Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The call was for an EVO attack, but when they got there it turned out there was no EVO. Just a kid in a purple suit with a look in his eye that was ready to kill.

Rex had seen that look before. “Hey kid, you OK?” he called out as he landed on the dark pier. He thought he was being ignored for a minute, but the kid finally huffed a sigh.

“He got away,” the kid said. He was staring out into the blackness of the ocean at night.

“Who got away?” This time he was being ignored. The kid turned from his spot on the pier and marched back toward the docks, pointedly ignoring the newcomer. Rex jogged to catch up, calling “wait up! What happened here? What’s your name?”

At the docks, a large robot decked out in red stood passively waiting. It turned at the sound of Rex’s voice.

“I am Baymax.”

Rex blinked up at it. It’s voice was surprisingly soothing for such an intimidating looking machine. “Wasn’t talking to you,” Rex said, “but hi anyways. I’m Rex.”

“Hello,” Baymax responded. A moment later the purple helmet of the kid’s suit appeared over the robot’s shoulder.

“Hey kid,” Rex started, but was interrupted before he could even finish his thought.

“Baymax,” the kid said loudly, authoritatively, “take us home.”

“No, wait,” Rex tried again, but it was too late. The robot shot up into the air in a millisecond, only visible in the dark by the light of his propulsion jets. Rex sighed, then braced himself as the nanites in his body shifted and changed until they formed his trusty turbine wings. He shot up into the air after them.

“Hey!” Rex yelled into the sky, gaining on the kid and his robot, but the wind was against him and they couldn’t hear. He pushed himself faster, until he was almost close enough to touch them. Sensing something there, the kid looked back, and his tired eyes widened in shock.

“How are you doing that?” he called back to Rex. His eyes slid from Rex’s face to the wings behind him, trying to comprehend.

“Nanites!” Rex called back. He couldn’t help the grin.

“You’re an EVO?”

“And I can cure EVOs too. Pull over so we can talk.”

They ended up resting on the top of the golden gate bridge, the nearby city lighting up their perch. As the kid climbed down off of his robot, Rex called his nanites back to their original state. He stood with a hand on his hip, the kid pulling off his helmet to look up at him in awe.

“The name’s Rex,” Rex said, not for the first time that night.

“Hiro,” Hiro finally answered. “How can you control the mutation?”

The question caught Rex a little off guard. “Uh, I don’t know, I just always have. I talk to the nanites, and they do what I say.”

Hiro’s jaw dropped open, and he clutched the helmet to his chest a little tighter. “You can control nanites?”

Rex scratched his scalp behind his goggles strap. “Well, yeah,” he started, wanting to steer the conversation towards whatever incident had alerted Providence in the first place, “but that’s-“

“You can help me take out Callaghan!” Hiro interrupted. He was smiling, but his eyes had turned dangerous again.

Rex didn’t like that look. He furrowed his brows. “Who’s Callaghan?”

Chapter Text

Hiro had turned away from Rex to tell his story, of how his brother died, and how Callaghan was responsible. He sat on the edge of the structure, his feet dangling down over the traffic far below. From behind he looked so small, and lost. Rex sat down next to him.

Up close, Rex could see Hiro’s eyes had grown hard again. 

“So your plan is what?” Rex asked gently.”To take this guy out? You mean kill him? Is that what your brother would want?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Hiro tensed up, eyes narrowing. “Tadashi isn’t here anymore,” he said. “And it’s Callaghan’s fault.”

Rex tried again. “And killing him isn’t going to make you hurt any less than you do right now.”

“How would you know,” Hiro spat. He stood up quickly and marched back to Baymax, who had stood silently observing the pair.

Rex jumped up after him. “Hiro, wait,” he said, but Hiro was ignoring him again. He grabbed his helmet from the ground and popped it back into place, then climbed back onto Baymax’s back.

“I thought you could help,” he said from the robot’s shoulder.

“I can help. Providence, we can-”

“This isn’t some EVO monster,” Hiro said. “What does Providence care about Callaghan?” He paused to stare up into the dark sky, then said, “don’t follow me,” and shot off again.

A buzz sounded in Rex’s ear. “Rex, are you OK? Where’s the EVO?”

It was Holiday. Rex sighed and pressed his earpiece to respond back. “No EVO,” he said. “It’s just a kid.”

“But the EVO signature-”

“It’s a long story, doc, but somehow he managed to turn dormant nanites into little robots-”

“Hiro Hamada,” Holiday interrupted.

Rex was taken aback. “What?”

“I know who you’re talking about. That’s Hiro Hamada. He invented cross nanite robotics technology earlier this year for a school project or something. It would have opened doors to nanite research if his nanobots hadn’t all been destroyed in an accident.”

“That’s the thing, doc,” Rex said. “They weren’t destroyed. They were stolen, by some guy, Professor Callaghan. He set the fire that everyone thought destroyed the bots. It also killed Hiro’s brother.”

Rex could hear Holiday gasp over the comm. “Oh no.”

“And now he wants revenge. In the worst way.”

“That poor kid,” Holiday responded. “We can’t let him kill anyone.”

The nanites in Rex’s body started to shift and reform again. “Don’t worry,” he said into the comm as his turbine wings reappeared, “I don’t plan to let that happen. Do you know where Hiro lives?”

“I can look it up,” Holiday said hesitantly, “but Rex - we’re still tracking the nanobots here at central. You could just go take this guy out now.”

“I’m not going to beat up Hiro’s arch enemy and then go tell him. That would be worse. I’m gonna try to talk some sense into him first.”

It was at least ten minutes later when Rex found Hiro again, standing in a makeshift workshop in what Holiday insisted was his garage. He wasn’t wearing his purple suit anymore, and he wasn’t alone. Four college-aged adults, all dressed in differently colored outfits, turned to watch Rex as he landed, called his nanites back to their original state, and awkwardly stood outside the garage.

“Uh,” he said, “Hiro?”

Hiro looked up at him, then wiped his eyes with his wrist. He’d obviously been crying. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m... sorry.”

Rex entered the garage, glancing around. It was an impressive setup for someone so young. Red armor pieces were strewn about the floor, and the robot Rex assumed must be Baymax stood above them, now a plump white marshmallow.

“Who’s this?” one of the girls asked. She was shorter than him but somehow much more intimidating.

“I’m Rex. I ran into Hiro earlier, we had a chat.” He turned to look down at Hiro. “You OK?”

Hiro smiled softly. “I’m better,” he said. He breathed in deeply, then nodded almost to himself. “We still have to stop Callaghan,” he said, with a glance at his friends. “The right way.” The hard edge was gone from his eyes.

“But we have no idea where to find him,” someone else said. He was tall, the same height as Baymax without his red armor, and decked out in green. “He could be hiding anywhere.”

At that, Rex grinned. “Actually,” he said, “I think I can help out with that.”

Chapter Text

“What is going on in here?”

Hiro and the others jumped, and Rex turned to see a brown-haired, middle-aged woman standing in the entrance to the garage. She was obviously exhausted, enough to match the others, and clutched a cellphone up to her chest. “Can someone explain to me just what has been going on?”

“A-aunt Cass,” Hiro stuttered, before Baymax could answer. He didn’t move for a second, then quickly started shedding his purple gear, trying to hide the evidence on the floor. “U-uhh, nothing, we were just-”

The woman, his aunt, interrupted him. “You’ve been gone all day,” she said. “I was so worried. And now, you’re all….” She looked up at Baymax, then around at the group, and seemed to notice Rex for the first time. “What’s going on?” she asked again. “And what’s Baymax doing out here?”

“We can explain,” the tall one in green said, but then he hesitated, and looked down at Hiro, who was obviously scrambling for an excuse. So they haven’t told her, Rex thought. He still didn’t know the full story himself – Hiro hadn’t mentioned the rest of his team – but he knew enough to realize they needed a cover.

“Ma’am,” Rex stepped in, and held his hand up for her to shake. She didn’t, and he didn’t blame her. “My name is Rex, and I’m with Providence. We got called in earlier this evening for an EVO attack in the city, and your kids,” he guessed, “happened to be on the scene.”

“Y-yeah,” the other guy said, catching on to the fake story. His head was popping out of what Rex could see was a monster suit, which Rex hadn’t bothered to question yet. “An EVO attack.”

“I didn’t see anything on the news…” Cass responded, uncertain.

“It, uh, was a secret,” Rex tried. “Very hush-hush. We kept the media away. I’m… sorry for the inconvenience.”

Cass stared at him for a moment, then turned to Hiro and quickly pulled him into a hug. “I was so worried,” she said again, into his hair. “Why didn’t you call, or, or something?”

“I’m sorry,” was all Hiro said. He seemed to have slumped into his aunt’s embrace, and Rex breathed a sigh of relief. The kid had obviously been in a dark place earlier, ready to commit murder. Rex wasn’t sure what had happened in the meantime, but it must have been enough to calm him down, change his mind. Surrounded by a loving family now, Rex was no longer worried.

While Cass was distracted, the other kids started shedding their gear as well. She looked up once the guy in green pulled his chest plate up off a wool sweater, then glanced between the four of them. “Wait,” she said, and held Hiro back at arm’s length to look down at him as well. He’d missed his magnetic shin pads in his scramble to rid himself of his outfit. “What are you all wearing?”

“Uh,” said the girl in the pink dress. She’d removed the orange chest plate and held it, along with her helmet, behind her back.

“School projects,” the other girl spoke up. Her yellow armor had been set beside Baymax’s red on the floor, and her jumpsuit zipped down to reveal the white shirt she wore beneath it. “That’s what Hiro was helping us out with earlier, and we were testing them out earlier when the EVO attacked.”

Cass eyed the red pieces of armor on the floor. Even if she hadn’t seen them on Baymax before, which Rex would bet she hadn’t, it was obvious who that armor belonged to. “You’re using… Baymax in your school projects?” she asked Hiro, who she still held firmly by the shoulders.

Hiro glanced sideways. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “Baymax was just sitting there, and I… wanted to put him to good use.”

Rex could tell by the look that Cass wasn’t convinced, but she didn’t ask any further questions. “OK,” she said. “Well, what about food? It’s midnight – have you all eaten?”

The four looked between each other now, not sure what to say. They still needed to catch Callaghan, and with Rex using Providence to track his nanobots, they might finally have the upper hand. Rex could tell what they were thinking, when, one by one, they all shot him a look. They wanted to catch Callaghan tonight, to get this over with as soon as they could. Hiro did too, by the way he was staring at Rex around his aunt.

Rex cleared his throat. “Uh, we, uh might need to these kids a bit longer, if that’s OK, for questioning-”

“No,” Cass interrupted. “It’s not OK. It’s midnight, and my nephew needs to sleep.”

Baymax chirped up helpfully. “Hiro is experiencing mild sleep deprivation,” it said.

Cass glanced up at the robot again, and it blinked at her. “Yes,” she agreed, then turned back to Rex. “And I’ve been sick with worry, and from the look of it, everyone else could do with a good night’s rest too. I’m sorry,” she quickly added, before Rex could counter her. “You can come back in the morning if you need to.”

She started to lead Hiro out of the garage, Baymax following closely behind and Hiro shot Rex a wide-eyed look. There was nothing he could do, but Rex knew the woman was right. The kids were all tired from the events of the day, another fight at this hour would do them no good.

“In the morning, then,” Rex stared, meeting Hiro’s eyes. “We’ll finish this in the morning.”

Hiro watched him for a moment, and then nodded. He disappeared with his aunt and robot around the corner, leaving Rex alone with the four strangers.

After a moment, the shorter guy, who’d kicked off his monster costume, spoke. “I’m Fred, by the way,” he said, giving a half wave. He pointed at the taller guy, “Wasabi;” the tall girl, who quickly grabbed Rex’s hand to shake, “Honey Lemon;” and the short girl, who gave Rex a fake salute, “Go Go.”

“Secret identities,” Rex nodded, impressed. “Nice.”

“They’re… just nicknames,” Honey Lemon said. “You said you’re with Providence?”

“Better question,” Fred cut in excitedly. “Do you have, like, a retractable jetpack?” He mimed Rex’s turbine wings, then jumped to Rex’s side to get a look at his back. “Because I could have sworn you flew in here, and-”

Rex smirked. “Oh,” he said, bracing himself as his nanites began to shift and combine, forming the wings again, “you mean these?” The others stood back to avoid the growths, and muttered in awe. Basking in the attention, Rex called the nanites back, and held his fists up. “I can do this too,” he said, as his arms were covered in metal and his giant mechanical fists emerged. “I call them the Smack Hands.”

“Woah-oh!” Fred cheered, pumping a fist in the air. Go Go whistled.

“How can you do that?” Wasabi asked. “Enhanced robotics, or-?”

“I’m an EVO,” Rex said, releasing his nanites again to rest his hands on his hips. The group raised eyebrows in disbelief – except Fred, whose eyes went wide.

“You’re an EVO?” he asked, more impressed than confused. “No way. No way!”

“How is that possible?” Honey Lemon asked. She took a step closer, looking him up and down, and Rex felt very much like he was meeting Dr. Holiday again. “You control the mutation? Does that mean you control the nanites inside of you? Qué increíble,” she breathed in an undertone.

“Gracias,” Rex responded, “soy bastante increíble.”

Honey’s eyes brightened with interest. “¿Hace cuánto tiempo que has sido capaz de controlarlo?” she asked.

“Ehh,” Rex stopped to think. “About as long as I can remember, which… isn’t very long, actually. That’s not the point.” Rex suddenly turned serious. “Hiro told me about Callaghan.”

The rest of the group turned solemn, looking at the ground or at each other. “Yeah,” Go Go muttered. “Callaghan.”

“I can control the nanites, so Hiro thought maybe I could stop the nanobots Callaghan stole.”

“Could you?” Wasabi asked.

Rex shrugged. “Won’t know until I try. But it looks like we’re not trying until the morning, anyways.”

Go Go sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Probably a good idea. I’m going to be sore for a week.” The others murmured in agreement, and they slowly started heading toward the doorway. Once they were out on the street, and Wasabi had closed and locked the door behind them, the four of them started heading toward a nearby van.

“Wait,” Rex said. He glanced back at the building attached to the garage. “You don’t all live here too?”

Wasabi huffed a laugh. “No,” he said, “this is Hamada’s place.”

“Oh,” Rex said. He was still a bit confused. “Then how do you all know Hiro?”

“We were all really close with Tadashi,” Honey Lemon said, her voice dropping a bit, “before….”

Rex already knew what happened. He’d heard part of it from Hiro on the bridge, and part from Holiday on the communicator. “Yeah,” he said, sympathetically, then added, “that’s why you’re after Callaghan too.”

It was more of a statement than a question, but Go Go still felt the need to answer it. “Tadashi was our friend,” she said. “And Hiro is our friend. And if Callaghan set that fire… if he killed Tadashi, and stole Hiro’s nanobots, then we’re going to help our friends, and stop him.”

The five of them had reached the van and started piling in, Wasabi behind the wheel. Fred stopped before jumping into the back. “Do you have anywhere you’re staying?” he asked Rex. “Like, a secret Providence safehouse, or?”

Rex frowned, and looked up into the night sky. Far above, somewhere, the Keep was flying away from the city to make its rounds around the North American continent. When Rex called in the situation, the rest of the Providence agents packed up and left. If he needed backup, they could be there in minutes, on one of the jets stored in the Keep’s transport bay. If he wanted out, Six could would be there to pick him up in no time. Until then, he was still on the mission.

“No safehouse I know about,” Rex shrugged. “I’ll probably just hang out in the city until we catch this guy. I’ve never been to San Fransokyo before.”

“Dude you should totally come to my place. Don’t wander around the city alone at night.”

“Yeah,” Go Go agreed from the front passenger’s seat. “And anyway, we can show you around tomorrow, after we’ve won.”

Rex grinned. “Sounds like a plan.”

Chapter Text

Rex took a moment to remember where he was when he woke up the next morning, years of practice shortening the process to just a few seconds. Guest bedroom, big mansion, San Fransokyo. He sat up with a groan. The bed was softer than the ones at Providence, or the usual rest-stops he found when away from headquarters, and his back wasn’t used to it.

The butler met him in the hallway when Rex finally ventured out. “You’re up,” he said, his voice dry. “Breakfast is being served in the young master’s room.”

“Cool,” Rex said. He shuffled his feet awkwardly, and the butler calmly raised his hand to gesture down the hall. Fred had given him a quick tour of the front of the mansion the night before, but Rex had been stiffing yawns. The two hour trip to the city in The Keep was exhausting, and San Fransokyo hadn’t been his first mission of the day. Or his second.

“Hey!” Fred called when Rex had been let into the room. “Secret agent kid! How’d you sleep?” He’d been stretched out over a couch, but jumped up when Rex walked in, ushering him in to a table with food on it. “I couldn’t sleep at all. Too excited.”

Rex picked up what looked like a scone. He’d never had a scone before, that he could remember. “Yeah,” he mumbled, thinking about how quickly he’d fallen asleep the moment his head hit the pillow last night.

“Wasabi’ll be here any minute,” Fred went on. “He’s picking Honey up. Go Go’s coming on her own, then we’re gonna get Hiro. And then,” Fred added dramatically, punching his palm, “we’re taking Callaghan down.”

Rex swallowed a mouthful of scone. “Does his aunt really not know what you guys are up to?”

Fred flopped onto a nearby chair. “Naw,” he said. “She thinks we just finally convinced him to register for classes. Which, granted, was our goal, before the Yokai showed up.”

“Yokai?”

“That’s what we called him. Callaghan. Before we knew it was him. Then we thought it was Krei…” Fred’s voice trailed off as he noticed Rex’s confused look. “You missed out on a lot, dude. But if he hadn’t shown up, yeah, we would have gotten Hiro to come to school, instead of just pretending to.”

“Don’t you think lying to her is kinda… messed up?” Rex asked.

“It’s to keep her safe,” Fred said, in the same tone as someone repeating a rehearsed speech. When Rex raised his eyebrow, he added, “and, you know, to keep up safe. Because she would kill us if she found out.”

Wasabi and Honey showed up several minutes later, let into the room by Heathcliff. They stopped to gape at Rex, whose right arm had been transformed into a giant orange sword, and who was slicing pillow after pillow as Fred tossed them into the air. Fred cheered whenever one ripped open, bouncing on his toes and clapping.

“What is going on in here?” Wasabi asked before Fred could toss another into the air. Fred paused, mid swing, and finally noticed his guests.

“You’re here!” he exclaimed, then tossed the pillow back onto the couch. “Finally!”

“Is that a sword?” Honey asked before Rex could call his nanites back. She pulled her phone out of her purse. “Did your nanites make that? Can you make anything with your nanites?”

Rex smiled as the camera light flashed from Honey’s phone, and held his sword arm up higher, almost forgetting to watch for the ceiling. “Not anything,” he said, “but I can do some cool stuff.”

Wasabi noticed the food on the table, and went to grab something to eat. “Is Go Go here yet?” he asked as he picked through the sugary pastries. He decided on a slice of toast but, when he bit into it, almost dropped it. It was coated in cinnamon.

“Not yet,” Rex answered for Fred. He had to stand still as Honey examined the sword, disinterested in promises to ‘see how it worked’ and instead trying to decipher the metal composition of the nanite creation.

Fred went to join Wasabi at the table. “But she should be here soon,” he said. He started peeling the wrapper off a muffin which had, as far as Wasabi could tell, dehydrated marshmallow bits, from some boxed cereal, inside.

There was another knock on the door at that moment, and Heathcliff opened it again to let the shorter woman in. “Are you all ready to go?” Go Go asked impatiently, glancing at Rex and deciding to ignore the sword that had taken over his arm. “Let’s go get Hiro. Let’s end this.”

The team piled back into Wasabi’s van, Rex beat to the front passenger spot by Go Go. She jumped into the seat just as Rex pulled the door open. “My spot,” she said to his frown, and jerked a thumb to the back of the van.

Rex stared out the window as they drove downtown, to Hiro’s aunt’s café. San Fransokyo by day was even more dazzling than San Fransokyo by night. The sidewalks bustled with pedestrians, streets clogged with cars and buses. Above the shorter of the buildings, he could see construction equipment working on the inner-city high-rises, or steel frameworks for new buildings altogether. The sky was littered with banners and billboards, and blimps covered on advertisements, and above them all the were turbine generators, decorated like fish, birds, and dragons.

“This place is amazing,” Rex breathed. Wasabi glanced back at him while waiting for the light to change, and smiled.

They parked out in front of Hiro’s garage. “You wait here,” Go Go said to Rex, and pushed him by his shoulder to stand in front of the garage door while the others rounded the corner to the café entrance. “We’ll get Hiro.”

“I told the lady I was coming to question Hiro today,” Rex said. “For Providence. The ‘incident’ we lied about yesterday?”

“It’ll be fine,” Go Go promised. “We’ll tell her you’re questioning him at school. Besides, it’d be suspicious if you came in at the same time as us.”

Rex scowled, and crossed his arms to wait. They were gone at least five whole minutes, but it felt like longer, and by the end, Rex was tapping a foot impatiently. When they finally returned, Hiro wheeled a red suitcase behind him.

“Hiro,” Rex pushed himself up off the wall he’d been leaning against. “How you feeling?”

“Even better,” Hiro said. His voice actually sounded stronger, and Rex smiled. Hiro stopped the suitcase behind him and knelt to unlock the garage door. The door slid up, locked onto its track, and daylight filled the garage. The discarded gear still lay about the floor. Hiro turned to look up at Rex, and added, “ready to stop whatever evil plan Callaghan has up his sleeve.”

Rex flashed a grin back. “Good,” he said. He took a step to join the others as they entered the garage to retrieve their gear, but Hiro stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Wait,” Hiro said, and now he was grinning. “I’ve got something I want to show you first.” He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a rubber band. In a second, he fitted the rubber band between a thumb and forefinger, jerked up Rex’s jacket sleeve, and snapped the band against his skin.

“Ow!” Rex jumped back, grabbing his bruised forearm. “What was that for?”

The red suitcase lit up. Hiro said nothing, and stepped back to give a white balloon space to rise up out of the it. In moments, a robot, which Rex recognized as the one Hiro had flown home on the night before, stood blinking in front of him.

“Hello,” Baymax said. “I am Baymax. Your personal healthcare physician. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”

Rex stared up at it, opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. He finally said, “I thought Baymax was your fighter bot. Not… your nurse bot.”

“He’s both,” Hiro explained, and started to lead Rex into the garage, Baymax following closely behind. The others fit gear over their clothes and checked equipment to make sure everything worked. “My brother made him,” Hiro went on. “Baymax was his project, before he died." Hiro stooped to start fishing for Baymax's armor as he spoke. "He programmed Baymax with over ten thousand medical procedures. Tadashi wanted to help a lot of people. And I…”

Hiro stopped, holding a scratched sheet of red armor. He took a shaky breath, but Go Go appeared at his side, and gently took the armor from his hands. “Here,” she said, and began to fit it to the robot’s chest as Wasabi sorted through the rest of the bot’s armor.

“Hiro wrote an entire battle matrix for Baymax,” Honey Lemon said, standing at his side. “To protect him when he was investigating his stolen nanobots. He programmed Baymax’s entire battle chip in just a couple of days.”

Rex whistled low “I don’t know the first thing about programming by hand,” he said, “but I’ve watched my brother program machines. It takes forever.”

Fred popped his head out of his suit to chime in. “Yeah, Hiro’s a genius. He made all of our gear too. He literally turned us into superheroes.”

Hiro smiled shyly, and kicked the ground with his sneakers. “Thanks,” he said softly.

Go Go boxed Hiro affectionately on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said, then handed him his own purple chestpiece. “Gear up. We’re finishing this today.” Then, to Rex’s surprise, she turned to look up at him.

“What?” Rex asked as Hiro shrugged into the chestplate and started pulling up his magnetic kneepads.

“Well, Providence?” Go Go said. “You tracking him?”

“Oh. Right.” Rex had nearly forgotten. He reached up to click on his earpiece, setting it to its speaker setting. “Holiday?” he asked the air. The others watched him. It took a moment, but eventually her voice answered back.

“Rex?” she asked back. “You still working on that nanobot mission?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “You have a lock on that reading from yesterday?”

“Of course. We almost sent more agents after it. Rex – he’s heading towards the KreiTech campus unveiling.”

Chapter Text

Rex carried Fred by the top of his suit as they flew. He was the only one not worried about Rex carrying him in mid-air, and, Honey pointed out, this way Baymax could use both his arms to hold on to Wasabi. Wasabi wasn’t wholly reassured.

“I forgot Mr. Krei was opening his new building today,” Hiro shouted in the air over to Rex. “It’s been in the news, but I wasn’t….”

“Callaghan wants revenge,” Go Go said. She clung to one of Baymax’s wings. “But what’s his plan?”

The building came into view in moments, but as far as Rex could tell through his goggles, nothing was amiss. A crowd was gathered in the plaza, listening to a speaker at a podium, and a news helicopter flew slow circles in the air, but there was no sign of Callaghan or the Nanobots.

“Holiday?” Rex said aloud. He’d left his earpiece on for the flight. “Are you sure Callaghan is here? I don’t see anything.”

“We’re still picking up the nanite signature from around the building. It’s all over the place. He should be there.”

They soared over the circular building, ignored by the crowd below, and then saw it. A mass of black huddled behind building, crawling down from the hill. Then another, crawling up the hill from the streets below. Then a third.

“That’s it,” Hiro said. Rex could barely hear him over the wind rushing past his ears. “Baymax, land us there.”

Rex followed the red robot back to the lower roof of the new KreiTech building. They wheeled around just in time to see Callaghan himself, supported by a wave of the black nanobots, rise up over the side of the building and bear down on the man standing at the podium. The man turned in confusion when the crowd reacted to the sight, and started to scramble away when a black coil snatched him up off the ground, and drew him up into the air.

“That’s Krei,” Fred said. “And that’s Callaghan.”

