To be a hero is to be a terrible paradox.
The act of wanting to be a hero implies you wish danger on others; one cannot
be a hero without someone to save.
"Being a hero doesn’t mean you succeed in saving that day, it means you tried.”
~ James Marsters
Hiro Hamada
Nicknames: N/A
Magic Status: Mundus, but publicly is thought to be Gifted
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: Japanese/White
Accent: San Fransokyo native (very similar to San Francisco accent)
Height: 5′5″
Build: Slender, lanky even though he’s kinda short; typical awkward teen build.
Complexion: Lightly tan with an olive undertone.
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color/Length/Style: Messy, black and short, fluffy and constantly in his eyes.
Tattoos: Circuit board tattoo that takes up most of his shoulder of his left arm and his brother Tadashi’s name in binary code on down his forearm on that side; both tattoos are UV ink though (it’s a very popular tattoo style back home) so they cannot be seen in normal light and only show, and glow faintly blue, under black lights.
His aunt doesn’t know he has them and he would prefer to keep it that way for a while.
Piercings: Orbital ring piercing in each ear.
Daily Jewelry: Usually wears a bracelet made of a few of his minibots around his wrist.
What would you find if you Googled them?
Almost nothing. There might be some mention of the Hamada family in San Fransokyo, but most of those mentions note the family as deceased, so obviously that can’t be him. Otherwise every electronic trace of him before coming to Swynlake seems to be strangely absent.
What natives would know about them:
Again, not a lot. He’s a recent addition to town, most assume he and his aunt Cass moved to Swynlake because it is a Magick-friendly area more than the United States and with his being Gifted it was likely safer. Clearly the kid already had some accident that left him with a prosthetic leg so he must have been through something, most people assume it was anti-Magick related but don’t want to ask.
But otherwise he’s just a new kid around town, seems to pop up in the middle of things often though, especially in the middle of trouble.
He works at the Comic Barn and is attending Pride U, although he rarely seems to actually go to class, but people don’t pay much attention to that, or him, and that suits Hiro just fine really since he doesn’t want to answer too many questions about where he came from before moving to town.
Hiro just stared at the weapon, not out of fear even though that would have been the appropriate response in a situation, but curiosity.
He saw props all the time at work, overly exaggerated models built to look flashy with fake components that were meant to be eye catching but served no functional purpose. The weapon did look like it shouldn't have been real but it didn't look like some toy either, not even an expensive one.
How exactly did a science teacher have something like that if it was real?
Hiro might have shrugged a wand or some other magical means of defense, or even a sword given how half the population of the town seemed to think they should be out slaying dragons, but he really never saw things like that; something more in the realms of science and only theoretically possible.
"You have a laser gun," Hiro, once his brain had focused in on a detail, did not easily stray from it. Even when Drakken was staring at him with what he assumed was meant to be an intimidating glare but the guy didn't know practically anybody staring at him was equally uncomfortable for Hiro so that wasn't going to break his attention.
"I'll have it fixed," he replied in regards to the wall, which felt entirely uninteresting in comparison at the time, although the bot did rattle a bit and steal his focus for long enough to glance at it and mentally relay the power down command to make it instantly go motionless and the sensors go dark, before he was right back zeroed in on Drakken's hand.
Being threatened with a laser gun was, actually, one of the few times lately that Hiro had been genuinely curious about something. He was practically itching to have a closer look, to see if it was real; how was it pieced together? How did it convert energy to a focused form and from where? A dozen questions raced inside his skull and that was likely not the goal Drakken had in mind but threats fell a bit short in comparison to answered questions.
"Does it work?" At that point he had to ask, the impulse was chewing at his brain so intensely. "
That wasn't the answer Drakken had been wanting to hear– but it did confuse him enough to blink, brows furrowing, because there was none of the usual timid nature of fear in the kid's voice or demeanor. It just sounded like he had been pointing out the obvious with his statement. Which, he was, but didn't he understand he was being threatened with said weapon?
It nearly took the wind out of Drakken's villainous sails. Gah! He hated when people didn't follow the script. There was a back and forth to this that was an art! Did these younger people simply not understand the beauty of the dialogue?
No. Of course they didn't. Their attention spans had been thinned out to five seconds before they were looking for the next hit of chemical rush in their brains. They didn't understand the satisfaction in the build up.
It made Drakken all the more angry. How dismissive he was about the infrastructure and his wrong doings! He should have been apologizing by now, and yet all he could focus on was something Drakken had long since thought to be a trivial invention.
Fury roared through his veins, guiding his actions now rather than any rational thought.
"Let's find out, shall we?" he said, voice telegraphing his darkening mood. Drakken lifted the gun and pointed it down at the robot. Normally he would think this to be sacrilegious– he hated to waste a perfectly good machine that could easily be repaired. It wasn't the robot's fault, it was merely a tool. But the kid had asked.
Drakken pulled the trigger, a blue beam (which was both for his aesthetic and due to the nature of the higher energy being emitted) shot out to hit the robot. Upon impact, it cut a hole straight through the material. He moved his hand, dragging the laser through a few more inches, and then let go. He watched the pieces where the laser had touched glowed briefly from the diminishing heat and then turned to look at the kid, awaiting his assessment.
The drone was easily repairable, which of course wasn't the point. He had knocked a hole in the guy's house but that was also fixable; but Hiro wasn't the type to place chess. He wasn't calculating moves, he jumped several ahead.
The drone also wasn't the only robot he had.
His phone was tucked away in a side pocket and it glowed, wiggled and popped out to drop to the ground with a swarm of nanobots, only a small wave but it rolled over the larger robot, across the floor and reformed from a fan of the tiny bots into a singular stream.
Since the dog was in Drakken's other hand and he didn't want to harm the creature by it snapping and possibly swallowing and choking on one of them, the bots swirled around to the opposite side, forming themselves into a skittering arachnid body with spindle-thin appendages. It shot up the man's leg and circled his arm and wrist rapidly, leaving behind a trailing stringy web of bots wrapped around the weapon as the larger swarm scurried back to the ground and, disproportionately strong for the size of those bots, gave a nice, firm jerk along the strands to relieve the man of his interesting little toy.
Hiro didn't necessarily want it, but Drakken had damaged his robot so he didn't want him having it either.
