The warm sunshine and cool breeze flowed into the room through the window, it warmed her face and brought a smile to her lips. She squinted as her eyes adjusted to the brightness then glanced around at her surroundings; this wasn't her room. Her soft smile turned into a cheeky grin as she remembered the events of last night. Honey Lemon curled her toes and they brushed along his legs, she looked up from where her head was resting on his bare chest to see the still sleeping face of Tadashi, looking peaceful as ever. Her fingertips ran along the chiseled muscles of his torso, her eyes watching it rise and fall with every rhythmic breath. She lay like that, watching him for a while then took a deep breath as she sat up in his bed. Now sitting with her feet hanging off the edge, she stretched her arms up in the air, letting out a big yawn. The long, over sized sleeves of Tadashi's shirt fell to her elbows when she raised her arms, and fell back down past her fingertips when she lowered them. She carefully re-covered Tadashi with the blankets then made her way out of his bedroom.
At the end of the hall she entered the bathroom and flicked on the light, she smiled at herself in the mirror. Her long hair was a mess and her well slept in makeup was smudged on her eyelids. The sight that made her happiest though, was the only article of clothing she was wearing; Tadashi's shirt. Well, that and her panties. She put her messy mop of hair up in a high ponytail and then twisted on the faucet. The water was freezing cold on her face but it helped to wake her up, she found a facecloth in the cabinet under the sink and used that to wipe her makeup away. After she washed her face she made her way to the kitchen. The sound of her stomach growling seemed to echo through the silence of the apartment and she rubbed her tummy before opening the fridge.
Ting-ting crack! On the metal bowl, the egg cracked and she broke it open, the yolk falling into the mixture of pancake batter. She mixed it all together one last time before scooping some up with a spoon and pouring it onto the sizzling pan. Honey Lemon hoped she could turn their perfect night into a perfect morning after by having a nice breakfast ready when he woke up. Just as she was finishing up the last pancake, a sleepy Tadashi sauntered out of his room, rubbing his eyes.
"Something smells good, you aren't setting my kitchen on fire are you?" He smiled a drowsy smile, walking over to her.
"Isn't it a little early to be giving me a hard time?" Honey Lemon squealed a little as he folded his arms around her and lifted her off the ground with a tight squeeze.
"It's never too early for that, watcha makin'?"
"Pancakes. Although if I really wanted to set us on fire, I'd make bacon. Lucky you, I prefer when you're not charred." She winked, feeling rather proud that she had made anything at all. As well as being proud of her joke.
"Well, thank you. For making pancakes and for not making bacon." Tadashi kissed her good morning and the moment they touched, the feelings of last night came flooding back. She rocked on her heels as her heart danced at the feeling.
"Yeah, it's no problem." Her words were breathy, their faces still close. After a moment she cleared her throat, trying to get out of the haze of lust that was clouding her mind. Now she spoke clearly, "Uhm, I was thinking that today we could finish our project, since we changed it, and the science fair is tonight and all."
"Oh - uh - yeah, for sure. There's not much left for us to do, just maybe test run it a couple times and all that other housekeeping stuff, so that should be easy." He nodded stepping away from her sort of awkwardly. He moved to grab plates from the cabinet for their pancakes.
After an hour or two of building and eating pancakes in Tadashi's garage, mostly him building and her eating pancakes, they finally finished their project.
"Up top!" He raised his hand for a high five and she left him hanging, opting to hug him instead due to not being able to contain her excitement. After so many hours of working on this she was finally confident that they had an amazing entry for the science fair. It was a small contraption in a sort of trapezoidal shape, on one side was a keypad where, after typing in a certain combination of numbers, it activated a chemical reaction inside. Inside was where all the magic happened. A small silicon ball was infused with several different chemicals, depending on the reaction, and then ejected out the other side. From there, the ball was thrown at a solid surface where it would burst on impact and release a certain matter. Ice, goo, air, etc. She thought it was a pretty impressive contraption, but the competition at SFHS was stiff so they couldn't get too ahead of themselves.
After their short lived celebration Honey was racing around Tadashi's house trying to get ready as fast as possible - doing her hair, putting on suitable clothes, and makeup - then she was zooming off to the school. The fair didn't start until six but she promised Mr. Krei that she would help set up for the event by moving tables and chairs and setting up speakers and so on. She arrived at about 3:15 pulling into the closest parking spot she could find. Even though it was three hours early, there were tens of people there already, all trying to help ensure the whole night went smoothly.
