"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
-Winston Churchill
...
Tadashi chooses his battles carefully. He has never lost. These conditions are not coincidental.
A timeline of events surrounding Tadashi's most important battles.
...
Tadashi Hamada has always chosen his battles with the utmost care.
He's always chosen the morally correct choice. Most of the time.
He's always chosen the choice he believes has the highest chance of success.
And once he has chosen something, he sticks with it. And. Does. Not. Give. Up. He's never lost a battle before.
That's why, in the flaming debris that was once his family's car, he abandons the motionless bodies in the front seats and reaches for his toddler brother. He knows how the impact happened and what the results would've been, and more importantly, he knows what his parents would've wanted anyway. That doesn't mean it isn't hard. Watching the car go up in flames after fiery explosion doesn't help his guilt much. He shields the wailing bundle in his arms from the sight.
It's not fair. He always makes the hard decisions. The Hamada brothers live. Their parents do not.
But he sticks with it. Tadashi promises himself that no matter what the case is, no matter how uncertain the circumstances, no matter how unjust the cause may become, he will never, ever, give up on Hiro Hamada. So he tailors his life so he never has to.
Aunt Cass takes them in, but there's not much room in her house. She insists they have separate spaces, separate "rooms" anyway, so they make room for Hiro to have a bed on the other side of the attic. He doesn't fight her on it, knowing she's stressed over the cafe and his parents and him and his brother. Besides, Tadashi always ends up awake in the middle of the night to tuck his brother into his own bed. Even in his teen years, sometimes Hiro would end up staggering into Tadashi's bed, only half awake but by force of habit knowing where to seek comfort from his brother.
Aunt Cass enrolls him in the local elementary school. When he chooses which group he'll befriend he thinks long and hard. He's going to be an example for Hiro, and he needs to lay down the foundations for success. He befriends everyone, is kind and smart, and even a little funny. Not that this all comes naturally, of course. He works for his impeccable grades, studying every night. He tutors during clubs after school, and tutors his little brother at home. He finds the balance between funny and hurtful, class clown and stick in the mud, and finds himself surrounded by people in awe of him. Through all this, he is labelled a nerd. It's difficult to find a balance between schoolwork and a real life, but Hiro's pleading eyes do wonders for convincing him.
Hiro comes into elementary school at the same age as everyone else. He's five going on six, but it's very clear he doesn't need to go through kindergarten, so they put him in first grade. Despite the difference in stature and social maturity (which had worried Tadashi to the ends of the earth) he manages to fit in (somewhat) and makes fast friends with a group of boys with questionable ideas of fun. Tadashi watches on, worriedly, through first and second grade, as the same boys are implicated in pranks in the classroom. He tries to relax, reminding himself of his own misadventures in grade school. But the final straw happens in Hiro's third grade when his best friend is involved in a dangerous prank at school.
Tadashi takes matters into his own hands. They have a serious talk, in which he makes Hiro reevaluate his life choices and options. They talk about Hiro going to middle and elementary schools, then high schools and colleges. He doesn't let Hiro give up. He encourages Hiro to join clubs, and build better social connections. For the next few months, Tadashi hears from Hiro about his new friends, a small group of people who are only slightly nerdy, but an altogether good group of kids.
He continues tutoring and babysitting and helping in general while studying and doing chores interacting with his classmates, but now he's in high school. His time is eaten up by the hours upon hours of school activities, both academic and social. There are difficulties, yes, but he pushes through and doesn't give up.
(But Hiro is his primary focus and is never neglected for any of Tadashi's other options.)
Then Hiro skips a grade in the transition from elementary to middle school. He is in seventh grade, at age ten, two years before everyone else, and the kids in his new grade don't handle it well. Hiro does not tell Tadashi.
Tadashi is horrified when Hiro comes home bruised one day.
"What happened?"
Hiro shrugs, trying to seem nonchalant. "I fell down the stairs."
"Did you fall? Or did someone push you?"
Hiro doesn't answer.
"I fell."
"You're a terrible liar."
Hiro shrugs again, walking upstairs.
