" Wh-wh-what's gonna happen to all these Mortys?"

"They'll go back to their families, attend school regularly, play video games, date girls… poor little Rickless bastards."

-Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind

There's a new student. It's perfectly normal. It's routine.

The introductions play out the same way they always do, whenever they have to introduce a new student: this time, the new girl's name is Maria Diaz, she's 15 years old, and she came to the Seattle suburbs from somewhere in Los Angeles.

Maria doesn't speak up when the teacher asks her to describe herself, and Morty thinks of himself.

The first time he ever saw how fucked-up he could be, it was when he wasn't looking at himself at all. It's hard to remember, because it happened a long time ago, because he needed to forget to keep himself sane, adventuring with Rick. Because he needs to forget to keep himself sane, living like any other ordinary teenager.

But there are a lot of Mortys out there, and he only saw some of them when he met the Council of Ricks. Most of them weren't very happy, the last Morty saw them. They always looked like they would rather be anywhere else. Morty always looks like that, now, no matter where he is. I would rather be anywhere but here, in this situation, in this life-

Maria holds herself at arms length from everyone, which seems fine to everyone, because no-one would have liked her, anyways. She has terrible taste in clothes; she dresses like she just walked out of the Victorian era and now she's trying to be a punk. And she's an ugly bitchy dyke, right, guys? She keeps forgetting to speak English, she probably came from Mexicobefore she came from Los Angeles. She gets into fights, that violent thug.

No-one else notices that Maria doesn't just slip into Spanish, but other languages too, or that she fights like she's not used to enemies with only two arms and two legs.

Morty follows Maria to the library one day, in-between their classes, and sits down across from her at the table. She looks up at him, and when his tongue gets stuck in his throat, she moves to pointedly ignore him.

He sits silently with her for two more days before he finally manages to spit it out.

"Morty!" he splutters.

"Hm?" Maria says, looking up from her sketchbook, where she's drawing… something.

"M-Morty. My name's Morty."

"Maria," Maria says, cautiously, like, oh, well let's see where this one is going.

"I know," Morty says, before he can think of how weird it is to say that. "I-I mean, I remember. The teacher introduced you."

Maria shrugs, and Morty wonders if this was a bad idea. Maybe he had the wrong idea all along.

"You, you moved here, right? Do you travel a lot?" Morty asks, and the girl shrugs.

"I used to," she says. "Not since before I left Los Angeles."

"I used to t-travel, too," Morty admits.

She looks at him, skeptically, and then packs up her things and walks away.

She's there the next day, like nothing ever happened.

Morty gets shit grades in every class. Maria gets shit grades in every class but Art.

"This is a Gastercyst," she explains one day, holding a pen in bony, calloused fingers to sketch out the delicate curves of a monstrosity. "They eat people. Anything, really. They're very messy."

"Oh geez." For a second, it's like he's back with Rick again, except for almost everything else. "Do they, can they die?"

"Sure. A heavy blow to the back of the head should be enough to do it."

He looks at the picture. "I don't know where that is?"

"It's here," Maria says, shading in a particularly malicious pucker of flesh. Oh.

"Not, not to insult your art skills, you're a really good artist and I'm scared even though I know that Gastercyst isn't real, but, like, uh, how do you make that into a good grade?"

"No matter what I'm drawing, I always tell the teacher it's a metaphor," Maria says. "I'm going to title this one, I dunno, 'Dysphoria' or something."

"It's not a metaphor?"

"Nah," Maria says, looking very carefully at Morty. "It's totally literal. Even as we speak, the Gastercysts are trying to use your skull as a portal through the veil of ignorance, to emerge and feast upon mankind."

Morty folds his arms around himself. "I know you're messing with me."

That gives Maria pause. "Yeah, I guess I am? Only because I know that you know enough to see through it."

"I don't know much," Morty says, not used to hearing that sort of thing in the least.

"You know more than most people do," Maria replies.

He follows her bestiary as closely as he can, and sometimes he talks about weapons with her. Hey, do you think a plasma rifle would work on that?

It just slips out, one day. He can't help himself, really. His tongue sticks in his throat again, and he has to deliberately swallow, he has to deliberately jar it loose; but he can't stop himself from doing it.

