indulgent. “What makes this place any different from the entire multiverse?”
The answer was: nothing. Well, maybe one thing. In this dimension, your dad was in charge of everything, constantly in control. That’s why you would often vanish to other realms, away from all that trouble when he wasn’t looking. When he was drunk enough to forget you existed.
Except this time, you did it in broad daylight.
“Besides,” you cut Rick off before he could externalize his thoughts, “I’m barely even wounded! What’s a few bruises and scratches?”
His jaw tightened, you could see the famous vein on his forehead. That familiar feeling of frustration prickled under his skin—your stubbornness, your damn unwillingness to admit when you were outmatched. It was admirable in a way, infuriating in others. It reminded him so much of himself, and he hated it.
“A f-few fucking scratches? Miss fucking Charlie, you look like you got tossed in a meat grinder,” he jerked a thumb at your shirt. “L-look at that. You’re wearing it inside out. And backwards. Christ’s fucking sake.”
Miss Charlie? Another coke reference. You frowned.
And, by the way, you actually were wearing it the other way around.
Because if you wore it the right way, he would see the frightening amount of blood spilled onto the fabric that soaked it and colored it scarlet. This way, Rick had no way of seeing it unless you turned around.
Frustration flared up in your chest, making you grit your teeth and causing the hot anger to bubble right beneath the surface, close to spilling over the dam.
“I don’t have the time for this,” you said flatly, and then did something neither of you expected.
You whipped out your own portal gun, one you constructed yourself and fired it to the side, a blue swirling vortex opening right next to you, zipping with energy. You stepped right through it and vanished again. The portal snapped shut behind you with a crackle, leaving only smoke and silence.
For a full three seconds, Rick just stood there, frozen. Not because he was shocked.
Because he was fucking pissed.
Then, like a storm front rolling in, his entire face darkened. He didn’t let his rage get the better of him like last time.
He laughed. One dry, humorless chuckle echoed through the garage before he snatched his own portal gun off the workbench, the one with two barrels and a kill counter, and slammed his thumb on the ignition.
“Y’know,” he muttered to nobody, voice low as hellfire while typing coordinates into the device with brutal precision, “I invented inter-fucking-dimensional tr-travel before you were born.”
The air ripped open in front of him, a swirling maw of crimson energy, and Rick stepped forward without hesitation.
“Run all you want, Cocaine fucking Kate,” he grunted into the void between worlds. “But I’ve been on-on the fucking run for longer than you’ve been alive.”
Another step in. He vanished into the rift-portal snapping shut like thunder. He promised himself, he swore he wouldn’t let you get away. Not again.
You knew you weren’t getting away for long.
You’d noticed that unusual type of a portal gun lying there on the workbench, odd and weirdly shaped when you stood in the garage, and immediately connected the dots.
Rick Prime had the same one. You knew, you’d seen it, you helped with making it. The portals it shot were deeply red, similar to blood, loaded with overwhelming energy and cracking with each swirl. Dangerous, and deadly.
And if you were right, your dad would be right on your tail by now. Wielding the insanely precise portal gun in his hand, enraged to his core. But you had one more trick up your sleeve.
You stopped in an empty void between realms, switching some settings on your device, and opened a portal within a portal. This way, he would never find you in the tiny space between dimensions, undetectable and unable to be reached from the outside.
Unless he’d figure out how to open one of them himself and somehow found a wormhole leading to yours. Knowing Rick, he was already flipping realities, searching for you to no avail.
That was exactly what he was doing. He didn’t let the hot panic get to him when he couldn’t catch a trace of you, trying to think soberly, trying to not let the vodka-activated attachment overtake his logic.
Then, he realized something. Interdimensional interference.
Your gun was powerful, he had to give you credit where it was due. Powerful enough, if used correctly, to cloak a dimensional gateway so well that nothing short of another portal device could find it.
His lips twitched into a smirk of bitter respect as he flipped through the settings.
You were jumping the dimensions inside the wormhole you’d reached, searching for a specific one, the one you’d always go to.
It took you a moment of dimension hopping, but you eventually found it.
