Chapter Text
. I .
Before the world taught him otherwise, he didn't know he was different; a devil, a freak, a curse. No, all he knew in the beginning was that while the kids on TV were learning the cow says moo, the duck says quack he was reading his mother's left-behind encyclopedia collection. It didn't occur to him that it was strange he could read segments astrophysicist to zoomorphism and remember each word on every page. It was simply a thing to do in his and papa's little motel room with the sink that never stopped dripping and papa's beer-burps from the sofa, where he'd been lying motionless for days.
He asked, "when is mama coming back?" only once. He could understand acetylhydrolase, Glucocorticoids, and tropomyosin but papa's sudden hoarse sob was far beyond his comprehension.
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. II .
School was pure hell, and his grades were abysmal. The white kids hated him because he was too brown, the Mexican kids hated him because he was too white, and everyone agreed that the Sanchez kid was too damn weird overall. He became mean from too many beatings under the bleachers and lean from his school-funded breakfasts and lunches being regularly stolen. The teachers were no help: they saw him only as a smart-ass trouble maker, constantly demanding he show his work, criticizing his grubby apperance, and calling his essays on dimensional space travel “a fiction.”
Papa only sighed and clucked a tired, “ay mijo,” every time his son returned home scraped and bloodied and a little angrier than he'd been the day before. He never did more than offer a beer or a joint, his solution to all life’s problems. The day Rick finally snapped and beat Billy McKinnon comatose into the pavement, he found himself promptly kicked out of school. He considered it a relief, and he knew papa did, too.
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. III .
He was sixteen and shoveling fish guts on the wharf for Mr. Gutierrez when it finally happened: a portal, glowing and green, opened on the waves, and out stepped himself. “Rick!” the twenty-something greeted him like an old friend, and Rick’s heart filled with shining light. He laughed and laughed and dove without hesitation into the sea, squirming out of his dirty coveralls (he wore a white t-shirt and Levi’s underneath) before reaching his alternate self, who pulled him under the armpits into the portal.
“I knew it!” he exclaimed euphorically, hugging himself hard, and felt tears prick his eyes. “I knew I wasn’t wrong. I knew there was more.”
“Damn right there is, fish-breath!” the older Rick carried his energy and reflected it right back at him. “Y-you ready to get the fuck out of here?!”
Rick could only nod, heart hammering as the portal closed around his old life, not caring where they went next. He did not look back.
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. IV .
Okay, so as it turned out, blindly trusting himself was a mistake. That Rick must have been on the stupid end of the spectrum if he thought caging a bunch of Ricks together in a sweatshop-like space with all the materials they could ever need and orders to crank out inventions to start a war wouldn't lead to a revolution.
Still, aside from the fact that he'd just been in a skirmish with himself, against himself, and had watched himself die a few times in some creatively horrific ways, he was feeling pretty good about things. After all, he now had a portal gun - the infinite number of dimensions were his to enjoy at his leisure.
And enjoy he did. His curiosity was insatiable- for years he had to go everwhere. He tended to stop by bars first- prohibition planets were no fun- where he could sample the local culture and listen in on the gossip.
It was on an exceptionally beautiful planet, with tall buildings and glass walls, crystalline lakes and jaw dropping mountain ranges where he was witness to something that changed his life forever.
A scream cut through the bar chatter, and then more followed. The patrons rushed to a window- all the walls were windows- to look at the ground many stories below, where birdlike people were taking to the air, darting out of the way of descending spacecrafts.
"What the hell..." Rick muttered, and the bartender glanced nervously at him.
"The Galactic Federation," the old-timer said in a hushed monotone, the feathers in his brown owls' wings fluttering anxiously. "They want our planet and have been trying to negotiate with us for weeks. They say it is an ideal location for their home base. I fear negotiation is no longer on their minds."
As Rick watched, a skinny girl- she couldn't have been older than fifteen- leapt into flight, her colorful hummingbird wings pounding the air powerfully. A figure from a spaceship coldly took aim and fired; they watched in horror as she crumpled, landing broken atop the roof of a nearby building.
There was a charged pause, like the entire planet had forgotten how to breathe. And then there was only chaos, madness, and blood.
Civilian bird people produced unusual-looking weapons hidden in seemingly innocuous places, arranging themselves in a formation that could not have been unrehearsed as they fired at the ships. In retaliation, the crafts opened to produce... fly people?
