Hiro never trusted adults. They smelt like hand sanitizer all the time, they were hard to understand, paradoxical and often more than not, hurtful, both physically and emotionally.
They smiled a lot at him and always used sweet voices to tell him things. You're doing fine. It'll be okay. It won't hurt. This will only take a while. They were all lies. But Hiro wasn't stupid. He knew how to discern lies from truth. One just had to swing the opposite direction to get a precursor of what lay ahead.
He even lied to himself once in a while. They helped him to cope and sometimes they were even encouraging on the days he felt too sore to get up.
Today was one of those days. He woke up feeling sore again. It was nothing new, and he simply lay limply on the ground, slowly processing everything. Something felt out of the ordinary. No, he should be looking at the white, pristine walls that smelt like sanitizer. But he found himself staring into the brightness of the sky, and breathing in what smelt like grass and dirt. He closed his eyes again because the sun's glare was too disconcerting and it hurt his head. Then he heard two voices conversing with each other. One masculine and one feminine.
Masculine and feminine.
Masculine and feminine.
He repeated them quietly in his head, because he could not remember how to use his voice.
"When will he wake up?" said the masculine voice. He sounded very impatient, like he wanted to hurry off to somewhere. Hiro had never been in a hurry before. There was nothing to rush away to, because it was dangerous outside. That was perhaps the greatest mystery to him. He had never been "outside" before. He wasn't sure if the compound outside the tower was counted, because it was all fenced up. He vaguely remembered being taken onto an aircraft to some place, but there was no concrete thought or feeling he could latch onto to bring back the memory.
"The sedative should wear off soon. It's been almost one day." Replied the feminine voice. She sounded calmer and it reminded him of the nurses back in the white room.
One day? Had he been asleep for one day? Hiro couldn't remember. The sun was burning onto his skin and he felt dizzy. The pounding at the back of his head only meant that a level eight headache was approaching. Level eight because it was going to be intense but still bearable if he clenched his teeth.
Somewhere in the back of his head Hiro remembered that he liked the number eight. There were ten numbers in the perfect scale. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten.
But there was something special about eight. Eight was a good number, because it was far away from the bottom, but it wasn't an extremity either. It meant that he wasn't special enough. He didn't like to be special; they called him the "unique test subject", all the time and ran all sorts of tubes and needles into his body. It always burned and made him feel like regurgitating out everything he had eaten.
The voices started speaking again and Hiro wondered seriously for a moment if he was going crazy.
Masculine and… feminine.
Masculine and feminine.
Then he recalled that he heard them before. He wasn't going crazy.
"Has he been… abused?" the feminine voice questioned.
"I checked him the previous night. I couldn't find any traces, but we don't know what these people can do with technology. For all we know he's covered in puncture marks that we can't even see."
He felt someone run a hand through his hair.
"Poor kid. I can't imagine what he's been through."
It was the first time in a long while since Hiro had ever associated human contact with comfort.
Tadashi peered through the blinds of the shack that served as their temporary hideout. The walls were nearly in sight- they could cross the border by tomorrow if the weather conditions allowed it. For now, he could only sit on the worn out couch and watch the droplets of acrid rain splatter onto the muddy ground. It was dangerous around here, with congregations of the infected running amok. But the attacks were sparse and they could usually be anticipated.
Within the confinements, the population of infected were usually kept in check to a certain degree. A large majority of the ghouls only survived up to the runner stage. But beyond the border, there was no law or control. There were those things of varying stages and infection and to top it off, bands of rogues dominated the plains beyond the borders. What was more dangerous than the infected? An insane, power-hungry rogue. Run-ins with them were near impossible to avoid.
"Are you going to take it?"
Tomago was holding out a belt of ammunition towards him. She was soaked and her wet hair clung limply onto her face. She shook the belt underneath his face once more, and he snatched it from her, slinging it over his shoulder.
"So much for manners," she scoffed, slightly annoyed, as she removed her jacket and hung it on the couch to dry.
"You're one to talk." He muttered distractedly.
"Don't pull a Krei on me." She huffed, leaning against a peeling wall. "I braved the weather out there to get ammo, you know."
Tadashi grunted in response.
Her eyes trailed towards the boy, who was still lying limply on the couch. "He woke up a couple of times yesterday when we were out in the field. He doesn't talk much though. Could barely get a word out of him."
"Can't blame him. Imagine if you woke up in a completely unfamiliar setting with two random people staring down at you. I know I would be fazed."
"Tadashi," Tomago called out unthinkingly. He turned around in surprise, but she was staring at the ceiling, caught up in her own reverie. "What is this APEX that Krei was talking about?"
"It's an organization. You could say it's like a modified version of the Fireflies. These people actually have the ability to get things done."
"Are you part of them?"
"In a way. I was approached by Callaghan to design prototypes for a type of tech that could aid molecular reconstruction."
"The SFIT professor?!" Tomago stared at Tadashi in disbelief. "But didn't he… Wasn't he caught in that fire during the outbreak?"
"Well, surprise. He's alive. Don't look so shocked Tomago, weird shit happens all the time here. My latest project was born because of it."
"Baymax?"
"Yeah. At first I thought he was the one funding the project, but I found out the funding came from another bigger organization, which was the APEX. I don't usually deal with fat cats because they're hard to wash off once you get them on your hands. But Callaghan brought me their blueprints and… impressive is an understatement. They've got tech, they've got money and they've got people. They're at the closest point that anyone has ever gotten to finding a cure."
"So you're building Baymax for them?" Tomago moved towards Tadashi and watched the rain.
