Fly Soup

Author's Note:

This is a follow-up to my fanfiction "One Hundred Parabolas." The former is set during the movie showing events from Honey Lemon's perspective and her and Hiro's budding relationship. By the time this fic starts, they are going steady.

Chapter One

Officer Maconi trooped into his office. He hadn't believed the boy, Hiro Hamada, who had come in and told him that a man in a kabuki mask had stolen his robot inventions, tiny robots that could shape themselves at the controller's will. He did believe now, of course. Professor Callaghan had been arrested, while his daughter was in intensive care with a full chance of recovery.

He relapsed into silence then looked over some files. The phone rang and he answered it, dipping a doughnut in a jar of chocolate on his desk.

On his wall was a wanted poster for a man with red hair who was called suspect 3380-1. He had been seen near a bank after it was robbed of two billion dollars from Cray's account. To Cray two billion dollars was nothing but that money had been intended for a charity and was locked off to be taken to said charity when the collector arrived the next day.

Cray came out of an office meeting and paid the charity collector but was still upset about the cash that had been stolen. Security cameras caught the redheaded man, who was also wanted in Malibu Kariya or Los Angeyatomi. In fact, there wasn't a town in a 500-mile radius in which he wasn't wanted. And no one knew his bleedin' name. All they had were pictures of him, no public profile, no Social Security number. It was enough to drive Officer Maconi mad.

Across town, Baymax had just come out of its battery charging case, activated by Honey Lemon accidently stabbing her eye with an eye dropper.

"Hello, I am Baymax. I am your personal health care official. On a scale of one to ten…"

"It's not me you should be worrying about, Baymax," said Honey Lemon. "It's Hiro."

"Hiro? What is the trouble?" the robot asked the fourteen-year-old boy in the corner.

"I was just remembering…" Hiro said, looking up despondently. "One day Tadahashi and I were talking about osome Norwegian princesses he had to research for a history class at San Fransokyo University."

"Yeah, there's a mandatory history class for all freshmen," Honey Lemon said, putting salve on her eye.

"I could've taken care of that," Baymax said.

"Yeah, I know you could have, but you need to focus on Hiro right now."

"I'm perfectly equipped to take care of everyone's health care needs."

"Just focus on Hiro," Honey Lemon said. Then she turned to the boy. "So you were saying?"

"The Norwegian princesses…their names were Elsa and Anna. They lived in the kingdom of Arendelle. Tadahasi found them interesting because…their parents were dead like ours. Though from his research they died when Anna was fifteen and her older sister eighteen. Still…he, well…"

And here Hiro blushed a deep scarlet.

"You are feeling an extreme hormonal upsurge common in teenagers especially pertaining to the aspect of infatuation."

"Knock it, Baymax," Hiro said, trying to indicate with his eyes t hat he didn't wait that phrase to be uttered in Honey Lemon's presence.

"It's all right, Hiro," Honey Lemon said, sounding too happy for it to be believable and keeping her teeth tight together in a smile. "It's all right for you to have a crush on a girl from two hundred and fifty years ago in a faraway continent."

"No, no, Aiko. You don't understand…"

"I understand perfectly, Hiro. And I have…a thing to go to."

"Honey, wait!" Hiro said, standing up.

"It's best you not talk to her while she's feeling this way," Baymax said as they heard Honey Lemon dashing down the stairs toward the café where Hiro's Aunt Cass worked.

"Someone's got to confront her," Hiro said. "The others will notice if Honey isn't speaking to me."

"I'll go see what I can do," Baymax said. He leapt out of Hiro's window, knowing that going through the café would only terrify Hiro's aunt and any probable customers who might be down there taking a gander at the moment.

"Be careful Baymax," Hiro said quietly as he booted up his computer. "And now time to make the time-travel engine fully functional. The space transporter is tough but if I just look at it from another angle…" Hiro turned his head upside down and gazed under his arm at the wall. There was a poster there of a teleportation device from a science fiction movie. "That calibrator wouldn't actually do it but maybe if I tried a lithium alloy with carbon and nitrogen and wolfium…nah, that would make it explode. Come on, Hiro. Think, think, think. Oh, I've got it! I'll just…"

And he went straight to work, moving pieces on his computer model.

Outside, Baymax landed before Honey Lemon, his wings outspread. She was weeping and ran into him, not looking through the curtain of tears shrouding her eyes to see him.

He then applied his synthetic hands with healing fibers to her arms to eradicate the pain she was likely experiencing then. Having done that, he held out a handkerchief.

"Thanks Baymax," Honey Lemon said, wiping her eyes with the handkerchief.

"I can heal you of your physical pain," the robot said. "But I can only use traditional remedies for emotional pain. And the kind you are suffering from now seems like a 9.0 to me."

"I'm fine," Honey Lemon said. "Really I am."

"You have feelings for Hiro?"

"No, I don't! He's fourteen, I'm twenty. It would never work out."

"Age shouldn't matter when it comes to love."

"You're a robot. You don't know anything about it."

"No, I don't," Baymax said. "But I know that you feel something strongly, and a part of that has to do with how glad you are when around Hiro. Because you are happy around him. I mean, I can feel a level of happiness when you're in the whole group, but it's only a 7.0 on the happiness scale. When it's just you and Hiro, it ranges from an 8.6 to a 9.4."

"Oh come on. I've never been that happy around Hiro."

"Yeah, once. You nearly made it to 9.5 then, though having watched other people, I think an actual 9.5 for you would require your and Hiro's lips to touch. Everything past that would require more intimacy."

"Shut up, Baymax. Hiro is obsessed with a girl who is long dead and buried! He won't ever want me!"

"Maybe he knows that she's beyond his grasp. Or perhaps the reason he's thinking of her has nothing to do with infatuation. Perhaps you should seek deeper."

Baymax placed a hand over her heard, then rose into the air toward Hiro's window. Honey Lemon watched his flight. She felt confused, which was a thing she wasn't used to. Of course, liking a boy who was six years younger than her was baffling enough. Sometimes she wondered if she was imposing her feelings for Tadahashi on Hiro. But that couldn't be it. Could it?