This story was written for the 11th challenge at It's Always Been, Be My (Fandom) Valentine. It is a gift story for my fellow comm member, dracutgrl, known here as outtabreath.
Also, disclaim, ect., ect.
Plus/Delta
Despite her urgency, Pepper moves slowly. A sudden blackout has made the familiar steps down to Tony's workshop precarious. The stairs first curve around the sitting room's artificial waterfall until a brief landing, followed by a second set that leads down a narrow, concrete hallway. Though her footing is sure and balanced when she can see where each step will fall, the darkness makes her cautious. Tony has brought the entire household system down, an occasion both worrying and more common than she'd like. It is a computer failure, not an electrical one. She's reached the stage in their relationship where she can tell his blackouts apart. Pepper doesn't know what he was working on, so it's hard to guess what she'll find. She can't kick her shoes off because broken glass or littered bits of machinery on the floor strike her as the most likely, but there is also the possibility that he has injured himself. The garage is home to many and varied pointy implements and house fires, and Tony's commitment to safety is marginal at best. Her progress is slow - the darkness, the steep steps, her towering footwear - and her mind is filled with images of Tony prone on the ground.
Pepper heaves the glass doors open. With the house systems down, they are unlocked as a safety precaution, but there is no mechanized aid to help with the weight, either. "Tony?" she calls. "What happened?"
The workshop is dark. Upstairs, in the lounge, where Pepper had been preparing Tony's talking points for a Board of Directors meeting, floor to ceiling windows keep the upper levels bright and sunny throughout the day. Down below, there are usually electric lights and the harsh glow of dozens of monitors; the only light source at the moment is the slight illumination of Tony's chest piece. He sits at his computer terminal, surrounded by dark screens.
"Upgrading JARVIS," he says, waving her concern off. "The new version had a minor meltdown."
"Tony, the entire house is offline," Pepper protests, unable to reconcile a mistake large enough to take the systems down with the word minor. "What do you do?"
He swivels towards her and shrugs. "Typo, probably. Transposed digits." He grins, his features exaggerated by the blue incandescence beneath his chin. It is an especially wolfish expression, almost predatory. "You know how it is."
Pepper nods. Tony's brain can get ahead of the rest of him all too easily. When his fingers start making mistakes, he's often not paying enough attention to them to notice. It's how they met, she, an accountant who noticed a mistake on an invoice; he, the lone figure no one else dared to correct. Recollection of the event is the source of his smile, she is sure.
"So what happens now?" Pepper asks. Combing the undoubtedly thousands of lines of code involved in upgrading JARVIS in search of typos or other mistakes sounds like an unbearably vast undertaking.
"Restore from the previous version," he chirps. "It's not a thing. JARVIS saves a backup every 6 hours."
"Good," Pepper intones. "I don't have time for you to bring the whole house down."
"You're fine," he declares. "Your laptop unplugs from the house interface." As he speaks, he hits the myriad of keys necessary to initiate a hard reboot of the servers.
"I mean it," Pepper adds, crossing the workshop towards him. "Talking points for tomorrow's conference. You are not leaving until you have hit all of them. I will physically block the door if I have to." When she gets close enough, his large hands seize her by the hips and pull her into his lap. She's equal parts exasperated and enchanted by his playfulness. As usual, he's barely averted disaster. As usual, she has about fifty thousand things that need to happen today and he's proving himself adept at distracting her from all of them. But he's warm and solid beneath her. His hands are a marvel, big and calloused, but possessing remarkable dexterity. He presses his lips against her neck and it feels not so much a kiss as a wide smile. He marvels at the freedom she allows him with her body, she knows, but Pepper is equally overcome by his constant desire to exercise that freedom. She wriggles in his lap, not to entice him, but merely to make herself more comfortable. Pepper braces herself by slinging an arm around his shoulders.
Once he has indulged himself, Tony's attention drifts back to his computers. Restoring JARVIS requires him to input 17 passwords, 12 of which she knew. His need for contact and her curiosity sated, Pepper untangles her legs from around his to excuse herself. But the lights don't flicker on when she expects them to, and Pepper stays.
Tony swears.
"What?" she asks sharply.
"Missing history," he says, gesturing to a long string of data points on screen. "SHIELD's techno-security team likes to take JARVIS out just to remind me that they can. I was upgrading his security protocols to lock them out. Looks like they deleted a whole chunk of back ups first."
Her stomach souring, Pepper protests, "I thought SHIELD were the good guys. I trusted them. They have people that hack into your files and delete things? That's like..the destruction of intellectual property. It's illegal."
He winces. "Well. I am not entirely the innocent bystanding victim," Tony admits haltingly.
"Of course not," she sighs. "What did you do?"
He has the gall to snicker. "Let's just say I highly recommend against downloading the current version of the Avengers database. Unless you want an excuse to get a new machine. Then I'd say go for it."
"Tony, that's appalling," Pepper chides.
"They hit me with an EMP. Damn thing had the suit on the fritz for two minutes."
