(A/N) Well, you all wanted to see how Tadashi was doing. But first, I think we'll see what's happening with a few other members of our team.
Love Don't Die Easy
Chapter 7: Your Wound
GoGo didn't know about the others, but when she lay down on the hospital cot, she found she was too tired to sleep – too tired, heartsick, and angry. Even though she'd caught small snatches of sleep over the last few days, she felt like she hadn't slept since before Akuma Island. Heartsick for Hiro, Tadashi, and Rosie – that she'd had to walk into that lab and find Yokai defiling the woman Tadashi loved.
The only way she could stand to think about it was to consider Yokai and Tadashi as separate beings, because Yokai was not Tadashi. Tadashi wouldn't set Baymax on Hiro, and Tadashi would never do something so unthinkable to Rosie. Tadashi Hamada, whom she'd seen through many crushes, and had watched fall in love with Suri Avicenna – the boy who'd been her friend through her one and only boyfriend and who had stuck with her as she'd come to terms with the fact that she liked girls.
No. That man would never treat love so shamefully. Yokai was not him. Yokai was an enemy who wore the face of her best friend. Unlike the rest of her friends, she was not unfamiliar with having enemies. She knew how to fight, how to defend herself. She knew what it was like to have someone come at you with the intent of killing you, and more and more she found herself fearing that if none of the others proved able to do what might need to be done…that it would fall to her.
Honey Lemon, Wasabi, and Fred couldn't even be expected to kill a spider, let alone put a sword or a bullet through an actual person. Hiro might be able to kill, but to expect him to do it to his own brother…no. There was no way that was going to happen…no way she was going to let it happen. Ultimately, if they couldn't pull Tadashi back from the raging storm that was Yokai, she knew it would fall to her to put Yokai down for good – to kill the man who had been her best friend in order to save him from what he had become.
The more she thought about it, the more she found her thoughts drifting back to the look she'd seen on Rosie's face when they'd burst into the lab – the despair and horror that had filled her normally gentle blue eyes. She remembered the look in Tadashi's eyes back on the island for that brief moment he'd awoken to what he'd done – the knowledge that he'd hurt his own brother. She remembered the heartbreak on Ruby Krei's face as she held up the engagement ring that would forever remain just that. Even further back, she remembered when Rosie had come to see her after getting back from New Cairo – how she'd poured out her heart, telling her all of the things she'd felt for Tadashi now that she'd never be able to tell him herself.
Rosie's words had made her think about things she would've rather not, and with everything that was happening, those thoughts were beginning to creep up on her again. The way her heart had dropped into her stomach the day Tadashi had introduced her to Honey Lemon – less like the start of a good rollercoaster and more like the ground had been pulled out from under her feet. How she was never shy about her interests when it came to getting a girl between the sheets, but how she'd known it would be different with Honey Lemon if she ever chose to intrude on the boundaries of their friendship. How she and Tadashi had constantly teased each other about never making a move. How so many people had gone to their deaths with so much left unsaid. What would happen to her? Would she look death in the face and know she'd never told Honey-
"GoGo?" the other girl's gentle but worried voice suddenly intruded on her thoughts. "Are you awake?"
Rolling over on her cot, GoGo looked through the semi-darkness to see the blonde bane of her existence standing in the doorway. She knew that dawn couldn't be all that far off, but there was still some measure of darkness to hide in.
"Couldn't sleep either, huh?" she asked, slowly sitting up.
"Not so much, no," the chemist said, looking guilty as she entered the room. "I've been worried."
"About what?"
"About you," she said quietly as she came to her, fingers brushing lightly along the bandage that now covered her right shoulder. "Are you doing all right?"
"Doesn't hurt much," she said gruffly, attempting to brush it off. "It's pretty shallow…and Rosie got me patched up. You don't have to worry about me."
"But I do. I did. I was so…" she struggled to explain as she sat down beside her. "I really thought he was going to kill you, GoGo."
"Nah. If it was that easy, someone else would've got me a long time ago. I can handle myself. Really," she tried to reassure her, but the fear in the taller girl's eyes didn't seem to be easing up even a little bit.