Yokai was a good nickname, Rex decided. He looked like a demon. The pictures Fred and Hiro had shown him the day before hadn’t done justice to the way he crouched menacingly underneath his long black coat, the way he melded fluidly with the nanobots supporting him as if they were his own limbs. The way his theater mask expressed nothing but cold, hard, wrath, and how nothing in his expression changed when the mask was removed.

“Yikes,” was all Rex could think to say.

“Callaghan!” Hiro shouted from the air, but neither of the men could hear him. Callaghan was standing forty feet in the air, Krei clutched tightly by the nanobot swarm, the rage flowing out of him by his words and by the way the nanobots writhed below him. They’d begun to fill the floor of the square below, which emptied of spectators. Callaghan lifted a hand in the air as the kids landed on the roof. From three sides of the round building, black tendrils began to lift up into the air, supporting equipment Rex couldn’t see clearly.

“Callaghan!” Hiro tried again once they’d landed, and Rex pushed his goggles back up his forehead. This time, the man turned and saw them. His expression didn’t change. Hiro jumped off Baymax’s back and ran to the edge of the building, followed closely by his bot. “Don’t do this!”

“Krei took everything from me,” Callaghan said. His voice was low and menacing, and he lowered his arm to his side. “Now I’m taking everything from him.”

Above them the black tendrils met, forming a perfect circle with the machine parts in the air. Rex stared up as the machine flared to life. Blue light closed the ring like a soap bubble, and within moments the air started to shift, wind kicking up, bits from the tallest roof point closest to the machine vibrating, breaking off, falling – up.

“No,” Krei said, his voice starting weak but getting stronger with desperation. “No! You can’t!”

Rex stared at the machine as debris from the building flew through it, and disappeared. “What is that?”

“The teleporter,” Wasabi answered. “The one Abigail died in. He’s going to suck up the KreiTech building with it. And half of San Fransokyo.”

“Shut it down!” Hiro was shouted over the sound of the groaning building. “Let him go!” When Callaghan said nothing, Hiro popped the helmet off of his head and held it to his side. “Is this what Abigail would have wanted?”

Callaghan’s eyes narrowed. “Abigail is gone!”

Hiro took a shaky breath. “This won’t change anything. Trust me. I know.”

Rex has only known the kid for a day, but, he thought to himself, Hiro had never sounded more grown up than at that moment. He’d come ready for a fight, but by the way Callaghan’s eyes seemed to soften, and his body lost its tension, Rex wouldn’t get that fight.

Until Krei spoke up, and said, “Listen to the kid, Callaghan. Please, just let me go. I’ll do anything you want.” The moment Callaghan heard his voice, the hard edge returned to his eyes, and tension returned in his shoulders.

Idioto, Rex thought.

“I want,” Callaghan said, glaring at no one in particular, “my daughter back!”

A rush of black nanobots swarmed at the roof where the kids stood, and they ducked to either side just in time to avoid the crash. A wall of black separated Rex, Hiro, and Baymax from the others. “Go for the mask!” Hiro yelled, and he jumped onto the waiting Baymax’s back. “The neurotransmitter’s in the mask!”

In seconds, Baymax had blasted off, shooting through the air at Callaghan. An arm of nanobots snatched the robot midflight, spun it around, and threw it into another wall. Rex reaffixed his goggles on his face and was up in the air after them. He circled above Callaghan’s head, but while his nanites were arranged to form the turbine wings, he couldn’t bring out his fists, or his sword, or anything else useful for a close range fight. He tried diving at the mask from above, but the nanobots flicked him off course, and he barely stabilized his nanite wings in time to keep from slamming into the side of the building.

The others jumped into the fray as well, but the nanobots flung them away as well. Rex weaved through and ducked around jabbing nanobot tendrils while, below him, each of the costumed heroes fought their own nanobot swarms.

When two arms of the nanobots threatened to crush Wasabi between them, Rex flew high then called his nanite wings back, reforming the machines in his body into his large metal boots. He landed hard on the roof, crushing hundreds of the tiny robots beneath him, and accidentally breaking through to the floor beneath. Wasabi slid down with him, but landed on his feet.

“Huge metal feet?” Wasabi asked in disbelief, staring up at Rex. “Really?”

Rex smirked. “You haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

He kicked out a wall, figuring the building was being destroyed anyway, and jumped down to the grounds outside. Go Go zoomed past, then a few yards away Honey Lemon jumped out of a shattering pink bubble.

“What’s the plan?” Rex asked. His nanites quickly returned to normal.

“Hiro’s figuring something out,” Honey answered. Rex followed her gaze into the sky just as Baymax flew overhead and landed nearby. They ran to meet him with the others.

Hiro crouched low onto his bot’s back. “Forget the mask,” he said. “There’s no way to get to it in this mess anyways. We need to distract him. Rex, can you shut the nanobots down?”

“I can try,” Rex said. He readjusted his goggles over his eyes. “I’ll need them to hold still a few seconds, though.”

“The base of the pillar,” Honey said, and pointed. Callaghan was attacking them from high on a pillar of nanobots, and though the tendrils and arms all snaked out from it, at the very base of that pillar they were still.

Hiro nodded. “Honey, Fred, give us some cover. Go Go, you, Wasabi, and I will draw his focus away. Rex, get in there and shut them down.” The team nodded, and split up.

The nanites in Rex’s body began to shift and change again, but this time he reached past all of them, calling up the omega he knew was inside of him. The activated nanites linked. In moments, they’d rearranged to form his glowing blue battle axes. He slashed at the nanobot tendrils in his way as he ran straight towards the center of the madness.

High above, Fred in his monster suit set fire to Honey’s chemical balls. The air erupted into a blue fog which spread so fast it covered the area in seconds. Rex could hardly see more than a few yards ahead of him, but he knew that meant Callaghan, high above the action, would be able to see nothing.

The nanobots stilled for half a moment. Without any visual references, Callaghan wouldn’t be able to attack them directly. Instead, the bots covering the floor began to swirl, and Rex lost his footing, almost tripping to the ground. The tendrils began whipping madly, lashing out in every direction. Go Go zoomed past again, slashing the bots on the ground as she went, and a wave of them chased after her.

So Callaghan can tell where we are when the bots go offline, Rex thought. He carefully dismantled his nanite machines and ducked another sweeping tendril. The searching nanobots ignored him, and moved on.

It took another few seconds for him to reach the base of the pillar. The nanobots were fully distracted now; he could hear the sounds of the fights all around him, only slightly muffled by the fog, and with Callaghan focusing on those fights, he’d completely forgotten about the seventh combatant.

Rex reached an arm out to the still nanobot pillar, and his nanites reacted to the nanites within. It felt just like curing an EVO, turning the microscopic machines off and absorbing them into his own cache. There was only one problem. As soon as the nanites powered off, the nanobot host deactivated from the swarm, and fell away, floating up into the air. They weren’t sending the shutdown code on to the rest of the pillar.

“Is something wrong?” Go Go asked as she zoomed by again. She circled around the pillar, trying to cut off as many of the nanobot connections, but as soon as a few bots were destroyed, others snaked in to reestablish the links.

“I can turn the nanobots off,” Rex said, “but… it’s like I have to do it individually. I won’t be able to shut the whole system down.”

Go Go was silent for a moment. “That is a problem,” she finally said, then repeated the issue into the team’s linked communicators. “Hiro? Rex can’t shut down all the nanobots at once. We’re gonna need a plan C.”

She zoomed away again, and Rex was left on his own, standing at the base of a swarm of nanobots that had begun to notice they were being attacked. He dodged out of the way of a lashing tendril, then held his arm out wide. The nanites shifted and grew until his sword had reappeared. Then, with the adjustment of a screw, the sword edge began to spin, faster and faster until it formed a rotary saw, which Rex dug into the nanobot pillar and out the other side.

It didn’t do much good. The pillar swayed for a moment, and the damaged bots flew up, but more nanobots swarmed to take their place, fixing the wound. Now Callaghan knew he was here for sure, and the bots fought back madly. Rex retreated, slicing what he could as he made for the edge of the nanobot circle, and almost ran into Fred.

“Whoa!” Fred shouted, muffled by the suit. “Is that a saw? Awesome!”

“I can’t stop them. What are we going to do?”

Fred was about to respond, but paused to send a blast of fire at an arm of nanobots. Rex sliced open another tendril making for Fred’s back. “We destroy as many bots as we can,” Fred explained. “The portal’s getting stronger, and sucking them into it. Even the active nanobots will get sucked in if we disconnect them from the swarm.”

That explained the weird shift in gravity Rex had started to feel. When he’d jumped to avoid an attack, his landing had taken a half second longer than it should have, then a full second, and after a few minutes it felt like he might not touch the ground again. “We’ll have to shut the portal down too,” Rex said, “or it’ll take us along with the nanobots.”

Honey ran past the pair, using one of her rubbery chemical compounds to jump high onto the nanobot pillar. Rex sawed another tendril in half, then watched as she jabbed her chemical purse into the nanobots, snatched a ball out of it before falling, and threw it up behind her. The purse exploded as chemicals combined too fast and too dangerously, and shredded hundreds of the nanobots to bits. More surged to take their place, but within moments the ground of the plaza was almost clear of the tiny robots.

“¡Órale! ¿¡Viste eso!?” Honey cried, elated. “Now that’s a chemical reaction!”

The explosion cleared away what was left of the fog, and with no bots left to fight, the heroes on the ground stared up at Callaghan. He had Baymax, and Hiro by extension, locked in a death grip, but within moments he realized he was out of bots. There was nothing he could do.

Using Callaghan’s surprise to their advantage, Baymax and Hiro broke out of his grip. Hiro directed Baymax in smashing the rest of the nanobots around them, then flew straight for Callaghan. Rex thought it was going to punch the man off of his tower, but instead the bot just plucked the mask from his head and crushed it in its fist.

“Uh,” Wasabi said.

“Eso no es bueno,” Rex agreed. Callaghan’s nanobot tower began to crumble, falling upwards, but the long nanobot arms supporting the machine began to crumble as well. Everyone turned to run as the giant circle fell, almost in slow motion, down to the plaza floor. It hit the ground like an earthquake.

Baymax landed, Callaghan in one arm and Hiro latched to its back. The rest of the heroes scrambled to their feet. The air was filled with dust now, microscopic particles of debris from the remains to the KreiTech building. Hiro jumped down from his bot’s back, then turned to look at the portal machine.

“It’s still on,” he said. “It should have been destroyed. We… we have to shut it down.” He turned to look back at his friends, his eyes seeking Rex.

Rex had to wipe the debris clear from his goggle lenses to even see around him. “I can take care of that,” he said, but as he started to step forward his feet began to slide. Hiro’s had as well, and Baymax quickly scooped him up.

“We can’t get close to it,” Go Go yelled over the noise. Everyone started running to escape the force that had sucked up most of a building, but the running was slow, and Baymax had to use his thrusters to help push everyone away. Rex’s turbine wings barely gave him enough force to outrun the suction.

“There’s no containment field,” Wasabi pointed out. “It’ll collapse on itself eventually. But how long do we have?”

“We need to get out of here,” Honey said. The others keep running, but Hiro stopped, and turned. Rex stopped as well to watch Baymax set Callaghan, half conscious, down behind a broken wall. The bot looked up and stared at the pulsing portal.

“Baymax!” Hiro shouted at his bot. “Come on! We have to get moving.”

The robot didn’t respond for a moment. Rex could feel the dirt beneath his feet start to slide again, and he braced himself against a cracked bit of cement. “My sensors are detecting signs of life,” Baymax finally said. It raised its arm to point at the machine. “Coming from in there.”

Rex could feel his heart beating. The same portal, Wasabi had said earlier, that Abigail had been sucked up into. Callaghan’ daughter. Somehow, she was still alive.

Hiro reached the same conclusion, in half the time. He scrambled back up onto his robot’s back.

“Hiro, no!” Go Go yelled.

“That thing could tear itself apart any second!” Wasabi shouted. “You can’t go in there!”

“She’s still alive,” Hiro shouted back. He turned to look at his friends. “Someone has to help.”

Baymax’s thrusters restabilized, and it took off slowly from the shifting ground. The others shouted for Hiro to come back, but Rex just stood there, processing. As Hiro and Baymax looped high in the air, Rex called on his nanites again.

He’d been using his turbine wings a lot lately.

“What are you doing?” Wasabi asked when he realized what Rex was doing. Rex had braced himself for takeoff, knowing that as soon as he left the ground he wouldn’t be able to evade the portal’s suction any longer.

Hiro and Baymax disappeared into the blue machine. “I’m going to make sure they’re safe,” Rex said, and kicked off into the air.

Chapter Text

The space inside of the teleportation machine was so very quiet.

Except for the blood rushing in Rex’s ears, and the mechanical whirring of his turbine wings, and the aching sound of building debris spinning and occasionally crashing into each other. Perhaps Rex just thought it was quiet because the noise outside had been so loud.

He had no idea where he was. He pushed his goggles up his forehead to stare at brightly colored clouds looming in the distance, building parts that floated like space trash, and broken or deactivated nanobots scattered everywhere. After a moment he couldn’t tell which way was up or down. There must be oxygen, because he was breathing fine, and it couldn’t be outer space because his body wasn’t freezing. In fact, he couldn’t really feel anything. Not until a slab of cement rammed into his calf.

“Ow!” he shouted, and grabbed at his leg to assess the damage. Not broken, probably. And he could hear his own voice, which was a plus. “Gotta look on the bright side,” he said aloud, ignoring the pain.

Hiro and Baymax could be anywhere in this mess, and he had no way to find them. “Hiro?” he yelled. He flew away to dodge a particularly large section of wall, and scanned the debris for any sign of them. “Hiro? Baymax?” Not for the first time that day, Rex thought about how useful it would have been if the heroes had bothered to give him their radio frequency.

Would radios even work out here in wherever they were? “Holiday?” Rex tried. He tapped his communicator in case it had accidentally shut off. “You there Holiday?” No answer. Weird. Even in Breach’s alternate dimension his comm had been able to link back to Providence. Wherever this was… it was very far out.

“We are here,” Baymax said calmly from a ways off.

“Rex?” Hiro called called. Rex turned to find the source of the sound, and saw the pair approaching him upside down. Or maybe Rex was the one upside down. He twisted to right himself in their perspective.

“This is so trippy,” he said by way of answer. A shot of pain went through his leg as he’d moved, but he tried not to let it show. Holiday would have to check that out later.

“Did you follow us in?” Hiro asked. “That’s dangerous!”

“Going in here alone was dangerous, kid,” Rex said. “I wanted to make sure you were alright. Did you find her?”

Hiro nodded, and pointed. “The pod,” he said. “Come on, help me get it out.”

He guided Baymax through the building debris, leading Rex away from the mess, and towards a white speck in the distance.

Up close, Rex could see that inside lay a woman, almost Holiday’s age, deep in sleep. “The pod was outfitted with a cryo-sleep function,” Hiro explained. Rex pretended to know what that meant. “She might not even remember having gotten stuck in here.”

Baymax maneuvered behind the pod and began to push it back to the portal entrance. Rex clung to the side of the pod, his bad leg left to hang in the void, and Hiro climbed up from Baymax’s back to cling to the other side.

“How long has she been asleep?” Rex asked, after the momentary silence had begun to bug him again.

“I,” Hiro started. “I don’t remember. They said she died… two years ago? I’ve been so focused on….” His voice trailed off. He stared down through the pod window, at the woman. “I’ve been so focused on trying to stop Callaghan,” he tried again. “Because of what he did to Tadashi. Because… Tadashi’s dead. But Callaghan thought his daughter was dead too. He just wanted to avenge her. And I just-” His voice cracked.

Hiro looked, and sounded, utterly exhausted. How much sleep had he gotten last night, Rex wondered. How much sleep had he gotten since discovering his nanobots had been stolen, or since his brother died? “Hey,” Rex said. “You’re not the same as him. You never killed anyone.”

“I tried to,” Hiro responded. Rex swerved the pod around a shattered section of wall as they started to approach the debris, and glanced over. Hiro stared down at his hands, where they clutched the side of the pod. “Yesterday. Before you showed up, I… I was going to.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Only because the others were there to stop me.” Dead nanobots pinged off the pod as they flew through the debris, and went flying in every direction.

Rex decided to switch tactics. “Come on,” he said, “give yourself a break. You’re just a little kid. You made a mistake. You learned from it. Callaghan… he should know better. He devoted his life to science, and still let his anger blind him to what he was doing wrong. You’re still growing. No one can blame you for the way you reacted to… what happened.”

Hiro was silent for a moment, and then he huffed a laugh. “You make it sound like I’m twelve years old,” he finally said with a sad smile.

Rex blinked. “Wait,” he said. “how old are you?”

 “Really?” Hiro asked with a raised eyebrow. When Rex said nothing, he answered, “I’m fourteen.”

“Fourteen?” Rex repeated, disbelieving. “Are you kidding me?”

Hiro laughed again, a full laugh, from his belly. “I’m small for my age,” he explained.

“I’ll say. I thought you were twelve.” Rex laughed along. After maneuvering the pod through an opening in a row of glass windows, he added, “I guess that means you’re not as much of a genius as I thought you were, kid.”

“Hey! What does that mean?”

“I thought you were in college at twelve.” Rex grinned. “I was secretly a tiny bit impressed.”

“I am impressive!” Hiro countered. “I graduated high school at thirteen! I’ve built my own fighter bots! I made those nanobots, in just a month!”

Rex faked a shrug of indifference. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess that’s cool and all. I mean, I routinely save the world from EVOs, and more than once from a crazed, murderous AI – but you graduated high school, so, that’s cool too.”

Hiro glared, but Rex met his eyes, and the two of them slowly started laughing again. Loudly. The sound of it filled the otherworldy air, and bounced off the building debris. Baymax blinked up at the pair, and said nothing. In his amusement, Rex almost missed another corner section of cement wall, and pushed the pod to the side just in time to avoid the wall hitting more than the foot of his bad leg. He grimaced, but ducked his head to hide it from Hiro. Holiday would be so mad at him when they got back home.

If they got back home, he was starting to think. They had pushed through most of the building debris, towards the bright yellow light of the portal, but they didn’t seem that much closer. “Is it just me,” he asked, “or is that thing just as far away now as it always was?”

“I think distances in here are screwed up,” Hiro said. He wasn’t even looking at the portal, but staring up at the pink clouds. Rex followed his eyes. “If we had time I’d want to get a sample, of something. Maybe Honey could figure out what this is. Where this is.”

“I’d say pocket dimension,” Rex said, “but I’ve been to pocket dimensions before, and my comm still worked.” He tapped his ear again to indicate his communicator. “I can’t get in touch with Holiday here at all.”

Hiro raised a skeptical eye. “You’ve been to pocket dimensions?”

“Just one, really. An EVO girl I was fighting. Long story,” Rex said, then smiled warily. “Maybe I’ll tell you about it if we get out of here.”

Hiro turned to look at the yellow portal entrance. “Maybe it isn’t a distance issue,” he said. “Maybe it’s been getting small. We should hurry,” he added, turning to Baymax.

Before the robot could increase its thrusters, something suddenly crashed into the bottom of the pod and the jolt of it sent everyone flying. Rex barely righted himself in time to see Hiro spinning off in another direction, and he hurried to catch him.

“What was that?” Rex asked, but Hiro ignored him.

“Baymax!” Hiro cried. He reached out of Rex’s arms towards the robot, whose armor had been crushed so badly most of it had fallen off.

“I am alright,” the robot responded. It blinked up at them. Rex carried Hiro to the pod and began to assess it for damage while Hiro scrambled for Baymax, and pulled the robot up. He held tightly to the fingers of Baymax’s remaining gloved hand. “My suit has been damaged. My thrusters are inoperable.”

“It’s OK,” Hiro said, then turned to look at Rex.

“The pod’s OK,” Rex said. “She should be fine. I… I can’t pull all of us, but if we switch sides, I should be able to push us through.”

Hiro nodded. Slowly, Rex climbed to the back of the pod while Hiro climbed, pulling Baymax behind him, up to the front. Rex’s leg had started to throb, and Hiro noticed the way he held it out as he settled into position to push. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Fine.”

Hiro gave him a worried look. “Your leg-”

“It’s fine. It… it hurts. I’ll have to get it checked out when we get back. But it’s fine for now, and besides, I don’t need my leg to get us out of here.” With that, the turbines in Rex’s wings began to spin, and the pod, Hiro sitting on top, began to move.

Rex worried that it would be too heavy, that he wouldn’t have the energy to push the entire thing, but as soon as it began to move, it was like it moved in its own. The zero gravity must be helping out. With no wind or gravity to hold them back, there was very little drag on the vessel.

In moments, though, the pod began to veer upwards. Rex noticed it just before Hiro called out his name, saying, “Rex? Something is wrong.”

Baymax seemed to meet Rex’s eyes just as he looked up at the bot. Hiro was still holding tight to its fingers. “My weight is dragging us off course,” the bot said.

“This isn’t going to work,” Rex said. “The weight is too unbalanced.”

“What do we do?” Hiro asked. His voice had an edge of panic to it. He was unwilling to let the robot go – if anything, his grip on the bot had gotten tighter – but they were running out of time before the portal collapsed in on itself. “Should we just spin the pod, so Baymax is on the bottom?”

“We’ll just veer the other direction.” Rex had stopped pushing, to think, and now he noticed it. The yellow light of the portal was pulsing. Getting smaller. It would be gone in seconds.

“Then what do we do?” Hiro asked again, getting frantic. “I’m not leaving Baymax behind. He’s… he’s all I have left!”

“I’m thinking!” Rex shot back, then took a breath. “You’re supposed to be the one with the big brain. Come on, genius. Help me out!”

Hiro squeezed his eyes shut. They didn’t have time, Rex knew. He repositioned the pod and started pushing, but in moments it began to veer off course again.

“Spin,” Hiro said.

“We’ll just go off course again.”

“No, I mean, keep spinning. Rotate. The drag will move in a circle around us and if we spin fast enough each rotation will correct our position.”

There was no time to argue with the idea. All it took was a twist in the position on his turbines, and Rex had the pod rotating just like Hiro said. The kid helped out as well, shifting all his weight towards the rotation to help it spin faster.

“I’m going to be so dizzy after this,” Rex complained. Ahead of them, though, the portal was still open, and closer, closer, closer, until….

The next thing Rex knew, his entire body was aching in pain. He tried to take a deep breath but his lungs protested, and for a moment he panicked, thinking he couldn’t breathe. After a short coughing fit, he was able to force down air. Even breathing hurt.

He was laying on his back on what felt like concrete, or perhaps it was a bed of nails. His skull hurt from where it must have hit the ground, and his already damaged leg seemed even worse, by how much it hurt. We must have come through at a bad angle, he thought to himself.

Something pressed down on his shoulder when he started trying to sit up. “Don’t,” someone said, and it took him a minute to recognize the voice as Honey Lemon. He tried opening his eyes instead. They felt grimy – he hadn’t been wearing his goggles. And they must have kicked up so much dust when they came through the portal.

He started panicking again. “Hir-” he tried to ask, but was reduced to another coughing fit.

“Hiro’s fine,” someone else said. Wasabi. Rex blinked, and looked around without moving his neck. All he could see for a moment was the grey dust, and then a flash of yellow and pink at his side. The pod, and Hiro, must be somewhere behind him.

He tried sitting up again. “You really shouldn’t be standing,” Honey said, but she didn’t stop him. Something in his chest stabbed with pain, but he tried to ignore it.

“Ambulance will be here in minutes,” Go Go said from somewhere outside Rex’s field of vision. “Wasabi called as soon as you two idiot disappeared.”

Rex craned his head to look back at the pod, and saw it was open, with Wasabi standing over it. Fred, half shrugged out of his suit, stood at his side. A few yards away, Go Go stood over Hiro, who crouched over a mess of white and red. Baymax, presumably, but whatever was left of the bot wasn’t much. It almost looked like it had been crushed.

The thing was full of air, Rex suddenly remembered. It must have popped, and… deflated.

 “We have to get out of here,” Fred said.

“What?” Wasabi said, shocked.

“The cops are going to be here too. What are we going to say? We’re superheroes? Cops never like superheroes in the comics. We have to get out of here first.”

“Rex needs a hospital,” Honey said.

“I’m fine,” Rex said, but his voice was hoarse, shaky, and he erupted into another coughing fit soon afterward.

“And Mr. Krei needs a hospital too.” Rex had almost forgotten about the target of the day’s attack. The kids must have found him, as he stood off to the side of the group, holding his left arm awkwardly. “And we can’t leave Abigail here by herself.”

“She’s still asleep,” Fred said, “and the cops will be here by the time she wakes up. We have to scram.”

“Oh you’re not going anywhere,” a woman’s voice Rex didn’t recognize said from somewhere far away. As the dust cleared somewhat they could see a group of people gathered at the edge of the destroyed plaza. Most of them just gawked, but someone emerged from the crowd to make her way towards their group.

This was the last thing Rex thought he would have to deal with today.

“A-aunt Cass,” Hiro sputtered. He stood up shakily, with Go Go’s help.

“What are you doing here?” Wasabi asked. The kids had tensed up at seeing Hiro’s guardian, and Rex could practically feel the change in the air.

“What am I doing here?” She said, still climbing over chunks of broken concrete to reach the group. She sounded angry, but a slight quiver in her voice betrayed her worry. “What are you doing here?”

“We,” Hiro started, but he didn’t seem to know what to say. He looked back at his friends, and Rex saw Fred shrug. “We were, uh, trying to-”

Cass finally reached her nephew, and cut him off with a tight hug. “I know what you were trying to do,” she said, softly, into his mess of hair. Hiro didn’t hug her back, but he instinctively slumped into her embrace. “Do you really think you kids were being very secretive?”

The others all shared a look. “Well,” Fred said, “kind of.”

“Are you OK?” Cass asked, pulling back to get a good look at Hiro. “Are you hurt?” She crouched down to his height and ran her fingers over his forehead, through his hair, to check his head.

