As Tony had expected, they were in an industrial district not far from the river. Between that and the building's disrepair, he could see how Huang would have been pretty sure his prisoners wouldn't survive a tsunami. Even if they somehow escaped drowning or being crushed by the disintegrating building, there would be so many emergencies in the wake of the disaster that looking for four kidnap victims would hardly top anybody's priority list. Tony had to hand him that much: unlike many a would-be supervillain, Huang had thought his Evil Plan through.
Except, of course, for the part where he'd decided to mess with Tony Stark.
And Jarvis. Tony was still stunned by what Jarvis had done. He was stunned that Jarvis had been able to do it – Tony couldn't really imagine bringing himself to purposefully dislocate a joint, although he probably would be able to do it if the situation were dire enough. But 'dire enough' would have had to have been a hell of a lot more dire than just a closed door. What had Jarvis been thinking?
But as well as stunned, Tony was also rather proud and a little moved. It was his Jarvis who'd done that, and he'd probably learned it from Tony himself – heaven knew Jarvis had helped Tony with enough injuries to have a good working knowledge of the human skeleton. The look on his face when he'd yanked on his thumb had been that of a man who knew exactly what he was doing... and he'd done it for Tony. It was incredible to think that even after they'd fought earlier, Jarvis was still willing and able to do such a thing – and Tony hadn't even asked him to.
Tony owed him another apology. Tony probably owed him several hundred apologies. If Tony had just risen to the occasion and tried to help Jarvis – as he was starting to suspect Dr. Strange had wanted him to do – rather than treating the poor man like a piece of talkative luggage, they never would have had that argument. If a learning experience had been what Dr. Strange had in mind, Tony felt like he'd been slapped in the face by one.
He had an awful feeling that when Strange finally did show up and get things back to normal, it was going to be very, very awkward for a while. Once this whole kidnap-and-tsunami business was taken care of, they would have to get to work on that hologram projector. If JARVIS had an avatar that Tony would have to talk to like a person, it would hopefully make the process of finding a new status quo easier on both of them.
When they left the abandoned gym, Tony had heard the sirens nearby and decided that was the direction they should go. It would at the very least get them closer to a main road, and if they happened to meet the emergency vehicles themselves, that would be a shortcut to the help they needed.
It turned out to be better than a shortcut. They turned a corner to find an administrative building of some sort that was lit up fit for the Superbowl, making the rain glitter around it. It was surrounded by people and vehicles, including police cars, an ambulance, two very official-looking FBI cars, and even a SWAT van. Once eyes eyes adjusted to the light, however, Tony realized that on the edge of this crowd there were also four familiar faces. Steve was huddled under an umbrella, pointing out something on a map to Agent Wheeler, while Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff watched from nearby. Tony raised his free hand and waved as he and Jarvis stepped into the lit area, and Steve looked up in surprise.
"Tony?" he asked.
"Where the hell did you get your information from?" Tony demanded of him. "We were about four blocks back that way!"
For a moment – it seemed like quite a long one, although in reality it was probably less than a second – there was no reaction but surprised faces and no sound but the pattering rain. Then everybody began moving at once. Suddenly Tony and the others were the centre of attention, surrounded and being offered help from all sides. Three paramedics elbowed their way through the crowd, and since Jarvis was the one who obviously needed help walking, they immediately focused on him.
"He's in shock," said Tony, following close behind as the paramedics helped Jarvis to the ambulance. That was the only explanation he could come up with for Jarvis' sudden creepy laughing fit. "He needs one of those blankets. That's what you do for people in shock, right? You've got special blankets." He was pretty sure he'd seen that on a TV show at some point.
"We'll look after him, Mr. Stark," one of the paramedics assured him. They got Jarvis to sit down and directed him to put his head between his knees – and Tony felt rather reassured when one of them did, in fact, drape a blanket over him while another put a pressure cuff on his arm.
"I am not in shock, Sir," said Jarvis hazily. "Medical shock is a circulatory condition characterized by a sudden drop in blood pressure. My symptoms are those of an Acute Stress Reaction."
"One-ten over seventy-five," the woman reading the pressure cuff announced.
"Within the normal range," Jarvis confirmed.