It was nothing but a pitch black space that curved all light inwards and swallowed it, leaving the void completely lifeless and empty. No stars, no light.
And inside this seemingly inhabitable dimension, you and one other person had your space station. Of course, it had interdimensional cloaking on, so only a person who knew how and where to look could find it. You opened a portal right onto the roof.
You plopped down on the metallic panels surrounded by boundless nothingness and endless silence, and just sat there with your knees pulled up under your chin.
Rick knew you’d have a place to run to, a hide-out. You were his daughter, at the end of the day, after all. You were smart and cautious, cloak your signature, mask your footsteps, hide in a place so deep it might even evade his scanners.
But he was more stubborn than even you, and no matter how hard you tried to vanish, he’d bend over backwards to find you.
Dimensions whizzed by, flashes of light and color, before he found the one he was looking for. An infinite black, no stars. Perfect.
The watch-like device on your wrist buzzed lightly, catching your attention. You froze, your heart dropping way lower than the roof you were sitting on. If the device was right, and it was never wrong, someone just evaded the main wormhole.
It was either Prime, or…
Your fucking dad. Of course he had to fucking find you, because he’d sooner turn into a cactus than let you have some peace. You sighed deeply, no sound leaving your lips in that interminable void. You were waiting for the inevitable.
Which, behold, came too fast to your liking. Rick landed on the station’s roof with a slight stumble, portal vanishing behind him. His eyes darted around, gaze sharp and cold in the endless dark.
Silence.
That familiar feeling of anger was still there, coiling in his gut, but he held back from letting loose.
The air was perfectly still, no sound of movement, not even a quiet breath. So, you were there, he was sure. Just not showing yourself.
He couldn’t see you, you were aware. He wouldn’t be able to see you, ever, if you didn’t want him to; it was your dimension, your station, your place. You were masked in there perfectly, the protective barrier made you practically undetectable. Even if he scanned the entire realm, there wouldn’t be a trace of life showing up on the device.
But you were tired of running.
You tapped something on your ‘watch’, scrolled a bit, disabled some settings.
The space station lit up with dim, yellow-ish lights, hovering in the empty void. It appeared out of nowhere. And so did you. You knew he’d spot you the second he’d look down, because you were sitting right beside his legs. You were ready.
Rick didn’t flinch, didn’t jump, didn’t even turn his head right away.
He just stood there, boots planted on the cold metal roof of a station floating in a void that shouldn’t exist, somewhere beyond the edges of everything sane.
Then, slowly, he looked down. And there you were. Curled into yourself like a ghost wrapped in bloodstained denim and smoke. Your face pale under the dim yellow glow, eyes red-raw but defiant. Not crying. Never crying where he could see.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
“You built this,” his voice was quiet now, hollow almost. “This-this place… you built it yourself.”
Not a question.
He reached out with one unsteady hand and brushed his fingers along the vividly red back of your shirt, then recoiled when it came away scarlet with fresh blood. He felt sick.
“You’re not just a teen,” Rick mumbled suddenly, fingers trembling like reality had just cracked open beneath him. “You’re my kid, but you-you fight like someone who’d died ten fucking times and cr-crawled back from hell each time.”
His eyes flicked up to yours. For once, no sarcasm, no rage that filled him just a few moments before. Only fear.
“Who-who were you running from?” he asked again, not demanding now, but almost pleading through gritted teeth. “And why’d they let you come back?”
And for the first time in your whole life, you let yourself fall apart in front of him.
A few hot tears rolled down your pale cheeks, searing trails in the blood and smeared mascara that covered your face. You genuinely looked like you aged twenty years in the span of thirty seconds.
Not a lively, careless teenager was staring back at him, no. Not the girl he’d known, but someone who’d seen and went through way too much for their age. It terrified him.
You smiled sadly through the tears.
“Oh, dad,” you whispered, voice cracking under a dire amount of exhaustion. “You have no clue.”
Your head tilted back to the endless void beneath your feet, you were swinging your legs in the air, gripping the edge of the metallic panel tightly. Your knuckles were white under the dried-out blood and dirt, topped off with smeared ashes.
