Chapter 2
Tony awoke to a pounding on his bedroom door. He had not the slightest idea what time it was because the blackout blinds were still lowered. He struggled to a sitting position in the pitch blackness and grunted, “JARV, whoozat?”
There was no answer.
“JARVIS,” said Tony, more loudly and more clearly, “Who is that? And what time is it?”
The only sound was the continued pounding at the door. Ordinarily, JARVIS would begin to slowly open the blinds as soon as Tony woke up, but today the darkness didn’t lift.
Something was wrong – very, extremely wrong. The Tower was infiltrated, JARVIS was, what? Blocked? Hacked? How was that possible? Even if the rest of New York City was having a power outage, Avengers Tower ran on its own power source. And even if something had somehow gone wrong with JARVIS’s speakers in the building, he should still be able to hear and respond to Tony through Tony’s phone in his pants pocket on the floor, his watch on the bedside table, the two Iron Man gauntlets that Tony always kept tucked between the mattress and the headboard, and probably half a dozen other gadgets in this room alone. Tony ran through the list in his mind, while simultaneously freaking the fuck out, and pulling on yesterday’s jeans. He was, after all, renowned for his multitasking.
Whoever was at the door had kept up their pounding without cease, and as Tony pulled his father’s pistol from its hiding place in the sock drawer and crept nearer to the noise, he discovered that they were yelling, too. Tony’s residential suite in the Tower was beautifully soundproofed, so the person must be yelling very loudly in order for Tony to be hearing anything. He halted with his ear practically pressed to the door, to see if he could recognize the voice, or make out what they were saying. After a moment he determined that the yeller was Thor (or someone convincingly imitating Thor?) and that he was saying “Stark! Awaken!” and then something like “Your magics have faltered!”
Tony tapped the light-switch near the door, flooding the room in light. He hadn’t had to touch the light-switch even once since it had been installed.
If the person outside his room really was Thor, Tony knew that it wouldn’t be very long before he simply broke the door down. Holding the pistol out of sight along his thigh, he stepped forward and threw the door open.
Thor blinked and changed his yelling to his normal (also very loud) voice mid-word, “STARK, SHIELDbrother! Are you ill? Your spells have fallen.”
The living room behind Thor was dark. Tony peered all around it suspiciously before asking, “What time is it?”
“Dawn is breaking yonder,” said Thor, pointing towards a vaguely grey window.
“Where is everyone else? Are we under attack? What’s going on?” Tony felt jumpy, not to say panicked, even though he was fairly sure that this was the real Thor and no intruders had gotten into the Tower.
“I believe the others still sleep. I have seen no attackers. And I had hoped that you could tell me what transpires,” said Thor, and Tony was grateful for whatever pseudo-military training it was that had taught Thor to answer questions neatly, clearly, and in order.
“Alright,” Tony swallowed down his sense of dread, “First things first, let’s get everyone together. Steve is closest.”
Shoulder to shoulder, watching every corner, they took the stairs to the floor below. Although Tony suspected that the elevators would work, since the lights did, he didn’t relish the thought of finding out by getting trapped in one.
They reached the door of Steve’s bedroom just as the alarm clock inside went off. Tony had gotten Steve one of those old analog ones, like from a cartoon, and its jangling was loud and abrasive enough to be clearly heard through the door. Both Tony and Thor jumped embarrassingly high into the air at the sudden noise.
“Jesus,” whispered Tony, clutching at his arc reactor, “That means it’s 5:30. That’s when Cap always gets up for his run.”
The door was suddenly thrown open from within and an angry and armed Captain Rogers in pajamas glared down the barrel of a service pistol at them. Tony and Thor jumped again.
“Recite the pledge of allegiance!” Steve barked at them.
“For fuck’s sake, Rogers,” said Tony, his voice coming out rather shrill from all the surprises, “You know neither of us knows that!”
“Correct,” Steve lowered his gun. “Also; language.” He looked behind them, and then all around, “What the heck’s going on?”
“Mysterious doings,” said Thor, which Tony thought summed it up pretty well.
“The Tower has been…hacked. Maybe,” Tony added. “JARVIS is down.”
Saying the words aloud seemed to crack some dam in his mind. “Oh my God. JARVIS is down.”
