Title: Holding Pressure
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (Marvel comic)
Characters/Pairing: Robbie Reyes, Gabe Reyes, Dr. Strange
Rating: PG
Length: 4k
Summary: Robbie Reyes has been permanently separated from Eli Morrow. Now he has to decide how to use the rest of his life.
Notes: Completely ignores how Robbie got free from Eli in Avengers, because I don't like that run. Also includes a whole lot of headcanon.
Warning for self-harm (in a magical context).

In the bright and balanced light of the vanity mirror in his sterile new bathroom, Robbie Reyes stared into his two green eyes, deliberately pressed his index finger to the skin of his left temple, swiped slowly to the right across his unblemished forehead, and watched his body change.

His cheekbones hollowed, then filled. The gauge of his earlobes widened and his plugs dropped out and landed in the sink; thankfully they were plastic not glass. He scrolled his finger slower, watching. His tan flickered between deep and light, and wrinkles appeared at the creases of his eyes, along his forehead, at either side of his nose and lips. Aches arose in his knees, his right shoulder and elbow, his lower back. He grew a little thicker around the throat, patted his suddenly-obvious gut, looked down, and discovered his left index and middle fingers had vanished, ending in scarred stubs that tingled faintly. Gray speckled his hair, flecks arriving like white birds swooping down to rest, before overtaking his whole head in a wash. The gut vanished and was replaced by a chill weakness, his cheeks hollow, all his hair and eyebrows absent as his skin sagged and clung to his bones like wet tissue paper, before flesh and strength returned and with it tattoos, all up and down both forearms and flickering rapidly over his chest and neck and then covering his suddenly-bare scalp, flames and flowers and automotive diagrams and the flag of Mexico and names of people he didn't know and would never meet, bold and settling under white hairs, among prominent veins. Two dates in Gothic script right over his heart, with forty-two years between them. The aches in his back and limbs intensified, spreading to his fingers and toes, the left side of his jaw, his hips, and he hunched and couldn't straighten himself. He grew thin again. His vision faded in the center and he couldn't make out his own face, and for an instant he thought he wasn't real.

He scrolled rapidly back toward his left temple. His body regressed to the age of twenty-six, then stopped.

He leaned heavily on the sink, staring down at his undamaged hands. His arms were shaking.

Be handy, came a thought. Put on some coveralls, scroll into our fifties, hello I'm here about the plumbing on the third floor, pop-pop-pow, ditch the bloody coveralls, scroll back to thirty and go sit at the bar and watch the chaos. Robbie grunted and smashed his face against his palms, trying to crush the thoughts back.

The first time it had happened, he'd still been under observation in a guest room of the Sanctum Sanctorum, worrying at the little lump under his right pectoral where there should have been pain, stitches, a fresh scar from the implantation. His powers were gone, the plates of the Rider's skull under his skin were gone, his connection to the car was gone, and he was trapped in this small soft watery human body after so many years being something not-quite. Still can't die, he'd thought to himself. He'd imagined stalking a gunman down an alley at night, taking a bullet to the neck and grinning and tackling to the ground, letting his victim empty the entire cartridge into him even as he disemboweled him alive. And then he'd run out of his room barefoot, searching every door in the Sanctum for hours until Dr. Strange finally returned from some other dimension in a shower of sparks, wearing fishing waders under his red cloak and covered in orange ooze.

“He's gone,” Strange had assured him after taking a decontamination shower and drinking a quart of peppermint tea and holding Robbie's skull between his palms for a psychic re-scan that felt far too brief. “You have PTSD. Talk to your therapist.”

 

The Avengers-subsidized therapy sessions were mandatory.

Robbie's therapist was a bearded white man in his late forties—an LPC, LMFT, LCMHC, and LCAT certified in CBT, Art Therapy, DBT, and EMDR. He, like every therapist on the list provided to Robbie by Dr. Samson, listed PTSD high on the list of problems he managed. Robbie had never seen combat as a human, had come back to life immediately after dying, and had never put himself through boot camp, so he always slunk past the VA endorsements on the walls of the lobby feeling like a fraud. Robbie had done the hurting and killing. He hadn't been something that could hurt or die.

Yegor Ivanov

Alexander Northwick

Michael DeCuster

Emil Saltares

Valentina Tolentino

Everett Talcott

Sooner or later, Saul Marsh LPC LMFT LCMHC LCAT would ask Robbie about the people he had killed, and whether it had been Roberto Reyes or Elias Reyes who'd decided on the killing. Eli wasn't in any condition to defend himself, but six people was an implausibly low kill count if Eli had been in control the entire time. Robbie also didn't think he'd be able to hide how much he'd wanted each of those six people dead.

