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rokhal · 1 month

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Ghost Rider/RE7 AU fanfic: Skills

Follows directly from this fic. Set in @wazzappp's Ghost Rider/RE7 fusion AU, during the period that Robbie and Gabe are living in an isolated BSAA-provided safe-house, watched by intelligence agents and also by Chris Redfield.

At least until the thing with Mia, Ethan Winters and Chris Redfield seemed to be friends, and Ethan seems to have looked up to Chris. I don't see this happening with Robbie. Not to say anything bad about Chris -- I'm not familiar enough with his character -- but his wiki page has his full career and this man has spent twenty years professionally shooting things. I just don't see Robbie getting that cozy with him, not without a long adjustment period.

Anyway, here Chris is being friendly. He's got a soft spot for orphans.

Mr. Redfield (like hell was Robbie going to call the private military contractor on whose word they had been extrajudicially deported to a Spanish-speaking country under false Mexican passports, and who had probably trained the guys who trained the guys who disappeared people for the cartels down south, “Chris”) showed up a couple times a month to supervise Robbie practicing with his illegal BSAA-issued firearms and make nice with Gabe. Gabe liked Chris. Robbie had to let them think he liked Chris, because if Chris ever decided that Robbie and Gabe were more trouble than they were worth, presumably as witnesses against Cutting-Edge Health Connections or whoever it actually was that had snatched Gabe up for his life-saving experimental “therapy,” then Chris would probably dismember them both and cremate them in an oil drum. Heck, he could probably skip the cremation step and just leave their corpses in the house. No one would find them for years.

Career-choice aside, Mr. Redfield seemed like he wanted to appear harmless. He generally arrived in a nondescript rental car, biceps straining the sleeves of his polo shirt, bearing some comics or Cholula hot sauce or something else he thought would endear him to them. Today, he trundled down the miles-long gravel drive to the house in a Toyota Tacoma. Robbie didn’t know they sold those in Spain. As he approached, Robbie spotted something mechanical and spindly in the truck bed, which resolved itself into a pair of bicycles.

“Got something for you two,” Mr. Redfield announced, getting out and lowering the tailgate. He vaulted into the bed, and motioned for Robbie to grab the bicycles as he handed them down. Robbie had to take a moment to identify a secure place to grip them; bicycles were about 80% moving parts. Robbie steadied them both awkwardly by the handles to keep them from toppling over, and Mr. Redfield jumped down with a large brightly printed box under each arm. “Casco para Bici de Montaña” and “Casco Juvenil para Bici,” the glossy boxes read. The price stickers were still in place; the helmets had each cost over fifty euros.

Mr. Redfield waved for Gabe to come over, and Gabe ran up and grabbed his helmet with both hands—“Is that for me? Do I have to give it back? Does Robbie get one?”—while Mr. Redfield used his foot to depress a metal brace near the bottom of the frames that allowed each bike to stand upright so Robbie could let go of them.

“They’re a little old-fashioned and I had to guess on the sizes,” Mr. Redfield apologized, gesturing to the bikes. “I figure they should be good enough to have some fun on, though.”

Robbie couldn’t guess what about these bikes was old-fashioned; the paint and seats had a few scrapes and there were stickers plastered to the frame of the smaller bike, but they both had actual shocks with springs and pistons and everything. Each handle had its own cluster of levers and cables. Robbie wasn’t stupid, he knew a bike was basically a big pair of gyroscopes that steadied you as they rotated and he could deduce that the levers and gears and chain served the same purpose as a manual transmission for whatever fraction of a horsepower a human’s legs produced, but understanding how one worked and actually operating one were very different. These weren’t the small one-speed bikes his peers back home might meander along the city sidewalks or pull wheelies on; these looked like the kind grinning sweaty white people rode down mountains on TV commercials for allergy medication. The saddle on the larger bike was taller than Robbie’s hip. If he tried to sit on it, neither of his feet would touch the ground. “It’s big,” he remarked.

“The seat’s not hard to adjust.”

Crap. Mr. Redfield must think Robbie was complaining. Robbie had no opinions about bicycles—no, maybe he did. Bikes were quiet, inexpensive to operate, difficult to conceal tracking devices on, simple to repair, and while they couldn’t compete with cars on the freeway, they were the next best thing for long-distance travel. And they didn’t require ID or registration. If the BSAA had meant to trap Robbie and Gabe in this off-grid house, maybe Mr. Redfield was offering them a plausibly deniable escape. Or maybe he was just irresponsible. That left only the major problem. “Gabe doesn’t know how to ride a bike.”

Mr. Redfield made as though to punch Robbie in the shoulder, and Robbie flinched before he could stop himself. Redfield completed the punch slower, lightly, the same way he insisted on manually adjusting Robbie’s posture when he supervised firearms practice, like he was doing Robbie some kind of favor by pushing his tactile boundaries. “Well, lucky he’s got you for a big bro, huh?”