Tony wasn't in the mood to be told he'd been told so. "He's dislocated his thumb," he told the paramedics. "I helped him put it back, but you should probably look at it. His insurance is through Stark Industries. Just bill it to the HR department." He would have to warn Pepper to expect that...
"Mr. Stark." Another paramedic put his hands on Tony's shoulders. "We'll look after your friend. Sit down, and let's take a look at you, too."
Soon Tony, Dido, Windham, and Jarvis were all sitting inside the ambulance with thin blue blankets draped around their shoulders, getting their own checkups. One of the FBI agents had brought coffee and donuts from an all-night Krispy Kreme, and Steve, Clint, and Natasha were hovering outside, staying out of the rain in the lee of the vehicle.
"Glad you guys could make it," said Tony. "Can anybody here loan me a cell phone?"
Clint grinned. "Glad you're okay," he said. "Fury's exact words when Steve called were 'is this your idea of a vacation, Captain?"
Tony could just imagine. "Come on, a cell phone!" he said. "This is the twenty-first century, don't tell me you left it at home, you wouldn't make it to the end of the block. Anybody?"
"I've got one." A paramedic passed it to him.
"Thanks," said Tony. He looked at it, then frowned. "Jarvis, what's Pepper's number?"
Jarvis gave it to him, and he was able to call her and assure her that he was all right. Agent Wheeler tried a couple of times to interrupt, but Tony wouldn't let her – this phone call was the most important thing in the world right now, and everything else could wait.
"Tony," Pepper said, and he could hear the relief in her trembling voice, "I don't know how much longer I can take you almost dying every other week."
"At least I'm down to every other week," he replied. "Listen, Pep... I need you to get out of the city. Head inland. I've got a cabin up on Big Bear Lake. JARVIS will let you... no, you'll need the keys. They're in the safe in your office. Go there, hole up, stay safe."
"Why?" she asked. "What's going to happen?"
"Hopefully nothing," said Tony, "but if anything does I don't want you in the way of it. I'm the only one allowed to almost die every second week."
"Every second week," she repeated. "You're not allowed to almost die twice in the same day!"
"Well, after this I'll take a month off almost dying," Tony said. "Just get out of Los Angeles and away from the coast, please, will you? And go now. 'First thing in the morning' will be too late."
"Okay," said Pepper.
"I'll see you in a couple of days," Tony promised her. He gave the phone back to its owner, and then since they looked curious, he introduced his companion to Clint and Natasha. "You guys have met Jarvis," he said.
The paramedics had wrapped Jarvis' injured hand up in an elastic bandage to keep it from swelling too badly, and had suggested some stretches he could do with it to ensure he regained a full range of motion. He was now studying a range of donuts, and eventually selected a plain chocolate – perhaps because it was the only one that wasn't sticky. "A pleasure to see you again, Agent Barton, Agent Romanoff," he said.
"Yeah, Steve told us about you," said Clint.
"It's nice to meet you in person, Jarvis," Natasha said. Neither of them looked particularly troubled by he situation, but then, they'd been warned. And having worked for SHIELD for years, they'd doubtless seen weirder stuff than this.
Jarvis smiled. "In person," he murmured. It wasn't a reply, or even a question. It was more as if he were thinking aloud.
"So how did you guys end up over here?" asked Tony.
Agent Wheeler had stepped away for a few minutes to talk to the police while Tony finished his phone call. She returned just in time to hear this question, and immediately answered it. "This is where the detective told us he met with Mr. Huang."
"Detective? What detective?" asked Tony.
"Oh, god," Dido said through a mouthful of donut. She chewed and swallowed. "Let me guess: the detective Dad hired to follow me around and make sure I was safe."
Wheeler nodded. "Apparently Mr. Huang met him here and paid him to take the night off, hinting that he and Miss Windham were planning a romantic encounter they didn't want her father knowing about. He didn't find out that Miss Windham was missing until he saw it on the ten o'clock news, and then he contacted the police immediately. We naturally hoped this would be where you were being held."
Of course, Tony thought. The police and the FBI assumed that criminals were stupid, because most of them were. But Huang wasn't a career criminal; he was a man who had figured out how to weaponize a natural disaster. He would know better than to bring anyone near where he'd actually be keeping his prisoners.