Instead, before Mr. Marsh could ask about Robbie's kills, he'd described his experience in the bathroom that morning: scrolling back and forth through the life he could have lead, if he hadn't been shot to death at eighteen. “That's fascinating,” Mr. Marsh said. “So you can see your future self?”

Robbie shrugged and made an equivocal head tilt, squishing and stretching the chunk of blue silly putty that was always resting next to the box of tissues when he came in. “It's not my future,” he said. “I can't age anymore. The—old-me—loses some fingers, and I can't do that because of the Bloodstone fragment. It's, um, copied off a 'me' from another dimension, who didn't die.”

“So there's no temporal paradox, it's just an interesting ability,” Mr. Marsh said. “What would you like to do with it?”

Match his face to the birth-date on his driver's license in the coming decades, like Dr. Strange intended for him, but Mr. Marsh probably meant something less pedestrian. Robbie's heart raced and he clenched the putty in his fist until it began to ooze out between his fingers, curling like flower petals. He hadn't been asked yet about his criminal history, but after their intake interview Mr. Marsh had received a packet that explained Robbie's former status as a Ghost Rider, that he'd been possessed by the ghost of Elias Reyes/Eli Morrow/Leroy Rexxx/Eric Ransom, and that under this ghost's influence he'd been a very dangerous individual. Still could be, if he handled himself right.

Robbie licked his lips. “I had an idea. It was something the ghost would have thought of.”

“Something harmful?”

Harmful. He nodded.

“Am I right in guessing that it's not something you would do?”

“Dunno.”

“Why not?”

Robbie looked up, met his eyes, a flash of anger running up and down his spine that left the world around him cold and flat and Mr. Marsh just a volume in space, a meat body with a pumping heart and a set of vital structures whose texture Robbie's hands knew intimately. “I thought it. Sometimes I think of something, and I wait for the time to be right, and then I do it.”

“Me, too,” Mr. Marsh said, infuriatingly calm. “I think of a lot of things. Some of them aren't so nice.”

“I don't want to talk about duty to warn stuff today,” Robbie said, looking back down at the putty.

“What do you mean?”

Robbie glared at Mr. Marsh's shoulder. “Stuff. Like, if I told you, you'd have a duty to warn about me.”

Mr. Marsh sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, folding his hands together and twiddling his thumbs to mirror Robbie's posture. “Robbie. I'm going to make a guess about what's bothering you, and you don't have to tell me if I'm right or not, and I'll tell you why I don't feel any duty to warn anyone about you.

“I'm guessing, based on my limited knowledge of Eli's interests, that you thought about a way to use your new ability to change your apparent age to commit a crime. For example, a murder. And I don't feel any duty to warn about you because you have told me repeatedly that Eli is the last person on earth you want to be like.”

“I don't want to. But—” Robbie cut himself off, and Mr. Marsh waited patiently. Mr. Marsh could out-wait him; he'd done it before. Robbie could either change the subject and be recorded as uncooperative, or finish the sentence. “Sometimes it feels like he's still here. Thinking with my head.”

“That sounds painful and frightening.”

Robbie bit back his automatic response that he wasn't in pain. It was very difficult to experience pain with the sliver of Bloodstone implanted against his rib instantly and automatically healing any injury he incurred, but Mr. Marsh wasn't talking about literal pain, and Robbie knew this because he wasn't an idiot. Instead he said, “I wasn't afraid of him, though. I knew how to handle him. I was scared of myself, and how he was changing me.”

“How did you handle him?”

Robbie shrugged. “He was a pretty simple guy. Wanted to have fun and feel good. So I could threaten to hurt us if he did something I didn't want, or pick someone for him to beat up as a reward. It had to be something I could keep my word on, but I could usually figure something out. Sometimes I'd let him use my body for safe stuff. Food. Talking to people.”

“That sounds like a lot of hard work.”

“I had to.”

“You had to anticipate his needs and reactions so you could manage him. To do this, you probably had to build a very detailed mental model of him in your head. That's how we know people, we build simulations of them, a lot like computer programs. The more impactful these people are in our lives, the more important it is that we anticipate their reactions accurately and automatically, and the more energy these mental models take up. It can be hard to stop running them.”

Robbie rolled the silly putty into a snake as Mr. Marsh talked. Then he wrapped it around the knuckles on his left hand where his fingers would end on his fifty-year-old body. “Dr. Strange said it was all in my head, too.” He smeared the putty down his fingers, engulfing the skin. “Even though he's gone I still hear him.”