“Uh, about that,” Robbie started, then froze when he heard a crumbly hiss of tires on sand, and a scream moving rapidly downhill. “¡Ay! Gabe!”

“Thought you said he didn’t know—” Mr. Redfield started, but Robbie was already sprinting around the Tacoma, between the endless shrubs, down the rocky slope after Gabe, who was hurtling toward the ocean at ten, fifteen, twenty miles an hour—toward the ocean and the rough cliffs that led down to it.

“Gabe! Stop!” Robbie stumbled on a loose rock and gasped for air. “Gabe!”

“Whoa, little dude, safety first,” Mr. Redfield called, waving the boxed helmet in one hand as he overtook Robbie without obvious effort. Maybe he was some kind of bioweapon. “Come on back here, let’s get this fitted.”

Gabe arrested his headlong course toward certain death by some kind of miracle, and turned his bike around a mere five hundred yards from the cliff. (It looked closer from Robbie’s perspective.) He stood up on the pedals to put his weight into climbing back up the hill, just like he’d had full use of his legs his entire life, before swinging down off the bike and walking the rest of the way, panting. Robbie wheezed and braced his hands on his knees when they reached each-other.

“Cliff,” Robbie managed. “Gabe. Don’t go down the cliff.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” Gabe protested. “That’d be stupid.”

“I know, I know you’re not stupid. But.” Robbie grasped desperately for some way to explain his panic besides, every time you show me something new you can do I get scared you’re possessed again. “This ground is a bad surface for braking. You could skid and lose control at high speeds.”

“I want to try on my helmet,” Gabe said, passing his bike to Robbie as he jogged up to where Mr. Redfield was opening the box. Robbie watched closely as Redfield set the helmet on Gabe and stuck little strips of foam to the inner rim wherever Gabe said it chafed him. Gabe kept trying to loosen the chinstrap until Robbie admonished, “If you cracked your head open I’d be so sad I might die.” Then Gabe slumped and let Redfield tighten the chinstrap according to the diagrams. Redfield was following the English language instructions, but Robbie noticed that he’d had to turn to the middle of the guide pamphlet to find them. The front pages were all in Spanish.

“Thought he didn’t know how,” Mr. Redfield remarked, not bothering to lower his voice despite Gabe being right there.

“Uh,” Robbie said. He still knew almost nothing of what Gabe’s life had been like while the Connections had had him, but he doubted it had included many outdoor activities. Gabe was looking away, picking at a sticker on his bike’s handlebars. “He was...away...for a while.”

“Daddy Baker taught me,” Gabe explained. His voice was quiet. “He taught Evie first. Then me. She really liked it, she made me ride for her after she got too old.”

Robbie swallowed. “You, uh. Are you happy to have your own bike now?”

“Yeah.” Gabe was still absorbed peeling off the previous owner’s stickers, but Robbie watched Mr. Redfield watching his brother with a blank, analytical expression. “Evie was really sad she couldn’t play with her real body anymore. She was nicer when I let her play with me.”

Did Gabe mean play together or play with, like a toy? Hopefully Mr. Redfield would assume Gabe meant the first one, because the second option might have left traces that might require more aggressive decontamination. “I’m really proud of you for learning how to do this,” Robbie said, trying to change the subject. “But you gotta tell me before you go out riding, okay? And stay where I can see you. I don’t want you getting lost again.”

“I wasn’t lost, I was turned around,” Gabe protested.

Mr. Redfield laughed. “Great comeback. Okay, dude. To keep from getting turned around, you just look for your major landmarks. Right here, that’s the water, that’s always gonna be South. You climb up the nearest hill, and you look for either a downhill slope, a river, or the sea itself, and you can figure it out from there.”

“See?” Gabe said, raising one eyebrow at Robbie.

Are you fucking kidding me. Robbie glared helplessly at Mr. Redfield. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now you two can do some sight-seeing. Or,” he said, winking, “zip into town for groceries in an emergency.” What was that wink for. Was Redfield trying to warn and prepare Robbie for something, or just playing Friendly Paramilitary Babysitter? “Don’t act too excited, now.”

“Right, thanks,” Robbie said. “I, uh. I rode a motorcycle once. Bike can’t be that different?”

Redfield frowned. “You never rode a bike?”

Why was he acting shocked. He’d read their file. Foster kids couldn’t haul bikes from home to home. “Who was gonna teach me?”

“Me,” Redfield muttered. “Now. Apparently.”

“Is it a requirement?” Robbie checked.

“No, not like firearms training,” Redfield said, confirming one of Robbie’s previous suspicions and raising more questions at the same time. “But I figure you want to keep up with him.”

“Yeah.” Ahead of them, Gabe mounted his new bike again and squiggled back and forth up the hill toward the driveway. “Thanks.”

#robbie reyes #gabe reyes #ghost rider re7 au #i just got way too into this over the past two weeks. procrastinating other stuff #fanfiction #my fanfic #all-new ghost rider

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