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Hiro Hamada had just managed to worm out of any discussion with Aunt Cass about today’s activities, despite Baymax almost ratting him out. He reminded himself to add some sort of safeguard against that into his robot’s code. He couldn’t let his secret life be exposed to anyone. It was bad enough that Granville had managed to find out, and he still didn’t know which villains knew. At least Trina, Noodle Burger Boy, and Obake were down for the count, as far as Hiro knew- but Momakase might have found out. But he couldn’t exactly do anything about it now.
In reality, Hiro was hoping to just relax tonight. He was still pumped full of adrenaline from saving the city, and the feeling of it leaving his system made him tired. He was also really starting to feel the effects of the injuries he had sustained from the Kaiju crashing into the bay. He’d be bruised to hell and back tomorrow for certain.
What was harder to parse was his mental state at the moment. He was elated at the fact that he had saved the city from an exploding star, relieved that Obake was gone and couldn’t haunt him any longer, but there was something deeper in his head that he couldn’t quite explain.
He had asked Baymax for some sort of explanation as to why Obake had gone from the bright-eyed student from Granville’s descriptions to the destructive and cold-hearted maniac that had almost killed everyone he loved and made him watch. Baymax had given Hiro that explanation. Slow-acting but still fixable brain damage, a spiral into madness. The fact there might have been something in there to save didn’t sit well with Hiro. After all, he had inherited Tadashi’s good heart and obsession with helping everyone. This was the first time Hiro had to deal with death for the greater good. He was just too much of a hero to have wanted anyone to die.
He supposed there wasn’t anything to do about it now, which just made him more confused about his feelings towards this whole situation. It was bittersweet when it should’ve been happy. He hoped he’d feel better in the morning, when he’d be distracted with trying to convince Granville to pass him despite the fact he had disobeyed her and that he didn’t have a final project anymore. That monumental challenge might just make him forget about this whole situation.
He left Baymax to charge overnight, and changed into pajamas. His room was still in a bit of disarray from the whole being kidnapped by Obake via Baymax incident, but it wasn’t completely trashed. Expert procrastinator as he was, he decided to leave cleaning up for tomorrow. He collapsed into bed, taking a moment to look over at Tadashi’s corner of the attic, neat as he had left it all those months ago.
“I hope you’re proud of me, wherever you are.” He said to the corner.
Hiro wasn’t exactly a believer in heaven or hell, or in any sort of god, but it was nice to just pretend for a little while sometimes. If Tadashi had gone to some sort of spirit realm, Hiro certainly hoped that he would approve of what he was doing. This was all to carry on his legacy. Everything Hiro did was to make him proud.. even if he knew he’d never really be as good at it all as Tadashi was.
Usually, Hiro was plagued by insomnia. There were always too many ideas floating around in his head. It always took a few hours before he could manage to get some shut-eye. But tonight, because of how exhausted he was, it didn’t take long for Hiro to fall asleep.
He appeared in a hallway, like the one from the SFIT robotics lab. But it wasn’t the same, the tiles were a different color and there was a blue stripe running across the wall that wasn’t there in real life. The place was hazy and bright, like his dreams usually were. Nothing was in crystal focus. But he could hear footsteps coming, soft but distinct. A figure emerged from the haze and Hiro was taken aback.
It was the bright-eyed student from Granville’s stories, straight from the yearbook picture he had found. He had the same outfit and everything, red scarf, grayish-purple shirt, and black jacket. It was hard to reconcile him with Obake, but they were the same. They didn’t look similar though. This was Bob Aken, the one with so many ideas to make the world a better place. The one that Granville blamed herself for ruining. He stopped walking and looked at Hiro. He was a foot taller than him and still had those terrifyingly piercing eyes. Hiro took a step back, not wanting to get too close for fear that this too could be a nightmare waiting to happen.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Hiro wondered if he should talk, or even if he could talk. The haze turned purple like the beams from Hiro’s energy amplifier, which made him even more uncomfortable, but he couldn’t wake up. The person in front of him spoke first.
“Hi. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Hiro found that he could speak now, and so he did.
“You already did- you tried to kill everyone I know and love! Just.. back off.”
“I don’t really know how to say this, but I’m not him. Well, in the biological sense, yes, but brain damage is a bit odd. It wasn’t me talking to you back there unfortunately.”
“You are him, you’re him!!” Hiro could feel himself starting to tear up from a mixture of anger and fear, and he walked back a bit more to try and get away from those eyes.
“I’m here to send a message that I couldn’t say to you while he was alive. He’s dead and I wanted to thank you for stopping him when I couldn’t.”
“So why didn’t you stop him if you were there, huh? Why didn’t you do anything, what was stopping you.”
