Title: Greased Lightening
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (Fullmetal Alchemist fusion)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2764
Summary: Gabe Reyes is a normal fifteen year-old trying to survive being raised by his twenty-year-old brother Robbie, procrastinating on his schoolwork and his next D&D campaign by learning Alchemy from military textbooks he pirated off the Darkweb for funzies. He convinces Robbie to take an aptitude test with him.

It was almost eight in the evening, and Gabe Reyes was making dinner.

He’d had two peanut butter and banana sandwiches already, and done…most of his school work—okay, about three quarters of each of his assignments were done, except for History, but he’d get to that, he rarely got to sleep before midnight anyway—and right now he wished these onions would hurry the fuck up and cook already because Robbie was supposed to be getting out of work any time now, and also he was hungry again. He was seriously considering pouring out half the water in the other saucepan so it would boil faster and he could dump the macaroni in.

He heard Robbie’s Neon backfiring as it slowed to pull into their driveway. The kitchen table was covered in books. But Gabe had started dinner. This was good. He was almost halfway through making dinner. He was more than half-way through his homework. This was also good. And Robbie had gotten out of work sort-of-on-time. Again, good.

Robbie shuffled into the apartment, piercings in his lips and ears, bags under his eyes, and a bandage on his knuckles. “Hey, Gabe. Smells delicious. You do your homework?”

Gabe’s shoulders hunched, even though he’d done it for once this time. “Almost done. You punch somebody again?”

“Car,” Robbie said, also hunching, which probably meant he'd skinned his knuckles while using a wrench, rather than that he'd punched a car; Robbie would never strike an innocent vehicle. He reached the kitchen table and poked through Gabe’s papers. Found a big sheet of printer paper, with a hexagon in a circle with Greek letters around the edges. “Gabe—”

“I’m almost done,” Gabe insisted. “I was working on that in between doing the other stuff. Like, as a break. I was using a timer.” He yanked his phone out of his pocket, waved it at Robbie: a refurbished IPhone 5 Robbie had bought him for Christmas two years ago. “I’m working. I started dinner. I’m trying—”

“I know,” Robbie said, his ass thumping down on one of the kitchen chairs, his head drooping toward his knees. “Sorry, I know you’re trying. You’re so smart, Gabe, I just want you to do well so you don’t get stuck here.”

“It’s not so bad,” Gabe said, which was not true. They had many nice neighbors, but nobody actually wanted to live in their neighborhood. You had to watch over your shoulder walking around outside, and it wasn’t safe to leave the apartment after dark, full-stop. Also, there was a red-light camera at the nearest intersection and the yellow light only stayed lit for maybe two seconds. Robbie had already gotten a ticket in the mail.

Robbie stared up at him wearily. He had thick, jagged eyebrows with a scar through one of them, and he always looked angry even when he was just tired.

“Anyway, I think I’ve got enough of this figured out to actually do it, but the textbook says you need a partner and a fire-extinguisher,” Gabe added, picking up the diagram.

“Sounds promising,” Robbie said sarcastically, but Gabe had noticed him perking up faintly at the mention of the fire-extinguisher. “Have you figured out how you want to add it to your next campaign yet?”

Gabe gave the onions a guilty stir. “I dunno. It’s been so long, Tony’s probably bored of it anyway.”

“That’s ridiculous, you guys had a great time,” Robbie argued. “You made that whole country, and like a whole monetary system, and Tony made that, uh, half-orc sorceress that he was all excited about—what if you just did a mini-campaign. You don’t have to top yourself every time. Or maybe somebody else could DM.”

“Maybe,” Gabe said. “I just want to try something. I think, if I could actually do any of this stuff, and know how it feels, I’d be able to integrate it into the game system in a more realistic way. And even if I can't do it, I want to practice the set-up.”

“I thought you needed special equipment, like, a chip in your head,” Robbie remarked, picking up the diagram and flapping it.

“No, that’s what the government says, but according to the forums, that’s a tracking device so the CIA can blow you away if you take your knowledge and try to defect.”

“Ouch. Does it pick up alien transmissions, too?”

“Nope.”

“Bad deal.” Robbie squinted at the diagram. “I can’t believe it’s this simple.”

“People’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

“Tio Maldito used to mess around with this stuff, but he was ex-military or something, I don't know.”

Gabe managed to retrieve the second sauce packet from the pasta water. “If he's still around, we could ask him.”

“Gabe, please don't start this again.”

“I'm not starting anything,” Gabe insisted. “I'm just saying, it's a super weird coincidence for us to have no living relatives. Like, really, none? Nobody? Mom's side or Dad's side? Nobody down South even?”

“It'll be fourteen years next month,” Robbie snapped. “There's nobody. Let it go.”

