Work Text:
The hum of the portal gun was usually a clean anf sharp sound basically the audio equivalent of a freshly sliced apple. However, this time it sounded like a wet cough. Rick didn’t look up even a glace from his work, his fingers flying and tapping across the sub-atomic re aligner with a jerky precision that implied he’d definitely been awake for over seventy two hours. Which he actually had. "J-Jerry, if you touch that, I will transmute your bone marrow into liquid magnesium. I’m NOT kidding, It’ll burn you from the inside out like a human s-sparkler. Put. it down."
Jerry, who had been hovering near a shelf of glowing violet canisters with the desperate and quite aimless energy of a man trying to look busy in a room he obviously didn’t belong in, immediately dropped his hands. He wiped them on his khaki pants as his face flushed a light pink of humiliation. "I wasn’t going to touch it," Jerry muttered, his voice carrying that familiar reedy whine. "I was just... looking. It’s a very nice shade of purple. It reminds me of the wild orchids we saw in—"
"I don't fucking care." Rick snapped. He spat a small glob of blue tinged saliva onto the concrete floor of the laboratory. "I don't care about the orchids, I—I don't care about your memories, and I especially don't care about whatever incredibly mundane thought process led you to believe that standing three inches behind me while I calibrate a—a class four reality anchor is a good use of your car—burp—bon based existence."
"Beth said I should get out of the house," Jerry said, clearly defensive now as he puffs his chest out just enough to look like a man who occasionally stood up to his wife, both knew he didnt. "She said the garage was a communal space."
"The garage is my temple of high concept s-sci-fi bullshit, Jerry. You are a tourist here. You’re the guy who walks into the Louvre and a-asks where the vending machines are." Rick finally set the re-aligner down with a sharp clack. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, leaving smudges of gray grease on his temples. "We’re going to Sector 81-G. I need a stable i—urp—isotope of Z-90. It’s a simple grab-and-go. If you speak, sneeze, o-or make that weird clicking noise with your throat when you get nervous, I WILL literally leave you in a dimension where the dominant species reproduces by.. laying eggs in the ear canals of insecure middle-aged white men. Got it???" Jerry swallowed hard. His throat made a distinct click sound.
Rick closed his eyes, took a deep breath that smelled of stale beer and ozone and pulled the trigger on the portal gun. The green vortex bloomed against the wall, but it wasn't the smooth and swirling emerald it usually was. It looked kind of jagged around the edges and flickering like a dying fluorescent bulb. Rick frowned, a flicker of genuine concern crossing his features before he quickly masked it with his habitual sneer. He couldn't let Jerry see him hesitate. If Jerry saw him hesitate, Jerry would start asking questions, and if Jerry started asking questions, Rick would have to explain the math, and explaining math to Jerry was like trying to teach a golden retriever how to play the cello. "R-right." Rick said, grabbing a heavy canvas satchel from the workbench. "In and out. Three minutes. Don't l-look at anything." He stepped through the portal. Jerry who's terrified of being left alone in the garage with a half disassembled sentient toaster that had been watching him with cold, red eyes, scrambled after him. The transition wasn't smooth. Usually, passing through a portal felt like stepping through a cool sheet of water. This time, however, it felt like being dragged through a hedge backward while someone violently shook an etch a sketch. Jerry stumbled out onto the other side, tripping over his own sneakers and landing face-first in a pile of dry metallic dust. He coughed, spitting out a mouthful of gray grit that tasted like copper pennies. "Oh Jesus," Jerry groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "Rick.. my knees. I think I scraped my—"
"Shut up, Jerry." The tone of Rick’s voice wasn't his usual dismissive bark. It was quiet and flat. Jerry looked up. They weren't in a sprawling alien landscape of purple flora or crystalline towers. They were in a vault. The walls were made of massive, interlocking plates of some dark, matte black alloy that seemed to absorb the light. Above them, a vault ceiling stretched into darkness, ribbed with massive structural beams that looked like the ribcage of some primeval leviathan. The air was cold. Not exactly freezing or stinging, but the kind of stale, sterile chill that suggested the oxygen had been recycled through a filter for a thousand years. In the center of the room, sitting on a pedestal of solid obsidian, was a small, spherical chamber. Inside it, a single clump of dull, lead-colored crystal sat perfectly still. "Is that the... the Z-thing?" Jerry asked, slowly getting to his feet and brushing the metallic dust from his knees. Rick didn't answer. He was looking back at the wall behind them. The portal was gone. That wasn't unusual. Rick usually closed them behind him to prevent tracking.
What was unusual though, was the portal gun in Rick's hand. It was sparking. A thin,
lazy wisp of black smoke was curling out of the fluid reservoir and the small digital display on the side was dark. "Rick?" Jerry's voice went up an octave. "Rick, why is your gun smoking? Is it supposed to do that?"
"Of course it's not supposed to do that, y-you absolute monument to stupidity." Rick hissed, his voice tight. He unscrewed the casing with a fingernail, squinting at the delicate internal circuitry. "The portal man-manifold buckled. The local gravity well here is... fuck. It's concentrated. It's like trying to open a screen d-door against a hurricane."
"So... we're stuck?"
"For five minutes, Jerry. It's a blown f-fuse. I have three—three different ways to jump-start this thing in my coat." Rick reached into his lab coat pockets, his hands rummaging through the endless and impossible space within. He pulled out a handful of wires, a dried alien finger, a flask, and a small, half-eaten sandwich, but nothing that looked like a tool. He frowned, reaching deeper, his arm sinking in up to his elbow. "Where the hell is my micro s-soldering..."
