On Hiro's fifteenth birthday, he got his first piercing.
He'd been wandering around the sleazy part of town, watching the sun set out of the corner of his eye, when he came across a tattoo and piercing parlor.
Skull decs grinned at him from the windows but what really caught his attention was the sign that said:
First Piercing Is Free.
One quick glance over his shoulder later and he was strutting into the place like he'd been planning to get a piercing for the past year. As opposed to the last thirty seconds.
The inside was only slightly more impressive than the outside. Peeling and dull black paint gave the place a dreary feel, but the walls and walls of tattoo illustrations lightened the atmosphere a little.
Transfixed, Hiro slowly traced one of the drawings with his finger. It was a rib cage, visible because the skin had seemingly been torn and stretched, and under the white bone were gears and pumps and tubing.
"Looking to get a tattoo, son?"
Hiro spun around like he'd been caught shoveling whip cream into his mouth at midnight and looked up to see the old guy standing at the register looking at him with a lopsided grin on his face. The place was pretty much empty, so it made sense that he was looking for something to do.
Hesitating only for a second, Hiro said, "Actually, I was hoping you could give me a piercing."
The man at the cash register hummed thoughtfully. "A piercing, huh? Is it your first one?"
"Yes… Also, it's my birthday."
Chuckling, the man stepped out from behind the counter, revealing a slightly protruding stomach and several tattoos, including a series of entwining vines that traveled from his elbows all the way to the palms of his hands. He jabbed his thumb towards the backroom and Hiro, all energy and curiosity, ran after him.
The backroom had a leather chair in its center and a stool. With a slight hop, Hiro hopped in the chair and sat back as the man retrieved what looked like a piece of cardboard from a purple cabinet in the corner.
"So, what's your name?" Hiro asked, feet kicking restlessly as he waited for whatever came next. It wasn't like he'd ever gotten a piercing before.
"Ralph." He presented the piece of cardboard to Hiro, who saw now that it was covered in different piercings. "Which one would you like?"
The variety of shapes and colors was a little overwhelming, especially for someone who'd only entered the parlor on impulse, but Hiro played it cool and pointed to a black hoop, earning a noise of approval from Ralph.
"Good choice. Most kids your age get stubs for their first piercings, but I've always been partial to hoops." He waited for Hiro to continue, then added when it became clear the boy didn't know what else he had to say. "Where would you like it?"
Flushing a little pink around the ears, Hiro replied, "Somewhere visible. I'll let you decide exactly where."
A frown crossed Ralph's face. Deciding where to pierce was a pretty hefty responsibility, after all.
From what he could see, the kid was in the middle of a growth spurt (and probably a rebellious phase), mid-teens, and confident.
"If you want it to be visible, the best place to put it would be near your eyes, since that's where people have to look when they look at you. Most people get it around their eyebrows, but you're not most people, are you?"
Hiro nodded emphatically, earning himself another grin.
"Alright, son, how about we put this in the corner of your eye?"
After hearing the boy's agreement, the man busied himself with rummaging through the top drawer of his cabinet. Overhead, the lights on the ceiling flickered a little. Either they needed to be replaced or they had a bug in them.
Hiro was pondering which one it might be until the gleam of metal demanded his full attention.
"What is that?" He asked, voice only quivering slightly.
Ralph looked bemused at the question, then he realized Hiro was staring at his hand like he'd just pulled a kitchen knife out the drawer and chuckled. "It's how I'm going to put the hoop in."
Gulp.
To Hiro, the hook Ralph held actually looked menacing, gleaming under the dim and flickering light like an artifact of doom that would take great pleasure in causing him pain.
Ugh, this was ridiculous. He'd faced down Yokai, hadn't he? He wasn't just any fourteen- fifteen-year-old kid. He was Hiro Hamada. A veritable genius!
One ruthlessly suppressed whimper later and he was gripping the armrests with white knuckles, body tensed for torture, and ground out, "Do your worst."
Meanwhile, Ralph, who had been keeping an eye on him while he sterilized the hoop and the hook, fought to keep his lips in a solemn line.
The kid was taking it so seriously.