“Do you know this is a common experience?” Robbie stared down at the blue silly putty on his fingers, squinted at them against the blue carpet until they seemed to disappear. Mr. Marsh continued. “People often describe hearing or anticipating the words of those who are no longer part of their lives. It's because of that mental-modeling process. When that relationship was positive, a persistent mental model can be a source of strength and comfort. With an abusive relationship, the mental model is...more like a flashback. It's your brain anticipating what Eli might say to you so you can protect yourself from him, even though you don't need to anymore.”

Robbie unwrapped his fingers and opened and closed his left hand. “I don't feel scared when it happens,” he admitted. “I feel strong.”

“I believe you,” said Mr. Marsh. “On an unrelated note. You know I get updates from the Avengers about you. Only things they think are relevant to your mental health, no details.”

Robbie snorted.

“What's funny?”

“They just want to make sure I don't die again and come back as a Spirit of Vengeance until after I pass therapy.”

“You know there's no grades in therapy. You don't have to perform for me.”

“I know.” Robbie winced. That had been a very Eli-style joke. “Sorry. Sir.”

“You don't have to apologize. I just wanted to check in before we end our session. Is there any emotional need you are trying to solve through self-harm?”

Robbie met his eyes very steadily. “I tripped.”

“I don't know the magic-science here but the memo I received described a much greater energy loss from your...life-crystal.”

“I tripped in traffic.” Mr. Marsh stared him down, and Robbie broke first. “Look. I never wanted to live a hundred more years.”

“Fifty to a hundred more years, I thought. Dr. Strange's notes said he couldn't predict the...magic rock half-life.”

“So he aimed high. And I'm thankful. But you don't need to worry about me. I'm not wasting my lifespan.”

“I trust you to be honest with me. Unfortunately our session is coming to a close, but, put briefly, recovery from abuse takes time but it is always worth working toward. The ways your mind has adapted to the abuse don't make you a bad person. And I don't think the Avengers think that about you, either. Your assignment this week is to think about the goals and wishes you had to put on hold when Eli entered your life, and whether they still hold interest for you. It's important to look forward as well as backward.”

 

It was hard to remember what goals and wishes Robbie had had before dying, but Mr. Marsh had assumed wrong: he spent a great deal of time thinking about his future.

Gabe liked New York. It turned out they had an aunt on Mom's side who was still alive and seemed relatively harmless. Robbie was six months into a two-year internship with StarkTech, learning how to service people's generators and ductless heating systems; it came with a comprehensive health plan, company housing, a meal stipend, and an in-home caregiver to assist Gabe while Robbie was at work. It wasn't automotive engineering but it was an offer he couldn't refuse. As long as he didn't screw up too badly—assault a coworker or something—he could expect a full-time installation/maintenance job with a salary just big enough to discourage him from leaving New York and the watchful eyes of its resident superheroes.

Gabe wanted to visit MoMA again; he was taking art classes at the YMCA, and making TikToks about art history. Robbie had always dismissed modern art as an elaborate joke on art collectors, unlike airbrushing and pinstriping which were meant to be enjoyed, but Gabe had a more generous perspective and Robbie enjoyed hearing it.

It was a weekend ritual to call the medical transport company and hire a van. While they waited, he helped Gabe shower and shave and then lie face-down on the bed so Robbie could massage the tight bands of his thighs with the roller, work loose the knots in his back with his knuckles and palms, help with the stretching exercises the new PT had given them to ease joint pain, in preparation for the upcoming hours in the chair. Adulthood had made Robbie steadier, and brought Gabe terrible growing pains and then a slate of new medications. Naproxen, acid-reducers for the heartburn from the naproxen, gabapentin for sleeping and sometimes for the daytime too, a new anti-seizure drug, another muscle relaxant.

“How big today?” Robbie asked, the same pain-scale question he'd been asking Gabe since the first time he'd been allowed to attend one of Gabe's PT sessions back when they were kids.

“Mmf. ...Watermelon?” Gabe turned his face toward his bad side, using the weight of his head to stretch his neck. Robbie swallowed hard and moved toward his shoulderblades, rolling the thin muscles with the blade of his palms. “No, wait. The squiggly one. Yellow.” Gabe's brow furrowed. “Canteloupe.”

“Yeah?” Robbie confirmed, relaxing. “Better than last week?”

“Dunno. Think so.” Gabe bent his elbows and pulled his hands as close as he could to his shoulders, and Robbie broke off the massage to help him move the last few inches into position to stretch his chest muscles, elbows up and palms flat. He pressed down gently into the center of Gabe's back to deepen the stretch until Gabe grunted softly. “Robbie, when do you get a new car?”

