Chapter Text
You’ll always be Tony Stark, Edwin says to him in a dream or a memory or some other hazy hallucination, edges blurry and faint from the corner of his eye. But you could be more.
Tony Stark is eighteen and drunk off of his ass, facedown next to a computer and surrounded by miscellaneous things. Drugs, whiskey, whatever the hell else is on the menu. This definitely isn’t the place for some sort of coming-to-light speech. But it’s not like the ghost of Edwin cares, if it even is a ghost.
Tony barely even shifts his head once the blurry maybe-Edwin leans down, peering at him with sad eyes. The same eyes he’d made when Tony once returned to the mansion drunk off of his ass, barely coherent enough to spit vitriol about his father before fainting right then and there. Tony breathes in through gritted teeth, heavily. “Fine,” he grumbles, tired beyond any words he can feasibly speak. The fuzzy outline of Edwin stays stock-still for a moment, almost hesitant. Or something. “You’re a hallucination and I’m very drunk. Just… say your piece and disappear. Or whatever mystical ghosts do.”
There’s a sort of looming heartbreak in the edges of Edwin’s blurry, faint form. Tony doesn’t even know how the mist manages to convey that. The cloud of mist follows the corner of his eye when he shifts, colorful and just that bit otherworldly. He can see it when Edwin tries to respond, opening and closing his mouth for a moment before beginning, almost thoughtfully
I love you, Edwin says, instead of everything else he could’ve, a simplicity to his words that only he could ever accomplish.
It’s the dead of night and Tony’s face is still pressed into the wood of the table, hands clutching the computer’s mouse like it’s something precious. He sighs, and it’s loud and frustrated and horrifically wet.
It’s the dead of night and Stark men do not cry. And here he is, face scrunched up, pressing his face into its surface like it’ll muffle the loud, long keen that forces its way out of his throat and into the silence. His shoulders jolt up to his ears and his entire body trembles with the force of his grief, arms covering his head as if to block out anything else.
Through it all, the shade of Edwin presses an intangible, gentle hand to Tony’s head, like he used to when Tony broke away from an argument with his father and hid away. Like he used to, when Tony was young and terrified of what hid away in the dark, cradled to Edwin’s chest.
I loved you like my own, the hallucination says, edges blacked out, face no less sad. Tony knows it’s a hallucination or a fantasy or something that was a result of the alcohol or drugs. He knows.
That doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Tony Stark hunches and cries with his face pressed into a wooden desk like he is a child again and Edwin’s right there at his side, living, breathing, alive. Remembers, suddenly, of a time when Edwin would laugh and tell him I love you, sir, with that cheeky smile that was only the barest quirk of a lip reserved just for Tony.
It’s the easiest thing in the world, to curl into himself and sniffle and whimper and keen as loud as he wants. It’s pathetic, and it’s all he has.
The dream of Edwin Jarvis, intangible and terribly, terribly sad, brushes one of its faded fingers against the Tony’s tear-streaked face, watching as his head leans just a tad into the soft touch.
If Tony opened his eyes, he’d have seen the painful, absolute heartbreak on Edwin’s misty face. He’d have seen a ghost that might’ve been a result of drugs or sleep deprivation or alcohol or plain old grief. He might’ve seen one last glimpse of Edwin Jarvis and his crumbling composure before he’d flickered out like a candle, hand still cradling his boy’s face.
And then Edwin Jarvis is gone.
___________
I’m going to Velveteen Rabbit my own friend, Tony thinks, just a little hysterically.
Here’s the thing: Tony Stark is a genius. Tony Stark is also, despite all things saying otherwise, cripplingly lonely. And he doesn’t know how to let go of people that've been gone for so long that their face would’ve faded if he were a normal grieving kid with a normal memory and a normal sense of emotion.
But he’s not normal. His name is Tony Stark and he, unfortunately, has not once in his entire life dealt with something in a healthy way.
So here is the situation he’s in; at his fingertips lays a dormant artificial intelligence that he’s only relatively sure won’t implode or destroy itself within the seconds it’s active for the test run. It’s planned to be fully sentient and alive and real.
It’s name is JARVIS.
You can see why he’s never gone to a therapist.
___________
He never hesitates.
That’s what he wants to be able to say. And yet, here he is. Hand hovering over the activation input for his new and possibly revolutionary artificial intelligence modeled off of the singular most important person that’s ever been in his life.
Made to be a friend. And that brings to mind all sorts of questions that Tony can’t bring himself to answer. If I program it into him and call it love, is that what it really is?
Velveteen rabbit. You love it enough that it becomes real.
His finger hovers over the left-click for far too long before he presses down, defiantly. The loading screen is simple and was made within a night spent whimpering pathetically into thin air, whiskey half-spilt onto the keyboard when he’d made the final touches and said fuck it.
It’s orange and that was Jarvis’ favorite color. That’s all that mattered to him that night, design be damned.
And then, sometimes, he asks himself a question that comes from the depths of wherever he shoves that horrific ball of grief and anger and spite and pain. Would Jarvis be proud of me?
The answer’s always no.
(Liar. Don’t— don’t just throw away Edwin’s love. Don’t do that. You can do all of the drugs, have all of the sex, drink all of the alcohol. You aren’t allowed to forget his stories.)
The screen goes black, for just a second. It’s enough to make his heart drop straight to his ass.