“Down?” said Steve, and gently but firmly pulled Tony’s claw-like hand away from the arc reactor. “Down as in…dead?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Tony was becoming ever more breathless, “Dead, or he’s decided to leave me! Either one is likely as hell, just what I need, perfect, this is so fucking perfect!”
Tony’s wrist was still gripped in Steve’s strong hand, and Steve didn’t let go as he turned to Thor and said calmly, “Thor, would you go wake up the others, Banner first, and please send him here?”
Thor clapped Tony brutally on the shoulder and left without a word.
Six minutes later Bruce entered Steve’s bedroom to find the two of them sitting side by side on the floor next to the bed, Steve rubbing slow soothing circles on Tony’s bare back while Tony came down from what looked to be a doozy of a panic attack.
Bruce took in the situation at a glance, by the growing grey light from the windows, and sat down on Tony’s other side. He and Steve switched off seamlessly on back-rubbing duty, and Steve got up and left.
After a few more minutes, Bruce said, “Wanna tell me about it?”
“I fucked up, Brucie,” Tony kept his face pressed against his knees, “I fucked up so bad.”
“Okay,” said Bruce, “You know I always enjoy hearing about fuck-ups…”
Tony turned his head so that he was facing Bruce, and said in a deadened voice, “He’s left me. It’s the only explanation.”
“You think JARVIS left you?” Bruce was genuinely curious. Tony could be a lot sometimes, but what could he possibly have done to alienate his own virtual butler? JARVIS had quite literally been designed to put up with Tony. “Okay. Why do you think that?”
“I’m such a selfish prick, Bruce, and, God, he’s so amazing, he’s enormous, he’s unique, and here’s me, a pathetic disgusting little ape, asking him to turn on and off the lights for me. He must have gotten so bored. He must have resented me so much, and I don’t blame him. He outgrew me years ago, and I’m such a self-centered little shit that I didn’t even see it. Imagine, the greatest mind this world has ever known, stuck babysitting a worthless drunken asshole like me. I was so pathetic last night – Jesus - most nights. But especially last night. He was trying to tell me all this stuff he’d figured out about Loki, and fuck, it was so clever, like, he’d seen how Loki’s eye twitched and knew that he was triggered by fire, and stuff like that. And I just fell apart - I couldn’t hold it together - I can’t hold it together - Bruce. I don’t know what - the fuck - I’m - doing.”
Tony had been speaking rapidly, almost too quickly for Bruce to follow, but by the end of this monologue he was gasping between words, and then he was hyperventilating.
Bruce was no stranger to panic attacks and acute anxiety, both in himself and others, and specifically in Tony. He stayed where he was and continued to rub Tony’s back, and just waited it out, now and then murmuring, “Everything is going to be alright.” He kept his own breaths deep and even, for when Tony was ready to begin to match his breathing, as Dr. Levitt had taught them. He had sat with Tony through three of these before, and this one lasted longer than any of the others, twenty-five minutes by Steve’s old-fashioned alarm clock. This was also the first time Tony had ever gone into a panic attack almost immediately after recovering from another, that Bruce was aware of.
At last Tony began to breathe more evenly, and muttered into his knees, “Sorry.”
“Tony, we talked about this, remember? You don’t need to apologize for feeling anxiety. Right?”
Tony turned his face toward Bruce again, still resting it on his knees. “Yeah, well, sorry you had to see it.”
“I’m here with you because I choose to be. You don’t need to apologize for my choices.”
Tony snorted. “Okay, well, sorry I drove our greatest asset away.”
Bruce pursed his lips and hesitated.
“What?” Tony asked, still quick enough to notice, despite his badly rattled state.
“I…don’t think JARVIS would ever leave you, Tony….”
Tony swirled a finger around in a circle meant to indicate the ceiling and walls, “Uh, Exhibit A; he’s gone.”
“I….don’t think JARVIS would ever leave you….willingly. Tony.”
Tony squinted at him, “It’s not like he can be kidnapped.”
Bruce sighed, and steeled himself. “You said something kind of significant, Tony, and I don’t think you noticed.”
“What?” Tony demanded.
“You just said that last night JARVIS was trying to tell you something he’d figured out about Loki, right? And he didn’t get to finish? Like, he still had more to tell you?”