“This place?” you gestured vaguely at the entire void, “is the only one where I’m truly safe. I put so much blood, sweat and tears into putting this realm together.”
You sniffled, then sighed.
“I’m running from things you don’t want to know,” your voice dropped back down to a whisper.
Rick’s breath was uneven as he sat down next to you, not saying a word, still lost in his own thoughts, but close enough that your shoulders almost touched. For several moments, you just sat together in silence, getting overwhelming.
He spoke up again, the anger in his voice dulled now to an ache in his chest instead.
“You’re too-too young to carry all this alone.”
You looked at him. Not glanced briefly, but really looked. Your gaze spoke volumes, months of built up exhaustion, fear, constant running, heartache, the emotional distance growing between you—you were so close, yet so far away. It was taking a major toll on you.
You wondered if he knew that you were skipping school daily. That you were visiting the kind of people he’d have a heart attack if he saw them. That you ended up addicted, unable to function without substances he’d forbidden you from touching. That a blade was sinking deeply into your flesh every night when you’d press the knife against your skin with no mercy.
That you were one step away from giving up.
You could’ve said a lot of things, but what you said was nowhere near the options that popped up in your head at first. Safe to say, you didn't really think it through.
“Did you know Prime has the exact same portal gun as you do?” you had no right to know Rick had it. He’d never shown you. “The one that opens red portals. Identical.”
Rick froze.
The windless dark, the silent station, the blood on your clothes and face, all of it faded into background noise.
His voice came out low—dangerous—not because he was angry at you, but because he knew exactly where that thread led, and it was horrifying to even think about.
“You’ve seen Prime,” it wasn’t a question.
He slowly turned his head to face you, eyes sharp like shattered glass. “That’s who you were with.” A pause. “That’s why you’re hurt.”
You wanted to explain yourself, but he didn’t let you.
“You-you don’t know who that man is,” he spat out, voice cracking under the years of buried rage and regret. “I don’t care if-if he looks like me, talks like me, I’m-I’m not fucking him.”
He stood up suddenly, boots clanking against metal loud enough to echo in the void. His hands trembled, but not from rage this time. It was something far worse; helplessness.
“If he fucking touched you, if he put a finger on you, he won’t live enough to-to regret it.”
Rick turned towards you, the red portal gun already buzzing in his grip, its core pulsing like a dying star.
You also stood up, stumbling, fear choking you with more strength than any hands that’d ever strangled you. You put your hands up in the air slightly, trying to seem even more harmless. You didn’t care if the deep cuts on your forearms were visible now.
It wasn’t necessary. You already looked wounded, hurt and scared, bathed in blood of who you used to be. If you were anything, it was senseless violence. Just like him. Just like your father.
“I’m not…” you started, but you didn’t know what to say to fix this. The only thing you could feel was the overwhelming panic filling your chest, making it hard to breathe. “Please hear me out, okay?”
You stared at him, at his hand squeezing the portal gun like a lifeline, and you already knew you lost this battle.
“Don’t hurt him,” your tongue slipped. “Prime didn’t lay a finger on me, I swear. He saved me. He helped me fight off the people who were after me, recharged my portal gun and sent me back home.”
You ran a shaky hand through your hair, avoiding looking at him. You were scared of what you’d see.
Rick realized something was seriously wrong. Not only because you were butchered, cut up and bruised, and he had no clue how many of these wounds were self-inflicted. Not because he could tell you weren’t entirely sober yet, the last bits of space drugs he couldn’t name and coke and whatnot still in your system. Because it reeked of altered memories and successful brainwash.
He was probably never this terrified in his life before.
“You have no idea what he’s capable of,” he forced the words out. He then mumbled, more to himself than to you, “should’ve protected you sooner.”
“Prime literally saved me from hell. I know what he did, I know who he is,” your voice was trembling, so were your legs. “But he helped me. I don’t know why, I swear, he doesn’t even hang around much. He just appears out of nowhere when I need help the most, then vanishes.”