"It isn't…that I don't believe you, GoGo," she said, beginning to reach a hand forward to touch her cheek before seeming to think better of it. Instead, her hand fell to rest on GoGo's knee. "It's just…it scared me. I don't know what I would do if you died. Wind up just like Rosie, I guess," she said, gripping her knee a little tighter.
"Honey…" GoGo murmured softly, feeling a tremor pass through her body at the sudden intensity of her grip. If Honey Lemon was saying what she thought she was saying…
"GoGo, I'm not- not looking for anything from you. I just…so much has happened…I want to tell you the truth. You don't have to do anything with it. I just want you to know how I feel…in case we don't come through this."
GoGo didn't give her a chance to finish. Before she could talk herself out of it or lose her nerve, she closed the already minimal distance between them and pressed her lips firmly against Honey Lemon's.
The other girl gasped faintly into the kiss, but she didn't pull back. GoGo felt her tremble as she gripped her shoulders tightly. Honey Lemon's grip also tightened noticeably as her hand moved from her knee to her inner thigh. As much as she ached to deepen the kiss, she was also content to stay right here in this moment forever, feeling the softness of Honey Lemon's lips against hers.
Is this real? Can this really be happening to me?
When the pair finally separated for air, they both just sat where they were, eyes closed, enjoying the lingering taste. When GoGo finally opened her eyes, it was to the sight of Honey Lemon's enraptured face.
"What…what was that…you were saying?" she somehow got herself to ask, reaching a hand up to trace her bottom lip with her thumb. When Honey's eyes finally blinked open, there was an intoxicated smile on her face.
"I…I…"
GoGo might have kissed her again had Wasabi not chosen that exact moment to stick his head in the door.
"GoGo, you-"
The two young women immediately leapt apart at the sound of his voice, jerking to opposite ends of the cot.
"Wasabi," GoGo ground out in frustration.
"Oh, no," Wasabi started, a look of understanding immediately spreading across his face. "Oh, no, no, no, no! Don't tell me it finally happened! It finally happened and I just interrupted the friggin' moment. Shoot!" he growled, banging his head lightly against the doorframe. "Look, guys, under any other circumstances, I'd shut the door and keep walking, but…Hiro and Rosie have got something. They need all of us. It's time to go to work."
XxX
The first thing Hiro had realized upon gathering enough of his composure to leave Tadashi's lab was that they needed to move somewhere safer. The video files had shown him that, at the very least, Callaghan had their home and several places on the SFIT campus bugged. Given how closely Tadashi and Rosie had worked, there were likely places in the med tech building that were also bugged. It wasn't safe for them to stay there.
Fred had guaranteed it was impossible for the mansion to be bugged, so they'd gathered up their gear and what was left of Baymax and retreated there.
In spite of the fact that Fred's dad had state of the art lab equipment, Hiro would have much rather been working in his and Tadashi's garage space. Working there was comforting to him and it made him feel closer to Tadashi. But now that he knew that Callaghan had violated that space, there was no way he was going to give their former mentor anything else to use against them. So here he was, hard at work in the Lee lab.
The files Tadashi had sent to Rosie were pretty much a godsend. It had probably taken Tadashi several months to complete Baymax's coding and if all of that had really been lost, it would have taken that same amount of time to recreate and by then, Callaghan and Yokai could have destroyed every last atom that had been Krei Tech, and themselves along with it. But with this near miraculous recovery, all Hiro really needed to do was combine the base programming with a few things recovered from his own subroutines.
If he left the original coding exactly as it was, Callaghan could just as easily force Tadashi to erase it again. So he was recalibrating the backdoor codes in order to protect Baymax. More than this, though, he was carefully recovering stored memory from his subroutines. Without that, Baymax wouldn't have Tadashi's current scans, and he wouldn't remember any of them. Something about that thought just made Hiro sick to his stomach, so he was being careful not to lose even one line of coding.
"Hiro?" he vaguely heard Rosie's voice from somewhere behind him. "How's it coming?"
"Fine," he grunted, not taking his attention away from the holo screen.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, her voice coming from just behind him now. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt her fingers brush faintly against the bandages that now adorned his upper arms. Rosie's patch job from what he'd unwittingly done to himself that morning.
"Fine," was his only response, and still he didn't look at her.
"Cass made okonomiyaki. I brought you some…in case you were hungry," she said. He didn't look up when he heard the sound of a plate being set down on the table.