“Because I’m dead! I’ve been dead! I died twenty years ago from the accident, I am not him and don’t you tell me I am.” There was a note of desperation in his voice that Hiro had never thought he’d hear from this person. Obake had always been the most calculating man he had ever had to deal with, Hiro had never heard anything but a displeased monotone from him. It was getting harder to reconcile the two as one person.
“Shut up, you’re just a figment of my imagination trying to make sense of everything. You’re here because I feel bad I didn’t save you.” He was begging to wake up but he still couldn’t. The person in front of him wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was looking past him, and he realized he was standing in front of the robotics lab that he and his friends spent so much time in.
“There wasn’t anything of me you could save. Even if the damage had been fixed, I wouldn’t have come back. Come on, I want to show you something. I’ll prove that I’m real.”
Hiro flinched as he walked past him and through the lab doors. He stopped at a desk which was covered in tools and monitoring instruments. The haze got brighter and brighter until the two of them were drawn into something akin to a memory.
Everything was bathed in purple light, the two of them were frozen in place. They watched as a copy of the same Bob Aken as the person next to him walked up to the desk with its equipment. He reached into his bag and pulled out the energy amplifier, plugging it into a computer. He pulled the two halves of it apart, smiling brightly as it started to work. He didn’t have time to scream before it exploded, flinging him backwards into the wall between Hiro and the person next to him. He hit his head on the wall and a beam of purple light soon struck him again, reflecting off his goggles but hitting the part of his face that Hiro had seen glowing so many times. The memory ended and the haze disappeared.
“That was when I died. The kid who woke up in the hospital after this, he wasn’t me. This whole time I’ve been trapped and trying to control him. It worked.. at first. It hurt, and after a while, it was excruciating. We were 26 when he buried me entirely. By the time there was a treatment for the brain damage, I was too weak to make him want it.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t in any sort of control after that.. not until the very end at least. You would never have saved him, Hiro. I made sure of that. I made him stay behind when your robot left- I knew I’d never have this chance again and if he didn’t die he’d do this again. I couldn’t let him win.”
“I couldn’t have done anything?”
“Nope. You did everything right.”
Hiro mentally sighed in relief. Even if this was only a dream, though a very realistic one, it was nice to hear it. Even if he had heard it from the rest of his team too. He wondered what it would have been like to have actually met this version of him, the genius SFIT student who flew too close to the sun and paid beyond the ultimate price. He wondered what it would feel like to be trapped in your own mind, to lose control and have to watch someone else ruin your relationships and destroy your city.
Something else lifted from him too. He felt like he could wake up now if he wanted. The ghost had spoken his message and there was nothing else left to do. But he didn’t want to wake up yet. If this would be the only chance he ever got to talk to this kid , only 2 years older than him according to the yearbook he had found, that Granville had spoken about, he was going to take the chance.
“Why are you here still? I was just supposed to drop in and say a few words.. wait, why am I still here?”
This was more of a confused tone that Hiro could definitely relate to at times. Confusion was his internal voice in 90 percent of non-robotics situations.
“I don’t know. I guess you’re really a ghost.”
Now that Hiro knew he could wake up, he supposed he could get a bit lighthearted.
“I used to be an atheist, but honestly living for 20 years as the voice in someone’s head kinda makes you believe in spirits a bit. I don’t know if there’s anything after death though. Maybe the amplifier has some unknown properties still. I guess I’ll find out when this dream’s over.”
“So.. what do we do now.”
“I dunno. It’s your dream, I’m just the dude who walked in.”
“I’ll let you stay and hang out if you have any SFIT stories.”
Bob smiled at that. Hiro could tell he had a few good ones up his sleeve.
“I may be involved in a few SFIT legends.. ever heard about Trevor Trengrove being taped to the cafeteria door by a bunch of SFAI students?”
“Yeah, Gogo told me about it when we were trash-talking about him after finding out he was a fraud.”
“It was me. I did it. I blamed it on the SFAI students and they were happy to pass it off as their work anyhow. He wanted to spray paint the Shimamoto statue with paint that I knew was bad for marble and I had to stop him somehow . I don’t think he knew it would damage the stone but I wasn't taking any chances. Humiliating art students by taking their statue from under their noses is one thing, but actually messing with the Shimamoto statue? No way.”
“So.. Shimamoto was always your obsession.”
“Definitely. I loved her art, didn’t know she accidentally built a doomsday machine until way after he took over.”
“Anyway… what was Professor Callaghan like? I mean, I fought him and Tadashi knew him, but I want the 20 year old gossip.”
“Boring. Really boring. And like, before you explain it as only because of my hubris, if you throw aside the fact I didn’t like limits way before he took over, Professor Callaghan was allergic to all forms of fun. Not just my idea of fun, which in his defense was usually just making robots to mess with people or to make my life easier. He tried to stop my statue heist plans because we had a project coming up. I put the statue in his parking spot.”