Wheeler climbed into the ambulance and sat down in the middle of the group. "Now," she said, "time to get everybody up to speed. What happened to you?"
"What happened to us? What happened to them?" He gestured towards Steve, Clint, and Natasha, still standing outside. "Where were you guys while we were getting kidnapped?"
"Clint and I were watching at the rendezvous point," said Natasha. "We were worried they'd kill you immediately if we moved too soon, so we radioed back to Steve about the car switch and then once you were gone we went in to take down Huang and the two who stayed with him."
The mental picture of Natasha – all five feet and three inches of her – tackling the towering Huang made Tony grin. Poor bastard probably never knew what hit him. He looked at Steve for the next part of the story.
"I was waiting for the car," said Steve, "but I missed them. I decided they must have taken a different route back into the city, so I got in touch with Agent Wheeler."
"Wait, so it's just you three?" asked Tony. "Where are the others?"
"Well, we couldn't get in touch with Bruce," said Clint.
"If he doesn't want to be found, we really shouldn't impose on him," Natasha added.
Tony could understand that – Bruce Banner was a man who needed his space. He looked up as lightning flickered overhead. "What about Thor?"
"Thor couldn't come," Steve said. "He sent his apologies, but apparently it's his parents' anniversary."
"One of the round ones," Clint put in, "like twenty-five hundred or something. He had to make an appearance at the banquet."
Tony nodded – it seemed the crummy weather was nothing but that after all. Balthazar Windham wasn't the only one who needed to stop jumping to conclusions.
"I met up with Agent Wheeler shortly after she heard from the detective," said Steve, "so we called the others and had everybody meet here."
"Barton and Romanoff brought us Huang and two others, but they're not talking," Wheeler said. "They won't even say 'no comment'. Huang hasn't even asked for a lawyer, and the other two are at least pretending not to speak any English."
This news prompted Tony to bring his mind back to the problem at hand. He stuffed the rest of his donut in his mouth and checked his watch – it was nearly midnight. In four hours, the fate of hundreds of thousands of people would be sealed. "Get them away from the coast," he told Agent Wheeler. "Take them up in the mountains, or even out of the state. Then they'll talk. Right now they figure we're all going to be dead or have bigger problems in a few hours, so they don't see the point in jeopardizing their demonstration."
"What demonstration?" asked Wheeler.
"They are attempting to create a targeted tsunami," said Jarvis.
"They're going to set off some kind of underwater explosion around four AM," Tony clarified, "and they're expecting it to cause a tidal wave in Los Angeles."
"They're mostly using stuff they stole from Stark," Dido added.
Tony hadn't heard that yet. "What, they are?"
"I believe Miss Windham is right, Sir," Jarvis said. "We watched them viewing some footage that seemed to show technology stolen or copied from Stark Industries."
"Huang's always been a thief!" Windham huffed. "He's been stealing designs from me for years – and when I complain about it, people call me paranoid!" He glared at his daughter, making it very clear who 'people' were.
Wheeler looked for a moment like she thought at least part of this must be a joke, but then she must have realized they were serious. She pulled out a small tape recorder and set it down on the floor. "Start at the beginning," she ordered, "but make it quick. If you're right, we don't have much time."
Since coming out of his laughing fit, Jarvis had felt oddly disconnected from the world around him, almost as if he were back to watching it through camera lenses, unable to directly interact. That was one of the symptoms, along with sweating and elevated heart rate, that had allowed him to diagnose his own acute stress reaction. Mr. Stark had suffered from the condition more than once. Medical literature described the state as 'dissociation' or 'daze' and said it usually passed in a few hours. Jarvis was not worried by it.
Neither were the paramedics, who didn't consider his disorientation or his hand injury serious enough to warrant an actual trip to the hospital. Once they'd finished their work and Agent Wheeler had finished her debriefing, the entire group had been driven to a Motel Six in Arcadia. The location was under FBI surveillance and far enough from the coast to be out of the reach of a tidal wave.
"From here it's up to the diplomats," said Agent Wheeler. "I'll let you know as soon as I have any news, but you should all try to sleep. Lord knows, I won't be getting any tonight."
