Title: Relax
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: PG-13 (cursing)
Length: 2k
Notes: Set somewhere between Issue 5 and Issue 7, after they beat Mr. Hyde but before Eli goes after the Russian Mob.
Summary: Eli just wants to teach Robbie a new skill, that's all. Just a little harmless possession between friends.

“Him,” Gabe announced, pointing at an articulated Iron Man action figure with light-up repulsors, a flip-up helmet, and a detachable backpack drone. It cost thirty-six dollars new in the box, batteries not included.

“You got it, Buddy.” Robbie took it off the shelf and put it in the basket of the motorized cart.

“Thank-you, Robbie, you're so awesome! He's so awesome, look, it's Iron Man!” Gabe showed Robbie the box again, and then set it back down in the basket and started pulling at the edges, found the tape holding the cardboard shut. “Help me open it, please?”

“Wait until I pay for it, that's the rules,” Robbie replied, eyeing the Walmart employee in the Loss Prevention vest who'd been “discretely” following them around the store. “Come on, let's go get batteries for him.”

Robbie pushed his own cart full of groceries, glancing back every few seconds to make sure Gabe was close behind. As they left the toy aisle and passed the Sporting Goods aisle, the voice in Robbie's head said, Stop.

“What?” Robbie whispered.

Stop here. Look at the knives.

There was a big glass case of knives, binoculars, and flashlights at the start of the shelves, and Robbie took a look. Bushnell, that sounded like a good brand of binoculars, and then the knives, folding pocket-knives with aluminum handles and anodized finish, and then fixed-blade knives, Bowie knives, tanto-point knives, and a machete with a saw halfway down the blade, and wow. Maybe money really did make you crazy: Robbie had never been a weapons guy, the case workers would have been all over him, but suddenly those fixed blade knives looked beautiful. He approached the case and peered at a Ka-Bar with a cross-guard and a thick, stacked leather handle, new in the sheath, and he could almost feel the weight of it in his palm, taste the metal. His fingers trailed over the glass.

He spotted the price tag and the spell broke. Three hundred bucks? No, thank-you.

Come on. You know you want it.

Now it was just a big knife. Overpriced, too large for opening boxes or trimming vinyl or cutting wire-ties, and kind of a silly thing to own. He shrugged, then whispered, “No, it's fine.”

His eye caught on a Craftsman multitool, though. Pliers, scissors, three different screw-drivers, wire nipper, 10mm wrench, and two folding blades for fifty dollars. And next to that was another multitool, for forty-five. He flagged down an employee and got him to open the glass case and hand him the forty-five dollar multitool. He stuck it in his own cart and started pushing it away when Eli said, Wait. You'll need to sharpen that.

“I'll use the grinder at work,” Robbie whispered.

“What?” Gabe asked.

“Sorry, I was talking to myself.”

Are you fucking kidding me? A grinder? You don't use a grinder for maintenance, you use that when you put a giant chip in your blade or it's rusted to shit and you need to bring it back to life. You need a whetstone.

Grinder's fine, Robbie thought. He pictured the work bench, the power grinder with its selection of wheels in varying grits. It was more than enough to do the job.

A power grinder will eat past the high-carbon edge in two or three passes and if you fuck up, you can overheat it and destroy the tempering. It doesn't even put an edge on. Get a whetstone.

I don't know.

You gonna take your cooking knives to work once a week? Get a whetstone.

Robbie patted the stack of twenties and fifties in his pocket.

It saves money in the long run. Get a whetstone.

Good point, Robbie thought. He turned down the camping and hunting aisle, past mess kits and sleeping pads.

“What are we buying now?” Gabe asked, whirring along behind him.

“Some stuff I can use to take care of our kitchen knives. They get dull if you don't sharpen them.”

“Ninja Wolf has to use carborundum,” Gabe informed him, “because his blades are. They were forged in Mount Ashimoto. The lava. So he has to use carborundum.”

Robbie grinned down at him. He didn't know that particular bit of Ninja Wolf lore, or even what carborundum was. “That's so cool.”