Hiro half smiled. “I’m… a little banged up,” he admitted.

“You need a hospital,” Cass said, and stood up. “Oh my gosh. I’ll chew you all out later but right now, you need a hospital.”

“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Hiro said, in what Rex could only describe as a whine. Rex started to laugh, but a stabbing pain ran through his chest again and he cried out, falling back to the floor.

“You all need to go to the hospital,” Rex heard Cass say, and her voice sounded extremely alarmed.

“But the cops-” Fred started to say, but something – or someone – shut him up.

Rex could hear a wailing sound somewhere nearby. “The ambulance is here,” Go Go announced. “Are we bailing?”

“No,” Cass repeated. “What were you idiots thinking? Trying to be superheroes? I’m not letting you all get yourselves killed.”

There was a moment of silence, then Honey finally spoke up again. “Aunt Cass is right,” she said. “Hiro and Rex need real medical attention. Who knows what happened to them in the portal?”

The gravel under Cass’s feet moved, and Rex imagined she was fixing her nephew with a death stare. “You went in the giant death portal?” She almost yelled.

Chapter Text

Four fractures in his leg, foot, and ribcage, some internal bleeding, and a mild concussion. Holiday almost killed him when she intercepted the team at the hospital. The hospital staff gave her an inch thick clipboard of paperwork to fill out before they’d let her take him, but her Providence badge stopped them from operating.

“He has an unusual… condition, which we know how to handle,” Rex could hear Holiday saying out in the hallway. “Any wrong moves could end up hurting you more than him.

Rex tried laughing at that, but his head hurt and his chest ached and he just grimaced instead. His nanites had already started the process of repairing his internal tissue, but it took time, and without Holiday’s equipment it was more painful than it had to be.

Hiro lay in the other bed in the room, his aunt at his side and a nurse updating his IV. He was much better off than Rex, no dangerous fractures and only mild bruising. The doctors said he was a bit dehydrated, though, and underfed, and hadn’t been getting enough sleep lately. Aunt Cass had squeezed his hand tight at that, but Hiro said nothing.

The rest of the team sat in visitors chairs, or stood awkwardly against the wall, not allowed to be there but refusing to leave. They were still in their costumes for the most part, except Fred, who had discarded it in the bed of Cass’s truck to save everyone the trouble. Go Go fumbled with the helmet in her hands. Honey sat worrying the edge of her skirt, occasionally touching her shoulder like she wanted to grab her purse, forgetting it had exploded in the battle.

No one spoke until the nurse left. “How did you know where we were?” Wasabi asked Cass. She just let out a heavy sigh.

“I should be the one asking the questions,” she said. “I watched you all going in and out of that garage for a week, working on some project you were obviously keeping a secret from me.” She looked down to meet her nephew’s eyes. “The school called a couple times. It wasn’t hard to realize you were lying to me about going to class when they still didn’t even have you registered.”

Hiro blinked and looked away. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“I don’t want to hear sorry,” Cass said, “I want answers.” She turned to the other kids, even giving Rex a glance in his hospital bed. “What’s been going on? I knew you were taking Tadashi’s nursebot out for some reason, and I knew you were making fighting suits…” she gestured weakly at the students’ outfits, and glanced back at her nephew. “And I saw the news footage this morning, before I closed the café to find you. The way you were fighting, and the nanobots… why were your nanobots there? Who was that? Why is Providence here?”

Hiro was still avoiding her eyes, so Go Go was the one to answer. “It was professor Callaghan,” she said. Cass didn’t seem to comprehend. “He set the fire. He stole Hiro’s nanobots, for some sick revenge plot. We had to stop him.

Slowly, Cass sat back down in the chair that had been left beside Hiro’s bed. She stared down at the small hand squeezed between hers. “Professor Callaghan,” she said, almost a whisper, to no one in particular.

“And they did stop him.” It was Rex who spoke up. The atmosphere in the room was getting a bit too heavy for his liking, and he knew the implications of what Cass had just been told. For all intents and purposes, the man had murdered her nephew, and she was just hearing about it now. Rex didn’t want her to think about that right now, while they were in the hospital, everyone a little banged up and worse for wear. He wanted her to focus on the fact that Callaghan had been stopped.

Cass watched Rex from over Hiro’s mess of hair.

“I helped, of course,” Rex added. “Probably couldn’t have done it without me. Ow.” He flinched as his side jabbed in pain again.

“We could have managed on our own,” Hiro said, speaking up finally. His voice was weak and tired from the strain he had undergone, but Rex could hear his smile.

Hiro clutched Baymax to his chest with his free hand. More accurately, Baymax’s data chips. The bot itself had been damaged in the portal, and fully destroyed on their reentrance to reality. The carbon fiber skeleton was mostly intact, and had been gently lifted into Cass’s truck bed to be worked on later. Luckily, the chips weren’t damaged, and most of the bot’s internal circuitry and memory was functional. “We’ll rebuild him,” Hiro had promised aloud before leaving for the hospital.

Fred had been unable to help adding, “we have the technology,” and a chuckle.

Cass ignored Hiro’s quip. “Thank you,” she said earnestly to Rex. He could barely meet her eyes when he tilted his head on the pillow, but he tried anyways. “You got Hiro to safety. You helped him….” She didn’t finish saying what she was thinking. “Why? How did you know what was going on?”

“We picked up an EVO alert coming from the city.” This time it wasn’t Rex who spoke, but Holiday. He hadn’t even heard her enter the room, but once she spoke all eye were on her. “Except it wasn’t an EVO, it was the activated nanites in your so- in your nephew’s nanobots. Once Rex heard what was going on, he decided to stay to help fix the issue.”

Holiday crossed the room to Hiro’s bed. “Doctor Rebecca Holiday,” she said, and held a hand out for Aunt Cass to take. “I’m the chief of nanite research for Providence. And you,” she said, looking to Hiro, “must be Hiro Hamada. I’m very impressed with your work.”

Hiro gawked. “T-thank you,” he stuttered. Rex grinned.

“And you,” Holiday turned on Rex, “need to get back to HQ, right away.”

“I kinda wanted to stay here,” he protested weakly. He knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere – another nurse had already brought in a wheelchair, and Holiday had that purposeful look in her eye. And as much as he tried to ignore it, his insides were killing him.

Holiday pushed the wheel chair to the side of his bed, and he started the painful task of sitting up. “You’ll have your chance to come back,” she said, surprising him.

“Really?”

“Get in the chair.”

Rex looked down at the simple black wheelchair, then back up at Holiday. “I can walk,” he said, knowing full well he sounded like a whiney child, and that with his leg he really shouldn’t. Holiday didn’t even bother to give that an answer. Obediently, he stepped off the bed and stumbled into the wheelchair. As Holiday picked up his shoes to drop into his lap, he noticed that everyone else was still watching them.

“So uh,” he said, “guess it’s time I make my exit.” He scooped his jacket, gloves, and goggles off the bedside table.

“You gonna be OK?” Fred asked. The others didn’t seem to know what to say.

“I’ll be fine,” Rex shrugged. “Not the first time I’ve fought evil supervillains and escaped from different dimensions.” He grinned at their expressions. “I was promised a tour of the city, remember? I expect you to live up to that.”

His cool laugh was cut off by another choking and coughing fit, and Holiday began to wheel him through the door. “Thank you for making sure he didn’t get himself killed,” she said to the college-aged heroes. “I saw the way you fought. You did well.”

They grinned sheepishly, except for GoGo, who simply responded, “thanks.”

Holiday turned to look back at Cass and Hiro. “Sorry to cut and run like this,” she said, “but I really need to get him out of here. Hopefully this won’t be the last time we meet.” And the door closed behind her.

Providence had a jump jet waiting outside the hospital. With their speeds, the trip to headquarters, and by extension Holiday’s lab, would only take a few minutes. Rex half expected Six to meet them at the jet, but instead there was just a small squadron on pawns. “In case anything happened,” Holiday explained as he strapped himself in.

“You knew I could take that guy,” Rex boasted. He could hardly feel the movement of the jet as they flew back.

Holiday just smiled.

Chapter Text

The room got quiet as soon as the Providence agents left. Hiro tried not to look up at his aunt, still sitting beside him, or his friends standing on the other side of the room. Instead he stared straight up at the ceiling, trying to process everything that had happened.

He never intended his aunt to know about any of this; it was painful enough for himself to learn what had really happened to Tadashi. He’d wanted to spare her from that pain, as well as the knowledge that instead of playing it safe, Hiro and his friend had decided to run out after the murderer on their own. Playing superheroes. Doing the exact same thing Tadashi had been doing before he died, except this time with fancy tech and a hijacked nursebot.

Hiro looked over at his aunt when he realized she was staring at him. She took a shuddering breath.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said.

Hiro gulped, and looked away. “Yeah,” he responded weakly.

From her chair, Honey Lemon started to laugh softly. The others looked at her, but they could feel it too. The wound-up tension from the day, from the past week, was starting to dissipate into nervous energy.

“We almost died like twenty times,” Fred said, and Go Go punched him in the shoulder.

“Don’t say that.” She stretched her arms, shook her head to loosen her neck muscles. Beside her, Honey impulsively stood up to stretch her back.

Wasabi had all but collapsed onto the wall behind him. “If it wasn’t for Baymax,” he said, but didn’t finish his sentence. Hiro’s fingers curled tighter around the data chips in his hand, one green and one red. When he pried open the data port from the back of Aunt Cass’s car, he almost thought of leaving the red chip there, or dropping it to the ground and stepping on it. Instead he just held onto it.

All things considered, the Baymax he’d grown to love was just as much the red chip as he was the green.

Cass sat up a bit straighter in her chair, and took a hand from Hiro’s to wipe her eyes. “How did you even get Baymax?” she asked.

“He was in our room,” Hiro said. “I accidentally activated him, uh, sometime-”

“-last week,” Cass finished for him. “That’s right. I remember.”

“You remember?” Hiro turned his head back towards her.

“You tried to rush off without even saying goodbye.” Aunt Cass smiled. “I knew something was up but I figured you would tell me what was really going on when you were ready.”

Hiro decided not to say that he hadn’t planned on ever telling her.

A nurse came back into the room, carrying Hiro’s chart in his hands. He stopped before speaking to turn and look at the mostly costumed heroes standing in the room. “Visitors have to sign in first, and we can’t have all five of you in here at once.”

Go Go tried to protest but Wasabi stood up and stepped in front of the group. “Come on,” he said, and started to walk towards the door. “We should leave Hiro and Aunt Cass alone.”

“Aw,” Fred said, but reluctantly followed the rest of the team out. They all turned to give Hiro one last look before they left. “Get better soon, buddy.”

“Don’t take too long resting up,” Go Go called.

“We’ll see you soon,” Honey said, then to Aunt Cass she added, “call us with any news?”

Cass nodded, and watched as the door closed behind the kids. The nurse stood there until they were gone, then stepped closer to Hiro’s bed.

“Good news,” he said. “You’ll be able to go home in a few hours, after we’ve made sure your bloodwork comes back fine and you’ve been rehydrated.”

Cass visibly sagged. “Thank goodness,” she said.

“The doctor’s going to be by in a while,” the nurse went on, “to check your IV and blood pressure.”

Aunt Cass squeezed Hiro’s hand a bit tighter after he left, and stood up. “I have to go to the ladies room,” she told him. “I don’t want to be gone when your doctor gets here. Will you be OK for a few minutes?”

“I’ll be fine,” Hiro promised. She looked like she wanted to hug him before leaving, but refrained, and quickly stepped out of the room. For a minute, Hiro felt more alone than he had in months.

With nothing else to do, Hiro held the two data chips up to inspect. They contrasted comically, he thought. Completely subconsciously, Hiro had chosen the exact opposite color from Tadashi, and instead of with his name he’d marked it clearly with his intent.

Hiro turned the green chip over in his hands, then set it on the blanket in front of him. With a fingernail, he started to pick at the edge of the duct tape on the red data chip, scratching the sticky residue off the hard plastic. By the time Aunt Cass returned most of the tape had been peeled back. He quickly ripped the last of it off and crumbled it in his hand, dropping the red chip onto the blanket next to the green.

“You holding up?” Aunt Cass asked.

“You were gone like two minutes,” Hiro said. “Nothing’s changed since then.”

For the next hour, Cass interrogated Hiro on everything that had happened. He could tell she was trying not to be harsh about it; she avoided probing questions, backed off when it was obvious he was having difficulty answering. But she didn’t let up either. When he’d finished telling her about Baymax – what it was like communicating with him, how Hiro had upgraded him – she asked about the rest of the team, and how Hiro had managed to find the time and the resources to design their suits as well.

They took a ten minute break as Cass was called to fill out some more paperwork, then she helped Hiro into the car and asked about Krei. Hiro wondered why she’d started with him, and not Callaghan, but as he started to explain the connection between the two he noticed her knuckles on the steering wheel go white. He told her about Project Silent Sparrow instead.

“That was that portal you almost got yourself killed in,” Cass said. They were stopped at a light only a few minutes from home.

“I had plenty of time to get out of there,” Hiro said. Aunt Cass frowned, and didn’t respond. Hiro stared at the pedestrians crossing in front of them and pretended he wasn’t watching his aunt from the corner of his eye. “Baymax wouldn’t have let anything happen,” he added, “and Rex went in with us.”

“Was that the Providence kid?” Cass sighed. “I wish they’d hung around a bit longer, instead of just taking off like that. I don’t know how I feel about that kid.”

“He’s cool,” Hiro said. “He stopped me from… making things worse than they needed to be.” Cass raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask. “And he helped us find Callaghan when we couldn’t.” Then Hiro grinned, and added, “plus, he’s an EVO.”

They were moving again, and Aunt Cass stared at the street for a moment before recognition flooded her eyes. “He’s that kid?” she asked.

Hiro nodded. He hadn’t recognized Rex at first either, not until he was lying in bed the night before trying to distract himself from the fact that he couldn’t fall asleep. After hours planning strategies and mulling over upgrades for everone’s armor, Hiro had finally started thinking about everything that had happened that day. Finding Yokai, discovering he was Callaghan, removing Tadashi’s data chip… then running into Rex after he’d chased the nanobot swarm to the mainland.

Less distracted finally, Hiro had realized Rex’s orange machines looked familiar, but had to look it up on his computer to be sure. There were rumors of Providence’s secret weapon, but he never thought he’d meet the kid. Much less become friends.

If that’s what they were, after spending less that a full day together taking down a murderer.

“That’s probably why they took off so quickly,” Hiro said as Aunt Cass pulled up to the curb outside their home. She shifted the car into park and pulled up on the emergency brake. “He probably has a million better things to do than hang out here.”

Hiro unbuckled his seatbelt and slid out of the car. Aunt Cass met him at the back, where she opened the truck’s tailgate. “Hey,” she said. “That woman. Doctor Holiday? She thought your nanobots were impressive.”

She bumped her nephew in the shoulder, but Hiro said nothing, and ducked his head to hide his frown. He didn’t want to think about that quite yet. Instead he scooped up Baymax’s remains: crumbled twists of carbon fiber still tangled into sheets of torn, tattered vinyl. Aunt Cass helped him carry everything into the garage, where he’d work on rebuilding Baymax later.

Hiro took a shower at Cass’s bidding, then came back downstairs to find her stirring a pot of soup. “Dinner,” she said. She gestured towards his customary spot at the dining table.

“It’s not even night,” Hiro responded, if the bright afternoon light streaming through the windows wasn’t indication enough. Hiro had tried to talk his aunt into reopening the shop for the rest of the day, but she’d shaken her head and told him they were both going to take a day off.

“You’re eating anyways,” Cass said. She ladled out a bowl of the kombu broth and sliced chicken and vegetables. It was a nicer meal than she usually served, but Hiro instantly recognized it as Tadashi’s staple comfort food.

“Thanks,” he said when Aunt Cass set the bowl in front of him. She took the seat across the table.

“So what now?” she asked as they ate. Hiro had to consider the question for a few minutes, and she let him.

“I should talk to someone at SFIT,” he finally said. Aunt Cass didn’t suppress her smile in time to keep Hiro from seeing it. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Offices should still be open for the next couple hours….”

“Tomorrow,” Cass said. “We’re taking the day off, remember? You can go there tomorrow morning, and by then they should know about… everything that happened. Your professors might even be more lenient.” She failed to hide a smile again.

Hiro could feel himself going stir crazy the rest of the afternoon, so when the sun set Aunt Cass finally let him head back down into the garage. She followed, though, under the guise of wanting to see his work up close for herself. He knew she just wanted to keep an eye on him, and let her.

Tadashi’s hard drive, taken from his lab a SFIT, held all of Baymax’s backup data: copies of code, specs and schematics, and information on all the chemicals needed to fill all of his nursing functions. Aunt Cass stayed out of the way as he worked, but he instinctively explained everything he found to her anyways. “Huh,” he’d say, and when Cass asked ‘what’, he’d say “Baymax has an epinephrine injector I didn’t even know about,” or “did you know Baymax has defibrillators in his hands? I thought he was going to use them on me once, and it turns out they don’t even work properly yet.”

(“I told him he’d given me a heart attack,” he explained when Cass’s eyes went wide. “I wasn’t really dying. He just didn’t understand the expression.” Unless he had, and Tadashi had just programed his bot with a sense of humor. Which was starting to sound likely, looking at Tadashi’s code.)

The moment he started yawning, staring at lines of code he couldn’t make sense of, Cass stood up from the sofa chair in the corner – where she’d been reading a book – and told him to go to bed. “You can figure that out tomorrow, but for now you need to sleep.”

He blinked at the small clock in the corner of the screen. “It’s only eight,” he said.

“And the doctor said you haven’t been getting nearly enough sleep lately. Come on.”

Hiro didn’t resist when she tugged lightly on his arm. Mochi met them at the door to complain about being left alone, and followed the pair up to the bedrooms. Hiro collapsed on his bed, surprised by how tired he was.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Aunt Cass said from his doorway.

“Night,” Hiro said back. His voice was muffled through his pillow and he wasn’t sure if she could hear it before closing the door behind her.

It was Mochi who woke Hiro up the next morning. He didn’t even remember falling asleep, but the cat on his stomach pulled him out of dreams of black smoke. Mochi hopped off the bed while Hiro forced himself up, waited at the door until he was dressed, then led the way to the half-full food bowl in the apartment kitchen.

"Mochi," Hiro sighed, but obligingly refilled the bowl. Mochi purred audibly. He ate, and Hiro dug through the pantry for something to eat himself. None of his usual breakfast snacks were stocked, but there would be plenty to grab downstairs, Hiro knew. The cafe was already open, Aunt Cass dealing with the rush of morning regulars ordering teas or pastries, and the familiar sounds wafted up into the apartment along with the scent of freshly made bread.

They were sounds Hiro had been avoiding for the last two months. He allowed himself time to pause and enjoy them for a moment before heading downstairs.

“Good morning,” a woman said to Hiro. Mrs. Akiyama, from down the street, whose birds Hiro had been paid to watch during more than one summer vacation growing up. He responded politely, and from the counter Aunt Cass looked up.

“You’re up,” Aunt Cass called. “You’ve got visitors.” She nodded to a table across the room, where a blond kid who looked to be about 17 was sitting, drinking a green colored smoothie. The kid next to him jumped up.

“Hiro!” Rex cried. All eyes in the cafe turned to him, and he seemed much too cheerful for how early it felt, but Hiro couldn’t help grinning.

“What are you doing back so soon?” Hiro asked, crossing the room. Rex shrugged.

“Holiday couldn’t stay away,” he said, but Hiro knew it was just an excuse, and they both laughed.

Chapter Text

If Rex hadn’t already been laughing, then the way Noah choked on his drink when he introduced Hiro would have made him start. He’d told Noah that Hiro was only a kid, but he’d obviously expected a normal-sized fourteen-year-old, not the scrawny gap-toothed kid Rex himself had mistaken for twelve just yesterday. It didn’t help that Hiro was watching him with wide eyes, his face a mask of youthful curiosity.

“Noah Nixon,” Noah sputtered, offering a hand as if on instinct.

“Hiro.” He returned his name with the handshake, and Rex frowned.

“Yeah, I just said both your names,” he complained. Usually this was Noah's cue to chew Rex out, but instead he just smiled sheepishly, and Hiro grinned.

“Really though,” Hiro said, “what are you doing here? I thought you’d have important Providence stuff to be getting back to.”

“Nope. No important Providence stuff,” Rex said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve earned like a year’s worth of vacation time by now-”

“Probably not that long,” Noah cut in.

Rex ignored him. “So I figured I’d use some of it now. See the sights. What do you say? Your aunt said you were gonna register for classes today. Can we see your school?”

Hiro suddenly looked lost. “Uh,” he said. “I mean, of course, but I think the others might be here soon. Wasabi said he wanted to pick me up.”

“Cool,” Rex said, and he judged Noah in the side. “You’ll get to meet everyone else too.”

“Everyone else?” Rex hadn’t told Noah much about the college kids. He was pretty sure, what with their superhero-ing, there’d be secret identity stuff to consider, and Rex didn’t even know what the rules were on that.

Noah had insisted on coming along when Rex told him he’d be heading back to San Fransokyo the next day. He only had two classes that day, both of which he was uncharacteristically willing to miss in favor of visiting ‘one of the coolest places in the world’. He’d asked on the phone, when Rex recounted the story, then sat through a retelling in the jump jet, where Rex pantomimed destroying the nanobot swarms.

“It’s a shame,” Noah had sighed. Rex raised an eyebrow. “Those nanobots could have advanced nanite research by decades, and you had to get rid of all of them. At least he’ll still have his backup files.” When Rex just frowned, Noah added, “aren’t you at all interested in what those things could tell us about nanites?”

Rex had shrugged. “I guess? I didn’t really think of that when they were trying to kill me. But they’re just nanite robots, right? Everything already has nanites, so is it really any different?”

“It’s very different,” Holiday said, from her seat piloting the jet. As soon as Rex had made it known he’d be taking off anyways, Holiday had volunteered to be his chaperone. Rex knew why she was really coming along. He hadn’t lied when he told Hiro that she couldn’t stay away.

“Hiro found a way to control the nanites,” Holiday pointed out. “Harvesting dormant nanites is one thing, but activating them? Without triggering the mutation? His control over the nanites is second only to yours, Rex. His technology could be a major step forward in developing the cure.”

“This kid could put you out of a job,” Noah laughed.

For as talkative as Noah had been in the jet, now, standing in the café, he was oddly tight-lipped. He’d had questions for Hiro, Rex knew, but he couldn’t seem to vocalize any of them, and he just gaped when the bell over the door chimed, and in walked Hiro’s friends.

“Little man!” Fred stepped in first, and promptly pulled Hiro into a tight hug. “Long time no see!”

Honey hugged Hiro as well, but Go Go was the first to look across the table and quip, “what is he doing back so soon?”

“Nice to see you too,” Rex said flatly. “I came to get my tour of the city, remember? Though it’s looking like first stop, S-fit.”

“SFIT,” Go Go corrected, “and it takes more than a day to plan a good city tour, idiot. You’ll have to deal with the second-rate tour.”

Wasabi stood looking at his watch in the doorway. “I don’t know if we’ll have time,” he said. “After all the classes and lab hours we bailed on last week, we can’t really afford to ditch anymore. And Hiro has to do all his registration today as well.”

“Who’s this?” Fred suddenly asked. Everyone followed his eyes to Noah, who stood up a bit taller.

Rex flung an arm around his best friend’s shoulders. “This is Noah! I promised him a tour on he jumped on the chance.” Lifting his other hand to point at each in turn, he added, “and this is Fred, and Honey Lemon, and Go Go, and Wasabi. They all have weird names.”

Fred stuck his hand out and Noah dutifully shook it. “Noah Nixon,” he said again, and Rex rolled his eyes. “I’ve never been to San Fransokyo before. This place is so cool.”

“Yeah it is,” Fred agreed.

A customer huffed at Wasabi for standing in the way, and he quickly stepped away from the door. “We should probably get going,” he said. The team all waved goodbye to Aunt Cass before leaving, heading outside and to the side alley where Wasabi had parked his van.

Wasabi unlocked the van and Honey frowned. She turned to count everyone in their group. “This might be a problem,” she said. “I don’t think there’s enough room for everyone in your new car. Maybe if we squeeze-”

“Don’t worry,” Rex said. His nanites started to shift, a bit sluggish from yesterday’s offload but reforming all the same. His motorbike appeared in moments, hovering just slightly off the ground. “I’ve got it covered. Noah and I will follow behind you.”

“Awesome,” Go Go breathed. She bent to inspect the machine, whistling low when she noticed it wasn’t resting on the ground. “A bit clunky for my liking but still cool. How fast does it go?”

Rex grinned. “Wanna find out?”

“Oh no,” Wasabi said. He pushed Go Go towards his passenger side door. “No. We’re not having a street race, in my car, in broad daylight, in the middle of the city. You and Go Go can get yourselves killed some other time.”

“So, if it wasn’t broad daylight?” Go Go asked.

“I don’t have a helmet,” Noah complained. Rex just looked at him, and he begrudgingly climbed up behind Rex. “This is so unsafe.”

“If it wasn’t my car,” Rex heard Wasabi say before he shut the door behind him.

“Oh come on,” Rex said to Noah. “We’re not gonna go very fast following a van.”

Wasabi backed his car out into the street, and Rex set his goggles over his eyes before following closely behind. It was painfully slow going. The streets were crowded with more traffic than Rex had expected, and there was barely any gap between cars as they drove down through the city, carefully avoiding the downtown areas. Rex could see Fred in the backseat of the van in front of him, gesturing wildly with his hands as he spoke.

“So what’s with you?” Rex finally asked. Noah’s grip on his shoulders, tense whenever they took a turn or sped up at all, tightened again.

“What?”

“You got all dumbstruck back at the café,” Rex said. “What was that about?”

Noah took a moment before responding. “Rex,” he finally said, his voice serious, “that kid is like the poster child for child prodigy.”

