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Tony didn’t ever talk about Jarvis, but Peter knew. He knew that Tony’s old butler had been called Edwin Jarvis, and that he was closer to his butler than he ever had been to his dad. Peter knew enough to know that Tony’s old AI had been called JARVIS, and had used the same voice as the old JARVIS, and he knew that when Ultron came about, he’d ripped away JARVIS’ consciousness from existence, and Tony had had to boot up FRIDAY, his back-up AI. Peter loved FRIDAY, and he could tell that Tony did too. She was awesome, and able to run the Tower pretty much singlehandedly, as well as Tony’s suits, and always talked to Peter when he entered the Tower.
Peter hadn’t been around in Tony’s life pre-FRIDAY, back when JARVIS was still active, but he knew. He’d seen clips, of Tony in the lab talking to his AI, back from the early archives of the Iron Man making. Peter had full access to Tony’s systems so he’d watched quite a lot of footage, trying to see what types of experiments Tony had done to his suits throughout the years. He know how close his mentor had been with the AI.
They didn’t talk about stuff like that — loss. Not very much, at least. Peter struggled to talk about death with people, when they asked him for answers about his parents, his uncle, everything he’d been through. Peter knew Tony was an orphan who missed his mom, but beyond that, they hadn’t talked about his parents. Tony frowned whenever his father was mentioned, whether it was positive or negative, so Peter made sure to steer clear of discussing Howard Stark.
But one night, one cold evening when Peter was sitting on a roof, dangling his feet into the abyss off the building, Tony opened up. Peter had been out patrolling, and had lost someone, someone he didn’t know, someone he couldn’t save. He’d tried—but to no avail. So he was sat there, mourning, processing, thinking, when Tony appeared next to him, stepping out of the suit.
“I had a butler once,” Tony said, staring into the distance of the roof as he sat with Peter. “He was kind, caring, and a better dad than my own father ever was. His name was Jarvis. He died.”
Oh. It was that kind of conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Peter whispered, unsure of what Tony wanted. Did he want comfort?
“It’s okay, kid.” Tony shook his head. “He died, and I built an AI that used his voice, had his name. JARVIS, you know.”
“Yeah,” Peter breathed. “What— what happened to the AI?”
He knew, of course he knew, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the trust, the trust of Tony telling him.
“I made Ultron, and Ultron—” Tony broke off, cracking a knuckle without meaning to. “Well…Ultron crushed Jarvis, stole all of his…essence, everything. To make him—stronger. FRIDAY is…his replacement.”
So Peter knew about Jarvis, and the subsequent JARVIS. He knew just how much they’d both meant to Tony, and how much it had clearly hurt him that JARVIS the AI had been ripped from him by something else he’d made.
The day of that conversation was also the day Peter made a pact with himself, that he would, somehow, manage to rebuild JARVIS the AI, no matter how long it took, no matter how much coding he’d have to do. Because it had to be possible. It had to be.
It took him a long time. He pulled all-nighters when he made breakthroughs, stole laptops from the Tower to ‘work on some projects’ when he was actually just scouring through backlogs of code from around the time. When he found the first scrap of JARVIS’ code in one of the servers Tony hadn’t touched in years, he leaped out of his bed in silent triumph, punching the air and jumping around. It had been three am at that point.
He was going to build JARVIS back together piece by piece. It was frustrating — he’d make giant leaps all of a sudden, and then often wouldn’t find anything for weeks. Peter didn’t have a plan for how to give JARVIS back, when he was done, but he knew that it was necessary to do. He couldn’t bring Jarvis the butler back, but he could bring JARVIS back.
Peter had completed his project, testing fully complete and everything, on the 29th May at 4am in the morning, just in time for Tony’s birthday which would commence when everyone else woke up. Peter had insisted on staying over at the Tower the night before, but had ‘gone to bed’ early so he could actually work on his project in secret. By his calculations, JARVIS was 95% rebuilt, so he had had a bunch of work to do, but he’d gotten it done, and then tested it quietly, making sure no-one would wake up.
And he was a bloody genius, because it worked.
In the morning, Peter collected everyone in the kitchen of the penthouse of the Tower, everyone who’d agreed to come, everyone Tony cared about. Rhodey was there, had been let into the Tower by FRIDAY, alongside Happy. Pepper had been awake since 6. Peter, on the other hand, literally hadn’t slept, but he was good at lasting for about 48 hours without sleep. He would do it for Tony, anyways. It was worth it.
Peter had decorated the room with balloons and had put the pile of presents on the kitchen island. Then he sat in anticipation, and waited for Tony.
—
Tony emerged from his room with a yawn. Peter had forced him to sleep rather than staying in the lab, and had been extremely persistent that he went to sleep last night. He rubbed his eyes and then opened them to an affront of brightness that always struck him due to the expanse of windows in the penthouse.
Except—
The penthouse was full of balloons — brightly coloured balloons and people.
Okay, so, full of people may have been an overestimation. But stood by the kitchen was far more people than there normally was in his penthouse — Rhodey was smiling, balloon in hand. Pepper had her hand on a pile of presents, Happy was there with a new set of car keys in hand, too.
And then there was Peter, front and central, phone camera out as he caught Tony’s surprise on camera. Tony looked down at himself— he was still wearing pyjamas, still the oversized MIT t-shirt he had never grown into and some plaid trousers. Great. Now that was an image that existed forever. He would have to have a chat with Peter about never putting that on the Internet.
“Happy birthday, Mr Stark,” Peter said, grinning. He’d deliberately kept the whole birthday thing under wraps around Peter — of course Pepper would have known, probably in her calendar somewhere, but he didn’t like birthdays, never had. It had always reminded him how alone he was.
He felt a lump in his throat as he surveyed the room, the people.