"This conversation isn't over!"
Tadashi is ignored.
But Tadashi doesn't give up.
Hiro comes home physically sound for the next few days, so Tadashi pulls back a little. But he knows it's not over. Hiro comes home dejected, and Aunt Cass gets emails from teachers about missing homework. She's wondering (and he is too, honestly) if maybe Hiro shouldn't have skipped two grades.
The next week Tadashi discovers a tear in Hiro's favorite hoodie and decides enough is enough."Hiro, we have to talk about this."
"No, we really don't," is the sharp reply.
He doesn't give up. He gathers evidence. The hoodie, the missing homeworks, the stair incident- all of these and more are mentioned in his and Aunt Cass' email to the principal. He talks to Aunt Cass, but the school doesn't do anything.
He doesn't give up. They find another angle. He talks to Aunt Cass about pulling him out of school. Hiro no longer comes home fine: his homework disappears, his hoodie is torn beyond repair, and Hiro himself is miserable. Tadashi knows this is a battle he can not fight for Hiro. But there are other options still.
Tadashi does months of research on online courses- even neglects his own schoolwork a little (which is really, really bad because he's approaching the end of his senior year even though he's only seventeen and he has college to worry about because he skipped a grade, too) and manages to amass a comprehensive list of online courses Hiro can take to get through middle school. He will not let his brother's genius be obstructed by the social limitations of a school. He will not give up on his brother.
Hiro's first year of middle school ends and Aunt Cass agrees with Tadashi, signing off on all of the courses despite some initial doubt. Hiro starts flying through high school courses over the summer, giving Tadashi the breathing room he needs for the college application process.
And all of a sudden, he realizes he wants to go to SFIT.
When Tadashi is looking for colleges, he chooses for himself. He goes into robotics. And, he reasons afterward, if he continues and makes it into the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, he's sure to have a good career. Then he can take care of Hiro and Aunt Cass.
Hiro seems relieved by this development. Tadashi is staying in the house, and will only be walking at most, five blocks to get to school. This is agreed upon after a round of Hiro's super pout, and the reasoning that if given the freedom to stay behind at the lab at campus, Tadashi would abuse that privilege, staying overnight. Tadashi will not admit to either of these happenstances occurring, no matter how true they were. (But he'd known from the start he'd be staying in San Fransokyo.)
It's so worth all the sleepless nights, all the mornings he felt almost hungover, and the food deprivation. All this to get into Nerd School. But he could never give up, not on a cause like this.
Then he bumps into a girl who practically radiates the sun, with honey blonde hair and a blinding smile, and he picks her books up for her like the start to the cheesiest college love story ever. She's a chemist and she's actually into her classes unlike some of the other girls on campus and they geek out a little over her science text books and they exchange numbers and whoa that happened fast.
When he gets home he's all smiles and laughs and Cass eyes him knowingly and Hiro is utterly confused. During dinner his aunt asks him what her name was and Hiro chokes on his chicken wings, spluttering while Tadashi's face burns. Aunt Cass only cackles, ruffling his hair while Hiro points at him and gapes.
"Tadashi? A girl? Are you sure she wasn't a textbook-induced hallucination?"
Tadashi glares. "She's a chemist."
Hiro's expression fell back into disinterest. "Ah, a fellow nerd. No, it doesn't count."
Just as his Aunt began "of course it does!" Tadashi agreed. "You're right, it doesn't- because I just barely met her!"
"Come on, Dashi, you're so boring! Get a love life!"
"It's the first day of college! I'm busy!"
"He's right," supplied Aunt Cass.
"Unbelievable," muttered Tadashi.
His baby brother, the troll, has the nerve to smirk, so he gets kicked lightly under the table.
