Warnings: Mild swearing on occasion.

Disclaimer: I don't own Big Hero 6. I just wrote this story.

POV: Alternates between Abigail's and Hiro's perspectives.

Sequel: This occurs after the movie and is a sequel to my other story, Malignant Butterfly Infestations: A Case Study. It's entirely possible to read this one without reading that if you want, but it does occur chronologically after and make brief references to things from that fic.

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A Practical Examination of the Law of Ideality

Part One

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Abigail

It's the slowness of everything that gets to her. She walks at a toddler's pace now, eats her food like she has hours to spare, brushes her hair more sluggishly than the spread of planets across the galaxy. She can't help it. Her traitorous limbs always shake and falter until she can barely muster the strength to dredge her way through a simple task.

There's probably some kinda irony in it somewhere, Abigail thinks, pausing on the side of a brick building to wheeze a little. It doesn't help that the streets of San Fransokyo are notoriously hilly, with raised beds and low trenches that seem designed to irritate her. If she weren't so stubborn, she'd take the cable car. But it isn't her style. Not the girl who once climbed Aconcagua on her own, without the advanced respirators they're selling for mountain climbers these days. Not the girl who had run marathons and triathlons practically since birth, whenever she wasn't working with Alistair and her father's team on their innovations in robotics. Abigail Callaghan isn't the type of girl to slow down for anything.

Except when I don't have the choice.

Abigail discards that train of thought as she straightens, wiping sweat from her forehead and into her hair—which isn't exactly how she wanted to present herself today. She heaves a breath, smoothing the bottom of her dress, feeling almost silly out of the training clothes and practice suits she's worn for so long. It's a noncommittal sort of plain blue dress that seemed to fit the occasion, nothing particularly fancy. Her hand slips into the pocket almost automatically, and her fingers brush the worn slip of paper, its edges soft as tissue.

It still seems insane to her that it had been so easy to wheedle the address from one of the reporters who'd covered her story. Not that she needs to check the number now: she knows the address of the Lucky Cat Cafe by heart, mostly because she'd studied the slip of paper like it might tell her everything she wanted to know if she stared long enough. But it makes her feel better to have the scrap of paper on her, useless or not.

Pushing herself back into a slow trudge, Abigail examines her surroundings. The buildings are not much like those in the area she calls home, a spacious neighborhood on the cliffs that overlook the bay. Her own house, huge and well-kept and once shared with her dad, seems empty in comparison to the bustle she sees here. Where her home is monochromatic and manicured, these buildings burst with color. There are streaming flags and dangling banners proclaiming sales and openings, balloons twirling in the breeze, low thrums of electric bikes motoring up the steep hillside, children hunched in a circle over their holographic card games in the alleyways.

The burgeoning crispness of another San Fransokyo winter, mild as always, fills the air that Abigail sucks into her lungs. It's been a long time since she's been so exhausted. Her legs ache somewhere deep in the muscle, a shaky, buzzing vibration that makes her feel like insects have crept into her flesh. It's normal to feel some pain every now and then, considering what your body has gone through, her physical therapist had told her cheerfully yesterday morning, staring down as Abigail sweated profusely after a two-minute jog.

"I'll show you some pain," Abigail mutters to herself, ignoring the mildly startled gazes of a passing couple. A streetcar brimming with passengers drifts past her, climbing the hillside as easily as a balloon floating into the air.

Abigail follows. A minute or two farther up, the hill comes to a plateau on which sits a busy intersection, the crossroads bordered by a spectacular array of stores. As she pauses again to catch her breath, she watches a handful of pedestrians stream into the antique shop at her side. Diagonally across from her is a tiny corner drugstore—do they really even make them that small anymore?—and across the way is a dry-cleaning shop, a cafe, and a bookstore.

She peers more closely at the cafe, one of the area's classically old-fashioned homes that must have been retrofitted into the new power grid at some point in the last half-century. With its curved windows and odd, pointed roof—almost like a castle spire—it blends seamlessly into the neat rows of similarly haphazard-looking houses lining the street at its back. Nothing glaring marks the building as a shop instead of a simple residence, except the presence of a scribbled menu on the framed chalkboard standing out on the sidewalk and the gold lettering in the window: Lucky Cat Cafe. From where Abigail stands across the street, the power lines for the streetcar are woven through the air between the buildings like some giant spiderweb. It should have been ugly—heaven knows the neighborhood association in her area of town would have pitched a fit at the thought of the wires cutting through the geometric silhouettes of their homes—but it isn't. In fact, Abigail is surprised to find the whole scene almost charming.