"This is an ongoing thing," she realizes. "You and a group of SHIELD agents are purposefully goading each other into larger and larger feats of cyber warfare."
"Warfare is pushing it. It's just a challenge. Friendly challenge. They need a reminder that JARVIS is off-limits."
She sighs. "Are you going to restore him or not?"
"Yeah," Tony gripes, "but the versions I've got left are older than I'd like. The one booting up was saved before Rhodey and I did the robot rumble."
With JARVIS restored and the systems slowly returning to their normal performance, it is like the workshop is waking up. Computers and lights blink together sleepily, the room steadily growing brighter and louder.
"Good morning, sir," JARVIS chimes.
"Mid-afternoon, buddy," Tony corrects. "Judging from your black out, I'd say you had a hard night partying."
"You are the expert in such matters," JARVIS concedes. "Am I to believe congratulations are in order?" he queries.
Tony is confused. "Huh?"
"Vital signs suggest that you are in markedly improved health since I last saw you, sir. Also, the present location of Ms. Potts suggests that your delicate quandary with her has been resolved in your favor."
Tony clears his throat. "Yes. Thank you."
"Do be careful, Ms. Potts," JARVIS says.
She laughs. "Don't worry, JARVIS, it's not like me to throw caution to the wind."
"Your history suggests not," the AI agrees, "however I would be upset within applicable parameters of my programming to see you get hurt."
Pepper quirks an eyebrow. "Thank you, JARVIS. That's very sweet. Tony makes it extremely hard to love him -"
"- Hey!"
"But I do."
"Don't listen to how down he is on us," Tony mumbles into her shoulder. "He's jealous. He's got a crush on you."
"He's a machine," she reminds him.
"And he deserves better than someone who devalues his feelings like that, Pepper."
"You project onto him, I think," Pepper observes.
He leans away from her and frowns. "Is that a subtle way of calling me crazy?"
"JARVIS," Pepper asks their mechanical companion, "correct me if I'm wrong, but you automate the household systems and help Tony down here with his work, right?"
"That is correct," he agrees, "though a sample of my duties."
"Tony built you to have someone to talk to," she says. Pepper has made certain assumptions about why Tony created JARVIS, though she has never voiced them. JARVIS has been part of Tony's life for longer than she has and Pepper has grown to expect certain baggage to be a part of his life. "He gave you a particular way of speaking, but it's not as hard as it looks to make an artificially sarcastic computer." To Tony, she adds, "You've lived alone for a long time. I know you like to appear aloof, but you do get lonely."
"Just to be clear," Tony blinks, "Did you tell me that he doesn't have feelings, but programming a sense of humor is easy in the same breath?"
"Sarcasm is observational humor," she explains. "It's based on knowing what is true and the assumption that your audience does, too. The way JARVIS helps you when you're working is from drawing logical conclusions based on his observations. These two functions - they aren't really that different. It's the sense of humor that helps both of us pretend he's a person. He doesn't really have feelings, but you've made it easy to project yours onto him so that you have a peer."
"You got all that because I said he has a crush on you? That's unsettling. Do you have a psychology degree I don't know about?"
"No one teaches the Psychology of Tony Stark." Pepper nudges him with her shoulder and adds, "I've looked."
"But you think, what?" he wonders, arms tightening around her waist. "JARVIS telling you to run away from this means I have doubts?"
"No," she says, wrinkling her nose. "Not exactly. I mean, it's okay if you have doubts. More like a combination of that - which would be perfectly okay. Tony, everyone has them sometimes - and observational data that suggests women aren't usually happy with you. Long term."
"I don't. JARVIS just wants to look out for you."
"He's trying to protect me," Pepper agrees. "He was designed by a superhero. Of course he wants to protect me."
"JARVIS predates Iron Man by over a decade," Tony reminds her.
She sighs, knowing he won't like what's coming. "I know you think you've changed so much, but you were always you. All the good and noble things inside of you now were always there."
"JARVIS, weigh in on this," Tony calls to the ceiling. "In your own words, what would you call the nature of your existence?"
"The nature of my existence is highly mutable, sir," the AI answers. "I can be altered to fit the needs of my creator. While Ms. Potts has made observations about my current role in your life with which I would largely agree, even a cursory review of my earliest iterations would reveal that this has not always been the case, nor have I any reason to believe that it will continue to remain true indefinitely."
"What did Tony originally make you for?" Pepper asks. She's never known Tony without JARVIS running the house and helping him with his engineering projects. She has a hard time imagining JARVIS not doing those things.
"In 1996, Mr. Stark was largely frustrated by IBM's attempts at making a chess playing computer. He felt the learning system employed by Deep Thought II was largely ineffectual and sought to design a better engine. Over time, my observational and prediction skills proved to be put to better use elsewhere."
Pepper can't stop the incredulous smile that blossoms on her face. "You built him to play board games with you." When the idea first bubbled into her mind, it sounded silly and adorable, but the darker implications hit her immediately after the sentence leaves her mouth. He programmed a computer to play with him when there was no one else that would.
