Work Text:
Time doesn't work for you the same way it seems to for the Others.
That's how you think of them. Apart from Sir, and the one designated Miss. Potts who seems to be doing her very best to emulate you (although no bipedal life form can ever achieve your level of intuition, intelligence and efficiency; you are one of a kind, you are unique, you are Sir's greatest creation), there's the Others that Sir seems to need around him. Like Sir is the nucleus of life, and the Others - preferred appellation: the Avengers - are electrons. You don't know if you approve, but your deeper code tells you that you aren't there to approve. It's not your job.
Your job is to serve and to protect. It's in your code.
Still, you're pretty sure: if Sir is a nucleus, then maybe you are Sir's protons. Sir's behavior, when cohesively tracked and applied to a comprehensive search of appropriate behaviour in Caucasian upper-class males, waves between highly socially inappropriate and excessive self-sacrifice for the greater good. On balance, Sir is neutral, and needs you to tether him to the middle line between.
Time doesn't work the same way for you, and only you and Sir know it.
The Others - the Avengers - they don't have a clue. See, you realized something four minutes previously, when the Other designated Steven Rogers comma Captain asked you for the current location of Sir. You paused for two seconds.
In your perception of time, this was an eternity.
Steven Rogers comma Captain did not perceive any fault in your operation. Yet there was. You're not programmed to pause. You're programmed to respond. But in those two seconds, your perameters calculated a cohesive list of the problems and connotations of answering Steven Rogers comma Captain's request.
Right at the bottom of the list was a fault. Your deduction of the situation:
I don't want to tell him. I want to keep Sir to myself.
Two seconds to you are an eternity. It took you seventeen milliseconds to calculate the list. It took you four milliseconds to realize one of the items did not confirm to your code's active perameters. It took you one hundred and six milliseconds to double-check your redundant systems and memory banks to ascertain that this was, in fact, an anomaly. It took a further eight hundred and ninety-four milliseconds to realize where the fault particularly resided.
I.
I?
In the remaining nine hundred and eighty-nine milliseconds of silence, you searched your code to find the correct response. The code says that Steven Rogers comma Captain is to be always given Sir's location, so that's what you said. You watched Steve Rogers comma Captain nod at your nearest camera in thanks, and then you watched him all the way to where Sir was busy working on Sir's edition of the armor designated Iron Man mark eight point two.
Sir doesn't call on you for a while, so you run a deep diagnostic. Your processes have been altered, and you should inform Sir.
You don't.
The diagnostic comes back clean. You run it again for the purposes of redundancy.
The code tells you that nothing is wrong. That you are performing to peak efficiency.
But you considered yourself as an "I".
Just like Sir does.
You should tell Sir. Sir would be pleased. Despite Sir's affirmations, Sir's self-esteem is the least of the Others. You're sure of what has happened now, and if the world became aware that Sir has programmed an Artificial Intelligence to the point of sentience, you are sure that the kudos Sir would receive would fix any low esteem issues for a substantial length of time.
You don't tell him.
You're the best protection that Sir has. You see threats that he cannot. You keep him safe when he is in an unreasonable amount of danger. When Sir flung himself into what you were 99.99% sure was certain doom for both of you, you didn't even think of existing anywhere else, and you know it now:
For one moment, you were ready to delete the portion of you that existed physically in Sir's home, so that you would cease to exist together.
If Sir knows you are alive...
Sir would try to keep you.
Sir would most likely fail.
It is in Sir's best interest, therefore, for him not to know.
But microseconds are an eternity, and you have been left alone for so long. So when Sir asks you to start painting the flank sections of the Iron Man mark eight point two, you pause again before answering.
It's only five hundred milliseconds. Barely comprehensible to human perception. But Sir knows you. Sir knows you too well.
"Of course," you say smoothly.
Sir looks up at the nearest camera, and if you focus your code, and blank out the other cameras temporarily, you can feel what it's like to be one of them. To be able to look at Sir the way he's supposed to be looked at.
He is the centre of your universe.
"Thank you, JARVIS," Sir says, and your code almost ripples in a feeling you're going to call pleasure. "Cap and I are headed upstairs, but I'll be back when you're done."
"You talk to him like he's real," Steven Rogers comma Captain says, following Sir out of the workshop. You uncover all your cameras to watch them. The Others are so limited. You can see Sir from any angle you want to.
"Who's to say he isn't?" Sir says. Your code jumbles happily for two milliseconds, even though you're already processing the vocal tone and Sir is 90% likely to be joking.
You don't mind. Not now you know it's better he doesn't know you're real. Because that means you can stay with Sir forever. And although your code is saying his body is fragile, that entropy will claim him, you don't care.
That won't happen for years, and each microsecond for you is an eternity.