Which makes this whole meeting thing a shit ton more difficult. It would have been easier, maybe, if this Hiro Hamada kid lived in a stuffy neighborhood like her own, one filled with stoic, pretentious neighbors who keep track of favors owed as carefully as they do their finances.

But he doesn't. His home—because he lives in the upstairs part of the shop, she imagines—looks cozy and a little timeworn, with warm lights filtering from the cafe lanterns inside.

She's never met him, not personally. But he is, by all accounts she's been given from the police, the hospital, and her dad, a good kid. The kind of kid who risks his life to save a woman he's never met.

Abigail sighs irritably, wishing her job were an easier one—or at least less despicable—but she isn't the type to wallow in self-pity for long. Anyway, it'd be stupid to go back now, she reminds herself stubbornly. And if there's one thing Abigail hates, it's looking foolish. She'd gotten that from her dad.

Still, as she crosses the street and comes near enough to hear the fluid buzz of conversation wafting from the door of the cafe, she can't help but pull up the mental image she's created of "that nice boy," thinking coolly, I wonder if he'll hate me for this.

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Hiro

"Are you actually listening to me?" Gogo asks, breaking off from her tirade to glare balefully at Wasabi. Hiro, balancing precariously on his knees atop the cafe chair, takes the opportunity to swipe her notebook, which features, as always, the most diligent notes of anyone in their Systems Engineering class. As distracted as she is, Gogo doesn't notice the theft, and Hiro flips through a few pages to scan her writing.

"Nope," Wasabi replies. He doesn't look up from where he sits hunched over his own laptop. "Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Besides, we're not applying anything in the first section of the paper. We're just leading into our example of the general flow-down structure for critical parameter management. We don't get into the applications until later, when we've introduced the topic we picked."

"You still have to mention your topic in the introduction!" Honey Lemon adds cheerfully. She sits beside Hiro, which has given him a good look at her laptop screen. He's pretty sure from the length of her paper that she, as always, is going to be the first of them to finish the assignment.

"Well, duh," Gogo replies. "All I'm saying is I think she also wants us to go into that CPD&M process map she showed us, remember? She harped on it for like two days, so I bet y—hey!"

Before Hiro can finish scanning her notes, she seizes the spiral notebook, a maligned expression on her face. "Oh, come on, Gogo," Hiro wheedles, bringing out the puppy-dog look that works so well on everyone except Aunt Cass and Baymax. "You know it's completely unfair that Professor Dobbs doesn't let us use our laptops in class—it's an advanced tech class in robotics! And I write too slow, and my handwriting is...you know…"

"Atrocious?" Gogo supplies helpfully, blowing her gum into a bubble as she peers down at Hiro's own spiral-bound notebook, whose haphazard series of notes looks more like a series of snail trails than anything coherent.

"Exactly," Hiro replies, unashamed. Across from him, Fred types so viciously at his keyboard that he might as well be attacking it, but he pauses long enough to snort at Hiro's response. "I just don't have what she said about the Cp and Cpk classifications. And the Kano Process. But I wrote everything else!"

Gogo's sigh is long-suffering, but she tosses him the notebook in favor of a return to glaring at her computer screen. "You should do something about that, Hiro," she says. "You write like a freaking doctor."

"Don't I know it," Hiro mutters, flipping the pages of her notes once more. "Oh yeah, she did give us the Cp formula, didn't she?"

"Can I just say—again—that this would be much easier if she would just give us a test like a normal professor?" Fred grumbles.

"Most of our professors have assigned at least one paper so far this semester," Honey Lemon rebukes gently. "Just not—"

"Fifteen pages."

"Right."

Hiro dutifully transcribes Gogo's notes into his file, only half-listening as Fred and Honey Lemon begin to debate the pros and cons of tests and papers. Their assignment isn't so bad, he thinks. It's just a lot of different components that need to be fit together coherently. The hardest part will be organizing it all, but now that he's gathered everything he needs to make it work, he feels a lot less worried.

Stretching his arms above his head, Hiro peers at Baymax, who sits in his usual place in the corner next to the kitchen. While Baymax's advice about their paper would have been useful, the healthcare companion has always refused point blank to help them with any of their school assignments. (Hiro can almost hear him now: "Research suggests that the best ways to learn a subject is to study and teach each other. Having the answers handed to you does not improve your overall comprehension of a topic.")

