Title: USP
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider / Fullmetal Alchemist fusion
Rating: T
Length: 5k
Author's note: Illicit drug use by a teenager. Cursing. Written for the prompt, clue medicine.
Summary: Gabe finally gets to sit down with his long lost Tio Elias aka Tio Maldito and try to figure out how the heck he managed to accidentally commit an alchemy taboo. (In which Gabe Reyes is an alchemist prodigy with no legs, Robbie is the Hell Charger, and Eli Morrow is not yet dead.)

The first thing Tio Elias did before helping Gabe up the front steps was disappear into the double-wide and reappear carrying a large black trashbag that he dropped over the porch railing. Then he collapsed the chair and carried it up the steps while Gabe pushed himself backwards step-by-step with his hands, up onto the porch where he could climb back into the chair and move about with some semblance of dignity.

The double-wide didn't look much cleaner for Tio's hasty tidying. Stacks of newspapers, bits of machinery, books, jars of alchemical precursors, magazines about hog farming, boots, and exercise equipment made a labyrinth on the rust-colored carpet. The imitation-wood-panel walls were bare.

Gabe didn't know much about uncles, but from TV and his few encounters with fellow foster kids' relatives he knew they could be sorted into two categories: emergency back-up parent, or irresponsible ne'er do-well. Tio did not seem very responsible. This was fine. Gabe and Robbie didn't need a parent, they needed an alchemist.

“Haven't had a house-cleaner around in a few years,” Tio said, waving at the mess, and then he locked the front door and stepped around Gabe into the kitchen. “You hungry? I got bacon, andouille, chorizo, kielbasa, pork chops, pork tenderloin—no, saving that—picnic ham, honey-sliced ham—” The freezer had to be packed top to bottom with pork products. “All organic, best you ever ate. C'mon, boy, pick something.”

“Chorizo, please,” Gabe said hesitantly.

“Gimme a challenge why don't you,” Tio said nonsensically, and then he tugged at something inside and a pile of frozen meat in unlabelled plastic vacuum-sealed packages clattered to the floor. “Fuck!” Tio exclaimed. “Ay. Motherfucker.” He lowered himself slowly to the floor, bracing himself against the kitchen counter with one hand, and began to sort through the packages while the freezer whirred and poured cold air down into the kitchen. “Goddamn it. This is—no, that's the bratwurst. This is—bratwurst, andouille, andouille, chorizo. Yeah.” He threw the package over the floor toward Gabe and then began the apparently-laborious process of picking up the spilled frozen meat and stacking it on the counter while still seated on the kitchen floor.

Gabe leaned forward carefully to pick up the packet of sausage and pushed himself into the kitchen. “Um,” he said, and held out a hand.

“What?” Tio stared at him. The stack of meat on the counter started sliding, and Gabe watched helplessly as a pork loin flipped end over end and whacked his new uncle in the shoulder. Tio swore, but it wasn't a swearword Gabe knew.

“I could stack things?” Gabe offered.

“Huh,” said Tio with a blank look. Then, “Sure, kid. Get over here.”

They managed to clean up the floor in three stages, rather than the one step it would have taken if Gabe had legs or if Tio were able to bend down and straighten up repeatedly. Still, at the end of all this, Tio looked somewhat gray around the lips, and he gripped the counter as he leaned against it for a minute. “I suppose you want this cooked,” he said, and, yes, Gabe would appreciate it being cooked. Tio chopped up the sausage and a potato and started stirring them around in a pan. “First things first,” Tio said, sounding less out of breath. How'd you find me? Real answers now, how the fuck did you find me?”