"Maybe later," he mumbled.
"I hope you know I have your aunt's full permission to force feed you if necessary. You aren't going back out there without something in your stomach."
"Yeah, great," he said. It was an empty threat and they all knew it. No one could force him to do anything right now.
He heard Rosie sigh, seeing her lean against the table out of the corner of his eye.
"So what's the plan exactly?"
"Get Baymax up and running. He'll be able to find Tadashi and Callaghan. When we find them, we'll stop him," he answered succinctly.
"And what exactly does that entail, Hiro? Are you going to set Baymax on Callaghan like Yokai did to you?"
"No," he said firmly, finally turning to look at her. "He's turned my microbots into something they were never supposed to be. He's already corrupted Baymax once. I'm not gonna let him do it again. I'm not gonna let something Tadashi put his heart and soul into be twisted into a weapon. I just need him to find Callaghan. I'll handle the rest on my own."
"So…what? You're going to kill him?" she asked, worry evident in her eyes.
"Yes," he answered straight up. No dodging the issue, no sideways language. Just a simple, pure absolute. Yes. He was going to kill Robert Callaghan for what he'd done to Tadashi.
"Hiro, this…this isn't what Tadashi would want."
"I think he might just feel differently if we could ask him now. Callaghan hurt my brother. He needs to pay for what he's done and I mean to make him."
"Hiro, please. Once you cross that line, there's no going back," she pleaded with him, reaching forward to grip his hand. He angrily yanked his arm away in response.
"How would you know?"
Again, Rosie sighed heavily. "Don't think I haven't seen death, Hiro Hamada. I've seen the absolute worst of humanity. There are things you don't know about me…about why I'm a doctor. There are things I wish you didn't have to know, but I also know we can't protect you forever."
"No. There are things you don't know, Rosie. You don't know what Callaghan did to him," he ground out angrily as he turned back to the holo screen.
"No, I don't. Maybe you ought to show me," she suggested. He'd told them about the flash drive, but he hadn't let anyone see it.
Hiro's fingers froze just above the keyboard, his shoulders stiffening as he struggled to choke back the hatred the thought of those files gave birth to. "I shouldn't. He wouldn't want you to see it," he choked out. She would feel just as guilty as he did, and he didn't want this hideous bile spreading beyond his own soul. He didn't want to hurt what Tadashi had loved.
"He wouldn't have wanted you to see it either. Please let me see it. I know all you can do is feel helpless anger at what you saw, but I might actually be able to figure out a way to start helping him. If we're going to do that, I need to know what we're dealing with."
"Fine!" Hiro finally snapped, yanking the flash drive from his pocket and thrusting it into her outstretched hand. "But don't say I didn't warn you. For all your talk, you might just be on my side once you've seen it."
XxX
"Where am I?"
"Nowhere. You don't exist."
He isn't sure how many times this exchange has happened. Up until now, he hasn't been able to disprove the other voice. There is nothing around him – nothing but darkness and silence – nonbeing. And yet…that voice exists. It calls to him from somewhere beyond himself. More than this, his voice exists. He is able to ask.
Cogito ergo sum.
"That isn't true," he finally challenges the other voice. It sounds like him, but it's also not him at the same time. "If I didn't exist, you wouldn't need to tell me I don't."
"Shut up."
"No. Tell me what's going on!"
"Shut up. Shut up! I don't want to hear this!"
"Just tell me what's happening!"
"Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" the other voice screams at him. Lines of searing red anger shoot through his void, piercing him with the hate of this other. "It's all your fault! You're the reason we're in pain! You shouldn't exist anymore! Why do you exist?"
"I don't know. You'll have to tell me. Where am I? Who am I?"
At this, the blackness instantly washes to white. The only black that remains is the man standing before him – a young man with dark hair, clothed in a long black coat. The man glares as he surveys whatever it is he sees.
"Who are you?"
"You ought to know me," the other man returns coldly. "I wear your face, after all."
At these words, he begins to realize he also inhabits a body. Looking down, he sees hands, wills himself to flex fingers. Then he reaches those fingers up to feel his face, feeling similar features to the ones he's looking at. However, when he realizes he doesn't have the other man's scars, something finally clicks in his brain.