Gabe let it go. He cut the end off the tube of ground beef and squelched half of it into the pan with the onions, then added some flavor powder as he smashed it around. Robbie nudged him aside to take over the stirring, and Gabe sat back at the table, staring blankly at all his assignments.

“How about history,” Robbie suggested, and Gabe growled.

He stared at Chapter 14 until the Hamburger Helper was done, then he and Robbie stacked the papers on one side of the table so they had space to eat dinner. Gabe propped up his history textbook, which was more tolerable to read while he was stuck doing something else, like eating. Robbie washed the dishes, Gabe switched to physics, and then Gabe's homework-timer went off. “Yes!”

“What now?” Robbie asked warily.

“Help me move the table.”

They picked up the kitchen table and walked it out toward the living room, so as not to scratch the linoleum, and Gabe grabbed a piece of string, a tub of margarine, and a canister of Morton salt. Gabe packed a scoop of margarine into a sandwich bag, cut a hole in one corner, and piped margarine out onto the floor in a circle while Robbie anchored one end of the string in the center. Then Gabe squinted at the floor from several angles, carefully added six more dots of margarine, and connected them to make a hexagon on the inside. Between the circle and the sides of the hexagon he drew symbols for combustion and oxidation, and in one area he erased parts of the circle and added two eight-inch-wide circles in the margins. Then he dusted the area with salt and blew on it so it rolled against the margarine and stuck there.

“You’re helping clean this up,” Robbie said.

“I know, I got it. Where’s the fire extinguisher?”

“Car.”

Robbie went out to his Neon, which really did need a fire extinguisher because it had some electrical problems he’d still not sorted out and also there was a slight risk of it blowing a gasket from its recently installed turbocharger. Gabe set the rest of the margarine tub down in the center of the circle, beside their only ceramic dinner plate and a pack of matches.

“What’s with the margarine?” Robbie asked when he returned.

“I could’ve used paint,” Gabe said.

Robbie’s eyebrows went up, point taken.

“Plus, salt’s recommended for first-timers. Same with the palm circles, it’s a safety thing.”

“Safety first.”

They stared down at the mess of grease and salt on the floor. Robbie yanked the pin out of his fire extinguisher.

“Okay,” Gabe said at last, kneeling down by the two little circles he’d made in the edge of the big diagram. He lit one match and set it down on the dinner plate, burning. “Here goes.”

“Shouldn't we be chanting or something?” Robbie interrupted. The match went out.

Gabe glared at him. “That's for magic.”

Robbie waved at the salt circle, the symbols.

“Magic's not real.”

Robbie snorted. But he kept hold of the fire extinguisher.

Gabe lit another match, set his palms down in the circles, and—his mind went blank. He was supposed to be envisioning the heat of the match and the oxygen in the air combining with the margarine to produce CO2, heat, and light in an exothermic and very straight-forward oxidation reaction, but instead, he thought it's too important, and I can't concentrate when it's important, and what if I don't have the talent? And the match went out.

Gabe felt a cold wash of shame and disappointment. But he lit another match. Try again. Heat, oxygen, oil, concentrate, concentrate.

“Air, fuel, and fire,” Robbie murmured behind him. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”

The asshole was chanting. Chanting some gearhead thing.

Heck, for all Gabe knew, this was magic, some online roleplay meme he'd blundered into without the context and taken for truth. Forget “reversal of entropy,” forget “Platonic forms and the effect of information on physical processes,” this was a kid's game and he'd roped Robbie into it, and what a joke because Robbie hadn't had time for games for about ten years. He'd finally gotten Robbie to do something that wasn't cars, housework, or punk rock, and it was some stupid Slenderman ritual he'd found online—heat, oxygen, oil: oxidization, heat, light.

Something rushed through him. It was like his body was a screen door letting a breeze stir up the dust in a musty old house. His hair blew back, light flared red through his closed eyelids, and he opened his eyes. The diagram was shining, harsh glinting light-and-dark like a seam in space, the kitchen lit up white, Robbie stood beside him clutching the fire extinguisher, and in the center of the ring, the margarine was on fire.

A five-foot plume of flame leapt up from the canister and Robbie shot it with the fire extinguisher. Gabe tipped back and fell on his tailbone, elated.

“The fire,” Robbie said, pointing the extinguisher back and forth from the foam-covered margarine tub to the sodden match. “It jumped. From the match. Did you see that? It—”

“I had my eyes closed,” Gabe laughed. “Why—I can’t believe I did magic and I had my eyes closed—”

“Magic’s not real,” Robbie countered, setting down the fire extinguisher. “Holy shit, magic’s real. Alchemy, whatever-the-fu—fudge.”

“Robbie, you gotta try,” Gabe ordered, standing with a wince. “It runs in families, maybe you can do it too, you gotta try.”

“I haven’t studied any of this stuff,” Robbie protested. “And the circle’s all wet.”