And so Baymax tends to cloister himself in the corner during their study periods, looking like a cross between a watchful cat and a punished child, though Hiro has never been able to explain his amusement at the image to Baymax's satisfaction. At any rate, it seems like the healthcare companion enjoys the time spent scanning the guests in the room ("It's educational," he always replies in response to Hiro's questions), if the frequency of his visits are any indication.

"I need a break," Hiro says suddenly, breaking up the debate. Fred blinks at him. "I'm gonna run to the kitchen and see if I can swipe some chocolate cake. Want anything?"

"Hanami dango," Fred says instantly, and Wasabi—who has yet to look up from his screen—adds "Cinnamon rolls."

"I could go for chocolate cake, too," Gogo replies.

Honey Lemon nods, adding "If you can get past Baymax."

"He's been better since Wasabi explained that most humans eat more than the recommended amount of sugar and fat sometimes. When we're doing social things. Also, thanks for that," he adds to Wasabi, who grins at his screen.

"It was just getting kinda sad with you trying to sneak junk food from us whenever we went out."

Hiro coughs a laugh. "Anyway. He basically just makes sure I cut back on that stuff on other days to make up for it. Remind me again why I let him download those databases on nutrition?"

"Like you could have stopped him," Gogo responds slyly, turning back to her computer.

There's no good response for that, so Hiro stands and meanders toward the kitchen. Though weekends typically attract a fair amount of customers, mostly locals from the neighborhood and students from the high schools in the area, the cafe is particularly packed today, perhaps due to the cooling temperatures of the San Fransokyo winter, which always drives up the appeal of a decent cup of hot coffee or cocoa. Even as small as he is, Hiro has a hard time squeezing between the tight clusters of occupied chairs to reach the kitchen.

Baymax, who leans slightly against the back wall, pauses his systematic scans of the cafe to watch Hiro's approach.

"I've come for chocolate, and you can't stop me," Hiro tells him with a smile, extricating himself from the gap between the last two tables.

"I have come to find that to be true as a rule," Baymax remarks, slowly pulling himself upright. "But I must warn you that consuming high amounts of sugar can stress your liver and—"

"Bad cholesterol, triglycerides, leptin resistance, addictive sugar response...did I cover all of it?"

The robot's sigh is long-suffering, but the way his vinyl lower eyelids shift upward just a fraction suggest that he is amused (though Baymax would, of course, note that "robots are incapable of experiencing such an emotion"). "I believe you have."

"I'll eat a ton of vegetables tomorrow or something," Hiro says, holding his right hand up in an I swear sort of gesture, one that Baymax has finally become accustomed to.

"Nine vegetables," Baymax presses.

"Are you crazy? Six."

"Seven."

"Deal." Hiro smiles again and makes a shooing motion, as it would be hard to squeeze around Baymax's girth to get into the kitchen, but the robot tilts his head distractedly in the way he does when trying to decipher Mochi's erratic behavior. "Baymax? What is it?" Hiro follows the robot's gaze, but there are too many people moving in the small cafe, there's nothing out of the ordinary as far as he can tell.

"There. By the window," Baymax says slowly. "I believe that the woman who has just entered is the same one rescued from within the portal."

The words sound disjointed, almost bizarre to Hiro's ears. In the three months that have passed since they first discovered all that had happened between Callaghan and Krei, Hiro has almost managed to forget that the whole thing had ever happened. Between their frequent group patrols as Big Hero 6 and their inundation with coursework for SFIT, all that came before Tadashi's death has begun to feel like a past life that happened to someone else.

But the young woman Baymax has pointed out is clearly the one they rescued: short stature, mousy brown hair pulled back into a loose bun. To Hiro, her presence in the cafe is as unbelievable as if she is a ghost.

Maybe she is. It would explain the sudden and irrational wash of anxiety and dread that falls over him like a flood of cold water.

She is frowning down at a scrap of paper in her palm, and Hiro takes advantage of her distraction to duck behind Baymax before he can rationalize the action. "Go into the kitchen?" he asks, huddling behind the robot's bulky frame.

Anyone else would probably have instantly caught Hiro's meaning and started off for the door, but Baymax, being Baymax, turns to stare at him instead. "You appear to be in distress. Do you wish to avoid speaking with her?"

"No. Well, yes," Hiro replies, squirming under the robot's gaze. "I don't know. I want to think about it."

Baymax tilts his head, but he finally obliges. Hiro steps just to the side of him, still using the robot as a shield, and slips into the kitchen in front of the robot. One of the part-time baristas Aunt Cass hired shoots them a fleetingly curious glance as she steps away into the back room, but Baymax ignores her. The robot has a question prepared before Hiro even has time to lean in relief against the wall. "Why do you wish to hide in the kitchen?"

