Title: Music For Our Great American Road Trip
Fandom: Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: T
Length: 4k
Author notes: All-New Ghost Rider/Fullmetal Alchemist fusion in which Gabe Reyes lost both his legs and Robbie Reyes is a 1969 Dodge Charger and they're both unlicensed alchemists on a road trip looking for their long-lost uncle.
Summary: Robbie and Gabe pick up a hitchhiker.

“Huh,” Robbie said.

They were cruising northwest at sixty miles an hour over a two-lane highway through miles and miles of drab gray-green scrubland bounded on either side by barbed-wire fencing and distant rocky outcrops. Every ten minutes or so, they passed a big ranch house, or a herd of cows, or an abandoned field harvester. But mostly it was just the sandy ground, sparse dry clumps of grass, stands of cottonwood trees marking dry stream-beds. The current stretch of road they followed was so straight and flat that it seemed to vanish into stripy haze of heat waves in the distance.

Gabe looked up from Robbie's new Galaxy phone, on which he'd been setting up the voice assistant. “What?”

“There's a girl.”

Gabe squinted into the distance, then whipped his head around in case they'd passed her. “Where?”

“Ahead of us. Walking down the road.”

“Like a hitchhiker?”

“I guess.”

They slowed a bit. There was no one behind them; the last car they'd seen for the past twenty minutes had been a broken down little truck loaded with blue plastic barrels and dawdling along ten miles below the speed limit. Robbie proved to be right. A couple miles down the slope, and the girl came into view, red-haired, wearing denim-on-denim, with a rucksack at her feet and a guitar case slung over her back. There was nothing but barbed wire and bare hills in all directions. She had one thumb out, her arm lax at her side.

“That's not very safe,” Gabe said.

Robbie made a chuff of static through the radio, and slowed further, passed the girl and pulled over a hundred feet down the road. She jogged to catch them and Gabe started to haul his wheelchair into the back footwell, clear his books and papers off the passenger seat.

“Shit,” Gabe realized.

The girl was all the way at the door now. Robbie rolled the window down, the hand crank spinning on its own. She peered in. Her face was freckled and red from sunburn.

“Uh...where you headed?” Gabe asked.

“Coeur D'Alene.” She had a strong twang to her voice. Gabe didn't think anyone actually talked like that in real life. Robbie crackled the radio again, almost a snort. “That's in Idaho.”

Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Wow, us, too! Boise! You want to ride along?”

“Cain't exactly say no.” She peered in through the window, squinted at the chair and the papers piled on Robbie's back seat. “Us?”

Oops. “Me and the car. You know, when you're travelling, you start...talking to people who aren't there.”

“Oh, I get that,” the girl said, getting in. She smelled like she hadn't showered for a couple days, but then, so did Gabe. “Be nice to have someone new to talk to.”

She put her rucksack in the footwell, climbed in with her legs resting on top, hugged her guitar case on her lap, and buckled in. Robbie took off, a loud rev and then a controlled explosion that propelled them to sixty miles an hour in well under ten seconds. The girl eeped. Gabe rested his hands on the wheel and tried to make it look like he was driving. He had no idea how to explain how he was using the pedals.

She glanced at his stumps, opened her mouth, and shut it.

Gabe stared down the road, the endless stones and sand and sparse tufts of dry grass. Robbie kept quiet, carrying them steadily toward Utah as his engine hummed, bone-deep, through the cabin. This was going to be very boring. “So. You play guitar?”

“Huh?” She blinked, then patted her guitar case as though she'd forgotten it was occupying her entire lap and scraping Robbie's ceiling. “Oh! Yeah. I mean, o'course. Ever since I was a little kid, I had lessons, but it's only since I left for—I guess I just had to get out into the world to find my passion, you know? To find something to say. So. Road trip!”

Gabe moved his left hand to the top of Robbie's wheel and leaned his right elbow on the armrest so he could face her, and look relaxed and cool like in the movies. She was way older than him, probably college-aged, but that didn't mean he had to act nervous. He nodded and tried to think up something interesting to add that wouldn't incriminate himself. Playing NPCs and delivering backstory at the kitchen table for his friends was one thing, but inventing cover stories for his actual life was completely different.

He heard a clicking noise. Robbie was blinking his right turn signal. Gabe put both hands on the wheel again, ten and two, and Robbie stopped. Gabe glared at the rearview mirror.

