Title: Turning Radius
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: PG-13 (cursing)
Length: 3k
Content notes: Amputation, speech difficulties
Author notes: Timestamp in an All-New Ghost Rider/Fullmetal Alchemist fusion
Summary: Gabe tries to get Robbie to open up about how he's adjusting to the whole turned into a car thing. Robbie tries not to make Gabe worry and fails miserably.

(Background: after an alchemical transmutation gone wrong, Gabe Reyes lost both his legs and his big brother Robbie lost his entire body. Fortunately, Gabe was able to think quickly enough to bind Robbie's soul into the 1969 Dodge Charger abandoned in Tio Maldito's old garage where they were doing their Alchemy. Unfortunately, Gabe passed out from blood loss on the way to the hospital and he and Robbie were separated. Robbie got auctioned off by the impound lot, and Gabe got put back in foster care, alone. As soon as he got off his pain meds, Gabe started looking for Robbie online. Yesterday afternoon, Gabe finally found Robbie on Craigslist, bought him from a local drug lord, and left California heading East.)

They barely made it to Flagstaff.

Robbie's engine overheated three times and he kept having to pull over to cool off, and then Gabe baked in the merciless heat radiating down from Robbie's black roof. The last time, Gabe was out of drinking water. He opened the driver's side door, checked the desert for oncoming traffic, and then braced one arm on the seat and the other on Robbie's door-frame and lowered his stumps to the pavement. He pulled himself immediately back in. The road, even in Robbie's shadow, was burning hot. Robbie made concerned whistling noises with the radio.

“I'm okay,” Gabe assured him, opening both windows and lowering the seat back.

Even with his engine shut off, something whirred and spun under Robbie's hood. He was probably trying to cool himself down so they could move again. Thank god Robbie was a mechanic. If Gabe's consciousness were trapped in a car, he wouldn't know the first thing about how to keep himself going.

Robbie used to be a mechanic.

Gabe was going to have to do everything for Robbie now, check his fluid levels and air his tires and, and tune his valves or whatever Robbie had been babbling on about while he'd been fixing up this stupid car, sweating and grinning and covered in grease. Gabe didn't know cars, except the older the car was, the more finicky and high-maintenance. Gabe wasn't responsible enough to take care of himself, let alone Robbie, let alone Robbie as a fifty-year-old suped-up muscle car. He dug his palms into his eyes.

At last, Robbie deemed it safe to start up again. The whole car shook as the engine turned over. Gabe pulled himself upright, shut the door, re-adjusted the seat back. “Okay, vamanos,” he said, patting the steering wheel, and Robbie moved off at fifty-five miles an hour.

The radio flicked back on. Robbie switched rapidly between Mexican and Country and talk radio, interrupting every couple seconds with a warbling, low-fidelity echo of whatever the speaker had just said. It seemed like it was hard for him to control pitch and shape tones and consonants. Gabe resigned himself to living in a Star Wars movie for the next few weeks, maybe come up with some kind of code system until he figured out how to get Robbie's body back.

When they got to Flagstaff, Gabe tried to direct Robbie to a gas station. Robbie ignored him, practically ripped the steering wheel out of his hands, and pulled up to the lobby of a Super 8 motel. “I'm not leaving you here alone,” Gabe protested.

Robbie made a blaaat sound and wiggled the door handle, then shut off his engine.

Gabe dug the key out of his shorts and stared at it for a while, bare steel with a heavy pewter sugar-skull key-chain. Contemplated sticking it in Robbie and trying to start him back up. He put it back in his pocket, sighed, and heaved his wheelchair out of the passenger seat, banging it on Robbie's shifter and center console and steering wheel on its way out the driver's side door. He had to lower himself onto the ground so he could snap it open and do the safety latches. His arms shook as he pried himself backward up onto the seat. He was so tired, he probably wouldn't have made it if he'd still had legs.

He wheeled himself up to the lobby, bumped over the threshold of the automatic doors, paid for a ground-floor handicap access room with twelve of the twenty-dollar bills he'd transmuted out of an old pair of boxers and a pile of junk mail back at the foster home. Robbie followed him to the room, rumbling over the parking lot almost close enough to nose against the back of Gabe's chair, parked himself, and locked up the doors after Gabe grabbed his bag out of the passenger seat. Then Gabe wheeled himself painstakingly up the ramp. His bag almost slipped off his lap; his stumps weren't long enough to support it in place.