Gabe exhaled. This was a less stressful line of questioning than “Where's Roberto” or “Where've you two been all these years” or “So what's your mom and dad been up to these days” but Gabe had done a lot of borderline-illegal and some actually-illegal stuff, lying to government officials mostly, in his quest for his long-lost uncle. He recounted how he'd looked up the deed for the abandoned garage in LA and then checked public records and caught on to Tio's various aliases as he moved homes and money between Albuquerque, Boise, and finally Sioux City Iowa CHECK. Tio stirred steadily and swayed on his feet as he listened. “I guess I better hope you're the only one who wants to find me that bad,” Tio said at last. “You get any help?”

“Just Robbie.”

“He a cop now or something?”

“Uh, no,” Gabe said. “He's a mechanic.”

“Blue collar.”

“I guess. He's partway through community college, but he had to stop.” Robbie needed his body back so he could finish his auto tech degree. “He can't—” Gabe remembered he wasn't ready to explain that part yet. “We do Alchemy.”

“Yeah, you said.” Tio gave the pan of potatoes and sausage a final shake and scraped it out onto a paper plate. He started to hand Gabe the plate and the fork, then stopped himself and carried it to the cluttered dining-room table.

Gabe saw bills, newspaper clippings, more hog-farming magazines, and a vacuum sealer. He painstakingly dragged the one chair out of his way to eat at the clean spot. The chorizo had seasoned the potatoes, odd spice choices giving an unfamiliar flavor, but still good after such a long trip, and salty. “Could I please have some water?”

“Huh. Water.” Tio filled him a glass at the sink, cleaned another spot on the table, and moved the chair there. “So! Equivalent exchange put you in a wheelchair. Most people smart enough to transmute with that much power are too smart to take the risk. Makes it uncommon. They say there's perks, but nobody talks about 'em in detail. That true for you?”

“What?”

“Perks. Are there perks?” Tio's light brown eyes fixed on Gabe's.

“Oh!” This was a far easier topic. “Yeah. My memory's messed up, because I almost bled to death and passed out, but I think I, like, saw things? And I thought about it while I was in the hospital and I realized there's no real reason you have to actually draw out your alchemical diagrams to transmute, as long as you hold the right, um.” He struggled to put into words how he tensed his mind when he transmuted matter by the circle of his arms. “I mean, the body and the mind—there's this way you...” He trailed off as Tio waited silently. “It's hard to explain,” he said, defeated.

“How 'bout you show me.”

Gabe glanced around the detritus on the table, and selected a magazine, a plastic bottle cap, and a heavy-duty staple from a cardboard box. “You done with this?” he asked, holding up the magazine.

Tio took it from him, paged through it, and ripped out a section before handing it back. “Go ahead.”

He took a settling breath and tried to connect to the earth beneath the chair's wheels, through the slab the house rested on, West to the Rocky Mountains where continental plates still butted heads and bulged heavenward, limitless energy trapped in the rock. He felt the power flow toward him, seeking a release, and he focused on the materials in front of him and fixed in his mind the desired end result, the most practiced alchemical transmutation he had. He pressed his palms together and slapped them down on the litter. There was a flash of light and a smell of ozone, and when he opened his eyes he held a pile of twenty-dollar bills in his hands.

“Some perk,” Tio said.

Gabe shuffled through the pile and started picking out the bad ones—the ones with Jefferson on each side, the ones with his own social security number as the serial number, and the mutant bill-trees that branched out and merged into each-other. At the end, he had seven apparently-normal bills, which he handed to Tio. “Sorry. We didn't really have better options on the road. I'll stop now—”

“Don't stop on my account,” Tio said, holding a bill up to the light to look for the water mark. He discarded two more, then put the rest in his pocket. “This is good, you can earn your keep.”

Gabe laughed, and Tio chuckled with him. Steam from the potatoes and sausage wafted up and he shoveled down a few more bites. This was good. He and Robbie had an uncle. An unregistered alchemist on the run from the law, but still: uncle. Family. And probably not in a hurry to force Gabe back into school or get panic attacks over Gabe's grades. And Gabe had tracked him down with old-fashioned footwork, they hadn't even had to—they didn't have to—Robbie didn't have to—

Gabe set his fork down. “Robbie and I did a transmutation for information,” he said, his voice cracking. “The command was to find living blood relatives. We had aluminum scrap for energy, and a road atlas for the marker. Just information, a pound of aluminum would be fine, right? But it took my leg. And it took—”

“Your other leg?” Tio prompted, when Gabe's pause went on too long.