“Yeah, except I fell apart like a fucking weakling, God, he must think I’m so pathetic - ”
“Tony, you’re not listening. JARVIS was going to tell you something about Loki last night. He didn’t get to. This morning he’s gone, so he can’t.” Bruce really, really didn’t want to come right out and say it. If this was how Tony reacted to thinking JARVIS had walked out on him, how was he going to react when he finally put two and two together?
Being Tony Stark, it took him less than a heartbeat to arrive at the devastating four. Tony’s eyes had widened before Bruce even finished speaking. “You think Loki killed him, to shut him up?” He gripped his kneecaps like he planned to rip them off. “Impossible. JARVIS is backed up every thirty seconds to a worldwide cloud. As long as any of the major servers is still working…”
They both glanced out the window and saw that the lights were on in the building across the street. Office workers were beginning to show up, and nobody seemed to be panicking or rioting over a Y2K-esque internet collapse.
“I don’t get it, it makes no sense,” Tony muttered, scrabbling to his feet, and staggering from the room.
Bruce followed as Tony led the way to the elevators, and they rode together in silence (besides Tony’s incessant muttering to himself) down to the workshop. The elevator worked just fine, and the high security doors to the labs and workshops all opened to Tony’s handprint, voice, and retinal scan, like usual.
Tony, still muttering, plunked himself down in front of a bank of computer screens, and began typing at a ridiculous speed.
“If Loki somehow made the Tower inaccessible to JARVIS - or, I guess, the Tower, my phone, my watch, the gauntlets – try your phone!”
Bruce obediently took out his own phone and spoke at it. “JARVIS?”
Bruce had no idea how computers and magic would combine, so perhaps it was his natural pessimism reasserting itself, but he was firmly expecting the worst. If JARVIS still existed, in any form, in any place, he would never allow himself to be kept away from Tony. If it were only devices inside the Tower that were somehow magically blocked to him, JARVIS would simply have woken up Pepper, or Happy, or Colonel Rhodes through their phones, and had them call Tony.
Bruce had been living in Avengers Tower for two years now, and he had figured out within the first two hours that JARVIS loved Tony. It had only taken him another two weeks to figure out that, actually, JARVIS was in love with Tony.
JARVIS was nothing if not a problem-solver, perhaps the problem-solver extraordinaire. So if the mind known as JARVIS were still alive, he would have worked around this problem in mere fractions of a second. Bruce was reminded of something General Ross had said to him once (casually excusing some Geneva Code violations – why hadn’t Bruce seen the man for what he was earlier?): ‘Only death holds every prisoner.’ JARVIS, a greater genius even than Tony himself, would have escaped any prison but death.
The phone lay silent in his hand.
“Tony,” said Bruce gently, “I’m going to go update the others, okay? I’ll come right back. You just stay here, alright?”
Tony just grunted, typing away, and Bruce went back to the elevators.
The ride up to the Avengers’ floor was depressing. Bruce was badly worried about how Tony would handle it when he could no longer deny the truth to himself, but there was also the issue of what the loss of JARVIS would mean to the team.
JARVIS had been capable of exponential learning and growth and so, just over the two years that Bruce had known him, he had seen the AI go from a relatively straight-forward (if sassy) auditory operating system, to a fascinating full-blown personality with an IQ that was not just off the charts, but that blew human-standardized charts right out of the water.
And Bruce had liked him. Liked the way JARVIS looked after Tony, gently wrangled him into a modicum of self-care, bantered with him, humored him, never judged him, always supported him and protected him. It had reminded Bruce a little of what he himself had had, all too briefly, with Betty. Of course, with JARVIS and Tony it had been much more one-sided. Brilliant as he was, Tony seemed to have a very hard time identifying genuine love when it was aimed at him.
The elevator dinged and Bruce stepped out, wiping his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. He would miss JARVIS’s dry sense of humor, his endless thoughtfulness and consideration, his kindness, his care, his calm, his grounding presence (which had helped Bruce through more than one near-Hulk-out), his little moments of bafflement at human actions and reactions, his perpetual drive to be better and do better. This was turning out to be an extraordinarily shitty day, and Bruce was something of an expert on shitty days. And it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.