"Don't be a jerk, I said I'd fix the hole. You think I'd damage my robot on purpose?" He added simply, curious to get his hands on that gun and see how it functioned. "How did you build a laser gun? The power source alone..." he trailed off, he personally dealt more with robotics and mechanical engineering wasn't as much his area but that didn't stop him from wanting to know. That was the sort of tech that had useful applications, and mostly he just liked trying to figure it out.
It also stood to reason Drakken had the resources to make something like that, but that was less surprising; magic town did tend to mean a lot of people were hiding interesting things.
Despite living with two of them Hiro didn't know as much about elves; he knew there were a few scattered around the world, vaguely recalled some comment Ian had made once pertaining to how the Irish elves had lost their connection with Arcadia but he didn't always focus in on things Ian talked about with Luca and Riley when the subject was elves because it felt sorta intrusive to do that.
He was just the Mundus friend, even if people didn't know he was only Mundus.
Still, elves needing that inhaler was probably the best route.
"Private companies are better; governments try to find a way to turn anything into a profit or a weapon; and outside of Ireland potentially they're not going to have enough elves around to make a lot of profit." He was suspicious of most big companies, yes, more suspicious of those on government payrolls.
"They're the elves without a lot of magic, right? And they've been here a long time? They probably have research into some things already; you're walking in with the research already mostly done so they're going to want that."
Which was to say that Luca could make it work; Hiro just didn't want to see them manipulated with the promise that it could.
Hiro paused, deciding he was just going to have to keep an eye on things to make sure nobody took advantage of Luca the way they had his brother and himself.
"Just...don't trust anyone right away, okay? If what they promise you sounds too good to be true it probably is," he had to say it, maybe some of it was paranoia but it was Luca and he couldn't lose his best friend. "I just don't want you to end up where I did."
Private companies better than government companies. Okay. Luca filed that bit of wisdom away even if they didn't really understand what it meant. They had the vaguest understanding of 'government' from their history classes. Although most of the time, government to them just meant the Town Board which didn't have any companies to go along with it.
But they could do some reading online to understand more of what that meant and see which companies fit what Hiro was saying.
"If I put together a list of possible companies, maybe you could check them? You'd probably find problems more than I would before I even take anything to them."
After all, they trusted Hiro. They trusted Hiro with their life and with their creations, so trusting them with this new experience was the most obvious choice in the world. It might not protect them frome verything that could go wrong, but that was okay. It'd at least be the two of them together.
Hiro, again, knew very little about elves in comparison to what there was probably to know. And he couldn't say he knew much about how they handled things like scientific endeavors because so far as he knew they didn't do that, that was kind of the exact opposite of what elves did, wasn't it? Didn't they dislike humans because of technology and things like that?
Although elves that had been banished from Arcadia and lacking most of their magic probably had to do something with their time considering how long they lived. Maybe science was the only way left to go. He had no idea.
But it sounded like he was going to have to look into that a little bit more and if nothing else his suspicious nature might actually come in handy.
"Okay," he agreed because it was Luca, and he knew Luca was going to continue with the idea because they had spent so much time working on it at that point and they had made progress. Which meant he could either help and potentially avoid a situation like he had found himself in before, or he could leave them to figure it out on their own and he was not going to do that.
Of course he wasn't going to do that.
"Yeah, I'll figure it out. You start with a patent and make sure it's very detailed because if you don't cover every piece and how it was made someone can come along and copy that," he cautioned, wondering if Tadashi's work had ever had that legal protection considering it was all still in the developmental stage. Something he was never going to know unless he searched Krei Tech himself, and he wasn't going to take that risk quite yet.
But he also didn't want anyone taking something that Luca had worked so hard on, especially when the anti-Magick applications for it might have been a factor.
"You're also developing something for Magicks; that doesn't always go over too well when it comes to science. People like to try to keep those things separate." He wasn't trying to dissuade them in the least, but he also wanted Luca to know that it wasn't simple either. There would be people who would dismiss the idea for no other reason than they disliked Magicks. "You're probably going to have an easier time if you look for companies for investors that are already involved in the medical field is Magicks."
That was probably this smartest route, if not the safest; there were laws and stifling regulations that would have to be worked around. And it wasn't impossible by any means, it just had to be the right means to get them to that end goal.
"Plenty of people ended up trying to take advantage of what my brother was working on and it didn't have anything to do with Magicks; you gotta weed out the ones who won't actually want you to succeed. That's why I think starting with a company connected with Magicks is a better idea."
Companies already involved with Magicks in medicine. It was logical when Hiro laid it out. but they hadn't specifically thought of that before. After all, Luca couldn't be the only one realizing how unfair it was that Magicks were the last to get treated for anything - and the farther they were from human, the harder that was.
It was why in some ways, Luca wanted this inhaler just to be the start. There were too many gaps for people like them.
Nodding, Luca filed the information away. "I was, um, figuring that I could look at companies in Ireland to start with? Elves are supposed to be part of the government there and everything, so they might have companies that do what you're talking about."
Despite living with two of them Hiro didn't know as much about elves; he knew there were a few scattered around the world, vaguely recalled some comment Ian had made once pertaining to how the Irish elves had lost their connection with Arcadia but he didn't always focus in on things Ian talked about with Luca and Riley when the subject was elves because it felt sorta intrusive to do that.
He was just the Mundus friend, even if people didn't know he was only Mundus.
Still, elves needing that inhaler was probably the best route.
"Private companies are better; governments try to find a way to turn anything into a profit or a weapon; and outside of Ireland potentially they're not going to have enough elves around to make a lot of profit." He was suspicious of most big companies, yes, more suspicious of those on government payrolls.
"They're the elves without a lot of magic, right? And they've been here a long time? They probably have research into some things already; you're walking in with the research already mostly done so they're going to want that."
Which was to say that Luca could make it work; Hiro just didn't want to see them manipulated with the promise that it could.
Hiro paused, deciding he was just going to have to keep an eye on things to make sure nobody took advantage of Luca the way they had his brother and himself.
"Just...don't trust anyone right away, okay? If what they promise you sounds too good to be true it probably is," he had to say it, maybe some of it was paranoia but it was Luca and he couldn't lose his best friend. "I just don't want you to end up where I did."