“I’ll get a towel.” Gabe ran to the bathroom, came back with a holey bath towel and carefully blotted the foam off the circle of margarine, scooped suds out of the warm oil in the canister with a mug and dumped it in the trash.

“I haven’t studied this stuff, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Gabe? What do I do?”

Gabe squinted down at the circle. A couple of symbols were smudged and there was a gap in the line; he patched them with some more margarine, another sprinkle of salt. “Just focus on what you were saying. Air, fuel, fire. You gotta, like, visualize the chemical reaction you want to happen. It’s easy. This is like the easiest transmutation there is, that’s why it’s an aptitude test. You did great in chemistry, right?”

“I did fine.” Robbie had done great in chemistry. Robbie was great at basically everything. He could just sit down with a book, read the whole thing in one go, and pass a test on it the next day. It was incredibly annoying, especially since he always insisted that Gabe had to go to college after graduating.

“Sit down, concentrate, put your hands in the circles.” Gabe lit Robbie a fresh match and set it down on the dinner plate. “Come on. If we can do this together, it'd be so awesome!”

Robbie knelt in the circle with his hands on the floor. “Get ready.”

Gabe grabbed the fire extinguisher.

“Okay,” Robbie said, narrowing his eyes at the match. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”

The match went out. Gabe lit him another one.

“Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”

“You got this.”

“Air, fuel, and fire.”

The flame of the match streaked upward, a ribbon of yellow light. “You're doing it! You feel it, like it's moving through you?”

Robbie's eyes were huge. The circle began to glow, the crudely-drawn shapes and symbols sharpening into ragged borders of light and shadow. Gabe saw the moment when Robbie finally threw himself into the transmutation: he started to grin, the circle flared, and the flame streaked toward the tub of margarine. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.” The flame hit the cooking fat, and a fireball the size of a watermelon burst into being in the middle of the circle—

Gabe aimed the fire extinguisher. The fireball dissipated into smoke and dissipated toward the ceiling, but then another fireball formed—puff, gone, burn, puff, gone, burn, puff, gone.

Robbie laughed, and then the next fireball was bigger, way too big, and Robbie's laugh cut off, he yanked his hands back from the circle, yelled, “Gabe!” and Gabe shot foam all over the floor.

“Wow,” Robbie said shakily, when the grease fire went out. The kitchen floor was a disaster.

“Show-off,” Gabe said. “We did it! Robbie, this is so awesome!”

“We can control fire,” Robbie said, his eyes still wide. He sat on the floor, stunned like he'd just had a religious experience. “We can control fire.”

“We can control a lot more than that once we get further into the curriculum,” Gabe told him. He had almost a gigabyte of bootlegged Alchemy textbooks on his laptop.

“We can control fire,” Robbie repeated, with his completely normal attention span. “I can run crazy boost on the Neon without worrying about engine knock. I can get complete combustion on every power stroke. I can make the Neon go so fucking fast.”

“Okay, Robbie,” Gabe said. “You do that, I'll be over here turning lead into gold and building my own Gundam.”

“You can do that?”

Gabe shrugged. “It's basically counterfeiting, so. Probably a bad idea. But I'm sure there's tons of stuff I can do with it to earn extra money that's legal.”

Robbie shook his head, pushed himself to his feet, and started to mop up the fire retardant foam and margarine with the bath towel. “No, don't worry about that. I mean the Gundam.”

Gabe flushed. “I don't know if I can,” he admitted. “I'd have to design a Gundam. But you can do all kinds of stuff with Alchemy. It's basically controlling chemical reactions, and everything's made out of chemicals.”

“I gotta learn to control fire,” Robbie insisted. “I mean, really control fire. Like, down to the millisecond.”

“I'm not sure human brains work fast enough for what you're thinking of doing,” Gabe said, blinking at him.

“I'll get a rhythm. I'll figure it out.” Robbie was...he was excited. He was happy. He was psyched. Gabe couldn't remember Robbie acting like this since he'd gotten a gig roadie-ing for Almas Perdidas on the weekends last summer.

“I'll get my laptop, maybe there's a diagram for finer control,” Gabe suggested. He was halfway to his bedroom when the timer on his phone went off.

Time for history again. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and banged his head against the wall.

“Sunday,” Robbie yelled from the kitchen.

“What?”

“Let's work on this Sunday.”

“Really?” Gabe squinted. Robbie spent most Sundays in a near-coma, catching up on sleep. Gabe did, too.

“This is awesome,” Robbie said, over the squelching sounds of him shuffling the towel around on the floor with his feet. “And we don't do anything fun together anymore. I kinda miss that about your D&D thing, you know?”

Gabe had no idea Robbie had enjoyed his D&D sessions with Tony and the others; Robbie had never participated, just hovered in the background and made snacks. “Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “Sunday.”