Suddenly, a sound echoed through the chamber. It wasn't a mechanical sound. It was a deep, resonant thrum like a massive wet finger being dragged across the rim of a wine glass. The black metal plates of the walls began to glow with a faint, pulsing blue light.
"Rick," Jerry whimpered, taking a step backward and bumping into Rick's shoulder. "What is that? Is that an alarm?"
"Don't touch me!" Rick snarled, shoving him off. "And no, it's not an a-alarm. It's a bio-security sweep. This place is an old fe-federation blacksite bunker. It's been abandoned for three centuries."
"Then why is it turning on?!"
"Because we just int-introduced two highly foreign biological signatures into an airtight automated vault, y-you idiot!" Rick finally pulled his hand out of his pocket, holding a small, glowing blue screwdriver. "Just... stand still. Don't breathe. If the sensors think we're a threat—"
A massive, deafening CLANG reverberated through the floorboards. Jerry screamed. A short high-pitched yelp and threw his hands over his head. From the ceiling, a massive sheet of the same matte black alloy began to slide down, sealing off the only exit archway. It descended with the slow, terrifying inevitability of a guillotine, hitting the floor with a force that rattled Jerry's teeth in his skull. The blue light in the walls shifted instantly to a deep, blood-red. A synthetic voice, cold and completely devoid of inflection, echoed from speakers hidden in the darkness above. "Foreign pathogens detected. Biological quarantine protocols initiated. Sector 81-G is now under Class-A isolation. Automated decontamination cycle will commence in seventy two hours. Have a productive isolation." The red lights didn't turn off. They just pulsed. Sslow and steady, casting long, distorted shadows across the massive, empty room. Jerry stared at the massive, sealed door. He walked over to it, his sneakers squeaking on the dusty floor. And pressed his palms against the cold metal. He pushed. He grunted. He leaned his entire weight against it, his face turning red.
"Jerry." Rick said, his voice dripping with exhaustion. "W-what are you doing?"
"I'm seeing if it's.. if there's a latch or something," Jerry panted, his hands sliding uselessly down the smooth surface. "Maybe we can pry it."
"It's a ten-foot-thick slab of hy-hyper dense collapsed dark matter, Jerry. You couldn't s-scratch it with a diamond-tipped drill, let alone your soft, manicured, middle mana—urp—gement fingers." Rick sat down on the obsidian pedestal, his legs dangling over the edge. He placed the portal gun on his lap and began to methodically disassemble it, laying the delicate, glowing pieces out on the black stone like a surgeon preparing for an autopsy.
"Well, what do we do?!" Jerry's voice was rising into full-blown panic now. He began to pace, his hands clutching his head. "We're trapped! There's no air! We're going to suffocate in a blacksite bunker! Oh my god, Beth is going to have to raise the kids alone. She's going to remarry. She's going to marry someone named Greg who plays tennis and makes his own pasta!"
"First of all, there is air," Rick said, not looking up from a tiny copper coil he was inspecting with a jeweler's loupe. "The vault has a c-closedloop oxygen recycler. It'll keep us alive until we die of dehydration, which,, a-at our current rate of panic, will take about four days. Second of all, Beth would never marry a guy na-named Greg. She hates tennis. She’d marry a guy named Chad who owns some l-logistics company and drives a Tesla, and he would treat Morty like a disappointment a-and Summer like a trophy. And quite frankly, it would be a step up for all of them."
Jerry stopped pacing. He looked at Rick, his eyes wide, hurt flickering behind the panic. "That's... that's a horrible thing to say."
"I'm a realist, Jerry. Now s-shut up. I need to focus."
"You always do this," Jerry said, his voice trembling slightly. He sat down on the floor, about ten feet away from the pedestal, pulling his knees up to his chest. "You drag me into these things, you ruin my day, you ruin my life, and then you just sit there and act like you're the smartest person in the room."
"I am the smartest person in the room, Jerry. I'm the smartest person in any room I've ever walked into, including rooms containing literal gods." Rick's voice was sharp, but there was a faint tremor of frustration in it. He poked a wire with his screwdriver. A small spark jumped, stinging his thumb. He cursed softly, sucking on the burned skin.
"If you're so smart, why are we locked in?" Jerry muttered, tucking his chin into his collar. Rick paused. His blue eyes, usually so bright with manic energy, looked incredibly old in the dim, red light of the quarantine vault. He looked at the portal gun then at the massive sealed door, and theb finally at Jerry, who looked small and pathetic curled up on the cold floor. "Because," Rick said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous murmur, "I-I didn't account for the localized temporal drift. The gateway calculation was off by three-hundredths of a—you know what? Y-you won't understand anyway." He set the screwdriver down. "The portal gun is dead, J-Jerry. The power cell is cracked. It's going to take me at least f-forty eight hours to rebuild a crude generator from the scrap in my pockets."
Jerry stared at him. "Forty eight hours?"
"Yea, well.. At least."
"In here? With nothing?" Rick reached into his coat, pulled out his flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a long, burning swallow. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and held the flask out toward Jerry. "Not nothing," Rick said dryly.
"I have about h-half a pint of seventy proof synthetic bourbon left. But since you're a lightweight who gets emotional after one glass of Pinot Grigio..I-Isuggest you start pacing yourself."
Jerry looked at the flask, then at the vast, empty darkness of the vault above them. The red light pulsed, a slow, rhythmic heartbeat that seemed to underscore the sudden, terrible weight of the silence between them. He didn't take the flask. He just pulled his knees a little tighter to his chest, closed his eyes, and wished, with everything he had, that he had just stayed in the house.