Once he got into the room, he realized he was hot and thirsty and stinking and he didn't have a change of clothes and he really really needed to pee. The fastest way to take care of all these problems was to roll off the chair and into the bathtub, where he banged the healing end of one stump when he landed and then sat there for almost an hour, clutching his thigh and staring at the drain and sobbing into the meat of his hand while cool water poured down on him. He washed his clothes in shampoo and hung them on the towel rack, and went to bed in a towel.

His stomach woke him up at dawn. He wheeled himself to the bathroom, wriggled into his damp clothes, brushed his teeth, hung his bag from the back of his chair, and left a twenty on the bed for the maid. The moment he left the motel room, Robbie popped open his driver's side door.

“Genial, I didn't know you could do that,” Gabe said.

Robbie's radio clicked and hummed, and then, slowly, he said, “Prac-tice.” The word ended in an exaggerated staticky hiss.

Gabe's eyes hurt and his breath caught. It didn't sound like Robbie's voice—aside from the hissing and wobbling, it was deeper, more resonant, which made sense because Robbie didn't spend his life talking into microphones, and people's voices always sounded different to themselves than to other people. Robbie must be trying to recreate the overtones he heard when he was speaking. But that smugly humble, one-word answer, that was Robbie all the way. “You need gas,” Gabe croaked. “And I'm hungry.”

An hour later, Gabe had McDonalds and Robbie had a full tank of premium, and Gabe was trying not to drop french fries on Robbie's floor while contemplating the best way to get his hands on some more cellulose fiber to make more money. He could save all his fast food packaging, but he still needed pigment. Green plants worked great. There were palm trees at the edge of the parking lot, but the leaves were too high to reach.

He dropped a french fry. “Fuck,” he said.

“Te nautuh,” Robbie said.

“Huh?”

The radio crackled and made a swooping noise. Then, “T. t. t-t-t-d-d-d-dddddd-d-th-th-th-d-d. De. Nada. Itsss bvine. Vvfffine.”

“I'm still sorry,” Gabe said. He set his food on the center console and bent down to throw the french fry out the window.

“Ch-How aw yyou.”

“I'm fine.”

The radio crackled dubiously.

Gabe finished his Egg McMuffin and slurped the dregs of his coke. Robbie could barely talk because Gabe had turned him into a car. Now Robbie depended on Gabe for everything, and Gabe, just like always, couldn't stop himself from dropping food in Robbie's car, except the car was now Robbie's body, because Gabe had inadvertently performed human transmutation somehow and the best way he'd thought of to fix it was to weld Robbie's soul to the nearest inanimate object for safekeeping, except it wasn't really safe because Robbie could get wrecked or overheated or run out of gas or run out of oil or run his battery down, and what if they got separated and Robbie got trapped like he had when Grumpy stored him in his front yard up on cinderblocks because he kept running away and making the gangsters think he was haunted. Except he was haunted. The car. Robbie was basically a ghost, which meant Gabe had killed him. And then bound his soul to this world so he could never know rest—unless his binding sigil got damaged, which could happen at any time, probably from Gabe banging his wheelchair against it trying to shove it out through the door.

Gabe dropped another french fry, this one laden with ketchup, on the seat. “Fuck!” He ate it hurriedly and wiped the seat off with a napkin.

“How far. Tcho Al. Bvu. Kkker. Kee, Albuquerque?”

Gabe checked his phone. “Three hundred and twenty-three miles.”

“Kas? Kkkk. Kchkk. Kas. Kas stay-shhhhhunn. How mmmanny kas-stay-shunzzz.”

“How many gas stations?”

Robbie beeped. Then, “Wwwai-t. D-raw dthththe kom-bvus-chen, combustion arrrray. Sso I can connntrolll my ffuel usage.”

Gabe blinked. Remembered Robbie's lighter, bought for the purpose, with the array scratched into the side, Robbie wandering around Tio's abandoned garage flicking the lighter and making fireballs for hours on end while Gabe chalked diagram after diagram onto the open floor. Remembered the last month before the accident, when Robbie had Sharpied the array onto the back of his hand every morning, Robbie taking him out for a ride in the Neon, and then, with a distant expression, pressing down on the gas while the little car took off like it was trying to launch into space. “Won't you hurt yourself?”

“I knoooow what Im. Dthoo-ine. Do. Do-eeeem. Eeen. Cr-sh-ch-k-crsh.”

