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One year later, and it still hurt like it was the first day. Hiro stared at Tadashi’s cap from across the room. His ribs itched, and he longed to scratch, but he might pull out the stitches if he did. Three times before he'd landed himself in the hospital, but this was by far the worst. Looking at the cap resting on the bedside table started to bring back memories and the scene began unfolding before him. The phantom smell of smoke burned in his nostrils, hot dry air against his raw throat, as fresh and sharp as the night Tadashi had died. He could hear the roaring of the flames, the explosion, the shattering glass; the cacophony in his head drowned out the steady beep beep beep of the machines he was connected to.
“Hiro?” an unfamiliar voice called, breaking him out of his trance. He gasped as he was jarred back into the present, before turning his head toward the doorway with a tired blink. A female nurse with short red hair and scrubs with ducklings on them had entered the room carrying a bag filled with a clear liquid. "Hey, glad to see you're awake," she chirped, walking over to the IV stand by his bed.
”Hey,” Hiro replied, his voice unexpectedly wavering. He was still thinking about the event in the back of his mind.
“Your sister stopped by while you were asleep.”
“Who…?” He blinked in confusion, then realized she was probably talking about Gogo. “...Not my sister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed... Anyway, she said you'd want to have that.” She nodded in the direction of Tadashi's cap. Once she'd finished changing the bag on the IV stand, she smiled and asked, "Are you feeling better? On a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt?"
“What?” Hiro’s breath hitched a little, but then his mind pulled together again and he answered. “Uh… two. I guess. It mainly just itches.”
She nodded. "I guess the painkillers are working. If you need more, just push the button on the pump, okay?" Hiro was starting to have trouble holding back his tears. His throat bobbed a little as he tried to swallow the painful lump in his throat. Not trusting himself to speak again, he nodded and waited silently for her to leave. Once her footsteps receded, he took in a shaky breath and let himself cry as quietly as he could.
Crying was a natural response to pain. But this wasn’t that kind of pain.
Suddenly he heard a faint sound of feet running down the hall outside. They slowed just outside the door, and Hiro didn’t have time to wipe his eyes and force his face straight before Honey Lemon stepped in, gripping the doorjamb with one white-knuckled hand.
For a moment she stared at him wide-eyed, a range of expressions passing over her face.
“Hiro,” she whispered, bringing her free hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault, I’m so sorry.” She let go of the door and stepped inside. Her hands tangled on the strap of her purse and she bit her lip.
Hiro’s expression changed from one of sadness to pure spite a split second before turning his head away. “Go. Away.” His voice shook with held-back sobs but he poured as much venom in as he could. Honey’s was the last face he wanted to see right now.
He couldn’t see her, but he could hear the tremors in her voice. “H-hiro, please. I didn’t - I never meant for any of this to happen.” She was crying - he could hear it. But he didn’t turn to look. If he turned, he would break too.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hiro could see Honey's figure enter his field of vision and so he jerked his head toward the window on his left, roughly wiping away the tears with his unencumbered left hand. "But it happened anyway. You did a shitty thing, Honey. Live with it."
"I'm so sorry, Hiro, I didn't think--"
"That's right, you didn't think. You didn't think that throwing corrosive chemicals around might be a bad idea." For the first time in a while, his stitches throbbed, but he was too angry to care. "And now Baymax is..."
The fire alarm started to sound before he could finish his sentence.
Hiro felt his chest seize at the sound - he knew it was coming since the moment the alarm began - since the moment the hospital staff had warned him - but no amount of mental preparation could stave this off. His hands went to his ears, but the sound leaked through, slamming him back to the night of the fire with the force of a wrecking ball into brick, and his mouth opened to drag as much air into his lungs as panic would allow. It wasn’t much.
Hands gripped his wrists gently, grounding him in the present. The pressure on his ears loosened, enough to let through Honey’s high, anxious voice. Tunnel vision blackened most of the room, but Honey’s tear-streaked face was visible as if through blinders.
“--Hiro it’s all right! It’s all right. It’s only an alarm test. There’s no fire, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
Closing his eyes, Hiro allowed himself to rest his head on Honey’s shoulder as he started the deep breathing exercise he’d learned after the particularly brutal run-in with his most persistent bully the year after Tadashi graduated. As he counted the four seconds for inhaling, his mind fell back to his usual pattern of rehashing Callaghan’s Laws of Robotics, but as he formed the words, he found himself unable to move past Callaghan’s name. At some point the fire alarm had stopped, but his ears were still ringing. He gasped as Honey’s hand moved to his back, and he jerked away from her touch.