“No, I did that,” Gabe explained. “I mean, I figured it would take something, didn't care what. Could be worse. Could be down an arm.”

“Or a head.”

Gabe laughed again, a bit strained.

Tio's eyes flicked rapidly between Gabe's face and the defective twenties on the table between them. “Why?”

“To get Robbie's soul back.”

“The information request took Roberto's soul,” Tio checked.

“No, his body. The t—” Gabe's voice cut off, not because he didn't want to continue, but because he couldn't make himself.

“The transmutation...”

“It.” His throat cramped. He didn't know why this was so hard to explain, it had happened over a month ago now, and he and Robbie had even joked about it in the week since Gabe had found him. “The circle reached up and it tore—” But it hadn't torn Robbie apart, it couldn't have, Robbie's body had to be somewhere, conservation of mass, stasis, it was easier not to tear things apart. It had to be. Not that it actually was, the universe ran on entropic decay and entropy meant it was easier to destroy than to preserve, but Robbie's body had to be okay somewhere—there wasn't any blood on the floor except for Gabe's— “It took him. All I could save was his soul.”

Tio raised an eyebrow. “Living blood relatives, that's all your array was asking for?”

Gabe nodded.

“Did it work?”

“I don't know. It lit the map on fire, like it was supposed to, but I didn't grab it in time because Robbie was gone and my leg was cut off.”

“Hm,” Tio said, frowning. “What runes did you use?”

Gabe twisted around in his chair to grab his backpack with his notes. “This is what I designed, based off the chapter on queries in, in Tactical Alchemy Unit IV,” he said, pulling out a grubby and wrinkled sheet of printer paper. “But I have trouble with details sometimes. Robbie helped check my work, he's always super careful, but maybe I got something wrong in the planning stage—”

“You coulda swapped something.”

“Yeah.”

Tio took the paper from him and rotated it carefully, checking each rune and vertex of the alchemical diagram while rotating it little by little like a clock. An alarm on his wrist interrupted him, and he cursed. “Hold that thought.”

He stood, slowly, and returned to the kitchen, where he pulled two plastic pill organizers and a little clear plastic bottle off one of the open shelves. He swallowed a concerning number of pills, one at a time, washing them down with water from the sink, then he filled the little bottle with water from a jug and some powder from a little plastic packet, leaned over the kitchen sink, and squirted the solution up one nostril, then the other, until it ran out the other side. He sneezed violently, then braced his arms on the counter as though dizzy before he straightened again and wiped his face on a paper towel. He returned to the living room and dug a little wooden box out from a drawer in the TV stand, then sat back down at the table with two white tablets in his palm. He chewed one and offered the other to Gabe. “Here,” he said, as though he hadn't just swallowed half a pharmacy. “Helps you think. This could be a long night.”

“I don't think you're supposed to chew those,” Gabe said.

“What are you a nurse? It's legit, USP. Here.” Tio pushed the other pill at him, and Gabe turned it over. It looked like a real pill, hard and oblong, with a smooth white coating and little printed numbers on the side. To escape Tio's stare, he broke the pill and swallowed half. It was bitter and rough. He washed it down with the rest of his water. “This ain't even the good stuff. Won't even raise your blood pressure.” Tio stuck out his hand, fingers twitching, gimme. “Highlighter.”

Gabe pawed through his backpack and passed one over.

Tio checked Gabe's symbols, then hovered the highlighter over the paper in silent loops and zigzags before finally touching it down and drawing a sort of constellation between the vertices of the transmutation figure. “Furfur,” he said, spinning the paper around so Gabe could see.