It took a lot of time, sweat, and hard work but the place was starting to come together real nicely. The entire gymnasium was filled with rows of tables and banners that welcomed people to the fair adorning several support beams along the ceiling, including one over the main entrance doors to the gym from the outside, the sign was very large and read "Welcome to the SFHS Science Fair!" It was visible from the parking lot. Soon, contestants started crowding in with their contraptions and experiments, Tadashi met her at one of the larger tables and hung their poster up on the divider between the table behind theirs.
"This place is looking pretty great, how long you been at it?" He chuckled, noticing the sweat beading on her forehead and the stressed and tense atmosphere around her.
"Oh ya know, only three hours! I just really need ours to win." She nodded wiping away the sweat with her wrist.
"Well don't worry, our entry is incredible thanks to you. I'd like to see them try not to give you the win." He patted the small of her back reassuringly. "But even so, if we don't win, there's still a chance we can get chosen for the scholarships."
She nodded, feeling more at ease now that Tadashi was here with his supportive words. "Okay, you're right. I just need to relax, everything will be fine, tonight will be perfect no matter what."
"That's the spirit babe, now help me set this up." He gestured toward their chemical embrittlement chamber with a nod of his head.
"Yeah okay, for sure - wait did you just call me babe?" She raised a confused eyebrow, not really used to pet names other than her usual nickname, of course.
"Yeah, why? Is that a problem?"
"I don't know it's just a little weird, I'm not used to it is all." She shrugged stepping closer to him.
"Oh. Well you seemed to enjoy it last night." He said the words so matter-of-fact and just as a competitor walked by too. Honey Lemon could see the shocked look on their face as they hurriedly walked away and she gasped.
"Tadashi!" She smacked his arm hard, still appalled at what he had said; in public nonetheless.
He immediately started cackling, finding it obnoxiously funny. "Ow! Woah, woah - hey." He managed between laughs and put his arm around her, pulling her into him. "I'm just messing with you." She glared up at him and her smirked back. "Come on, we're a couple! We can joke about these things."
"Not in public!" She continued to scold him, clearly still embarrassed over him explicitly joking about their sex life.
"Okay, okay. I'm sorry, it won't happen again." He was still laughing but she expected him to keep his word.
"Good, I don't need you scaring off anymore innocent bystanders." She was serious but this only made him laugh more. Honey rolled her eyes before moving to finish organizing their table.
"Welcome," Mr. Krei's voice echoed through the gymnasium, booming from the microphone. "To the twenty-fourth, annual, SanFransokyo High School Science Fair!" The crowd of parents and science enthusiasts cheered and applauded at the commencement of the night. "Please feel free to look around at the many outstanding entries we have tonight, at the end of the night we will be announcing the winner of the first place prize of a ten thousand dollar scholarship!" The crowd cheered as it was dismissed and Mr. Krei stepped down from the stage, He guided the panel of judges through the different entries.
"Well look who we have here!" Honey jumped when she turned around to face her Chemistry teacher.
"Mr. Callaghan!" She replied carefully, an uncomfortable tone in her voice.
"Aiko, Tadashi." He nodded to the both of them, he sounded rather casual which was much different from the last time she interacted with him in public. Neither one of them said anything, she just smiled at him awkwardly. "So."
"So?" She gave a quiet laugh, the last thing she wanted to do was upset him again.
"Aren't you going to show me what you've got going on here?"
"Oh!" She cleared her throat, remembering the objective of the night. "Right, our bad, uhm so this is our invention, it has five different reactions and states of matter it can make so if you just take a look at our cheat sheet.." She slid a large piece of paper over to him with all the codes and their corresponding reactions written out in bright, colorful handwriting. "Then you pick one and you just type it in the keypad and you'll get a ball that comes out this end." She tapped the side of the box where the spheres were ejected and waited for her teacher to test it all out. Not to her shock, he chose the gooey slime reaction; she assumed that this would be a crowd favorite as it sounded the most exciting. Out the end came an iridescent, magenta ball. "Great! Now pick on of the several targets we have lined up and throw it." She nodded and her and Tadashi stepped out of the way to reveal the targets behind them.
Callaghan closed one eye and lined up the shot, he threw it full speed and the ball exploded off the target into a thick slime that very slowly stretched down off the edge of the surface but never broke as it was too thick and strong to move much.