The sudden movement caused another sharp flare of pain in his ribs. Hiro roughly shoved Honey Lemon away as he doubled over clutching at his aching abdomen. Honey Lemon stumbled backward with a gasp and then froze in place. Hiro waited a short moment with his head lowered and his eyes glued to the floor for the pain to weaken into a dull throb. His eyes shifted to Honey Lemon’s sandals; the ones made of cork and white plastic. Hiro remembered how excited she was to show them off to the team when she bought them last summer, but now all Hiro could feel was bitter resentment. He finally lifted his gaze to meet Honey Lemon’s as he spoke.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay the fuck away from me?!” he spat. “Get out of here before you destroy any other valuable equipment”.
Hiro could see the tears forming in Honey's eyes after he spoke. A small voice in the back of his mind that sounded so much like Tadashi told him that he should stop being so cruel to her, but he pushed it away. It was because of her thoughtlessness that his body was covered in cuts and chemical burns, and that Baymax... Well, he'd passed out before he found out what happened to Baymax. However, before he had a chance to speak again, Honey had already left the room.
The panic threatened to rise again, filling him with a desperate need to know. Images flashed across his mind, of Honey’s corrosive chemicals eating through red paint and carbon fiber armor, through vinyl skin, dripping and spilling onto a small green chip marked with his brother’s name and handwriting. He wanted to be sick at the thought.
Hiro coughed against the pain in his ribs, moving to clutch at his injury. His elbow brushed something too rough to be sheets, and he glanced down. His heart twisted - Honey must have brought Tadashi’s hat over when she came to him. Tears blurred in his eyes as he reached over to grasp it. He lifted it up, and his heart stopped at the wink of green plastic and black marker tucked inside it, and the glint of tape holding it in place.
With somewhat unsteady fingers, he managed to loosen the tape's hold from the hat and took what was left of Baymax's chip into his hands. Even though he knew that there were several backups for Baymax back in his workshop, there was something devastating about seeing the original chip that Tadashi poured his blood, sweat, and tears into perfecting so mangled. Though what was left of the label still bore Tadashi's tidy handwriting, the remainder of the chip was only about half of its original size and pocked with corroded holes. As he stared at the remaining portion of the cartoon doctor's smiling face, he could hear Tadashi's proud voice as if he were standing right next to Hiro. "This chip is what makes Baymax, Baymax."
A sob burst from Hiro as he heard the door open and a voice call out. "Hey Hiro, I heard you were awake now. Honey just ran past me in the hall...wait, what's wrong?"
Hiro coughed to cover up the sob as Wasabi entered the room, but the physicist still looked concerned. He picked one of the chairs by the wall near Hiro’s bed and brought it over, slowly sitting down.
After a moment of waiting in silence for Hiro to say something, Wasabi finally spoke first. “Hiro, what did you say to Honey Lemon? You know it was an accident. She would never wish to hurt you or Baymax. Not to mention we have plenty of undamaged backups for Baymax ready to go. I don’t get why you’re being so cruel to her.”
Hiro couldn't look Wasabi in the face, and stared down at the chip instead. He clenched his hand around it, and the jagged, melted edges dug into his skin.
"The last time we backed him up was weeks ago. He won't remember..."
“Remember what?” Wasabi probed. Hiro played with the chip for a while before answering.
“Tadashi.” He managed to choke out, tears pooling in his eyes and beginning to run down his cheeks. “W-we found… we… I should’ve…”
“Hiro, whoa, hey… slow down. What is it? What’d you find?”
“You think Baymax was all there was?” It came pouring out, like the dam had finally burst. “He wasn’t! There was so much… a-and we were just looking through his stuff, we found… so many files. So much… There was so much he wanted to do, and I-I thought… if we saved it, I could… I could make it happen. But it’s gone now, I should’ve backed it up but I didn’t and it’s gone now.”
“...oh.” The word came as if someone punched Wasabi in the gut, and the resulting silence seemed to last an eternity. After a while, when his tears started to slow, Hiro screwed up the courage to look up at his friend. Wasabi also seemed to be focused on Hiro’s hands and the burnt piece of plastic inside with a pained expression, but when he noticed Hiro looking at him, Wasabi straightened up, cleared his throat, and tried to smile. “Hey...it’ll be okay, bud. Tadashi was pretty good about keeping hard copy notes...he always used to be on us in the lab about actually writing stuff down...”
“Yeah, Wasabi, and guess where those hard copies were, idiot. At the lab with all the other backups” , Hiro grumbled.