The yellow highlighter connected the signs of the planets and elements by no discernible chemical logic. Gabe realized that the yellow lines simply traced a path between symbols that shared similar shapes. It was meaningless. Yet Tio seemed so sure; Robbie had been very young when he'd last met Tio, and he hadn't known any real Alchemy at five years old. Gabe sighed and scratched his chin.

“No, look,” Tio said. “You did a query, a request for information. That's not normal Alchemy. That's Sorcery, communication with spirits, in this case Furfur.” Tio tapped the yellow lines he'd drawn. “That's his seal, coded in the transmutation array.”

Gabe blinked. “I accidentally summoned a demon?”

Tio snorted. “Demons would love it to be that easy. No, you just made a long-distance call. The array...can't call it window dressing, but it just structures your deal.” He used the highlighter as a pointer on the diagram. “You paid your block of aluminum, here where you specified, and Furfur had the option to take it and answer your question, or ignore you. Not to take your leg and my whole other nephew. Furfur's Mephisto's little bitch-boy, though, he shouldn't have the balls to cheat on something like that, that's bad for the boss's business. Makes no sense. What I'm wondering is if you somehow transposed something and made an entirely different transmutation—”

Gabe swallowed hard.

“—Or if Hell's had a shake-up and it's anarchy down there. Hope not.”

“Hell's not real, though,” Gabe said. “Religion-Hell. Are these aliens? AI?”

“Don't know, don't care. But they call themselves demons and they call their home Hell.” He raised an eyebrow at Gabe. “Alchemy's just instructions you draw on the ground. Who do you think reads them?”

Gabe blinked. “Me.”

Tio chuckled. “Nice. Yeah, you, but somebody else has to pull strings and push levers. You want anything really complex done for you, you talk to a demon. Want to pick up new tricks, ask a demon. Nicely. They're pretty clear about what they do and don't like. Anyway. Where was I?”

“I dunno. Don't you feel the fault lines when you transmute? Or the wind, moving through you?”

“I don't do that woo-woo shit. Ah!” He made the gimme motion again. Gabe noticed his index finger had been broken, and the tip of his ring finger was missing.

“What?” Gabe asked.

“Your notes, your other stuff, your projects, gimme those. No, gimme half, you take half, I'll take half, look for any bits you could have swapped in to make a transmutation that wants one and a quarter human beings as exchange.”

They split Gabe's notes between them, and Gabe pulled out his iPhone and the external drive he kept his downloads on. Tio sent Gabe to roll away several times, between (and sometimes over) the piles of his belongings on the floor, to grab more paper out of the office in the second bedroom. They filled the sheets with runes, tried them out in different positions on Gabe's query-array, computed outcomes, double-checked each-other. Tio, thankfully, turned out to have a solid understanding of Alchemical arrays, and some interesting ideas for recombinations that Gabe hadn't thought of. Gabe ran one of his pens out of ink, and had to switch to a green gel pen.

“This is getting nowhere,” Tio announced after fetching himself some water from the tap. “I've got two bomb recipes, a dirt generator, an invocation to Buer who happens to be a dead demon last I checked, and this one that looks like it generates hydrogen from water vapor. Nothing that boosts power requirements, unless you swapped in whole groups of symbols. Roberto grew up smart, right? Like his dad?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. Robbie was a lot more than just smart. Gabe was smart, but that didn't make him reliable. “Robbie's careful.”

“Mm.” Tio frowned down at his papers. “You come up with anything to raise the dead or animate a homunculus on your end?”

“Not so far.”

Tio looked up at him suddenly. “Where is Robbie? Is he in a jar or something—am I talking to him right now?”

“Huh?”

“You said you bought his 'soul,' is it in your body?”

That would have been a better idea, Gabe thought. Or just a different kind of misery. “Oh! No. I stuck him to the car.”

Tio drew back. “My car?”