Rick rubbed his eyes and blinked rapidly, but they hadn't lied to him. Six-foot-tall, armed and uniformed houseflies marched from the lowering craft ramps, interspersed here and there with other aliens and even some humans. There were thousands of them, and they looked trained for battle.
This proved to be true when they opened fire on the civilians, mowing them down easily. Rick's stomach churned. These were just people. Businessmen and grandmothers and howling, down-feathered toddlers.
The ones that could fought back valiantly, but the fallen bird people quickly outnumbered the dead Federation members. This wasn't a fight, it was a massacre.
The city was rocked as a still-circling spacecraft dropped a bomb some fifteen clicks off; the aftershocks shook the buildings, made Rick's teeth rattle. He was dragged from the window by other patrons and they crawled behind the bar counter as more bombs dropped, huddled together like frightened children.
The bar trembled again and some bottles fell off a shelf; a few shattered loudly and splashed their contents everywhere.
Cries of "Fire!" could be heard, and Rick squirmed away from the arms and legs and wings holding him back to stare out a window; to him, not knowing was worse than anything. It was so loud; roars and howls, the rat-a-tat of distant machine gun fire. Even from here the stink of death and smoke permeated everything else.
It was as though the world had caught fire. He'd noticed the high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere upon arrival but hadn't thought much more on it; there was no other way the flames would have spread so fast. There wasn't a damn thing not blazing, from what he could see.
"We have to go!" he urgently told the others in the bar. When they stared blankly at him he pounced and seized two people by the arms, hauling them to their feet. "Move!"
He threw them towards the door and grabbed another two people; the rest of the cowering group followed suit and hastened for the stairway to the rooftop.
Upon reaching the summit of the tall bar, Rick pushed his way to the edge of the roof and looked around in awe. Bird people were leaping off buildings by the hundreds as the city burned below them, flying in a breathtaking whirlwind to... where? Where was there to go?
A muscular arm snagged his waist and he was pulled skywards as well.
"Huh?" He looked around and saw that he was being carried by a serious-faced young man with amber eyes and eagle's wings. "Um. Hi."
"In my culture, we do not leave wingless people behind to die on burning buildings," the bird-man told him, and Rick cracked a grin.
"Thanks, dude."
They dove in formation with the other bird people and Rick, nerves bubbling into something like exhilaration in his gut, couldn't resist a whoop. He spread his arms wide as the stranger continued to hold him securely.
His bird-man flew a little lower than the rest, likely because of Rick's added weight, and he didn't notice the armed federation soldier poised atop a nearby temple.
"Birdperson!" Rick shouted in warning as the sniper met his eyes with its own multifaceted insect's gaze. It pulled the trigger, and the bird-man let out an agonized shriek as bloodied feathers filled the sky. He pumped his good wing frantically, but they were rapidly losing altitude.
Rick, swearing loudly, assessed their situation: they were falling much too fast, tumbling head over heels. All around them, shots were firing and bird people were dropping like Icarus himself. Fire continued to rage disorientingly, a hellmouth growing hotter the further they descended. Smoke stung his eyes and filled his lungs. What to do...
Gripping the bird-man's wrist as tightly as he could, he fumbled in his coat for the portal gun and fired at random to a spot just below them.
They plummeted into darkness.
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. V .
Everything was steaming. And wet. Rick felt like he was walking on a sponge in hot dishwater.
The fact that he was carrying the soon-to-be corpse of a near-stranger did little to improve morale.
"H-h-honestly, I expected you to weigh more," Rick told the barely responsive bird-man when he stopped to take a breath and assess their surroundings (swampy, hazy, all trippy day-glow colors. Had he any of his equipment, he'd be testing for hallucinogenics in the atmosphere.) "You're, you're kinda built like a brick shithouse, dude."
"My kind have hollow bones," the man mumbled weakly into Rick's sternum. Rick had examined his wound- a through-and-through hole in his wing, an absence where once there had been feathers, flesh, and bone. He could easily have stuck a few fingers through the injury. It bled profusely, even after Rick had stripped his own shirt off and ripped it into bandages.
"I am cold, Rick." Birdperson- he had a real name, but after hearing Rick attempt to mimic the whistles and hoots of his language, he'd hastily agreed that 'Birdperson' was fine- told him. His blood was beginning to seep down Rick's bare chest. "I fear I may lose consciousness."
It was hot- too hot- on this marshy planet. Sweat ran freely down Rick's forehead, stinging his eyes, and still Birdperson shivered.