Owning a car meant renting a place to store it. No car would ever be like the Charger had been; his anchor, his prison, his second body that he missed like a severed limb. Eli's final resting place and good riddance. “Not any time soon,” Robbie said. “We don't need one. We can take the bus and the subway, and the van company is really handy. I think maybe one day I'd get us a van like that.”

 

Robbie's week in the Sanctum Sanctorum had been a blur of magical instruments, induced comas, out-of-body experiences, fancy showers, beds too soft to sleep in, and maze-like corridors that the cold New York wind blew through. He remembered clearly how hollow and unbalanced his mind had felt the first time he woke up for real. He'd never felt so alone before. He told himself it was because he missed Gabe, it had to be, even though he FaceTimed him three times a day where he was staying at a private care facility until Dr. Strange deemed Robbie stable enough for release. When Dr. Strange explained what he'd done, that to replace Eli's sustaining power he'd implanted Robbie's corpse with a mystical substance capable of instantaneous healing, Robbie had interrupted him.

“I want you to heal my brother.”

Strange huffed. “What's wrong with him?”

“Spastic diplegia,” Robbie said, echoing painful words he'd heard for years and years from doctors' and nurses' mouths. “Hip luxation and scoliosis. He was doing good for a while, but he grew and now it's bad again and he can't get around like he used to. He's hurting. And he's having more seizures.”

“I can put you in touch with some practitioners who haven't let their license lapse; don't tell them I sent you because my name won't help.”

“No, we have medical coverage,” Robbie said. “He's got appointments coming, but the meds can only do so much and I don't want him to have to get surgery, not when you could just fix him. Fix his body, so he can do what he wants and not be in pain.”

“No.”

“Respectfully,” Robbie said, trembling, “why the fuck not?”

“There's no such thing as magical healing, only sacrifice.” Strange snapped. He stretched out one hand, showing how his fingers trembled. “I've explored the options and the cost is too high.”

“You did it for me—”

“You're an exception.”

“What, 'cause I'm in some super-powered club?” Robbie demanded incredulously. “I wasn't even a hero!”

Dr. Strange pinched the bridge of his nose. “Heroes die and stay dead every day. You would be more dangerous dead than alive. Dividing the Bloodstone and implanting a piece in you was a heavy decision motivated by pragmatism, not kindness. It is not a gift.”

The unwanted thoughts in his head, the ghost of Eli's ghost, remained calm within him and latched on to the key term in Strange's dismissal. “Bloodstone, what's the Bloodstone? How's it work?”

“You don't want to know,” Dr. Strange said, and opened a portal to another floor of the Sanctum and vanished.

 

They scheduled the van to pick them up after three hours at the MoMA, including, at Gabe's request, lunch at the Modern Bar Room. Gabe couldn't have alcohol with his meds, but he liked to watch the bartenders mix drinks, and he always cracked up halfway through ordering a 'virgin' version of whatever cocktail caught his eye. Robbie didn't drink because he still carried Eli's old terror of getting caught-out for being a sociopath while his inhibitions were down. He tried not to stress about the menu prices. His stipend was enough to eat out once a week, the insurance deductible had been met already, and they couldn't get evicted during his internship.

Robbie nibbled on one of the weird mushrooms smothering his polenta as Gabe tucked in to his smoked potato ravioli, watching the videos he'd made while listening through one ear-bud. Robbie listened along with the other.

“Merret Openheim made this teacup with real deer fur. On the inside, and the outside. There's no place to put tea in it. You can't put it in a dishwasher. It's not really a teacup. But...is it nice? It looks funny, and it looks like it feels soft. It's pretty the way a deer is. And I bet you've seen a teacup just as useless, in somebody's fancy cupboard. Locked up. Expensive. You can't put that in a dishwasher either. But that fancy glass...um...china teacup, it looks like you could use it. If somebody came to your house and asked you, why don't we use that cup? You'd have to say, because you're too clumsy. Because I don't trust you. I think Merret Openheim's teacup is much nicer. You can see by looking at it why you can't have tea in it, and if you dropped it, I don't think it would break. The fur would, um, pad the fall. If somebody came to your house and asked you, why don't we use that cup, that fur cup, you could both laugh because it's a good joke. And you could pet it.

“People say modern art is fake because it's easy to do. But I think that's the really good part. Anybody could go to the store and get fur and glue and put it on a teacup and tell the same joke Merret Openheim did. I think it's a good thing to have in your house, because your friends can laugh at it with you and you don't have to shut it in a china cabinet.”