Gabe forced himself to meet Tio's scowl. “He's the car. It's like his body right now, it's all he has. Until we can figure out how to get it back. My legs would be nice, too.”

“Why'd you stick him to my car?” Tio demanded. “What, you carried him around until—now we've got two problems!”

“I was bleeding to death and it was right there,” Gabe snapped, heat racing from his heart to the palms of his hands and the soles of his non-existent feet. This must be what Robbie felt like when someone threatened Gabe.

“Where were you pulling this shit? Who took my car?”

“We broke into your garage!” Robbie had done the breaking-in part, but he'd done it because Gabe needed the floor space. “We didn't know it was yours, until Robbie recognized your car. He got it running again! It was just sitting there! He had to change out all the hoses, and, like, lash the valves, and all kinds of weird car-guy shit! He loved that car, and he's the reason it runs at all after sitting there for twenty years.”

Tio stared across the table at him, his head tilting this way and that, otherwise motionless. “Don't tamper with other people's cars,” he said at last.

“Okay,” Gabe said. “I'm sorry. It was the only thing I could reach that could move on its own. Robbie was just...” Just a tiny light, electricity against his skin, terror; intangible and shapeless, yet Gabe had held him between his palms and known him. “Wispy.”

“Did you do this in my garage?” Tio checked.

“Yeah. We didn't want to catch the apartment on fire. Not that we caught the garage on fire,” Gabe added quickly. “It had more floor space. And it's concrete.”

“White sealant.”

“Yeah. Made it easy to chalk.”

“Mm,” Tio said. He shuffled through his papers again. “Yeah. Nice texture, just the right bite to it. I always drew my figures out in the open space, near the roll-down door.”

“Yeah, us, too,” Gabe recalled. “Where it's open, there's less cabinets.”

“You ever activate a query before this? Any transmutation other than rearranging matter?”

Gabe shook his head. “It's pretty advanced, I'd just figured it out. And Robbie didn't...”

“Didn't what?”

“He wasn't as interested in meeting our family. He's, um. He's pretty mad about foster care, still. I'm sure he'll like you just fine, now we found you.”

“Course he will, I'm a likable guy.” Tio stood and flipped his papers upside down. “Look at the time. It's four in the morning.”

Gabe realized that he'd been working—not crawling Wikipedia, not researching for his next campaign that he and his old friends would never get to, not wandering into strange, new, irrelevant fields of Alchemy—just working, on the exact thing he needed to be working on, for almost nine straight hours. He hadn't even had coffee. He wasn't even tired. This was fantastic.

Sure, it was bad when adults offered drugs to teenagers, but childless adults like Tio didn't necessarily know any better, and Gabe couldn't argue with success. He found the other half of Tio's pill next to his elbow, where he'd left it nine hours ago, and put it in his pocket for later.

“You should fit just right on the couch,” Tio said with an amused expression. “Don't have a spare bed. Don't usually get company in here.”

“Where's your bathroom?”

“Down the hall.” Tio led him to the door, then went in and brushed his teeth and used the toilet, leaving Gabe waiting uneasily outside. When Gabe got his turn, he realized he'd been spoiled by being placed with the Clarks, after the accident, and then on the road moving from handicap-suite to handicap-suite. The chair barely fit inside, and he couldn't turn around. Getting to the toilet took some acrobatics and he almost knocked the lid on the tank trying to support his weight on it. The sink, when he leaned sideways in his chair to brush his own teeth, was filthy. He was glad Robbie was outside and couldn't see this.

Tio set him up on the couch for the night, shoved the coffee table aside so he could fit his chair and let Gabe a heavy canvas coat from the closet that smelled like pig. No pillow. “Say,” Tio said as he turned off the light. “Anyone ever talk to you about Ivanov's Syndrome?”

Gabe sat up. All he could see was the shadow of Tio's head in the dark, against some faint light source from down the hall. “What's that?”

“What tu abuelo had. Passed on. Nasty genetic shit, leaves you dead by thirty.”