Drakken, so consumed with looking at the robot, hadn't even noticed someone had entered his domain through the hole left in the wall. Not even as Puddles wriggled rather aggressively in his arm, growling now. It wasn't until they spoke that his head shot up, hand aiming the laser gun at them now instead. His heart pounded painfully in his chest, adrenaline making everything heightened and a supposed threat.
It took him a bit too long to realize he recognized the kid standing there. The arm lofting the laser gun fell heavily, the device bouncing slightly against his thigh. His eyes squinted as he forced himself to remember...ah! Right. The one with the little robots! That could form to the kid's heart's content! He had liked that one.
This one, he looked down at the malfunctioning thing, not so much.
He remained quiet for a long time.
Then the anger began to boil as he took in the scene of the living room.
His living room in his house. As much as he had resented this place when he had first moved in, it had become his place of refuge. It may not have been like some of the grander lairs he had once lived in, but it was his, and anyone who harmed it would need to pay for such a crime.
"And yet, you did," Drakken said, slow and careful. He looked up in much the same way, jaw set and eyes dark. "I am eager to hear how you plan on fixing it."
Hiro just stared at the weapon, not out of fear even though that would have been the appropriate response in a situation, but curiosity.
He saw props all the time at work, overly exaggerated models built to look flashy with fake components that were meant to be eye catching but served no functional purpose. The weapon did look like it shouldn't have been real but it didn't look like some toy either, not even an expensive one.
How exactly did a science teacher have something like that if it was real?
Hiro might have shrugged a wand or some other magical means of defense, or even a sword given how half the population of the town seemed to think they should be out slaying dragons, but he really never saw things like that; something more in the realms of science and only theoretically possible.
"You have a laser gun," Hiro, once his brain had focused in on a detail, did not easily stray from it. Even when Drakken was staring at him with what he assumed was meant to be an intimidating glare but the guy didn't know practically anybody staring at him was equally uncomfortable for Hiro so that wasn't going to break his attention.
"I'll have it fixed," he replied in regards to the wall, which felt entirely uninteresting in comparison at the time, although the bot did rattle a bit and steal his focus for long enough to glance at it and mentally relay the power down command to make it instantly go motionless and the sensors go dark, before he was right back zeroed in on Drakken's hand.
Being threatened with a laser gun was, actually, one of the few times lately that Hiro had been genuinely curious about something. He was practically itching to have a closer look, to see if it was real; how was it pieced together? How did it convert energy to a focused form and from where? A dozen questions raced inside his skull and that was likely not the goal Drakken had in mind but threats fell a bit short in comparison to answered questions.
"Does it work?" At that point he had to ask, the impulse was chewing at his brain so intensely. "
He had to do something to keep from going stir crazy.
Which was why he was out well after dark when most people were in for the night; one of his larger bots needed more testing than could be done in the basement and given the steel framework was still exposed during that stage of development it wasn't really safe to do in the backyard either wear a stray screw or piece of broken frame might give one of his roommates the elven version of tetanus.
Besides, it was a simple gliding capacity test; the bot was designed with a compact oval body and panels that extended to allow not for flight but rather the ability to climb on thermal breezes.
As the sleek device darted along in the air Hiro watched for signs of instability, shaking or bends in the thin panels, keeping track of it by the reflective paint covering the bottom of it. That was on the temporary; but he couldn't exactly see in the dark.
He also wasn't paying attention to where he was walking and stepped right off a curb without realizing it, stumbling and for a second his focus was scattered wildly. Since the bot was controlled via the same tech as his nanobots the smooth dips and circles broke and it went careening wildly across the street.
He'd wandered into the Southern Isles neighborhood during his walk and that was rather unfortunate. Hiro was regretting not going to the farmlands instead as he watched his creation flounder past several houses before it smashed right into the side wall of another with a rattling thud and disappeared in a shower of plaster, glass and broken bits of wall.
Huh. Maybe he should have made his prototype a bit smaller rather than several feet wide without the addition of those wingspan panels.
Hiro cringed and hurried across the street, more concerned with the damage to his bot than the house; he'd worked hard on that thing!
Drakken had been enjoying a nice evening to himself. As per usual.
He was in his garage, which had basically become an extension of the lab he had created in the attic– it had simply run out of room and his scientific genius would not be stifled by mere square footage! And it was easier for Commodore Puddles to come and go from. (It was on his list to make some sort of ramp system for the little dog that was better than Puddles traversing the windy stair case– he just hadn't gotten to it yet.)
The delicate, yet triumphant music of Jean-Philippe Rameau coated the space, adding to the pleasantness of the night. He had made a nice dinner, including dessert (the best part), and so far he had been making excellent progress on his current project! There were only so many days that tipped his in favor, and it seemed like that this was shaping up to be–
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand then a loud bang had Drakken falling out of his chair, the light flickering briefly. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, listening, and when Commodore Puddles' barking started up he was on his feet in an instant, grabbing one of his prototype laser guns, and rushing back into the house.
Where he found an utter mess. One that he had not created!
At least, he didn't think so. Drakken glanced up and, nope, the ceiling appeared to be intact. It was the giant hole in the wall and the massive device currently twitching in the middle of his living room that was the problem. He quickly crossed the room to gather the brave poodle in his arms, who had been barking at their home intruder, and stared down at the machine with the laser gun pointed at it. Just in case.
Hiro had the misplaced hope that nobody would be home, highly unlikely as it was, and he could just drag the glider bot back out of the mess and figure out a way to pay for the damages from afar rather than let anyone know he was actually at fault.
The last thing he wanted was the police trying to seize his bot and examining it too closely; he didn't trust people doing that and he trusted even less how rumors got around town. Having to answer for some high tech oddity wasn't something he wanted to talk his way out of.
But he already knew his optimism was dashed fully the moment he arrived at the rather impressive hole in the wall and found a barking dog, Drakken, who in his defense Hiro had no idea lived there, and...a gun? It didn't even look like a normal one but nobody was bound to just have some sci-fi looking weapon lying around that was functional.
If the intention had been to scare someone off maybe laser gun wasn't the way to go; Hiro just stared at it for a few seconds while his brain was processing through a rapid list of plausible excuses. None of them sounded even remotely possible though so he was a bit stuck.
"I did not mean to do that," he decided to just go with no excuse at all because how exactly was he supposed to explain the twitching bot still trying to power itself back up and failing to do so because it was tangled up in a rug or curtain, or whatever it was that had wound all up in the engine when it crashed.