This was Gabe's third take. He and Robbie would edit it tonight, after Gabe recorded a voice-over with some biographical information about the artist, but this video wouldn't need much cutting. Gabe was getting better at making his speech flow, faster than he ever had in speech therapy.

“Were you serious?” Robbie asked, as Gabe scrolled back and forth through the video. “You want to make a fur teacup?”

“Maybe.” Gabe frowned. “Not if we have to move and throw it away.”

“We won't,” Robbie promised. Gabe looked up at him skeptically. “We might move, but it won't be like when we were kids. We can hire a big truck with room for all our stuff and bring it along.”

Gabe sipped his virgin raspberry martini and stared at a still image of the teacup. “I don't think Merret Openheim made it just to sit in a museum,” he said. “I think people were supposed to touch it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“We could put the making-of process in the video,” Robbie suggested.

“I could take it to art class,” Gabe said at the same time. Then he looked up at Robbie and made an exaggerated frown. “Robbie, aren't you scared of cameras.”

Robbie grinned. “Not when it's you.”

 

Information about the Bloodstone was hard to access for those who were not wizards, warlocks, demons, or descendants of Ulysses Bloodstone, but Robbie's limited experiments had made him comfortable with some basic assumptions.

The smaller the fragment, the less stable it was. Possibly related to surface area, or possibly there was some critical mass of magical energy a Bloodstone needed to be self-sustaining. Robbie's fragment was not stable. It had been measured out to allow him at least a typical human lifespan with a safety margin in case of faster-than-expected decay or wear-and-tear.

Bloodstone wasn't smart. It couldn't be programmed; it could be controlled by the bearer to an extremely limited degree and only with special tools. Mainly, it healed. It healed new injuries instantly, and old injuries slower; Robbie had gone to sleep without his flesh tunnels one night and woken up with his earlobes shrunken two sizes so none of his jewelry fit. He'd had to stretch his earlobes around a ballpoint pen wrapped in teflon pipe seal tape, pushing so hard the skin tore. It bled, and kept bleeding around the pen. Robbie eventually gave up and bought smaller plugs at a Spencer's. He still couldn't wear his favorite glass earspools a month later.

Bloodstone couldn't heal a wound whose skin edges were being held open. But it would try. It would try and keep trying, until the bleeding flesh was soothed.

Gabe slept heavier than ever on his meds, and Robbie had no fear of waking him as he crept toward him in the dark, holding a towel and a sharp clean knife. He pulled back the covers just enough to see Gabe's neck in the light of the window, and draped the towel over his shoulders.

“Robbie?” Gabe mumbled softly.

“Just keeping you company. Go back to sleep,” Robbie murmured. He rested the knife in his lap and waited silently until Gabe's breathing evened out again. He bit his lip, then cut his left palm, deep, longitudinal between the tendons and hurried to press the bleeding wound against the back of Gabe's neck. Gabe shifted, and he rubbed his shoulder reassuringly with his thumb.

The wound throbbed against Gabe's skin.

Robbie wasn't sure how efficient this process was, but the Bloodstone's efforts had to be going somewhere and the pressure kept the wound open. Watermelon to canteloupe, he thought. That was progress. He hadn't been tired at all in the museum; they could have stayed another hour, maybe two. Maybe one day Gabe would compare his pain to a peach, or a grape. A raisin. Maybe the seizures would stop. Maybe Robbie was just burning through his own lifespan and not accomplishing anything at all.

Mr. Marsh had asked him, when they'd first talked about the night Robbie had died, whether Robbie regretted stealing the Charger, the act that had set off the cascade of events that had bound him to Eli for eight terrible years. In those eight years as a Ghost Rider, Robbie had hurt people. Killed people, and still lived with the responsibility for choosing their deaths. He'd made a difference in Hillrock Heights, but not a permanent one; he'd spread terror, and his alternate identity had become an internationally-wanted supervillain. His emotional regulation was shot and the only person he'd had to confide in all those years had been Eli, his enemy. His abuser. Eli's longterm project had been to reshape Robbie in his image, and he'd at least half-way succeeded.

Robbie stared across the room at the shadow of Gabe's microphone and ring-light and desktop computer, the clipboards he used instead of easels, the art supplies and shelves of books and the toys he still posed around the room. The group photo from the YMCA, brochures from the community college. Robbie had stolen the Charger so long ago because he'd wanted to give Gabe a better life. After eight hard years, he had the power to do it. He had no regrets.

He thought of those two dates tattooed over his future counterpart's heart, forty-two years between them, and held on.