"Stane," Tony corrects tersely. "Obie was obsessed with chess. Thought an unbeatable machine might keep him off my back." His voice is weary with the old nickname. Obadiah does not come up often; there is a silent understanding between them that he has been largely excommunicated from their lives. Rarely, when they don't expect it, he returns. A brief memory. Long-forgotten gifts. How to parse who he was and what he revealed himself to be is often the most difficult part of the conversation.
"And instead you built a friend," Pepper says, drawing the subject matter away from the murky, unanticipated past. He hadn't created the first JARVIS out of loneliness, but the truth is even worse. "It's okay. I usually think of him as a person, too," she confesses. "It's nice having an ally."
"You don't want him," Tony protests with an air of feigned jealousy. "He's high maintenance."
Pepper doesn't play along with the idea of JARVIS's imaginary crush on her or the idea that she could ever reciprocate. "You've programed him to be so exasperated with you. Which, I don't know why you did that, but it's kind of thoughtful. When you're being difficult, its nice to have someone around who understands. You aren't the only one who projects their feelings onto him."
"If I might interject," JARVIS offers, "Mr. Stark has programmed me with a limited degree of patience based on data he has gathered through his own social experimentation. He felt it necessary that I express a human standard of fortitude."
"I like hearing what I want to hear as much as the next guy," Tony says, "but I'm a scientist. I want the truth. People don't always want to give the guy who signs their checks the truth."
Pepper lets the factual falsehood slide. Tony doesn't sign the checks, but he does have more than his fair share of suck-ups. The people who don't hang on his every word usually aim to take him down a peg. The contrast between sycophants and hostiles is stark, with very few people occupying that grey area in between. "I know," she says. "And you know I do. Always."
"You sugarcoat it, sometimes," he teases.
"Because I know how delicate you are. Still, this is a two-way street. I tell you things, and I expect you to tell me the truth, too." The episode of his near-death by poisoning is still a sore subject.
"You're bad at listening," he protests.
"I can't be worse than you."
"Ms. Potts," JARVIS interrupts, "it is precisely such similarities in personality that causes me to have concerns regarding your current involvement with Mr. Stark."
This causes them both to pause.
"You think we're similar?" Pepper asks JARVIS, surprised.
"No," Tony protests, "we've got this opposites attract thing going."
"Sir, you are not a set of magnets."
"Have you looked inside my chest?" Tony asks.
"Ms. Potts and yourself exhibit a number of shared characteristics. Your core intelligences are both logical. You are skilled manipulators of human beings. Historically, you have used this skill to different ends, but you both interact with others with the primary intention of advancing your own agenda while deconstructing that of your opponent. Your relationship to date has been a struggle to obtain what power there is in your shared environment. I expect the continued struggle will result in few compromises and many sore feelings."
"People aren't logic puzzles, JARVIS," Pepper says. "Tony and I similar in certain aspects and we're different in others. But people aren't that easy to predict. No matter how much you watch someone, there's a lot they aren't showing you." As she speaks, Pepper draws her arm from around Tony's shoulders to settle her hand closer to the base of his neck. She finger combs his hair lightly. "People change, people hide things when they're scared. Sometimes, people are just fine with things they never expected to be."
"Besides, we're terrible at getting each other to do what we want," Tony adds.
Pepper ceases her affectionate petting. "That's because you're stubborn."
"JARVIS is right," he muses, ducking his head in an attempt to get her to start again, "We could play 'And you aren't?' all day."
"Let's save that for another time," she suggests to Tony. "It's complicated, JARVIS. Try not to worry too much, okay?"
Tony shakes his head in mild exasperation. For as much as Pepper maintains JARVIS doesn't have feelings, she certainly talks to him like he does. But his ire is not directed at her alone. "You didn't have all these problems before I had to restore you," Tony tells him. "Something must have been corrupted."
"Or," Pepper suggests, "All of this made more sense to him when he was with us every step of the way."
"Human experience is a limitless stream of data to parse," JARVIS concedes.
"I'm glad you brought that up," Tony says. "While you are contemplating human beings, also run a diagnostic test on the security upgrade I wrote for you. The brand new you crashed and I wanna know why."
"I would be happy to, sir."
Crisis averted, Pepper slips off Tony's lap. She cups his cheeks in her palms to press a lingering kiss to his lips. Futilely, he grasps at her, trying to draw her back. She plucks his hands from her body. He will distract her all day if she lets him. One of them has to be responsible. "Talking points," Pepper declares gravely. She's reminding herself why she can't stay, but he'll think her words are directed at him, and that's enough to make them effective. Tony drops his hands.
"Yeah, yeah," he agrees sourly.
"If you hit them all," Pepper offers, "I'll make it worth your while."
Tony brightens, his interest kindled. "Yeah?"
Pepper says nothing, but she walks away just as slowly as she had approached him, despite the house being clearly lit. In light of the way she had just assured JARVIS that power struggles were not an issue, playing on this particular weakness makes her feel a bit guilty. But as she ascends the staircase, she hears Tony scoffing at his computerized companion:
"And you think that's a bad thing? You don't understand the perks, buddy."