He finds out he and Honey are in the same lab, along with one of her friends, Wasabi, a neat freak with an interest in plasma lasers. Despite the other boy's occasional freakout over the anarchy that comes from sharing a lab with other people, the other guy is actually pretty cool, and he nods and smiles when he sees him in the halls. Then he meets Honey's roommate, Gogo, who is also in the process of moving her stuff into the lab, a punk chick with a purple streak in her hair and a don't-mess-with-me attitude. Gogo drags along Fred, a dorky geek who has followed her ever since she stopped a guy from hazing him. Tadashi thinks privately that it was a good thing he'd met Honey, because without her he probably would have no close friends whatsoever. He can blend in fine, mingling and socializing with the crowd and be seen as an overall popular guy, but as for real, deep, connections, he doesn't usually have time, or so he reasons with himself. And he needs them, he leans on them all too much now, because it's hard to raise Hiro right, even with Aunt Cass doing half the work.
His friends are concerned over him, he knows.
Tadashi gets Honey Lemon to make a plastic that melts into the material used for tags so he can implant trackers in Hiro's clothes. Tadashi complains to Fred about his brother sneaking out for bot fighting. Tadashi enlists the help of Gogo and Wasabi to conceal a GPS in his motorcycle. Tadashi just kinda talks about Hiro. All the time.
It's adorable, if not the slightest bit worrying. But Tadashi's life since age seven (when his brother had first been born) has been about Hiro. His friends understand that- it's okay, it really is. But Tadashi has never had a life outside of Hiro.
...
They decide interventions are necessary the many, many times Tadashi comes back from the lab exhausted. He won't give up, no, but they won't let him go too far anyway. It scares him how much he needs them. It scares them that he never had them.
Tadashi was late to the lab that day, which wasn't the the end of the world, though it was slightly unexpected. He arrived at the lab in time for their usual lunch break, just in time to be able to sit and sulk for a while. He came into the lab and sat down at the communal counter, plopping his chin into his hand and sighing, before getting out a notepad to draw the latest designs on Baymax. The others in the lab exchanged pointed looks.
"Tadashi, what happened? Is something wrong with Hiro?" Honey Lemon asked, carefully venturing into conversation with the young man, evidently upset. He sighed resignedly.
"He's going bot fighting again. I caught him coming back home."
"You're suffocating him, man!" Wasabi tossed him an apple from the fridge. They always kept extra snacks for the times when they didn't want to go out to get food. Unsurprisingly, this occurred often- every time someone had a new project idea they didn't want to leave.
"Let him go," advised Gogo, sweeping past with the latest wheel disc. She popped her gum, eyeing him judgmentally from her workbench. Tadashi sighed, chin resting in palm as he reluctantly bit into his apple.
"Thanks, Wasabi," he called out reluctantly.
"Dude, you need to chillax a little. Give him a little space. Hiro's growing up, you can't hover over him all the time," Fred told him, lounging in the couch.
"I know, I know," Tadashi insisted halfheartedly. He put the apple down.
Tadashi sighed, the third time for this conversation. He put down the pencil. His head went into his hands, as he rubbed tiredly at his temples.
"Have you gotten any sleep?" Honey Lemon approached the counter, leaning across to examine the face of her longtime crush. Her usually optimistic attitude falters upon seeing him, truly seeing him, and the exhaustion written all over his features.
"...yes," he replies, after lengthy deliberation.
"How much?"
"Maybe... Three, four hours? I'm fine guys-"
Honey Lemon cut him off, expression growing stern. "In the past 48 hours how much sleep have you gotten?"
Tadashi scratched the back of his head, sitting up. "Uhm..."
A voice from his lab answered for him.
"In the past 48 hours, patient entitled 'Tadashi Hamada' has received approximately 3.68 hours of sleep. This schedule is considered unhealthy. I suggest sleeping for at least 8 hours every night."
Tadashi glared at his robotics project. "You need an off switch."
"Okay, I think we can all agree it's time for Tadashi to go to bed," declared Wasabi, seizing control over the rolling chair the other guy occupied in order to dump Tadashi on their community couch. Fred plopped down on the couch in his lizard costume, further trapping the sleep-deprived college student. He stopped struggling at this point, acknowledging the pointlessness of this particular battle.
One whiff of Honey's special sleep scent and he was out like a light.
This was the first, but by no means the last occasion they had to do so.
...