"My grandfather was a mad scientist," he confesses to Maria one day, while they're walking home from school. While she's walking to the bus stop and he should be going the other direction but he's busy being stupid again. "He, he took me on adventures to see the universe."

"My best friend was a magical fairy princess," Maria replies. "We went on adventures to fight monsters," she says. And Morty wants to laugh at her. But most people would laugh at Morty, too, for believing that his grandfather was a mad genius; and the universe has always been too large for him to understand; and Maria confessed the same way Morty confessed, vaguely guilty and with terribly-suppressed grief.

He texts his mother, I'm going to be late tonight, and follows Maria the rest of the way to her house. Maria's mother and father dote on him and dote on Maria — oh, they're just so happy to see that Maria is finally making friends!

Well, he's actually a little jealous.

"Jealous?" Maria asks.

Oh no, he said that out loud? "Your family," he says by way of explanation, hunching his shoulders.

Maria doesn't ask anything else, which is a relief; and her parents don't care that they hightail it into Maria's room and shut the door, which is strange, but it's also a relief and at this point he doesn't care.

Maria's room is stark and bare. The closet is closed, the bookshelves are mostly empty, and everything smells of sharp soap. Only the rumpled bedsheets give any indication that the bedroom has been lived-in for more than a week or two, let alone for the months that Maria has actually been here.

(The few posters that once lined Morty's room are gone, now; every inch of pop-culture is brittle and jagged at the edges. This story could be real, somewhere out there in the multiverse. And what are you, a voyeur? )

Maria collapses into a chair, and Morty hesitantly sits on her bed. That would once have been alluring and erotic. Wow, Morty, you're parked right here, where a girl sleeps! But right now, he doesn't care. He's not sure he'll ever care so acutely about sex again, and he doesn't really want to.

"Do you know how I met my friend?" Maria asks him, after the silence stretches on for too long. And he shakes his head, so she continues with a dark smile. "She accidentally killed people and destroyed things that her mother cared about. So her mother sent her here, where she could accidentally kill and destroy things that her mother didn't care about, instead."

Morty can't stop the laugh that bubbles out of him. The apathy and disregard is so funny and starkly familiar it hurts. "Wow, her mother s-sounds like a jerk."

"She was," Maria replies, and her smile brightens a bit, still sharp.

Morty collapses back on the bed, staring up at the plaster ceiling. "My grandfather… grandpa Rick was a jerk, too. Once, once he sort of turned an entire planet of humans into monsters, you know? We left them behind for another world. We left my mom and dad behind t-to find new versions of them."

Maria sucks her lips between her teeth.

"I-It was sort of my fault too," Morty admits. "He wouldn't have done it if I hadn't… we messed up so badly."

He doesn't elaborate, and Maria gets up, throwing herself onto the bed next to Morty. She doesn't move.

"Star Butterfly turned herself into a monster, and she was a princess," Maria says. "Princesses are actually terrible people, most of the time. I think there's a reason we left monarchies behind. But she was still my very best friend. She could be a good person, if that's what she wanted."

Morty closes his eyes. "That's not actually, uh, reassuring."

"I know," Maria offers. "It's what I've got."

A few weeks later, Maria takes him aside as school is ending for the day. "There's something I want you to keep for me," she says, looking pale and dour.

"Wh-what, me?"

"Yes, you." Maria scowls. "I can hardly give it to my parents, right? We left Cali for a fresh start, they don't know I have anything left of Star, and you're the only person I can think of-"

"Oh, geez, calm down," Morty says. "I, whatever it is, I guess I can help, okay?"

She pats her backpack to reassure herself, and follows Morty off to his mother's house. Summer makes a token jab at Morty ("Bringing a girl home?") but takes the hint, and fucks off and leaves him and Maria alone as he takes her into the garage.

"This is where Rick used to work," Morty says. He used to cry every time he walked in here, but now his eyes only get misty. "He was good at a lot of things, I guess, but he could hide things, too." He hid a hell of a lot.

Maria takes the hint and doesn't bother him about Rick. Instead, she reaches into her backpack, withdrawing a pair of scissors. "Can you hide these?"