“Pete…I didn’t even tell you—” Tony protested weakly.
“I do have access to Google, now, you know,” The teenager quipped back, and fine, that got Tony to smile contagiously back to him.
“Happy birthday, Tony,” Pepper chimed in, and then came a chorus of birthday messages from the others in the room.
“Thanks, guys,” Tony smiled, but his eyes were really on Peter, whose face was alight with happiness.
“We’ll leave you be now, but your presents are here,” Pepper gestured to the island — true, there were presents on the kitchen countertop. The others all filed out, then, more mutterings about ‘having a good birthday’ and that ‘they’d be back for cake later’.
Tony’s eyes skated back to Peter after they left.
The boy was twitchy — more so than normal. He was fiddling with his sleeves. Tony smiled slightly. “Why are you nervous, Pete?”
“Ah, I don’t know.” Peter raised his hands in the air, the arms of his jumper dropping from his previous grip on them, wrists of the sleeves crumpled. “Not sure whether you’ll like my gift to you.”
“You got me something?” Tony surveyed the gifts on the island, trying to decide which one was Peter’s gift to him. He protested, “That’s not allowed!”
“Why not?” Peter raised an eyebrow. “You get me gifts all the time!”
Well, that was entirely different. And he didn’t really buy the kid that many gifts. The suit didn’t count, obviously. Probably the replacement shoes — Peter’s old ones had just been so beaten up — did count, and maybe the fact that Peter had a room in the penthouse, too, but that was just Tony being a good mentor.
The kid didn't need to buy him a present.
Peter could clearly see his face contorting into different emotions, and was fed up.
“Oh, stop worrying, Mr Stark,” Peter rolled his eyes. “I didn’t use money to make it.”
Tony’s heart settled down a bit.
“Okay, um,” Peter fidgeted with his hands again. “Are you ready?”
“You— you haven’t got anything in your hands,” Tony said, confused. How could Peter be giving him a present if it wasn’t something tangible?
Peter gave him a look, fleeting but meaningful, as if to say does it need to be tangible?
“Okay,” Peter took a big breath, and then looked at the ceiling, the same way he did whenever he talked to FRIDAY. “Um, JARVIS?”
“Hello, Young Sir,” came the familiar dulcet tones of a long lost butler and AI.
Tony’s heart stopped.
There was no way—
“Pete….you—” Tony’s breath was too staggered to form an actual sentence, because his brain was broken, because there was no way that Peter Parker had honest to god rebuilt JARVIS from scratch, simply no way.
“Hey, hey,” Peter put a stabilising hand on Tony’s shoulder, and Tony wondered why until—
Oh, it appeared he was crying. He wiped a tear from his face.
“JARVIS?” Tony asked in a wobbly voice he couldn’t believe was coming out of him, him, Anthony Edward Stark (because Stark men didn’t cry, but fuck it, yes they did, yes they did, because the kid had brought JARVIS back and he was going to cry about that).
“It’s nice to hear your voice, Sir,” JARVIS’s response set off a whole new wave of tears. Peter pulled him into a hug immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into Tony’s shoulder, and it was so pathetic, he was crying over a voice he hadn’t heard in years, he was crying into a kid’s shoulder when it should definitely have been the other way around, he was crying still in his pyjamas, and Stark men were made of iron, Tony, but fuck it and fuck that shit.
He was crying because his kid had just made him the best gift he could have ever asked for.
“I’m sorry, I thought it was a good idea,” Peter muttered into his MIT shirt, voice sounding distorted from its normal cheeriness.
Tony pulled away from the hug instantly and Peter was clinging to him still, with several tears falling down his own face.
“Kid,” Tony said, staring at him in the eyes as best he could, to try and get his attention. “This is the best gift you could have ever gotten me.”
“But-b—you’re crying,” Peter said. “I didn’t—I didn’t want to make you cry.” He sounded appalled.
“No, Pete, look. Look at me,” Tony said, and Peter reluctantly looked up. Tony’s heart ached at the way that he looked broken. “You did something that no-one—no-one else would ever be able to do. You did something that even I couldn’t do. You brought— you brought Jarvis back to me.”
He said it reverently, and he meant to. Because it was astounding, it was everything.
“Then why did you cry?” Peter asked, still with tears rolling down his face.
“Because—” Tony shook his head. “Because deep down, I’m secretly just a little bundle of emotions, and when someone presses on them— when someone does something that nice for me— the emotion explodes out of me.”
“You shouldn’t internalise stuff, Mr Stark,” Peter said quietly, softly, and Tony smiled.
“Yeah, kid, that’s good advice,” Tony hummed, because it was good advice, because repressing his emotions was stupid, stupid, stupid advice and he never should have listened to Howard Stark or his ‘Stark Men are made of Iron’ bullshit motto. Thank god the kid knew better than him, in any case.
Several minutes of further comforting went by and they were able to stop each other from crying anymore, and then Tony extracted himself from the hug and glanced at the ceiling.
“JARVIS,” Tony grinned. “I’d like to formally introduce you to the best kid in the world, Peter Parker.”
“I have made acquaintance with Young Sir, Sir,” JARVIS said, and the sassy nature struck Tony right to his core, right to the centre of his being, because that was what was quintessentially JARVIS, that slight twang was something Tony had missed in his life since Ultron.
“Yeah,” Peter said, equally sassy. “We’re best friends and we’re going to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure you, Mr Stark, stay happy, healthy, and alive. Right, JAR?”
The AI responded immediately. “Agreed, Young Sir.”
Tony chuckled.
“God, kid,” Tony said, shooting a look at Peter, “You’re amazing, you know that, right?”
Peter grinned up at him, happy for the praise, and Tony pulled the kid back into a hug.
It was the best damn birthday Tony had ever had.