Rex laughed aloud before he could stop himself. “Is that all?”

“He’s fourteen and smarter than Doctor Holiday!”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.”

“I’m serious Rex! Even Holiday was impressed by him, you heard her! And he’s only fourteen, and it’s one thing to hear it, but to actually see him in person… he’s so small.”

“Right?” Rex asked with another barking laugh. “I thought he was twelve! He kinda acts like he's twelve sometimes too. He’s still just an idiot kid, genius or not. Don’t let his big head fool you.”

Noah sighed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They finally pulled up on the SFIT campus, and it was bigger and greener than Rex had expected. He’d pictured a city school, crammed between tall apartment buildings and office complexes. Instead, it seemed to be a world of its own, sprawled over almost an entire hill. There were water features built into the grounds, buildings separated by rolling lawns, and a gaping empty plot roped off front and center, with the beginnings of a construction site.

The scorched remains had been cleared away, but even without having seen the school before, Rex knew what must have previously stood there.

The van pulled into a parking lot and Rex followed behind, waiting for Noah to step down before calling his nanites back to their original form. The others tumbled out of Wasabi’s van.

“Welcome to SFIT,” Wasabi said. “Our home away from home.”

“Do you need any help registering?” Honey asked Hiro.

He shook his head. “I’ll just be talking to some counselor. Besides, you need to get to class, right?” As he spoke, Go Go took a step in Rex’s direction.

“Didn’t seem to be going very fast,” she said. Rex groaned.

“These streets are so packed, how do you manage? It almost seems easier just to walk.”

“You need a slicker bike,” she said.

Hiro took off to find the admin building, and Rex and Noah trailed behind. Fred and Go Go decided to join them as well. “I don’t have class for an hour,” Go Go explained.

“And I don’t even have classes to go to,” Fred added. “Might as well show you around while we wait for Hiro.”

Noah gave Rex a questioning look, but said nothing. He was too easily distracted by the displays in the main building, plaques that described the history of the school or the notable accomplishments of faculty and alumni. There was an entire wall dedicated to a space probe sent out by the Applied Physics department, and a small display of the public works projects taken on by the Civil Engineering department.

Hiro seemed just as enthralled by the displays. He watched the walls more than he did the room around him, and almost ran into two different people. Go Go had to direct him down a hall before he missed it, to a room much more humbly decorated with plaques to the various heads of departments.

Rex heard Hiro’s breath catch when he saw the display for professor Callaghan, the late head of the Robotics department, “who died in an unfortunate accident.” He quickly looked away. Go Go was at his side in an instant, one hand squeezing his shoulder while the other pointed to the door to the admissions counselor.

They ran around to three different offices to get Hiro completely set up for classes, and Rex was started to get bored. First it was admission, then academic counseling, then Go Go peeled off to head to class and Fred led the way to the robotics laboratories. Rex trudged along afterward, not nearly as fascinated by the displays and projects as Noah was.

It wasn’t until they passed by the undergrad labs that Rex stopped to stare. “Woah,” he muttered under his breath, and poked his head through the half-open door to watch the giant shared lab room buzz with activity. Tanks filled with water housed monstrous creatures Rex didn’t recognize, a guy hung off the ceiling from what looked like suction cup rollers, and half-hidden by a carefully hung tarp, robotic machines moved around what looked to be a small tennis court. Behind short, temporarily constructed walls, Rex could see kids tinkering with their projects, adjusting settings and adding parts.

Noah joined him at the doorway to gaze at the projects. “What are all these?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Rex said, “but they’re awesome.”

Fred had stopped walking when he realized they were no longer following. “Undergrad projects,” he answered. “Everyone’s gotta do something for their degree program. This is my favorite place – the master’s projects are cooler but you can’t get into their labs unless you’re a grad student.”

“This is so cool,” Rex said. A bot holding a tennis racket zoomed past and they ducked out of the doorway to avoid getting hit while a student chased it down. “Why didn’t we come here first?”

“There isn’t much space left,” Rex heard Hiro say behind them. He was peaking around the closing door into the room as well, his eyes darting around to take it all in at once. “They’re supposed to assign me somewhere to work on my project but it doesn’t look like there’s room for anything more.”

“You’re getting a lab too?” Rex asked. “You probably won’t need all that much space for your little nanobots.”

Hiro hesitated before answering. “I’m not doing the nanobots for my project,” he confessed. “I’m supposed to talk to someone at the department about taking over Tadashi’s undergrad project.”

Rex wasn’t sure what to say, but Fred was instantly impressed. “Woah, Hiro that’s awesome! You gonna turn Baymax into a proper fighter bot?” he asked. “Make him even cooler than before?”

Hiro chuckled. “For our uses, sure. But I want to finish Tadashi’s project the way he intended. He’d probably kill me if he knew what I’d turned Baymax into,” Hiro added with an air of dread.

They finally tore themselves away from the shared lab room to find the department offices upstairs. “You know,” Fred started to say as they waited for the elevator, “They might not let you do Baymax for your undergrad. Tadashi… would have been a senior. Baymax was almost done anyways.”

Hiro shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I thought of that,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas. I can be pretty convincing.”

They all stopped outside the department offices for a minute, no one really sure what to say. “Well,” Fred started, but his voice trailed off. He tried again. “Good luck, little man. We’ll wait out here for you.”

Hiro nodded and pushed open the door. It swung shut behind him, but they could still see him through the clear glass panes, walking up to the reception desk and being pointed to another door.

Rex looked up and down the hallway. Whoever had designed it obviously preferred visual appeal over functionality; there was nowhere to sit. Not even much to look at since most of the glass walls to the rooms had been frosted over to hide the project secrets inside. “You know,” Rex said, with a huff, “I'm happy for Hiro and all, but this city tour is turning out to be pretty boring.”

Chapter Text

Hiro might’ve been gone for twenty minutes, and listening to Fred and Noah bond over the various comic books they both happened to be reading was starting to lose its appeal, but Rex didn’t expect Honey Lemon showing up to ease his boredom, and he certainly didn’t expect Dr. Holiday to show up with her.

“Ah,” she said, like it was perfectly normal to find Providence agents wandering the halls of teched out school labs, “there you are.”

“What are you doing here?” Rex asked. “I mean here here. And how do you two know each other?”

“We ran into each other out on the quad,” Holiday said. “Honey was helping me find the building.” She looked up appreciatively at the taller girl. Honey was practically bounding on the balls of her feet, phone clutched in both hands and a lab coat draped over her normal clothes.

“I recognized Dr. Holiday from the hospital yesterday,” Honey explained to Rex. “You didn’t tell us she’d be here too! I’d love to show you my lab,” she turned back to Holiday, eyes wide. “If you have the time.”

“I’d love to,” Holiday said, and Rex sighed and slumped back against one of the frosted walls. “But, if it’s OK with him, I’d like to see Hiro’s lab space first.”

“He doesn’t even-” Rex started to say, crossing his arms in boredom, but the office door finally opened at that moment and instead of another professor walking out, it was Hiro. He held a folded paper in his hands and seemed to be in deep thought, and he looked up in surprise when he noticed who all had gathered to wait for him.

“Honey… Dr. Holiday.” His eyes suddenly gleamed with understanding and he held up the folded paper. “Did you get me this?”

“What?” Rex said in confusion. Holiday just smiled knowingly, and nodded.

“I pulled a few strings,” she confessed. “Probably not best practices, but… I figured with everything you’d been through, you deserved it.”

“What are you talking about?” Rex asked. Luckily Fred had stuck close, and he picked the paper out of Hiro’s loose grip to read.

“Lab assignment,” Fred said. “They gave you… a private room.” His eyebrows went up. “26B”

“Tadashi’s lab,” Honey said softly.

“I called the school and they said no one was using it this year,” Holiday started to explain. “Out of respect. And I knew you’d need adequate lab space if you wanted to properly continue research for your nanobots.”

“Thank you,” Hiro said, and he met Holiday’s eyes with a look of earnestness. But just as soon as he’d said it, his gaze dropped down to the floor. “But… it turns out I won’t be working on the nanobots for my school project.”

“Oh,” Holiday said. Rex could hear the slight confusion in her voice. “Well. You can still work on them on your own time, right?”

There was a tension in Hiro’s shoulders as he mumbled “right, of course” in response.

Rex frowned, and asked, “so do we get to see your lab?” Hiro smiled weakly. He took the folded paper back from Fred’s hands, and glanced down at the small map printed in the bottom corner.

“This way,” he said. He led the way down the hall, Rex falling into step beside him. Just behind them, Noah and Fred had shifted their conversation to some action movie coming out next month, and in the rear Honey answered every question Holiday posed about the school and its facilities.

“So,” Rex said quietly, so as not to draw attention. “Want to talk about it?”

“About what?” Hiro asked, but his voice cracked.

“Whenever someone brings up your nanobots, you get all tense,” Rex said. “Like you want people to forget about them.”

Hiro turned down a hallway, heading back toward the elevator they’d taken up, and was silent for a moment. Finally, he muttered, “Dr. Holiday was really hoping I’d do more research on nanites, for Providence, right?”

Rex shrugged. “Probably.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. But after yesterday….” Hiro’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head. He stopped in front of a doorway, completely unmarked, and looked down at the paper. In a louder voice, he said, “I’m pretty sure it’s this one,” and punched a five-digit code into the keypad on the door’s lock.

When they all stepped into the room, the first word Rex could think of to describe it was ‘gutted’. The room looked like it had been gutted. A wide circular window gave a view of one of the lawns outside, bustling with activity, and it let in a harsh ray of sunlight to highlight just how wrongly empty the room was. Empty book shelves, empty desks, a lonely looking computer terminal in the back, and disused lab equipment collecting a thin layer of dust. There was a clear from where a rug must have previously laid, keeping that bit of floor cleaner than the area around it. A narrow wooden draw had been left open, a single wrench still inside.

“It looks like it hasn’t been touched since…” Fred started to say. He and Honey both sent worried glances at Hiro, who was staring all around the room as if he could see ghosts. Then Honey stepped forward, a hand on Hiro’s shoulder, and that seemed to jolt him back into awareness.

“Y-yeah,” Hiro said, to no one in particular. “Guess I should get started moving stuff back in here.”

“We can help move everything back in,” Honey said warmly.

“Thanks,” Hiro looked up at her with a smile, and right at that moment Rex felt his stomach growl. He instinctively raised a hand to it, as if he could silence it, but Noah caught his eyes and gave him a look. Rex tried to shrug apologetically.

“Why don’t we go get grub first?” Fred asked. “Save the move in for tomorrow?”

Honey raised her phone up in her hand and switched on the screen. “Wasabi will be out of class in ten minutes,” she said. “We can drive in to the city, go somewhere nice for Hiro’s first day.”

“Anywhere sounds better than cafeteria food,” Rex said.

“The cafeteria here’s actually pretty nice,” Fred said, “though expensive if you’re not a student. But, ooh, we should go to that Ramen place on Marina. Trust me,” he held his hands up, “it’s so much better than the instant stuff you get at the stores. Which is saying something, since, y’know.”

“Instant-?”

Honey frowned at that, though. “Why don’t we go to the sushi bar on Midori?”

“Would they let us in if we’re underage?” Noah asked, with a weak gesture at Rex and himself. “Or Hiro, especially?”

Honey opened her mouth to answer, then stopped, and glanced at Fred. “Do they card?” she asked him.

“I don’t remember. It’s been so long. I think they let minors in…?”

“Why don’t we let Wasabi decide?” Hiro said. “He’s driving us, anyway.”

“Speaking of Wasabi.” Honey clicked her phone on again to check the time. “We… should go grab him from class. Are you joining us for lunch?” she asked, slightly louder.

Dr. Holiday looked up in surprise. She had been inspecting the abandoned lab equipment in the back of the room, and Rex had almost completely forgotten she was there. “Oh,” she said, and straightened. “No, I’m going to stay here, I think, and check out the school a bit more. It’s been year since I’ve been on a campus.”

Nerd, Rex wanted to say, but he just grinned. “I guess you know how to reach me if you need to,” he said instead, and pointed to the comm in his ear. The thing was so much a part of him, he barely remembered to take it out when he bathed.

“I’ll call if I need you,” Holiday said with a smile, then her voice got a bit softer, and she added, “you go have fun.”

Rex felt his face flush, and he crossed his arms to hide his embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, and followed the others out the lab door. Noah was talking to Fred again, and Hiro seemed deep in thought, but Honey was smiling, like she’d caught the exchange. She said nothing as they got in the elevator, but down in the building lobby she lightly bumped his shoulder with her elbow.

“She kind of acts like a mother,” Honey said quietly, and now Rex really felt his face flush.

“Wha- I mean, it’s not…” he back peddled. “You mean Holiday?” he tried again, unable to stop the catch in his voice. He saw Noah glance back at them. “No, no, she’s totally into me.”

Honey at least had the decency to try to hide her laugh, mostly unsuccessfully. “Of course,” she said, and her tone wasn’t too patronizing.

Rex was quiet for a moment, then asked, “is that really… how moms act? I don’t remember mine, is all,” he added.

Honey gave him a weird look he couldn’t completely decipher. “You said something like that before. About not remembering.”

Rex grimaced. “Yeah. I’ve got this bad habit of suddenly losing all my memories. Apparently. Hasn’t happened in a couple years, not since I joined Providence, but… can’t remember anything before then.” Honey looked worried, and Rex just sighed. “It’s OK though, I found my brother – or, really, he found me – so at least I know I had a family, even if I can’t remember anything about my parents before they died.”

“Oh,” Honey said. Rex recognized that tone, when someone didn’t quite know what they were supposed to say to a story like that. “That’s….”

Rex shrugged, but he didn’t get a chance to give a cool, nonchalant answer, because Fred spotted Wasabi leaving the Physics building then, and called out loudly, “Wasabi! We’re getting lunch! Drive us!”

Wasabi ended up driving them to a Japanese fusion restaurant, one Hiro remembered Tadashi going to one or twice but which he’d never been to himself. They left Go Go behind – she still had one more class of the day – so Hiro got her customary front seat spot.

“Won’t she be mad we ditched her?” Rex asked from the middle row of the van, where he’d climbed in with his friend after Honey and Fred took the back.

“She can meet us in the city later,” Wasabi said with a shrug.

They walked around part of downtown after lunch, waiting for Go Go at an arcade Rex insisted on stopping at. Hiro was surprised she’d actually had a tour route planned out; he thought the whole ‘tour’ deal had been a joke, or an excuse for Rex to come back. They left Wasabi’s new van at a public parking garage and crammed onto a city bus headed toward Golden Gate Park.

For as long as Hiro had lived in the city, he didn’t remember ever playing tourist or tour guide. He’d been down the Golden Gate Bridge once on a school field trip, visited shrines for new year’s, seen the earthquake memorial monument more time than he could count on his way to the public library. But it was different, seeing his city through Rex’s eyes.

For one, Rex was so fascinated by things Hiro had never paid much attention to before. He pointed out statues Hiro never really looked at, stared up at the floating wind turbines as if they were made of magic, and even seemed in awe of the architecture. He also stopped to stare at the storefronts, or flashing billboards, or fliers plastered on the sides of buildings, which Hiro’d been trained to ignore.

Go Go was apparently used to this. She dragged Rex away from a street vendor’s stall like it wasn’t her first time.

When Hiro noticed the light in the sky dimming, he thought about watching the sunset far above the city, just days before, after his first successful test flight with Baymax. Now Baymax was lying in the garage of the café, twisted and broken. Hiro would have all semester to rebuild him, but he didn’t know if he could wait that long.

“It’s getting late,” Wasabi said. Honey was taking pictures of Rex and Noah making faces in front of a stone dragon. It was only a twenty minute walk to the Lucky Cat café, so Hiro took a tingle step down the sidewalk and jerked his thumb in that direction.

“I’m real close,” he said, “so I’ll walk.” Wasabi’s van was at least another long trolley ride deeper into the city, and Hiro was pretty exhausted of vying to standing space.

The others seemed against the idea.

“Alone? Honey asked, turning quickly towards him.

“At this hour?” Wasabi asked, even though it wasn’t really that late, not by Hiro’s standards. The sun wasn’t even down yet.

“We’ll go with you,” Go Go said. She zipped up the front of her jacket like she meant business.

“No, no,” Hiro started to say. He held his hands up in a placating gesture. He’d wandered the city alone at night as a bot fighter more times than perhaps even Tadashi knew about. It wasn’t always the safes, but he knew how to take care of himself.

It was Rex, unexpectedly, who saved Hiro from his friends’ worried and suspicious looks. “Hey,” he called, now leaning slightly against the dragon, “how late is your aunt’s café open ‘til?”

Hiro blinked. “Uh, what day is it? Wednesday,” he answered before the others could. “Eight? It’ll still be open now.”

“Perfect,” Rex said. He nudged his friend Noah’s shoulder. “I’m starving. What if Noah and I come grab something to eat before we have to go?”

Hiro shrugged, and said “sure. Aunt Cass would probably love that.” He looked up at the others, who were sharing uncertain looks, but finally Hiro saw Wasabi’s shoulder’s sag.

“We should head back to the van, then,” he said. Fred and Go Go nodded in agreement. “Hey. We’ll see you tomorrow, Hiro.”

He grinned. “Yeah.”

Honey quickly knelt down and gave him a tight hug. “For your first real day of classes. I’m so excited!”

Go Go cuffed him lightly on the shoulder before turning to leave. “Don’t stay up too late, you’ll have a ton of homework to catch up on.”

“And a whole robot to rebuild!” Fred added. He joined the others as they headed towards the corner trolley stop, and Hiro watched them go for a moment.

Rex broke him out of hit again, as if he couldn’t stand the solemn silence for long. “OK,” he said, “I’m totally turned around. Which way are we heading?”

There were only a handful of customers in the café when Hiro pushed the door open for Rex and Noah. Aunt Cass would be in the back kitchen, preparing the dough for tomorrow, so Hiro didn’t bother calling for her. He ducked around the counter and grabbed a plate, then looked out through the display glass at Rex. “Any requests? It looks like all the macarons are gone but Aunt Cass’s muffins are the best.”

“Hiro?” he heard Aunt Cass call from the kitchen. There was a metallic clank, then her head poked out from around the corner, followed by the rest of her. “Hiro!” she cried again, and wrapped him in a tight hug. He tried not to let the ceramic plate lip from his grip. “How was your first day!?”

“Good,” he answered, a little breathlessly from the squeeze. She let him go. “I got all my classes, and my lab assignment.” He decided to leave that comment hanging, not wanting to give further detail, not just yet. “Rex and Noah came back for more, so I was gonna-”

Cass looked up as if noticing the other two for the first time. “Wonderful!” she said. “Anything you want, it’s on the house.”

“Oh, that’s ok,” Noah started to say, but Cass shook her head, going serious.

“I insist,” she said, and without waiting for them to say anything she took the plate from Hiro’s hands, and another off the clean stack, and started loading them with food – pastries and slices of fruit and even cuts of the premade sandwiches she always kept at the ready.

When Rex and Noah were settled at a table in the corner, Hiro shuffled his feet for a moment, then awkwardly excused himself. “I’m just gonna head out to the garage,” he said. “There’s… a lot of work I should probably get started on.”

“You sure you’re not hungry?” Noah asked. Rex had already started eating.

Hiro’s stomach was starting to protest, but he couldn’t think of eating just yet. “I’ll grab something on my way out,” he promised. Aunt Cass would never let it go if he let his mental preoccupations distract him from taking basic care of himself, again. He gave a smile, and added, “I can show you my lab properly when you’re done.”

They agreed to that, and Hiro grabbed an apple before heading out the side house-entrance door and into the alleyway.

Baymax was where Hiro had left him, the carbon fiber skeleton piled up on a work bench with the twin data chips staked by a computer terminal nearby. Hiro stared at the mess for a bit, then turned to the collection of boxes in the back corner of the garage, carefully distanced from the water heater. After the fire, Tadashi’s friends had packed up everything from his school lab and brought it all over to the house, where there was no other room to put it. Hiro hadn’t been using the garage much then, and when he finally did turn everything back on to work on Baymax’s fighting code, he hadn’t touched those boxes at all.

He dug through them now, hunting for the external hard drive he knew Tadashi had kept to back up all his data on. The hunt was tough; most of the boxes were filled with books, research on engineering or code languages but also entire boxes full of books on medical procedure, diagnosis data, and the chemical compositions of different medicines and treatments. Years’ worth of research in an entirely different field.

“Three years’ worth,” Hiro said aloud to himself. Tadashi would have been a senior.

He found the hard drive two boxes and a long, shuddering breath to regain his composure later, tucked between loose handwritten notes and a soccer ball. Hiro remembered that soccer ball from years ago. The usual hard black polygons had been traded for soft grey circles. The shapes almost looked like Baymax’s ‘eyes’.

There was no access cord with the hard drive, but Hiro dug one out of a tangled draw near their 3D printer, and plugged the hard drive into the computer, waiting for it to boot up.

The hard drive, when he finally got it open, was so neatly organized Hiro wanted to laugh. It was just like Tadashi. The folders in the root menu were divided into each school semester, the ones in each other those by class title. Each class folder was neatly divided into the different projects, and then further by the project units. It was a perfect little nest of files sorted for their exact purpose and need, complete with shortcuts to different files for multiple uses. If there hadn’t been a folder labeled “Baymax” in the root menu, Hiro wasn’t sure he’d have ever found it.

He quickly scanned over the subfolders – “Outline,” “Schematics,” “Code,” “Components,” and “Audio” – before clicking on schematics. That, at least, had no further subfolders.

Hiro was staring at a digital 3D depiction of Baymax’s skeleton when footsteps from the alleyway jarred Hiro out of his focus. He looked up in time to see Rex raise his fist to knock on the garage wall, then stop and grin.

“Whatcha doing?” he asked. Hiro wanted to close out the window before Rex could see, but he forced himself not to.

“Reviewing Tadashi’s project notes,” Hiro said. He leaned back in the chair and felt it roll half an inch away from the desk. “There’s a lot of stuff in here. It’s gonna take forever to figure it all out.”

Rex leaned up against the desk, looking down at the computer display. It was obvious he didn’t really understand what he was looking at. “Didn’t you turn Baymax into a fighter bot in, like, a single night?”

Hiro laughed. “That’s just adding code to mimick martial arts movies and designing the plates to sit over his vinyl. Wouldn’t have taken anyone that long.”

“I didn’t even know what half of that meant.” Rex pushed himself off the desk to check out project posters tacked up on the opposite wall.

“Where’s Noah?” Hiro asked.

“I think sweet talking your aunt for more food?” Rex said. “Hey, can I ask something?”

Hiro didn’t have to guess what he wanted to ask. Amongst sketches of old bots and engine parts were printouts of nanites from Tadashi’s microscope, and rough designs of the original nanobot prototypes. Rex had zeroed in on them with clear interest.

“After that fight, I don’t think I can look at those nanobots again without thinking about it,” Hiro said before Rex could even ask. He turned to give Hiro a look, and Hiro just shrugged. “I’d rather just not have to deal with the nanobots again.”

“Did the fight bother you that much?” There was a look of pity in his eyes, and Hiro couldn’t help but think of all the monsters Rex must fight on a daily basis.

“It’s not the fight. It’s….” He didn’t know how to voice what he was thinking. He raised his hands in a vague gesture, then glanced toward the trash bin sitting against the wall. “Tadashi… didn’t want them falling into the wrong hands. He knew what the nanobots could do. And he died… because someone wanted to use them for the wrong reason. Because someone wanted my stupid little-”

His throat tightened before he could say any more, cutting him off. He had to take a couple deep breaths just to calm down. “I know Providence would want them,” he finally said, “and I know you’re supposed to be the good guys, but I can’t help but think… about how much bad these nanobots could do.”

“I can understand that,” Rex said quietly. Then he added, “but they could do good too.”

Hiro ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I know. I get that. That’s… that’s what Tadashi would say too. But I don’t think I could bring myself to work on them ever again, without seeing them as… the thing that killed my brother.”

Rex didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said. “The nanobots didn’t kill your brother. Callaghan did.” Then he sighed, and moved away from the side wall. “But I think I see what you mean.” He slumped down in the worn red couch, and Hiro turned in his desk chair to face him. “Holiday would get it, too, if you told her that. She wouldn’t want to force you to do anything you weren’t comfortable with.”

Hiro pursed his lips, suddenly thinking hard. “Providence,” he said slowly, “is mostly just interested in my nanite research, right?”

Rex raised an eyebrow. “Probably,” he said, and he stood up as Hiro turned sharply back to the computer. “Why?”

“Because I think,” he said, pulling up his project files and scrolling through the mess of unorganized data, “if I can separate out the nanite data from the bot data, I might be able to give Providence something worth looking at.” He furiously dug through the files, copying what he needed over to the clean root menu of the external hard drive and separating code from nanite readings, and taking the bot readings out of his test data. Rex joined him at the desk again, leaning over to watch.

“You can do that?” he asked, stunned.

“I can do anything.” Hiro didn’t try to hide his smug tone.

“You don’t have to,” Rex said, but once Hiro had gotten started he didn’t want to stop. The process was easier than he’d expected, just splitting the data apart and stuffing anything he didn’t need into a hastily written subfolder to delete later.

“It’s OK,” he promised, only looking up when he heard Noah enter the garage behind them. “It’ll be a gift. A thank you for helping me deal with… yknow.”

“What’s a gift?” Noah asked.

“Hiro found a way to split his nanite data from his research, so Holiday could try it for her cure.” Hiro missed Noah’s response to that, because at that moment he finished the data transfer.

Caught up in the moment, Hiro unplugged the external hard drive from the terminal and held it up with a triumphant, “here. Finished.” Then he stopped to look at the drive in his hands. “I mean. Oops.” His eyes darted around the garage.

“What?” Rex asked.

“I can’t give you this. It’s… Tadashi’s. It’s got all of… I’ll need it. I’ll just have to….” Hiro pulled out a drawer to look for a thumb drive, but all he could find was the stick with Megabot’s code. He scrambled for something else, but Rex stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Wait,” he said with a glint in his eye. “I’ve got an idea. What if you came with us?”