"Not exactly the priority. I was trying to gather intel for them to infiltrate FEDRA's system. The entire perimeter around the walls are rigged and I needed time to figure them out. My last run was for that purpose. The scavenge was just a cover up."
"Is Krei going to sell the chip to the APEX?"
"Not unless he can upgrade it. The APEX can easily obtain the blueprints of my current prototype if they really wanted to. But I won't put it past Krei to do that if we fail. He'll need something worth just as much to recuperate the loss and the upgraded chip is the perfect solution."
"The APEX must be full of nice people then," Tomago said sarcastically. "It almost seems like they wanted you dead when Krei was talking about them."
"Maybe they do. Maybe delivering the kid to the Fireflies' lab is all it takes to get a cure and maybe they want to be the only ones who get there. They're already so close. It's fucked up, but that's the way the world works. Pride above everything else."
Tomago nodded briefly and Tadashi found how she accepted such a twisted way of life so quickly rather amusing.
"So how does Hiro fit into all of this?"
The question caught him off guard and Tadashi fell silent. Except this time, it wasn't on purpose. It was a genuine, confounded silence that perturbed him. Krei had mentioned that Hiro wasn't the average immune, but what made him different? Did he possess some special antibody that the rest of them did not? And how did he even get his hands on Hiro in the first place? And what did they do to him that made him so afraid?
"Never mind, I shouldn't have ask-"
"No," Tadashi interrupted. "It's just that, I don't know. There's a lot that we don't know and we probably will never know. We're just disposable players in their big game."
"I don't want to go back."
Tomago and Tadashi watched the boy's tiny frame rock back and forth on the chair for what seemed like the hundredth time as he muttered the same phrase repeatedly. Both were unsure about what to do, or how to comfort the distraught child in front of them. How they would make it across the wall and past the border was beyond Tadashi's wildest imagination.
Everything went wrong the minute he opened his eyes. He tried to run, and Tomago had to grab him by the waist just to stop him from trying to escape or hurt himself. The boy was obviously terrified. He had cried out in some garbled language with a hoarse voice- Japanese? It had the distinct twang to it that Tadashi heard many times in his childhood. His father was a Japanese and he had attained a certain native proficiency of the language. Although it was too fast and muddled for Tadashi to properly understand what the boy was trying to say, he did pick up some words like "aunt" and "cat".
But the moment Tomago relaxed her hold, Hiro lashed out with ferocity that bewildered even Tadashi. He kicked out high and hard, catching Tomago directly in the ribs. She let go of him immediately and he dashed towards the couch, burying his face in the upholstery of the couch.
"He's just scared." Tomago said, as she rubbed the ointment over her bruised abdomen. She winced when she accidentally pressed too hard against it.
Tadashi frowned slightly. "I know."
The boy suddenly stopped, and looked uncertainly at the two adults.
"I don't want to go back."
But this time, it sounded like a definite statement.
Tadashi bent down beside the boy. "You don't have to if you don't want to. No one's going to make you go back there." Tadashi had little clue of wherever this place the boy was referring to. But the boy had barely spoken more than those six syllables and Tadashi would hang onto the slight thread of chance for conversation he had been offered by the boy's sudden clarity.
Something moved in the boy's face as he stared at Tadashi with intense deliberation. Tadashi could almost feel the gears in Hiro's head turning, carefully measuring the pros and cons.
"Did you own a cat before?" asked Tadashi. He could not fathom what prompted him to ask that question or its purpose.
But whatever it was, it seemed to work. An involuntary smile had flashed across Hiro's face at the mention of said cat.
"Mo-chi."
There was something soft and childlike in the way the boy mouthed the first syllable with a satisfying pop of his mouth. He repeated the word twice, and his smile grew brighter, revealing a perfect set of white teeth. He deserves that much at the very least, thought Tadashi. There was little left in the aftermath of the world that allowed moments like such. The cat must have been a fond, if not, distant memory.
"That was her name." He told Tadashi.
"Do you remember anything else?" Tomago probed softly, now squatting next to Tadashi.
Hiro sat upright and stared at Tomago, stopping abruptly. Then he suddenly shook his head, his big, hazel eyes devoid of expression. "Are you going to conduct a test on me?" He asked quietly, tucking his head down.
"Why would-" Tadashi began, but backed off as Tomago shook her head.
"Hiro," Tomago called out gently. "We don't have to talk about that if you don't want to." Tadashi knew she was trying to distract him. "Here, how about I tell you about myself instead? I know Krei said my name was Leiko, but you can call me Tomago."
She waited for him to look up, before she continued. "I used to do a lot of mechanic stuff when I was your age." Hiro remained silent. "Tadashi's a robotics engineer. He went to college with me."
"What's a college?" Asked Hiro softly.
"Just a place where a bunch of nerds like us congregate in." Hiro looked at her with genuine confusion, earning a smile from Tomago. "It's a school for higher education. You get to attend lectures and create stuff."
Hiro sat up. He felt like he could trust Tomago, but he didn't know. Everyone he knew always wanted something from him. Things he never knew he could offer but apparently could give. There was something thick and hard stuck in his throat and he knew he was going to cry. Crying was already bad enough. But to cry in front of complete strangers was just embarrassing.
"I'm sorry for hitting you." He felt afraid and guilty. "I didn't mean it. I really didn't mean it."
"No, don't be sorry." Tomago said, pausing for a few moments before she added with a dangerously low voice. "The people who made you feel like you need to act like that are the ones who should be sorry."
Hiro hesitated for a few moments before he nodded and slumped back into the couch.
Tomago had to leave the shack to compose herself.