You gestured with your head to the space station below your feet again.
“This place? He found it, but never once damaged anything. Never blew it up or put any traps in here,” you let out a long, ragged exhale. “He only leaves notes. Nothing more.”
Rick stared at you in cold, hard silence. He hoped the freezing spikes of panic piercing through his lungs didn’t alter his expression. It was worse than he expected. You were made into a puppet with changed memories, he could tell, and it made him want to tear his hair out of his skull.
“Show me the notes,” he demanded in a flat tone, fighting to stay calm.
You looked at him miserably.
“I keep them at home,” you mumbled, and it was true.
You had an entire box under your bed with notes from Prime, all sorted out and organized by dates. Something you never told your dad about. You didn’t think he’d ever find out.
“But…” you began, reaching into the pocket of your jeans. “I have today's one.”
You glanced at him briefly, then looked at the note with the little unevenly colored heart, then handed it over to Rick.
“But please, don’t rip it apart,” you added quietly.
He was pale, visibly on the edge. The amount of questions that popped up in his mind was overwhelming.
He stared at the note until his vision blurred. Anger, guilt and fear churned in his stomach, a dizzying mixture of emotion that made it hard to think straight. Turning the paper in his fingers, he scanned the scrawled words in a language he didn’t understand as if he could read between the lines. He could tell it was a terrestrial language, but wasn’t able to recognize it.
“And this is all-all he does,” it was more of a statement than a question. “Leave notes.”
You hesitated for a split second before giving a nod.
“Yes, almost always,” you confirmed, trying to figure out if he really was this calm or just pretended to be collected while making a whole elaborate plan to kill Prime.
You decided to just tell the whole truth.
“There are days when he shows up when I’m here, at the station,” you started with a tired sigh. “We hang out. But mostly, he just leaves notes like this one.”
Rick’s face hardened. He knew exactly what that meant, he’d been around long enough to recognize even the most subtle types of manipulation. Prime was trying to establish a connection, trust, a bond, and he hated it. He hated how it was working. Prime was visibly winning you over.
He crumpled the note in his fist, ignoring your silent protest, then closed the distance between you. His eyes were searching your face, looking for any sign of deceit or hesitation—but found none.
“And what else?” his tone came out way sharper than he intended. “Does he come near you?”
“He braids my hair sometimes,” you said with a sudden, odd sense of warmth to your voice, something so unusual for you. “And compliments me when I do something right.”
At that moment, Rick really wasn’t sure if he wanted to die or wanted him to die.
“But he also shields me with his own body,” you said in a much quieter tone. “Whenever someone tries to hurt me, he’s there and steps between us. As if he’s not afraid to die.”
Something flashed in his eyes, cold and utterly pissed, but the anger was directed at something that wasn’t even in the room.
He was gripping the crumpled note so tightly that it was almost tearing apart. His shoulders were tense—as if he was physically stopping himself from lashing out.
“You trust him,” he said, not even trying to mask the defeat in his voice.
“I don’t know,” it wasn’t entirely a lie. “On one hand, I know exactly who he is. I know what he did,” your tone grew more desperate with each new word. “But on the other hand, he’s always there. Whenever I’m in danger, whenever I need protection, he’s there.”
You didn’t say ‘and you aren’t’, but you didn’t need to. It hung in the air, and you’d get the same effect by slapping him. Rick realized he failed. Miserably.
The urge to yell, smash something, tear this whole universe apart burned through his veins. But he didn’t move until a question forced itself from his lips.
“When will he show up next?”
That was when you paused. He wasn’t asking just to know. He wanted to get rid of Prime, possibly destroy your world in the process, all of what you’d worked for so hard.
You shook your head, biting your lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
“I can’t tell you,” you said slowly. “I can’t tell you. You’ll kill him.”
And just like that, whatever calm was left shattered in an instant. His entire body coiled like a snake ready to strike, all the worry and rage that had built up over the past few days finally finding an outlet. Even the air around him became charged, crackling with tension. His hands, rough and scarred that killed countless beings across the multiverse gripped your arms. Hard. Tight.
