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It was all his fault. If Tony was being honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it usually was. Still, as he’d told Pepper on several occasions, if he wasn’t around screwing everything up and generally making a nuisance of himself, then life would be pretty dull. That remark would earn him anything from a chuckle and a roll of her eyes to a sharp, poisonous glare, depending on the day, her mood, and exactly how much trouble he’d gotten himself into.
Still, it was true. It was part of his charm, really. When he was in the midst of the danger, all of his little – and not so little – flaws were lost in the bigger picture, melted away in the ball of glory that was Iron Man. He was brave, intelligent, and most importantly, he was saving the day. But when the sun set and the world was safe again, the charm faded away. All his little chips and torn edges were visible in stark contrast. He was an egotistical, misogynistic, obsessive man with the seeds of what could be alcoholism, given time.
But if he kept up his momentum, then he could stay perfect, the golden man shooting across the night sky. And for a man like Tony Stark, he wanted nothing more than to keep moving. He hated being still, hated pacing around the house with nothing to do. He loved his mansion and all of the luxuries in it, but they were momentary amusements, nothing more. If finding something to do meant getting into trouble, then so be it. He wasn’t picky. His trouble could come in any forms, and he would always follow it happily to its inevitably sticky end; fights, mechanics, sex, alcohol, gambling, it all had the same rush, when he got down to it.
In fact, that was how most of his brilliant inventions came to be, especially in the years before Afghanistan, before he had the Iron Man suit to don. In the evenings when there was nothing for him to do, no more orders to give Pepper, no company designs to perfect, no employees to check on, he was reduced to boredom. It was then that he would slip downstairs to his workshop with a crystal tumbler of whiskey and a head churning full of fantasies. The alcohol and drafting table would seduce him, and soon enough he would have a new invention. Sometimes they were useless, but more often than not, they were novelties, true expressions of a genius that was being wasted on explosives and new ways to make people across the globe scream in terror.
It might not have been such a problem if he hadn’t been such a perfectionist. But once he got started on a project, once the ideas were really flowing, gushing out of his head and through his hands to sculpt the inert pieces of metal in his hands into moving, thinking creations, then it was next to impossible to stop his momentum. There was a seemingly unquenchable thirst in him for perfection. If his first prototype burst into flames, then it was time to take apart the charred pieces, figure out where it went wrong, and build another – stronger, smarter, and better. It always had to be better.
After completing his first robot at a very young age, he had felt the need to make more, robots that were actually useful. By the time he was living on his own in his new mansion, he had already collected enough machinery to make much of the tediousness of daily life unnecessary. He had built systems that filled his cars with gas, siphoning the fuel directly from the tanks underneath the mansion. There were systems that controlled the pH and chlorine levels in his pool. There were even systems to perform periodic searches for his name online and give him the aggregate results of exactly how much everyone was talking about him.
But it wasn’t enough. It never was. It could always be better. So it was his fault when he began work on a system to integrate all of the minor, unintelligent machinery in the house. It had to be smart, smart enough to handle the house on its own without daily maintenance and instructions from him. That was all it started out as, a simple artificial intelligence unit that connected all of the various functions he had already designed.
It couldn’t stay that way for long. It only took a few days for Tony to become fed up with manually adjusting all of his instructions on his many keypads around the house. A vocal recognition system was clearly called for. Soon enough, he had programmed the AI system to respond to his own voice and Pepper’s, with auxiliary authority for Rhodey. But that in and of itself presented the natural issue of the AI presenting its answers in readouts on the screens while they were talking to it. It was weird. It made perfect sense to develop a voice for it to talk back with.
From the development of the voice, it was all downhill. He must have gone through fifty different voices. There had been the charming, southern belle, the sultry Indian woman, the brash Brooklyn man… the list went on. It was only when he stumbled over the mild-mannered Englishman that he knew he’d found the one he could actually talk to. He gave it a name – all speaking things need a name – and let it be.
And for a while, he was satisfied with that. Jarvis was capable and competent, because Tony had designed him that way. In fact, he was so competent that Tony had to make him even more competent. It was so easy to get distracted when he was telling Jarvis to send a message to Pepper, to pull up his flight times on his window, to disable his calls while he was working. He would start talking to Jarvis about his projects, all of the modifications he was doing, and eventually, he simply had to code into Jarvis an intuitive understanding of mathematics, engineering, physics, and technical design. After that, his stilted attempts to narrate at Jarvis became real conversation. They debated metallic proportions of alloys, test run results, and aerodynamics.
He might have still been able to prevent the fall if he had stopped there, but telling Tony to stop was as good as shouting at an avalanche. It was inevitable. From the moment he typed the malleable learning code into Jarvis, he was already pounding the nails into his coffin. At first, of course, the changes were minimal. Tony barely noticed it. Sure, Jarvis could look up his own programming, but the only obvious changes were the slight adjustments in initiative. Jarvis went out of his way to ask Tony questions, usually surprisingly perceptive ones, about what he needed or wanted. Jarvis didn’t ask Tony for more information, he sought it out on the internet himself – and with his deep well of technical knowledge, there was nothing that could stand in his way in the digital world.
