Chapter Text
It was a Tuesday afternoon at the Lucky Cat Cafe, and five friends and a plump robot were chatting around their usual table. They talked about everything from their new secret lair, to Globby's current emotional state, to the latest chapter of KHeartsQT's fanfiction.
Yet not a word was heard by their youngest member. He was slumped, chin on knuckles, gazing down at the table.
"Hiro. What's up," Gogo remarked when she noticed it. He mumbled wordlessly in response.
"Come on man, something's bugging you. You can tell us," Wasabi cajoled.
This only caused Hiro to stand up suddenly, both hands on the table with a determined expression, and walk briskly out of the cafe. He drew his hood over his head and took his phone out of his pocket to summon Skymax as he walked down the street.
Without breaking step, he spun on his heel and walked dejectedly back to where he had come from. He had forgotten something.
When he got back, the others were standing up, ready to come look for him. "Hiro, is everything..." Honey Lemon trailed off.
"Baymax," Hiro said shortly, gesturing for him to follow and walking outside. But Honey Lemon stopped him. "Hiro, it's alright if you don't want to tell us now. Just... we want to help." Hiro hesitated at this. He wanted to tell them, tell them about all the pent up frustration and lingering loneliness, about the inexplicable sense of betrayal. But he was, frankly, embarrassed. Perhaps he'd tell them when he returned.
"Thanks guys," he appreciated. But he kept walking.
Skymax was waiting for him a few blocks from the store. Suddenly, Wasabi cried out. "Hiro!" He mouthed silently, "Chief Cruz!" and pointed with his thumb to where the said person was strolling up to the cafe. Hiro's eyes widened as he frantically pressed the deactivate button on his screen. Just in time, Skymax flew up, and Hiro tucked his phone behind his back, arranging his face into a grin at the Chief.
Wasabi signalled with a thumbs-up, and Hiro ran down into an alley a little further up, summoned Skymax, and geared up both him and Baymax. He wasn't expecting to use the suits' superpowers: all he needed was to fly. As he mounted his companion, he asked him, "Baymax, can you scan for Karmi?"
Baymax blinked at the question, as though slightly surprised. "Karmi. Scanning... Karmi is located: at SFIM, San Fransokyo Institute of Medicine, in room A113."
"How long will it take to get there?"
"Approximately: thirty minutes. SFIM is on the other side of the city."
"Buddy, time to fly."
The duo landed quietly in SFIM's green space. It was rather late, and the university's tall building cast a long shadow on the lawn. There were only a couple of lights on in the school's many floors, and Hiro knew just who would be working in one of them at this time. He and Baymax hurried into the bushes, or in the case of Baymax, waddled awkwardly. Discreetly, they packed away their suits with Skymax.
But when they stepped out, they were blinded by the light of a phone's flash photo. Hiro shielded himself, yet when he recovered, he could not see who had taken the photo, between the spots that were still swimming in his eyes. He rubbed them and took Baymax's hand, leading him to the entrance of the majestic building.
Hiro straightened his shirt, patted down his helmet-hair and generally tried to look somewhat less dishevelled than normal. This institute felt as though it deserved a higher level of respect, somehow. Perhaps it was the classy lighting fixtures that lit up the white walls and vast hall, or the sparse yet ergonomic furnishing. Perhaps it was simply the fact that it was the only other university he had been to other than San Fransokyo Tech.
Or perhaps it was the prospect of seeing her again, for the first time in seven months, that was intimidating.
Hiro breathed in. She couldn't have forgotten about him: she never missed replying to his reviews of her fanfiction. But would she be glad to see him? Would he be disturbing her in the middle of whatever groundbreaking work that girl was up to now?
What did it matter? Hiro would see her, and if she did not want him, he would leave without a fuss. But if she did, he would be there. He would be there. He would be there for her. Hiro could not pretend that he just as badly wanted her to be there for him.