"Wow!" He exclaimed, his expression seemed rather thrilled. "That's really incredible you two! I'll put in a good word about you to the judges." He nodded then pushed past the crowd of people as interested viewers took notice of what had just happened and wanted to take a turn themselves.
Honey Lemon and Tadashi smiled at each other.
"Okay, everyone can take a turn but we need you to make a line!" He called and showed the gesture of a line with the motion of his hands. The people quickly obeyed but struggled to stay in the line as everyone was stepping out to try and get a peek at the action.
"Hey you two! How are my little scientists?" Aunt Cass had somehow managed to get to the front of the line and skip a big chunk of it. "I am your aunt and I have seniority over all these people... So tell me how to work this!" She clapped her hands together excitedly as Tadashi explained this time; they took turns. Cass obeyed the instructions and chose the pink powder ball which was a nice change from the rainbow goo. It burst into a thick cloud of fluorescent dust that nearly engulfed Tadashi and Honey. Their once white lab coats already looked like they had been tie-dyed from all the other people though so half of their bodies being coated in rosy talc didn't really matter much. "That's so cool you guys! Oh i'm so proud of you!" She jumped around and ran to hug them but stopped when she noticed how coated they were in mess. "Maybe later." She nodded and patted their shoulders. "Oh, I love you two! Good luck!" She called as she walked away, heading to test out the other entries.
Their night continued on like that in a monotonous fun. The dozens of people that were dying to try it out slowly trickled away as the end of the line caught up. Their time of fame was coming to an end along with the night but they didn't mind because for a while, their invention had the spotlight. They just hoped that was enough to get the judges excited. Now they were approaching their stand and Honey's heart started to beat rapidly.
"Good Evening." The only woman in the group of four judges nodded when they had reached the stand.
"Good evening, Miss. We are entry number thirty four with our invention centered on the idea of Chemical Metal Embrittlement." Honey smiled, trying her best to sound cool and collected. The two of them walked the judges through their experiment, explaining the science behind it and even demonstrating the function of the machine using the ice sphere on one of the targets.
"And now it's your turn." Tadashi nodded and the judges took a moment to scribble things on their clipboards before each taking a turn to create a sphere. "There are four different kinds of reactions left so each of you will get to try out a unique one." They seemed rather thrilled and appreciative of this.
"Okay now line up and take your shot." Once again, the two of them backed away to make room and all the judges took turns throwing the ball at the target.
"Okay last one." Tadashi signaled the man who hadn't thrown his sphere yet and just as he pulled his arm back to let it fly, he was interrupted. A loud boom erupted through the gymnasium, silencing everyone inside and stopped every person dead in their tracks.
"What was that?" Honey questioned, hesitation in her voice, not too sure that she wanted to know.
"I'm not really sure-" Just as Tadashi finished his sentence, a second one went off, It was an explosion coming from the other side of the gym. The screams of students and parents echoed through from the other side of the room as flames crawled up and out from where the explosion had been.
"Is that.. Fire?!" Honey felt her heart sink to her gut as an absolute sense of dread flooded through her body, shredding apart her previously happy disposition. The fire spread so quickly that, by the time the alarms started crying and the sprinklers started raining down, it was too big to be extinguished. In fact, it seemed to only fuel the flames, another explosion popping and crackling in the corner of the building.
"Honey Lemon, come on!" Tadashi declared, gripping her arm tight and yanking her from where she was standing. The entire gym burst into absolute chaos, people crying out to their kids and others, horrified shrieks sounded like they were all around her and there was no flow of traffic, everyone was racing in every direction. The fire had crawled along the walls to wrap around to the other side now and was slowly engulfing the whole building.
"Tadashi, I don't know where the exit is!" She cried, feeling so hopeless as they aimlessly ran through the rows of tables. "What about Gogo, and Wasabi and everyone!" All of their friends were there too, each had their own entry in the fair - except Fred who was simply coming for moral support - but now they were all a part of this mess and Honey had no clue where they were. She only hoped they already made it out.
The building was overheating quickly and she was sweating bricks, her skin felt almost as itchy as her eyes that were trying to blink through the smoke.
"Tadashi!"