“I can't believe we're headed to the same state,” he said. “What a coincidence. You're like a wandering bard and I'm, um—” a necromancer— “Um. A wizard? I guess? 'Cause I don't have many hit points? Anyway what were you doing hitching on the side of the road there? Pretty empty.”

She smiled very wide, and her eyes looked tight. “I caught a ride but I had ta ditch in a hurry.”

Robbie sped up, then did the weird down-shifting thing with his transmission that sent one of his gauges into the red for a moment. Gabe patted the steering wheel and he settled back to his normal cruising gear.

“But you seem nice,” she continued. “So like. All's well that ends well!” Her twangy accent vanished.

“It's an adventure,” Gabe agreed.

They rode along, mutually agreeing not to talk about how much fun they were or were not having on this adventure. Gabe's hands were sweating against Robbie's wheel. He wanted to look around. He wanted to read his alchemy notes and try to figure out what symbol he could have possibly transposed to change an information-seeking array into one for human transmutation. He wanted to finish setting up Bixby for Robbie's new phone. He thought about turning on Robbie's radio, but there weren't many options out in the desert, and he couldn't exactly ask Robbie for permission.

Actually...why not. If Gabe couldn't talk to Robbie for the next five hundred miles, he might as well be alone in the car. It would be horrible. He already couldn't stand it when Robbie was silent for more than an hour at a time; he started wondering if he'd imagined his voice all along. And he was so terribly bored. “I should introduce you to Robbie,” Gabe said.

“Where?” the girl asked, peering into the back seat. It struck Gabe that she must be looking for an animal. Robbie made a recalcitrant squawk with his speakers.

“Robbie's the computer who controls the car,” Gabe announced. “Robbie, say hi.”

Silence. The girl raised her eyebrows, then reached into the top of her rucksack, keeping her hand out of view.

Gabe glared at the radio, then took both his hands off the steering wheel. “Robbie. It makes sense. I don't have any feet. Say hi.”

“Hi,” Robbie said at last, drawing it out. Watching the girl, Gabe noticed for the first time all day how obviously synthesized Robbie's voice was, despite his quick progress in making himself understandable. “Uh...yeah. I'm the computer.”

The girl peered at the radio, took her empty hand back out of her bag. “That's cute. Is that a recording or an AI?”

“AI,” Robbie buzzed. “I'm a high-perfor-mance ECU, I manage intake charge richness and ignition timing. Uhhhh, and steering, throttle, braking, na-vi-ga-tion, all that. Lots of sensors, and, uh, motors. My name's Roberto, that stands for Remote Operated—no. Racing Optimized...Buh...what's your name?”

“Lisa,” said the girl slowly.

“I'm Gabe,” Gabe said. “Gabriél.”

“Pleased to meet you, Lisa.”

“So that's how you were driving,” Lisa said, glancing at Gabe's stumps again. “I didn't want to, like, ask.”

“Yeah, Robbie takes care of everything,” Gabe said, reclining his seat to he could reach into the back and grab his stapled-together pile of alchemy diagrams.

“Why's he have an accent?”

“Why do you have an accent?” Gabe snapped, grabbing the hub of Robbie's wheel protectively.

Lisa banged her head against the neck of her guitar case. “Ohmigod. Ignore me. I meant, like, he sounds like the guys from back home.”

“Don't talk about him like he's not there.”

“Gabe, cálmate. It's fine. So. Lisa. You can ride with us as far as Boise if you want, but we have to stop in Salt Lake City—”

“Wait? Why?” Gabe interrupted.

“So you can get out and sleep and—”

“What, stretch my legs? It's just fourteen hours.”

“Don't you have...rehab? Something, for your hips?”

“It's fine. I'll do it later. I can sit in the chair, or I can sit in—in you, and you're a lot more comfortable. It's fine.”

Robbie squawked and went silent for a moment. Then, “We're stopping in Salt Lake City.”

Gabe growled.

Lisa squinted at the radio. “Doesn't he—I mean, Roberto, don't you have the Three Laws?”

Gabe glanced at her, surprised. She didn't seem like the type who read classic sci-fi—

“I like Will Smith,” Lisa explained. “So...who's in charge here?”

Gabe stared up at his uncertain face in Robbie's rearview mirror. Robbie twitched his windshield wipers. The silence stretched until they spoke over each-other.

“Gabe.”

“Robbie.”