Just then, a voice called irritably from the reception desk. "Hey kid, are you going to come in or not?" Hiro started, then decided that now was as good a time as any. He stepped through the automatic doors and walked briskly up to the slouched lady at the desk. Baymax followed.
"Can I help you?"
Hiro shifted nervously. "Hi, I'm looking for a girl named Karmi? She started here recently, she's a biotech major, I'm not sure if you know her?"
"Last name?"
It struck Hiro as odd that he had never asked Karmi this. "Well, actually, I don't kno-" He was cut off by the air being squeezed out of his lungs.
"Stem cell T-23 is good for experimentation, Karmi," called a short-haired, tall girl from the other side of lab A113. She pushed her roller chair from her desk and handed the sample to Karmi, who was clad in enormous safety goggles, a clean lab coat and sterile latex gloves. Currently, she was carefully injecting a Petri dish with a clear, viscous liquid and was concentrating on measuring out the liquid precisely.
"Thanks, Vicky," she nodded to her lab partner as she continued. "Margo, how are the results graphs coming? Did you finish them for T-19?" Her other teammate sat to her right and was busy punching some numbers into a calculator. She wore no safety equipment, despite the nature of their project, only a baggy shirt that said, tech me to the moon.
"Huh?" She flipped through a thick binder. "Yeah, I think I did, except the-"
Karmi interrupted her abruptly. "Sh." Her brow was furrowed.
"Why-"
"Sh."
The lab was silent for a moment before Karmi heard the voice drifting faintly, familiarly, up the stairs. "... she's a biotech major, I'm not sure if- "
"Ok, well- " Margo started to continue.
But Karmi had stood up, a grin crawling up her face, the syringe left dripping on the table. She paused for a moment, not wanting to believe it in case she was wrong. Then she flew out the door, her coat billowing behind her, and flung herself down the stairs.
She stopped on the second stair to the bottom to take off her safety goggles, not believing that it was really him, standing there, hands in pockets, hair a mess, a little out of place and just there. She grinned wider as an idea came to her: she would scare him.
Karmi tread quickly, silently, to behind where Hiro stood.
Then, without warning, she engulfed him.
As tightly and wholly as a white blood cell would a pathogen.
"Hiro!" she exclaimed, squeezing the air out of his lungs.
After he recovered from the initial shock, Hiro started smiling uncontrollably. "Karmi- can't- brea- "
"Oh, Hiro what took you so long?"
"Karmi- "
"Shush, Genius Boy." And he hugged her back, smelling the familiar disinfectant and latex in her coat. She buried her head into his short self, his smell a familiar mix of musty garage and robotics prodigy. Well, thought Karmi, if they ever made a scent called robots prodigy, this is what it would smell like.
They let go, and Hiro spoke. "I mean, I knew you would miss me, but not that much," he joked.
"Don't flatter yourself, Genius Boy."
But then her tone turned accusatory as she stepped back and pointed a finger at his chest. "Why didn't you come before? I thought we were friends, and friends don't just ditch each other because the other one left their school for good. Not that I'd have known much about that, but I know I wouldn't do that to you. I only couldn't come because I was explicitly banned from SFIT and surrounds on pain of being grounded until I turn 18. And I'm kind of fond of my childhood. You had better come up with a good excuse, Genius Boy. And no, commenting on my fanfics doesn't count as human interaction."
Hiro was sheepish. "Er... I've been... busy?" The truth was that he had never been able to gather the courage to actually make the journey and see her. He had been so doubtful she'd even want to see him, especially after he was one of the reasons she had to go away in the first place. He had been frustrated at her leaving without bothering to say goodbye or even letting him know. He had felt lonely talking to her like a regular fan, like she hadn't just gone and left him, through his laptop screen. But now that he was here, he found it silly to not have come earlier, if this was the kind of reception he would have gotten.
Karmi snorted at his response. "Sure you were."