“What?” Hiro and Noah said at the same time.

“Yeah, you can just come back to HQ with us to give Holiday the nanite data. Think about it. I saw your home, I can show you mine. Show you around Providence. You’ll get to see Holiday’s lab,” he added promisingly.

Hiro frowned. “I have classes tomorrow. I can’t ditch.”

Rex just shrugged at that. “We’ll have a jump jet take you to class. You can arrive in style.”

It honestly sounded like a terrible idea to Hiro, but he pursed his lips again, considering. Seeing a Providence base for himself did sound like a cool idea, and who knew when he’d get to see Rex again, and have another opportunity.

“I’ll have to ask Aunt Cass,” Hiro finally said, and instantly hated how much that sounded like needing to ask permission to go out and play.

“No big,” Rex said, and pointed at the comm in his ear. “I’ll get Holiday to ask for us, when she comes to get us.”

Hiro held the hard drive in his hands a bit tighter, trying not to let himself get too excited. “She wouldn’t mind?” he asked. “I mean, I’m a civilian. Would they allow me to-?”

“Don’t worry,” Rex said, with a knowing grin. “I can be pretty convincing.

Chapter Text

Hiro wasn’t sure how they’d managed to do it. One minute, he was hovering by the door of the café, waiting to see what Rex and Dr. Holiday could possibly say to Aunt Cass, and the next… he was being whisked off toward a jet to fly back to Providence headquarters. He’d been so sure Aunt Cass would say no. It would only be the proper thing for a parent to say in that situation, and he’d already started thinking about the box of spare flash drives under his bed that he could hunt down.

And then she was saying yes. Aunt Cass was saying yes, go run off with these secret government agents in the middle of the night before your first day at SFIT, and bring a change of clothes in case you’re out too late. Hiro wasn’t modest about being a genius but even he still couldn’t fully process how the Providence agents had convinced his aunt this was a good idea.

“You’re going to love this,” Rex told Hiro in the elevator of a nearby office building. The jet had been parked on top, for the whole day apparently. It was the nearest place to leave the giant Providence jet with as crowded as this city was. “The jump jets uses this super propulsion engine that lets us fly around the world in minutes.”

The elevator doors opened, and Dr. Holiday led the small group out onto the roof. “I think it’s actually called the Super Propulsion Engine,” Noah added. “It’s not a very creative name. They use an air-breathing rocket turbine system.”

“Which I don’t understand at all,” Rex said. “I just know they go really fast.”

Noah couldn’t explain the specifications much better than that, but Hiro could see most of them on his own. He dropped his backpack onto a seat once they were inside and followed Holiday to the cockpit to check out the flight instruments as well. He couldn’t use any of this information on his current projects; the air-breathing rocket engines would be too bulky on Baymax’s exosuit, and flight controls for an aircraft were much different than for a robot. But it was fascinating to see everything anyways, and he could always store this away for later.

“You’re going to want to strap in,” Holiday said as she powered the jet up. She smiled knowingly at him, and added, “it’ll be a short flight.”

It was. After maybe sixty seconds, he felt the jet slowing down, and just a few moments later they landed with a bump on the rocky ground. “We’re here,” Rex said, unbuckling himself from his seat. He jumped up, looking excited, and was out the jet before the door had even finished opening. “Home sweet home.”

Providence headquarters stood impressively before them. It had to be hundreds of feet high, at least thirty stories, and if the view from the jet was any indication, sat right on the edge of a canyon. There was a city just down the mountain but here the Providence base stood a sentinel above everything

“There won’t be time for a grand tour,” Rex was saying, indifferent to the monolith. He’d turned to walk backward past the armed guards so he could talk easily at the same time. “But you’ve gotta at least see the Petting Zoo.”

“That might be a bit dangerous right off the bat,” Noah countered. He turned to Hiro conspiratorially, and said, “my first time here, he got us stuck in the Petting Zoo and we almost died.

Rex scoffed but didn’t argue, and Hiro opened his mouth to respond that he’d survived an evil madman with a swarm of tiny deathbots and could probably take on some farm animals, when Dr. Holiday interrupted. “The lab first,” she said. Her voiced echoed the air of authority he’d heard back at the hospital. “I don’t want you getting into trouble and forgetting the reason we brought you here, Hiro.”

The hallways all looked the same to Hiro but somehow Rex was able to read where he was going with ease. “My room’s over there,” he’d say, and point off down a hallway, “and the cafeteria’s down that way,” and he’d point somewhere else.

Holiday punched a code into an elevator’s control panel and it took them to a small circular room. Staircases spiraled up and down – probably in case the elevator stopped working – but she led them to a doorway nearby. “This,” Rex said dramatically as the doorway slid open on its own, “is Providence’s Nanite labs.”

It was not the largest laboratory Hiro had ever seen, but it was obviously competing for the title. The room fanned out in a half circle in front of them, and when Hiro stepped inside he could see tall glass windows surrounding the whole thing. Rows of machines and computer consoles spanned the entire half-ring, humming quietly as data was processed, and everything seemed to reflect off everything else in a way that wasn’t blinding, but instead… warm.

“Wow,” Hiro breathed softly. His eyes darted around the room, trying to take in and understand everything at once.

Holiday strode out to the nearest computer terminal, but Rex veered off to the right and hopped up to sit on one of the machines. “So what do you think?” he asked, watching Hiro closely.

“It’s so…” Hiro grasped for an adequate word. “White.” Rex laughed loudly and even Holiday quirked a small smile. It was true though. There was just an air of sterility permeating everything in the lab, a clean whiteness even covering the windows; it was worlds apart from the dinky thrown-together lab in Hiro’s garage.

“What do any of these do?” he asked, gesturing towards some of the machine that stood by the entrance to the room. He recognized bits – this was obviously a high-powered microscope, and he was pretty sure that over there was a centrifuge – but the rest of it confused him, and therefore piqued his interest.

“It’s our nanite equipment,” Dr. Holiday said. It wasn’t really an answer. “We’re currently experimenting with trying to deactivate the nanites by overcharging them, which involves separating EVO nanites from their host, and putting them under an electrical pulse.” She gestured towards the different pieces of equipment as she explained the process, and Hiro joined her at the console. “It works well enough on a single nanite, but small groups just fry out, and there’s no way to overcharge the nanite in organic matter without killing both.”

Hiro gripped the straps of his backpack tightly, and leaned up to inspect one of the computer monitors better. It was displaying readouts from one of the recent electrical tests. “You tried adjusting the voltage?” he asked.

“Yes. Any less than what we’re giving them and the nanites just hyperact. Which is interesting but doesn’t help us shut them down.”

“What about the period of exposure?” He slung the backpack off his shoulders absentmindedly, dropping it to the floor, and reached across the console to point at one of the readouts. “All these experiments say the nanites were put under the pulse for the same amount of time. What if you changed that.”

“We tried-” Holiday started to say, almost warily, but then she stopped herself, and frowned slightly. “In our initial tests we tried different pulse lengths, but we haven’t varied form our set standard since, and the results might give us some interesting data. I’ll have to look into that.” She leaned down to jot a note onto a clipboard, then glanced over at Hiro and raised her eyebrows. “Rex says you have an impressive setup at home, Hiro, but nowhere near the access to resources we have here. How did you manage to do all the research you did?”

Hiro shrugged, and shot a glance over at Rex. The older kid was talking to his friend again, but watching Holiday and Hiro from the corner of his eye. “I don’t know,” Hiro said, “I’ve got a pretty decent microscope and a computer of my own.”

“You’re being modest,” Holiday said, but Rex cleared his throat loudly before she could say any more.

“I thought we were just stopping here to give you whatever’s on the hard drive,” Rex said pointedly to Dr. Holiday. “I wanna get down to the Petting Zoo before Mel goes to sleep.”

“I’m sure you could just wake him up again,” Holiday responded, her voice a bit exasperated, but she relented, and led Hiro to another computer. “Here,” she said, and opened an access panel on the side of the console. Hiro dug the hard drive out of his backpack and they plugged it into the computer, then navigated to the hard drive and copied the scattered bits of data from the root menu onto the computer.

“There,” she said, standing up straighter and fixing Rex with a look. “Done. That didn’t take long, did it?”

Rex jumped down from his perch with a grin. “Awesome,” he said, and began popping his knuckles. “If we have extra time, we’re totally showing you around Sit Ops next.”

“Who are we showing around Sit Ops?” a new voice spoke. Hiro turned, startled. He hadn’t heard the other man enter the room, but there he was, walking out of the elevator room wearing a green suit and sunglasses, as if he found the whiteness of the lab too bright. Then, he said simply, “no.”

“Aw come on,” Rex whined back, and Hiro would have laughed if the man’s blank face didn’t almost seem to be glaring at him.

“How long is this going to take?” Rex complained. He trudged down the hallway after Six, who led the way to a briefing room while Noah and Hiro followed, silent. Hiro seemed wary of Agent Six, which was understandable, considering who Agent Six was.

“We wouldn’t be having a late night briefing if you hadn’t disappeared all day,” Six said.

“I didn’t disappear, Doc was with me.”

“And she said you disappeared.” Rex frowned. She must have thrown him under the bus while he was gone exploring the city. It’s not like they hadn’t told her where they were going.

“Do we have to do this now, though?” Rex tried. He gestured back at Noah and Hiro, and added, “I’ve got guests,” with a significant eyebrow waggle. Six half-glanced back at them but didn’t break his stride, and Rex groaned. “Don’t worry,” he said to Hiro, “Six is always like this. He’s probably just punishing me for being gone all day.”

“Daily briefings are important for the successful operation of future missions,” Six intoned, then he stopped, and turned back to look at the three of them. “Why don’t your friends visit with Dr. Holiday while you’re busy?”

“Because that’s boring,” Rex said before he could stop himself. Actually, Hiro didn’t seem to think it had been boring at all. As soon as he’d seen the lab, his eyes had lit up and he was asking questions, getting into the sciency techno-babble Rex was used to Holiday having to translate. Hiro would probably like having to hang out with Holiday for longer, and she definitely wouldn’t mind it either.

He tried to backpedal but was cut off by Bobo before he had the chance. “Hey,” the ape called, his head poking out the cafeteria door down the hall, “we got a problem in here.” Then he noticed Hiro, and stepped out, and Hiro’s eyes popped. “And who’s the kid?”

“Hiro,” Rex said, gesturing towards Bobo, “this is Bobo. Bobo, Hiro. Why are you in the cafeteria? I thought we had a briefing?”

“What’s wrong?” Six asked, failing to conceal the sense of urgency in his tone.

Bobo jerked his thumb towards the kitchens. “Grill’s broke,” he said. “Some clown’s trying to serve up cold sandwiches.” He said it as if that was the most disgusting thing he could be forced to eat.

“I thought this was a late-night briefing, not a late-night snack” Rex said.

“Some of us get hungry waiting around for you to show up,” Bobo said with his hands to his stomach. “I was promised dinner.”

Rex looked up at Six to crack a joke, then noticed the genuinely distressed look on the agent’s usually unreadable face. He thought he might’ve heard the man’s stomach growl.

Rex had to stop himself from laughing. “OK, OK,” he said. “No food, big issue. I’ll just do a taco run.”

Six looked like he was going to argue, but Bobo said “I want Chinese,” before he could.

Noah jumped in at just the right time. “There’s a 24-hour place near my neighborhood,” he said. “You can drop me off and I’ll show you where it is.”

Rex looked hopefully up at Six, and the man finally sighed. “Fine,” he said. “But be quick about it.”

They took an extra Providence transport jeep back into the city – there wasn’t room enough for all three of them on the Rex Ride, his nanite motorbike build, and Rex wasn’t leaving Hiro alone at headquarters. They waved goodbye to Noah at his house, and then instead of heading back for the jeep Rex called up his nanites. They shifted to form the hovering motorbike, the only ‘vehicle’ Providence actually allowed him to drive.

“Get on,” he said to Hiro, and he was surprised to see Hiro grin.

“It’s just like my brother’s moped,” Hiro said. Rex raised an eyebrow. “Or, nothing like my brother’s moped, really, but it reminded me of that. Tadashi would kill me for not wearing a helmet, though.”

Rex lowered his goggles onto his eyes and laughed while Hiro clambered up behind him. “No helmets on this ride,” he joked. “Noah complains about it too.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Hiro said.

The Chinese food place was small and quiet, with one tired-looking girl behind the counter. Rex read the order to her from the note Six had scrawled out, then waited impatiently with Hiro while the food was made. Six called through the comm twice, to ask what was taking him so long, and in the background Rex could hear Bobo complaining as well.

Hiro had to tie the stack of takeout boxes onto the back of the Rex Ride, and it was a good thing he was so small because he barely fit in-between them and Rex himself. “Back to Providence,” Rex said as they took off down the dark city streets again. “Then to see if I can slip past Six without him noticing.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” Hiro said good-naturedly.

“I wanted to show you around, though,” Rex said. “I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I knew you’d just be stuck with Holiday the whole time. Not,” he added, “that she isn’t cool, of course, and probably gets your whole genius scientist thing.”

“Kinda,” Hiro said slowly. “You guys definitely know more about all this stuff than I do. I just figured out enough about the nanites to use them in the bots. It didn’t seem all that important.”

“Well, Holiday’s pretty happy to see what you got. She’s probably reading through it right now trying to…” Rex’s voice trailed off, and a cold shiver ran through his spine. His skin prickled.

Ahead of them, appearing like a tear in the very air above the street, a red portal formed, growing large enough to swallow them up. Rex swerved to avoid it, feeling Hiro tense in surprise behind him.

“Breach,” Rex said, but it wasn’t adequate explanation, and the sudden change in direction had thrown him off balance. He began to fall, the nanites shifting in him automatically to protect him, and the motorbike build retracted instantly. He and Hiro both dropped to the pavement and rolled a few yards before Rex could stop himself, and he grabbed Hiro by the hood of his jacket before he could get hurt. So much for not needing a helmet.

The takeout, Rex noticed too late, was gone. Must have fallen into the portal. Bobo would be pissed.

Hiro scrambled to his feet and Rex let him go as they both stood up. He could hear laughter, and looked up to see Breach standing in front of the now closing portal, watching them through her unkempt hair. She raised an oversized arm in a half-shrug, and said, “almost like you saw me coming.”

Rex raised his goggles back to his forehead and started brushing himself off. “I guess my nanites are onto the whole ‘ripping the very fabric of space’ thing. Plus,” he said, and glanced down at Hiro, who was just staring in shock, “you just plain creep me out.”

She tensed, like she was going to respond, but stopped. “And who’s this?” she asked. She waved a hand and Rex grabbed Hiro by the elbow, yanking him back in time to avoid the portal growing under his feet.

“Hiro,” Rex said, gesturing towards her, “this is Breach. I mentioned her to you before.”

“I don’t remember,” Hiro said and shook his head, but the nanites in Rex’s body were already shifting, changing, forming his large metal boots.

“She’s bad news,” Rex said, and charged. Breach just smiled, raised her arms, and flung a series of small red portals in Rex’s way. He dodged them easily, and Hiro kept his distance from them as well, but in front of him Breach dropped into another portal and disappeared. “What do you want, Breach?” Rex called.

“Hey!” Hiro shouted behind him, and Rex turned to see Breach appearing out of another portal, grabbing Hiro around his shoulders with her smaller arms. “This one is so much smaller,” she said, and she sounded genuinely amused.

“Let him go,” Rex shouted, but Breach had ducked back into her portal, taking Hiro with her. He had nothing to defend himself with, Rex quickly thought. There was no reason to think anything would have happened but he still should have made sure Hiro had something to defend himself with.

The creeped out feeling wasn’t gone, luckily enough, and Rex turned again to see Breach reappearing, still holding onto Hiro, rising out of the pavement. “Is this another one of your friends?” she asked. “I didn’t expect they could be so small.”

“Let him go,” Rex said again. His nanites reformed into his large metal fists, which he raised threateningly. “I’m not interested in being part of your collection, and you’re not taking Hiro to your little dollhouse either.”

Breach laughed again, and held Hiro out in front of her. He struggled, unsuccessfully, to get out of her grip. “Oh,” Breach said, “I’m through collecting you, Rex. It’s way more fun messing with you.” Then she let go of Hiro’s shoulders and he dropped into the portal below.

Rex made a strangled noise, lurching to attack, but a second later Hiro landed, just a few feet away. He looked like he wanted to vomit, but stayed on his feet. Breach was laughing, but a sudden static sound distracted her, like she was listening to someone speaking through a comm.

“Are you OK?” Rex asked Hiro, his metal fists shrinking away.

“I’m fine,” Hiro said. His voice was a bit shaky, and he glared up at Breach. Rex followed his eyes. She was standing on the pavement now, the portal below her gone, and she suddenly looked grim.

“We’ll play some more next time,” she said. “Van Kleiss has a very important mission for me.” She smiled one last time, then formed a tall portal behind her. “It involves an old friend of yours,” she added, and ducked into to the portal to disappear.

It stayed open for a moment later, like Breach’s long-distance portals tended to do, and in that time Rex could see through it, to the opening on the other side. The city looked familiar, and the writings on the buildings even more so. “Wait,” Rex said, taking a step forward. “I know that place.”

It clicked instantly in his head. Hong Kong. An old friend Van Kleiss was after. Which meant….

“Oh no,” Rex cried, and without thinking, ducked into the portal after her. He barely felt Hiro right behind him, following.

Chapter Text

Hiro groaned and sat up, rubbing the sore shoulder he’d landed heavy on when he grabbed the back of Rex’s jacket and followed him through the… interdimensional portal? There’d been too many of those lately.

The world was suddenly bright, and Hiro had to squint to look around at the strange city he’d wound up in. He was sitting on a monorail track, like the ones in San Fransokyo, but he didn’t recognize the city or anything nearby, except for the language on the buildings: Chinese. The nauseous feeling in Hiro’s stomach grew. “Uh,” he said, “where are we?”

Rex pushed himself onto his feet, so Hiro followed suit. “Hong Kong,” he said. He balled his hands up into fists. “She’s going after Circe!”

“Who’s-” Hiro started to ask, but a loud sound cut him off, and they both turned to see the train barreling down the track towards them.

“Of course,” Hiro heard Rex mutter, just barely over the sound of the oncoming train. In moments, a pair of bright orange turbine wings sprouted from his back. He grabbed Hiro under his armpits and in a second they were in the air, the train passing underneath.

Hiro flailed, and grabbed onto Rex’s wrists for extra support. This was much less enjoyable than flying with Baymax. He kicked, which threw Rex off-balance, and they spun to the side. Hiro’s stomach lurched before Rex finally got them righted. “What are we doing here?” he shouted above the noise of the train, his voice a bit shaky.

“That was Breach,” Rex shouted back. He was flying higher now, above the buildings, looking for something. “I mentioned her to you, back in Callaghan’s teleportal. She’s after my – hold up,” he said, and paused. Hiro couldn’t see Rex from his position, and watched uncomfortably as the buildings passed below his dangling feet. “It’s Six,” Rex finally said, then, slightly louder, “we’re in Hong Kong.”

“I know, you already – oh,” Hiro cut himself off when he heard a light scratching sound and realized Rex was talking through his comm.

“We ran into Breach,” Rex said into his comm. “She knows Circe’s here.” He paused to listen, then said, “yeah… I mighta sorta told her about my old gang? And… I’m here! Gotta go!”

A water tower had come up below them, and Rex dove down toward it. He dropped Hiro just a foot off the ground, then landed lightly behind him, the metal clang announcing that his nanite machine was being taken apart. “Where’s here?” Hiro asked. He held onto the railing of the water tower just to keep himself steady.

“An old hideout,” Rex said. “I promise I’ll explain everything as soon as I stop Breach.” Hiro turned to watch as Rex’s legs transformed once again into giant metal boots. Normally Hiro wanted to stop and watch Rex’s transformations, to figure out how the tiny nanites worked to reform body tissue into mechanical parts. This wasn’t the time. “But right now,” Rex was saying, “I’ve got to make sure nothing happens to Circe.” And with that, he kicked down a door in the side of the tower.

Hiro half expected water to come rushing out, but the only thing he saw was dust and wood splinters, and the only thing he heard was Rex calling for Breach again. Then it was quiet. Hiro coughed and waved away the dust, then peeked inside just in time to see Rex’s metal boots deform back into normal legs, and hear him say, “Breach is… not here?”

“No,” another voice said, “but our breakfast has been soundly defeated.” Hiro’s eyes when wide when he saw the speaker, who looked like some sort of humanoid sea creature, with tentacles for hair and limbs. Nearby stood a girl who almost looked like a giant insect. Hiro’s limbs were frozen. “Who’s the kid?”

Rex looked down at Hiro and he seemed just as lost as Hiro felt. “Uh,” he said, and Hiro saw him take a deep breath, like he was controlling himself. Then he looked back up at the others and set a hand on Hiro’s shoulder, drawing him further into the room. “This is Hiro! He’s from San Fransokyo. And this is my old gang, from back before I joined Providence. Skwydd,” Rex gestured toward the first kid, who sat on the couch in the middle of the room, then the other, who’d walked over to the dining table, “and Cricket.”

“Hello,” Cricket said with a small wave. Hiro already knew that he wouldn’t be able to say anything back, so he offered a weak wave instead.

“Where’s Tuck?” Rex was asking.

“You’re standing on him,” Skwydd answered.

Both Hiro and Rex stared down at the door smashed beneath their feet, and Hiro felt his heartrate jump. Then a muffled voice said “I’m cool,” and a white ribbon slid out from beneath the door. It circled around their heads for a moment before spiraling down to the floor on Rex’s other side, forming the figure of a boy covered head to toe in bandages. He leaned an arm across Rex’s shoulders, a friendly gesture, and held the other hand out for Hiro. “I’m Tuck. Nice to meet you.”

“You’re all EVOs,” Hiro finally said, instead of answering. The three strange kids all exchanged glances.

“Uh,” Cricket said.

Hiro suddenly felt self-conscious. “Uh, I mean,” he said, and he took quickly Tuck’s hand before it was withdrawn. “I’m Hiro. Sorry. I’ve… never met an EVO before Rex. I didn’t realize-”

Another girl entered the room, cutting Hiro off. She had a towel wrapped around her hair, and looked completely normal from what he could tell, and she raised an eyebrow at Rex. “Why’d you bring the kid?” she asked. Hiro gulped.

“Circe,” Rex said. Hiro could hear the relief in his voice. “You’re in danger; Breach is here. Well, not here here – she’s in Hong Kong. We followed her through a portal here. She said Van Kliess was after you.”

The girl – Circe – glanced down at Hiro with a wary eye. It looked like she didn’t trust him, and honestly Hiro couldn’t blame her. He mentally kicked himself for that introduction. Seeing the kids, realizing they were EVOs… he’d been a bit frightened. Of course EVOs weren’t always monsters, there was enough evidence of that on the internet, but it was one thing to read about mutant beings and another thing entirely to see them. He hadn’t expected them to look so inhuman.

And that just intrigued Hiro more. How had the nanite managed to mutate their bodies without deforming their minds, the way most EVOs were? If he could figure that out, couldn’t Hiro find a way to trigger the nanite mutation in a person without risking them becoming a monster? There was so much potential here he had never even considered before.

As the gears turned in Hiro’s head, Circe’s gaze finally slid back towards Rex. “How do you know Breach is here?” she asked.

“We saw her,” Rex said. “She opened a portal here after we fought, earlier.”

“Did you see her coming to our hideout, specifically?”

Rex frowned. “Well, no. We didn’t see her on this side of the portal, but-”

Circe sighed and sat on the arm of the couch, by Skwydd. “Breach is messing with you,” she said, and pulled the towel off of her head. Her hair fell, wet and straight, to her shoulders, the tips colored a deep purple. Like Go Go’s streak, Hiro thought.

“O-OK,” Rex stuttered, “then why Hong Kong?”

“Because it’s on the other side of the world?”

Rex glanced down at Hiro again, and Hiro met his eyes and shrugged. To be honest, he was still a bit confused about this whole situation. The encounter with Breach had been disorienting enough, and now suddenly it was day, breakfast-time in fact, in an entirely different city?

“Uh,” Rex said. He glanced between the four friends, like he was thinking hard. “Sorry for… interrupting? Then?”

“No big,” Skwydd said with a shrug. “It’s only the most important meal of the day.”

Cricket stepped forward with a smile. “Hey,” she said, “why don’t you guys join us for Yum Ta?”

Hiro didn’t know what that was, but they were being swept out the gaping doorway before he could figure it out. Even Rex didn’t have time to argue as the others corralled them down to the street, Cricket at Hiro’s side. “You said you were from San Fransokyo?” she asked. Trying to make small talk.

“Yeah,” he said. “Never actually been out of the city before.”

She laughed softly, and asked, “how’d you get mixed up with Rex then?”

“It’s a long story. I, uh, made these nanobots – nanite infused robots,” he explained, trying to sound nonchalant, “to get into this college I was applying for-”

“You made what?” Tuck cut him off.

“College?” Cricket asked. Hiro grinned. This was always his favorite part.

“Yeah,” he shrugged, “I’m kind of a genius.”

Yum Ta turned out to be a restaurant, a big expensive-looking place, where everything was written in Chinese and the waiters didn’t seem to mind that their new guests were a group of EVOs. “Don’t worry,” Cricket said when she noticed Hiro reaching for his empty pockets, “we’ll pay for you and Rex.”

That wasn’t what he was looking for, though. Hiro had left his cell phone in his backpack, instead of sticking it into one of his pockets, and his backpack was still sitting by one of Dr. Holiday’s computers, in her lab, back at Providence headquarters. Where it had been late at night, not breakfast time.

Cricket called the waiter over and ordered for the group in Cantonese, and Hiro nudged Rex lightly in the elbow, and pointed, discretely, to his wrist. Rex’s eyebrows furrowed, like he didn’t understand. Hiro sighed, and glanced around for a wall clock. He could probably figure out the time difference between here and San Fransokyo on his own.