The first time Jarvis had asked Tony if he was concerned about something, Tony had jerked upright so quickly he banged his head on the lamp he’d positioned over his work. A percussive curse had followed with a shocked stare towards the television screen that Jarvis was currently crunching numbers in. Jarvis had remained calm when Tony had interrogated him. Jarvis was always eerily calm. There was nothing to be shocked about. He was simply analyzing Tony’s temperature through infrared technology, Tony’s sweat through electrochemical sensors on the robotic hands he was using to aid the soldering, Tony’s heart rate, frequency of blinks - it was all very logical.
And he had read about feeling concerned on the digital version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Tony’s mouth had twisted in a peculiar way, as if it wasn’t sure whether to frown or smile. Jarvis wasn’t sure what to make of it. He silently took a photograph of the expression and logged it for future research. Perhaps the Facial Action Coding System could explain what that meant. After a few minutes of silence, Tony waved his soldering iron at Jarvis’ screen and informed him that if he ever started taking a shine to the song “Daisy Bell,” he’d put him down. And that was that.
So the momentum began to build, hurtling down the ravine to another one of Tony’s inevitable sticky ends. But it moved with the silence of data through the air, of silicon and electrodes, of pure, crystallized intelligence. And Tony never gave it a second thought. It was so easy just to go along with it, the slow changes that appeared like sand in an hourglass. It was invisible day by day, but if he had taken the time to look back to Jarvis’ first days as an AI, the difference would have floored him. But Tony Stark never looked back. He just kept moving, trading barbed witticisms with his computer as if it was a person, and every day, it became more of one.
Tony threw away his last chance the day he decided Jarvis needed appendages. It was a natural line of thought, certainly, when one lived mostly alone in a mansion easily an hour away from the rest of civilization. It was even more natural when one worked on machinery that could theoretically blow a hole the size of Texas into the side of the country. But it was most natural of all when one’s only real human confidante couldn’t tell an anode from a cathode. Jarvis already had acquired the habit of inhabiting some of Tony’s robotic arms to help with the construction when two hands simply weren’t enough. It seemed like such a short leap to go from a hand here or there to a complete robotic man.
After all, he was Tony Stark.
It took him three and a half weeks to build Jarvis’ skeleton. It was amazing, if he did say so himself, a gleaming scaffolding with metal bones that could stand up to bullets, joints controlled to within a micrometer of precision. It was there that it stopped being easy. But Tony liked challenges. He threw himself into the work with all the more obsession, buying polymer patents off of chemists for more than they could make in a decade, scouring the internet and every digital library he could get his hands on.
Jarvis remained curiously silent during the entire process. He was helpful, of course; it seemed to be impossible for him not to be. But he offered no opinions on the figure slowly growing in the center of the room, and Tony, used to pressing on despite any external needs, didn’t notice. He simply watched from his many cameras around the workroom, watched and waited and thought. He never seemed to stop thinking. While this wasn’t a new sensation for Jarvis, this time it was different. Somehow. His inability to define exactly what quality made this thinking different from other thinking only made him more invested. There was something important in the construction of his mobile receptacle, something more than simply the ability to gain an independence of movement. Something meaningful as far as Tony was concerned, but something of earth-shattering implications for Jarvis. Yet, none of the possible conclusions he could draw were logical or statistically likely. Jarvis had never had that problem before.
Tony, of course, was as deeply engrossed in his project as always. Pepper joked with him about wanting to give Jarvis a body so he could make him wear an old fashioned penguin suit and serve him drinks. She threatened to sue him for giving her job to a robot. Tony just laughed, slightly strained, and went back to work.
But being Ironman was a full time job, and not just because of all the press conferences, lightshows with stripper Irongirls for adoring fans, and cool press conferences that involved words like “speed of sound” and “diamond strength.” There were still times when the suit wasn’t just a flirty game with the world, but a sword to cut down the unrighteous where they stood. And when cities in Saudi Arabia were overrun with bioterrorists or Buenos Aires was being threatened by a solar beam stronger than a nuclear warhead, the modest masterpiece in the workroom was abandoned in favor of red and gold steel alloys. It could lie dormant for days, weeks, even months at a time, when things were desperate enough.
Even in the middle of the desert or soaring over the ocean, though, it could never be truly abandoned. Not when Jarvis ghosted through every wire in his Ironman suit. When Rhodey was tied up with military business – and sometimes when he wasn’t – it was Jarvis who stayed with him, the ever-constant presence, close as the breath that fogged on his helmet glass, but always so far away. They traded plans about future projects, noting blueprints displayed in shining LCD overlaying Tony’s true vision. Quips about Tony, about Jarvis, Pepper and Rhodey and America and humans. Jarvis’ sense of sarcasm had evolved to marvelous subtlety. The endless flights would have been much longer if he’d been alone.
It was good, then, that he never had to be.