"Yokai," he says quietly. It's the name his master gave him.
Wait? Master?
"That's right," Yokai returns, sneering at him as he begins to circle him. "Keep going."
"And I…I'm… my name…is…" he struggles for it, but it's just out of reach.
"Not quite. Keep trying," Yokai mocks, continuing to circle.
He has a name. Of course he does. He must! Only…what is it?
"Dammit," he hisses, fingers rubbing at his temples in frustration. Yokai laughs.
"You don't know, do you. All you've got left is me. Yokai."
"That's not true!" he snaps at the other man. "It can't be," his voice trails off, despair welling up in his heart. Is this really all that's left?
"It's not so bad. After all, where would you be without me? We survived because of me," Yokai growls.
"Survive…survived what?"
Suddenly coming to a stop, Yokai slowly shakes his head, not looking at him as he does. "No. You don't want to know that."
"What? Happened?" he repeats slowly, taking a step in Yokai's direction.
Yokai's eyes narrow as he glares at him out of the corner of his eye. "It should have destroyed you. Why didn't it destroy you? Why are you still here?! I don't want those terrible memories!" he snarls, clutching at his head in agony. "Why won't you just DIE?!"
Suddenly his heart is awash in the anguish pouring forth from the other man. The white space vanishes and he's assaulted by memories of pain. Agony in every atom of his being…pain searing his heart and mind. He remembers fire pouring over him like a boiling stream of lava. It consumes everything he is – and yet he's somehow still alive.
"WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE?!" Yokai shrieks. His voice is everywhere, boring into his brain, clawing at his raw, bleeding soul – and he has no answer, no way to make this utter misery end.
Why am I still alive?
"Nii-chan?"
Another voice – not the tormented raging of his other self, but something dear and precious. He reaches desperately for that voice, struggling through Hell in his attempt to grasp it.
A young boy – a kid with the same hair and eyes Yokai has. Tears pour down his face as he reaches out a hand.
"Nii-chan? Ta_shi? Where are you? Tada_!"
He needs me.
That's the answer. That's why he is still alive. He can't die – not so long as this boy needs him. This suffering would have killed anyone else, but he can't die yet.
Hiro.
"Hiro!" he cries out, but no matter what he does, he can't reach the boy.
"No!" Yokai's suddenly snarling in his head. "You can't save him. He will die because of you! You are poison! Everything you love turns to ash!"
Then the surface he's standing on vanishes and he's falling, falling through smoke and fire and pain. He can hear Hiro screaming.
"Ta_shi! _dashi!"
When the falling finally stops, it's a different voice calling out. Hiro's still screaming, but it's with a different voice. There's still smoke, fire, and pain, but now he's trapped. His leg is caught and he can't get out and he's afraid. What happened?
"Mom!" he cries out in a different voice – younger, unchanged. "Mom!"
"Tada_," a weak voice calls out to him. He looks forward to see his mother reaching back to him. Two of her fingers are broken and several trickles of blood are running down her face. When he looks to where his father should be, all he can see is broken glass and twisted metal. There's a half-severed hand hanging from what used to be the driver's seat of their car. Worse still, everything is painted red with blood. He feels bile gathering in his stomach. He opens his mouth to scream – but Mom gently rests her hand on his cheek, guiding his face away from the horrific sight.
"Don't look, honey. Don't look," she soothes.
"Mom…Tou-san," he sobs. He struggles to free his leg, but he can't do it.
"It's all right. Everything's going to be all right," she insists, even though they both know it's not. "Ta_shi, can you move?"
"I can't," he sobs. "My leg's stuck."
Nodding vaguely, his mom starts to push at the jagged bar that's pinning his leg to the seat. It shouldn't be possible for her to move it when all she has to work with is her damaged right arm, but somehow the bar is moving by inches. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it occurs to him to snap open his seat belt.
Somewhere off to his right, he can hear his baby brother sobbing. When he looks toward him, he can see a small cut on his forehead, but other than that, he doesn't look like he's hurt. For once in his life, the three-year-old hadn't been trying to get out of his car seat. While Mom works to free his leg, he reaches over to undo the buckle on the car seat, slowly pulling Hiro into his arms.
"It's okay. You're okay," he lies for his baby brother, like their mom lied for him. He almost doesn't notice when she finally frees his leg.
