Chapter Text
The few weeks after the Callaghan Incident had been like the nuclear fallout after a bomb. It was something about losing the last tie to his brother that really broke Hiro into thousands of little pieces, with no one he could ask to help pick up the shrapnel. For the first few days, he stuck to his bedroom and didn’t speak a full sentence to anyone if he could help it. Something at the back of his mind whispered caution that maybe, just maybe, he had been falling back into the pained cycle of hopelessness that came with Tadashi’s death. Breaking, trying to fix everything, and breaking again in the process.
How ironic, he mused one day, with his face pressed into the pillow and afternoon light streaming through the window above his head. The one time I actually need Baymax, he’s gone.
Isolation was already like an old friend to him, and all he had to do was open the door for it to reenter his life and throw a blanket of silence and pain over the room. Action figures and robot parts gathered dust, but he didn’t dare to check behind the screen that blocked off Tadashi’s part of the room. That’d be a new hornet’s nest in his heart he wasn’t willing to keep poking.
People had tried to contact him, at least. For a week, the rest of the crew at the Institute sent countless video messages, texts, and even a package filled with glossy photos taken around the lab, but time and time again he couldn’t bring himself to respond. The words were trapped in his hands rather than the computer, and there wasn’t enough will in him to try and find them again.
And then he got the letter.
It was Day Seven of his self-inflicted lock in when Aunt Cass wordlessly dropped an envelope on his desk alongside his dinner. He didn’t immediately tear into it, instead setting the plate aside with the others while staring at the paper addressed to him in neat, tiny handwriting. From the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology.
His thoughts skipped ahead of him. Were they retracting their offer for him to join? Was it about his microbots nearly destroying the city? His stomach fell faster than gravity could carry it. Were they going to clean out Tadashi’s lab?
And then, almost before he realized what he was doing, he was tearing open the seal and unfolding the pages inside. He skimmed for answers in a panicked rush, and he was sure that his fingers were leaving sharp half-moons into the print, but none of that mattered.
The message finally got through tear-blurred eyes. It wasn’t any menacing threat, not even a formal announcement regarding classes.
It was a handwritten letter from Abigail Callaghan, mostly to give her thanks in gracefully lengthy paragraphs and flowery apologies on behalf of her father. What caught a majority of his interest, however, was that she mentioned working with the Institute until they could find a suitable replacement for her father’s position.
“For now, I’m going to be in charge of the lab space (years of bot-fighting and astrophysics finally comes in handy, huh?) and I don’t think I need to remind you that our doors are always open for a bright mind like you. There’s still a private workshop with your family’s name on it, if you ever feel the urge to return.” Stapled to the note, he found a simple application form that he had seen a thousand times over the past year.
Maybe it was how she mentioned that there was a space waiting for him, or even that it was connected to his brother still, but the letter filled Hiro with the most blatant and blooming hope he’d felt since he’d set off to save the city a week ago. His heart ached to be surrounded by the people who stood beside him when he was so alone, and his fingertips twitched for the ability to invent and create, to build and help in any way possible.
He couldn’t recall a time that he’d scrambled around the room more frantically for a pen.
---
In the next two weeks Hiro was shocked at how easily he fit into the flow of the lab. The coursework was challenging, but not too much for him, so that left him with plenty of time to set up shop and work on whatever sparked his interest.
Of course, after finding Baymax’s chip, rebuilding the robot tended to be the only thing to spark his interest for days at a time.
The rest of the crew flowed in and out of the room at their own paces, busy with their own projects but thrilled to have the youngest Hamada present and smiling as though he was born and raised in the labs.
The workshop his brother used to work in wasn’t huge, but the coziness of it almost added to the connection to him. The shelves were lined with boxes of his old work as well as new gadgets and parts that Hiro had brought with him, and it melded into the perfect harmony of old and new.
He used his own two hands to rebuild the empty space in his heart.
Soon enough, Baymax was rebuilt and had his old operating system booted up along with his memory system intact. (No fighting chips for now, he told himself. Better to embrace the comforts that Tadashi coded.)
After that, he took at least an hour every day to skim through Tadashi’s old notes in his trademark scrawl (Too familiar from notes stuck to the fridge and blueprints left around their room) for any research he could expand on or continue. Everyone would pitch in at one point or another to try and decode a particularly confusing passage or add some information that Tadashi had only mentioned out loud rather than written down.