They both turned their heads at the sound of two girls whispering on the staircase. They were Vicky and Margo. "Oh!" Karmi exclaimed at the sight, remembering. She had left the syringe dripping unhygienically and potentially disastrously on the tabletop, next to a cell that was almost certainly dead by now. "Sorry Hiro, gotta run, be right back..."
Thus, as quickly as she had come, Karmi was gone.
Hiro was left standing awkwardly opposite the reception desk, with two girls who were now descending the stairs. "Hi, I'm Margo," the shorter one waved confidently. "You must be Karmi's friend. We were just going to tell her that she may or may not want to check out the potentially catastrophic mistake she just made, leaving a syringe leaking and a pathogen unsupervised, but," she shrugged, "most people do that within their first week. I'm surprised it took her this long."
Hiro grinned back. "Well, I'm not. She's very meticulous when it comes to biotech. Or anything, actually."
"She must really like you to come down like that. Why haven't you come earlier? Why didn't any of Karmi's other friends?"
Hiro didn't really want to answer that, so he turned to the taller girl. "Karmi's sure made a few good friends here. Are you guys working on a project?"
Vicky answered a little shyly. "Yes, we are."
Hiro had to prompt her. "What's your goal?"
"To- We're trying to find a way to clone green algae."
Hiro was a little surprised at this, more so perhaps than even the fact that Karmi had agreed to work civilly with others in a team. "Why would you want to do that?" Also, Hiro was pretty sure that the method had already been discovered.
But his question was left unanswered as Karmi came bounding down the steps, exhibiting a level of exuberance Hiro had only ever seen when she was in the presence of her beloved Captain Cutie. She jumped the last step, yet when she looked up, her expression was anxious. She smiled briefly at him, then turned to her friends darkly.
"The syringe. The cytoplasmic mix." The girls turned, worry in their eyes. "It dissolved a patch of the table. And T-23. Much more than a drop leaked... almost the entire contents of the syringe have been spilt."
Vicky wrinkled her brow. "But our research?" she asked. "And the specimens? They're good, right?"
Karmi bit her lip. "Half your binder has been dissolved." She paused. "But the specimens are fine, despite their close proximity. It's a miracle, really."
Vicky let out a breath she didn't realise she had been holding. Her relief was disproportionate to the amount of damage done. Smiling grimly, Margo patted her friend on the shoulder. When she had joked about the potentially catastrophic consequences of Karmi's mistake earlier, she had not considered just how impactful the damage might be. "Karmi, how will we get our research back?" Margo whispered a swear word.
Karmi rubbed her temples. "I don't think we will." She turned her attention to the boy looking down guiltily. It was his fault for coming in when he knew Karmi was working. "Hiro, you are a distraction," she asserted.
"I'm sorry Karmi, I didn't know what..." Hiro trailed off, looking sideways at Karmi. He cocked his head away from her, his bangs flopping down. "A distraction, you say? Should I take that as a compliment?"
Huffing, Karmi tried to suppress a smile. "Well is there anything you can do to fix this blunder?"
"Karmi," Hiro cracked his knuckles, "this is what I do." He started listing on his fingers. "I'm going to need one of your student login details, fifteen minutes at that computer," he tilted his head in the direction of the receptionist's desk, "one 16 gig USB, that guy's hairband," he referred to a student with a man bun who just happened to be passing through, "and four large packets of gummy bears. Stat. And months of your hard work will be magically restored."
"That guy's hairband?" Karmi asked incredulously. "I could give you mine."
"No compromises. I have a very specific set of skills," he stated, with the subtlest glint in his eye.
"Or none at all, Genius Boy," Karmi muttered. But she was already on the job.
Author's Note
Thanks for reading! Just to be clear, my stories don't all exist in the same world or continue on in any way. So, in my other story Privacy Breach, Karmi finds out that Hiro is Captain Cutie. However, in this story, she doesn't know. It just continues on from where the TV series left off. Leave a review if you want- feedback is appreciated!.