“Mierda, soy el coche, no puedo estar a cargo,” Robbie griped. “Uh, Lisa. Don't worry. I would never, ever hurt—uh, well.”

Gabe didn't like how long Robbie paused here, but he wasn't exactly surprised. Robbie had never put anybody in the ER who didn't have it coming, but that made two people that Gabe knew about so far. And on top of that he had his violent panic attacks. “So what's with the guitar?” Gabe asked.

“I'd protect Gabe with my life,” Robbie finished, which was just embarrassing and probably not what Lisa needed to hear to defuse the whole you've hitched a ride in a sentient car bombshell. “And, uh. You, too.” Gabe could hear the I guess lingering unspoken in the air.

“The guitar?” Gabe insisted. “It looks really heavy.”

Lisa's eyes shifted from Gabe, to Robbie's radio, and back to Gabe. “Actually it's super light,” she said at last. “It's acoustic. Spruce and maple. My dad got it for me when I got accepted to UCLA, want to see?”

“Yes, please.”

She unlatched the guitar case, frowned, and then re-latched it, shoved it backwards behind Robbie's driver's seat, and then twisted herself around to open it in the back where there was room. She tenderly maneuvered a blond wood guitar with a red fretboard onto her lap and strummed a chord.

“Cool,” Gabe said. He dug his phone out of the pocket of his jacket, which he'd stuffed between his seat and Robbie's center console. “Here's my iPhone, Robbie got it when we—uh, I mean, um.” Cars couldn't buy their brothers Hooray! We're finally out of the foster system! celebratory used iPhones. He put his phone back. “Do you play? You said you play?”

Lisa gave no sign that she'd noticed how very, very bad at lying they were. Backstory, Gabe told himself. It's just our backstory, it has to make sense. She reached back into her case for a pick, plucked out a cheery little melody, and then started to sing. She had an easy, pleasant voice that blended with the warm notes she strummed from the guitar. Her exaggerated drawl came back. “Oh, I had a little horse, the purdiest buckskin you saw, and I rode him through the forest. A big black crow began to caw...I'm still working on the first few stanzas, I had to, like, scrap them and start over.”

“You had a horse?” Gabe asked. That was one weakness he had as a dungeon master: the party always needed a horse to carry their loot, and he had to role-play it because it was an NPC, but he'd never even touched a horse before.

Lisa grimaced. “No, I made that up. But it's Country, I have to sing about horses. I wish I had a horse. I volunteered at a horse rescue for a summer and I got to feed them and walk them.”

“How was that?”

“One took off running while I was holding her and gave me a concussion.”

“Ay.”

“She's the sweetest. Her name's Pansy. She's scared of plastic bags.”

“You should write a song about that,” Gabe suggested. “My horse saw a plastic bag...cracked my head...now I can't remember...who I am!”

Lisa strummed along with him, and made a credible effort at keeping in tune, which was impressive because Gabe didn't know what tune he was trying to sing himself. “Sure, it could be funny,” she said, “but I need the theme. The culture. The ambiance. Like, one amusing anecdote does not a country ballad make.”

“Like a metaphor?”

“Like context,” Lisa said, the rhythm of her words and the manic intensity of her expression making her seem slightly deranged. “I have to be Country. Experience Country.”

Gabe squinted at her. “Why? Why not just sing Country songs about your life?” Robbie agreed with a skeptical whistle.

“I, um. Hm.” She stared down the road and drummed her fingers on the body of her guitar. “I want to...I'm striking out on my own, right? This is when I establish who I am as an artist. And I want who I am to be, like, on purpose. I wasn't one of those deep emo kids who's always drawing sharpie on their arms, you know? I never had like a persona. But Country music is cool. I mean, a lot of the new stuff's sorta lame, but I like the sound. I like acoustics, it's not super aggressive. And nobody back home listened to it, so I feel like I picked it for me. But I can't just use the genre to sing about whatever's convenient. I got to walk the walk.”

“So you're hitch-hi-king alone through Nowhere, USA,” Robbie summarized.

“Look who's talking.”

Robbie crackled his speakers.

“No te preocupes,” Gabe said, patting Robbie's dashboard.

“Si, me preocupo. Lisa, we can get you a motel room. We can take you to Boise.” Robbie twitched his mirror at Gabe. “¿Podremos? ¿No?”

