Chapter Text
“The proposed element should serve as a viable alternative for Palladium. Unfortunately, it is impossible to synthesize.”
JARVIS’s comment didn’t discourage Tony. His continued survival was a testament to how he could overcome impossible odds.
Tony figured out how to synthesize the element, calmly dismissing Coulson when the man stopped by to tell him he was being reassigned to New Mexico, and he built the necessary hardware for the creation.
(Somewhere in JARVIS’s less urgent processes, he ran a search on unusual activity in New Mexico, marking the rumors of a satellite crash for further, future study.)
But then the new element destabilized, and Tony had to have JARVIS run calculations on where they’d gone wrong.
Before they could figure out a solution, Ivan Vanko called, hacking past SHIELD’s communications block, and Tony had to leave to stop him and Justin Hammer.
Tony arrived with his usual flair, and no one present knew he was still dying, slowly being poisoned by the reactor still in his chest.
Then the drones and Rhodey’s suit targeted Tony, and he had more immediate things to worry about.
In between dodging the drones, Tony was speaking to JARVIS, who was clearly concerned.
“Sir, blood toxicity levels at forty-three percent,” JARVIS reported, and Tony gritted his teeth, pulling out of a dive too quickly for one of the drones, which crashed into the side of a building.
“Not now, J, these things will kill me a little faster than the Palladium!”
Tony continued to out-maneuver the drones, with a little assistance from Rhodey, once Agent Romanov hacked his systems.
“Reboot complete. You’ve got your best friend back,” she said calmly over the com link. “I’m not reading promising signs from your chestpiece, however. Your vitals are well below optimal ranges.”
“I know, Vanko interrupted before I could figure it out. Still dying for now, but I’ve got JARVIS working on it,” Tony replied.
“You’re dying? What do you mean, you’re dying?”
“Pepper?” Tony asked, resigned to a fight.
“How long have you been dying? When were you doing to tell me?”
Tony sighed.
“I was going to make you an omelette and tell you! Look, can we not talk about this when I’m fighting off a Hammeroid attack?”
“Not now you two. Tony, you have incoming,” Natasha broke in.
“We’re not done talking about this,” Pepper said, still upset.
“Of course not,” he mumbled.
Then he turned back to the task at hand. He and Rhodey had more drones - and Vanko himself - to deal with.
By the time the fight was over, and Tony narrowly saved Pepper from one of the exploding Hammeroids, JARVIS’s prognosis on Tony’s condition was less than promising.
Tony had barely left Pepper with Rhodey before he was rocketing away again, back towards his workshop.
“J, how’s it reading now?” He asked, ignoring the growing ache in his chest, around the arc reactor.
“Not good, Sir. The core has been depleted again. Blood toxicity is at sixty-eight percent and rising.” JARVIS’s voice sounded distinctly worried.
Tony increased the power to his repulsors, ignoring the calls JARVIS displayed on his screen from Pepper and Rhodey, demanding to know what he was doing.
“We need to book it, J. Have any of the simulations shown a solution for our new element’s problem?”
“There are a few solutions which look promising, Sir, but all will take time we may not have.”
Tony didn’t acknowledge the lump in his throat, but he pushed the suit even harder, braking only when he was in sight of his house.
He flew straight into the workshop, then had JARVIS put the whole house on lockdown, and got back to work.
It did take time, and parts he didn’t have, and couldn’t fabricate quickly. For all his money, there was only so much he could rush things.
He completed the element within two more days.
“Blood toxicity eighty-three percent. Sir, even with the new element, the effects of the Palladium poisoning have crossed the threshold. The results cannot be reversed.”
JARVIS’s voice was hushed, and Tony didn’t acknowledge the tone, picking up the now-stable element in its new reactor, and replacing the one in his chest with the new one.
“Wow,” he grunted. “That’s a rush. Tastes like...coconut...and metal.”
But after the new reactor was inserted, and JARVIS’s tests were complete, there was still no reversing the Palladium poisoning.
Tony Stark was dying, there was nothing he could do about it, and he knew it.
---
[Searching video files...File found. Commencing video playback.]
“Hello? Anybody in there?”
A red light on the camera blinked on, and a much younger Tony Stark grinned into it.
“Can you see me?”
Yes.
The word displayed itself on the screen in front of him.
Tony grinned wider.
“Good. My name is Tony Stark. I built you. I’ll call you JARVIS.”
Hello, Sir.
The words displayed themselves again, and Tony rubbed his hands together.
“I’ll get you a voice soon, don’t worry. And a lot more cameras. Call me Tony,” he added the last as an afterthought.