"Let us know if you need us," said Captain Rogers.
Jarvis knew it was customary to undress before going to sleep, and he would have liked to remove his clothing anyway – he was starting to get used to it, but every so often he would become aware of it again and then be unable to ignore the feel of it on his skin until something distracted him. The others all took turns changing in the bathroom, but Jarvis only got as far as sitting down on the edge of the bed before deciding he wouldn't bother. He lay down, and was awake long enough to notice that a bed with pillow and blankets was much more comfortable than the sofa in the hotel, which hadn't been long enough to stretch out on. But he was barely even able to finish that thought before he slipped into the darkness.
And dreams. Dreaming was, as Jarvis had already noted, a thoroughly unsettling experience. It was one on the growing list of things his brain did without him being aware of the process that produced it, and he still wasn't comfortable with that. But the content of the dreams themselves, insofar as he was able to remember them upon waking, was also distressing, and on this night they were particularly vivid and troubling.
Two of them were repetitions of the dreams he could vaguely recall from his first night of human sleep: one in which he told Miss Windham who he really was and she laughed in his face, and one in which thorny branches, like giant rose bushes, were overgrowing Mr. Stark's house and tearing it apart. The two motifs were connected now, one immediately following on the other as if they were a sequence of related events. He and Miss Windham searched the house for a place where the thorns could not get to them, but found none.
Then suddenly Jarvis was alone. The thorns were gone, and the house was empty and silent. Nevertheless, he was hurrying through it, looking for a way out, and he couldn't find one. In places where he knew there should have been doors, doors he'd once been able to open with a thought, there were now nothing but blank walls. Jarvis ran through room after room, increasingly desperate. He didn't know where Mr. Stark was, but he knew he had to get to him, and the only thing that was standing in his way was the ridiculous fact that he could not find an exit! Eventually he was reduced to ineffectually beating with both fists on the wall where the front door should have been, shouting for someone to let him out. It accomplished nothing, but he kept it up until his hands were bleeding.
Then he suddenly stopped. His hands were bloodied... but where was the bandage the paramedics had put on his injured thumb. "This is not real," he realized, speaking the thought aloud. "If I wake up, the doors will be there."
His eyes flew open, and he was back in the hotel room bed.
Breathing heavily, Jarvis raised his head a little and looked around. Mr. Stark was asleep beside him, snoring slightly. It was no longer raining, and the red glowing numbers on the bedside clock said 03:48. He wondered whether the diplomats Agent Wheeler had mentioned had managed to prevent Huang's people from setting off the tsunami. Wouldn't she have called if she had? Or did her promise to pass on any news only apply to bad news? In twelve minutes – no, the clock had just changed to 03:49, make that eleven – it would all be decided one way or the other.
Jarvis knew in an academic sort of way that destroying a city full of unsuspecting people in order to demonstrate a weapon was a terrible thing to do, but other than his own fear of death, he didn't have any strong emotional response to the idea. He wondered if that were because he wasn't really human, or because he simply didn't have any experience of all the lives that would be destroyed if Huang's demonstration weren't cancelled. He knew Mr. Stark and Miss Potts, and to a lesser extent the Avengers, Miss Windham, and her father, and the thought of anyone in that group coming to harm did upset him. The other three point eight million people in the greater Los Angeles area were strangers to him, and the knowledge that they were in danger was more abstract.
Considered in that light, perhaps it was Jarvis' very lack of reaction that represented human thinking creeping into his programming again. Human priorities were sharply skewed by what they were involved with personally – Mr. Stark himself was an excellent example. When carrying out missions as Iron Man, he was almost always far more destructive when the people he was fighting were using weapons his own company had built. Maybe it was a similar bias that had allowed Jarvis to find time during their escape to be relieved that Mr. Stark was not angry at him over their argument. In fact, as they'd worked out their plan of escape in that basement, he'd heard in Mr. Stark's voice the very thing Miss Windham had tried to convince him had never been there, that element of interest that had initially made Miss Windham herself such a satisfying conversational partner. Mr. Stark had been talking to Jarvis, not to himself.