Gabe dug his wad of alchemized twenties out of his pocket and riffled through them. He'd have to make more when they stopped. “Sure.”

“No,” Lisa protested. “You guys—don't worry—”

“Just promise me you'll get a bus ticket after,” Robbie insisted. “Please. We can give you the money.”

Lisa glared at his radio, then his rear-view mirror. “You're really opinionated for a computer.”

Robbie let out a two-toned rumble and squeal like a microphone cable getting clumsily plugged in to an over-powered amplifier. It was frustration in audible form, and it raised the hairs on the back of Gabe's neck. “Humor me,” he buzzed. Then, softer and slower and more lifelike, “I don't want you getting hurt.”

Lisa glared at his mirror, then threw up her hands, hooked her pinkies together. “Okay! Whatevs! I'll take the Greyhound to Coeur D'Alene. But I know how to take care of myself. You should see the block I grew up on.”

“Yeah, so you know how important it is to have people watching your back,” Gabe said.

“Right.”

Robbie whistled in agreement. He rumbled over the road, downshifting to slow for a little clump of ranch houses surrounding a billboard, a bar, a silo, and a gas station.

“Slower,” Gabe said, watching his speedometer for him. “Little slower...okay, thirty-five.”

Robbie's speed steadied to the new speed limit, until the town's single stoplight turned yellow, then red. He eased to a halt, and his idle shook the whole car.

“Ooh, look at that old post office,” Lisa said, pulling out her smart phone to take a picture. The windows were dusty, and the letters on the awning looked like they'd kept the same design since 1950.

There was no one at the cross street. When the light finally turned green again, Robbie revved up and took off, more gently than usual but still rocking Gabe and Lisa backward in his seats. “Sorry,” Robbie said. “High-stall torque converter, I'm still figuring out how to work around it.”

“Weird.” Lisa spun in her seat and pointed out the window. “Cows!”

“Cool!” Gabe said. “Aw, there's babies!”

Robbie twitched his rear-view and side mirrors toward the cows as they passed them. “They're so big.”

“Never gets old,” Gabe agreed.

They crossed the state line from Colorado to Utah: more rocks, more grass, more thin three-line barbed wire fences, more endless straight two-lane highway. Here and there, hawks perched on the metal fence posts. The sun swung from high in the sky on their right to high in the sky on their left.

Lisa strummed her guitar and hummed, relaxing into Robbie's passenger seat. “Uh, Robbie. Do you synth?”

“What?”

“Can you synthesize a drumbeat? Maybe a bassline?”

Robbie buzzed uncertainly. “Are you asking me to play music with you?”

“He's not very—”

“I'm not very good at that.”

“You can't, like, download an app for it?” Lisa asked.

“I don't work that way.”

“He doesn't connect to the Internet. He'd get a virus.”

“I'm an ECU, I control the engine.”

“But you talk,” Lisa said.

“I can't sing, though.”

“Why not? Like, would it distract you from driving?”

“No,” Robbie hummed. “I'm just not good at it.”

“But you can learn, right? I mean, since you talk, I assume you can learn.”

“Of course I can learn, I'm an ECU,” Robbie said, quick and choppy.

“Do you want to learn?” Lisa shook her head. “Sorry, I guess that's kind of human-centric. See, most humans care about music—”

“Robbie loves music.”

“I like music, I'm just not good at it.”

“You don't have to be good at it to have fun,” Lisa said. “Ohmigod. Can you have fun?”

Gabe caught his breath and watched Robbie's mirror. His rear-view mirror was pointed at Lisa at the moment, so Gabe turned to the side mirror, stared into his own anxious face and wide eyes.

“I can have fun,” Robbie enunciated.

“That's so cool.” Lisa strummed up and down rapidly, rum-a-rum-a-rum-a-rummmmm. “Let me teach you a drumbeat. Then we can jam.”

“Okay,” Robbie said dubiously.

Lisa picked a little tune on her guitar, then shook her head. Tried another one, and another. Got out her phone and scrolled through a playlist. “Can you, like, imitate sounds?”

“The-oretic-ly.” He finished with a soft buzz and a whoop. “It takes practice.”

“Super! Okay, this one's a good one.” She put her phone away. “It's really simple and everyone loves it. I just need to do a two-beat rhythm, okay?” She patted Robbie's glove box with the flat of her hand, then with the backs of her fingernails. Thump, click, thump, click, thump, click.

