"Thanks for doing this," Hiro said for roughly the hundredth time that day, curling into a small ball on the couch. "I, um, I know this is probably weird for you."
Honey waved a hand dismissively, smiling kindly at her younger friend. "Don't worry about it! I've been thinking about what color palettes would work best for you, and Fred's already said he'll deal with the cost."
"Yeah," Fred declared, mellow as always, lounging on the sofa inbetween them like he was perpetually exhausted. "Honey totally helped me out when I came out, you know? I was a wreck, just ask Heathcliff. So it's like, I wanna pay that forward. Besides, one thing I know from superhero comics is that you can totally correct the public by adding a skirt to your hero getup. That's easy. But rebuying everything's a major bummer. You definitely need reinforcements for that."
Reinforcements, in this case, meant Honey and Fred. Wasabi was at a Star Trek convention and Gogo was spending a week with her family, celebrating her brother's birthday. Aunt Cass had offered to help, but Hiro would've felt guilty hauling her away from her work like that – and besides, Baymax was adorable and was bringing in a lot of customers as a huggable service bot. They'd all pitched in, though, in their own ways. Gogo's parents had gotten Hiro neon pink sneakers with purple lightning bolts on them that were a size too big. She'd handed them over to Hiro with a shrug, saying 'hey, they fit your feet'. Wasabi had given Hiro his sister's old collection of barrettes and hair bows, which was mammoth but organized by color and size in a travel case, as was the black boy's way. It had taken Hiro a long time to admit to the team Baymax using female pronouns for Tadashi's younger 'brother' wasn't an error, that she was a trans girl and only Tadashi had ever known.
She'd expected them to be grossed out. She didn't know why – these were her friends, they were in their twenties, and this was a liberal city, but she had still been terrified. She'd felt the same overheated-yet-chilled feeling waiting for their response as she had when she got into trouble botfighting, waiting for the ground to drop out from under her, not knowing what came next. She was so tired of lying she just had to be honest, she couldn't take it anymore, and yet that it was necessary didn't make it easy. The feeling of being the center of attention at the Expo was nothing compared to that moment. Baymax started to say something about elevated heart rates.
Then Fred blurted out, "It's cool, I'm like an inverse-you and everyone's cool with it. Wait, did you not know I'm a transdude?" Gogo had yanked Hiro in for an abrupt, protective hug, the second one she'd ever seen the Korean girl give anyone; in that moment Hiro knew Gogo was on her side even if she wasn't sure how to say it. Wasabi muttered an embarrassed apology for calling Hiro 'little man' before, looking kind of guilty for the mistake. Honey pulled out her phone and started hammering away at it, fingers a flurry of motion.
"We're going to get you some clothes you like," she announced, shrugging as Hiro opened her mouth to protest how that was way too expensive. "Hiro, I've seen you when we go out. You're always looking at dresses – and now, you can have some. I did that for Fred back in the day. And I know Tadashi would've wanted me to do it for you, too. Every girl deserves a nice dress!"
Hiro had needed them to be her back up for coming out to Aunt Cass out of sheer nervousness, though there she felt more guilt for not having come out sooner. She'd been planning it, but Tadashi's death had been too much to deal with. Hiro had postponed it until she could talk about her brother without feeling like her heart was ripped out of her chest. Smiling gently, Aunt Cass scooped her niece up in her arms lovingly, like the mother Hiro couldn't remember, before a long, overly-terrified lecture on the things college guys might try to pull on an underage college girl and how she needed to be careful out there. Before they left the house, the entire team had been sworn to protecting Hiro no matter what, given fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and subjected to individual hugs. It was so important, Aunt Cass knew, for girls like Hiro to have supportive friends, and she breathed a sigh of relief knowing her niece did.
