Work Text:
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
You don’t know how the robot got in here. You don’t ever remember seeing someone bring it in. Maybe Aunt Cass dropped it off, back when you didn’t get out of bed most days, and you just didn’t notice.
You stare for too long. The robot repeats the question.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
Oh. Uh… Zero.
No physical injuries were sustained. No treatment required.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
You say that you’re satisfied with your care. The robot goes back to its station and compresses.
You don’t go to SFIT. You throw out your offer of study. Aunt Cass stops announcing missed calls, probably because there aren’t any anymore.
There’s a limit to how understanding they can be after a few months.
You’re bored. You wander around your bedroom and sort through the dusty shelves of your old toys and action figures. You pick up an old Magic 8 Ball you didn’t know you had. Must’ve belonged to Tadashi. You shake it hard and ask in your head if the world is going to end soon. You stare at the answer it provides.
Don’t count on it.
You shake it again but it slips and drops onto your foot. You hop around and exclaim.
“Ow.”
The robot inflates.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
Low. About a one? The robot asks if it hurts when he touches it and you laugh and shove at him because yes it does hurt when he touches it.
He gets you to sit down and presses a small ice pack to your foot. You talk to him. You ask for his name. What was it again? Baymax? What a weird name. You wonder why Tadashi named him that.
You have a real conversation for what feels like the first time in months. For just a few minutes, you’re distracted from the bright red, pulsing, flashing agony settled deep and mute in your gut. You have a bit of fun testing the robot’s knowledge about itself and its programming and its parts. You have a bit of fun and it suddenly hits you that you’re having fun.
And then a wave of disappointment breaks over you.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
You mumble reluctantly that you’re satisfied with your care.
You get a bit careless. A bit clumsy too. You waste your days in the garage. You don’t do much. You tinker with this, you tinker with that. You stop wearing shoes. You don’t bother to find the protective googles. You wave around a blowtorch and you don’t wear the right gloves or any headgear. You don’t clip your spiky mess of hair out of your eyes so sometimes you don’t always know exactly what you’re doing or how the blood ended up all over your hands.
You head upstairs.
“Ow.”
Baymax inflates.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
Hmm. About a three? It’s one of those cuts that really only start to sting once you notice it’s there. It stopped bleeding after a few tempting squeezes and it doesn’t require very much medical attention. Just some antiseptic and a plaster. Baymax tells you it should heal within a couple of days.
You drag Baymax down to the garage and show him what you’ve been working on. You point out all of the parts and things that went into him. You show him some of the machines that built him.
You teach him a fist-bump – the elaborate kind you used to do with Tadashi. Baymax can’t blow it up quite right, but he tries. It’s kind of cute.
And then Baymax isn’t so cute anymore.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
You don’t say it.
You spend the afternoon trying to teach him how to play video games. His fingers are big and fat and his reflexes are slow, but you still get a couple of fun games out of him. Your victory comes easy. But you can pretend that it didn’t. You talk him up. You tell him he’s going to do better next time. With just a bit of practice.
There’s a lull. And then he says it again.
“Are you satisfied with your care?”
You stare at the screen for a while. And then you say it.
You’re satisfied with your care.
Aunt Cass worries about you. Well, you suspect she’s always been worried about you, ever since that day, but she voices her concerns over dinner one night and you just so happen to be listening. She says you look pasty. Like you don’t open the blinds enough or go outside anymore. Like the sun has forgotten your darling face.
You force a smile and tell her that you’ll make more of an effort. So she’ll stop worrying.
You have no destination. You wander around the city. You start at noon and you don’t stop until well after the sun has set. Your feet ache, but you don’t turn back home. You don’t even know where home is anymore, not from these parts. You gravitate towards back alleys, where the smells make your eyes water and the lights flicker and rain small sparks down on you. You hear a noise like toppled rubbish bins and you turn a corner to see a fight– a real fight, with fists and kicks and a whole lot of cuss words.
Your heart pounds and your body floods with adrenaline, but you don’t move. You don’t move until they spot you and shout at you and run for you, and then you turn on heel so fast that you fall and scrape your palms and knees and very nearly almost your head. You yell “ow” but no one hears you. Nothing inflates.
Lights burn through your skull. A car slams on the breaks and honks madly at you. You stagger to your feet and sprint back in the direction of home. You don’t know if you’re still being followed or not because you don’t ever stop to look back, not even for a second. You burn through fuel you don’t even have because you don’t eat all that much anymore and you haven’t moved this fast since you were still in school.
