4hello all you lovely humans!
this is the first chapter of our new story and my first collaboration with…
(drumroll please…)
the great marvelous and extraordinary tadashinfj!
please pay attention to the warning in the description and i hope you find it funny
leave a review
or don't
i don't care what you think
but tadashinfj thinks it would be nice
here you go!
*all hiro and megan perspectives are written by me. pretty much everything else will be tadashinfj*
the first chapter is a little short, but there will be much longer ones in the future
—TADASHI—
My cap flies off my head as I dash up the steps, filled with adrenaline and a feeling of complete certainty that I need to help Professor Callaghan. After all, I'm his student—his favorite student. I can't just let him die.
Guilt tugs at my heart as I hear Hiro screaming my name behind me, but I keep running. Hiro will be okay as long as he stays outside. I need to do this.
I look around for Callaghan, struggling to see through the smoke and ash drifting through the air. The hot air stings my eyes and throat, and I burst into a coughing fit as I inhale. But I have to keep going.
"P-professor Callaghan!" I call. "Professor, where are you?"
Pieces of debris fall from the ceiling, most of them on fire, and I dodge them as best I can while leaping over fallen robotics projects. Where's Professor Callaghan?
"Professor!" I scream again, trying to make my voice carry through the flames. "Professor!"
Finally, I hear a voice. "Tadashi!"
But it isn't Professor Callaghan.
It's Hiro.
And he's inside the burning building.
Seeing no sign of Callaghan, I turn around and run back toward Hiro. Where is he?
As I draw closer to the front doors of the building, I can see Hiro's slight figure standing in the smoke, trying to make his way over to me. My baby brother is coughing violently, the smoke too much for his asthmatic lungs. I need to get him out of here.
I sprint toward Hiro as fast as I can, my head and heart both pounding. It isn't good for us to be surrounded by fire for this long.
"Hiro!" I yell, shoving aside several recycling bins—the ones we used to transport the microbots. That seems like days ago.
"T-tadashi!" Hiro screams hoarsely. "You—you have to get out of here!"
Then my baby brother's eyes widen as he looks up at the ceiling. "Tadashi! Move!"
I look up to see a huge beam fall from the ceiling, and I know I need to get out of the way before it crushes my skull. I dart forward, trying to get out from under the beam, but then I hear a rush of sound and a huge force flings me forward. The beam, still falling, hits me anyway. My world flashes white and then goes black, and the last thing I hear is Hiro's scream.
—HIRO—
"Tadashi!"
I scream as the falling beam hits my brother, knocking him to the ground. I flinch at the crack of his skull meeting metal.
Something hot and stinging brushes my calf, but I'm already running, sprinting toward Tadashi's limp form. I drop to my knees beside him and attempt to shove the beam off him but draw back with a hiss as the metal scorches my palms. I grit my teeth and throw my whole weight onto the beam, letting out a rather unmanly scream of pain when the hot beam burns my hands and forearms.
I struggle not to gag when I catch sight of Tadashi's wounds. They might not be as bad as I think, but I can't stand the sight of injuries. An ugly, blistering burn stretches from just above his temple down to the base of his neck, and part of his shirt is burned away, fully showing the burns that wrap around his back and chest.
Trying to ignore Tadashi's wounds and my own, I grab Tadashi under the shoulders and pull him upright. I can tell he's breathing. That will have to be enough for now.
The heat intensifies near my already burned leg, and a searing pain races across the back of my calf. I scream and my knees collapse, Tadashi's larger form pinning me down.
I hear footsteps. Pounding across the floor toward me.
"Help," I gasp, the chemical smoke in my lungs forcing me into a coughing fit. "Help…"
Shouting. Men in uniforms. Tadashi's weight being pulled off me.
Strong arms lifting me off the ground, and then black.
—
I wake up to bright light. Too bright. It hurts my eyes and makes my head pound. I come out of unconsciousness slowly at first, trying to figure out what's around me and why my throat feels like it's been scraped raw.
I catch sigh of a dark head contrasting the stark-white pillow it lays on and immediately return to full consciousness.
Tadashi.
I shoot up in bed with a gasp, ignoring how the sharp intake of breath slices against my ravaged throat. He's alive. Hospitalized—but they don't keep dead bodies in hospital beds.
I try to push myself out of bed, but the second I move, several pairs of hands shove me back down. My head throbs as it hits the pillow again, and I bite back a groan of pain. I didn't even hit my head on anything. I'm kind of offended that it hurts so much.
"Stay down, Hiro," says a gentle voice. "It's okay. Tadashi's okay."
I relax slightly, aware that the hands pinning me down belong to a doctor in a lab coat and Aunt Cass. I recognize the doctor—his name is Dr. Armstrong, and he's been my pediatrician since we came to live with Aunt Cass.