"Aiko, please, I'm trying!" He hissed, she knew he wasn't actually mad at her it was just the circumstances, but the way he yelled at her along with all the horror she was already feeling, it just crushed her. She started to sob as he pulled her along, too overwhelmed with the situation. The only other sound she could hear besides crackling flames and terrified screams was Tadashi's coughing. She gasped between her tears saying over and over again in her mind that she prayed they made it out.
"Hey! Over here!" A voice called to them and Tadashi exclaimed.
"There it is!" He tugged on her harder now, dragging her to the exit.
When her scorching hot skin met the cold front of the night, it was the nicest stinging she had every felt. "Oh my god." She muttered at a loss for words.
"Oh thank god, we made it - oh." Tadashi clearly shared her speechlessness as he mumbled on and on. "Oh you're okay, you're okay." He hugged her tighter than he ever had before, she could feel the muscles in his arms quiver as they rested around her and she could hear his heart racing at light speed. She just cried into his arms for a moment before catching her breath.
"What about everyone else?"
"Tadashi! Aiko!" A distressed Aunt Cass rushed over to the two of them, the rest of their friends chasing behind her. Cass immediately fell into Tadashi, wrapping her arms around him.
"Honey Lemon, oh my god!" Gogo led the group of Fred, Wasabi, Hiro, and Max over to her, Wasabi was the one to give her a hug and pick her up off the ground.
"We were so worried about you two!" Wasabi whispered into their hug.
"We were worried about you guys too! How did you get out?" She was happy they were all safe but confused as to how they all looked clean and well like nothing had happened.
"We were all on the other side of the gym where the fire started, saw it coming miles away and ran out after the first explosion. It was wild!" Fred explained their escape and Honey was relieved that they were so lucky.
"Well thank god for that."
"Yeah, it was awful though, some kids experiment caused it. I don't know too much about the circumstances but they were just too close to the electrical wires." Gogo explained.
"That's so terrible." Honey shook her head, sad that this was how the night turned out. She took turns giving everyone a hug and Tadashi joined their group as well, talking with everyone. Max was going around to people who made it out, trying to assist any injured ones that he could until the paramedics got there.
Honey was starting to feel better after she caught her breath but the moment was cut short when a brown haired girl who was no older than them came stumbling out of the building and down the stairs. She collapsed at the bottom, coughing intensely and crying too.
"Help! Someone, help!" She pleaded in a raspy scream. Her arms were welted and her clothes were singed in some areas; she had been burned.
"Oh my god, Max!" Honey Lemon called as her and Tadashi raced to the girl, their albino friend following behind.
"What happened? Are you alright? Where are you hurt?" Max pushed through the two of them to the girl on the ground, helping her to sit up.
"Not me are you crazy! It's my dad! My dad is in there still!" Her voice was so desperate and as she sat up, her pleading eyes gaze into Honey's, she suddenly recognized her.
"Who is your dad?" Tadashi questioned but she didn't need to answer.
"Mr. Callaghan." Honey whispered. "You're Abigail."
"Yes! God, that doesn't matter! Please someone help him!" The girl continued to cry and Tadashi looked to the building.
"I'll get your dad out of there." He nodded and stood up from the ground.
"Wait!" Honey protested, grabbing his arm and jerking him back before he stepped onto the first step.
"Aiko, let go!"
"No, I can't let you do this, this is stupid! Just wait until the firefighters get here!"
"That'll be too late." He argued.
"Please don't do this!" He continued to ignore her pleading.
"Callaghan's in there. Someone has to help." When the words left his lips he ripped his arm free of her weak grasp and dashed up the stairs.
"No!" Wasabi ran up behind and grabbed the shrieking Honey Lemon, holding her back and preventing her from moving forward. All she could do was watch Tadashi run into the burning building. He disappeared from her sight which only made her panic more, she writhed in Wasabi's grasp. "Put me down!"
"Aiko, I can't -"
"Let me go!" She elbowed him in the gut, cutting him off and freeing herself from his grasp. Once she was free she started up the stairs but was cut short by another explosion. This one was bigger and knocked her down off her feet, throwing her off the stairs. She landed on her back and the wind was knocked out of her. Her vision cut off for a moment then slowly came back, blurry without her glasses. There was an incessant ringing in her ears and it took her a moment to realize what happened. When her eyes focused on the burning gymnasium her heart felt like it had been crushed into a million pieces.
"Tadashi!" She let out the most blood curdling shriek as the realization set it, the sound of sirens whining in the distance as help came all too late.
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