"_dashi, baby, you have to get your brother out."
"What…what about you?"
"I'll be fine, honey. Just get Hiro out. Get yourselves out…and don't look back. Get as far from the car as you can."
"Mom-"
"Ta_shi, there's no time. You have to go now!"
"A-all right. I'll get Hiro out…but I'm gonna come back," he insists, moving forward to hug her. She puts her arm around him, Hiro briefly cradled between the two of them. She presses kisses to each of their foreheads.
"We love you. We love you both so much. Take care of each other. Go, now!" she groans in pain as she pushes him toward the door. It doesn't take much to push the mangled steel out of the way.
Clutching Hiro to his chest, he crawls from the car and begins to limp away. He doesn't look back until he's gotten Hiro out onto the wet grass next to the highway, and just as he does, both their car and the truck that collided with them go up in flames.
"NOO!" he screams, the force of the blast throwing him back several feet.
"Why didn't you go back?" Yokai demands as flames begin to engulf his world once again. "You could've saved her. You know you could have! Maybe the crash was your fault in the first place. If you hadn't been whining about Hiro trying to grab your game-"
"SHUT UP!" he screams, trying to block him out, trying to hold onto his baby brother, but even that isn't possible. Hiro's tiny form twists into smoke as the world begins to fall away again. He tries to scream, but he has no voice. Even if he did, who would hear him?
Help…please…someone help me.
"Ta_shi."
It isn't just Hiro this time. There's a new voice – a woman…someone familiar…warm, kind, and caring. A tender smile made bright by a pair of crystal blue eyes…the sun on lovely honey brown skin. Beauty. A desert rose.
Suri.
Hiro and Suri. The two people he loves most in all the world. Together their beloved voices call out to him, a balm for the fraying edges of his fragile soul, but still he can't quite hear his own name. He still has nothing to disprove Yokai…
…and at the thought of his demon heart, he suddenly hears Hiro and Suri screaming.
"Baymax…destroy!"
"TA_SHI!"
Hiro…lying on the floor…coughing up a spray of blood…lips forming the words…
"N…Nii-chan."
Suri…pinned down…tears streaming down her face as Yokai tears her clothing from her body. He can't help but feel how warm she is against him.
"_dashi…please…don't do this."
NOOOO! his heart cries out in anguish.
"Yes," Yokai's taunting voice is in his ear again. "You did this. You hurt them. You will be the death of them."
"No!" he sobs, wishing he could just tear his heart from his chest. "No, this can't happen!"
"It already has. You can't stop it. You're a monster!"
He sees them die – over and over again – and he dies with them, his soul crushed a thousand times over.
Hiro enters the building instead of him, disappearing in a wall of fire. Hiro's the one trapped in the car instead of Mom. He's not in time to the bot fight and Yama's men leave his brother in the alley for him to find, completely broken. His battered body lying on the concrete – dead by Baymax's hand – on his order.
Suri's the one trapped in the building instead of Callaghan and he can't get to her. She's working in the New Cairo trauma center and insurrectionists burst in, gunning her down before she even has time to scream. She lies broken in his ruined lab, not quite dead, but something in her soul murdered – her clothing in tatters and her inner thighs slicked with blood.
He can't bear it. Every new vision is like bleeding out, but he still doesn't die. He just goes on living, goes on suffering, unable to die.
"Wouldn't they be so much better off if you were dead?" Yokai suggests callously. "As long as you live, they will be in pain. Isn't it better to just let them move on? They don't need you."
He doesn't know if he believes it or not. He feels it's true, but if it is, then why is he still here? That question is all he has as he burns alone in the dark.
Why am I still alive?
"Wake up, Yokai," his master said as he entered his cell.
Yokai blinked several times as he sat up on his cot, easily shaking off sleep. Already the horrors of his night terrors were fading away. He was aware he carried Hell behind his eyes when he slept, but that meant nothing to him when he was awake. He meant nothing to him. Now he was Callaghan's.
"Functioning at full capacity?" his master asked him.
"Yes, sir," he responded as he quickly got to his feet, standing at attention.
"Good. Everything's prepared. Today's the day. I want you combat ready in ten minutes."
"Understood."