“So, Hiro,” Circe said. His gaze snapped back to the table in front of them. Everyone seemed to be watching him, and he wanted to shrink back into the chair. “How long have you known Rex?”

More small talk. He could handle that. “Uh,” he thought it over. “Three days.”

Eyebrows were raised. “Well now you have to tell us the story,” Cricket said.

If anything, Rex managed to look even more uncomfortable than Hiro felt as he recounted their fight just days previous, glossing over details he didn’t really feel like sharing with strangers. Rex filled in whenever there was a chance to make himself sound cooler than Hiro making him sound, and looked appropriately sheepish when Hiro admitted that he’d saved them from the otherworld inside the portal.

Mostly, though, Rex glanced back and forth across the table as if he was trying to figure something out. The others ignored him, now actually interested in Hiro’s presence, but Hiro couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong. The food was brought out and Tuck took over, telling them about some trouble they’d gotten into the other day, and Hiro nudged Rex in the elbow again.

“Everything OK?” he asked in a whisper.

Rex didn’t look OK, but he nodded. “I,” he started, then stopped himself. “We should probably get back to headquarters, shouldn’t we, there’s not really anything – oh my god thank you,” he muttered suddenly, when a faint crackle told Hiro his comm had been activated. He excused himself from the table, and returned moments later.

“Well!” Rex said, a little too loudly. “This has been great but we gotta run.”

“You’re leaving?” Cricket asked. “You barely ate anything.”

“Technically we just had dinner,” Hiro pointed out, though he hadn’t actually eaten anything earlier. He started to stand up, though, eager for his own reasons to get out of here.

“Duty calls,” Rex said. His hand on Hiro’s shoulder was subtly pulling him back, trying to hurry their escape. “I’d stay if I could, but, y’know, work. Bye!” Hiro had to jog just to keep up with him as they made their way out to the street.

“What was that about?” Hiro finally asked when they were outside. “Most awkward morning ever. Or, night, technically.”

“I know,” Rex groaned. He covered his face with his hands. “I didn’t expect it to go like that at all. It’s awful.”

“It wasn’t… that bad.” Hiro tried to sound encouraging.

“No, I mean….” Rex’s voice trailed off, and he sighed. “Never mind,” he said, bent his knees slightly before his body started to change again, forming his hovering motorcycle. The change caught Hiro completely by surprise.

“Where are we going now?” he asked, but climbed up behind Rex instead of waiting for the answer. It didn’t really matter, as long as they weren’t hanging around here for much longer.

Rex adjusted his goggles over his eyes. “There was a break-in at a Providence holding place just out of town. Turns out Breach did come here, just… not for Circe. I still gotta stop her,” he said, and they took off.

Chapter Text

“This is not at all how I was planning this going,” Rex said to Hiro on the way to the Providence holding cell. It was far outside city limits, in the middle of a wasteland, which Hiro was beginning to think was Providence’s location specialty.

“What, you didn’t plan for a jailbreak on your day off?” Hiro asked. “Or, night off?”

“I didn’t want us to be in Hong Kong to begin with,” Rex sighed. “We should be back at headquarters, playing video games or shooting hoops or something.”

They could hear the alarm from the holding cell before Rex even pulled up to it, and it was even more blaring once they were outside the building walls. When Rex pulled to a stop, Hiro hopped down to the ground and said, “I’m more of a soccer player, personally.”

Rex dismantled his motorbike build, and his nanites returned to normal. “We don’t have a soccer field at HQ,” he said, and paused. “But we could probably clear out a spot in the Petting Zoo.”

“What is the petting zoo?” Hiro asked. Lights flickered red and white in the hallways of the holding cell, joining the obnoxious alarm in announcing the breakout. Providence agents rushed past them to get away from the escaped prisoner. “You didn’t really explain, and I figured you probably weren’t talking about a normal petting zoo.”

Rex laughed. “Yeah, it’s where we keep all the EVOs I can’t cure, the ones that aren’t super hostile, so Holiday can study them.” He stopped outside an open doorway, and turned to Hiro. “I’ve got to take care of this. You wanna wait out here?”

Hiro looked down. The body of an anonymous Providence agent lay prone on the floor, just inside the room. Hopefully just knocked out. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

He stepped back as Rex rushed into the room, but Hiro couldn’t resist taking a peek into the solitary holding cell where the breakout had occurred. The place had been trashed, prison bars bent and broken across the floor amidst the Providence agents, and parts of the walls shattered to pieces. The four-armed girl Hiro recognized as Breach lay on the floor as well, but she was struggle to try to lift her body, and in the center of the room, beside a glowing red portal, stood the escaping prisoner.

He was a stone statue. Literally. It was like someone had found a vaguely human-shaped pillar of rock and dressed it up to look like an odd mockery of a man. “Quarry,” Rex called out menacingly, and the statue moved, turned, fixed a single-eyes stare on him. A slit in his blank stone face turned upward in a smile.

“Rex!” he called back, and he actually sounded delighted. That, more than anything, sent a shiver down Hiro’s spine. He must be an EVO, another nanite mutation like Rex or Rex’s friends, but there was something very different about him. The EVO teenagers had frightened Hiro at first, sure, but they were normal people under that mutation. Even Breach, while definitely dangerous, came across as fallible. Almost silly, with her extra arms and playful taunts at Rex. Inhuman looking, definitely, but still a person.

The stone man was cold. Above it all. If he’d ever been human, he was nothing more now than a solid mass of quietly restrained rage. Intelligent rage, at that. He gave Hiro the impression that if he wanted to fight, to hurt him, he could, easily, without breaking a sweat.

Quarry reminded Hiro of Callaghan.

He slipped into the portal before Rex could stop him, and it closed behind him, leaving Rex standing alone in the wreckage of the room. Breach managed to struggle to her feet, barely, while Rex was distracted, but instead of disappearing as well she peered out at Hiro through the doorway. “I see you followed me here,” she said.

Hiro felt goosebumps rise on his arms involuntarily. “Hey,” Rex called to her, and if he meant it to distract her from Hiro, it worked. She turned around, both sets of arms hanging down limply as if she couldn’t afford the effort of lifting them. “You came to Hong Kong for Quarry?”

She scoffed. “Who did you think?” she asked. She raised one of her arms, one of the large, beefy ones that Hiro felt weird looking at too closely, and a red spark appeared in midair. It sputtered out before a full portal could form.

“What’s the matter, Breach?” Rex asked. “Portal troubles?”

She made a frustrated noise, then turned her head to look at Hiro again. He suddenly realized he was still standing in the doorway, the only physical means of escape.

“What’s your purpose here?” she asked him. Hiro didn’t know how to respond.

“What?”

She turned fully towards him again, and over her shoulder Hiro could see Rex tense. “I mean, why are you here? You don’t seem like anybody important.”

“Just along for the ride,” Hiro said. His voice sounded more self-assured than he felt. Too much practice faking it, he guessed.

She actually laughed, but Rex yelled “back off” before she could say anything else to Hiro.

“Don’t worry,” she said to Rex, and then she raised both her large arms and a portal appeared in a flash of red. “I’m not going to hurt your new….” She gave Hiro one last look. “…whatever you are.” Then she stepped through the portal, and was gone.

After a beat, Rex lowered his head into one hand, and let out a heavy sigh. “Can this day get any worse?”

There was already a jump jet waiting outside when they left the holding facility, and Rex seemed to know the man piloting it, though Hiro didn’t catch his name. They strapped into the back, and Rex gave Hiro a sorry look. “I guess we should just take you back home, huh?”

That wasn’t what Hiro was expecting him to say. “What? Why?”

“White’s gonna want me to deal with this right away, which means more briefings,” Rex said the word with an air of disgust, “and probably a few training runs, and no sleep for me tonight. Which would be really boring for you to sit in on, I bet, if they even let you.” Rex sighed. “Not at all how I thought today would go.”

“You got to see San Fransokyo,” Hiro countered.

“That’s true,” Rex said, some of his natural energy returning to his voice.

“And I got to meet your old gang.”

“Right…” Rex’s voice deflated again. He glanced sideways at Hiro’s confused look, and managed to grimace. “They didn’t seem to be… acting weird, did they?”

“I don’t know. I just met them. Is… that not how they usually act?”

Rex shrugged. “Maybe I’m overthinking this. I haven’t seen them since I sent Circe their way, and I was just worried that maybe, they might’ve… paired up.”

It took Hiro a moment to understand what Rex meant, and then he wasn’t sure if he should offer comfort or reassurance, or just laugh. He was leaning towards laughing. “Uh,” he tried instead, “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m not really the best judge of… that… kinda stuff.”

When Rex didn’t say anything, Hiro asked, “would it be a problem? If they did?”

Rex frowned. “I don’t know. No. Maybe. I mean, if they’re happy, I….” Hiro decided to change to subject.

The jump jet ended up taking them both back to Providence headquarters, because just as it slowed over the San Fransokyo bay Hiro remembered he’d left his backpack in Holiday’s lab. The agent in the green suit – Six, Hiro remembered – met them at the entrance to the base.

“We need you down in Sit Ops, Rex,” he said.

“Can it wait one minute? I need to show Hiro where Holiday’s lab is again.”

Six looked down at Hiro as if studying him – Hiro couldn’t really tell, because even though it as night the man was still wearing dark glasses. Finally, he said, “you look smart enough. I’m sure you remember how to find the lab on your own.”

“Aw, no, Six!” Rex complained. “We’re not leaving him to wander around HQ alone. Come on, Hiro. It’ll take, like, two minutes.”

“White wants you there now.”

“Uh,” Hiro cut in, “I’m sure I could find it again on my own.”

Rex gave him a pleading look, but Hiro just shrugged. He didn’t want to impose more than he already had, and it sounded like the situation was pretty urgent. Defeated, Rex sighed. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll tell Holiday you’re coming.”

“I’ll have the jet wait here to take you home,” Six said. He turned and headed down the entry hallway, Rex and Hiro close behind.

“Well,” Rex said, “It was fun hanging out today. Even if we did get attacked and teleported to Hong Kong.”

“That part was fun too,” Hiro said. Six turned down one hallway and Rex paused before following. “See you later?”

“See you later,” Rex agreed, and followed after the other agent. Hiro waved goodbye, and then he was on his own in the maze that was Providence headquarters.

Hiro had a pretty decent memory, but all the hallways here looked the same. They were numbered at the very least, and for the most part Hiro could follow the numbers he’d remembered seeing on the walls, but at some point he must have missed a turn. He ended up down one corridor where he was sure the elevator to the lab had been, but instead all he saw was another blank sliding door to another mystery room he probably wouldn’t be allowed to enter. He really should have agreed to let Rex be his guide one last time.

Just as Hiro was deciding to find someone to ask for directions, the sliding door in front of him opened. A man stood in the doorway, probably just a few years older than Wasabi and the others. He stared out into the hallway with that same look Tadashi used to get at dinner, when his mind was still focused on a particularly difficult problem. He didn’t even notice Hiro until Hiro cleared his throat, to get his attention.

“Oh,” the man said, surprised. “Didn’t see you there.”

“Um.” Hiro blinked, tensed his shoulders, and willed his expression into ‘poor lost child’ mode. The façade was almost instinctive, he’d used it so much. “I’m looking for Doctor Holiday’s lab?”

If the small child gimmick had any effect on the man, he didn’t show it. “I’m actually headed that way myself,” he said. His voice carried an accent Hiro couldn’t immediately place. “I can show you.” He started walking without checking to see if Hiro was following, and Hiro had to run to catch up. Almost as an afterthought, the man added, “I’m Caesar, by the way.”

“Hiro.”

“You seem a bit young for Providence, Hiro,” Caesar said. His pronounced Hiro’s name with a lilt, the same way Honey did, and Hiro involuntarily smiled. “What are you need at the lab?”

The façade was obviously not having any effect, so Hiro switched gears from ‘helpless child’ to ‘impressive genius’. “I, uh, left some of my project notes there for Dr. Holiday to look at. She asked to see some of my research, and I got a bit… distracted. I need to go pick up my hard drive.”

“What kind of research?” Caesar asked. Hiro couldn’t tell if ‘impressive’ was working either; Caesar still sounded slightly distracted, but he’d glanced back at Hiro while they walked.

Up ahead, Hiro saw the elevator he’d been looking for. “Nanite stuff,” he said offhandedly while Caesar pressed the call button. “Just the data from a project I was working on.” When Caesar gave him that look again, Hiro continued. “I integrated nanites into a robotics project I was working on – to get multiple bots to work and function together, the way nanites do – and I had to do some research to find a way to control the bots. Didn’t get a perfect solution; nanites are really hard to control.”

“I know,” Caesar said. They stepped onto the elevator together, and he punched in the code for the lab. “I helped design them.”

“You-?” Hiro mind raced. He stood dumbly for a moment, trying to remember what he’d read about the original nanite project, and the team behind it. He’d spent months, years even, pouring over articles in journals, magazines, newspapers, learning everything he could about the science team that wanted to change the world for the better. Then, he remembered something Rex had mentioned earlier. “You’re Rex’s brother, aren’t you?”

“The one and only,” Caesar said. The edge of pride that crept into his voice sounded so familiar.

The elevator dropped them off in the same small circle room Hiro had seen before, and they entered the doors of the lab at the same time. It was empty, no Dr. Holiday, but just as pristine looking as before. Hiro’s mind was still racing. He couldn’t believe he was actually meeting someone who worked on the original nanite project. He thought they were all dead.

Caesar was still standing beside him, instead of doing whatever he had come here to do. Finally, he said, “How did you manage to control the nanites, if I may ask?”

Hiro’s backpack was still on the floor by the console, where he’d copied all his nanite data onto Holiday’s computer. He could see the harddrive tucked into the main pocket, on top of everything else. Slowely, Hiro zipped up the backpack, and slung it onto his shoulders. “I could show you,” he said, trying not to sound too excited.

Chapter Text

It was pushing 11 at night and Hiro knew this was a bad idea, knew he should just head home and call it a day... but he couldn’t stop himself. Showing off was one of Hiro’s favorite hobbies, especially to those who knew what he was talking about. And not only had Caesar asked about his work, but now he was fully engaged, asking more questions, guessing solutions to problems, encouraging Hiro to explain his entire process. There was none of the previous half-present Caesar, who’d only barely been aware of Hiro’s presence.

It was like when Hiro got an idea for a project, and couldn’t help but explain the entire thing to Tadashi. Except this wasn’t Hiro’s brother, it was Rex’s, and he wasn’t politely listening along out of familial duty. He was fascinated by Hiro’s nanobots. A well-respected, famous, genius scientist and mechanical engineer, a child prodigy and member of the original nanite team himself, was fascinated by Hiro’s work.

It was enough to make Hiro forget these were the nanobots he was talking about. He’d been extremely flattered when Dr. Holiday asked, but he couldn’t talk to her about his project with the memory of Callaghan so fresh on his mind. This time, Callaghan hadn’t even crossed his mind.

Hiro had plugged the external drive up to Holiday’s console again, and sat up on the desk top near the monitor when reaching up for it repeatedly had become tedious. He needed to show Caesar how he had activated the nanites and manipulated then in the nanobots, which meant pulling up file after file in quick succession. All the bot data, which he hadn’t intended to give to Holiday, was still located on the junk folder he’d luckily forgotten to delete earlier.

“So the activated nanites stay contained in these cells,” Hiro said. He pointed to the schematics for his nanobots. The image was bisected, showing the magnetic casing and all the little parts inside that made the robots work. At the center, a metal cell the size of a water droplet housed the nanites that powered and controlled the single bot, as well as communicated with the rest of the horde.

Caesar inspected the handwritten notes Hiro had added to the image. “You suspended the nanites in a liquid solution?” he asked.

“Just water and table salt,” Hiro said modestly. “To help them communicate faster. We had to fill and assemble each capsule by hand, so it took forever.”

“And the robots are all controlled with the headband that translates brain signals. Genius.” He scrolled around for a moment, looking at other parts of Hiro’s design, then stopped and looked up, meeting Hiro’s eyes. “Would you mind if we tried recreating your nanite experiments in my personal lab?”

The words ‘personal lab’ swam through Hiro’s head. “N-no,” he said. “I mean, no I wouldn’t mind. At all. Of course!”

Hiro packed the hard drive into his backpack again and followed Caesar out of the main lab, back through the blank, confusing Providence hallways. As they walked, Hiro brimming with excitement, Caesar looked to him and said, “do you mind if I ask, why nanites?”

“What do you mean?”

“According to the schematics I saw, you used the nanite components to link each individual bot to the rest of the swarm. Conceivably, you could have done this with just a basic radio transmitter and receiver in each bot. It would have required much less research into nanite technology. Why go through the trouble of implementing nanites to begin with?”

Hiro had to think about that. It had been months since he’d come up with his original nanobot plans, since he’d even decided on his showcase project. The idea of nanite-infused robots had been there since the beginning, but he couldn’t remember why. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said slowly, trying to remember what had triggered the idea. He remembered Tadashi loving it, telling him it was new, innovative, eye-catching. With nanites everywhere, any engineer working with them, instead of ignoring them, was likely to get noticed. But it hadn’t been Tadashi’s idea. Where had it come from…?

It came to Hiro just as they reached Caesar’s lab, as Caesar was saying that it didn’t really matter because it had been a huge revelation either way. It was Callaghan.

Hiro had wanted to get into that school so badly, and he knew Callaghan would be judging for scholarship recipients. He used everything about that one conversation they’d had, when they first met at Tadashi’s lab, to tailor the project specifically for Callaghan: his impressed reaction to Megabot, his belief in pushing boundaries and shaping the future, and even an offhand comment on the tragedy of the Nanite Event, and how he wished some good could come from the machines that had caused so much harm.

“It was Callaghan,” Hiro said aloud as the door to Caesar’s lab slip open. If Caesar heard him, he didn’t pay any attention. He led Hiro into the room with a flourish, welcomed Hiro to his work space, then hurried to set up the machines for the experiment. Hiro stood in a daze, unable to respond.

Everything he had ever made had been destroyed by Callaghan, Hiro realized. Baymax’s upgrades: crushed leaving the portal. All of Hiro’s nanobots: destroyed in the fight and the fire. And now Hiro’s inventive spirit had been tainted with the knowledge that not only had Callaghan used it, used him, to hurt people, but he hadn’t really ever stolen the nanobots to begin with. Hiro had made them for him.

“It was Callaghan,” Hiro tried again. Caesar looked confused, but Hiro needed to explain, somehow. “I used the nanites because I thought Callaghan would be impressed. And he was. Enough to set that fire to take them.”

“Who’s Callaghan? What fire?”

“The one my brother died in,” Hiro said. Caesar didn’t know what Hiro was talking about, but his gaze dropped to the floor. That, at least, was something he understood. “I built the nanobots, then Callaghan took them, and he used them to hurt people, to hurt me and my friends. My brother, Tadashi, died in the fire. He wanted to save Callaghan, and Callaghan just… used me.”

Caesar slowly took a seat in a chair by the desk, which surprised Hiro. He still stared at the ground. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what that’s like.”

“You do?” Hiro asked incredulously.

“We created the nanites to help people,” Caesar said. “But not everyone had the same idea. And after the explosion….” Caesar glanced up, but he avoided Hiro’s eyes now. It was like he was lost in something far away, something he wasn’t telling Hiro. “Nanites have done more bad than good. And I’m the only one left who can try to make something good out of all this.” He met Hiro’s eyes now. “You can make something good out of what happened to your machines, too. You’re not stuck with the way they were used before.”

What happened to the nanites, and what happened to Hiro’s nanobots… it wasn’t exactly the same thing. “I can’t just ignore what happened,” Hiro said.

“You don’t have to ignore it. But you don’t have to be stuck with it either.” Caesar sighed, then, and stood up again. “Your nanobots are an ingenious invention, Hiro. If you developed them more, you could have something that could change the world, make it a better place. If you leave them as they are now, all they’ll ever have accomplished is pain.”

It was Hiro’s turn to avoid meeting Caesar’s eyes. Part of him knew Caesar was telling the truth, but it didn’t erase the hurt Hiro felt at just the idea of improving on something that had already caused so much damage. Plus, what Caesar had said, it sounded so much like what Callaghan himself had said that night of the showcase, months ago.

But as he looked around Caesar’s lab, Hiro was also reminded of the setup at Tadashi’s lab at school. There were some of the same machines sitting in the corners, a 3D printer like theirs at home next to the computer, and another computer across the room by a bookshelf that was stuffed full. The lab was an organized mess, which Tadashi wouldn’t have liked, but which Hiro thrived in at their home garage lab. Tools strewn across work tables, half completed projects pushed out of the way for new projects. Hiro sighed.

“OK. I’ll think about rebuilding my nanobots,” he lied. “But first, I’ve got to show you how I made these nanites work.”

Caesar grinned, and the moment was over. He connected the first two machines to the wall, and Hiro plugged his hard drive into the nearest computer, and they started on their work.

At four in the morning, Hiro knew he should be tired, but he couldn’t feel it. They had spent hours running tests, tweaking variables, recording results. All-nighters were nothing new to Hiro, who’d spent many a morning being chewed out by Aunt Cass when she woke up to find he was still down in the garage. All-nighters before a school day were common too, though a year off from formal education meant he hadn’t experienced them in a while. Whenever Hiro got invested in something, it was difficult to convince himself that sleep was worth it, and Caesar evidently was the same way.

Caesar was doing most of the work, though, while Hiro sat back and watched from the computer desk. These were all experiments he’d already run, months ago, and the results were giving him nothing new, though Caesar seemed to be getting more out of it that Hiro had.

He had powered up the machine for another run when, without warning, the door to the lab slid open and Hiro heard Rex ask, “hey, Caesar, you wouldn’t have happened to see-?”

Rex stopped talking when he noticed Hiro, staring back at him from the desk. “Uh,” Hiro said, “hey.”

“There you are,” Rex said with a sigh, and sagged against the doorframe. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to be gone hours ago.”

“We’re working on recreating his nanobot designs,” Caesar said. He was still intently focused on the machine, and hadn’t even looked up when his brother entered the room. “With some improvements, of course.”

Rex seemed to perk up at that, but Hiro shook his head. “That’s not what we’re doing,” he insisted, shooting Caesar a look. “Caesar’s just running my nanite experiments again, though what he’s looking for, I don’t know.”

Rex stared thoughtfully at his brother. “Don’t you have classes tomorrow?” he asked Hiro after a moment. Hiro shrugged and leaned back in the desk chair.

“I can get one of your hyper-speed jets to take me in a few hours. I’ll be fine.”

Rex shook his head, disbelieving, and moved to sit down on the desk next to Hiro. He leaned his elbows onto his knees, and dropped his voice while Caesar worked across the room. “So,” he said. “I see you met my brother.”

“Yeah,” Hiro said. “He’s cool, if… different.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Rex said. He was still staring at his brother, who was all but ignoring the two of them as he took notes on the next experiment.

“I don’t mean that,” Hiro said, and Rex raised an eyebrow. “That’s just hyperfocus. I know several kids like that. No, I mean… I told him about Callaghan, about what happened. And Dr. Holiday didn’t really ask any questions, and you didn’t push the issue earlier, but… your brother really wants me to rebuild my nanobots. I told him I’d think about it, but I think he knew I was lying, because he’s mentioned it several times already.”

Rex was silent for a moment, then said, quietly, “I think he’s right.”

“What?”

“I know I dropped the issue earlier, because you obviously didn’t want to talk about it, but they’re still your bots. You invented them.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Hiro said. He hoped Rex didn’t catch the way his voice cracked. “I just realized this earlier, too. Yeah, I made them, but I made them for Callaghan.”

“He stole them. You didn’t make them for him.”

“But I did. The designs, the nanites – it was all to impress Callaghan. Of course I couldn’t know what he’d do with them, but that doesn’t change the fact that I built them for him. And I don’t want to rebuild them, knowing they were really his all along.”

Hiro was staring hard at the floor, trying to control his expression, and he felt Rex nudge him in the shoulder. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he looked up and met Rex’s eye. “Then make them into something new,” Rex said.

“What?”

“You designed those bots for Callaghan, fine. Redesign them. For yourself.”

“They’d still be nanobots, even if they look different,” Hiro countered. “How could I trust them again?”

“What about Baymax?” Rex asked. “Baymax went rogue that one time, right? And you still trusted your bot. Because you removed that part of it.”

Hiro scoffed, and sank further into his chair. “That’s not what happened,” he said. “That part of Baymax’s programming, I made it to begin with. And it’s still there.” The red chip, clean after Hiro had picked off the strip of black tape, was still sitting on his desk in his garage, right under the green chip with Tadashi’s name on it. “It’s still part of who Baymax is. He just denied my access to his data port, so I couldn’t make him hurt anyone again.”

“Then do that,” Rex said. Hiro glanced at him, confused. “Limit access to your bots somehow, so only you can use them. So they’ll be for you, and just you, and you can make sure no one uses them to hurt anyone else.”

It… was an idea. One Hiro hadn’t considered before. Limiting access to the bots would be easy, it would just be a matter of programming his brainwave pattern to the control headset. Like a mental thumbprint lock. And then perhaps designing a kill code to shut down the bots if they ever went rogue again. Nothing too hard.

“I’ve built tons of things,” Hiro said. “Cool things, and stupid things I only used once then left in a box buried in the back of the garage. Why shouldn’t I do the same with my nanobots? Wouldn’t it be easier just to leave them to collect dust?”

“Maybe,” Rex admitted. “But they’re your invention. And you did kind of show them off to the entire school, and that Krei guy, and a bunch of other business people at that showcase. Someone will remember what you did, figure out how to recreate it, and then your invention will really be out of your hands.”

“They can’t do that,” Hiro said, but even as he said it he knew Rex was right. It would take even the smartest roboticist a long while to reverse engineer the nanobots without having direct access to them, but he hadn’t copyrighted them, and now the idea was out there.