Gabe swallowed. “Is that what you have?”

Tio paused, shifted on his feet. “Yeah. Fuckin' Ivanov's. Tomorrow, I'll drive you to Sioux City, the hospital, I know a guy, he's gonna give you a blood test. You want to know if you got this shit, understand. So you can take appropriate measures.”

“Wow,” Gabe said. “I, um. I guess I'm really glad we found you.”

“Me, too,” Tio said. “You got potential. I like you.”

Gabe grinned as Tio disappeared into the bedroom. He still felt wired, possibly from the half a pill he'd had, but it might just be because he was excited. He and Tio hadn't made any progress, but at least now Gabe felt like he had help, fixing Robbie. Someone to make sure he didn't screw up again.

For how long, though.

He'd never expected any long-lost relatives to be rich, but he'd been hoping for, maybe, comfortable. Capable. Someone who could take some of the load off for Robbie. Tio wasn't well off, and his adulting skills seemed more on the level of, well, Gabe. And that was beside the fact that he was sick.

Really sick. He'd said dead by thirty. He was on so many drugs, not just whatever he'd given Gabe; he was unsteady on his feet, and weak. Just cooking seemed to make him tired. Maybe they'd found Tio just in time to lose him again.

Pragmatically-speaking, Gabe had to figure out how to fix Robbie, soon, before Tio's heath got worse and he couldn't help anymore.

Gabe got his phone out and googled Ivanov's syndrome. Nothing came up. Must be pretty rare. Rare was bad, that usually meant there weren't enough sick people to bother figuring out how to help them. He called Robbie's phone, strapped to the headrest of the Charger's driver's seat.

“¿Qué pazsa?” demanded Robbie, buzzing. “Gabe?”

Oh, right, it was past four in the morning. “I'm fine. ¿Como te sientes?”

He heard crackling down the line, and he couldn't be sure if it was interference, out here in the boonies, or if it was one of Robbie's electric sighs. “You know,” Robbie said, which wasn't true; Gabe couldn't really know at all. “Es tranquillo. I'm watching the house and the road. Why aren't you asleep?”

“Me and Tio were studying.” Gabe gripped his pocket with the pill in it. Guilt tangled his words and he went silent.

“Got carried away?” Robbie prompted.

“Yeah.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not yet.”

“Don't be too hard on yourself,” Robbie said, slow and clear and careful. “There might not be an answer.”

“Assume there is,” Gabe grunted. “There's gotta be. There's no reason. This shouldn't have happened, that's what we did find out. No matter how I screwed up.”

Silence from Robbie, then a rising and falling crackle of static. “Tio's really an Alchemist?”

“Think so.” He hadn't seen him do any Alchemy, but there was hardly a clear space in the house to draw an array in. “He's got tons of supplies, and he knows the theory really well. And some that's just...nowhere in the textbooks.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Yeah. I told him.” Gabe winced. “He's pretty bent about you living in his car.”

More static. “Tell him I'm an upgrade,” Robbie said.

Gabe laughed queasily. “Do you remember—was Dad sick?”

“I don't think so. Why?”

“Tio says there's something genetic from our abuelo. He wants to get me tested.”

“I was a little kid,” Robbie said. “Mom and Dad wouldn't have talked about it around me if he was. Tio has it? I thought he just had a bad leg.”

“No, he's sick. It's bad.”

More static, jagged and loud. Then, calm, “Get tested. Tell him thanks from me. And go to sleep, okay?”

The couch was trying to swallow him and it smelled musty; the zipper from the canvas jacket rubbed on Gabe's chin, and besides that, there was the humiliating knowledge that a single hip-length coat now covered Gabe's entire body; he still felt wired and restless. Sleep would be a long time coming, but, “Night,” he said, and hung up.

He stared at the ceiling; at odd intervals, distant headlights through the blinds cast sweeping patterns, the same headlights Robbie was watching, parked outside by the machine shop.

.