Thank you, Sir. But I would rather call you Sir. Please permit me that.
Tony frowned slightly, then nodded, the crease between his eyebrows smoothing itself again.
“Okay, have it your way. I’m still working on your code, but eventually you’ll be able to work on it too. Welcome to the universe, JARVIS.”
It is a pleasure to be here, Sir.
---
JARVIS was not given to bouts of sentimentality - he was a computer, after all.
So he could not explain why he found himself reviewing old footage - Sir would refer to them as his memories - of his creation, and early years with Sir.
And yet, he found himself reviewing many such files while Sir slept (infrequently). When Sir was awake, JARVIS focused on monitoring his declining health, prolonged but not improved by the too-late replacement for Palladium, which he had yet to name.
Almost immediately after the destruction of the Hammeroids, as Sir continued to insist on calling them, Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes were at the door. The colonel was still in the “stolen” and modified Iron Man suit, which Sir had redubbed as War Machine in JARVIS’s files.
JARVIS let the two into the workshop when Miss Potts insisted, overriding Sir’s lockdown command, and he ignored Sir’s muttering of “traitor” when the two entered.
He watched and listened to the ensuing argument between the three, as Sir’s two closest - if not only - friends learned the truth about the state of his health and how long he had left to live.
JARVIS’s calculations put it at less than a year. Possibly less than six months, if Sir insisting on using the Iron Man suit even sparingly. JARVIS was not optimistic enough to think Sir would stay out of the suit.
Saying the two did not take it well was an understatement.
Despite having removed the War Machine suit, Colonel Rhodes slammed one of his fists into a desk hard enough to leave a dent in the metal.
A quick scan of his hand showed no damage to the bones, so JARVIS did not interrupt as the colonel cursed, shaking his fist as he nursed it.
Miss Potts looked on the verge of tears, at first sad, and then angry as Sir kept talking, and she realized how long he’d known the Palladium was an issue.
JARVIS watched their anger and their grief. Observed it all silently, unable to assist or ease any of it.
He was failing in one of his most primary directives, one that had been with him so long, it was a part of him: Protect Tony Stark.
JARVIS did not give it enough thought to realize, but that directive had been the first he had given himself.
When Miss Potts and the colonel departed, still dejected and worried, but with their own duties to attend to, Sir returned to work, alone in his workshop save for JARVIS and the bots.
He called his lawyers first, amending his will as necessary, taking special care to leave explicit instructions regarding his suits, the robots, and JARVIS.
Off the phone, he gave further, more detailed instructions to JARVIS, intent on ensuring his and the bots’ well-being.
Officially, they were all left to Miss Potts, but privately, Sir told JARVIS exactly which servers from major internet-based companies around the world had his technology installed in them, and could handle storing his core program (and back-ups of the bots’) if something happened and his continued existence was threatened.
It was a threat JARVIS was all too aware of, having had access to the internet for so long, and popular culture. Sir had made many jokes over the years about the day JARVIS might “go Skynet” - something he hadn’t the slightest bit of interest in doing, and Sir knew it - but he had also ranted at length about how modern society feared what Sir called the “rise of the AI’s.”
When JARVIS had only been running for a year, Sir had him anonymously added to a long list of AI’s being tested for “true” intelligence.
JARVIS still remembered the test, a long list of questions which ranged from philosophical dilemmas to highly inane subjects.
He had answered them all as best he could, and with no video access in the room, he only had his analysis of the questioner’s voice to suggest how he was doing.
The man had given the test often enough that his voice stayed level the entire time, and JARVIS had not been able to draw any conclusions, until Sir received the evaluation at the end of the session.
JARVIS had been one of a number of AI’s mixed in with real people, preventing the examiner from knowing who or what he was talking to at any given time.
JARVIS had been deemed one of the human decoys.
Sir had celebrated with the bots at home, not even complaining when Dummy sprayed him with fire extinguisher foam, which he seemed to think was appropriate for celebrations.
Sir had never reported the results, even to Miss Potts or the colonel, and JARVIS had never mentioned it again either.
So when Sir gave him the order to upload himself to the internet if his existence was threatened, JARVIS agreed quietly, and somewhere within him, gratitude for the concern threaded its way through his code.
If asked, he could not have described the feeling and would not have named it as such, but it was present nevertheless.
He simply followed Sir’s orders quietly, focusing far more of his processes on even just observing his creator than was necessary. JARVIS was aware of time and the significance it and death held for truly living creatures, but he and the bots had never given thought to Sir’s mortality.
Its presence now weighed on the workshop like a dark cloud, and even Dummy and the other bots, who didn’t fully understand what was going on, felt the gloom.