"Most of those companies are bloodthirsty," Hiro mumbled, reluctant to pull his eyes away from the blueprints at first not because it was important at the moment but the request hit a spot in his chest that echoed with a distant ache.
He'd learned a vicious lesson in trusting companies that claimed to build their foundation on medicine and then exploit technology for other purposes. In his head he was already turning over the idea of something Luca created with all the good intentions in the world being twisted into something to harm.
He didn't want to venture down that path but he knew Luca would head first and was far too trusting so there was no way he could step back and leave them to it alone so he abandoned his work for the conversation.
"Yeah, patents are what keep people from copying your work and taking it for themselves; you'd need that first. Then you'd need to prove to a company it works though, that it's safe enough, and that you either have investors or it's something they can make enough profit from unless you can find some company that either actually wants to help people or they have a reason to want something like your inhaler enough to manufacturer it. After all of that it would be produced and publicly sold."
Which...there were a lot of legalities involved and that was only the very simplified version, but it got the point across.
Luca bit their lip at the first words Hiro spoke, not sure how to respond. It was clearly from the part of Hiro's life that he didn't speak about anymore. But also, that was exactly why Luca was here.
Hiro knew things. Luca didn't. Whatever Hiro didn't know, he would have ways to find out.
"Okay. So. I'd need to apply to the patent because then it shows its my work. I have all my research and my documentation for making it safe to show a company. I don't have investors, but...if its the right company they'll want to help people. So it's just about finding one of those companies and making sure its real."
It probably wasn't that simple. But they had to start somewhere, right?
After all, Luca knew they weren't alone in needing an inhaler. Avery here in Swynlake was proof of that. Who knew how many other elves could be out there, needing help like this, and not able to find it?
"You're also developing something for Magicks; that doesn't always go over too well when it comes to science. People like to try to keep those things separate." He wasn't trying to dissuade them in the least, but he also wanted Luca to know that it wasn't simple either. There would be people who would dismiss the idea for no other reason than they disliked Magicks. "You're probably going to have an easier time if you look for companies for investors that are already involved in the medical field is Magicks."
That was probably this smartest route, if not the safest; there were laws and stifling regulations that would have to be worked around. And it wasn't impossible by any means, it just had to be the right means to get them to that end goal.
"Plenty of people ended up trying to take advantage of what my brother was working on and it didn't have anything to do with Magicks; you gotta weed out the ones who won't actually want you to succeed. That's why I think starting with a company connected with Magicks is a better idea."
He had to do something to keep from going stir crazy.
Which was why he was out well after dark when most people were in for the night; one of his larger bots needed more testing than could be done in the basement and given the steel framework was still exposed during that stage of development it wasn't really safe to do in the backyard either wear a stray screw or piece of broken frame might give one of his roommates the elven version of tetanus.
Besides, it was a simple gliding capacity test; the bot was designed with a compact oval body and panels that extended to allow not for flight but rather the ability to climb on thermal breezes.
As the sleek device darted along in the air Hiro watched for signs of instability, shaking or bends in the thin panels, keeping track of it by the reflective paint covering the bottom of it. That was on the temporary; but he couldn't exactly see in the dark.
He also wasn't paying attention to where he was walking and stepped right off a curb without realizing it, stumbling and for a second his focus was scattered wildly. Since the bot was controlled via the same tech as his nanobots the smooth dips and circles broke and it went careening wildly across the street.
He'd wandered into the Southern Isles neighborhood during his walk and that was rather unfortunate. Hiro was regretting not going to the farmlands instead as he watched his creation flounder past several houses before it smashed right into the side wall of another with a rattling thud and disappeared in a shower of plaster, glass and broken bits of wall.
Huh. Maybe he should have made his prototype a bit smaller rather than several feet wide without the addition of those wingspan panels.
Hiro cringed and hurried across the street, more concerned with the damage to his bot than the house; he'd worked hard on that thing!
Hiro had his attention buried in pages of blueprints spread across the desk in his lab; detailed information for the electronic component for the fabricated shell he intended to discuss with Sid after the enclosure of the pool was finished.
It was a personal project that time, rather than something for the house.
Luca was the only one that came into the basement much, unless it was for the sake of doing laundry anyway, so the knock was obviously bound to be them and Hiro didn't look up at first because Luca often came around to see what sort of projects he was working on.
"Hmn?" When he was very focused it was difficult to pull that focus away, even right then he was hesitant to abandon what was directly in front of him so Hiro answered without looking up quite yet, "yeah, sure; what's going on?"
As much as Hiro generally allowed Luca into their lab at will, they always knocked. It was all too likely that Hiro could be working on a project that would turn out to be horribly poisonous to Luca, so knocking at least gave Hiro a chance to say if Luca needed to mask up before they went inside. They typically wore gloves no matter what.
But they didn't get any warning like that, so they carefully opened the door and crept inside, shifting nervously back and forth.
"So. Um. The thing is that I think I've finished my inhaler. Or at least the first version of it. But I'm not sure what to do with it now. I know there are ways to get it to companies who can make more of them and make the medicine sot hat other people can use it too, but I don't really know how it works. I read something about a patent? And something about the fees and things. I didn't really get it but..."
They trailed off and took another break. "Could you help me?"
"Most of those companies are bloodthirsty," Hiro mumbled, reluctant to pull his eyes away from the blueprints at first not because it was important at the moment but the request hit a spot in his chest that echoed with a distant ache.
He'd learned a vicious lesson in trusting companies that claimed to build their foundation on medicine and then exploit technology for other purposes. In his head he was already turning over the idea of something Luca created with all the good intentions in the world being twisted into something to harm.
He didn't want to venture down that path but he knew Luca would head first and was far too trusting so there was no way he could step back and leave them to it alone so he abandoned his work for the conversation.
"Yeah, patents are what keep people from copying your work and taking it for themselves; you'd need that first. Then you'd need to prove to a company it works though, that it's safe enough, and that you either have investors or it's something they can make enough profit from unless you can find some company that either actually wants to help people or they have a reason to want something like your inhaler enough to manufacturer it. After all of that it would be produced and publicly sold."
Which...there were a lot of legalities involved and that was only the very simplified version, but it got the point across.