It'd be a shame to tell him at this point that tensing would only make it hurt more.
Five seconds later and the store was bursting with the terrified shrieks of a veritable genius.
Lingering outside of his house, Hiro wondered how long he could hide his new piercing from Aunt Cass. It was puckered, red, angry and completely hidden under a bandage at the moment, so maybe he could just walk really fast to his room and she'd never notice a thing!
All he had to do was make sure she never saw his face until he graduated college and moved out of her house. Problem solved.
He groaned, hitting his head gently against the wall so he didn't make too much noise.
No, that was a dumb idea. Who thought of that? Oh, right, he did.
Well, it was still a dumb idea.
But it would have to do for now.
Deep breathe in and….
"HiAuntCassByeAuntCassIhaveto-"
"Happy Birthday!"
Just as he was about to run up the stairs, his eyes firmly on the ground, he heard GoGo, Wasabi, Fred, and Honey jump out from behind the living room furniture and shout Happy Birthday.
Fred was wearing his Fredzilla costume, cheerfully humming to himself while his peers noticed the bandage on Hiro's cheek - he hadn't covered it with his hand fast enough - and the horrified look in his brown eyes.
Aunt Cass set the cake she'd been holding down and strode to his side. The cake, Hiro noticed, was covered in red frosting and purple trimming, with Baymax's face drawn expertly on its top in colored sugar.
Knowing his aunt, they'd probably still get to eat it, but it wouldn't taste as good after she chewed him out for getting a piercing.
Tentatively, she touched the bandage with the tips of her fingers, drawing a pained hiss from the teenaged boy in front of her.
"Hiro," she said, her green eyes looking down at him with concern and unintentionally drowning him in guilt, "Are you being bullied again?"
"What?" Indignant, Hiro brushed her hand away. "Of course not. Between Baymax and my nanomachines, anyone who bullied me would be mulch."
Oddly enough, Aunt Cass wasn't certain if that statement could be considered reassuring or not.
Wincing a little, Hiro pulled the bandage off, revealing his new piercing to the world.
And the large bubble Gogo'd been blowing abruptly popped.
On his sixteenth piercing, Hiro got three new piercings. One of them was a zero gauge.
For the first two, he was fine.
After all, he'd done it before and the pain was nothing new. He'd even gotten used to the slightly different impressions people had of him thanks to his piercing and his growth spurt. At sixteen, he still was a little on the skinny side and he wasn't quite as tall as Tadashi had been, but he was getting there.
He didn't want to settle for being almost as tall or the same height as his older brother. He wanted to surpass him. Because that's what Tadashi would have wanted.
"You sure you want this, son?" Ralph seemed a little hesitant about the round metal cylinder he'd picked out, twirling it in his fingers in what looked more like a nervous habit then a conscious movement. "You know, they called the police last year. Apparently, it sounded like a certain someone was being murdered."
"Oh?" Hiro asked with forced nonchalance. "Must have been a real scaredy cat." All the response got as an answer was a raised eyebrow and a lot of skepticism. Laughing weakly, Hiro added, "I swear I'm not going to scream the roof off this time."
Ralph shrugged. "Alright, son, if you say so." He heard the kid on his chair sigh with relief and fought to keep his face straight and composed as he got the hook for the hoops on his upper ear and the dermal punch out for lobe, and then sterilized them both in alcohol, all the while feeling two brown eyes following his every movement with rampant curiosity. It was a bit odd for a customer to jump straight to a zero gage without stretching his ear first but it wasn't exactly unheard of. Some people just didn't have the patience (or the money) to go from 20 to 0 gauges.
And he said he really wanted it, so why not?
In truth, Hiro had no idea what a gauge was. He'd only chosen the metal cylinder because he'd never seen it before and wanted to know what it was. Now, he'd been staring at the long handled dermal punch for some time, dots connecting in his head, and even if he hadn't known how the piercing for a zero gauge worked before he chose it, he had a pretty good idea now.
Still, he wasn't going to back down.
The cool metal of the hook pierced the cartilage in his ear easily. He had two new hoops before he'd even finished counting to thirty.
Next was the dermal punch.