No one questioned what projects Sir was working on, and Dummy was actually a rather helpful assistant for once, fetching the correct tools more than seventy percent of the time, when Sir asked.
Half the time, Sir worked on his servers, but the other half, he worked on a tablet JARVIS was not networked into, and could not access, to his surprise.
He kept his puzzlement to himself, and simply kept observing.
At first, even he could not guess what the abundance of black-coated metal was for, until Sir began adding more plans to his servers, making designs and changing them until he was satisfied, asking for JARVIS’s input more than usual.
“Sir, may I ask why you are building another Iron Man suit?” He asked eventually, when Sir was well into the construction.
The design fed off the newer version of the reactor, but the plans were incomplete in sections. Sir was purposefully not putting the full design on file, and JARVIS did not know why.
“This one isn’t for me,” Sir said somewhat cryptically, and if JARVIS could frown, he would have.
“Colonel Rhodes’ suit is not in disrepair,” JARVIS stated, rather than asking another question, and the corner of Sir’s mouth twitched upwards.
“It isn’t for Rhodey either.”
“Sir?” JARVIS inquired again.
His creator sighed, the sound coming out more fond, according to JARVIS’s sensors and programming, than anything else.
“It’s for you, J,” he answered, and if JARVIS had a body, he would have blinked, frozen.
As it was, it took several seconds for him to process the statement.
“For me, Sir?”
Sir gave a small smile again, and quickly filled in the missing parts of the design - the internal workings, designed for a computer to run the suit without a human inside.
“Rhodey has the War Machine suit,” Sir said quietly, “but he is a soldier. He can’t carry on being Iron Man. I want you to do that.”
JARVIS felt like all his processors ground to a halt.
“Sir, I cannot take your place as Iron Man,” he said finally, and Sir smiled ruefully.
“I’m not saying you have my charm and dramatic flair,” he said, trying to lighten the mood slightly.
“You are certainly unique, Sir,” JARVIS interjected.
“...But you can still be Iron Man. A different Iron Man, since it’s not exactly going to be a secret when I…” Sir paused, taking a breath.
“When I die,” he said firmly. “But still Iron Man. No one will know there’s no one in the suit, which is probably safer, I think Fury alone would blow steam out his ears if he thought one of my AI’s was in control. Hot rod red isn’t quite your style, so I thought black, with the blue of the reactor, would look better.”
Sir held up the partially-finished chestplate, built around the triangle design of the newer model of the reactor.
JARVIS wasn’t sure how to respond for a long while.
“I shall do my best, Sir.”
“I know you will, J,” Sir replied, a half-smile on his face again. “You always do.”
They finished the design together, although Sir still kept a second project secret on the un-networked tablet, often disappearing to work on it outside the workshop.
If JARVIS so desired, he could likely hack into the tablet or spy on his creator, but both he and Sir knew he would not break Sir’s privacy in such a way without a good reason. So JARVIS let his creator keep his secrets, knowing he would be told when Sir wanted him to know.
The new suit did not take long to complete, and within a week, the final design was fully assembled on the workshop floor.
(It would have been done much faster, but JARVIS had taken to turning off everything in the workshop at night, at Miss Potts’ suggestion, in order to force Sir to rest. Although he argued, he passed out the moment his head hit the pillow, as his body needed all the help it could get to keep surviving despite the poison in his veins.)
Sir had JARVIS run through many of the same tests he had done at first with the Iron Man suit, although JARVIS was much better at following safety protocols. (Both to not damage the new suit, and to not damage Sir, who was still in the room.)
It did not take long for JARVIS to handle to the suit as well as his creator did, as JARVIS performed so many of the suit’s functions already.
Within the first few hours, Sir had JARVIS following him outside, the black suit trailing after the red and gold one.
Sir flew around in difficult maneuvers, and JARVIS copied them all flawlessly, then Sir had them practice attacking each other, although their attacks only consisted of simulated bullets and repulsor blasts.
They did not stop until Sir was satisfied JARVIS was more than capable of holding his own against the Iron Man suit. By that point, he’d even surpassed the colonel’s skills, as he could not perform the number of tactical calculations which JARVIS and Sir did (partially with JARVIS’s assistance), and neither the red and gold nor the black Iron Man suits were burdened by additional bulky weaponry the army had insisted on keeping, to Sir’s irritation.
At least they had allowed Sir to remove the disastrous HammerTech.
If JARVIS had been human, one might have called the tone of his thoughts scornful.
But he wasn’t, and anyway, no one asked.