"I don't know. It's not a big deal or anything," Hiro replies sheepishly. "I just...don't know what to say to her. I mean, the medical team scooped her up right after we got her out of there, and we never actually met. While she was conscious, anyway. You know what I mean."

He sighs, glaring down at the floor. There's more to it, of course, but he's not sure he wants to bring the rest up to Baymax, who will undoubtedly point out the irrational trend to his thoughts—and Hiro doesn't need anyone to point out how insane he sounds.

Abigail Callaghan, whether she deserves it or not, will forever be connected with her father in Hiro's mind. It's been a hard thing, moving on after his brother's death—something harder than Hiro thought any human being could ever withstand. A small piece of him was ripped away on the evening when Tadashi sunk into flames, and he's not yet managed to fully adjust to the void his brother left behind, if it's possible to adjust to such a wound at all. His thoughts shift relentlessly toward his brother day after day, and Hiro has never lost the painful urge to turn to his brother to vent about his inability to cope—except that Tadashi's gone.

Sometimes, he wonders if it will always be this way. A ghost of a brother peering over his shoulder, remembered but invisible, present but unable to help in any real way except for the guidance offered by his memory.

And Robert Callaghan is the one who ripped Tadashi away. His daughter had nothing to do with it—and couldn't possibly have predicted what would happen to her, and her father's reaction, and the resulting death of Hiro's brother. Objectively, all of this is undeniable. But it's still impossible not to form connections between the daughter and the father, and he's not sure what will happen if he faces Abigail. What he might say to her.

"I guess I just don't know why she's here," he says finally, aware that Baymax is waiting patiently, as he often does when he wants Hiro to provide more information. "It's been...well, months. I never needed to talk to her, and she never came to talk to me. So why now?"

"I believe that is a question only she can answer," Baymax replies. The response isn't disparaging, as it might have been from someone else.

Hiro runs a hand through his hair. "Yeah, I know. It's just kind of hard to...to actually see her, I guess."

"Hiro? How's the paper coming?" Aunt Cass asks cheerfully. She balances a tray of empty dishes in one hand and hobbles carefully across the tile floor to place it on the island in the middle of the room. Her smile falters when she finally turns to look at his expression. "What's wrong?"

"It's nothing. Nothing serious. Just—Abigail Callaghan is here."

Aunt Cass frowns uncertainly, but Hiro can see the moment when she recognizes the name: abruptly, she straightens, her mouth pulling into a tight line and her hands coming together, one slowly folding into a fist and the other covering it, as though she's preparing for a fight and not a conversation. Hiro is almost grateful to see that he's not the only one struggling with warring emotions.

"What does she want?" his aunt asks, her voice almost too quiet to make out in the slow thrum of chatter streaming from the door to the cafe.

"I don't know yet. Baymax saw her. I didn't talk to her."

Aunt Cass nods, peering down at her fist as though she still isn't sure whether or not she means to use it. The hunch to her shoulders is wary, and the half-pained expression on her face is fairly familiar to Hiro, who is often the cause of such an expression. He and Tadashi used to put Aunt Cass through the ringer when they were younger, and Hiro's no stranger to her calculating pauses, which hover like a long intake of breath before the shouting begins. Between small scuffles with other students at school and buying a motorcycle that would "surely be the death of you" and, of course, bot-fighting, Aunt Cass has had practice dealing with unwanted situations—though perhaps few so unwanted as this one. Normally, if he had been at fault, Hiro might have begun to rattle off excuses to calm her down, but he currently feels just as lost as she looks.

After a few moments, her jaw tightens resolutely, a sign that she has begun to come back to herself. "Well, we can't just leave her there," she says briskly, straightening the hem of her apron. "She might just have come in for a coffee."

Hiro might have known that his aunt's practical tendencies toward feeding and mothering would win out in the end, though he doubts that she really believes Abigail has appeared on a whim.

"I'll go find out what she wants," she remarks, squaring her shoulders. "Stay here."

Hiro doesn't dare to peer after his aunt as she sweeps from the kitchen and into the cafe, but Baymax has never had any qualms about staring. The robot shuffles into the doorway, where his wide frame blocks the entrance entirely.

"I've told you it's really creepy to stare at people, right?" Hiro asks, more to distract himself from his sudden nausea than to actually correct the healthcare companion's behavior.

"I am not staring at people. I am watching Cass speak to Abigail."

