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Honey Lemon offers help first.
It’s been nearly a year since the fire, months since Baymax was rebuilt, and Hiro has fit so perfectly into their group despite his age it’s as if he has always been there. But he’s still so much younger, and Honey can’t help but keep an eye on him around the lab. So she was the first to notice the way Hiro was constantly pushing his hair out of his eyes, the reflexive motion usually accompanied by a frown as each interruption broke Hiro’s focus.
It was his own fault, really; Hiro was long overdue for a haircut, his bangs hanging into his eyes and the longest pieces in the back brushing his shoulders, but without Tadashi there to nag him into submission Hiro kept pushing it off, ignoring the hints his aunt dropped on occasion in favor of his class work or working on Baymax or his latest project.
But Honey sees him shove his hair back with a scowl from her corner of the lab, and bites back a laugh as she reaches for her bag. He’s entirely focused on his work at the big 3D printer, working late on yet another upgrade for Baymax, and doesn’t notice her until she’s at his shoulder.
“Here, Hiro,” she says, and he only jumps a little at her sudden appearance. He catches a glimpse of pink, but before he can wonder he feels a small snap as Honey brushes his bangs to the side. He blinks in surprise when she pulls her hands away and his hair doesn't immediately fall back into his eyes, and a second later she has done the same to the other half of his fringe.
“There!” Honey’s smile is bright and wide as she tucks a longer piece of his hair behind his ear. “That should help, hermano.”
When Hiro reaches up to carefully investigate, his fingers brush against cool metal and he realizes it’s a barrette. He’s seen Honey clip her hair back with them dozens of times while around the lab, and he gives her a grateful smile in response.
“Thanks, Honey.”
(It isn’t until later that he realizes Honey has put two of her cutest barrettes in his hair— one sporting a tiny pink acrylic bunny and the other a cheerful yellow bow— after Fred shoots soda out of his nose in surprise when he and Wasabi come back from their food run.)
It’s a few weeks later that Wasabi offers to take him to get a haircut – he knows of this one place that has student deals, friendly stylists and was outstandingly clean—and Hiro shrugs and agrees, if only to keep Honey Lemon from putting more cutesy barrettes in his hair. Wasabi’s new car is shiny and clean and Hiro finds a sticky spot under the handle when he grabs it to close the door and discovers why Gogo is now banned from riding shotgun.
“Crazy Asian drivers,” Wasabi gripes, and Hiro laughs, and it doesn’t hurt so much as he tells Wasabi about some of the stunts Tadashi had pulled on his moped whenever he had come to Hiro’s rescue at a bot fight. Wasabi is horrified, and is only somewhat mollified when Hiro assures him that of course we were wearing helmets, because it was Tadashi and Tadashi always made him wear a helmet, even if they were just going down the street.
Tadashi’s moped is still in the garage, pushed into a corner and covered with a cloth, hidden from sight while the pain had still been fresh, and Hiro idly considers asking Aunt Cass if he could maybe learn to drive it, since he’s still a bit too short for the truck even though he’s nearly old enough to learn to drive, and—
Then they’re at the salon, a little hole-in-the-wall, but true to Wasabi’s word it was brightly lit inside and probably the cleanest salon Hiro had ever seen in his short life. The stylist reminds them both of Honey, the young woman only a little older than Wasabi with bleach blonde hair and a bright smile as she guides Hiro to a chair.
Hiro is momentarily stumped when she asks what he wants done with his hair, and Wasabi suggests something shorter, so it would stay out of his eyes while he was working. The stylist says she knows just the cut, and Hiro shrugs and decides to go along with it—he is young and his hair grows fast, and maybe it was time for a change.
He closes his eyes as he listens to the snik-snik of the scissors, feeling the weight drop away.
(But he wasn’t expecting the results—still a little longer in the front, his bangs sweeping just past his brows, but short in the back, and—Hiro hadn’t realized his face was starting to fill out, his hair hiding this development until now, and he’ll never look exactly like Tadashi but the similarity was enough to momentarily knock the breath out of him.
Wasabi pays for the haircut, despite his protests, and they both thank the stylist before they spend the drive back in silence.)
By the third day Hiro is beginning to regret the haircut, exhausted by the grief he feels every time he sees his reflection; his face is still thinner than Tadashi’s was, his nose and jaw more rounded, but he has the same high cheekbones, the same warm brown eyes, and
It’s not until he forces a grin or a grimace and sees the gap in his teeth (that Tadashi had occasionally complained that Hiro should have been in braces to fix) that he sees himself instead of Tadashi, and the grief weighs him down again in a way he has not felt in months.