“That’s not true and you know it. You told us that you always kept backups at home. There was stuff at your house that the rest of the team wasn’t allowed to look at either. You told us that from the start. You have no excuse to be acting as aggressively as you are right now, so fix your attitude. If you aren’t careful, Baymax won't be the only one gone from the team, and unlike him, you can’t replace people”.
Hiro groaned and sank back against his pillow. The painkillers were making his mind fuzzy and all he wanted to do was go back to sleep and forget everything that had happened that night.
“Look, I’m sorry.” Wasabi changed his tone of voice. “I don’t know where that came from. It’s just, last time you were in a destructive mood…” He seemed to cut himself off. “We can figure everything out later. For now…” Wasabi’s brow furrowed. “How are you feeling? Gogo stopped by earlier, but she said you were still asleep. Do you feel okay?”
“I…” want to go home. “Do you know if my aunt’s coming soon?”
"Yeah, any moment now. She and Fred were grabbing something from the cafeteria while you were still out, but they should be on their way back." Wasabi sighed heavily and rubbed his neck. "Fred and I actually have to head back in a bit anyway. Campus security didn't really want us to 'leave the scene of the accident', but we just...we had to make sure you were still..."
He trailed off, but Hiro understood. They exchanged a few more simple pleasantries, and then Wasabi left the room, closing the door behind him.
Hiro sighed with relief and laid back down on the bed. However, it didn’t take long before he got bored of staring at the ceiling. Instead he started to get anxious and even a little lonely. He knew it was stupid to get emotional over a little piece of plastic, but it hurt to think about how the last physical thing that linked Baymax to Tadashi was destroyed. And now it seemed his friends thought it was stupid to get emotional over that chip. They didn’t get it though.
But just then the door to the room swung open once again.
“Hey, Hiro! Glad to see you’re awake.” Aunt Cass entered the room with a tender, sympathetic disposition. “Fred should be here soon; he told me he was going to get something for you. How are you feeling?” She asked as she sat down in the chair next to Hiro’s bed. Hiro opened his mouth to respond, but just then, they heard some worrying noises from outside.
“Hiro, you are gonna love this!” Fred exclaimed excitedly as he burst through the door. He beckoned to someone just outside their line of sight. “Come on, bring them in!” Hiro heard someone respond, sounding reluctant. Wasabi? Hiro figured Fred had managed to get him involved in some sort of shenanigans before he could escape. Sure enough, a few seconds later the larger man walked in the door with a sour expression on his face and his arms full of goodies. In the next few minutes Fred and Wasabi had all but covered Hiro’s hospital room in bags of gummy bears, and Hiro’s mood brightened considerably.
The four of them talked and joked for a while while snacking on way more gummy bears than was good for their health until finally Wasabi announced that he really should get back to campus. Hiro suddenly got a small knot in his stomach as Wasabi started to head out. He hesitated before speaking, but he had made up his mind before Aunt Cass had even entered the room.
“I lied.”
Wasabi stopped short of the door and twisted around to face Hiro. “You what?” Wasabi asked in a confused, light tone. Hiro glanced down at the chip before staring back at Wasabi and continuing. Aunt Cass and Fred stared at Hiro in befuddlement, waiting for an explanation.
“I lied about the backups, okay? I told you guys you weren’t allowed to see them because I never got to making them. I-”
Wasabi interrupted. “What? You told me you made them! Why would you do that?”
Hiro shortly sighed in discomfort. “I was going to, okay? I just never got around to it. I told you I did because I was going to do it shortly after you checked up on me to see if I made them. But I didn’t manage to do it before… you know, Honey’s little accident. So now they’re gone. My backups are gone, Tadashi’s files are gone, Baymax is gone…” Hiro stared at the chip again and rubbed it between his fingers. “...and the closest thing I had t- to... Tadashi’s… gone.”
Silence reigned after this confession. Hiro shut his eyes against the pressure of tears. If he said any more, he would cry again, and Baymax wasn’t here to tell him it was all right. He tried to take a deep breath, to swallow the pain in his chest, but the air shook and caught on the way in. Someone’s arm slipped behind him, pulling him gently into a hug. He didn’t open his eyes, but he felt feathery hair brush his neck, and a gold metal necklace chain against his cheek, and he returned Aunt Cass’s hug with his uninjured arm.
GoGo chose that moment to walk into the room. She took one look at the scene before her, assessed the situation, and broke the silence in a voice that was heavy with sympathy. “You idiot,” she told Hiro, somehow knowing that he’d done something stupid just based on everyone’s expressions. A sound like a hand hitting the back of a head followed. “Ow - Fred!”
If Hiro hadn't opened his eyes at that moment, he would have never believed Fred could pull such a GoGo-esque scowl on his own. Rubbing the back of her head, GoGo narrowed her eyes at Fred and opened her mouth to argue when Wasabi interrupted in an irritated sing-song tone, "Now is not the time!"