Oh, oh, oh, this was such a bad idea! Aunt Cass is going to kill me-
Ralph paused, long enough to nearly drive Hiro to the brink of insanity. "Are you sure you're sure you want this?"
"Yes!"
One punch later and Hiro was clutching his bloody earlobe with a pained grimace.
Ralph slapped him on the back. "You did good, kid. Not even a peep."
"Hey, Ralph?"
"Hmm?"
"I think I'm gonna pass out."
"What?"
Thud.
Between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthday, Hiro grew another three inches, worked out with Gogo, got another hoop on the top of his right ear and a zero gauge to match the one he already had. He also did his best to keep Aunt Cass from convincing herself that she was raising her sister's son to be a delinquent and away from the comfort foods.
He never got rid of his red shirt and hoodie, but he did tend to dress in dark colors more often than not.
Unfortunately, he'd also picked up a rather nasty habit.
It wasn't that smoking was something he liked to do. He hated the taste of it and Honey had once sat him down and lectured him for hours about the effect it had on the human body. The discussion as a whole was almost as disturbing as when Fred had tried to explain the Birds and the Bees to him when he was fourteen. With action figures.
Gogo actually liked his gauges. Said it made him look tough. Smoking, however, she couldn't tolerate. After calling him a variety of very colorful names, she refused to talk to him for a month.
She only started talking to him again when he swore he would stop by the end of the year.
The look on Wasabi's face when he found out could best be described as motherly disappointment. As Hiro did not see the man as a mother, it probably had the least effect. Sure, he felt a little bad…
But it was really weird.
As for Aunt Cass, he did his best not to smoke in the house or anywhere she might see, but he knew that she could sometimes smell the smoke on him when he came home.
The worst of all of them was Baymax.
The robot would search his room for cigarettes at every opportunity and destroy them.
This meant he'd had to find several hiding places for his cigarettes around the neighborhood but it was only a matter of time before Baymax started destroying those, too.
If he really wanted to, he could probably reprogram Baymax to make an exception to the No Smoking rule when it came to him. It was just that he didn't really want to.
In fact, he liked and appreciated that Baymax cared so much.
On his seventeenth birthday, Hiro left the house at 7 in the morning, wearing a navy blue T-shirt and gray slacks. It was time for his birthday piercing.
He'd been looking up some cool stuff he wanted to try out, which he couldn't try out if he waited too long to leave and Aunt Cass managed to stop him or his friends managed to put the house on lockdown or Baymax woke up from his sleep mode and tried to hug him until he changed his mind.
There was only one person he'd have allowed to dissuade him from doing this and he wasn't around anymore.
When the old tattoo artist saw him, Ralph gave him a jolly wave.
"I thought I'd be seeing you today. How old are you now, Hiro?"
Hiro grinned as the man reached out and tousled his hair. "I'm seventeen."
Ralph whistled. "Seventeen, huh? Practically a man." Straightening, he put his hands on his hips and said, "So, what will it be today, Hiro? Want me to hang you from a meat hook? Stick you on a fishing line?"
"That sounds great." Hiro replied, his eyes already drawn to the exact piercings he wanted. "But I have something different in mind."
When he walked out almost an hour later, he had two barbells slipped under the skin at the nape of his neck and a gauge in his tongue. He also had to apply pressure with gauze until the bleeding stopped, but he still felt pretty good about it.
It took two weeks for his new piercings to scab over to the point where he felt he could go outside without feeling like an open wound. He bent to kiss his Aunt Cass on the cheek before leaving the house, then changed his mind and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug.
"Whoa! Hiro," Aunt Cass laughed, kicking her feet as they dangled a few inches above the floor, "put me down. I have cookies in the oven."
His lips quirked cheekily, Hiro put her down and pecked her on the nose, then she shooed him out and he was off.
It was probably a good thing she was distracted. She'd have wondered why he wasn't taking Baymax with him, otherwise.
Before he passed the bush at the corner, he reached inside of it, pulling out an already opened pack of about six cigarettes.
Looking cautiously around him to make sure no one he knew was nearby, he slipped one into his mouth and lit it.