Robbie crackled, squealed, wavered up and down the range of pitches the Charger's speakers could emit.

Lisa frowned. “Maybe we should just work on one sound at a time.” Thump, thump, thump, thump. “Try that.”

Robbie let out a crack, a buzz, a pop, the syllable dum, a pew sound like a ray gun in a bad sci-fi movie, and then a deep thunk.

“That,” Lisa interrupted. “Can you do that again?”

Thunk. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

“Awesome. That's your down beat, um, like your kick drum. Now you need something with a higher pitch, a bit sharper.” Click. “Maybe with a little rattling sound.” She tapped her fingernails on his glove compartment again, separating them slightly to make a rolling rrrrk.

“Rick,” said Robbie. He repeated it, adjusting the pitch up and down. Rick, rick, rick, rick, rick.

Gabe had never watched Robbie learning from someone else before. He knew Robbie was good at school, he was smart, he could figure things out and do research, but he'd never seen Robbie focused and learning from another person, just like Gabe kept trying to, pounding away at history and trigonometry and never getting anywhere. It wasn't that everything came easy to Robbie, Gabe realized. Robbie just worked really hard at everything he did. Why can't I be like that? he wondered. He stared down at the alchemy diagrams on his lap. If he could work as hard at school as he did at alchemy, he'd probably be in all AP classes and Robbie would be proud of him, not having a panic attack once a month over Gabe's grades.

He shook his head, re-oriented himself to the here-and-now. He wasn't going back to school until he fixed Robbie. Robbie was on vacation because Gabe had turned him into a car, and he shouldn't be having any panic attacks.

“Okay, now put them together,” Lisa was saying, and Robbie's speakers went thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick, halting at first, then steadier and steadier. “Okay, speed it up a little.” Robbie's noises started to smooth out and speed up into a clear and completely recognizable synthetic drumbeat. Lisa nodded her head in time, and after about thirty seconds, she strummed her guitar and began to sing. “On the road again—”

Robbie stopped.

“What's up?”

Robbie croaked. “Sorry, I was surprised.”

“That's fine. You sound great! Let's start again.”

Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick.

“On the road again! Just can't wait to get on the road again.” She played chords to her own melody, strumming in time with Robbie's beat. “The life I love is making music with my friends, and I can't wait to get on the road again.”

Gabe's jaw dropped. Robbie thunked and ricked steadily, and the chords from the guitar backed up the melody Lisa sang, and it all blended together into a sweet synthetic whole. And all Robbie had to do was thunk, rick. Robbie turned his rear view mirror toward Gabe, and Gabe flashed two thumbs-up at his own awestruck face.

“Come on, Gabe, whistle something,” Lisa said between verses, still strumming along with Robbie.

“Me?” This was Robbie's time. Robbie was not-sucking at music. This was a miracle. “What should I—”

“I don't know, just whistle. You've got to whistle along to Willie Nelson. Jam with us!”

Robbie raised his windshield wipers, and Gabe took that as encouragement. He whistled. He had no idea what he was supposed to whistle, so he did something that was half On The Road Again and half advertising jingle. He felt stupid, but Lisa kept playing along and nodding for him to continue until he ran out of breath, then she picked back up with the last verse and closed out the song with a long sustained chord.

Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk... “Am I done?” Robbie asked.

“Yeah, that's the end. You want to try again? You want to learn a walking bass line?”

Robbie squealed his speakers. “Si!” Thunk, rick. “Maybe,” he amended. “Can I practice the beat thing first?”

“Of course!” Lisa scrolled through her phone again. “I got another one that'll work with that one-two beat. Want to go?”

Robbie revved and surged forward.

“Speeding,” Gabe reminded him. “Eighty, uh, seventy-five, oh, okay, sixty-five.”

“Thanks,” Robbie said. Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick. He flicked his windshield wipers, I'm ready, and Lisa gripped the neck of her guitar and strummed out new chords. They rolled north-west, strumming and singing and whistling and synthesizing, and Gabe's big brother, always listening to music and carrying musicians and their equipment around LA in his stripped-out Dodge Neon, for the first time in his life got to be part of a band. Gabe kept both hands on Robbie's wheel so Robbie could concentrate on the music. He was having fun. Was he relaxed? Gabe couldn't tell, but he thought he had to be.

Mierda. Maybe if they'd gone to Tio instead of foster care, Robbie could have had some fucking music lessons.

.