Chapter Text
The Hall was rapidly burning up in an incredible inferno. People were scattered about, rushing away as fast as their legs could carry them, only some stopping to help others who had fallen, or who were simply in shock and incapable of movement without prompting. The sound of the building slowly collapsing piece by piece and the screams and shouts of hundreds filled the air with an almost physical intensity.
Tadashi rushes towards it, gently grabbing the first person he sees and checking her over.
"Are you all right?"
She tries to catch her breath, glancing up at him as she struggles to find her thoughts in the chaos of the moment.
"Yes, but Professor Callaghan is still inside!"
She shakes him off and in another second she is gone, running to safety. Tadashi barely hesitates before turning back to the hall, running toward it with a new urgency.
He feels something pull at him and stops short. He turns, and he's confronted with the horrified stare of his younger brother.
"Tadashi, no! You can't go in there!"
His voice is stern, but his face betrays him. Hiro is clearly terrified and desperate to keep his brother away from the fire.
Tadashi struggles, and for just a moment, he considers remaining outside.
He quickly defaults.
"Someone has to help!"
He pulls his arm free, and he's off, running full speed up the stairs as Hiro screams for him to stop. The fire is rapidly getting closer, and he feels the heat of it all, intensifying with each step he takes. Breathing is quickly becoming harder, and his eyes are burning from the light, and the heat, oh God, the heat.
The fire burns loudly and ferociously, the beginnings of an explosion from further within is suddenly all too clear, Hiro yells something unintelligible from somewhere behind, and for the briefest of moments, Tadashi thinks-
"I'm going to die."
But he doesn't.
The very next thing Tadashi can remember is laying on the steps he had only just run up seconds before. Slowly and blearily, his mind barely picks up a presence somewhere close, and his head twitches, turning carefully to look at where he had been standing with Hiro before.
Tadashi was somehow alive after running full speed into a blaze that surely would have and should have killed him,
And his brother was standing before it with a strange, white animal, and wearing the most peculiar outfit he had ever seen.
…
An alarm clock sounds, and Tadashi wakes up from the same dream he's had nearly every night since the fire.
He shifts in his bed, turning to look at Hiro. His brother is just starting to stir from his own sleep, and the elder chalks it up to post-traumatic stress from the incident, as he has every morning after the dream.
There's no time for this; they have to get ready for school.
Tadashi Hamada was a lot of things.
Smart, talented, kind, generous…
Right now, though, he only felt helplessly confused.
With a - admittedly impressive - loud 'plink!' he starts from his thoughts, quickly inspecting his surroundings until he reaches the smug look on Gogo's face. He raises an eyebrow challengingly at her and retrieves the pencil she had launched at the side of his head.
"What was that for?" He casually tosses it back to her. She easily catches it, popping her gum.
"You're acting weirder than usual lately."
"Yeah? How so?"
"Well, for one, you keep staring at Hiro." She pops her gum again and glances over at Hiro, who is busily working on a project on the other side of the room. "It's kinda creepy."
"What? No, I'm not-!" he's cut off when she makes a face, shutting his protest down in an instant, and he sighs tiredly.
"Hiro, he's…"
Tadashi trails off, unsure of how exactly to describe what he's been seeing. Gogo lets a couple of seconds pass in an awkward silence, then raises her brow and tilts her head forward, indicating he should continue. He tries to gather his thoughts into a coherent stream.
"Hiro's been acting different; not at all like his usual self."
"How?"
"He seems…just, really distant the past couple of months. I feel like he's really stressing out over something, but he keeps denying it whenever I ask." He looks back up to meet her gaze, silently asking if she could have an answer.
"A couple of months ago was when the fire happened — he could still be stressed about that," she offers, shrugging. He looks down at his hands again and shakes his head in frustration.
"I know it could be that, but I-… Hiro's always come to me about these things! We've always been able to talk about them, but he hasn't once since the fire, and…"
"…And?"
"…He keeps disappearing lately, too."
Gogo lets out a huff, trying not to laugh. "Bot-fighting?"
"No. No, I don't think it's that. I know when Hiro's been bot-fighting — he gets cocky and acts all high-and-mighty. That's not him right now, and he's almost never even in that area anymore."
"Tadashi, we've been through this — the whole GPS trackers in Hiro's jackets is super weird."
"Yeah, yeah," he rolls his eyes, "but come on, it comes in handy!"
"Okay, yeah, sure," she says, sarcasm dripping heavily off of every word.
"Look, the point is that I'm getting really worried about him."