As terrified as Hiro had been about the entire coming out thing, she slept better that night than she had since Tadashi died. Baymax informed her of that when she woke up. Her REM sleep was flawless, she had actually met her nightly required hours for once, and her serotonin levels were well balanced. Baymax had no problem adjusting his programming to call her by the right pronouns back when she first activated him after Tadashi died; it took a few seconds of readjusting programming, and that was that. (Had Tadashi installed that? Had he hoped one day she'd come out, and wanted to make sure she had his robot's support? It made her wish he was there so she could call him a sentimental dork.) The next steps in this whole thing that she really wanted to do were getting a less-masculine name and clothes she didn't feel like she had to endure just to pass as a 'normal guy'. Baggy pants and hoodies were a shield she hid behind to try to make sure nobody caught on she was a girl, but if she was brave enough to go fight Callaghan riding atop a giant robot, then she was brave enough to pick out a skirt. It couldn't be that hard.
Except it was, actually. She wasn't sure what sounded like a more awful experience, a cheap thrift store where people would be staring and nothing would probably be in her size, or a more expensive store with more people staring where she would maybe find something that worked. She knew she still looked boyish, even with her hair growing out. All that attention sounded like it was way too much to handle right now. Ordering things online would've been easy in her botfighting days, she knew that. She also knew Tadashi would become a ghost just to haunt her if she tried going back to botfighting to get money for that kind of thing. The next option was Fred, who called in Honey, and then they were curled up in front of his computer, trying to make sense of the mess that was the world of online shopping, with its' seemingly endless list of sites and styles and fabrics and her head was spinning already just thinking about it.
"Did it suck this much for you?" she asked Fred, expecting a 'no' since he was the least stylish man, trans or otherwise, she'd ever met.
"Yep. Don't worry, it totally sucks less the more you get used to it." He patted her head like she was a little sister to him, affectionate if overly chill. "I used to be afraid to wear colors because I thought they showed my curves."
She raised an eyebrow at that, confused. "You don't have any curves."
He nodded grimly (well, as grimly as Fred could do anything). "That's what I mean about it sucking. But Honey makes it suck way less. She's like a queer guardian angel."
Honey just giggled amicably at that, clearly not offended in the least. To be honest, while Hiro would never wear a lot of Honey's outfits, she admired how the Latina girl just did whatever she wanted when it came to clothes, baking, science, superheroics, and everything else in life. And though Hiro would never say it, Honey was sort of how she'd imagined having a mother might have been like, guiding, gentle with a hidden stern side, patient enough to help her through this weirdness. Hiro was great at robotics, strategy, computers, technology production and invention – not clothes or make up or any of the things she cooed over in secret without ever daring to buy. She couldn't remember much of her mother so she wasn't sure if it was genetic. The pictures Aunt Cass had shown her showed Hiro's mother mostly dressed plainly and in labcoats at work. And everybody looked like crap at work except superheroes.
"I think I'm gonna add a skirt to my superhero outfit," Hiro mused, thinking about heat-resistant fiber with enough trace metals to be magnetized to Baymax. "Not anything like the metal bow in Fred's comics, though. I'm not ten."
"Bows really would make you look younger," Honey replied thoughtfully. "That's not bad though, when you're not being a superhero. You have years ahead of you to wear mom jeans and V-necks, you can live it up in college."
"Like the girl in Astronomy 104 who wears tulle tutus and armwarmers all the time?" the younger girl asked with mounting horror. "Nope, not happening. Is there a middle ground between boring and… and… that?"
Honey bent over Fred's laptop, opening up three tabs and typing in corresponding websites with speed that rivaled Baymax's. She turned, watching Hiro's face slowly light up. It was the same expression she'd seen on Fred back when he went by Francesca; that moment of realizing 'oh, that person looks like me' and 'oh, I could actually wear that, huh?' It was the moment where at least one thing, even if it was just clothes, seemed possible, and every small step was important, especially if it made her friends even the smallest bit happier with themselves and with the world.
"I hadn't considered J-fashion," Hiro muttered, looking like doors had just opened for her in her mind.
She snapped a picture of Hiro while the younger girl was still gazing at the screen smiling, a timid, hopeful smile that made Fred and Honey's spirits soar.