XxX
After working through the night, Hiro had finally finished all the necessary computations to get Baymax up and running. There was a moment before attempting reactivation that he'd considered not telling the others and just going it alone, but then Rosie had reentered the lab and he'd known by the sight of her that none of them could do this alone. The young surgeon's face was pale and tear-stained and her hands were shaking badly.
"Is…is Baymax ready yet?"
"Yeah," Hiro answered, voice a little less venomous than it had been the previous night. "You saw it?"
"Yes."
"You saw what he did?"
"I did."
"You saw what that monster did to Tadashi…and are you upset or aren't you?" he demanded quietly, voice possessed of a sort of controlled anger.
"Of course I am. It…it's awful. It isn't any wonder Baymax wasn't able to diagnose it. We'd never even imagined a scenario like this. We'd talked about…creating a program specifically to assist with combat veterans, but this…it's just unthinkable," she said, running a hand through her loose brown curls.
"Is there any way of helping him?" Hiro asked as he entered the reprogrammed chip into Baymax's storage unit.
"Yes…but it won't be easy. Much of it will depend on him…and whether or not he wants to come back from this."
"And after seeing all that…do you still not want to kill Robert Callaghan?" he asked as he slowly looked up at her.
Rosie stared at him several moments, sighing heavily before answering. "Hiro…the Hippocratic Oath not withstanding, I promised myself a long time ago I would never do that. Maybe some people do deserve to die, but I'm not the one with the power to make that choice."
"Why?" Hiro demanded quietly, voice threaded with latent rage. "I thought you loved Tadashi, Rosie. Why wouldn't you want to make the man who did this to him suffer?"
"Don't do that, Hiro. Don't make this about my feelings for Tadashi. That's no different from what Callaghan did to Ruby Krei."
"So what?" he snapped as he turned away from her. "Maybe I'm not any different from him. Maybe I need to be like him to give him what he deserves."
"You don't really believe that," she said calmly. "I know you want to believe that of yourself, but you don't. Not really."
"How would you know?" he snarled, repeating his question from earlier. "How could you know anything about me?!"
"I know because I felt that way when I was your age. I know exactly how all that pain and anger feels. You see…my dad was a soldier. He fought in the Raqi War. He was a good man, and he was killed in cold blood. For the longest time, I wanted to make his killers pay. I was filled with rage and hurt and hate. I thought I'd die with all that hate in my veins, but then something happened for me…and I'm hoping it happens for you, too," she explained as she moved toward him. When she placed a hand on his shoulder, he slowly shook his head.
"No," he whispered, not just to disprove her, but to force back the way her words were resonating with him. In fact, they echoed almost exactly what he'd felt in Tadashi's lab, nearly choking on his own hate. If he was going to see this through to the end, he couldn't let go of this anger yet.
"Hiro…do you hate Robert Callaghan more than you love Tadashi?"
Those words really did cause something to begin to splinter inside of him. Almost afraid to let go of his anger, he pulled himself away from Rosie and moved back to the storage unit, grinding out a pained, "Ow!" without responding to the doctor's question.
Baymax immediately deployed from the storage unit, quickly re-inflating. When he stepped from the unit, he glanced between Hiro and Suri for a moment before waving at Hiro.
"Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion."
Hiro smiled bitterly as he looked the robot over. He was glad to have him back, but there was also a small part of him that was afraid he would never really be able to unsee the berserker bot bearing down on him with the intent to kill him.
"Yeah, Baymax, we know that part."
"Hiro," the nurse bot began slowly. "If my memory checks are valid…it seems my healthcare protocols have been violated. You have sustained a very severe injury to your ribcage."
"Yeah, but it's all right. Rosie patched me up," he said.
"Yes, the wound has been properly treated. With proper care, there is no reason you should not make a full recovery."
"Heh, sure," Hiro said as he moved to retrieve Baymax's helmet from the pile of armor that was haphazardly stacked against the lab wall. He wasn't sure how much 'proper care' his wounds would be receiving.
"You have also been injured," Baymax commented calmly as he turned his attention to Rosie. "You have a puncture wound in your lower left torso. There are also severe contusions on your wrists and abrasions on your-"
"I know," she interrupted before he could finish.
"The abrasions have not been properly treated. There is already mild infection. I would suggest an antibiotic," Baymax said as he began to move toward her.