You come home and race up the stairs, two at a time, and fall onto your bed and shake and gasp.
“Ow.”
Baymax inflates. He comes to you this time.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
You can’t breathe. You want to tell him a six or something like that but you can’t breathe. You ran all the way home. You didn’t stop running – couldn’t stop running – and now you can’t find enough air to fill your lungs. Baymax asks if it’s an asthma attack and you shake your head no. It’s not that. It’s something else. A different kind of attack.
Baymax gets you to sit up and lays a hand on your back and instructs your breathing. You listen to him and you calm down and you’re reminded of Tadashi and the hurt takes hold of you like a tight fist over your heart. It takes longer than usual for you to calm down, but eventually you do.
He tells you what you already know. You’re injured. He tells you that he needs to attend to your injuries, and you let him. You tell him that you saw your first real fight today and it wasn’t nearly as cool as you thought it would be. It was actually pretty scary – the way they just didn’t hold back. The way the bones crunched.
He asks for the knee that took the brunt of the fall and you pull up your pant leg. You watch with rapt attention as he works on you. He wipes away a mix of dried and wet blood and grime and makes you wince with a strong dose of antiseptic spray. He puts on a small dressing. He applies some light relief to the red sting on your palms.
He tells you that you’ve been a good boy. He gives you a lollipop. He pats your head and you close your eyes and nuzzle up into his hand.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
You ignore him.
You call Baymax a nerd. You set him up to ramble off some facts about neurotransmitters, or what to do in the case of a chemical burn, and you laugh and punch him in the arm and call him a nerd.
He almost always tries to correct you. He is not a nerd.
He is a robot.
You still call him a nerd.
His battery runs low often now. He insists on going back to his charging station, but you just start taking it to him. You fetch it from your bedroom and make him charge on the spot. You don’t let him compress. You don’t let him go offline, not even for an hour or two.
When you make repairs – when you clean your own blood off his hands – you make him stand there and wait.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
He doesn’t stop. You pretend that you don’t hear him, but each time you do causes you to feel more and more distressed. More desperate.
More injuries follow.
“Ow.”
He stops saying it for a while.
And then he says it again.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
You spit it out one day. You shout it out – you don’t want him to deactivate. He can’t deactivate. He can never deactivate ever again. You are not satisfied with your care and you never will be.
He’s not allowed to deactivate.
You can’t bear to lose anyone else.
You can’t lose him too.
Baymax says he doesn’t understand. And you don’t make him understand.
Some days you’re more self-aware than you usually are. You know you’re being selfish. You know you’re keeping this ingenious creation all to yourself and you’re not at all honouring your brother’s wishes. You know you shouldn’t be Baymax’s patient. His one and only patient. You know Baymax is supposed to help a lot of people. You know Baymax isn’t supposed to help you.
You know like a punch to your gut that Tadashi didn’t build Baymax to help you.
And it makes you hate yourself that little bit more.
You go out one night, without Baymax. You’re thankful that it’s a cool night so you don’t get too hot and gross in your long-sleeved hoodie and your full-length pants. You go to a bot-fight. You storm right in and toss an upgraded Megabot into the ring and hope that it’s good enough to cause some trouble.
You hand over a decent amount of cash. You put up a good front of not knowing where the hell you are or what the hell you’re getting yourself into, and then you wreck your opponent’s bot just as easily as you would’ve done years ago. You act like a real asshole. You proclaim your victory louder when your opponent and the bystanders stare at you like they didn’t hear you.
You actually feel a little terrified thrill go through you when someone grabs a fistful of your hair. And then the side of your head is slammed into a wall and you’re let go and you collapse against it.
For a few seconds, your head is just a pulsating, twinkling haze of pain. You gasp and clutch at it and don’t do much else.
Someone takes all of your money and someone else takes Megabot. Someone ropes your arm around their neck and asks where you’re based, and you mumble the name of your aunt’s café. Then you’re being walked across town by a total stranger who jostles you a lot to keep you awake and asks you questions you struggle to answer but they absolutely insist that you try.
You both make it to the café some time later, and by then everything has come back into focus. Your helpful stranger asks if you can take it from here and you give a faint nod. They tell you to take it easy and then they’re gone and you’re opening up the door as quietly as you can.
You slowly ascend the stairs and come into your bedroom and you don’t even need to say it, but you do anyway out of habit.