He becomes lethargic as a result, dragging his feet as he moves around his lab, oblivious to the looks of concern his friends were trading and tuning out Baymax as the nursebot waddles after him.
That afternoon, Fred drags him away from his work, declaring they were going on a food run with Baymax’s reminder that Hiro was allergic to peanuts following them out, but before long Hiro has tried on more hats than he has ever seen, one after another as Fred drags him between stores.
He pointedly doesn’t look at the baseball caps and Fred doesn’t suggest one, instead piling all sorts of other hats on his head. At some point Fred’s knit cap ends up on Hiro’s head as the kaiju-fanboy tries on an oversized bucket hat; it’s too big for Hiro, stretched out from constantly being worn, but the sight sparks an idea in Fred’s mind, and he flings the bucket hat back onto the shelf as he jumps into motion.
“I’ve got it!”
(Soon the two are headed back to the university, arms loaded with bags of takeout and an oversized cable knit beanie pulled over Hiro’s hair, the same dark blue as his favorite hoodie and
It’s not perfect, but it helps.)
Or at least it helps until Hiro realizes that wearing his beanie in the lab was a dangerous prospect, as one misfired thruster nearly sets the knit cap on fire while it was still on his head. Gogo laughs as she notices his singed bangs, and Wasabi frets over him as Honey Lemon carefully trims away the burnt hair.
So the beanie is abandoned on the desk in his lab when he arrives and remains there until he leaves for the night, and he’s right back to avoiding his reflection whenever possible. This goes on for a week before Gogo announces her presence in his lab one night with a loud crack of gum, and tells him that he’s coming back to her apartment after he’s finished up his work, and Baymax is at home with Aunt Cass so he has no reason to say no.
Gogo is every bit as strict about helmets as Tadashi, but she drives twice as fast as his brother ever had and Hiro silently revels in the rush of the wind, and it’s a little like flying with Baymax and
He’s going to ask Aunt Cass about the moped later, he’s sure of it now.
They’re at the complex Gogo lives in sooner than Hiro had expected, and while it’s nothing extravagant like Fred’s house it’s comfortable and lived in, and Gogo halfheartedly apologizes for the mess and doesn’t mean a word of it and Hiro expects nothing less and says nothing as he steps over a pile of clothing.
There are pieces of bikes scattered here and there, but before Hiro has a chance to investigate Gogo is brandishing a comb and a bottle and
“Alright, what color do you want?”
They sit around and laugh at stupid videos online while they wait for the bleach to process, and it stings his scalp but Gogo assures him that’s normal so long as it doesn’t start to burn and seriously Hiro just tell me if it does, we don’t need your hair falling out.
The streaks of platinum left behind when Gogo helps him wash out the bleach in the sink are startling, but then Gogo is toweling his hair dry and she has another bottle full of dye the color of Baymax’s armor.
It seems perfect until Hiro looks in the mirror and sees Tadashi, and suddenly the red streaks are fire and his brother is gone just a charcoal body being dragged out of the rubble and he’s gone and Gogo holds him tight until he stops shaking. She strips the color out of his hair with practiced ease, and after a moment of thought she retrieves a well-used and stained bottle from under the sink.
(She later shows him how to help her strip the color from her hair, and the next day they arrive with Hiro sporting violet streaks to match his armor, and Gogo’s bangs are now the same shade as her favorite flavor of gum.
Fred makes the mistake of commenting on the pink, and Hiro laughs as Gogo punches him.)
Aunt Cass hasn’t missed any of this, and it eases the pain in her heart a little when Hiro is finally smiling again, looking a little more like his brother every day but with his friends there to help pull him through it.
“Hiro’s growing up,” she tells Baymax one evening, after Hiro has run off to work on Tadashi’s—on his moped with Gogo, leaving the inflatable robot on the couch with her and Mochi.
Baymax’s eyes shutter in an imitation of a blink, and the nursebot tilts his head. “Yes, he is currently experiencing the rapid growth commonly seen in puberty—“
And Cass laughs hard enough to startle poor Mochi, who hops off the couch with his tail bristled out, and once she manages to rein in her laughter she just pats the confused robot on his hand.
“Close enough,” she says, still smiling as she turns on the TV and settles in against Baymax’s side for the evening.
(And she still chews him out for dying his hair without asking her, and lectures him about always wearing his helmet when he goes for rides with Gogo as he learns to drive the moped Tadashi had saved up months for and by the time she's done he’s rolling his eyes in exasperation and she just smiles and pulls him into a tight hug.
He’s going to be okay. They all are.)