“It's really hard.”

“I bet.”

Gabe nodded to himself and flipped Iron Man's box back and forth.

Robbie surveyed the sharpening kits. There were several: handles with tiny high-carbon inserts that you dragged your knife through to scrape off curls of metal from the edge, a plastic brick with holes in it that you stuck ceramic rods into to polish the blade against while keeping a consistent angle, steel mesh embedded in plastic and studded with microscopic industrial diamonds in various grits, and one box that just contained two hand-sized stone slabs and a bottle of oil. That one, Eli said, when Robbie looked at the “Natural Arkansas Soft Stone.”

It should have been cheaper than the others, Robbie thought, but it wasn't. You sure?

Of course.

Robbie put the twenty-seven dollar sharpening kit in his basket. “Let's get some batteries for Iron Man.”

“Batteries,” Gabe agreed. “Iron Man lost his batteries! And now he's in big trouble. He can't fly or use his repulsors.”

“Let's hurry,” Robbie said, breaking into a mock jog that was just the same pace as the Walmart power scooter. “Can't leave Iron Man grounded.”

They headed to the Electronics department and got a pack of AAs. The loss prevention guy trailed them all the way to the check-out line.

 

That evening, after spaghetti-and-hot-dogs and ice cream and washing the dishes, Gabe sprawled on the floor with a couch cushion and five of his action figures, while Robbie unboxed the sharpening stone. He put a drop of oil on and smeared it around with his finger, like the instructions said, then he dug his kitchen knife out of the drawer. It had only cost ten dollars, and when it was new it had been impressively sharp, but lately Robbie had found that he needed to put some force behind it if he wanted to cut vegetables. This was unsafe.

He set the edge of the blade slantwise on the stone, like in the diagram. The instructions said to pick a consistent angle to sharpen at, somewhere between fifteen and thirty degrees. Robbie wondered how consistent it had to be. He started to drag the blade over a section of the stone, pressing down, handle to tip, when Eli barked, Not like that!

Robbie stopped. Studied the diagram. He thought he was following it.

You'll ruin the stone that way. You'll make grooves in it.

He moved the knife again, this time pushing the edge straight across from one end of the stone to the other. He shifted the blade to an area that hadn't seen the whetstone yet, and did it again.

Points for creativity. No.

Robbie set the knife down and glared across the kitchen at the closed Venetian blinds on the window, in lieu of Eli's unknown face. He picked up the instructions again, wondered if he should have just bought one of those kits with the ceramic rods and the integrated angle guides.

Just let me do it.

Let you? Robbie looked down at the stone. At his own hands. Sharing control with Eli was nothing new; every time he'd changed—spontaneous human combustion, becoming one with the car, whatever you wanted to call it—it got hard to tell who was doing what. Mostly it had been Robbie, but the first night he'd been trapped inside, like a nightmare, and ever since there had been...lapses, moving in ways that Robbie never would have thought of. Giddy laughter. Kneeing a man under the chin and snapping his neck.

He could accept sharing that body. It wasn't really his; it wasn't even human. But sharing his real body?

His real body had his face, his name, his ID, his newly-clean legal record. His real body belonged to the person Gabe trusted. He didn't know Eli all that well, except that Eli was kind of a dick. Not that Robbie had much room to point fingers, though.

Eli grumbled—not really a sound, just a feeling. If you just relax—

You relax, Robbie retorted.

Rude?

Sorry. Just, don't tell me to relax.

He felt Eli's amusement, a little flutter in his chest. Okay then. Go limp. And maybe I can...get in there, and show you how it's done.

I'll figure it out. There was only one way of using the whetstone left to try, and that was to push the blade over the surface of the whetstone from one end to the other while also pulling it from the handle to the tip in a smooth continuous curve.

You're rubbing on the corners, Eli nitpicked. You're not keeping it flat.

Robbie tried again, pushing down harder to steady his hand. That's too hard.

He lightened the pressure. Your angle's all over the place, you're gonna fuck up the edge. Let me. C'mon. You'll ruin your knife.