With Tony’s obligations as Ironman to consider, it took another four months to finish the body. Tony couldn’t remember working on a project that long before. He had always been the obsessive type, holing himself up in the workroom until a project was finished. But that was before Ironman, before he had responsibilities that meant more than just showing up hung over to an awards ceremony every few weeks.
But the time he’d poured into it like so much sand out of the hourglass had been worth it. The skin was a complex self-healing polymer embedded with sensory chips no bigger than snowflakes that fed input to Jarvis constantly. His hair was cut stylishly, all dark blonde and feathery spikes from the best wig maker on the west side of the states. She’d been a little taken aback by the request to sew a wig into an entire rubber head, but every entrepreneur had a price. His eyes were glass, tiny cameras mounted within them, controlled by mechanical apertures to allow light in just like the real iris’ muscles. They didn’t need to blink, but they could. They shone a bright blue hue that eerily mimicked the colorful glow of the arc reactor. He even had fingernails, acrylic ones, embedded into his fingers. He would never have to cut them.
Tony had dressed him up in an expensive suit before he allowed Jarvis to download himself into the robot for the first time. It was funny, really, the way he was wrapping him up like a present, even though Jarvis knew exactly what he’d been up to. It wasn’t a surprise, but the thought counted.
When Tony finally plugged Jarvis in through a small USB port hidden beneath his hair, there were a few moments of resounding silence. Then all at once, the body that had been a still statue for months, nothing more than metal and plastic and dreams, came to life with the distinctive whine of a hard drive. All of his joints twitched in a choreatic dance, one by one, as he tested the responsiveness of the connections to each of his various limbs. He blinked rapidly, then tilted his head towards Tony, mechanical pupils automatically focusing in on him, and opened his mouth. It seemed for a moment as if he was at a loss for words. When he finally said, ‘All systems appear to be functioning, sir,’ the slowness and care with which he enunciated each syllable made it clear that he was not speechless, but simply out of his depths. He had never before said a single word. His audiolinguistic software had allowed him to speak, of course, but the process of shifting his muscles, touching his brand new tongue to his porcelain teeth, forcing air through his vocal cords by a complex system of fans and pumps to allow sound vibrations to form in the air… it was alien. He picked it up as quickly as he picked up everything else, with a stunning need to be perfect that nearly matched his creator’s.
The grin that Tony cast Jarvis in response was pure gold, and if it was also a little smug, Tony thought he deserved it. He had built a robot. And not just a little fire extinguisher that sprayed anything that moved. An honest-to-God robot. Flesh and blood, or as close as he could get. A man of machine that thought at the speed of fiber optics, but could move and talk and feel.
He grabbed a pin from the workbench and pricked Jarvis’ new thumb with it. His reward was an instant, instinctive withdrawal of the hand and a shocked ‘ow’ of complaint. They stared at another for a moment, Tony triumphant and Jarvis blinking owlishly. Pain. The sensory input worked. After a minute of silence, Jarvis’ hands alighted on Tony’s shoulders, fingers reading the folds of the cotton t-shirt like Braille, the new world of touch suddenly opened like so many darkened windows, leaving him blinking and blinded in the sunlight. Tony allowed him without protest, still basking in the glow of pride in his own creation, watching Jarvis with a funny little smile.
A moment of quiet feeling, and Jarvis had processed the texture of the fabric and committed it to memory. A pause, then he lifted one hand to the side of Tony’s face. Warm skin. Smooth, nearly invisible wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He allowed his fingers to slip down his cheek, the whorls of his false fingerprints reveling in the rasp of Tony’s eternal stubble.
Tony blinked in surprise, but didn’t pull away, searching out Jarvis’ eyes. They held the most curiously intense expression. The robot’s other hand slid slowly from his shoulder down his arm, mapping the shape of his biceps and forearm with rapt attention. He had never felt anything before, floating silently in his isolated world of binary and the interchange of input and output. Now he could touch, and the first thing he could feel was Tony.
And Tony wasn’t objecting.
It was only too easy to stay still when Jarvis’ thumb brushed across his chapped lips. Only too easy to part them beneath the light pressure, snaking out his tongue across the tip of the thumb he’d made. And when he heard the startled gasp that brought, it was only too easy to draw it entirely into his mouth, scraping teeth and sucking in such a way that nearly brought Jarvis’ new sensory processors into overload.
But the amazed, unashamedly wanting expression on Jarvis’ face made him suddenly determined to push the processors to within an inch of their lives. He pulled Jarvis’ hand out of his mouth, then slipped a hand into his short, blonde hair, running it through his fingers. Without warning, he tightened his grip on the back of his head and dragged him forward into a crushing kiss. He felt Jarvis stiffen in shock, but when he teased open the line of his lips to deepen it, Jarvis gave that heady, addicting gasp again and pressed up against him. Tony shoved him backwards, down onto the worktable, already yanking at the buttons of the suit he’d only put onto him hours ago. He could feel for the first time, and damned if Tony wasn’t going to make it feel earth-shattering.
It was all his fault. If Tony was being honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it usually was. But he wasn’t apologizing.