“Maybe we need more gummy bears,” Fred leaned over and whispered loudly in Wasabi’s ear.
“Really, Fred?” Wasabi glared at his friend. “Now is not the time for that either!”
Wasabi grabbed Fred by the collar and started dragging him out the door with GoGo trailing behind. Hiro could hear them bickering outside his door as they walked away. The room was suddenly silent. Hiro couldn’t bring himself to move, this was all just too much. Everything he loved was gone; Tadashi, Baymax, even his friends probably hated him now. Overwhelming feelings of anger and sadness and frustration and loss took their turns seizing his mind. After what seemed like hours, a small sound pulled him out of the trance. The silence was broken by quiet sniffling. He had forgotten that Aunt Cass was still there.
“Hey, Aunt Cass.” Hiro forced a smile when she looked at him, although it probably looked more like a grimace. She quickly dabbed at her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Hiro. You know, usually I try to be strong for you, but… It’s like we lost Tadashi again. And now Baymax too.”
Hiro nodded numbly. Suddenly, he felt himself get pulled back against his aunt’s chest.
“We’ll get through it this time, too, okay?”
“Yeah, I guess we will.” Hiro responded. He let his body relax and they sat in silence for a moment. The moment turned into several, and Hiro tried to shut his mind to the pain and focus on the family he had left.
---
He could walk perfectly fine by the time the doctors judged him fit to leave the hospital, but they still insisted he take a wheelchair ride out to the parking lot. Aunt Cass hovered nearby as he stood up to get into her truck under his own power, not helping him up like he was a baby or an invalid, but also not standing too far away that she couldn’t swoop in if he did end up needing her.
Hiro looked out of the truck window on the ride back home, nodding along and occasionally humming quietly as Aunt Cass chatted about the regulars and a few classmates who asked about Hiro over the past week and a half, the impromptu meeting she had with the Provost during the lunch rush at the Café a couple of afternoons ago - "It came off like he was just worried we might think about suing the school. He must have mentioned the new laboratory practices being developed about a hundred times." - and the Welcome Home feast she had planned for later on that night. As the truck came to a stop outside the Lucky Cat, Hiro saw the bustling café and offhandedly wondered to himself who would help Aunt Cass during the days now that neither Tadashi nor Baymax could anymore...
"...and I called your friends, and they all should be over about 7:00. I think I managed to talk Honey into making her brownies this time because she knows how much you love them. She should really..."
Hiro's grin at the idea of eating something other than the bland hospital food slid off his face at the mention of Honey Lemon, and he whipped his head to glare at his aunt. "You invited Honey?! I thought you said you invited my friends?"
“Hiro, please,” Cass responded sternly. “You know Honey didn’t mean any harm! I’m sure she feels horrible about the accident. Tonight will be a great opportunity for you guys to finally make up.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to make up. With the way she acts, she’ll probably burn down the restaurant too.”
Aunt Cass gasped. “You don’t mean that!”
“If Honey Lemon is attending, then I won’t be!”
With that, Hiro threw himself out of the truck. He ignored his aunt calling out behind him, rushing through the cafe and stomping up the stairs and into his room. He threw himself carelessly onto his bed, ignoring the way the rough movement pulled at his stitches, and buried his face in the pillow, taking deep calming breaths. He was home now. He had to keep focusing on that, trying to calm himself down. He basked in the feeling of finally laying in his own bed again and waited for time to pass until the party.
Finally, what must have been hours later, he heard the doorbell ring.
He could hear the chatter of familiar voices drifting up the stairs, and he threw his pillow over his head to try to muffle the noise. It didn't work, though, and within a few moments Aunt Cass was calling his name. After the fourth time, he sighed and slowly got to his feet. When he got downstairs, everyone welcomed him warmly. Hiro returned the happy greetings without missing a beat, even if he didn’t really feel it. However,he pointedly ignored Honey Lemon standing off to the side. At one point she stepped forward, looking like she wanted to speak to him, but he turned his head away quickly to laugh at something Wasabi had just said, and her face fell. She stepped away.
It was somewhat more difficult to ignore her when the others didn’t. Like Gogo dragging her into conversations with him, or Wasabi not-so-subtly trying to direct the subject to her. Hiro reacted by more or less verbally bunting. If he addressed her at all, it was monosyllabic, indirect, and minimal. Honey shrank back, and Hiro was fine with that.