Hiro had to laugh at that. He was starting to think he really could have gotten along with this guy if they weren’t separated by 20 years of timeline. If only time travel was real, he thought, because Hiro would have been happy to do another statue heist and see Trengrove taped to the door.
“How’d you grab the statue anyhow?”
“Oh, I had a team of drones. Wendy and I snuck into SFAI campus, she was scared of heights so she hid in the bushes while I was riding a drone. Security never thought to look up. We nearly crashed it into the fence, but luckily we had like a centimeter of clearance. You should’ve seen the look on Callaghan’s face the next day, it was glorious. And I was back in time to scare off the SFAI students so they only had time to paint half of the cafeteria. It was space cat themed.”
Hiro was happy to talk about inane stories like this. Anything to avoid having to face the fact that either his brain had now decided to start making the most detailed and vivid dreams of his life, or that spirits were real and had the capability of entering someone’s dreams. Or, the third and equally horrifying option, the energy amplifier had the ability to take someone’s personality, everything that made up that person, and alter it in such a way that it was completely separate from the body and could be suppressed by whatever replaced it. In which case, the fact that Hiro had made and worked with one was actually terrifying.
“We got it with Baymax, but I guess you already know that.”
“I did. Well, I kinda saw what he saw, so it was really only whatever was on the news, but yeah. Not as cool as my heist, but a statue grab’s a statue grab. Glad to see humiliating SFAI is still an alive and well tradition. What was the cafeteria painted as?”
“Unicorns and rainbows. Fred and Wasabi got taped to the wall and made into unicorns. It would’ve been funny if it was just Fred but seeing Wasabi up there too kinda made it a bit more sad.”
“Understandable. There are just some people that don’t deserve to be made into art installations.”
“So.. I’ve talked to Professor Granville. She blames herself for what happened to you. I won’t tell her whatever you say to me, she probably wouldn’t believe me, but I want to know what you think.”
His face turned melancholy, a far cry from the lighthearted demeanor he had when he was telling his stories of Spirit Week shenanigans.
“It wasn’t her fault. I don’t even think it was mine. None of us could have predicted what the amplifier would do. But as for how she was before all that… I thought she was amazing. She was an inspiration, all of us who had her as a teacher absolutely loved her. But I don’t blame her for not imposing limits. Neither of us knew what would happen because of it. She’s doing a better job now though, with you. I suppose you’re her second chance, and I’m happy with that. If I hadn’t failed she would’ve treated you exactly how she treated me, and you and I both know how dangerous that can be.”
“You’re.. not mad.” Hiro was a bit surprised at the statement, honestly. Hiro would’ve definitely blamed Granville at least a little if it had happened to him.
“No. She did what she thought was best. She was wrong, but she didn’t mean any harm. Now she can do better. If my sacrifice did any good, it was to make her see a better way. You have more potential than I did. I hope you’ll use it well.”
Hiro could feel the dream slipping away. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to hear more, there were so many things he needed to ask, so many questions, so many answers- he wasn’t ready. The person in front of him was flickering purple, fading out.
“Wait! Where are you going!”
“I can’t be here any longer. Just.. remember this. Don’t go the way I went. You can be so much more than I ever was. Also, watch out for-
An explosion shook him awake. He was back in his bed, it was just before his alarm clock was due to go off. Watch out for what , he thought. That couldn’t be any good. But, he didn’t know what it meant. It could be something mundane. Or, it could be something world-ending. In either case, Hiro had more important things to do now than think about that dream. He certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone about it. That would require too much explaining for this early in the morning.
He rushed through breakfast, wanting to talk to Granville first thing. After all, he did kind of need to save himself from a failing grade. He steeled himself before going into her office.
After exiting with the confirmation that he would not only pass, but get an A, Hiro didn’t know what to do with himself. It was technically a day off, there were no classes today. And with the knowledge that Obake was truly dead, there was no reason to search. So Hiro was free for today, and he decided to spend that time looking for that yearbook. He wanted to see if there was anything he had missed in it. He eventually found it, and sat down at a table to open it up.
He saw Wendy Wower’s yearbook picture, as well as Trengrove’s- they were all smiling, but Hiro was on the lookout for the random snapshots. The one of Bob and Granville that he had seen before, now with renewed context. Then, he saw one of Bob and Wendy, posing with the Shimamoto statue in Callaghan’s parking spot, exactly as he had been told in the dream. You could see the space cat themed cafeteria in the distance.
Hiro shut the yearbook and put it back on its shelf. He hoped the year would go smoothly and he wouldn’t have to face any more villains. He had a new goal now, to carry on an additional, near-forgotten legacy, alongside Tadashi’s. Helping people wasn’t enough. He had to think bigger. He had to make the world a better place.