“Plus, like I said, you should do it for yourself,” Rex added. “Maybe if you remake the nanobots, they won’t just be a bad memory anymore.”

Hiro opened his mouth to respond, but there was a crackle sound and Rex groaned. He pressed the comm in his ear, spoke into it for a moment, then slid off the desk. “Well,” he said to Hiro, “duty calls. They want me running more training drills so I’m ready to take out Quarry whenever he shows up. You better get home before you miss school. If your aunt calls, I am totally throwing you under the bus, you know.”

“I will, don’t worry” Hiro said, and laughed. He watched Rex rush out, then stood up to rejoin Caesar. The man was taking copious notes on sheets of printer paper, and he actually noticed when Hiro walked up to him, because he shuffled them quickly into a neat stack. “What’s the conclusion so far?” Hiro asked lightly.

“Here,” Caesar said, handing him the stack. On the front was a roughly sketched drawing of a machine, but it wasn’t a nanite. It was a nanobot.

“Why did you-” Hiro started to ask, staring at it, but Caesar cut him off before he could finish.

“I’ve calculated that if you remove the nanite component to the nanobot, you’ll save on time and effort and actually make the nanobots easier to control with your headset. They’ll be slightly larger, to make room for the radio components and internal battery, but much more effective.”

Hiro flipped through pages and pages of calculations, schematics, data on radio frequencies and power sources. “When did you do this?” Hiro asked, staring at a page of suggestions on how to change the nanobot shape, to more effectively use space.

“In the last five minutes,” Caesar said, with a nod toward the desk where Hiro and Rex had been talking. “Plus, whenever you were distracted all night.”

Caesar had been writing at his desk a lot; Hiro had just assumed he’d been taking extra notes on the nanite tests, looking for something Hiro hadn’t noticed.

“I stand by what I said earlier,” Caesar continued. “Your nanobots are an ingenious invention, Hiro. You should develop them more. Like Rex said. Make them really yours.”

Hiro pursed his lips. “Does Rex go off and fight EVOs on his own a lot?”

“He’s usually got backup,” Caesar said with a shrug. “That kid’s pretty good at taking care of himself.” He watched Hiro intently, though, waiting for him to give a real answer. Finally, Hiro sighed.

“I’m not going to rebuild the nanobots,” he said. Caesar looked disappointed, but Hiro gave a small smile. “If they’re going to be even bigger than the last ones, ‘nano’ isn’t really an accurate name anymore, is it?”

“It wasn’t really accurate to begin with,” Caesar pointed out.

Hiro looked down at the sketch again. “They’ll be more ‘micro’ sized now, wouldn’t you say?”

Chapter Text

Six took Rex directly to Sit Ops, where Holiday was already waiting. “They’re transferring in the security feed from Quarry’s escape,” she told them both. “White wants us to analyze it for any potential leads on where Quarry’s headed.”

Rex opened his mouth to give a retort, but ended up yawning first. “Don’t we have analysts for this kinda stuff?” he asked, and pointed a thumb at the row of Providece agents sitting at desks nearby, to prove his point. Holiday held up a device Rex recognized as a nanite scanner before she answered.

“You’re the one that’s going to have to fight him,” Holiday said. “You need to know what he wants, what he’s planning, in order to do that. Your nanites are reading normal,” she added, checking the results of the scan. She slipped the scanner into her lab coat pocket, then held out a hand palm up.

Rex feigned ignorance. “What?”

“Your phone.” It was a clunky Providence-issue phone that wasn’t much good for anything, but after meeting Noah they’d finally decided to give him one, so the friends could stay in touch. Taking it away was standard procedure for debriefs. Rex sighed, defeated, when Holiday didn’t buy his trick, and the phone went into her pocket beside the nanite scanner. It wasn’t like Noah was awake to text anyways.

An agent alerted them when the security camera feeds were fully uploaded, and Rex slumped into his chair beside Six, arms crossed, fighting off another yawn. The feeds just showed Quarry talking to Breach before Rex showed up, and nothing they talked about was interesting at all. Rex should have gone to sleep hours ago. Six had to shake him awake when White’s face took over the computer screen for their conference call.

“Rex needs to sleep,” Holiday told White when he started insisting that Rex go in for physical training right then.

“We need him ready as soon as we’ve located Quarry,” White countered. There was an entire team working on pinpointing Quarry’s EVO signature, and with any luck they could track him down within the hour.

“And he won’t be ready for anything in this state,” Holiday argued. Rex yawned helpfully. “I’m not talking about a full eight hours, just a thirty minute power nap. We won’t find Quarry before then.”

White reluctantly agreed, and Rex would have cheered if he hadn’t been so tired. They sent him to his room alone, and it felt like he’d just barely closed his eyes when Bobo was shaking him awake again.

“Hey kid, get up.” Bobo grinned as Rex complained and forced himself into a sitting position. He held up one of his personal red blaster guns. “They want us in training.”

Rex would have sworn if he remembered any good swear words. This was the worst part of working for Providence. When there wasn’t an EVO threat, it was boring, but at least he could find some way to entertain himself. When there was someone to fight, Rex got to go out and crack heads, and on good days cure EVOs. But every now and then there was a serious threat – like a master criminal who escaped from jail – and they kept Rex busy waiting on the sidelines, which was far worse.

Six ran Rex and Bobo through a battery of tests in the training room, dodging and destroying whatever he threw at them. Like the rest of Providence headquarters, the room was so bright that Rex almost forgot it was the middle of the night outside.

After the training machines were sufficiently dismantled, Holiday returned to test Rex’s nanites and give them an update on the search for Quarry. “His EVO signature isn’t standing out on any of our scanners so far,” she said, “and the Hong Kong government’s being elusive about the molecular destabilizer.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rex said. He tried to ignore the pain as Holiday drew blood for a test, but instinctively muttered an “ow” anyways.

“The machine Breach told him about,” Holiday said. She fixed him with a look. “You were paying attention during the briefing, right?”

“No,” Rex said. He tried to look apologetic but it didn’t seem to work on Holiday. He could tell she was about to give him a lecture, about focus or the importance of being prepared or something, when his stomach growled loudly and saved him. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, and Holiday sighed, and sent him and Bobo down to the cafeteria.

After eating pretty much everything they could find, Rex and Bobo agreed to sneak back to their room to sleep before anyone could anyone could drag them off to more briefings or trainings. “With any luck,” Rex said, “I’ll get a decent half-hour nap before Six notices I’m not where I’m supposed to be.”

“Good luck with that,” Bobo huffed. He passed out in a food coma on his hammock before Rex could even decide whether or not to take his shoes off.

Six woke him up this time, probably giving him a stern look under his shades. “Your little friend’s gone missing,” he said.

“What?” Rex asked, still half asleep.

“Hiro. He didn’t make it back to the jump jet after he got his stuff out of Holiday’s lab.”

Rex rubbed his eyes and stood up from the bed. He barely registered that his shoes were still on, that he’d even fallen asleep with his goggles on his head, and it took his brain a moment to process what Six was saying. Bobo rolled over in his hammock, pointedly refusing to wake up.

“He didn’t….” Rex mumbled, confused, then blinked at Six. “What time is it?”

“Almost four.”

How was it four already? It had only been eleven when they got back from Hong Kong. Which meant Hiro had been missing for… five hours. “He’s not at Holiday’s lab?”

“Nope.”

“The Petting Zoo, maybe?”

“You check there,” Six said. “I’m heading to the security room to review footage, before White Knight finds out. If your friend has infiltrated Providence to steal information-”

Rex shook his head, leading Six out into the hallway. “He’s not like that, trust me. He probably just got distracted looking at tech.”

“White still won’t like that,” Six warned.

There was no sign of Hiro at the Petting Zoo after a half-hour’s search, so Rex double checked with Holiday, who promised she hadn’t seen the kid since they left with Noah to get takeout. Rex was beginning to think he should worry, and possibly track down the number to Hiro’s San Fransokyo home, when Six’s voice came through the comm in his ear.

“Check your brother’s lab,” was all he said.

“My brother?” But that made a sort of sense. If Caesar found out Rex had befriended a kid researching nanites, he’d definitely want to know. And if Hiro found out one of the scientists from the original nanite project was here at headquarters? Caesar’s lab would have been his first stop.

Hiro at least looked a bit guilty when Rex finally found him, hiding in Caesar’s lab like Six thought. Somehow, the two of them had managed to spent five hours running a range of nanite tests without finding it mind-numbingly dull, or thinking to possibly tell someone Hiro was alive and well. Or passing out from exhaustion; Rex still hadn’t shaken off the tired feeling from when Six woke him up, and Hiro hadn’t even slept that night.

They were able to chat for a few minutes, mostly about Hiro’s nanobot project, before Six finally checked in on Rex again. He was hoping it would take Six a bit longer. As expected, with the ‘intruder’ found, Six just wanted Rex back for more drills in the training room. A never-ending cycle of fun. He said goodbye to Hiro for the second time, made him promise to go home soon, then left for training.

Six joined him on the floor this time – Bobo refused to get up no matter what Six had threatened him with. Holiday ran the battery from the observation deck, which meant there was less muscle to beat but more complex fight scenarios to solve. Rex felt wide awake after the first round alone.

“White found the machine Van Kleiss was after,” Holiday told Rex and Six when they stopped for a water break.

“Are we heading out soon?” Six asked.

“No,” Holiday said. “The lab holding it hasn’t reported any disturbance tonight, which is odd, since Quarry had all night to go after it. Or all day, Hong Kong time.”

“So he doesn’t actually want this thing?” Rex asked. “All this for nothing?”

“Maybe not. He could be waiting until it’s night, so there’s less people guarding the machine. Plus Breach still hasn’t resurfaced, and even if Quarry isn’t hunting the destabilizer we know Van Kleiss wants it. We’re still on standby until this gets resolved.”

Rex groaned. Standby was the worst.

“Come on,” Six said to Rex, and started heading back to the training floor. “Let’s do another run through.”

The next hour passed in a blur of smashed machines and dodged bullets. If there were any updates on the Quarry situation, they weren’t important enough for Holiday to pass along. At least Rex was doing what he loved to do best: pounding heads and dismantling machines.

After physical training, Holiday took Rex back to the lab for more extensive tests. This was also boring – it meant getting his blood taken again and standing on scales and trying to lie still in the loud machine he didn’t like so Holiday could see how his nanites were doing – but it also meant he got to hang out with Dr. Holiday, and he never turned that down.

Six returned from Sit Ops with an update on the situation, but again the update was ‘no update’ and Rex was starting to get bored of this whole mess. There was nothing to do while they waited but run pointless tests and drills, and all Rex really wanted to do was sleep.

“Why don’t you?” Holiday said when Rex voiced this. He and Six just looked at her. “We’ve been on standby all night and Quarry’s still nowhere to be found. He might not show up at all, and this will have been for nothing. You’re still a teenager, you need your sleep, and if Quarry does show up it’ll be better if you’ve gotten some sleep than none.”

Six started to protest but Rex wasn’t waiting to hear what he had to say. He jumped up and grabbed the jacket and goggles he’d removed for the machine, and shouted “thank you, doc!” as he dashed out the door.

It was an alarm that woke Rex up the third time. He recognized the sound from countless nights being dragged out of sleep and sent off on some mission. They must have finally found Quarry.

“Tell them to turn that off, will ya?” Bobo grumbled from across the room. Rex watched him stick earplugs in his ears, still refusing to get up, and he forced himself to his feet, stretching the tired away. Showtime at last.

The building with the machine Rex hadn’t paid much attention to had finally been broken into, Six explained when Rex got down to Sit Ops. What he was planning, they didn’t know, but he’d finally surfaced and they weren’t going to lose him again. Rex was sent down to the transport bay while Six stayed behind to finish some other project, which confused Rex but it was a good thing anyways, because when he got down to the jump jets, there was another surprise waiting.

“Hiro?” Rex almost didn’t believe his eyes. The kid was sitting, backpack strapped to his back, kicking his heels against the side of a crate as if he’d been waiting for Rex to show up. “What are you still doing here?”

Hiro grinned. “I’m going to help you,” he said, as if that statement made any sense. The confusion on Rex’s face must have been obvious, because he added, “you helped me fight my arch nemesis, I want to help you fight yours.”

“OK, first off, Quarry is not my ‘arch nemesis’,” Rex said. “And secondly, aren’t you supposed to be at school or something?”

“I already called the professors.” Hiro shrugged. “They know I won’t be there.” Great. If Quarry or Van Kleiss didn’t kill Rex, this kid’s aunt might.

“OK, but you’re still just a kid. No offense, but last time you had your robot with you. Now it’s just… you. You’re going to get hurt.”

Hiro looked smug for some reason, and hopped to the ground. Behind him, a small team of Providence agents lifted the crate and started carrying it onto the jump jet. “It isn’t just me this time either, though,” Hiro said, and reached into the pocket of his hoodie.

Rex stepped closer just to get a better look at the small, white, object in his hand. “What…?”

“Microbots,” Hiro answered. “We manufactured them a bit fast, so these are the beta prototypes. I’ll need to test them to make sure they work properly. What better way to test them than helping you?”

Chapter Text

Hiro fit the device over his forehead and pulled on the string to tighten it around the back of his skull, then turned to Rex. “What do you think?” he asked. Rex looked hesitant to answer.

“It looks like some sort of science-y tiara,” Rex answered. “What are those little bits sticking up for? And is that a shoelace?”

Hiro felt at the shoestring keeping the neurotransmitter held in place. There hadn’t been time to design some way for it to stay up on its own, like Hiro’s last neurotransmitter, and Caesar had offered, so…. Hiro wasn’t going to mention that to Rex, however. “These are the cranial scanners,” Hiro said, touching where the small circular scanners arched up from the band. “They help the device read my brainwaves more easily. My last neurotransmitter went without them, but that’s because it ran on nanites.”

“They make you look silly,” Rex said, “but whatever. As long as you got it working, that’s cool.” He leaned as far forward as the straps on his seat would allow, and gestured towards the crate that had been brought onto the jet. The Providence agents who had carried it on now sat, weapons in their arms, strapped to the seats behind it. “What’s in there?” Rex asked.

Hiro held the single microbot out again for Rex to see. It fit across almost the width of his palm, noticeably larger than his nanobots had been, and easily mistaken for plastic if you weren’t physically touching the metal. “All the ones we managed to make before they found Quarry,” Hiro said.

From the crate, a large mass slowly started to form. The Providence agents looked up in alarm. It spilled up over the side of the crate and pooled on the floor of the jet, just in front of Hiro and Rex. The microbot in Hiro’s hand flew in to join the others

The sight of it still unnerved Hiro. He’d insisted they use white filament, instead of the more common black or grey, because he knew a black swarm would conjure up too many images of Callaghan, of that first fight at the warehouse or at the old Silent Sparrow labs. The white mass should instead remind Hiro of Baymax, the companion who wasn’t quite lost but couldn’t be there to protect him as usual.

But the white shapes were nothing like Baymax, even when Hiro tried to think them into mimicking the robot’s appearance. All he could see was a mindless mass of destructive power. Only the reassurance of the restrictions Hiro had placed on the neurotransmitter kept him from panicking.

He swallowed past a lump in his throat. “The microbots work a bit differently than the nanobots – no nanites, for one, besides what was already in the metal – but they do some of the same things. They listen to whatever I think, and make whatever I want.” The weak, monochrome imitation of Baymax raised a hand to wave at Rex. Some of the Providence agents seemed to be getting a kick out of the demonstration, which made Hiro smile.

Surprisingly, Rex also started chuckling. “Kind of like my nanites,” he said, and held up his own arm. Moments later, a sword replaced it. “But on the outside.”

Hiro laughed. “Sort of.”

They physically felt as the jet slowed down to normal airtravel speeds. “Over Hong Kong now,” the pilot called back from the front of the plane. The agents unstrapped themselves from their seats and stood up, always at the ready. Rex and Hiro followed suit.

“We’re going to be stopping a little early,” Rex called up towards the pilot. “Take us down to the nearest clear roof.”

“What?” The pilot turned around in his seat to make sure Rex was being serious. “We haven’t even locked onto Quarry’s EVO signature yet!”

It still surprised Hiro, whenever he noticed the adult agents working for this secret government agency treating Rex as an equal. Granted, Tadashi’s friends from SFIT treated Hiro as an equal, and they were all adults too, but this was different. These were professionals with jobs, not kids in school.

“I’ll catch up soon, I just have some people I need to check in on first.” Rex glanced sideways at Hiro, then added, “don’t worry, I’ll be there before Quarry causes any real damage.”

The Providence pilot sighed, and let them down. It was dark outside, already well into the evening, and from the open cargo doorway Hiro could see the water tower where Rex’s Hong Kong friends lived, just a few rooftops over.

The microbots followed behind Hiro out onto the empty roof. There were enough of them to copy himself in size and shape, and they started to bunch together at the very thought before Hiro forced himself to think of them lying flat on the ground instead. They were slower to respond than he’d like, but efficient.

“How many of those did you even make?” Rex asked once the swarm had half-covered the rooftop. Lying flat had been a bad idea; Hiro tried to imagine them curled together, into a shapeless blob, instead.

“Enough to be useful,” Hiro wished aloud.

Rex stepped towards the edge of the rooftop, facing the water tower. “Then be useful and find a way to get us over there.”

“Don’t you have wings?” Hiro asked. In response, Rex yawned widely.

“I got like an hour of sleep last night,” Rex said. “Aren’t you supposed to be practicing with your new toys?”

Hiro frowned, but joined Rex at the edge of the roof. It was only several feet to the next one over; the microbots should be able to span the distance easily. If they would hold, however, Hiro couldn’t know for sure. But there was only one way of finding out.

The microbots sounded like rain, or possibly hail, as they slid across the roof top to Hiro’s feet. He flinched as the swarm passed him, and they arched out over the gap between the two rooftops, automatically twisting into place and linking to form a white bridge in the air. They touched down on the other side and stilled.

“See?” Rex said. “I knew you could do it.” He moved to step onto the microbot bridge, but then stopped. “I feel like I might break them if I try walking on them, though,” he said. “You try first. They’re your bots.”

“You go first,” Hiro said, shaking his head. “You’re the one with retractable wings, in case they do break.”

The microbots held their weight perfectly, even felt more solid to walk on than the nanobots had been month ago. Hiro wasn’t sure if he should chalk that up to them being bigger, and therefore somehow stronger, or if they were just responding to his anxious worries. Either way, he and Rex crossed onto two more rooftops and finally made it up to the water tower.

“I just need to make sure they know what’s up,” Rex said. He climbed up to the railing of the water tower while Hiro called his microbots onto the roof with him. They weren’t making Hiro as anxious as they had been, but he still readjusted the neurotransmitter around his head, to make sure it wouldn’t fall off and get lost, leaving the bots out of his control.

When Hiro climbed up to the entrance of the hideout, his microbots trailing along behind him, he found Rex standing there speechless. “Everything OK?” Hiro asked.

“That’s what we were wondering,” someone said from inside the hideout. Hiro barely recognized the voice as Tuck’s. He and Cricket waved to Hiro from the couch. “Hey, Hiro. Cool to see you again.”

Rex shook his head, as if clearing away a thought. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

Hiro recognized the excuse, and smirked, remembering what Rex had asked him on the jet hours and hours ago, when they first left Hong Kong.

“We spent all night looking for Quarry,” Rex added before Hiro could think so say anything.

“Quarry?” Skwydd asked. “I thought Providence had him locked up.”

“Yeah,” he said, “until Breach busted him out this morning. You were right,” he added with a look towards Circe, who stood near the back of the room. “Breach wasn’t after you. She was looking for him.”

The tension in the room was palpable. “Quarry’s out?” Cricket asked with wide eyes.

“This is bad,” Skwydd said. He and Tuck looked as fearful as Cricket. Hiro had only met Quarry for a brief moment, but he felt he already understood why they were so afraid. Even if the EVO hadn’t reminded him so much of Callaghan, Hiro wouldn’t want to deal with him more than necessary.

Circe, however, didn’t look afraid. She looked angry. “You had a run-in with Breach and came back here?” she asked accusingly, and stepped forward. “What if she followed you?!”

Hiro stepped in to defend Rex. “That was hours ago,” he said, “back when we first left. Would she really be following us that whole time?”

“Yes,” Circe said. She glared at Hiro, and he flinched.

Rex raised his arms in a placating gesture. “It’s OK, Circe. If Breach followed me, I’d know, because-” Rex cut himself off, looked around, and suddenly shivered. “…she followed me,” he said.

A series of red portals opened up above them all, along the support beams of the hideout’s rafters. Hiro stepped back in surprise, and in a moment the portals were gone, leaving everything stored up in the rafters to fall onto the group waiting below. Hiro threw his hands up to cover his head, and a flash of white suddenly filled his vision. The microbots, responding to his emotional state, had mimicked his movements and flung themselves above his head to protect him from the falling debris.

Dust and noise filled the room but all Hiro could see was the swarm of microbots crowding around him, making him feel small and trapped. He flinched, knowing what they could do to him, and willed them away.

The microbots didn’t move. Instead they hung over him for a few moments more, shaking slightly, then all at once dropped dead to the floor.

Hundreds of the little metal robots rained down around Hiro, clattering loudly on the wood and cardboard that they had protected him from. Hiro, already huddled in defense, wrapped his arms around his head and crouched down further. He knew, logically, that they weren’t trying to hurt him, couldn’t hurt him as long as he still wore the neurotransmitter, but he stayed curled in on himself long after the microbots had grown still at his feet.

A boney, pointy hand brought him out of it. “Hiro,” someone said. He looked up to see Cricket standing over him, watching him with concern in her eyes. “You’re OK. Breach is gone.”

Hiro looked down at the microbots gathered around his feet. If they’d been dead moments ago, they weren’t any longer. They held themselves down with control, not lifeless but purposefully remaining still.

“It wasn’t Breach,” Hiro tried to say, but he hardly knew this girl, she wouldn’t understand. He stood up shakily and tried dusting himself off. Across the room, Rex turned towards the others.

“I’m taking down Quarry,” Rex said. His expression was dark, or at least darker than Hiro had seen it before.

“What about Circe?” Skwydd asked. Hiro didn’t notice until that moment that Circe was missing. Cricket had pulled herself out of the debris beside Hiro and Tuck was just now sliding out in ribbons from under a pile of boxes, but Circe was nowhere to be seen.

“You guys sit tight,” Rex said. He lowered his goggles over his eyes. “I’m going to get Circe.”

A metal noise started, one that usually indicated Rex’s EVO transformation, and Hiro shouted, “wait!” His voice cracked, just slightly, and he coughed to try to cover it. “What about me? I’m supposed to help!”

He knew how he must look, with the microbots he had flinched away from scattered wildly across the floor, but Hiro had only built them to pay Rex back for the help he had been in the fight against Callaghan. If he couldn’t even help during the actual confrontation, then what use was he?

“You can help clean this place up,” Rex said. His turbine wings formed behind him, and he gave what looked to Hiro like a self-confident smirk. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be back before too long.” And before Hiro could protest again, Rex was gone.

The EVO kids surveyed the damage to their hideout with disbelieving sighs, but Hiro just stood there numbly. “This is going to take forever to clean up,” Tuck said. He had reformed himself, and walked among the crushed boxes with a frown.

Skwydd looked up at the broken rafters above them. “We’ll need to get more wood to rebuild those,” he said.

“I have to go,” Hiro said. The microbots started shifting, moving, bunched together in a shapeless mass at his side. He stuffed his still-shaking hands into his hoodie pocket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.… I have to go. I have to help Rex.”

“Of course,” Skwydd said. The three EVOs stepped closer together.

“You didn’t think we’d let Rex run into a fight against Quarry all on his own,” Tuck continued “did you?”

“Not if he has some idiot plan to get Circe back from Breach,” Cricket finished. She smiled at Hiro. “We’re going after him too.”

Hiro smiled back weakly. At least he wouldn’t be alone, and if Rex got mad at him for following, it wouldn’t be just him.

“One question though,” Skwydd said, and raised a hand – tentacle? – to point at the microbots. “What are those things following you around?”

Hiro’s smile faded, but held out a hand and pictured the microbot mass rising up. Beside him, the real microbots followed the thought, albeit slowly, and a single bot was deposited onto his palm. “Microbots,” Hiro said. “I modified them from a previous design and had a bunch made last night. Rex helped me when I was in trouble, so I wanted something I could use to help him with, too.”

Tuck stepped closer to the swarm to get a better look. “What,” he asked jokingly, “do you control them with your mind?”

Hiro chuckled. “Actually,” he said, and pointed to the neurotransmitter still tied around his skull. When he finally got around to taking it off, there’d be a dent in his forehead for sure. “They read brainwaves, and do what I think. I can make them do almost anything.”

“That’s so cool,” Tuck said. Behind him, Cricket’s eyes widened with understanding.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “That’s why they all shorted out when you panicked. I thought you panicked because they shorted out.”

The microbot in Hiro’s hand buzzed, and flew off to join the rest of the swarm. “Yeah,” Hiro said. “I don’t have the best time controlling them. I think that’s why Rex wanted me to stay behind. I don’t think he really wanted me coming back to Hong Kong to begin with.”

“If you haven’t noticed,” Skwydd said, “he ditched all of us. Speaking of,” he added, and pointed towards the gaping hole in their hideout roof. “Shouldn’t we get going?

Cricket gestured for Hiro to follow. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll catch up to Rex and you can help us fight Quarry. And if anything goes wrong with your robots, we’ll help you out.”

Hiro could see it in his mind’s eye. The microbots could carry him across the city just as they carried him across the showcase stage and exhibit hall. He could probably use them to fight just as easily as Callaghan had, maybe more so with the extra enhancements he had added in. The thought terrified him.

“Let’s go,” Hiro agreed. The microbots surged into action.