"Maybe later, Baymax," she said, smiling at the nurse bot as she took a step back. She didn't want Hiro to know where those injuries were. "I think Hiro wants you right now."
"Here," the young roboticist started as he dragged his chair over to the nurse bot, hopping up on it to place the scanner on his head. "It was damaged during the fight. Is it working?"
"Enhanced scanner working at maximum capacity," Baymax answered after a moment.
"Good. I need you to find Tadashi. If we find him, we can find Callaghan," he explained as he began to help Baymax back into the armor.
"I do not understand, Hiro. The treatment appeared to be working before, but now your mood seems to be wildly unstable."
"Ain't that the understatement of the freakin' year," Hiro growled, continuing to snap the pieces of armor back into place.
"I realize that because Tadashi is not dead, it is unnecessary to grieve for him, but it does not change the fact that you have suffered an emotional hurt. What will apprehending Professor Callaghan do for that hurt?"
"Not a damn thing!" Hiro snapped, working feverishly to finish putting the armor on. "I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing it for Tadashi. And I'm not gonna 'apprehend' Callaghan. I'm gonna kill him."
"Hiro, my programming prevents me from-"
"I know! I get that. I won't make you. You just need to find them. I'll do the rest myself. He needs to be punished for what he did to Tadashi. I don't expect anyone else to get their hands dirty. I can do this alone," he insisted, moving back toward the wall to retrieve Baymax's chest plate
"This is not what Tadashi would-"
"Tadashi's gone!" Hiro finally screamed, slamming the chest plate back against the wall. "Tadashi…Callaghan destroyed him. I'm not even sure if we can get him back. But if doing that means sacrificing everything else that I am, then I'll do it. I have to."
"Tadashi is here," Baymax said simply.
"No," Hiro said, voice dropping into a whisper as his hands curled into fists against the wall. "He's not here." Callaghan had twisted him into something just as dark and horrifying as he'd become – and that was Hiro's fault. It was his fault Tadashi wasn't here.
"Tadashi is here," Baymax repeated. Then Hiro heard another voice entirely.
"This is Tadashi Hamada, and this is the first test of my robotics project."
Slowly turning to face the other two, Hiro saw that a video file had begun to play on Baymax's chest – a video of Tadashi going through several activation tests with the nurse bot. As he moved slowly back toward Baymax, he could feel tears burning fiercely just behind his eyes.
With every moment he watched, he remembered all the life and love Tadashi had always carried with him – the bright soul that Callaghan and Yokai had stolen from him – the man that wanted nothing more than to help others. With every word, Hiro found Rosie's words coming back to him more and more.
Do you hate Robert Callaghan more than you love Tadashi?
No. The answer to that question was no. The brother he loved couldn't be saved with anger and hatred. The only way to bring Tadashi back was with love.
"That's all for now. I am satisfied with my care," his brother finally finished before the feed cut out. For several moments, the three just stood in silence, two with wet eyes and one with eyes unable to produce tears, but no less attuned to the emotion of the moment.
"Thanks, Baymax," Hiro said quietly, reaching out to lay a hand on the healthcare bot's chest. When he looked toward Rosie, he saw that she had her hands over her mouth as tears poured down her face. "Rosie…I'm sorry. I won't forget what you said…but I'm not gonna promise I won't kill the guy. I just…the only thing that should matter right now is getting Tadashi back. Callaghan comes later."
"Thank you, Hiro," the young doctor said softly, moving in to join the little circle. Resting a hand beside his on Baymax's chest, she briefly wrapped her other arm around him. "That's all I can ask."
"There's the Hiro we know and love," Hiro suddenly heard Fred say. When he looked to the door, he saw the others all standing there, already suited up. Fred was grinning manically while Wasabi just smiled faintly. Honey Lemon wore a bright, beautiful smile on her face and when Hiro noticed that she was holding hands with GoGo, he couldn't help but notice the tiny grin hidden in the engineer's normally stoic expression.
"You guys ready to roll?" he asked them.
"Just say the word, captain," Wasabi said with a nod.
"Right. We're gonna get Tadashi back this time."
…or I'm gonna die trying.
XxX
(A/N) And now comes the battle for Krei Tech!