"Alright, well listen," she leans in and looks him straight in the eyes, "Hiro lost all of his microbots in the fire. He worked really hard on those, and all of it went up in flames, and it doesn't really matter that Hiro's this super genius already in college — something like that can be pretty hard on a kid."
She leans back and waits for a response, getting one in a pause and a low sigh from her friend.
"Yeah, I guess, but…"
Gogo groans and brings a hand up to her head.
"Look, if you're that worried that something bad's going on, we can all just keep an eye on him for a while. I'm sure the others would be fine with following him around a bit and keeping him out of trouble."
Hiro Hamada could not seem to catch a break. Tadashi hanging around him at every possible moment, no matter how much Hiro insisted that he was fine was bad enough.
Now, it seemed like everyone else in their group had caught the crazy. Every second of the day, there was at least one or two of them creeping over or following him, and he hadn't gotten a single spare moment to himself in nearly a full week. It was exhausting! Not to mention he could barely focus on his robotics work with them bothering him all the time, and he definitely couldn't go out to take care of his other work…He just felt lucky that his friend wasn't mad at him for having to skip this whole week. Honestly, she deserved a prize for her understanding.
Currently, he was silently ruminating on his frustrations in the background as his brother and their friends chatted light-heartedly and aimlessly, walking along casually to the Lucky Cat after another long day of schooling and suffocating Hiro. He could feel Tadashi's gaze on him, as he had been feeling constantly for the past two-and-a-half months, and to be perfectly honest with himself, he was truly starting to feel his patience fray and wondered if maybe he was going to finally crack soon.
Unfortunately for him, his luck, or lack thereof, and the next few moments indicated that perhaps it would have to happen right about now.
The increasingly loud debate between Fred and Wasabi over something Hiro was decidedly not paying any attention to was brought to a sudden interruption with the arrival of an absolute mess of colors erupting around them.
"Whoa man, what in the world...!" Wasabi was scared into stillness at once, cemented in his place as he turned his head around to take in the chaos around them.
"Dude!" Fred was, on the other hand, in awe and excited at this new development.
Hiro turned at the sound of movement, and was greeted with Tadashi beginning to wrap his arms around him protectively out of habit. The rest of the group began to follow suit and drew closer to each other, forming an increasingly tight huddle. Gogo was almost glaring at the array of colors and textures that swirled around them, Honey gazing in a sort of terrified wonder as she stood next to her, arms wrapped around her friend's own.
Meanwhile, Hiro quickly took down a mental note about each and every little thing that was there, his hand instinctively moving to a ring on his left middle finger. His thoughts raced, and he wondered if he should engage it now or wait until it became absolutely necessary. The latter was quickly becoming the better option as he spotted small creatures, made of what looked very much like large cookies with colorful party hats and arms made of licorice, and heading directly toward them. He could feel Tadashi's arms tighten, heard Wasabi and Honey Lemon shriek, and that was it — he had to go now or else risk them getting hurt or otherwise trapped.
He pressed his hand onto the ring and began to focus.
A shrill 'shing!' sounded, breaking his concentration, and one of the creatures shrieked and dissolved into thin air as a spear-like object pierced it, sticking into the ground beneath and it's fellow monsters jumping back in surprise. Hiro let out a relieved sigh and began to smile, even as his brother and friends panicked further.
"Back! Back it up! Get!"
A teenage girl rushed onto the scene, waving a strange, bright light that emanated from a jewel in her hand at the remaining monsters, sending them skittering away, the awful chaos gradually dissipating as they left. She turned to grasp the spear, and it instantly began to dissolve into a light much like the one she held.
She spun around playfully and laughed lightly, beaming at the group as the light dimmed and the jewel dissolved as well.
"Hiro! Nice of you to finally join me!"
Hiro laughed and shook himself free of Tadashi's arms, wiggling his way through the others to jog over to the girl.
"Kii, am I glad to see you!" He threw his arms around her as she did the same, squeezing him tightly and lifting him from the ground in a big hug to twirl around as they joyfully laughed.
Tadashi didn't even know where to begin.
"...Hiro...?"
His brother and the stranger seemed to suddenly remember their presence and stopped, their smiles falling and the girl placing him back onto his feet. They worriedly looked at each other for a moment, before turning back to the group.
"Hey...so, uh..." Hiro kicked the ground nervously, glancing around for a moment before reluctantly meeting his brother's stare.
"Uh...well, this is Kii," he gestures to the girl, who waved and gave a shy smile.
"Hi!"
"So, she's my friend...and, uh...we sorta..." he waves his hands helplessly and shrugs as he tries to break the news gently,
"...fight monsters together..."