"No," he told the man angrily, fighting off his own surge of anxiety. "Dude, I just need to find some sort of, of charging agent. Fix my portal gun up. Then we-"
"Looks like you two are in a squanch of a situation."
Rick startled at the new voice, looking around wildly for its source. At the base of a six-foot-tall pink fungus was an alien creature, felid though it stood on two legs and appeared to speak fluent English.
"Looks like it," he repeated with some caution. For all he knew this thing was preparing to tripple in size and eat them both.
It hopped from its mushroom and strolled leisurely towards them. Rick warily stood his ground as it stretched to sniff at Birdperson's good wing.
"What did that to him?" he asked.
"The Galactic Federation," Rick replied, seeing no reason to lie, and saw the cat-thing's slitted pupils widen in new interest.
"So you'd say you don't squanch with the Federation," it clarified.
"The federation slaughtered my people and took over my planet," Birdperson explained, in the same tone he said everything else.
Standing ankle-deep in warm swamp water, holding an injured, winged man and talking to an alien, Rick felt a bit dizzy with the scurrility of his life. That, or it was the dense, soupy air he was breathing that made his head spin so. He swayed.
"Whoa," the creature warned, bracing its front paws on Rick's hip to keep him standing. "Okay. Anti-federation refugees are welcome here. Hold tight a squanch."
He dropped to all four webbed paws and ran lightly over the surface of the tadpole-filled algae.
A moment later, a raft could be seen emerging from the dense willow-like trees. It was steered by two speckled brown cats using long sticks, with the orange cat guiding them. Rick waded out to meet the craft and gently laid Birdperson out, resting his head on a bag of mud-covered root vegetables before climbing on himself.
He sat cross-legged next to a basket of melon-sized blue eggs and looked expectantly at the orange cat.
"Let's get to town!" the leader of the trio said. "Refugees, I'm Squanchy. Welcome to Planet Squanch."
...
They recovered at the bayou medical clinic, where Birdperson's wound was packed and screened and Rick was given an oxygen tank to meet his body's needs. A calico caseworker assisted Birdperson in setting up lodging in subsidized housing.
Rick got along amazingly with Birdperson and Squanchy. Though he'd never before had a chance to use the word, "friends," he could see no other way to describe the two. They spent much of their time during Birdperson's healing process together.
The neighborhood Birdperson lived in was full of people with stories similar to his own, all victims of Federation brutality, and Rick heard their stories when attending group counseling with Birdperson. An itch inside him was growing stronger by the day; he'd never been one to sit idly by when action could be taken.
"T-t-this is stupid," he finally snapped one night to Birdperson and Squanchy, standing abruptly from the table and going to the shelf where he kept his portal gun. "If this federation is so awful, why don't we just go take them down?"
Squanchy and Birdperson exchanged a look.
"Rick, you're drunk," Squanchy said; Rick rolled his eyes. He was barely buzzed.
"To combat an organization as large and powerful as the federation, we would require planning. Information. Allies. It could take decades. It might be impossible, and will almost certainly cost us our lives," Birdperson said pragmatically.
"W-well, we won't know if we don't try," he replied carelessly, holding the portal gun out. "Are you guys in or not?"
The two shared another glance; an irritating habit of theirs, as if they spoke a language of eyeballs Rick was not privy to.
"We'd need a cover," Birdperson finally remarked. "An excuse to travel planets and dimensions collecting information."
Squanchy grinned, fangs gleaming almost as bright as his eyes. "Well," he said. "I've always wanted to be a rock star."
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. VI .
One night, as he leaned in close to his vanity artfully smudging his blue eyeliner, a cough behind him caught his attention. Birdperson loomed in his doorway, and in the shadow of his wing, there she stood. Rick experienced a strange sensation in his chest, like his heart had hiccupped.
To the majority, she wasn't anything special. She was a short strawberry blonde with heavy curves, as covered in freckles as the galaxy was filled with stars. She smelled faintly of gingerbread and when she really got to laughing, she would dissolve into high squeaks with tears rolling down her apple cheeks.
She was a regular at concerts with a high percentage of humans, but couldn't quite be classified as a groupie. She didn't try to sneak backstage, didn't fawn and coo over him like so many others did. He didn't know when he had started looking for her in the crowds, a spark of elation when he saw her, a sinking disappoint when he didn't, but it was something Birdperson and Squanchy teased him for mercilessly.