He'd lived in the shadow of larger than life ideas from the moment he was born; magic, dragons and impossible power. His older brother found it, made a name for himself among the dragon riders, and Hiroth was determined to do the same.
Too determined, perhaps, because he wanted it from the moment he was old enough to understand what it was to go to the nest, hope to be chosen and prove yourself worth the might of a dragon. He needed something bigger than a life only looking up at the mountains of his home; the skies were his escape.
The instant the dragon’s gaze met his own, wings still damp from shattered shell and tiny claws scrambling for purchase before he gathered the creature in his hands, Hiroth knew everything he had built up as so grand in his head truly was. And it was right there in his grasp, orange and ebony scales and bright eyes.
He learned quickly, every lesson absorbed, he'd always been sharply intelligent. But he was also reckless to a fault. He couldn't stand the thought of waiting to practice, of wasting time; what good was it to be a dragon rider if you had to spend so much time being instructed?
Jont’adhg didn't agree; they might have been bound by the link between them but that didn't mean they were of the same mind. The dragon's advice often fell on deaf ears though; Hiroth would not listen.
Every lesson learned that was praised, every nod that confirmed he was ready; Hiroth believed it. He was Tad’ashi’s younger brother, after all; it was practically a legacy itself. His brother had renown as a powerful dragon rider, one who threw his all into safeguarding those who rode alongside him.
An unfortunate legacy though; one that claimed their parents, left them in the care of their aunt, and the day Tad’ashi didn't return claimed him as well. Only his ivory-scaled dragon, Baythrom, found their way back to the mountain, wounded, lost without their rider and fading.
Rumor was the Earthbound Shields had caught a group off guard and his brother had stayed behind to defend the slowest, overwhelmed in the end.
That was the day Hiroth refused to wait any longer.
Jont’adhg was still barely past testing his wings, it was a wonder things didn't go all wrong but somehow luck was on their side that time, and the next, until Hiroth started to feel invincible with each flight, each venture out further and further past the limits set by his instructors.
Then it all went wrong.
They hadn't even proven themselves properly when Hiroth convinced Jont’adhg to race to the heights of the mountains in the swell of a storm; desperate to prove if they could match that rage of nature they couldn't be held back.
Nature was not kind to those who challenge her though; Hiroth doesn't remember the roaring thunder and electricity in the air, nor can he recall much of the fall, the bone shattering crash or the haze of fevered sickness of the few days before they were discovered among the broken stone and trees.
Long enough for the infection to take his leg and the impact to damage Jont’adhg’s wings beyond what healing could repair; stealing the skies away from them.
Since that day Hiroth worked tirelessly to replace what was ruined and the skills of his people have at least aided him in that; his keen mind fashioning an idea that gave him back some of his ability to walk, and Jont’adhg some use of his wings back with the steel braces and joints.
But it isn't enough; Jont’adhg is still limited, both by the weight of his braces and the weakness of his damaged muscles, so flight is a burden only manageable in short spans. Hiroth is equally so; without the benefit of the harness he'd built to accommodate his prosthetic he cannot balance, cannot ride.
And he knows it's his fault; he failed Jont’adhg and himself, failed his brother's memory with his selfish ambitions.
The pair have made the difficult journey for the Brightsteel Competition to accompany his aunt since whispers tell the Shields may be in the area and if nothing else Hiroth cannot fail at keeping her safe; even if it means he must wait at the sidelines and watch others reach for the dream he once chased.
So, Luca had an inhaler. A finished inhaler that worked. It was close to the existing design, but there were plenty of modifications as well to adjust it for non-human biology. Currently it was keyed to themself, obviously, but it would be easy to adapt it for other beings who might need it.
Except they weren't sure how to take those next steps.
Knocking on the door to Hiro's basement, they shifted their weight back and forth. Only once they got the go ahead to come in did they open the door.
Hiro had his attention buried in pages of blueprints spread across the desk in his lab; detailed information for the electronic component for the fabricated shell he intended to discuss with Sid after the enclosure of the pool was finished.
It was a personal project that time, rather than something for the house.
Luca was the only one that came into the basement much, unless it was for the sake of doing laundry anyway, so the knock was obviously bound to be them and Hiro didn't look up at first because Luca often came around to see what sort of projects he was working on.
"Hmn?" When he was very focused it was difficult to pull that focus away, even right then he was hesitant to abandon what was directly in front of him so Hiro answered without looking up quite yet, "yeah, sure; what's going on?"
Some part of Hiro knew the less he was aware, the less role he had in her life the less likely it was if something did happen that it would reach back to her. The path of potential destruction wouldn't come barreling back to her front door, pulling apart things at the seams all over again.
The looming guilt of the inevitable never fully left him.
And if it didn't work with this guy there would be another one, there probably already had been other people and she had just never noticed because that wasn't where she centered her attention. That had always centered on himself and Tadashi, a little less the latter as they had gotten older and his brother had decided to take on the role of some sort of surrogate adult himself as much as he could. But it didn't change the fact Aunt Cass had probably dismissed things that might have changed her life for the better without even realizing it.
He couldn't blame himself for every single little mistake, but he could blame himself for the big ones.
"I know you did."
And what was he supposed to tell her? No? At that point simply disappearing on his own was practically impossible because he couldn't even fully function without some degree of help, and some degree of stability, so maybe that had been selfish too. And maybe it had been partially just because he didn't want to lose everything he had left.
He didn't like the idea that things might change, he was never going to like that, but what was the alternative? Just expect her to be alone? He didn't exactly look at the future and see himself involved in some relationship because clearly his few attempts at that had been very flawed and it wasn't something he wanted to touch again quite yet.
But that didn't mean she didn't, and that didn't mean that there wasn't someone who would see the best in who she was; even if he wasn't necessarily willing to trust anyone himself. There was probably never going to be anyone that would meet the high standard he had when it came to what Aunt Cass deserved.
His shoulders slumped a little, but he nodded.
"I know being alone isn't great, I get it. Well, I sort of get it; I don't know if I entirely get it." Sometimes it did feel like people were much harder to understand than computers. "I mean just don't go and marry the guy next week and I'm sure I'll get used to it."
Cass chuckled. "No worry of that. I know I can be impulsive sometimes, but even I'll take some time to think about a change like that. Reza and I are just at the beginning of whatever this is. It'll take me awhile to figure out this much, let alone anything else. There's time."