Right. Gabe had turned Robbie into a car, and now Gabe was patronizing him. Robbie used to be a mechanic and he'd been a goddamn prodigy with flame alchemy. As far as Gabe knew, he'd never damaged the Neon with it. Gabe shoved the rest of his fries into his mouth and wadded up his packaging. He needed a trash can—he needed to get the chair out of the car so he could wheel himself to a trash can—oh right, he was saving his wrappers to turn into counterfeit bills. What was he doing?

He needed a Sharpie, or some paint, or some white-out, or he could use some of the ketchup—wait, no, that wasn't durable. He needed a pen, to draw on Robbie, unless he was going to scratch the array into Robbie with the key. But what tool he needed, depended on where Robbie wanted the array drawn. “Where's your hands now?” Gabe asked.

Robbie took a long time to answer. “I dooonn have them.”

“I mean, what feels like hands.” Gabe paused, his gut churned. “Do you feel anything?”

“I fee,” Robbie said hastily. “I feel fine.” So Robbie wasn't trapped in a hell of sensory deprivation. “Bvut nuh-theen feels llike hanzz.”

“But you're fine,” Gabe said, fighting hysteria. Dios, Robbie didn't have any hands, of course he didn't have hands, cars didn't hold things, cars didn't manipulate their environment, they didn't repair or create or pull things apart to see how they worked, they just drove on pavement and drank gasoline. Every playable race in D&D had hands. Gabe had polymorphed him into a car and now Robbie couldn't access any of his learned skills.

And Robbie was fine.

He shouldn't be. There was no way Robbie was actually fine, he had a panic attack almost every month and he was always getting in fights and he needed something to do, to fix, to control constantly, and if he couldn't have that, he'd walk up to his foam rubber punchy-guy in the living room and go to town, and hopefully he'd remember to wrap his hands first.

Robbie had to synthesize his own voice now. Even if he wanted to express emotions—hah—he was a long way from figuring out how to.

He'd watched Javier and Nita role-play this with Nita's stoic, damaged Tiefling ranger and Javier's human monk. He should open up first. “I'm okay, too,” he said. Open up, open up. “But. Um. It's hard.” He pointed at the chair, paused. “Can you, uh, see me? In here?”

“Yes,” Robbie said. “Itss vlurrrry—blurry. Exceb-t my mi-rrrrz.”

Gabe looked up sharply at the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see Robbie's tired green eyes staring back at him. Just his own. He looked almost as exhausted as Robbie used to, but without the piercings. Gabe hadn't slept, and that meant he couldn't think. They were fucked. He looked away, and his eyes caught on the chair in the passenger seat. Right. “It's still hard,” Gabe said. “With my legs gone. I have to plan out...everything. I can't reach shit.” He wasn't going to mention the pain, the phantom limb pain that came and went, or the agony when he banged his stumps wrong. “I'm getting better at using the chair, but. I can't just...go sideways. I have to, like, shimmy the wheels around. And sometimes there's no room. And sometimes I really have to pee. And it. I'm glad I'm alive, it could be worse.” He could be missing his arms. “It's just. Little things, esto y aquello.” He was starting to choke up, and he tried to stop it; this was supposed to be about Robbie. “It's hard. You know?”

Robbie's radio went to static and whistling, and then he started—humming, he was humming and it sounded like a midi file. Gabe thought it might be a lullaby, but the pitch kept wandering around, and the rhythm was off, and he abruptly realized that there was nothing wrong with Robbie's ears or his voice that had made him unable to carry a tune as a human—that was just Robbie. He genuinely, fundamentally sucked at music. It was...comforting, in a deeply irritating way, to hear Robbie completely fail at humming again. At last, Robbie said, “I'm sso sorry, K-ayb. I wish I. Could hel-p.”

“I'm handling it,” Gabe assured him. “How about you?”

“It's. Frus-tr-ay-teen,” Robbie enunciated. “But. I'm a car now. I have to. Ket used to it. And, as long as you're o-kay, I can deal.”

This wasn't what Gabe was trying to get from Robbie, but he wanted, so badly, to believe it. He found himself nodding.

“I like to drive,” Robbie continued. “My body can k-k, can do a hun-d-red mmiles an hour. It feels. Amaz—awesome. I un-der-stan-d how the car operates, more. I don't ket tired any-more. There's. Doooown-sides, but. Thiss is me, now. I sh-ch-just have to ket use-d to it.”

“No, you don't,” Gabe protested. He grabbed the steering wheel, then patted it apologetically. He met his own eyes in the mirror. “This isn't forever, Robbie. I'm gonna get your body back. I told you. You were listening, right? Could you hear me the whole way over here?”

