Chapter 8
Hiro couldn’t wait for someone to answer the door. He walked straight into his brother’s house as soon as he worked out that the front door was still unlocked.
“Tadashi,” he called out, not seeing him in any of the main areas. He couldn’t even see Mei. He ran up the stairs and threw open the door to his brother’s workroom, where Tadashi was hunched over a computer screen cluttered with broken code.
Hiro stood over him, panting heavily. “…Tadashi,” he yelled, and Tadashi cried out, jumping so hard that something knocked under his desk and he immediately hissed with pain. Hiro grabbed the back of Tadashi’s chair and spun him around to face him. He ripped the earbuds out from his older brother’s ears and threw them aside. “Tadashi, we have to talk, right now – I don’t care if you’re busy.”
“Hiro?” Tadashi squinted up at him as he gritted his teeth and slowly rubbed at one of his knees. “Hiro, what… I am busy – what are you doing here?”
“I saw Takahiro.”
Tadashi’s eyes widened. The hand on his knee fell away, limp. “What?” he breathed.
“Takahiro. I saw him, I talked to him – H-He approached me after a seminar I did today, just, out of nowhere, and he, he,“ – Hiro kept tripping up over his speech; he couldn’t get everything out fast enough – “I-I told him to email me, and he did, and it– he said, he said that things had happened to him, when he was still staying with her – in her house, I mean, in the–“
“Hiro.”
It took his older brother’s hands on his face for Hiro to just stop and take a breath. Tadashi’s eyes flicked between both of his, still wide and alarmed. “Hiro, slow down, you’re not making any sense.”
Tadashi pushed another chair towards him and Hiro dropped into it, his legs bouncing fast and anxious. “I saw him, Tadashi, for the first time in like nine years, I saw him.”
Hiro looked to his brother expectantly, waiting for him to react, waiting for him to do something, but all he did was stare. “So,” Tadashi murmured, “you’re not here about… yesterday, then?”
Hiro frowned at him. The distraction made him impatient. “What?”
“Our fight.” Tadashi looked just as confused as Hiro now did. “We fought yesterday, remember? You came here to drop off a busted Baymax…? And then you stormed out again, hating me?”
“…You’re not listening to me,” Hiro cried, and Tadashi groaned into his hands. “I don’t care about that – I’m trying to tell you about seeing Taka–“
“Yeah I heard you, Hiro,” Tadashi snapped. He brought out his face again, glaring with frustration. “It seems just a bit strange to me that you would come over here and not even want to make up for yesterday, before you launch straight into all of this.”
“Fine,” Hiro shouted, prompting Tadashi to growl at him to keep his voice down. Hiro writhed in his chair, just itching to move on and tell him. “I’m sorry we argued, OK? It was stupid and you were upset, and I was upset – whatever. Tadashi.” Hiro grabbed his brother’s wrist and demanded his full, undivided attention. He didn’t give any warning – no indication whatsoever that Tadashi should’ve prepared himself for what he was about to hear. Hiro just blurted it out.
“Cass abused Takahiro.”
Tadashi grew tense under Hiro’s grip. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, until he finally ripped his wrist free. “What do you mean,” he asked warily.
“He told me. He IM’d me, and he said that things might’ve happened, back when he was still staying at her place. Weird things.”
Tadashi was silent for a few more moments. Then he dropped his face back into hands, and he didn’t resurface so easily this time. “Christ, Hiro,” he muttered. “Not this shit again…”
The words scared Hiro. He lashed out; he raised one foot to give his brother’s chair a good shove. “What the fuck does that mean,” he demanded.
“Hiro, don’t do this again,” Tadashi yelled, pleading. “Don’t do this to yourself – you’ve already been through this- this obsessive stage before, and it almost ruined you!”
“But I was right before, Tadashi,” Hiro yelled back. The adrenaline was just coursing; he couldn’t keep still. “I was so right and no one believed me. You don’t believe me now, but wait until you talk to Takahiro. He’ll tell you everything and then you’ll realise just how fucking wrong you were.”
Tadashi didn’t respond with words, but the cussing grunt he gave instead said all that it needed to and more. He wasn’t indulging him, he wasn’t listening. He didn’t believe him.
And Hiro started to panic.
“Don’t you dare start this shit with me again, Tadashi. You fucking owe me. You already doubted me once and look where that ended – I got hurt again. If you had only believed me – if only you hadn’t forced me away, then maybe that never would’ve happened. Maybe you could’ve kept me safe.”
It wasn’t fair. Some miniscule, still reasonable part of Hiro knew that it just wasn’t fair to pin the entire blame on Tadashi like that. Tadashi’s lack of faith in him had been just one flake of the snowball – just another falling domino in a negative chain of events.
Hiro knew it was wrong, and yet he took nothing back. He stared his brother down, his mouth struggling to keep itself in a straight line, as Tadashi slowly looked up. He could see in his older brother’s face that the guilt was just eating at him.
It was working. He was coming around.
“Hiro,” Tadashi said, and his voice sounded as full with tears as his eyes, “You know I never meant for anything bad to happen to you, you know that…”
Hiro felt a little… calmer, looking at his brother now. He sat with his back so straight and his posture so upright, while Tadashi was hunched forward, leaning over his knees, barely able to lift his gaze. Looking down at his older brother like this, it sent confused little thrills through Hiro. He felt like a bully – no longer a helpless victim.
And he kinda liked it.
“I know,” Hiro replied. “And, if you really are the good brother that you so love to think you are, then you’ll give me a chance. Give Takahiroa chance. Think about it! We could actually get her imprisoned! Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Wouldn’t that just make my case look so much better? So much more convincing? So inspiring?”