“Bullshit. You will tell me.”
You looked down at his hands squeezing your arms so tightly that it began to hurt a bit, then up at him, and his face twisted with rage.
True fear pierced through you like a bullet, tearing through your heart. You stared at him with wide, terrified eyes, trying to figure out what to do.
If you told your dad, you would betray Prime and sentence him to death. If you didn’t tell him, you would backstab him and be the worst daughter in the galaxy. The lines between your true memories and the ones that seemed to pop up in your head out of nowhere began to blur, you didn’t know what to think. You didn’t know if you could trust what your mind was trying to tell you.
You couldn’t choose which way to go.
“Only if I can tell him you’ll be there,” you pleaded.
That made Rick freeze. The anger fell from his face, replaced by shock. His hands loosened, eyes betrayed the anxiety that bubbled right beneath his skin.
There it was, proof that Prime had worked his way into your mind. Into your heart. His hands slipped from your arms and he stared at you, feeling as if you’d just stabbed him.
He felt like the worst person in the entire galaxy. Not that he wasn’t, he definitely was, but the weight of the ignominious failure crushed him. He was so busy schizing out and making his issues your problem that he didn’t even notice when you’d vanish for hours at a time.
“How long has this been going on?” he wasn’t sure if he was ready to hear the answer.
“Remember that super-fail at my birthday party last year?” you asked, but it was a rhetorical question; there was no way he didn’t remember. It was a disaster. “That was when I first met him. When I ran away for the whole night.”
You took a deep breath.
“So it’s been… eight months?” you hated how it sounded. “But we’ve been hanging out regularly for the past three or so.”
Eight months. Three of them spent together. Rick wished he could turn back time and never let you leave the house that night. He had no idea what it meant—how close you had become. What Prime was teaching you. What he might be trying to manipulate you into doing. He wanted nothing more than to lock you back in the simulation you’d grown up in, away from him and all this trouble.
But you weren’t seven anymore. You were smart, independent, just like him. You wouldn’t let him do that, you’d burn it down with yourself in it, regardless of the consequences.
“You’re-you’re fucking grounded,” he spat out, reaching to grab your wrist and struggling to whip out his portal gun out of the pocket of his lab coat. “We’re going home."
“I’m not going anywhere,” you protested, taking a step back, dangerously close to the edge of the roof. “You’re not grounding me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Rick gritted his teeth, switching settings on the device. He aimed it at you, watching the complete shock make your eyebrows shoot up. You had no right to know that the adjustment would just knock you out.
“Don’t piss me off, k-lax fucking princess,” he was aware that the amount of venom in his voice wasn’t necessary, that he was just starting an argument all over again, but the fury that now fueled him wouldn’t let him think straight.
You laughed hysterically, basically jumping closer to him, pressing your forehead against the barrel. Now it was his turn to be taken aback.
“Do it, then. Shoot me, fucking kill me, do it!” you screamed, your hand landing on the switch that flipped settings, accidentally making another correction. “Do it! Do it, fucking do it!”
And Rick, in all this chaos, blinded by a dangerous mixture of fear and rage pulled the trigger. Only when a bright ray of light lightened your face, when the bullet pierced right through your forehead, making your body fall limply to the metallic panels below his feet, Rick came to a terrifying realization that you switched the settings.
He didn’t just knock you out. The laser bullet went right through your skull, clean shot, blood gushing out of the wound at his shoes and the roof.
He stared with horror at his shaky hands.
Even when he kneeled in the expanding pool of your blood, garishly red and hot to turn you over, you didn’t stand up. You didn’t move or yell at him for actually pulling the trigger. Your eyes were open, gazeless, staring into oblivion.
“Forgive me,” his weak voice begged, bile filling up his mouth and burning his throat. “Forgive me.”
No matter how hard he’d plead, his daughter he murdered with cold blood in a senseless act of anger wouldn’t stop pretending and laugh it off. You wouldn’t get up. No amount of guilt would purify him, no amount of prayers would bring you back.
There was nothing he could do. It’s already been done.