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Hiro Hamada is your average twelve-year-old boy. His room (and hair) is a mess, he annoys his older brother to the point of exasperation, and he loves robots.
… But he’s also a child genius. And attending high school. And also no one really knows about the boy part yet, but hey, he’s working on that. But, while being a child genius means he’s smart enough to seek out and memorize rates of homelessness and death among trans people, it does not mean being able to determine whether or not he will end up as one of those statistics.
It does not mean he is capable of predicting who in his life will be accepting of the boy part. And, really, with no friends to actually beg for acceptance or refuge from non-acceptance, he’s kind of banking a lot on his older brother and aunt being super cool about it. Which is a little nerve-wracking, to say the least.
And, well, Hiro knows they love him (or more accurately, they love she-who-shall-not-be-named), and they definitely won’t kick him out, so really the worst case scenario is that they just don’t take it seriously. He’d probably even be able to get them to come around eventually, after a few years.
But god is that a dreadful worst case scenario. It’s already been exhausting enough having to deal with being misgendered by the people he loves most when he can still excuse it as him not having told them, but if they knew and still did it… Hiro thinks that might be a very different kind of exhausting, and he’s not sure if he’d be able to handle it.
So it’s a work in progress, talking about the boy thing. He’ll have to ease them into it. He’s already taken to wearing hoodies and cargo shorts, and his hair, while scruffy, is a lot shorter than it used to be. The only thing left to do is to actually ease them into the idea of the LGBTQ+ community existing, which… is honestly the part Hiro’s having the most difficulty with.
He’s almost brought it up a few times, mentioned a queer actor in one of the movies he picks for movie night or talking about a trans scientist he’s recently been obsessed with, but every time he completely chickens out. It’s like… if he says the word “transgender,” he’s scared it’ll stick right to the center of his forehead and they’ll know. And he’s just… not ready for that yet. They’re not ready for that yet.
So he’s (mostly, kind of, maybe) content with his family not knowing about the boy part yet.
“Hey, bonehead!” Tadashi shouts from their shared room, and Hiro rolls his eyes.
“What?” He yells back up the stairs from his spot on the landing.
Tadashi pokes his head out of their room to look at his brother. “What did you do with my tool kit?”
Hiro scrunches up his face at that. “I left it on your nightstand, where you told me to.”
“Well, it isn’t there,” his brother says, walking in the direction of his nightstand anyway as if to check again.
Hiro sighs, getting up and climbing the stairs into their room. “Well, that’s where I put it. So if it isn’t there, you moved it.”
“I didn’t move it,” Tadashi says from behind his screen. “The last time I saw it was when I let you borrow it.”
“Yeah, and then I put it on your nightstand.” Hiro falls onto his bed and watches his brother scurry around their room looking for his tools.
Tadashi huffs, looking under the scattered papers on Hiro’s desk. “Well, clearly someone moved it, because it isn’t there.”
Hiro crosses his arms. “Sure you didn’t misplace it yourself, robo-genius?”
Tadashi pauses in his searching to glare at Hiro. “Yes, I’m sure.”
Hiro gets up from his bed as Tadashi returns to looking and roots around Tadashi’s side of the room until he finds his older brother’s bag. He opens it, and what do you know? He finds the tool kit. Hiro clicks his tongue in annoyance.
“Here it is, idiot,” he says, picking it up. As he turns to show his brother, something falls out and clinks across the floor. Hiro crouches down to pick the mysterious object up. He turns it over in his palm. It’s a pin.
“Hey, don’t-” Tadashi tries to make a dive for it, but Hiro dodges out of the way. He isn’t sure why he does it, because it isn’t like he wants the pin, but… why would Tadashi have it in his bag?
“What’s this?” Hiro asks quietly, like he doesn’t already know the answer. He barely notices his other hand placing the tool kit down on Tadashi’s dresser.
Tadashi sits heavily on his bed. “It’s… a pin.”
Hiro runs his fingers over the pink, purple, and blue stripes and meets his brother’s gaze. “It’s a bi pride pin.”
Tadashi looks at Hiro like he didn’t expect him to know that. There’s something else in his expression that Hiro can’t place.
Tadashi nods stiffly. “It is.”
“Why…” Hiro starts, but the question doesn’t quite come out. He takes a breath. “Why do you have it?”
“I…” Tadashi trails off, and it dawns on Hiro the meaning of the expression on his face. Tadashi’s scared.
Hiro is twelve years old, and while a genius, can quite literally do nothing in this situation, and Tadashi’s scared. Hiro hates it.
He sits next to his brother on the bed and leans against him.
“There’s a reason, ya know,” Hiro starts. He can feel Tadashi staring at him, but he refuses to look up. “That I know what this is.”
Tadashi doesn’t say anything, and Hiro feels mildly like he’s going to puke. Someone in his family actually being queer is way more than he ever expected, but not being straight and not being cis are two very different things.
“I, um- Well, I’ve been doing some research about… stuff, and I… How do you feel about the name Hiro?” His voice gets lower with each word until it’s hardly a mumble. It isn’t hard to hear in the silence. “For me, I mean.”