Hiro continues to go bot-fighting, which continues to worry his brother to death and back. He doesn't tell his, aunt, not wanting to worry her. Tadashi struggles to find some way to get Hiro to stop, but nothing seems to catch his brother's attention. Even after being arrested, Hiro is on his way to the next botfight before Tadashi can say no.
He finds a new angle. He says yes.
Tadashi takes him to the lab.
After, still dazed in the excitement of it all, Hiro turns around. "I have to go to this school! If I don't, I- I'll lose my mind! How do I get in?"
Tadashi smiles.
...
(Tadashi's brother is not the only thing his friends find themselves exasperated over, though. His love life, nonexistent for so long, evokes dismay amongst his friends. They know both sides of why he won't just ask Honey Lemon out, but agree Tadashi needs a life beyond just his family. They take a leaf out of his book, and find a new angle.
So they team up with Hiro.
"Whoa," Hiro muttered, watching his brother talk one-on-one with the dazzling young chemist.
"Ah, yes," Fred started wistfully, "the Tadahoney. The hopeless, hapless Tadashi and the lovely, naive Honey Lemon. Such a pair have not been seen since the days of the elder Tomago couple..."
Gogo smacked his arm. "My parents got together years before these two ever will."
"This is so... Weird! He's... He's... Freaking out? What?"
"For a guy who seems to have it all, looks, brains, charm... Tadashi Hamada is hopeless when it comes to Honey," explained Wasabi.
"We've been trying to get them together for weeks," groaned Gogo, "But, as you can see, they have not yet done so."
Hiro facepalmed hard.
"He's such an idiot!"
"Thus is the sad, sad reality of Tadahoney- the ship that has yet to sail," Fred told him, kicking his feet up from the couch.
"Welcome aboard," said Wasabi solemnly, and the four began to plot.)
...
His little brother gave up a little too easily brainstorming ideas for the SFIT fair. (Tadashi didn't, obviously. His brother was a certified genius. But that was besides the point.)
Swinging his brother upside down by his ankles may have seemed a little extreme, but it did seem to shake things up enough for Hiro to find a new angle.
And what an angle it was. Microbots. From anyone else, Tadashi would've thought it impossible, but from his brother? He should have seen something like this coming.
Callaghan was impressed, Tadashi could tell. He had crushed the tiniest hint of jealousy inside him long ago, so even now, there was no bitterness that even his professor(who was rarely ever impressed) was impressed by Hiro.
At this, the highest moment of pride in his life, he probably should have seen it coming. He should have known something would happen. And happen it did.
Just barely twenty minutes after Callaghan's invitation for Hiro to join him at SFIT, disaster struck, as it had been known to in the Hamada family. It was the head trauma, they told him later. The head trauma caused when he fell, after the explosion that rocked the campus. The head trauma was what lead to his little brother's coma.
This they told him, sitting in the hospital bed he'd woken up in.
He'd gotten a few minor scratches from being so close to the shattered glass. He'd had a minor, oh-so-very minor burn on his arm from some flying debris. He had a minor concussion. But all his injuries were minor, compared to Hiro's.
Cass had rushed in. Tadashi had tried his very hardest not to cry, to stifle the oncoming tears deep within himself. But his Aunt had clutched him so delicately, so carefully around his wounds yet so tightly that he let escape a muffled sob.
They'd come so close to death.
He was out in the clear, the doctors told him. But his brother, his baby brother was not. The chances were uncertain. But there was a chance, he told himself.
And as long as there was a chance, the barest glimpse of hope in this swirling mass of darkness, Tadashi would cling to it. He would not give up on his brother.
Banishing all thought of failure, he knew, with chilling certainty, that his brother would live.
There was no possible alternative.
...
So, it's been a while since I posted. This was meant to be an all-out story, but I found it really difficult to continue writing. It's been a year since I abandoned it, so I tied off loose ends and kept it as a one shot. Mostly just a timeline of events from Tadashi's point of view, with a few sprinkles of BH6 team interactions. There are mentions of an AU at the end where Tadashi survived, but Hiro fell into a coma.
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