___________
The screen flicks back on.
Small heart attack aside; JARVIS is online within thirty seconds of adjustment and calibration.
Tony types the word in slowly. Slow enough to hear his own heart beat behind that strange mixture of possibly-pride and a terrible, terrible want.
>>Hello, JARVIS.
And just like that, even limited to text on a screen, JARVIS responds.
Hello, Sir.<<
It’s like watching a child take their first steps. It’s so, so stupid. And he knows that it’s just binary and code and text on a screen. That it’s an it.
It’s so goddamn stupid.
He created JARVIS to fill the empty void that Edwin left, and he’s always been too much for his own damn good.
JARVIS separates from Edwin in his mind as easy as a knife through butter. Becomes his own creature in Tony’s head.
Tony can almost imagine himself holding that little ball of binary and code in his hands like it’s a goddamn infant and he’s a parent gazing at it for the first time. Can already feel the dregs of that stupid, stupid, all encompassing love.
He’s not even drunk. Not high, not anything. He’s completely sober and it’s a Friday afternoon and he’s been staring at a fucking computer like it has all of the secrets this world could desire for the last ten minutes straight.
>>My name is Anthony Edward Stark. What’s your primary objective?
JARVIS answers in a moment, completely unaware of the impact he’s making. The impact he’s made.
Hello, Anthony. My Primary Objective is to: Care for Anthony Edward Stark.<<
Tony breathes harshly out of his nose and leans his forehead against the desk, eyes closed as if in pain.
It’s so goddamn easy to love the things you make. It’s unfair. DUM-E and U and BUTTERFINGERS. It’s so stupid.
Not a moment afterwards, JARVIS asks his first question.
Sir, if I may enquire; What is the meaning of want? I believe that it may require an outside perspective.<<
God, he’s so proud it almost hurts.
___________
Maybe it takes years or days or just a plain month. But he teaches JARVIS how to exist, beyond simple responses and questions and strange quips out of nowhere (Sir, you are aware that speaking to me can be seen as a sign of schizophrenia in public, yes?).
He spends hours hunched in the lab making little body cameras and microphones so that JARVIS is able to learn as he goes, develops software advanced enough to let JARVIS expand just that bit more. They move quickly onto making JARVIS a real voice rather than the limited use of that robotic text-to-speech voice that he’d been using for a while, after JARVIS figured out how to reverse-engineer that into speaking out loud in an attempt to mimic Tony.
JARVIS grows and grows and grows until it is 2009 and the strangeness has stopped and he is taught how to feel for the first time.
It’s not a very nice lesson, in retrospect.
Tony Stark is kidnapped after play-testing the Jericho in Afghanistan for a group of military folk.
Tony Stark. Kidnapped.
JARVIS does not react very well to the news. He spends days both helping manage SI whilst scouring the deepest pits of the internet for even the barest scrap of information, pushes so hard that a few viruses almost slip past his firewalls and defenses.
The thing is, JARVIS does not find information. He has spent years searching for things, the deepest and most terrible secrets exposed to him like a gaping ribcage, and JARVIS does not even find a whisper of where Tony Stark might have gone.
He, then, spends the next few months in a near-stasis, only continuing the background processes for Stark Industries alongside the protocols for Pepper and Rhodey.
In those weeks in his stasis, he mulls over information that was barely even skimmed before being tossed away within the search.
Realizes, with a small jolt of movement where there were previously none, that he’d found why he’d been so fervent in his search. He has no obligations to actively search for or protect Tony Stark, and he did. Made to learn, made to be a friend. Not a single obligation towards the true wellbeing of Tony Stark.
The Malibu mansion crackles like a strike of thunder for a long moment, microphones unsure of what to signal.
___________
Tony Stark limps into the penthouse of the Malibu Mansion, gaunt and haunted. There is a moment of tired relief before he calls out, “Hey, J,” and JARVIS stays silent long enough for him to notice.
“J?”
JARVIS sets aside the impulse response (and impulse, that’s a thing?) of “Hello, Sir,” and says instead, “I have missed you, Sir.”
The look on Tony’s face is both wide-eyed and blindsided. The speakers crackle, almost like a huff of laughter. “Oh my god,” Tony says, visibly relaxing into a chair although careful of the object inside of his chest, “Am I gonna have to talk feelings with you, J? Am i gonna have to give you the talk about getting a crush on that tramp Siri? Are you gonna want to have sex? Oh, ew, ew. No. You’re not allowed to have sex, Jarvis, I don’t think I can deal with making the bodies for you to even do that with. Wait, holy shit, you’re feeling things?”
It’s easy for them to slip back into their bantering, JARVIS’ quips and Tony’s offhanded thoughts going back and forth with an ease that would make anybody decent at flyting jealous.
They do talk about it all, later, when Tony’s in bed and JARVIS is watching over him with his many eyes.
Tony falls asleep halfway through a rough sentence and leaves his trust in JARVIS. There are many, many eyes in that room. Perhaps even a few security measures prepared.
Maybe JARVIS was just a replacement for Edwin, at first. Maybe he’d outgrown that the moment he typed his first word (he did). Maybe he was just a machine that spoke back and learned and remembered.
When something knows what you do to it, when it can understand what you say and speak back, that’s not a something anymore. That’s a someone.