He didn't pull on it too hard as he walked to the nearby prison. It was his second to last one and he wanted to savor it for all it was worth.
Maybe he shouldn't have started smoking, but when he was standing at the looming and oddly sterile looking entrance of the prison where Callaghan was kept, he couldn't help but be glad he had.
"Callaghan" A security guard called out the dark cell where the former Professor sat, apparently deep in thought, "there's someone here to see you."
The guard unlocked the door to cell and guided the man out, all the while wondering if the man was ever going to speak. All of the other prisoners were usually loud and rowdy, but Callaghan never responded to taunts, never said a word.
Just before they entered the visitor's area, Callaghan turned to him, his voice hoarse from weeks of disuse, and asked, "Is it a girl? Is it Abigail?"
For some reason, the guard found himself wishing he could honestly say it was but, instead, he just shook his head.
In front of him, Callaghan seemed to shrink into himself. Otherwise, he was silent and still.
Until he saw Hiro Hamada.
His back straightened, stiffened, when he saw the teenager. Despite this reaction, the teenager himself barely acted as though anyone of interest had entered the room, buffing his nails and twirling the phone like he was on hold for customer service.
Callaghan fell into his chair, picked up the phone, then knocked on the glass when it seemed like Hiro was too busy trying to touch his nose with his tongue to notice that the prisoner was waiting for him to place the phone next to his ear.
"Hiro" Callaghan breathed. "Why are you here?" And unable to resist, he added, "And what have you done to your face?"
"Nothing my brother would've let me do." Hiro casually retorted, puberty making his voice huskier than Callaghan remembered. While he knew he had the prisoner's attention, Hiro took a cigarette out of his pocket and twirled it, sending it dancing back and forth across his hand like a scurrying squirrel.
Face pinched and pale, Callaghan glanced at the cigarette. "Are you telling me you smoke those?"
"Yep."
"What are you trying to say? What do you want me to say? Trying to join your brother in an early grave isn't going to change anything."
Frowning, Hiro put the cigarette in his front pocket. If he tilted his head and squinted his eyes, Callaghan almost sounded like a concerned teacher, instead of the man responsible for his brother's death.
"That's not it."
Without giving him a proper answer, Hiro tossed the package of cigarettes through the small hole in the glass. He wasn't sure if the guard would let him keep them long enough for Callaghan to trade them for anything of value, but Hiro honestly didn't care that much.
"Keep them" He said, putting as much ice into his voice as he could muster. "I don't need them anymore."
And he hung up.
The last thing he saw before he walked out was Callaghan's slumped back as he was led away, his hands clasped around the package he'd thrown at him.
"Well, Dashi, I did it. I visited Callaghan."
It was Hiro's habit to go to his brother's gravestone every now and then so they could talk. He even did one half of their secret handshake with it once. That had felt a little silly, but it'd also depressed him way more than he'd anticipated so he tended not to do it often.
At the moment, he was lazing in the grass next to the gravestone, smoking his last cigarette with his head pillowed by the grass.
"I think I did all this, " he gestured absentmindedly to the piercings, "partly because I just wanted to make him guilty. I wanted him to look at me and know that if you were still around, I wouldn't look like this." Smoke trailed from his mouth, dissipating against the backdrop of the cloudless blue sky. "Or maybe I was just being a brat. Maybe there's a part of me that hopes that if I do enough stupid stuff, you'll show up and stop me." Turning on his side, he focused his gaze on the engraved name and grinned, "Dumb, right?"
Bonus:
By the time he'd finished the cigarette, he was drowsy and hungry and more than ready to walk back home. He shifted his weight so he could crush the stub into the dirt, thought about leaving it, then pocketed it instead.
Somehow, the thought of littering at his brother's grave didn't sit well with him.
He was just about to head out when he heard a voice so painfully familiar it nearly killed him.
"Hiro, I- What did you do to your face?!"
A/N: I hoped you enjoyed this^^ I also hope it's not blindingly obvious that despite my devotion to this fandom (and to Tadashi) I have never seen this movie.
The story was inspired by the wonderful art done for BH6 by Sorarts on tumblr.