She really didn't want to think about marriage. Maybe that would happen at some point in her future, but the idea of it made her nervous. What if something went wrong? What if she needed to leave again? What is the kids hated them? What if she found it impossible to live with another adult after being in charge for so long? There were too many questions and too many uncertainties.
Dating was enough of a mine field. She would start with that one.
"Besides, you aren't alone. Look at the house you've made with Luca and Riley. You have your coworkers. Plus I'm sure you have all kinds of people online that I've got no clue about."
He'd grown up on her. She couldn't even say it had happened while she wasn't looking, but it didn't come as any less of a surprise.
"And even with all that, I'll always be here. I promise."
Taking a deep breath, she shifted back to give him a little bit more space. "Sorry, I should probably let you get back to work. Want anything to drink? A smoothie?"
He wasn't so sure about that. The truth was life changed, sometimes so drastically it was impossible to assume from one day to the next exactly what might happen. She might have thought so right then, but would she think any different a few months down the road? A year? Chances were a year ago she wasn't even considering dating people and that had changed, hadn't it? Weren't those the sort of things that were supposed to change?
Luca and Riley, yes, he couldn't say that they weren't important. His friends. The people who probably spent more time than they should have had to making sure he didn't fall apart and doing so because they wanted to.
But he also couldn't stay if staying ended up endangering them and that was the hardest part; they would ask him to regardless. They would insist that they would figure something out, the same way Aunt Cass would; but Hiro wasn't sure he could stomach the idea of more guilt if the people around him got hurt again because of himself.
And everyone else? His coworkers? The people he might have interacted with in classes? Familiar faces around the neighborhood? They were just that; nothing that made a lasting impression in his life and not terrible people, but not people he felt much connection to. It was hard to explain that to her though, especially since she was the type of person that was friendly and quick to bond with practically everyone around her. The type of person people wanted to be friends with.
Tadashi has been like that, Hiro knew it was something the two of them had in common that he was on the outside of.
Online, well, he wasn't quite ready to have that conversation with Aunt Cass yet, because the people that he knew online, his past, might have been the exact reason he wouldn't be there forever the way she expected he would.
"I know; but I want you to be happy too." Hiro wasn't going to say it felt like the sort of life she wanted, and probably the sort of life she needed, was grounded in normality that he didn't fit into very well.
He wasn't sure what that would mean eventually, he wasn't very good at guessing.
"Nah, I'm just going to try to finish this up, it shouldn't take me very long. Then if there's anything else I can see about that after."
The worst part of him wanted to say that it probably would never matter how long she waited, that it would probably never be fine. That his scope of what family was had narrowed further and further with time, each loss had only caused him to pull the idea closer to himself, hold on to it tighter. And maybe there would never be room for it to expand, because expanding meant sharing what felt like the last anchors holding him together and he didn't want to do that.
He didn't want new faces at the holidays, he didn't want new pictures in new frames that would sit beside the ones that held the ghost of his parents and brother.
How was he supposed to pick apart the pieces of his personality that would best fit what was needed for the eventual ideal version of what he had to be? Because there would be one, and it wasn't fair to think that there wouldn't; even if it wasn't this guy it would probably be someone else sooner or later. There would be someone who saw everything good in her and he would be the problem because he took up too much space.
She thought so much about him there she was feeling guilty for thinking about herself.
"You don't have to wait for me," Hiro knew he should have had the conversation face to face but the idea of eye contact right then felt far too daunting, "I'll be okay with things, but you're supposed to be happy too."
He wanted to argue that he wasn't a child, that he didn't need to be sheltered, but part of him, the stubborn part, wanted to be a child about it and say that it wasn't fair. But if there was anyone things had never been fair to, it had been her.
"I mean you had to start over completely here, and that was because of me." And no matter how enthusiastic she had been to come along with him, how determined not to let him out of her sight after everything else she had lost; she did have to start over and that was his fault. "I messed things up before, and I can't fix any of that; but I don't want to miss things like this up for you now."
What Cass wanted to do most in that moment was reach out and pull him close, cuddle him to her chest as she rested her chin on top of his head. He would whine about it, of course, but there would be laughter too and in the end they'd be comforted.
Or she could hope. When he was younger, that had been an easy pattern and she hadn't questioned it. Over the last few years, she'd spent more and more time waiting for him to let her know what kinds of contact he was okay with on different days. It was tricky for him to manage all the signals he was being sent. She wasn't going to add to them.
But there was a moment she wished he was a little boy and solving this would be as easy as a hug.
"I am happy. I promise. I more meant that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. There's no timeline or pressure or anything. This is something I'm figuring out as I go. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. I don't really know. You can let me know how much or how little you want to know."
Still, she couldn't entirely resist her impulses. She reached out and laid a light hand on his back, rubbing it gently.
"Also in case you forgot, I'm the one who insisted on coming with you and starting over. I remember very clearly you telling me you were going to run away and you'd find a way to get word back so I'd know you were okay. You had it all worked out. I'm the one who messed up your plan. And I don't regret it. I'd do it again. So, no feeling guilty."
Some part of Hiro knew the less he was aware, the less role he had in her life the less likely it was if something did happen that it would reach back to her. The path of potential destruction wouldn't come barreling back to her front door, pulling apart things at the seams all over again.
The looming guilt of the inevitable never fully left him.
And if it didn't work with this guy there would be another one, there probably already had been other people and she had just never noticed because that wasn't where she centered her attention. That had always centered on himself and Tadashi, a little less the latter as they had gotten older and his brother had decided to take on the role of some sort of surrogate adult himself as much as he could. But it didn't change the fact Aunt Cass had probably dismissed things that might have changed her life for the better without even realizing it.
He couldn't blame himself for every single little mistake, but he could blame himself for the big ones.
"I know you did."
And what was he supposed to tell her? No? At that point simply disappearing on his own was practically impossible because he couldn't even fully function without some degree of help, and some degree of stability, so maybe that had been selfish too. And maybe it had been partially just because he didn't want to lose everything he had left.
He didn't like the idea that things might change, he was never going to like that, but what was the alternative? Just expect her to be alone? He didn't exactly look at the future and see himself involved in some relationship because clearly his few attempts at that had been very flawed and it wasn't something he wanted to touch again quite yet.