Fourth time's the charm—You can't keep sharpening the same side every time!

Oh, right, the instructions said to switch sides after every three strokes. Could you please shut up so I can concentrate. You're making this harder.

Just let me show you. Boy! You're making it worse! He flipped the knife over, and awkwardly stroked the blade over the stone in the other direction. Three strokes, as consistent as he could make them, then flip again back to the first side. He noticed the film of honing oil was starting to turn dark gray from bits of metal. He must be getting somewhere. He turned the knife over and peered at the reflection of the kitchen light along the greasy edge, at the bright gleam of fresh metal and the dull spots where the knife had been pitted and dented from banging around in the drawer. There was a long way to go if he wanted the edge completely smooth. He tested it, brushed the pad of his thumb sideways over the edge, felt microscopic burrs and coils of metal drag against his skin.

He flipped the blade again and ran it over the whetstone, five smooth strokes. Flip, a deft flick of the fingers, and now he pulled it toward himself, another five. His right hand held the blade at a small angle, machine-steady, while the fingers of his left braced the stone against the table. He shifted the whetstone for a better angle, rocked back and forth slightly with his movements. His irritation faded, lost in the steady, hypnotic motions of his hands and the pleasant whist-whist of the steel passing over the stone.

The honing oil grew dark with steel dust. Time to wipe it off and add fresh. He reached for his bag of patches, found nothing. No gun-cleaning kit, no cotton rag, unfamiliar Formica table-top, unfamiliar kitchen—no, wait, he knew this place—Whoa, Robbie and Eli thought.

That was weird. Was I you?

No, Eli said, dragging out his thoughts. I know where I am. I know what year it is. That wasn't me-me, I think you were tapping into my memories somehow. Which is not okay. Don't do that.

No arguments there. It was an accident, I'll try not to do that again. Robbie looked down at the whetstone. Remembered from the thoughts that weren't his, that the oil was getting too loaded with metal dust and he needed to wipe it off with a paper towel. He did so, smeared the fresh oil over the stone with his fingertips, and started honing the knife again. His hands fell immediately into that same well-practiced rhythm.

Huh.

I guess you did show me how to do this. Kind of. Thanks, I guess. Sorry it got weird.

You know, a little weird can be a good thing, Eli mused. I can feel your hands.

What? Robbie paused in his sharpening, gripped the knife involuntarily.

Well, not now, but when you were, you know, relaxed. It was nice. I've been dead for a long time, Robbie, it's hard to remember what it was like to be human.

Robbie hardened his mouth. I didn't ask for you to bring me back.

No, you were a lot too dead at the time. Eli shifted back and forth in Robbie's head, like a mosquito circling him, looking for a juicy target. No offense. I'm just saying it would be good, for our future relationship, if I got to feel alive every once in a while.

Relationship?

Our host-spirit relationship. Which will, if all goes according to plan, be—

Eternal, you said. Robbie stared down at his hands. They looked like normal, mortal, human hands. He'd bashed his knuckles at the garage yesterday, and they were covered in healing scabs. He had no intention of letting Eli take over his life, but on the other hand, Eli had helped him and Gabe out more than he could possibly repay, and he got kind of whiny when Robbie ignored him.

He started sharpening the knife again, trying to...to relax, to let his hands move without his conscious control. The more he concentrated, the more he felt his borrowed skill slipping away, until Eli said, Your angle's off, you just fucked up your edge.

You try it, Robbie snapped, and then he felt his hands prickling like he'd just been sitting on them for two hours. His fingers twitched involuntarily. He startled, staring at them, and the prickling stopped. That's you?

That was me, Eli grunted. You are one tight-assed little punk.

Robbie felt a bit better about Eli's request to possess his body, knowing that he himself could barely manage to step aside long enough for Eli to do more than move his pinkie finger. I'll work on it, he offered. Like you said, you did bring me back. It's a reasonable thing to ask.

That's me, Eli agreed. Reasonable. Now get that new pocket-knife, work on that. Factory edge is always shit, a man's got to put his own touch on his tools.