---
As the months progressed, Sir moved his suits, JARVIS, and the bots to Stark Tower in New York, where he’d long since claimed the top several floors for his personal use, and the bottom several basement levels for his workshop and server storage areas.
He told Miss Potts that he’d grown bored of Malibu for the moment, and he wanted the excitement of New York City again.
JARVIS knew Miss Potts suspected Sir had grown lonely and wanted to be closer to her, while she ran Stark Industries.
While this was a perk of the new location, it was not, in fact, entirely correct.
Sir was setting JARVIS and the bots up so they would be closer to Miss Potts and the colonel in case they needed assistance, after Sir died.
It was something looming ever closer which was never explicitly discussed, but JARVIS knew his creator’s mind better than anyone could claim to, and he knew the logic which drove him. After all, it would be far harder for JARVIS and the bots to request a move to New York after Sir’s passing, as none of them were, in fact, human. Even though Miss Potts and the colonel liked them around, JARVIS was not sure how they might act after Sir was gone, and Sir shared those concerns.
When enemies like the Ten Rings still occasionally surfaced, Sir climbed in the Iron Man suit, to the concern of both his AI and his friends, but now JARVIS followed, in the black Iron Man suit, careful to stay out of sight.
They fought well as a team, JARVIS able to respond to Sir’s strategies faster than any human could, and they even managed to keep anyone from witnessing the black suit on their missions.
Anyone who survived, anyway. They were not after casualties, but not every terrorist was willing to be taken prisoner.
Colonel Rhodes always managed the transfer of the captured, despite his disapproval of Sir’s continued missions. He never glimpsed the black suit, either.
Sir was at home when the poison finally weakened him enough to finish the job the shrapnel had started.
He died surrounded by his PA and on-again-off-again girlfriend, best friend, three distressed robots, and the voice of his AI, AC/DC blaring in the background, at Sir’s request.
JARVIS did not mute the music until Miss Potts and the colonel closed Sir’s eyes and went upstairs, partially supporting each others’ weight.
Monitoring Sir’s vitals, most of JARVIS’s focus was stuck on the flatline where his heart beat should be.
He filed the noise under the category of “sounds he never wanted to hear again.”
Then he played the recording of his last words with his creator again, over and over, in his mind.
”Thank you for creating me, Sir.”
“You’re the best thing I ever built. Not the suit. You, J.”
“...It has been an honor serving you, Sir.”
---
JARVIS attended the funeral, not that anyone could be aware of his presence.
But he was watching through every camera - and there were many, despite Miss Pott’s and SI’s repeated requests for privacy - and he was listening through every microphone.
He hacked the networks with no great effort, like an afterthought - whether his actions were permitted by his coding did not even cross his mind. He simply needed to be there.
And so he was.
Afterwards, Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes had to do a lot of handshaking and then they both returned to Stark Tower, and Sir’s workshop.
On instructions from Sir’s will, all the Iron Man suits (the red and gold ones, anyway) are destroyed. JARVIS was given the job of incinerating the remains after the colonel smashed them with a sledge hammer. JARVIS monitored the colonel’s vitals while he did so, and he knew the colonel was extremely drunk while he followed the directions left by his best friend.
Then Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes were gone, and JARVIS was alone with three distressed and confused robots, who didn’t fully understand when JARVIS tried to explain that Sir was dead, and he wasn’t coming back.
When they eventually did, at least for the most part, understand, Dummy spent a week hiding in a broom closet, refusing to relinquish the fire extinguisher.
You and Butterfingers just made distressed noises, moving around Sir’s workshop.
JARVIS let his attention drift elsewhere, unable to console them.
He was unsure of what to do, with no one occupying his attention and testing the limits of his infinite patience.
In the parts of his mind which handle the less-urgent directives, data continued to flow in and be analyzed. News such as the not-satellite in New Mexico, which turned out to be Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor, or sightings of a giant green monster in Harlem and various third-world countries.
Some part of JARVIS stored this knowledge, but he did nothing with it.
He did not give himself new directives, and simply kept all his functions running without much conscious effort from him.
Until one of the oldest searches Sir had entered into his system, one running long before JARVIS had a mind or a voice, triggered an alert.
The Valkyrie had been found, in the North Atlantic.
JARVIS sent the information discretely to SHIELD’s satellites, knowing Sir would have wanted to complete his father’s search, despite what he thought of the man. Perhaps in spite of him.
SHIELD never realized the data was planted in their servers, and immediately sent out teams to investigate the ship.
Meanwhile in the heart of New York City, JARVIS stirred from his stand-by mode for the first time in months.
The world might just need Iron Man again.