But that didn't mean she didn't, and that didn't mean that there wasn't someone who would see the best in who she was; even if he wasn't necessarily willing to trust anyone himself. There was probably never going to be anyone that would meet the high standard he had when it came to what Aunt Cass deserved.
His shoulders slumped a little, but he nodded.
"I know being alone isn't great, I get it. Well, I sort of get it; I don't know if I entirely get it." Sometimes it did feel like people were much harder to understand than computers. "I mean just don't go and marry the guy next week and I'm sure I'll get used to it."
He would have preferred the other answer and was glad he had a problem directly in front of him to keep his hands busy. She wouldn't know that he wasn't doing anything productive with it, only giving his restless focus somewhere to land while his thoughts raced and the words curled through him with a flutter of anxiety.
Right, that guy.
Hiro had no reason to dislike Reza, he knew nothing about him in the real world aside from some stray comments he might have heard in passing. Nothing substantial, but the temptation to go hunting through anything he could find buried online was instant. Maybe the guy didn't have much to find there but Hiro could find things most people couldn't, and if there was anything off about the guy? Suspicious? Should he have been around Aunt Cass?
No, of course not.
The first impulse was to pry into whatever might be found, take it apart and make sure the guy wasn't a potential problem. Because she didn't need anymore problems. But that would have to wait.
The flare of panic grew stronger, twisting itself into something uglier with his thoughts; he's a dad but he's not my dad. I don't need one of those.
He never had, had he? He had no real memory of his parents, he'd never felt attachment to the idea because he'd never needed to; he'd had Aunt Cass and Tadashi and that was his family. Small but he'd never wanted anything bigger, he'd never needed anything else. He'd never felt envious of people who had more in that regard; the family he had understood him when most people had never been able to.
And there was even less of it now; Tadashi wasn't even there to help him navigate the spike of frustration and the anxiety that tumbled alongside it. The threatening sensation of a meltdown that wanted to bubble up, would have, if not for an accidental failsafe in the gray matter and wires bundled in his skull.
"Oh, no, I don't know him," Hiro trailed off, his brain immediately wanted to retreat to that place within where the electricity of organic emotion numbed under the inorganic comfort of feeling less; he had to fight the impulse to go too far.
Reza wouldn't have understood that, understood him; Hiro wasn't very generous in the assumption.
Tadashi should have been there instead, he would have been earnestly, freely happy for Aunt Cass, welcoming and all the things, the good things, Hiro couldn't see himself being.
"Yeah, sure," he agreed, "I'm sure he's a great guy."
When had it become so easy to lie the second he needed to? There wasn't even a scramble in his thoughts anymore; he simply said what she wanted to hear because he couldn't stand the thought of disappointing her again.
For years, she'd never bothered dating. Running a business and raising her boys had been all she could handle, and the idea of adding another person into that dynamic had felt too precarious and impossible. Especially when there was a risk of it not working. How was it fair to expose them to someone only for them to get disappointed or lose them in some way? The boys had already lost so much. (So had she.)
But Tadashi was gone. Hiro was building his own life. She had her friends, but for the first time she was starting to feel a little, well, lonely. Boba was wonderful company, but it wasn't the same.
Still, she meant what she said. Hiro would always be her first priority. Nothing could change that.
Hiro's response was neutral and casual, which set off warning flares in her brain. After all, Hiro was rarely casual about anything. He lived his life in extremes of focus and passion except when he was too depressed to manage more than just the basics. Of course, she could blame it on his focus on what he was doing, but she highly doubted her stove was worth that. Not when he was so much smarter.
Crouching down, she said, "You don't have to. Or if you want to wait that's fine. I wanted you to be the first to know that this is something I'm trying, and if you had questions I could try to answer them. There's no rush."
The worst part of him wanted to say that it probably would never matter how long she waited, that it would probably never be fine. That his scope of what family was had narrowed further and further with time, each loss had only caused him to pull the idea closer to himself, hold on to it tighter. And maybe there would never be room for it to expand, because expanding meant sharing what felt like the last anchors holding him together and he didn't want to do that.
He didn't want new faces at the holidays, he didn't want new pictures in new frames that would sit beside the ones that held the ghost of his parents and brother.
How was he supposed to pick apart the pieces of his personality that would best fit what was needed for the eventual ideal version of what he had to be? Because there would be one, and it wasn't fair to think that there wouldn't; even if it wasn't this guy it would probably be someone else sooner or later. There would be someone who saw everything good in her and he would be the problem because he took up too much space.
She thought so much about him there she was feeling guilty for thinking about herself.
"You don't have to wait for me," Hiro knew he should have had the conversation face to face but the idea of eye contact right then felt far too daunting, "I'll be okay with things, but you're supposed to be happy too."
He wanted to argue that he wasn't a child, that he didn't need to be sheltered, but part of him, the stubborn part, wanted to be a child about it and say that it wasn't fair. But if there was anyone things had never been fair to, it had been her.
"I mean you had to start over completely here, and that was because of me." And no matter how enthusiastic she had been to come along with him, how determined not to let him out of her sight after everything else she had lost; she did have to start over and that was his fault. "I messed things up before, and I can't fix any of that; but I don't want to miss things like this up for you now."
Hiro's response immediately threw her off her stride. That one lady - he must mean, Moon right? But, they were just friends. They'd only ever been friends.
Do you think that in any possible timeline, there was ever the possibility that we could be more than just friends?
The words echoed in her mind, haunting her slightly in the wake of Hiro's question. (They had haunted her anyway for many different reasons. The unfairness of Mena. The devastation of forgetting. Now she had to wonder what she'd missed that other people seemed to be seeing.)
But now that she'd started, she couldn't very well stop. This wasn't hard after all! This was a normal conversation!
"Oh, no, actually. It's Reza. I'm not sure if you've met him before exactly," at least not outside of the many dreams where she'd been married to him, "but we've been seeing each other for a little while and then we decided to start actually dating."
Absently she picked slightly at her cuticle, an old nervous habit that came out at random moments.
"He's a dad, so he understands the way that like, my first priority is still you and the relationship comes after that do so I wanted you to know. And if you wanted to do dinner with him sometime we can do that. Or not! Whatever you're comfortable with."