"Rick," Birdperson now said in his deep monotone. "Sandy here has some interesting information."
Forcing down a sudden surge of nervousness, Rick swiveled in his chair to face her, plunking his leather boots up and crossing them at the ankle. He gave her his devil-may-care smile, eyes suggestively lidded as a rockstar's should be. "Does she, now?"
She was wearing a Flesh Curtains t-shirt, black and straining across her generous chest. A stripe of plump, freckled belly could be seen between the shirt's hem and her high-waisted shorts. He thought he'd never seen his merchandise put to better use.
"Rick Sanchez of dimension C-137," she said in a clear, authoritative voice. "I want you to know that, as vice president of the Galactic Federation’s human inclusion division, this concert is a sting operation. You'll be taken into custody the minute you step onto that stage."
He stared at her, too shocked to speak.
"I'm going to go get Squanchy," Birdperson declared. "We'll hide out at my home and regroup. You decide how we deal with her." He was gone in a brush of soft feathers. Rick kept staring at the undercover cop, mouth gaping slightly. Having said her piece, she fidgeted a bit, looking uncomfortable.
"W-w-why are you, why are you telling us this?" he asked finally, and she lifted her chin to meet his eyes.
"Because I want you to take me with you."
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. VII .
Elizabeth was nothing short of a marvel with a dove's coo for a voice and duckling down hair. Her eyes were intelligent and knowing, and he often propped his chin on his hands, watching her as she watched him back.
Sandy laughed when she caught them having one of their staring contests, stepping over Rick's outstretched legs to sink into one of Birdperson's guest nests. "You act like you've never seen a baby before."
"N-not one like this!" he insisted earnestly. Beth made a grab for his lip ring. "Aah!"
"Get him, Beth!" Sandy encouraged, grinning wickedly. Pleased at having earned her mother's approval, Beth beamed and clapped her pudgy star-shaped hands, squealing.
"No fair!" Rick tried to protest, but he was smiling too. "Y-y-you, you little shit." He kissed his daughter's fingers.
She grew fast, napping in Birdperson's wings and chasing Squanchy's tail. And for a while, it was enough. Sandy taught her to read, and she watched her father assemble projects with keen eyes. She hated when her parents argued, though, which was happening with increasing frequency.
"Where are you going this time?" Sandy demanded one morning, with that about-to-start-something tone in her voice that always made Rick's shoulders tense, his drinking hand twitch.
"Out," was his curt reply. She knew he was still gathering information from the rebel alliance, attending masked meetings and practicing covert sabotage.
"Oh great," she snapped, and huffed a sarcastic laugh. "Fan. Tastic. Why don't you come home shot full of holes again? That wasn’t traumatic at all."
"I-if you don't like dealing with it you don’t, nobody’s forcing you to." He wasn't looking at his wife as he rifled through drawers, searching for the updated portal gun he'd been working on.
"There's a grand idea!" she snarled, made ugly by anger and disappointment, and it occurred to him that he couldn't remember the last time he'd heard her laugh. "You're a father, Rick! Act like one!"
"M-m-m-maybe, maybe I never wanted to be a father; ever think of that?!" he roared, whirling on his wife at last and throwing a drawer at the wall next to her, where it crashed and shattered. In the rain of clothing that fluttered slowly down, he saw a pair of blue eyes watching them tearfully from inside the closet. Oh shit...
It took Sandy a moment to recover from the shock of nearly being brained by furniture; fury, indignance, and hurt filled her voice. "Why don't you just get out?" she ordered, shoving him forcefully with both palms.
He didn't return until late, long after he knew she'd passed out with a drink in her hand. He tried not to listen to his inner voice calling him a coward.
She barely stirred when he snuck into their bedroom, filling a duffel with things he couldn't easily replace, and then returned to the door as quickly as he'd come.
His heart leapt into his throat when he realized that he was not alone in the darkened hallway, but was being watched by a small, nightgowned figure.
"B-B-Beth!" his hands flew to his chest in shock, nearly dropping his duffel.
"Where are you going, daddy?" she asked groggily. Her chin-length blonde hair was frizzy from pillow static.
"I'm-" he considered telling the truth, or just grabbing her up and taking her with him. "I'm just getting some ice cream, sweetie," he said instead, and closed the door between them.
Kalaxian crystals did a decent job of numbing all feelings, but they never quite succeeded in erasing the look in his daughter's eyes.
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