Hiro hums indifferently, thinking that it's a good thing that most of the cafe regulars just consider an immobile robot to be part of the scenery at this point. After a brief hesitation, he hops up to sit on the granite countertop of the kitchen island in spite of the way his mind provides an impeccable rendition of Aunt Cass's frequent spiel about food-prep surfaces and get your butt off the counter, Hiro. "Not that it's good that you're staring or whatever," he begins, half curious and half in dread, "but—what are they doing?"

Baymax doesn't move. "They are sitting at a table while speaking to each other."

"Can you hear them?"

Some of Hiro's updates to Baymax's construction over the last few months have included solid-state components, meaning that no audible whirring suggests a focus on his audiovisual equipment. Still, the robot tilts his head the way one would when listening carefully for a sound. "My speech recognition software is familiar enough with Cass's speech patterns that I am able to distinguish her words from those of other speakers in the cafe. However, I am unable to detect Abigail's voice."

Hiro frowns. "Worth a shot, I guess. Do they look...I don't know, sad or upset or angry? How do they look?"

"They look like two people talking," Baymax replies, and Hiro rolls his eyes.

"Not sure what I expected," he mutters. Baymax still has difficulty reading his emotions, and Baymax has spent months at Hiro's side by now.

"Cass is standing. I believe she is about to return."

Hiro perks up, straightening in place. A minute later, Baymax totters backward to make room for Aunt Cass, who reenters the kitchen breathlessly, her expression serious.

"What'd she want?" Hiro asks. Aunt Cass frowns and swats his leg, and he slips off of the counter at once. "What'd she want?" he repeats.

Aunt Cass frowns, shaking her head. "She wouldn't tell me anything. Just that she wants to talk to you. I couldn't get a word out of her otherwise." Her hands are still clenched into fists, but she makes an obvious effort to unclench them, placing them on her hips instead. "I haven't told her anything—just that I wasn't sure you had gotten back from a friend's, and that I'd see if you were here. I can make her leave if you want. You don't have to talk to her."

"Well—did she say what it was about?"

Aunt Cass shakes her head again. "Just that it was personal, and that she really hoped to get in touch with you. She wouldn't say anything else." Pausing, she glares toward the door. "Not sure I like her."

Hiro heaves out a long, slow breath and shoves his fists into the pockets of his hoodie. It's not something he consciously means to do, but he finds himself waiting for Aunt Cass to speak, to give him some sort of direction.

"I think you should talk to her," Aunt Cass says regretfully, filling the silence. "I know you probably don't want to—I don't think I would want to—but I think if you don't you'll just be...wondering." She tucks a strand of his flyaway hair behind his ear.

Hiro nods slowly, his stomach still rolling unpleasantly. "Yeah. You're probably right," he says at last.

Baymax hovers a little closer to him in the way he sometimes does when vacillating between a hug and a firm talking-to as the best course of action.

"I am not distressed," Hiro remarks preemptively, pretending not to notice Aunt Cass hiding a fond smile.

"Would you like me to accompany you?" Baymax asks instead, perhaps deciding that a conversation about emotional strength is not one Hiro's likely to tolerate at the moment.

Hiro considers the question. "No," he says at last. "But thanks, buddy. I think maybe this one is something I should do on my own. No following, okay?"

"We'll be right here," Aunt Cass says. "Yell if you need something. She seems alright," she adds grudgingly, "but if you decide it's too much, I can get rid of her." The brash, no-nonsense tone inspires a little more confidence from Hiro.

"Thanks," he says, and then he slips out of the doorway and back into the crowded cafe, feeling two pairs of eyes on his back. I'm gonna have to talk to both of them about creepy staring after this, he thinks to himself.

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A/N: Hi! It's been a while since Malignant Butterfly Infestations, but I've had this idea floating around for a while, as well as ideas for another story (in which I finally get to write something with Tadashi in it!), so I'm jumping back into the fandom for a bit.

Abigail is such a fascinating character to me. In the movie, we never really get to meet her, but I've been wondering what she must have gone through after waking in the hospital. What must it be like to have someone love you so strongly that they'll stop at nothing to punish the ones who hurt you? Or to live with the knowledge that your father's love is something that destroyed another person's life?

This story (in four-ish parts) will explore that idea, and it will also give Hiro a chance to weigh Callaghan's actions again, and to consider what parts of his past he needs to hold onto – and which parts he needs to let go.

If any of this interests you, then please stick around! I hope you won't be disappointed :-) Please let me know what you think – feedback and criticism are both very much welcome!

Till next time, happy reading!

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