“Ow.”
Baymax blinks at you.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
You report back anywhere between a three and an eight. He tells you that that is not particularly helpful and you laugh a little shallow. He informs you that you may have a mild concussion. You tell him that that was probably because your head got knocked pretty hard into a wall and, last you heard anyway, getting knocked pretty hard into a wall wasn’t exactly the best thing to happen to a head.
You spend the rest of the night in his big, squishy embrace. Not even Tadashi was this big and squishy. He holds you and handles your head – you already know there’s a huge bruise developing there – in such a delicate, gentle way and it’s nice. You want him to tell you that you’re important. That you’re safe now. That everything will be OK.
He runs through the symptoms; he asks if you feel dizzy or nauseous at all, he checks if you’re sensitive to light and sound, and he fires off arbitrary questions at you to test your memory and reasoning and reaction times. But aside from the headache, you feel OK. You feel good.
You come to the realisation that you like being fussed over. You like it a lot.
Perhaps you like it a bit too much.
You try to get Baymax to call you a knucklehead. He asks what that means and you tell him it’s an insult, and instantly he refuses to do it. You rephrase. It’s just a fun, teasing nickname. There’s no offence behind it whatsoever. He trusts you on this, and he calls you a knucklehead and lightly rubs his fist over the top of your skull, and you feel just a little bit warmer on the inside.
You have him watch over you while you sleep, in case you slip into a coma or something. Not that it’s likely to happen, but you never know. He wakes you up every hour on the hour to tell you that you appear to be doing OK.
It feels far too nice to stop.
One day you make some popcorn. You turn on a computer and hook it up with a hard drive full of old films you and Tadashi used to watch together.
You coax Baymax to sit with you. He watches the film with you. He turns to you every now and again with health and safety related questions that you often have to answer with “it’s just a movie, bro, let it go”. “Willing suspension of belief, buddy”. “The rule of cool”.
You make obnoxious comments and crack jokes, and you encourage him to laugh with you, but the sounds he makes are just so horrendous – even worse than his fist-bump noises. Like electronic babbling. That’s something you’re definitely going to have to work on with him later. Laughing is pretty important.
One film easily turns into three. It gets late, though you don’t know exactly how late. You don’t know if the sun is up yet because your blinds are always closed.
You lean your head against Baymax’s vinyl-cover arm, which slips onto his stomach, which falls onto his stumpy little legs. You don’t hear a heartbeat, but you hear the thrum of his engine and that’s good enough.
You curl your knees up to your chest. You laugh a lot less. Your blinks become slower and longer. You convince Baymax to put an arm over you, and he asks if you’re cold, and you tell him no.
You just like the comfort.
You come awake the next morning to a stiff neck and an idle screen. You pull yourself up and blink with bleary eyes. Baymax is still there, and it’s the greatest thing.
He wishes you a good morning and you smile and wish him a good morning right back. He asks if you’re feeling any better and it’s too early and you’re not thinking – you don’t even know what injury he’s referring to, and you say that you’re doing a lot better, thanks.
You’re instantly awake. You regret your words.
“I cannot deactivate until you say you are satisfied with your care.”
Everything goes back to being bleak again. Your face falls into your hands. You won’t say it.
You don’t say it.
You go out one morning, just to make your aunt happy. You stop by the pharmacy because you remember Baymax mentioning that he was running low on supplies. They were depleting – all of the bandages and sticking plasters and ice packs and heat pads and ointments and sprays and pills and syrups and things were running out. Oh yeah, and lollipops too. Lollipops were especially important. Or maybe you could replace those with gummy bears or something. Shake it up a bit.
You look up what you need before you buy it, just to be sure. You flick through articles on your phone and stop on one that gravely warns of succumbing to the over-medicated society we live in today. This is your cue to roll your eyes and try another link, but a list catches your eye. A list of over-the-counter medication that, taken in extremely large doses, make people inexplicably sick. A list of brands to avoid abusing.
You add a few of those brands to your hoard. You tell the curious clerk that you’re assembling a first aid kit and you smile a little when she tells you how sensible you are.
You go back home and immediately begin popping pills like candy. You try to tell yourself that they are candy, to make it all go down easier, even as the first couple of symptoms start to kick in hard and fast and relentless.
Your first instinct is to reach for the pain relief drugs. But you’re already taking them.