He would have preferred the other answer and was glad he had a problem directly in front of him to keep his hands busy. She wouldn't know that he wasn't doing anything productive with it, only giving his restless focus somewhere to land while his thoughts raced and the words curled through him with a flutter of anxiety.
Right, that guy.
Hiro had no reason to dislike Reza, he knew nothing about him in the real world aside from some stray comments he might have heard in passing. Nothing substantial, but the temptation to go hunting through anything he could find buried online was instant. Maybe the guy didn't have much to find there but Hiro could find things most people couldn't, and if there was anything off about the guy? Suspicious? Should he have been around Aunt Cass?
No, of course not.
The first impulse was to pry into whatever might be found, take it apart and make sure the guy wasn't a potential problem. Because she didn't need anymore problems. But that would have to wait.
The flare of panic grew stronger, twisting itself into something uglier with his thoughts; he's a dad but he's not my dad. I don't need one of those.
He never had, had he? He had no real memory of his parents, he'd never felt attachment to the idea because he'd never needed to; he'd had Aunt Cass and Tadashi and that was his family. Small but he'd never wanted anything bigger, he'd never needed anything else. He'd never felt envious of people who had more in that regard; the family he had understood him when most people had never been able to.
And there was even less of it now; Tadashi wasn't even there to help him navigate the spike of frustration and the anxiety that tumbled alongside it. The threatening sensation of a meltdown that wanted to bubble up, would have, if not for an accidental failsafe in the gray matter and wires bundled in his skull.
"Oh, no, I don't know him," Hiro trailed off, his brain immediately wanted to retreat to that place within where the electricity of organic emotion numbed under the inorganic comfort of feeling less; he had to fight the impulse to go too far.
Reza wouldn't have understood that, understood him; Hiro wasn't very generous in the assumption.
Tadashi should have been there instead, he would have been earnestly, freely happy for Aunt Cass, welcoming and all the things, the good things, Hiro couldn't see himself being.
"Yeah, sure," he agreed, "I'm sure he's a great guy."
When had it become so easy to lie the second he needed to? There wasn't even a scramble in his thoughts anymore; he simply said what she wanted to hear because he couldn't stand the thought of disappointing her again.
He understood, to a point, the sort of nostalgia to holding onto things. It hadn't mattered much to him in the past when his obsession with having newer, more advanced, faster; just one step forward from what he had before had been so easy to be lured in by. But of course it was; those were the days when he'd thought the things that mattered were eternal.
It didn't matter if he took his computer apart every time Tadashi came home with some faster graphics chip or processor, he didn't think much at all of pulling the bot he'd built from nothing apart to make it just a little more precise in the ring in those back alley fights.
Because moving forward was simply the way progress worked, the way it grew.
But people couldn't be pieced back together in the same ways, sometimes they couldn't be put back together at all; things that mattered truly were only fragile.
If Aunt Cass found something familiar and comforting in clinging to a stove that could use a replacement was it any different than the way he looked at his now old laptop as a friend that wasn't going to go away with time?
"Oh yeah? Figuring out stuff for the cafe or having wild parties?" Hiro's thumb nail caught under the edge of a screw and held it steady as he used the tool in his other hand to turn it. "And nah, not right now; kinda need both hands for this."
"Oh, well I've definitely been playing a lot with some new recipes. I want to make sure to have some good menu updates for Valentines coming up so that it isn't just all chocolate."
Cass felt strangely nervous. Which was ridiculous. She had no reason to be nervous. This was Hiro who loved her and wanted her to be happy, she knew that the way she knew her own name and how to make the perfect ring donut. This was something that should be easy.
It was just new. Something that Hiro handled better than her - except when he didn't. (Something he'd probably learned from her.)
But dragging it out wasn't going to make it any easier. She was only making it bigger than it needed to be. Sabiha was cool with it. Who said that Hiro wouldn't be?
"But also I've been doing more cooking in. Because I've been seeing someone. And we're dating now."
The conversation was so steady, familiar, it c could have been about a dozen different things and still felt like conversations they had had before. That had changed some in time, it wasn't really her asking anymore about his latest project at school or reminding him to do the dishes before he disappeared into his room to work on something with his computer, it had evolved into asking if he wanted leftovers to take back home to his roommates, if he had made sure all of his laundry was clean because he needed his warm jacket for outside; the thing about moms really was they never stopped checking on somebody, they never stopped making sure everything was okay.
But sometimes as he had gotten older the questions didn't come as often and he found himself listening instead to what she had been doing, what new thing had come around in her life; those little details that reminded him, as hard as it was to see sometimes, that she wasn't just his mom but she was also a person trying to navigate day today the same way as anyone else.
The cafe was doing well, he didn't live there anymore; those rooms above it didn't belong to the both of them and there weren't mornings when she hurried off downstairs while he drug himself out of bed later, listening to the sounds of life below while he wandered around and felt that sense of security that came in knowing she wasn't very far at all.
But sometimes he felt like he lived in darker places than he would have ever wanted her to, in memories and regrets that drained so much of the color she deserved to have vivid around her.
Now he was on the other side of town and even though he could have called probably any minute of the day and she would have answered there would still have been a screen between them and Hiro, for all of a certainty that he was perfectly fine taking care of himself, that this is what he was supposed to do because that's what a person did when they got older; he still missed it just a little.
"That one lady you spent so much time with?" He guessed, because her words had caught him off guard but he realized they shouldn't have. And Cass was the sort of person that would have done anything for anyone, it was unbelievable really that it had taken that long for someone else to notice all those good things to her.
Except he had a suspicion people had noticed before but he had been what had been in the way of that, and now that he was out of the way she wasn't hindered anymore, she didn't have to think about him first and herself after. And as much as that sent a very distinct ache through him that centered right in his chest it wasn't surprising.
He could try to be happy for her but could he really be happy about the situation? He wasn't so sure about that, he wasn't so sure he even liked the idea that the fragile thing was threatened by change. But what was he supposed to do? Tell her that it bothered him? That it caused an irrational flicker of worry in the back of his mind because he had been telling himself for quite a while of it he didn't want to be in the way of her life but was that the start of how he was nudged to the edges of it?
He was selfish, had always been selfish; hadn't that been the reason so much had gone wrong for them in the past? Hadn't that been why he had ruined so much?