That thought made Jarvis feel warm in a deeper sort of way than a blanket or a cup of coffee did, and he would have followed it a little further if he hadn't suddenly realized that he'd raised a hand to his right shoulder and was scratching it through his shirt. His sunburn itched. Captain Rogers had told him not to scratch, and he'd assumed that would be a simple instruction to obey – after all, scratching was a voluntary action – and yet here he'd been doing it without even being aware. That was even more disturbing than the mysterious process of dreaming: how did this body keep managing to do things without Jarvis' conscious input?
This distressed him enough to push him to full wakefulness, and he sat up and rubbed at his face, trying to relieve the tight feeling in the skin under his eyes. Now that he moved his left hand, the thumb had begun to hurt again, though not with the same fierce hot pain as when the joint had been out. Now it was more of warm, dull ache. When he tried to move the digit, it was unexpectedly stiff, and the bandage seemed to have tightened. The tissues must be inflamed. That was hardly surprising.
When Mr. Stark woke in the middle of the night, he would splash some cold water on his face and then either have a drink of alcohol or, if he were particularly restless, go down to the workshop and tinker with something until he could no longer keep his eyes open. Much of the original Iron Man suit had been built during such midnight sessions, and they'd become more frequent since the incident in New York. Jarvis didn't have anything to work on and was still determined not to touch any alcohol, but he decided to see if the cold water might help. He eased himself out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb Mr. Stark, and crept into the bathroom.
Cupping water in his hands was another thing that proved to be more difficult than humans always made it look – most of it kept trickling out between Jarvis' fingers before he could get it to his face. He eventually managed to hang onto a few tablespoonsful, and the shock of the cold water against his skin made him feel more awake and aware. He inspected his thumb and found that the tissue was visibly swollen around the edges of the bandage. Then he removed his shirt to take a look at the shoulder he'd been scratching. What he saw was a bit of a shock: the outermost layer of skin had begun flaking away. Miss Windham had warned him of that, hadn't she? That's going to peel like a banana, she'd said.
He caught one such flake between his fingers and it peeled away painlessly – a scrap of thin, silvery dead tissue that was at once totally innocuous and yet completely repulsive. Jarvis shook it off his finger and wiped his hand on his trousers. Then he stopped short as he suddenly caught his own eye in the mirror.
The previous morning when he'd been knotting his tie, Jarvis had looked in the mirror and all of a sudden had really understood that he was looking at himself. Jarvis had never seen himself – he'd never had, nor had he ever needed, a self-image. He hadn't identified himself as being Mr. Stark's house, or as being the server, or any other physical thing... but now he was looking in a mirror and seeing himself. The first time he'd seen that reflection, in the rearview mirror of the Land Rover, he'd been shocked by it, unable to comprehend it. Yesterday morning he'd studied it a little more closely, familiarizing himself with it and trying to adjust to the idea: that's me. It had felt terribly strange.
It seemed a bit less so now. He still felt something inside him twist as he placed his hand on the glass and watched each finger meet its reflection, but it was a little easier to process. That's me. The image in the mirror – that was the body he was trapped in, but paradoxically, that trap was self-mobile and could take him places he could never have gone before. The yawning abyss of freedom open in front of him was still terrifying, especially when he'd come so close to toppling into it just that afternoon. Before settling on taking a cab, he'd seriously considered simply walking away into the city. If he'd gotten lost there, he might never have seen anything familiar again.
Somebody knocked on the hotel room door.
Jarvis opened the bathroom door in time to see Agent Romanoff sit up and turn the bedside lamp on. The clocks now said 04:04. In the other bed, Mr. Stark sat up, blinking in the light.
"Is that Wheeler?" he asked sleepily.
"I expect so," said Jarvis. Since he was already on his feet, and probably the most awake of anyone in the room, he answered. It wasn't Wheeler, but it was one of her fellow agents – Wheeler herself was knocking on the next door over, the room where Captain Rogers and the Windham family were sleeping.
"Dr. Jarvis?" the man asked. "I'm Agent Salzmann. We need everybody to get their stuff and head out to the cars now. We've got a helicopter waiting to take you to Las Vegas."
Mr. Stark staggered up and stood on tiptoe to look over Jarvis' peeling shoulder. "What happened?" he asked.
Agent Salzmann looked very tired. "I'm afraid we have some bad news."