You come to Baymax, one hand clutching your upset stomach, the other to your thudding head, and you whimper “ow, ow, ow” and beg him to help you.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
You don’t think about it. You rate it a nine instantly, because that’s just what it feels like in this very moment. You tell him to take care of you, and he scans you to work out the problem. He asks if you’ve been taking an excessive amount of pain relief medication and you answer him no.
He trusts you. He doesn’t believe you could ever lie to him. You’re best buds after all.
You keep taking the medication.
The medication is where all your money goes.
Medication and bot fights.
You’re particularly bedridden one day. You’re hazy and very likely high and you’ve been staring at Baymax for too long and he looks so bald to you for some strange reason.
You tell him to fetch you Tadashi’s cap from behind the closed partition. Baymax brings it to you. You don’t look at it for too long. You don’t feel the coarse fabric between your fingers for too long.
You tell Baymax to kneel, and he does. You set the cap on his head and laugh at how ridiculous he looks. It can’t fit over his stupid head. It’s too wide.
It was worth a shot, though.
One day you fuck up. Bad.
Your craft knife slips and you hiss and moan and press a dirty old towel to your naked thigh. You look back at your computer screen and keep reading whatever it is you’re not reading and ignore it. Like it’s not real. Because nothing feels real anymore.
Every few seconds you take the towel away and your eyes move slowly between the open wound and the dark red patch on the towel. The wound fills and floods with blood instantly. So you put the towel back.
You take it away again a few seconds later. You frown.
The gash is deep. Deeper than you expected.
You feel a little… uneasy.
Maybe you need Baymax now…
You put weight on your leg and your flesh protests. You cry out and take the weight off and clutch and claw at the skin around your wound and you wonder how you could’ve ever ignored a pain so intense. You hit something. You must’ve done. You hit something… vital.
You’re almost too scared to take the towel away, but you do. Your eyes widen as you watch your blood actually spurt. It’s never done that before.
You fucked up. You really fucked up this time.
You let the panic take hold and you yell out for help. It takes you a few seconds to realise that you were calling for Tadashi, and you switch to calling for Baymax. You need him to come to you because you don’t know how well you’re gonna handle stairs if you can’t even manage a few steps.
You try to take just one and you collapse and thud to the floor. You swipe at the tears in your eyes and grit your teeth and rock. Your hands are shaking real bad. You’re gasping. You watch as your blood seeps right through the towel and spreads, like the slow blossom of a flower. It scares you how much blood there is. The towel is just damp and red on your hand, and there’s so much blood and it’s not slowing down and you’re scared. You need Baymax.
Where is Baymax?
You scream for him and you hear him approach in that infuriatingly measured and leisured way that he does. He comes into the garage and pauses above you.
Now isn’t the time. But, incredibly, he asks.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
Ten, you scream, a ten – a fucking ten out of ten, a ten, ten, ten.
A second passes. He scans you.
And then he announces that he’s called an ambulance to your location.
You panic. You panic at the wrong thing. Baymax raises your leg and presses a fresh towel to your thigh – presses it hard – and all you can think about is what they’ll say when they find you like this. How can you cover for this? What lie will you tell them? Why was there a craft knife lodged deep in your thigh? Why did you yank it out again? If it was a crafting accident then why are there several similar scabbed-over cuts on your thigh?
Why do you hurt yourself? What do you gain from it?
Baymax is talking to you. He asks questions you don’t understand and you repeat “what” more times than you give real answers. You ask if Baymax can’t just fix this himself and call the ambulance off, but he is adamant that he can’t do that. You are his patient. Your health and safety is of the utmost importance to him. He can’t guarantee that you’ll be OK if real doctors don’t intervene. There’s only so much a nurse can do.
There’s only so much a robot can do.
He tells you not to panic. He tells you you’ve lost a lot of blood. He tells you that you may experience dizziness, fatigue, and shortness of breath. He tells you that the femoral artery has been cut and that the bleeding needs to be stopped soon or else you could die in a few hours.
You could die.
You start to cry. You choke on a sob trying to tell Baymax what he already knows. You fucked up.
You don’t want to be alone. You feel a million miles away from him. You try to sit up and reach out for him but he tells you to keep still to minimise your blood loss. He needs to keep the pressure firm on the wound. You find him unnervingly clinical and focused and you lie back on the ground and whimper.
You tell him to call the ambulance off. You plead with him to. You need him to.