Hiro fiddles with the pin still in his hands. He’s still leaning against Tadashi, but now it feels more like a plea than a comfort.
“And also he/him pronouns,” Hiro squeaks out nervously. The longer the silence stretches on, the harder it gets for him to blink away the blurriness attacking his vision.
Tadashi moves, and for a second Hiro thinks he’s getting up to walk away. An arm comes to rest around Hiro’s shoulders instead.
“I’d say… it sounds pretty neat, little brother.” Tadashi’s voice is tight. Hiro thinks they might be suffering from the same lump in their throats.
Hiro sniffs, wipes at his eyes, and turns to wrap his arms around his brother.
“I thought so too,” Hiro says, weak and a bit shaky.
Tadashi turns a bit so he can fold his other arm around Hiro too, and this is better than Hiro ever even imagined it going. He remembers the pin in his fingers.
Hiro’s pulls back a little and brings his hands back from around his brother. He grabs part of Tadashi’s shirt.
“Hiro, what are you-”
Hiro clips the pin shut in the fabric of his t-shirt. He taps it happily.
“I think you should wear it.”
Tadashi pulls away completely and lifts up the pin so he can look at it. After a moment, he closes his fist around it, and he looks almost… sad.
“I don’t know if I can,” he says.
Hiro looks between his brother’s face and his clenched fist.
“You will… eventually,” Hiro tells him matter-of-factly.
Tadashi chuckles and releases the pin. “Oh, and is that a fact?”
Hiro nods.
“I’m a child genius, so I know what I’m talking about.” He smirks. “I mean, I knew you lost the tool kit, didn’t I?”
Tadashi smiles. “Shut up, bonehead.”
-
“Is the cape beneficial to the efficiency of your suit?”
Hiro looks up from tightening the knot around his neck. “Nah, Baymax. It’s for the parade.”
“The pride parade?”
“Yeah.” Hiro grabs his helmet off the table. “The guys should be here any minute to drive us.”
Baymax examines the pink, white, and blue flag hanging from Hiro’s neck.
“Should I also wear a flag?”
Hiro smiles. “Sure, buddy. If you wanna get in the spirit.”
Baymax is quiet for a minute, and then a collage of pride flags appears on his stomach.
“Is this appropriate?”
Hiro gives him a thumbs up. “Perfect.”
“What about the pin attached to your shirt?”
Hiro’s hand rests on the chest of his armor, above where the pin is clipped to his shirt. “Oh, that’s-”
“Hiro!”
Hiro turns to find his friends bursting through the door of the Lucky Cat, Honey Lemon at the forefront.
“Look at this tiny flag I found. Isn’t it cute?” She waves a hand-sized lesbian flag at Hiro.
“Adorable,” Hiro offers.
Honey Lemon squeals. “I know, right?”
“You ready to go, Hiro?” Wasabi asks, using a mirror to examine the precise lines of the rainbow flags painted on his cheeks.
“Whenever you are,” Hiro says. His phone rings as if to defy the statement.
He checks the caller ID and answers. “Hey, Aunt Cass.”
“Hey, Hiro! Have you left for the parade yet?” His aunt chirps through the phone.
“Uh, not yet. The guys just got here.” Hiro watches Fred as he tries to frantically wipe cracker crumbs from his t-shirt that says, “I May Be Straight But I Don’t Hate” in an aggressive font. “We’re gonna leave soon.”
“Okay, baby. I’m so sorry I couldn’t come,” she says for the three-hundredth time since she found out she’d booked a catering gig the same day they’d planned to go to pride. “But I hope you have a really good time. And I love you very much, Hiro.”
Hiro smiles. “I love you too, Aunt Cass.”
There’s clattering on the other end of the phone, and Aunt Cass starts shouting to people in the background.
“Okay, sweetheart, I have to go now. Happy Pride!” She makes a kissing sound into the speaker.
“Happy Pride,” he echoes, and she hangs up the phone.
“I’m sorry she couldn’t come, Hiro,” Honey Lemon tries to comfort.
“Yeah…” Hiro says. He knows how much she wanted to go, and how much he wanted her to. He shakes that feeling off. “But, hey, now we get to go as Big Hero 6.”
“Yeah, that’s cooler, anyway.” Gogo blows a bubble with gum that’s rainbow but slowly blending to brown.
“Yeah.” Hiro thinks about what it would have meant to him seeing someone like them being proud. He thinks of what it would have meant to Tadashi. “Let’s go.”
“Okay, but please, everyone, make sure your shoes are clean before you get in my car,” Wasabi says as they all file out of the café.
Hiro pauses in the doorway and lets his friends walk without him to the car.
This would have been their first pride. He imagines how nervous Tadashi would have been to go. He imagines how happy he would’ve been too.
“Um, guys… I think Baymax is stuck!”
“Oh, no.”
Hiro looks to the car and finds Fred trying to push Baymax into the backseat with minimal success. He laughs and puts his hand over where the pin sits.
“This one’s for you, big brother.”