Chapter Text

Riding the swarm of microbots across Hong Kong would almost feel like flying, Hiro thought, if he hadn’t already experienced flying firsthand. Riding on Baymax’s back through the skies of San Fransokyo was an entirely different sensation from this. If anything, the microbots reminded Hiro of that summer Tadashi decided to take up surfing, and had dragged Hiro along; he felt awkward and clumsy as the little robots latched onto his feet and carried him rooftop to rooftop, but at least he wasn’t falling, so he was technically doing well.

Cricket guided the team as the traveled. She’d explained to Hiro that her hearing was better than the others’, that she could hear what was said to Rex on his communicator before he’d left. In different circumstances, this would have piqued Hiro’s scientific interested. He still didn’t completely understand what the EVO mutation had actually done to these kids. But all he could focus on was the fact that Rex needed their help.

A flash of yellow light was the group’s first indicator that they were close to the fight. It lit up a street just ahead of them, accompanied by the sound of something large crumbling. “What was that?” Tuck asked.

No one responded. Below them, Hiro could see the streets of Hong Kong, practically torn apart in the earlier fight. Providence agents had begun to move in, to calm the people down and restore order, but Rex and Quarry were nowhere to be found.

“There!” Cricket said as another flash of light appeared just ahead of them. It lit up the windows of an old factory warehouse, then disappeared almost instantly. “They’re in there!”

They ducked inside through a row of empty window frames just below the roof and landed on a metal grate catwalk. It was dark except for the moonlight filtering in, and Hiro couldn’t help but think of the last warehouse window he’d climbed through, just weeks ago, when he discovered his nanobots were being reproduced, and the Yokai.

Rex and Quarry fought far below them. They watched as Rex built machine after machine only to have the disintegrated by the bursting yellow shot coming from the weapon in Quarry’s hand, all while Quarry advanced, taunting.

 “Suppresses the atomic charge, or so I’m told,” he said. Rex threw his large metal fists up to protect himself and they were blasted apart in seconds. “Protons and electrons just fly apart!”

“He’s destroying Rex’s machines – Rex’s nanites – from a molecular level,” Hiro said to the others. “I… I don’t know how to stop that.”

“I got this,” Skwydd said. Without another word, he leapt down from the catwalk and shot a jet of ink over Quarry’s head. Quarry jerked back in surprise, missing his target and shooting a beam from the molecular weapon off to the side of the warehouse wall. Hiro and the other EVOs followed Skwydd down to where Rex stood, stunned.

“What are you doing here?” he practically shouted. Behind him, Quarry waved the ink cloud away.

“We’re not letting you fight alone,” Hiro said. He felt the microbots deposit him, not too softly, onto the warehouse floor by Rex’s side, then swarm up behind him – out of sight but ready to do whatever needed to be done.

Quarry stood just yards away. He seemed taller than Hiro remembered, more menacing with the weapon strapped to his chest and back. His knowing smile wasn’t helping matters either. Hiro looked away.

Rex was glancing between Hiro and his EVO friends, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I told you to stay behind,” he hissed, at no one in particular. Hiro couldn’t tell if that was anger or just stress from the fight.

“I came here to help you!” Hiro shot back. “I’m not going to leave you on your own!”

Rex gave a frustrated growl, then pointed behind Hiro. “Don’t help me,” he said, “help them.”

Hiro turned. Through the large hole in the side of the warehouse, the hole Quarry had made with his molecular weapon when Skwydd threw his aim off, Hiro could see the next building over. More accurately, the construction site on the next plot over. He could see construction workers who hadn’t been evacuated yet, running to escape broken and collapsing steel beams.

“On it,” Hiro heard Tuck say, and Rex’s friends disappeared through the hole to take care of the new problem. Rex wasn’t looking at them, though. He was looking at Hiro.

“Go,” he said, “I can handle Quarry.” But Hiro could tell he was just faking confidence. Hiro had worn that expression himself so many times.

Quarry didn’t wait for Hiro to respond. “It’s OK,” he said mockingly, and stepped closer to the pair. “I can destroy the both of you easily enough.”

Rex lifted a large robotic fist just fast enough to have it blown to bits, instead of his head. “Go on,” Rex said again. “I got this.”

He stood between Hiro and Quarry, putting himself between Hiro and something that would hurt Hiro, if given the chance. He wasn’t the first to do so.

“No,” Hiro said again, and he felt the microbots behind him bristle with barely restrained power. “I’m fighting with you.”

With a small movement, Hiro sent the microbots forward, surging in a solid mass towards Quarry. They surprised him enough to almost hit him before he raised an arm in defense and blasted the front of the swarm to bits. Hiro watched as about a hundred or so bots disintegrated to nothing in mid-air. Unlike with the nanobots, Hiro couldn’t feel the microbots disconnecting from the swarm, but he knew they were being pulled apart particle by particle.

“What’s this?” Quarry asked. He stared at the frozen microbot swarm that still clustered in front of him. “Tiny little robots linked together? You’re controlling these? You’ve got a good head on you, kid, to think up something like this. What’s your name, again?”

“Don’t talk to him,” Rex spat.

Hiro was already recalculating. He pulled the microbots back, then sent them across the floor to grab at Quarry from below, maybe drag him off his feet. He noticed what Hiro was doing and aimed the weapon down, shooting at the microbots like ants, but there were too many of them. Quarry staggered when the first bots grabbed at his feet, swarming higher and higher.

And then they stopped moving. The bots hung there limply, ignoring Hiro when he shakily willed them to attack. Quarry stepped back and shook them off easily, and they fell to a lifeless heap on the floor.

“Still working out a few kinks?” he asked. He pointed the weapon in his hand at the cluster of microbots that had fallen to the floor, but didn’t immediately shoot. Hiro could see them, in his mind, blasted to bits. He could also see them as they swarmed around Baymax, around his friends, as they rebuilt the portal machine and destroyed an entire city block. The nanobots were gone but he could still see them, lying lifelessly before him, dangerous.

Quarry finally pulled the trigger. Hundreds more disintegrated into molecular dust; the ones that didn’t spilled into the newly created hole in the floor.

“Hiro,” he heard Rex say, and Hiro had to drag his eyes up off the ground to look at him. He almost didn’t notice the heavy hand on his shoulder. Rex was staring at him closely, a look of fear in his eyes. “You need to get out of here. Now.”

Hiro started to protest again, but Quarry was moving closer now, and secretly he wanted nothing more than to be away from all this, the machines and the robots and the fighting. But he couldn’t move.

Quarry raised the molecular weapon again and Rex grabbed Hiro around his middle. In moments they were airborne, flying towards the opening in the warehouse wall; moments later, they were falling again, Rex’s turbine wings destroyed in the yellow blast. They landed softer than they had that morning, but the sudden movement and the sudden pain was enough to jerk Hiro out of his daze.

“Stay here,” Rex said. Hiro scrambled to his feet and Rex turned just as the warehouse wall crumbled in another blast of yellow light. Quarry stood in the new opening, ready to advance. “Help the others,” Rex said, “I’ll draw him away.”

What was left of the microbot swarm reactivated without Hiro noticing. They spilled out from behind Quarry’s feet to join Hiro on the collapsing construction site, noticeably fewer in numbers than when he’d started. Hiro guessed there were only about half of the original swarm left.

Rex blocked another of the molecular weapon’s yellow blasts with his robotic fists, and steered Quarry away from Hiro and the others, back into the warehouse. Hiro couldn’t hear what Quarry was taunting, over all the noise, and part of him still wanted to run back in to help. It’s what he’d come here to do, after all.

But he knew very well that he’d probably just freeze up again, end up as more of a liability than an asset. So he turned his back on the warehouse, on the fight, and faced the collapsing metal structure above him.

It almost looked like the construction beams had been sliced in two. Tuck was holding the pieces together as well as he could while Skwydd and Cricket rushed the construction workers out, but he wouldn’t be able to hold it for long. Without even thinking about it, Hiro willed the microbots into action. They swarmed at the base of the structure, leaving Hiro behind, then snaked up around the broken pieces and constricted them tightly into place.

Tuck stepped back in surprise. The microbots held the entire load up on their own, with just Hiro’s thoughts to guide them.

The rescued workers shouted something in Chinese, which Hiro only understood as thanks based on their tone. They ran off through the crowd that had gathered, knowing as much as Hiro did that no matter what happened, this structure would be going down.

“Hiro!” Cricket called to him. She ran back to join him, sparing only a single glance up at the microbot swarm holding the steel in place.

“Is everyone else out?” Hiro asked.

“There’s no one else but us on site,” Tuck confirmed. He’d unraveled and dropped to the ground, rolling back into shape at Cricket’s side just as Skwydd joined the group as well..

“Then we have to let the building down,” Hiro said.

“You mean let it fall?” Skwydd asked. “I thought we were trying to stop that.”

 “There’s no way we can keep it standing like this. If we guide the fall, we can at least minimize the damage.”

Skwydd glanced at Tuck, who glanced at Cricket, who shrugged and said “alright, Hiro, just tell us what to do.”

Directing Rex’s friends was harder than directing Tadashi’s – Hiro didn’t have Baymax, to give him mobility, and they didn’t have any radio communication links – but they worked fast and listened well to instruction. Each EVO took a support beam, with Hiro still holding his microbots in place, and slid them out just right so the structure above could collapse inward, instead of outward. Hiro called his microbots to grab anything that moved too far towards the street, and everyone was able to move out of the way in time to avoid getting hit.

“Everyone alright?” Skwyyd called as the dust settled. Hiro coughed into his fist. The microbots were still swarming out of the collapsed construction site, each little robot one by one appeared from between bent steel beams to join the tiny swarm growing by Hiro’s side. After a minute, the shapeless mass had formed, even smaller than it had been after Quarry blasted the microbots to dust.

“I need to help Rex,” Hiro said again, and this time he felt it. He didn’t see the nanobots by his side like he had before, tools of destruction for a faceless monster. They were microbots, new and slow and clunky, with more than a few bugs left to work out, and Hiro held the reins of their power. A power that could save lives and stop destruction just as much as cause it.

“Go,” Cricket said. She gestured towards the warehouse, where Hiro could still see flashes of yellow light and hear the sounds of fighting. “We’ll clean up here.”

Hiro nodded once, and started running. The microbots followed with barely a thought, slower but staying close behind him. He scrambled up over crumbled cement and made his way back into the warehouse, where Quarry was firing blast after blast at Rex, who….

Who was somehow managing to block them. He had transformed his robotic fists into a new machine, one Hiro hadn’t seen before. They were similar but blue, and projected a sort of energy shield – and every time the light blast from Quarry’s molecular weapon hit them, it bounced right off.

Hiro wanted to watch for a minute, to figure out what was going on with Rex’s new build, but the deflected blasts were destroying the rest of the warehouse around him. One shot a hole in the ceiling and Hiro instinctively flung his arms over his head to protect himself. The microbots swarmed above him protectively, just in time to block the debris raining down.

Quarry noticed Hiro before Rex had the chance. He shot one more blast Rex’s way, then sidestepped, moving closer to Hiro while Rex moved away. Hiro had just shaken the dust off when he noticed Quarry getting closer, and Rex getting further away. Rex didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late.

“Hiro!” he called out, but Quarry turned the weapon from Rex’s energy shields to Hiro, who stood just yards away. There was no time for Rex to intervene. Hiro called the microbots to protect him but even more were disintegrated in the yellow light, and when he looked up next Quarry loomed over him, tall and menacing. The remaining microbots stuttered to a halt.

“Hiro, is it?” Quarry asked. “You’re becoming a bit of a nuisance.” Hiro tried to quip something back but nothing came out of his throat.

“Don’t touch him!” Rex shouted back, but he couldn’t move any closer while Quarry had his weapon still trained on Hiro’s head. He stood, poised ready to move, but held himself still while Quarry stared down at Hiro.

Hiro could feel himself shaking and tried to still it.

Quarry reached out with his free hand and Hiro flinched, but couldn’t get his legs to move. “You’re a bit too small on your own to be a problem,” Quarry said, “but these little robots of yours have got to go.”

Hiro jerked back when the rock hand touched his hairline, but in less than a second Quarry had yanked the neurotransmitter off of his head and tossed it away. The shoelace keeping it in place was still tied tight, and the roughly made metal cut into Hiro’s skin as it was pulled off. He felt a trickle of blood form at his forehead.

The microbots behind Hiro clattered to the floor, rolling out like so many marbles. The sharp metallic sound echoed around the warehouse. “There,” Quarry said. “Much better.” He swung the weapon over to point again at Rex, but stared down at Hiro. “Without your little robots you aren’t much of a threat. Stay there and don’t move. You, on the other hand….” He turned towards Rex.

“R-rex,” Hiro managed to choke out. Rex was staring between him and Quarry, eyes narrowed dangerously though he still didn’t dare to move. His blue glove shields were lowered, and several yards away, right between him and Quarry, Hiro’s neurotransmitter lay discarded on the floor.

“Yes, Rex,” Quarry said. “I’ve had about enough of you as well. I don’t suppose you’d stand down and let me go this time, would you?”

“Even if you made it out of here, Providence would just track you down again,” Rex hissed. “Why don’t you turn yourself in and make it easier on all of us?”

“Can’t do that, Rex,” Quarry said. “You know that.”

“Pity,” Rex said. “I guess you’ll just have to let him go so we can finish this like we started.”

“Or,” Quarry said, and he reached out for Hiro again, grabbing him by his shirt collar and lifting him into the air. Rex shouted but Quarry shot another beam of yellow light his direction without even looking. “Maybe I’ll just take you along with me. You seem smart enough to be useful.”

Hiro kicked and grabbed at Quarry’s fist, felt the fabric of his shirt starting to tear, but couldn’t shake loose. “Rex!” he called again. He could see Rex over Quarry’s shoulder, lowering his shield from Quarry’s last attack and watching wide-eyed. “The n-n-transmitter!” Hiro called.

Rex’s eyes darted to the neurotransmitter, lying dented on the cement floor, then back up to where Quarry had started to walk away. Quarry heard Hiro too, though, and stopped moving, throwing a glance back. In a single instance, he raised his weapon and shot, and Rex took a running leap and blocked the majority of the blast with his glove shield. The shot had missed the metal of the neurotransmitter, disintegrating just the hastily tied shoestring knot into dust.

Rex snatched the neurotransmitter up off the ground, then stopped, unsure of what to do next. “I can’t use this,” Rex said aloud. Quarry’s glare softened.

“You mean only the twerp here can control the robots?” he asked, with an extra shake of the fist holding Hiro. He started laughing. “Even better.”

Dangling in the air, Hiro tried his hardest to shake his head. “N-no,” he tried to say, but the fabric of his shirt was cutting into the sides of his neck and his lungs heaved, both from the strain of hanging in the air and panic. He gripped Quarry’s hand tight with one of his own to give himself some leverage, then tapped at his temple with the other while Quarry’s head was turned.

Rex saw the gesture, but shook his head, still confused. “Quarry,” he said threateningly, “let him go.”

Hiro tried to mime putting the neurotransmitter on while Quarry was distracted, but Rex didn’t seem to be getting it. “There’s no way I’m letting this kid go,” Quarry was saying. Hiro tried pointing at Rex, then down at the microbots, and Rex tilted his head in confusion. “He’s my bargaining chip.”

“I-it’s OK,” Hiro managed to sputter out, and Quarry turned back to look at him, confused. “You’ll be OK.”

“What does that-?” Quarry started to ask, but Rex finally seemed to get it. He looked at the neurotransmitter in his giant robotic hand, shoestring dangling from where it had disintegrated off, then pressed it up against his forehead the way Hiro had done earlier that night.

The metallic sound of microbots moving echoed across the warehouse, and Hiro would have breathed a sigh of relief if he could get his lungs to work properly. Rex raised his own fist high in the air, and the microbots on the ground compacted into a tight rectangular box, barely the size of Hiro himself, stretched, and drove right into Quarry’s center.

As Quarry fell, his grip loosened and Hiro went flying. Rex dropped the neurotransmitter to grab Hiro before he hit the ground, and it clattered to the floor, echoing sound mixing with the noise of the microbots falling uselessly over Quarry

“You never set the brainwave limits or whatever,” Rex said, helping Hiro to his feet. It wasn’t a question, but an observation.

Hiro shook his head. “I did.”

“Then how-?”

“Caesar had your data on file,” Hiro said. “I just… added it into the program. Thought it might come in handy. If there’s anyone I trust with my tech besides me-”

“Touching,” Quarry’s voice rang out through the building. He’d gotten back to his feet, molecular weapon readjusted on his back. He looked down at the dormant microbots gathered by his feet, then took two steps, stomping them into pieces. “But this has gone on long enough. Maybe I’ll just destroy both of you.”

Rex raised his shield to block the next blast but Quarry was moving closer, and all Rex’s shields were able to do was reflecting the blast away. “What do we do?” he asked quickly. He and Hiro both stepped back as Quarry advanced.

“You don’t have enough little robots left to be useful,” Quarry said as Hiro rushed the fit the neurotransmitter back on his head. He had to hold it in place just to keep it there, and Quarry was right. When the microbots activated, there were only a handful left; not enough to do any physical damage to him.

The microbots skittered across the floor anyways, so Quarry turned and blasted what he could with the disintegrator.

“Maybe if we get the disintegrator beam to reflect back at him,” Rex said, but Hiro shook his head.

“That’d never work,” Hiro said. “You’d have to get the angle just right, and with the way he’s holding that weapon….” Hiro’s mind raced, thinking. “I think I’ve got something,” he said, “but you have to keep him focused on us.”

“Not hard,” Rex said, deflecting yet another blast from Quarry. They were almost up against the warehouse wall, and there wasn’t much room left to retreat. Hiro thought fast, calling the few microbots left to his control. They clattered across the floor, following Quarry until they reached his rock foot and began to climb up.

“Just give it up,” Quarry said, still advancing. “There’s nowhere left to hide, and no one left to save you. Maybe I won’t even kill you just yet.”

There were only a handful of microbots left, but Hiro directed them up to the energy pack of the molecular weapon, where it was strapped to Quarry’s back. If he even noticed the bots were there, he ignored them, probably thinking they couldn’t cause much damage as they were now. There weren’t enough left to attack him directly. But that wasn’t what Hiro wanted to do.

“Do you even really know why you’re fighting?” Quarry asked Hiro as he stepped closer. “You have no reason to be here.”

“You’re dangerous,” Hiro shot back. “I want to stop people like you.”

Quarry laughed. The microbots moved into place. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I can make use of your skills too, if you’d like.”

“Not interested,” Hiro said. He pictured the molecular destabilizer in his head. He’d only seen it in any detail for a few moments, but it was long enough to commit it to memory, to picture the microbots moving around it, tightening around the electrical feedback outlet.

It was like all those months practicing with Megabot, except Hiro could control the robots with his mind instead of a remote. Even without seeing the microbots, he knew it had to be working. Nothing seemed to happen at first, but a trickle of smoke started rising in the air behind Quarry, and Hiro could see the nozzle shaking just slightly in his hand.

Quarry stepped closer and Hiro’s back hit the wall, weapon and shield both raised high. Then suddenly, Quarry stopped.

“What the-?” he started to say. Hiro pushed against Rex’s side.

“Run!” he shouted. Rex stumbled, but then they were running, dodging away from Quarry as he looked over his shoulder to see the molecular destabilizer rattling, shaking, getting ready to explode.

The blast rang out behind them, lighting the entire warehouse in a sickly yellow hue before filling it with smoke. Hiro and Rex had just reached the cracked opening in the warehouse wall, where the others had been waiting, apparently watching. They coughed and waited for the dust to settle.

Somehow, miraculously, Quarry still remained. The molecular weapon had crumbled to pieces around him, and he had fallen onto his knees in the explosion, barely holding himself up. Hiro could see broken off bits of him, rocky debris scattered among the bits of metal and warehouse roof, all over the place. He felt a bit sick.

Rex didn’t wait, stepping forward to meet his enemy.

“What now?” Quarry asked. His voice sounded more gravely than before. “You could finish me off right here, you know.” When Rex didn’t respond, he choked a laugh. “You don’t have the guts to, do you?”

To Hiro’s surprise, Rex sighed. “Breach?” he called out. “I know you’re here.” A moment later, a red portal opened behind Quarry.

“You saw me coming,” Breach said, her upper body rising from the portal. Hiro was all but ready to collapse to his knees, the strain starting to take its toll. He couldn’t deal with another EVO enemy so soon after Quarry.

“She’s the one who took Circe!” Skwydd cried. He moved forward, prepared to rush her, but Rex stopped him with a hand.

“But not to Abysus, right?” Rex gave a knowing smirk. “You slipped her into your pocket dimension, to save for later, didn’t you?”

Breach smiled right back. “What makes you say that?” she asked playfully.

“Because you’re not an idiot,” Rex said. “You know Van Kleiss wants Circe back, but even more than that he’ll want someone to pay for what happened tonight.” He gestured down, to where Quarry still sat crouched on the floor. “And you know that doesn’t have to be you.”

Breach’s grin grew. “Wai-” Quarry started to say, but he ground beneath him shimmered, and a red portal opened up.

Circe dropped almost at Hiro’s side, and he had to suppress a yelp of surprise. “I hate you, Breach,” she spat as she got to her feet. Hiro was just happy her glare wasn’t directed at him for once.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Breach said. A moment later, she and Quarry were both gone.

Hiro had collapsed against the warehouse wall while they waited for Providence to arrive and pick them up. He’d left Rex to deal with his friends alone, staying in sight but out of the way so they could talk, and slid down to the floor when it became obvious his legs weren’t much use anymore. He could still feel his hands shaking slightly, so he kept them tucked tightly into his jacket pocket.

None of the microbots were left. He’d tried calling to them with the neurotransmitter, but nothing had happened. There was a chance it had been damaged with all that happened, so then he’d tried looking around manually. There were a few bots smashed to bits, some with only half their parts remaining, but he couldn’t find a single whole bot left among the rubble. He tucked the parts he could find into the pockets of his shorts so he could examine them later, in his own lab, at home.

Rex joined him a few minutes later, sitting cross-legged beside Hiro before Hiro could try to stand up. “You OK?” he asked.

Hiro gave a weak smile. “I’m good,” he said. “You?”

“Fine,” Rex said. He glanced over at his friends. “We got some things… sorted out.” He frowned for a moment. “That was really dangerous. You could have gotten really hurt here, you know.”

“I know,” Hiro said, “but I can take care of myself.” Unable to stop himself, Hiro chuckled, then added, “you sound like my brother.”

“God, I hope not,” Rex responded instantly. “I wouldn’t be a good older brother at all. I’m too used to being an only child.” He paused. “Until, like, a few months ago, that is.”

“You have a weird life,” Hiro said.

“You, too,” Rex said, and nudged him in the ribs with an elbow. They both laughed for a moment, and after it subsided, Rex asked, “so why did you put my brain stuff into the neurotransmitter?”

Hiro hummed thoughtfully. “Just in case anything happened,” he said, “and I couldn’t use the microbots. I kinda worried I might… have issues.”

“You did.”

Hiro nodded. “And I worked through them. It wasn’t easy… and it’s still not all gone… but I think I’m better. I think I’ll be OK.”

The sound of a jet engine roared above them, and they looked up to see the light of a Providence jet flying overhead. They both stood up. “See,” Rex said, “this is what I mean. If Tadashi were here, I’d get into so much trouble for getting you into this mess. You’re not gonna tell your aunt what happened,” he quickly added as Hiro started laughing, “are you?”

“No way,” Hiro said. “She’d never let me leave the house.”

They bid their goodbyes to Rex’s friends and were pulled onto the Providence jet by a rope ladder, another first for Hiro of the night. “We’re stopping in San Fransokyo first,” Rex said as they strapped themselves into the jet seats. He jerked his thumb to the overhead netted storage, where Hiro had tucked his backpack earlier. “Good thing we’re already packed, because we don’t have time for many more stops.”

“Right now?” Hiro asked. He could feel the jet powering up into maximum speed. At this rate, they’d be in California in a few minutes. “I thought we could stop by headquarters first, see about getting my... my….” He cut himself off with a huge yawn.

“Nope,” Rex said. He stifled a yawn of his own. “You’re going home. You already missed your first few classes, you could probably still make.…” Rex dug into the pocket of his jacket. Hiro watched, amused, as Rex fished through the pocket for a few moments, then pulled out the fabric lining.

“Lose something?” Hiro asked.

“My phone,” Rex said. “I… I left it with Holiday on accident. I completely forgot about it until just now. I don’t know what time it is.”

Hiro sputtered, laughing. “Maybe we should go get it back from headquarters first.”

“No, damnit,” Rex said. “We’re taking you home before your aunt thinks we’ve kidnapped you. I don’t want to get on her bad side.” He sighed, and leaned his head back against the jet wall. “And I was gonna get your number, too, so we could just text when we wanted to talk, instead of me randomly showing up in San Fransokyo all the time.”

“You could just put your number in my phone,” Hiro said. He contemplated reaching for his backpack, where he knew his phone was tucked into a side pocket, but decided to save that for when the jet stopped moving at hyperspeed.

Rex scoffed at the idea, though. “I don’t know my phone number,” he said, as if that was obvious.

Sunlight was slowly filtering in from the front of the jet but Hiro could feel himself slowly starting to doze off. They were quiet for a few moments, and then Rex asked, in a low voice, “hey, how did you do that thing with the molecular destabilizer?”

“The what?” Hiro mumbled.

“That thing Quarry had. You made it explode. How’d that work?”

“An old trick,” Hiro said. He rolled his neck, stretching, trying to stay awake. “From back when I used to be a bot fighter.”

“You used to be a bot fighter?”

“A really good one.” Hiro rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together lazily. “Made a ton of money. Practically a professional, before Tadashi convinced me to go to SFIT.”

Rex stared at nothing, and for a moment Hiro thought that was that, but suddenly he started laughing. “You fight with bots,” he said, when Hiro raised an eyebrow, “and I fight as a bot. It’s like we’re both professional bot fighters.”

“You’re not a robot,” Hiro mumbled, “just a… techno-mutant thing.”

“Let me have this one, OK?”