His head turns towards you, away from the wound. He tells you that you’re going to be OK.
He tells you that help is coming.
You wake up in what appears to be a hospital room. You’re wearing one of those paper hospital gowns and not much else. You look under the sheet to see your entire thigh is bandaged, but that’s not all. There are plasters of varying sizes all over you, from your collarbone to your arms to your stomach to your knees.
You sense a presence watching you and you turn your head to see your aunt glaring at you. Her eyes are red but fresh tears fill them and spill down her cheeks.
She’s not an idiot. She doesn’t fall for your excuses. She knows now what’s been going on. Why you’ve kept that robot in tow for the past year.
You ask if she’s been there the entire time and she tells you in a falsely cherry tone that she actually just got out of an interrogation with a social worker.
You shrink down in your bed. You actually think of someone else for the first time in forever and you think that must’ve been awful, I’m sorry, but you don’t say it. Why don’t you say it?
She doesn’t stay mad at you for long. She throws her arms around you and squeezes. She weeps and wails into your neck and you feel a little bit like your body is crumbling away as you lift a hand to pat sadly at her back. She tells you that you’re awful for putting her through this and for almost leaving her too. But then she shushes you – at least you think it’s you – and she tells you that it’s OK and she loves you and she’s just so glad that you’re still here. She promises through tears and sobs that you’re going to be OK.
You start crying too.
Some specialist has a talk with you, while you’re still confined to the hospital bed. They point to your visible bandages and comment that they must be quite nasty and you hum. They ask in a gentle voice who did this to you and you say no one. They ask if it’s self-inflicted and you shrug. They ask in a long and roundabout way if you’re suicidal. If you had intended to slice a femoral artery and bleed out in the garage, or if it was just an accident in an otherwise routine habit. You tell them it was an accident.
Baymax always believed you. But these guys don’t.
They talk and talk and talk and that’s fine, but then they remind you that your brother’s dead and you tell them you don’t want to talk anymore. They ask about Baymax – the robot who called the ambulance – and you tell them again, harsher this time, that you don’t want to talk anymore. They tell you that they saw his footage and you tell them you don’t want to talk anymore.
They tell you that they’ll talk to you again very soon. But you don’t want that. You want to be left alone.
You want to go back to Baymax. You want to tell him sorry for scaring him like that. You want to tell him not to worry about you because you’re fine now, you’re fine. It was just an accident and you’ll be home soon.
You don’t come home as soon as you would’ve liked, but you do come home. You think you can run – or rather hobble – straight over to Baymax, but he’s not there anymore. You ask where he went and Aunt Cass tells you in firm tones that he went back to SFIT. You’re not allowed to see Baymax anymore.
Something like devastation pulls at you, and doesn’t stop pulling, but you don’t have the time nor the privacy to express it. They flag you as suicidal, despite what you told them. They put you on a twenty-four hour watch. Aunt Cass spends a lot more of her time around you, even if she doesn’t talk to you, and she alternates with friends of hers. With Tadashi’s friends. Who smile, fond and distant, and tell you heart-warming stories about your brother who’s gone, like they happened just yesterday. Like he’s not really gone. But he is.
And now Baymax is gone too.
You get better, with time. They send you off to a shrink once every two weeks. You stop crying so much. You stop trying to hurt yourself, or letting yourself come to harm. You play games and watch films and work on projects until your watchers are more bored at the sight of you than they are vigilant and concerned. You convince them all that you’ve made real progress. You’re littered in white scars, sure, but at least none of your wounds are fresh.
You tell them you think it’s time you moved on. You’re almost sixteen. You want to work on something amazing for the upcoming SFIT showcase. You want take over and build upon your brother’s outstanding work.
You want to make Tadashi proud of you.
But you still miss him.
You get into SFIT. You don’t want to brag but… well, of course you do. You try to apologise when you finally register, for not ever getting back to them a couple of years ago, and they wave it off like it was no big deal and it’s fine.
They place you in your brother’s old workroom. It’s empty, but they tell you that all of his saved data is on the computer, under a file with his name on it. Some of his practical work is stored downstairs too, and you can pick it up anytime you need to take it apart and have a real good look at it.
You smile your gratitude.
You wander downstairs one day. You unlock a heavy metal door and swing it open and walk into a cold basement filled with mass amounts of junk. It’s dark. You can’t see a goddamn thing.
You pinch yourself on the arm until your entire body is wracked with shivers.
“Ow.”