Honey Lemon rattled off rapidfire chemical equations and reactions like it was offhand information while Gogo drew swift, confident, and clean diagrams on the physics of some of the inventions. Wasabi was in charge of double checking and triple checking facts and re-recording information so it wasn’t lost again. Fred was a surprising amount of help, always being the spark for a new idea or the funds behind an old one. (Who knew that one guy could have so many samples of Uranium just lying around?)
Together, they got through all the papers they could find, refurbishing old ideas and compiling them into a stack of notes that could be studied from every angle and considered foolproof. It was another step towards rejoining his memory rather than moving on from it. And what did they get from it? Improved super suits, armor, better tech and brighter eyes. Gogo perfected her wheels while Wasabi could slice hairs with his blades. Honey concocted perfect mixes of chemical cocktails while Fred’s suit became larger than life. From the past, they built the future.
They worked, it worked. Hiro felt more and more at home in a place so foreign to him, but familiar to his brother. His mind was kept as busy as his schedule, and the vague stimulation kept him out of isolation’s shadow.
---
Hiro learned to love Sunday mornings. He didn’t have classes on weekends, and his shifts at the café were only in the afternoons and evenings. That turned the blessed hours of sleep before noon into a time akin to a religious event. Aunt Cass knew not to wake him up under pretty much any circumstance, so the world was a joyous blur of exhaustion and light brushing his closed eyelids. His aunt had always mentioned Tadashi being the earlybird out of the two siblings, and that was one pair of his shoes that Hiro couldn’t fill if he tried.
He’d taken up the habit of cocooning himself in blankets, no matter the weather. It was just another barrier against the world for him, really. There was no way for light or sound to attack him with the most childish comfort around his shoulders. He was even safe from the nightmares that bounced around his head in the bleak hours before dawn. (Don’t ask him how it works, he’d never been sure himself.)
It wasn’t as though he was unresponsive, just protected. Warm sunlight fell through the blinds in stripes across his face like golden warpaint and tickled every inch of skin unprotected by his bedhead. A fan on the desk beside him oscillated with a faded nobility (and far too many modifications over the years to count) while it kicked the bangs off his face before letting them settle.
Something interrupted the birdsong and city noise bleeding through the window. Hiro only offered a yank of the quilts over his head, blocking it out. No matter how much he shifted the cover, the sound shuffled through the room and dragged Hiro back to the world of the awake.
The back of his mind spun stories and excuses for him to go back to sleep. It’s just Mochi. Maybe something fell off a shelf and was rolling around. Maybe he’d said something in his sleep that had alerted Baymax, and the giant goof was just stumbling around the room, waiting to be dismissed. He wrote it off as the last inkling of a dream, and drifted back into halfhearted slumber.
And then the acidic burn of solder his his nose. It was a distinct scent, a melted metal that binds circuitry together. He hadn’t been working on anything up in the room for months due to his new lab space at SFIT and the abundance of space in the garage, and while it should have raised a question in his mind, it was more of a comfort than anything. It was like the old days, the ones that lived only through memories. With it came the thin hum of the tool and the fine stream of smoke that could be tasted in the air. It almost didn’t mix with the smell of fresh coffee and pastries drifting up from the café.
Sitting up, he didn’t bother opening his eyes. He probably just turned the soldering iron on last night without thinking, or the cat bumped into the switch as he sometimes did. Running the heel of his hand over his eyes, his eyelids finally cracked open and the bedroom came into blurry view.
Through the mess of his hair, focus flooded in as his consciousness lost the sleepy weight that had settled over him.
“Hiro, You’re up early. For you, at least.”
Dark irises snapped wide open and filled with warpaint-yellow sunlight. He knew that voice. Even over the stuttering hum of the fan and quiet buzz of the soldering iron, the words skittered and echoed through his thoughts before he could make sense of them.
He was right there. Sitting right there, at the desk like he used to. Blueprints were unrolled on the desk’s surface, and sure enough, he was holding a freshly soldered circuit board up to the light.
“Tadashi- I- How...” The words were quick and confused and he had to be hallucinating somehow because this wasn’t real and he had to be dead and the back of his skull thrummed with the pain that he’d staved off with countless hours of busywork and college and it isn’t possible that he’s right here and healthy and there’s not a scratch on him-
“Are you okay, champ?”
He wasn’t. He really wasn’t.