“Yes,” Robbie said. He hummed some more, tuneless warbling, filling the silence. “If an-y-one can do it, itss you. I trus-t you.” Then, “It was-nnn-t your fault.”

“You don't have to lie to make me feel better.”

Robbie's radio clicked, and the engine turned over once, startling Gabe. Click. Click-click-click-wheee. Then, “I check-ked, too. The array. You did it right.”

“If I did it right, then why did this happen?”

Robbie went silent. Nothing from the radio, nothing from the engine. It was as if Gabe were just sitting in a normal car in the McDonalds parking lot, talking to himself.

Maybe he was. “Robbie?” he asked, and his voice cracked.

“Hey,” Robbie said.

Gabe breathed. He was sweating suddenly.

“Can you. Carvve the com-bus-tion array. On the hub of my s-teer-een—steer-een—en mi vo-lan-te?”

“Carve,” Gabe said. “What, like with the key?”

“Sure.”

“Would that hurt you?”

“In-tén-ta-lo.”

Given that Robbie had done most of his own piercings himself, Gabe was not at all confident that Robbie would say anything if Gabe was hurting him. “I'll just, like, scratch it real light,” Gabe said, and dug through his backpack until he found the dog-eared, grease-stained sheet of printer paper with the proper array. He studied the custom boss in the center of the old-fashioned steering wheel, two inches of clear resin encasing a little skull that looked like it was carved in plastic or ivory. He marked out the corners of the array lightly with a sharp edge on the key, then carefully traced each arc and corner, working from the outer ring that called in the tectonic energy to the inner bends that directed it into reduction and oxidation reactions and then meeting in the middle with the inner ring that interfaced with the user's intent. He buffed the little curls of resin away with his sleeve. “How's that?” he asked.

Robbie started up his engine and Gabe took a sip of his coke. The ice had melted, and he sucked the meltwater up until the straw slurped again. The engine's idle made the whole car shudder and the driver's seat jiggle pleasantly. At last, Robbie beeped the radio, and then with a bang, fire erupted out the hole in the hood, engulfing the blower.

“Fuck!” Gabe yelled.

Robbie beeped and whistled and did it again. A woman leaving the drive-through window stopped suddenly across the parking lot and got out her cell phone, staring at the massive fireball.

“Robbie! What the fuck are you doing!”

More whistling. The fire vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving not a trace of soot on the gleaming blower. Robbie revved twice, then said “Sé lo que estoy hac-i-en-do,” which was not reassuring because he'd just lit himself on fire twice in two seconds.

“Pero yo no sé nada, te vas a joder tu mismo, what the fuck!”

Robbie revved and whistled and flicked the windshield wipers back and forth, shifted into Drive, and then took off with a lurch. The exhaust banged like a gunshot. At the exit of the parking lot, Robbie stopped suddenly. “Seat bvellll-t,” he said.

“Are. You. Okay,” Gabe demanded, not reaching for the seat belt.

“I'm okay,” Robbie said. “Thaaaaa—mu-chí-si-mas gra-cias. You're the bes-t.”

Gabe buckled up. “You're acting weirder than usual.”

“I'm. Happy,” Robbie said.

“You just lit yourself on fire.”

“I'm fine. Are you read-dy to go?”

Gabe clutched his face in his hands. “Yes. Wait. No. Bathroom, then we can go.”

Robbie reversed abruptly, T-turned, and stopped short outside the McDonalds entrance. He opened the driver's side door and unlatched Gabe's seatbelt.

Gabe heaved the chair out, managed to do the safety latches without lowering himself to the ground first this time. He transferred over, undid the brakes, and backed away. Robbie shut the door for him, but kept the engine running. “No fire. People are staring.”

Robbie flicked the windshield wipers and sat there, revving his engine. The whole car swayed every time he did it.

It's fine, Gabe told himself as he rolled past the urinals to the handicap stall. Robbie likes fire. Robbie likes cars. You just gave Robbie back one of his skills, of course he's happy, and he's probably using the engine or the battery or something to make the sparks. He's not going to hurt himself.

He heard Robbie's exhaust pop again, through the cinderblock wall of the McDonalds. He maneuvered through the stall door, latched it, squeezed the chair into position, and got ready to lift himself onto the toilet. He ought to hurry.

Robbie only just figured out how to talk last night, Gabe continued as he got to business. He's been trapped on blocks with his battery run down ever since Grumpy bought him at the auction. Of course he's going stir-crazy now that he can move again. He's adjusting.

Out in the parking lot, Robbie's engine roared like a grizzly bear.

He's fine.

Gabe hurried.

.