They're longer than most scissors, but not too long. "Yeah." He takes them from her hands, and they're oddly heavy. "What are they?"

"Me and Star used them to travel between dimensions."

Suddenly, they seem even heavier. "Really?" He doesn't see how that can work, which doesn't say much, because he's incredibly stupid and he knows it, now. But… "How?"

"Magic, remember?"

He can't argue with that; he slots the things into a pile of scrap which is too sharp to reach through, unless you think about tapioca pudding while you do it.

Rick made the strangest things. He collected the strangest things.

Maria's fingers hover over a heavy crystal that he knows is a supercomputer. "Do you know how to work this stuff?"

"Most of what's left," Morty says. Other Ricks came through and took the best of his Rick's stuff, when Rick died. They took even more when he said that he wasn't even going to try to apply to become another Rick's Morty.

(His excuse was that there was already a Morty surplus, with the cloning shenanigans going on, but that was a complete lie.)

(He didn't want to stop being with Rick, but being with any other Rick felt like a lie, in a way that being with his replacement family didn't.)

The portal guns are long gone.

"I told you you're smart," Maria says.

"I guess," Morty says. He doesn't want to talk about it anymore, or think about the trial-and-error, and the machines he'll never be able to work. "Uh, why do you want me to keep the scissors?"

Maria shrugs. "I think I would have done something stupid if I kept them for much longer. Gone looking for something."

He doesn't ask for any more.

They're sitting in Rick's car, in low earth orbit, and Morty wonders if the car will break down and crash before they get tired of airing things out. Before they get tired of watching the stars from up here. He wonders if he doesn't know how to drive Rick's car after all, he can barely drive a normal car, but it works fine under his hands.

"Most of the worlds we went to weren't strong on the technology front," Maria says softly. "You could always see all of the stars. No light pollution."

Maria is still looking at the stars with reverence, though, and the contrast is enough to cut his eyes out. He remembers Rick, curling his lips, C-c-comeon, Morty, you c-can see the stars anywhere in space, 's just fuckin' fusion.

"You're not bored of it," Morty says, almost unable to wrap his head around that idea.

"No," Maria replies. "But most of those other worlds… they didn't have stars like these, either. Their stars were just window dressing. Backdrops. Their stars weren't like the ones here."

There's a song softly playing on the radio, and neither of them understand it, it's something made for people who aren't like them. But the track changes, and Morty starts to make another admission.

"Rick was an asshole," Morty says. "He did, he was terrible, I hate him so much. Maybe, I don't know, maybe he wasn't as bad as he wanted to be. But he was awful."

"You still miss him," Maria guesses, and Morty can't stop the tears from escaping. He can't stop himself from sobbing.

"Y-y-y-yeah," he says, his words breaking up on his own breath. "I, I, I m-miss him. Why? How c-can I miss-ss him? S-someone like, like that? I hate it."

"You know," Maria says, and Morty realizes that she's hugging him tightly. "You know, if you ever told me anything true about him, I can guess he was just as disgusted with himself to have cared about you."

"That's n-not good-d enough," Morty chokes.

"I know," Maria says, and she's crying, too. "But it's what I've got. Do you know, I know Star was a good person, but I can't help but hate her for some of the things she did? I don't want to hate her. How can I hate someone as innocent as her?"

"Maybe w-we should trade feelings," Mory says with a watery hiccup. "My love, for y-your hate?"

"Keep it," Maria replies. "You need your love more than I do."

Morty still gets shit grades in every class. Maria gets shit grades in every class, now, too. The scissors are never far from their minds.

"Forget adventuring. Do you ever think of leaving?" Maria asks one day. "Just you and me."

"I don't know," Morty says. He feels like a stranger in this world, but maybe he's always been a stranger in every world, ever since Rick dragged him through a portal for the first time.

Maybe running doesn't help.

"I think about it all of the time," Morty says. "But that doesn't mean I should do it, you know?"

Maria cackles like it's the funniest thing he's said in years, but she's not laughing at him. And that's the end of it, as far as their eyes can see.

They don't need mad genius to see the future, after all.