Tadashi didn’t say anything. He just wiped the back of his hand across his face.
“If I could actually manage to get her convicted for my rape, and for Takahiro’s too – well, that’s just more evidence to stack against her, right? She couldn’t just smile and look pretty and hold up her disgusting cakes for everyone to take then, could she? Teenage boys are a ‘grey area’ but what kind of jury isn’t going to think molesting an eight year old boy is sick?”
“Hiro…”
Hiro jumped up from his chair and started pacing around the room. His legs still ached from running, from being held in a perpetual state of high tension, but it was so easy to push past it. All of these thoughts, all this equipment surrounding him – they were giving him so many ideas, and he wondered if what he was feeling now was excitement.
“Your Baymax series still isn’t accessible to rape victims, right? You ignored all of the suggestions I sent you, right? Whatever – what if I could invent something that would help kids everywhere? People are prone to disbelieving kids, right, but no one can ignore photographic evidence – no, visual footage – yes.” He leaned over his very still, very quiet brother and borrowed a sheet of paper and a pen. He cleared some space on a desk and began to roughly sketch out the designs flashing through his head. “It’ll be something innocuous, something only a kid would have – kinda like in all those movies, right? Like a hidden camera in a teddy-bear, to watch the babysitters when the parents are away. Only you can’t trust the parents, either. You can’t trust anyone.”
Hiro felt a gentle hand on his back. He flinched, and then he ignored it. He felt good, like he was making up for his lost productivity that day. He was working so fast.
His drawing was messy, but he could tell what everything was, what it was doing, and that was all that mattered. “And maybe – oh, maybe there’s some sort of pre-arranged code word that triggers the camera to turn on? And then that would become a live feed – it would go to the police, and they could see if a kid was being abused or not, and then they could bust straight into the kid’s house and catch that monster in the act! And there would be no fucking trouble going through court because their abuse is on camera – I-It’s incontestable!”
“Hiro.”
“Every kid should have one of these, in their bedroom. To protect them from scumbags who’ll try to take advantage of them. Oh, but – what if the kids are too young to know what’s happening is wrong, what if they’re gagged or– well, maybe the cameras should be on all the time, then–“
“Hiro.”
Hiro glanced up from his scrawling, irked. “What?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Hiro, you…” Tadashi was standing behind him, his hands heavy on Hiro’s shoulders. He was trying so hard to sound nice. “You have a lot of… interesting ideas, Hiro, but… maybe you should sleep on it, OK? You should calm down, get some rest–“
“No way.” Hiro scribbled down some notes regarding his designs, and even he had a little trouble reading them. “I’m on a roll, bro – I’m gonna help so many kids.”
“Hiro, have you forgotten everything you’ve ever learned about ethics? Nothing about this is ethical.”
Hiro scoffed. He muttered under his breath, “Wow, you really think you can talk with your robots? How they just go around scanning people, collecting and storing data without consent? How they take away people’s autonomy? You’ve got Baymaxes in clinics telling old folks when to eat, sleep, and die.”
Maybe that was a little harsh, Hiro thought distantly. It took a while for Tadashi to speak again. “Your design is invasive. It’s a violation of privacy, and it’s incredibly illegal. You’d be generating mass amounts of… pornography.”
“Don’t think about it like that,” Hiro cried, disgusted. “No one is going to watch it and hoard it for anything like that – we’re gonna use it to catch predators and then get rid of it.”
“You can’t assume everyone will do that, Hiro. There’s a lot of potential for things to go wrong – you can’t be sure people won’t abuse the system.”
Hiro shouted it out like Tadashi was missing the bleeding obvious. “The good will outweigh the harm.”
“Hiro, you…” There was a sound like a whimper from his older brother. “Look, you’re not thinking straight. Just…”
A hand descended onto Hiro’s work, snatching the pen out of his hand before he even knew how to react.
“Hey, wha-!”
And then the drawing he’d been working on was gone too.
Hiro growled and sat back, feeling deeply agitated. Disrespected. The nails on his suddenly free hands ground into the arms of his chair, scratching, curling like talons.
Warms arms wrapped around his shoulders then, loving but restraining. His brother’s cheek nuzzled the side of his head. “Sleep here tonight, Hiro,” Tadashi begged softly. “Please – you can have the spare room. I’ll make you a good traditional breakfast in the morning. We can play games, watch films – we can do anything you like. Please, Hiro. I’m so worried about you, all the time, I’m never gonna…” He took a huge, shuddering breath. “Please just stay here.”
Hiro considered it. “I’ll stay the night,” he compromised, “if tomorrow you see Takahiro with me.”
Tadashi sighed miserably. His head fell into the crook of Hiro’s neck, almost in defeat.
“Talk to him,” Hiro continued, his voice stern. “Once he tells us everything, we’ll go to the police. All of us. We’ll turn her in and get her convicted. If we don’t, then she’s just going to keep hurting more and more boys.”
Tadashi was silent for the longest time that night. He breathed shakily against Hiro’s shirt, and Hiro wondered if he might’ve still been fighting back tears.
Eventually, Tadashi moved his head in a way that felt like a nod. “OK,” he whispered. “We’ll… talk to him.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Mmhm.”
Hiro felt… so much calmer now. With his calm, a wave of fatigue washed over him that made the warm air of the room feel like a warm blanket. His eyes slipped closed and he felt relieved.
“I’ll…” Tadashi rubbed his younger brother’s head as he began to draw himself up and away. “Just… I’ll get you some clean sheets.”
Tadashi walked out of the workroom, leaving his younger brother to just sit there alone for some time. Hiro raised a hand to the shoulder where Tadashi’s face had just been and felt the fabric between his fingers.
It felt damp.