"What happened?" I ask hoarsely. "Is Tadashi okay?"
"He's fine," Dr. Armstrong assures me. "He'll get better."
My eyes widen. "Get better?"
"There shouldn't be any permanent damage. He'll be fine."
I relax enough for Dr. Armstrong to check me over. My injuries are fairly minor—just painful. Aside from my scratched, burning throat and pounding headache, my worst injury is a second-degree burn stretching across the back of my right calf. There are more burns on my hip and hands, and a minor one on the edge of my jaw. My side and upper arms are bruised from shoving the beam off Tadashi, and I have to use oxygen tubes to breathe through my smoke-filled lungs.
It sounds worse than it is, even to me. But it's nothing compared to Tadashi.
The left side of my brother's face is almost just one third-degree burn, the blistered area just barely missing his eye and hair. It covers his cheek, temple, and the side of his neck. His ribs and back are burned just as badly, and Dr. Armstrong says he'll have permanent scarring. He has a concussion and swelling on the back of his head, a broken collarbone, and a humerus fractured in several places.
Most of the damage was done by the beam when it fell and not the fire itself. Dr. Armstrong reassures us that the only permanent injuries will be the scarring from his burns, but I can't shake the feeling that he's hiding something.
Dashi is hooked up to an IV and heart monitors, oxygen tubes and painkillers. He looks smaller among all these machines and computers, not at all like the big, strong, protective brother I know.
"I think you're good to go, Hiro," Dr. Armstrong tells me once my tests are done. "You're discharged."
I don't move from my chair, settled next to Tadashi's bed. "I'm not leaving until he wakes up."
"Hiro." Dr. Armstrong sighs. "We don't know when he'll wake up."
"Then we don't know when I'm leaving either."
Dr. Armstrong gives me a sad smile and walks away.
three days later
Tadashi's still asleep, and Dr. Armstrong has been trying to get me to go home for the last three hours. I won't go. I've been sleeping on the floor of his room—when I sleep—since he became officially comatose.
The bad news is that they don't know when he's going to wake up. The worse news is that his condition doesn't seem to be improving while he's unconscious, and that will probably extend his recovery a lot.
Finally Aunt Cass forces me to come home with her by basically kidnapping me in my sleep. She's my legal guardian, so it isn't illegal, but it's not like I wanted to.
I wait.
For Tadashi.
For my brother to come back.
By the end of the second week, I'm starting to doubt that he's going to wake up at all.
three weeks later
I shove my armor and helmet back into the drawer, not bothering to give them to Skymax. All I want to do now is sleep.
Aunt Cass thinks I've been studying at the library for the last four hours, so hopefully it seems understandable for me to be tired. But her footsteps seem unnaturally quick as she comes up the stairs, and I hear something else that makes me stop dead.
"I'll tell him," she says. "We'll be there."
I shove my gauntlets under the bed with no time to put them in the drawer as Aunt Cass peeks around the corner. "Hiro?"
"Yeah?" I reply, trying to sound less on edge than I feel.
"Tadashi's awake."
Aunt Cass almost has to physically hold me back while she checks us in. I want to see Tadashi so bad I can barely breathe.
Once they let us go, Aunt Cass is struggling to keep up with me—we're not allowed to run, but I'm walking as fast as possible and almost killing myself on the stairs. Dashi is in room 313.
305.
307.
309, 311…
313.
I unceremoniously shove the door open and burst inside.
My brother is sitting upright in bed, fresh gauze wrapped around his burns. He's still hooked up to too many machines.
But he's awake.
"Tadashi!" I half-scream as I give him the most careful tackle hug I can muster.
Tadashi laughs and ruffles my hair. There are tears in my eyes. I missed him so much.
"Why did you run into the burning building?" I mumble into his shirt. "Idiot."
"I'm okay," Tadashi assures me. "Are you all right? Are you hurt?"
"I'm getting better," I tell him. "My lungs are still a little off from the smoke."
I look up at Tadashi. He doesn't return my gaze, staring blankly ahead.
"Dashi?"
His gaze snaps back to me, but it still seems empty. "Yeah?"
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he says a little too quickly, still looking around. "Did you get burned at all?"
"Yeah, but it's almost all better now." I rub my leg where the bandaged, half-healed burns are. "Dashi, are you—"
"Better?" Dashi cuts me off, sounding worried. "Hiro, how long has it been?"
I bite my lip.
"You can tell me," he says softly.
"A month," I breathe.
"A month?!" His eyes widen and he tears a hand through his hair. "Oh my gosh. Hiro…"
"Tadashi?" I wave my hand in front of his face, alarmed when he gives no reaction. "What aren't you telling me?"
He turns toward me, and I see fear and pain and worry and grief in his glazed eyes. "Hiro…I can't see you."
My heart lurches into my throat.
Tadashi is blind.