But Hiro noticed Fred - Fred was hard to ignore, after all - so he noticed when Fred casually caught Honey’s arm, tugged her aside, and whispered to her urgently. Hiro didn’t catch all of it, but the words “--tell him what you told me,” were involved, which rankled Hiro at the same time as it raised his curiosity.
Shaking his head and pushing it out of his mind, Hiro jumped back into the ongoing conversation with Wasabi and GoGo when he noticed Fred walking over to Aunt Cass and whispering something into her ear. The shocked expression and tearful smile that bloomed on his aunt's face further confirmed his suspicions that something was amiss.
"Fred, what's going--"
Fred beamed at Hiro. "Oh dude, I was telling your aunt about this brand new soda I bought from this website. It's supposed to be onion flavored!"
Hiro gaped. "...Onion flavored?"
"Yeah man, I just got it in today, and we have to try it! Can I get some help bringing it up? I had Heathcliff drop it off outside."
Agreements came from Aunt Cass, Wasabi, and GoGo much faster than could ever be considered normal, and before he could form a cohesive argument over why it would take four people to grab some soda, they were all out the door.
And leaving him alone with the one person he wanted to avoid. Subtle. He was contemplating just heading back upstairs and leaving her alone in the kitchen when he heard a soft voice.
"Hiro...please...I know you're still mad, and you don't have talk to me. But won’t you just listen? Please."
Hiro remained motionless, his eyes fixed on a nail in the floorboards. He couldn't bring himself to snap at her anymore, and was still too sore to run out the door, so he just stayed and let her words wash over him.
"That day in the hospital, I had something I wanted to say to you but I didn't get a chance. So, uh, I'd like to say it now." He heard the sound of the zipper on her purse opening, and looked up a little to see her reach into it. She pulled out something small wrapped in pink tissue paper. "Before... you know, that day, Baymax talked to me when you brought him to the lab and said you kept saying you were going to make a backup of his memories but you never did. So, I helped him." She flipped the small package over in her fingers a few times before holding it out to Hiro. "Here he is."
Hiro stared at the package for a moment before taking it, a mix of curiosity and tentativeness in his eyes. He began to unwrap it slowly, eyes widening as he saw the familiar cartoon doctor smiling up at him. His fingers gently curled around the chip; he was speechless and tears were starting to form, but this time it was not a response to pain.
“It was stupid,” Honey Lemon blurted. “W-what I did, it was stupid and careless and dangerous and I hurt you and I hurt Baymax, a-and I can’t take that back. I can’t.” Her hand went to her face, brushing tears away as the words tumbled out. “I can promise I’ll never do it again, but those are just words, and I don’t know how much that means to you. But I can give him back, a-at least that much of him…” Her voice wavered, trailing off for a moment.
Hiro hesitated, every instinct screaming at him to open his mouth and forgive her, to run forward and bury his face and his lingering anger in a hug, but the words stuck in his throat and his feet stuck to the ground as if frozen. The last time he had held a chip like this, it had been melted and shattered, with Baymax lost and Tadashi’s death hanging freshly over his head. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he rasped. “Or just…”
“I tried.” Honey’s voice was small. “But I wasn’t sure how, and you wouldn’t to talk to me.” Her words picked up in pace as she spoke, until she was practically babbling. “I-I was going to pass it along to Fred, so he could give it to you, but he wouldn’t, he said I had to, so I-” Before Honey Lemon could get another word out, Hiro gave in and ran forward to throw his arms around her.
He wanted to thank her, to apologize for how he had treated her earlier, to say anything, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came out. He buried his face against her chest, tears soaking into her dress. One of her hands came up to stroke his hair, and the gentle touch made him sink against her and sob a little harder.
"Thanks," he choked out. Honey Lemon didn’t say anything, but she tightened her embrace around him, tears starting to fall from her eyes as well.
Honey did not say “You’re welcome,” nor did she say “I’m sorry” again. She didn’t need to. As Hiro sobbed out his relief into her jacket, he felt her press her cheek to the top of his head and heard her whisper, “I’ll be better,” almost too softly for him to hear. “I promise,” she went on. “I will never hurt either of you again.”
“Nice waterworks show.” Gogo’s voice quipped as she walked through the door with the rest of the gang. Swat. “Ow- Fred, so help me.” Wasabi’s face was that of a man who had given up long ago on babysitting children who were way past their prime. Aunt Cass followed shortly behind, guzzling down her third can of onion soda.
“So,” said Fred, glancing hopefully from Hiro’s face to Honey Lemon’s and back again. “We good?”
Hiro blinked, bleary-eyed from crying, and managed a watery smile. Honey Lemon smiled back, equally teary, but looking happier than he’d seen her in days. “Yeah. I think we’re good.”