There was a gap between the side of the radio desk and the concrete slab of the fallen ceiling, but it wasn't wide enough for Tony to wriggle out through. He would have had to take a page from Jarvis' book and dislocate something, and he couldn't think of any major body parts he was willing to do without right now. Instead, he stuck an arm out and felt around in the dusty gloom. "Wheeler!" he called out.

"Stark!" Her voice echoed back from somewhere beyond the rubble and dust. "Are you okay?"

"I'm not hurt," Tony replied, "I'm just stuck."

"All right," said Wheeler. "I'm gonna see if I can help some of the people over here. Hang in there!"

Tony didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. He could hear people and objects moving not far away from him, voices reassuring one another that it was going to be all right, and once again all he could do was sit there fuming at his own impotence. If he'd just had the suit, he could have blasted this giant piece of concrete out of his way with ease. He could have airlifted each and every one of these people to another island where they could get medical help. He could have...

"Tony Stark!" he heard Thor call from somewhere above.

"He's over there somewhere!" Wheeler called back.

"Here!" Tony banged on the underside of the desk. "Thor! Under here!"

Thor landed on top of the desk with a jarring thump, then seized the edge of the fallen concrete and lifted. It was clearly a great effort even for him, but the gap slowly widened until Tony could squeeze out, skinning his knees and tearing his shirt in the process. He climbed up on the desk next to the god.

"Thanks," he said.

"Do not think of it!" Thor replied, letting the slab drop. "It is my honour to help a friend." He looked across the mess of twisted wreckage towards Wheeler and the other survivors. Tony couldn't see any bodies, but there was enough blood-soaked clothing to suggest some very serious injuries. "Fear not, people of Midgard," said Thor. "Those who are capable must follow me now – I beg the patience of the rest. You must trust that you will not be forgotten, and we will send help as soon as we find it!" He leapt up through the hole in the ceiling, then reached down to pull Tony after him. The two of them worked together bringing up the other survivors.

It was no more than twenty or thirty feet to the surface, but that was a slow, hazardous climb through the shattered remains of the building. Thor led the way, carefully testing hand and footholds, and Tony helped him assist the people who needed it – he could do that much, at least.

"What happened to Steve and Rhodey?" he asked Thor. "Are they all right?"

"They are unhurt, and acquitted themselves most valiantly against the Kraken," Thor assured him. "You choose your friends well, Stark!"

"Does he always talk like that?" one of the civilians asked.

"Oh, yes," said Tony.

Thor vaulted up into what had once been the room Tony and Wheeler had made their phone calls from, and one by one brought the survivors out after him. Medics and nurses were waiting at the top. There were other injured personnel already being taken care of – some were bloodied, others had been doused in the blue liquid that seemed to be a major component of Kraken innards. A gigantic severed tentacle was lying across the runway, draped over the smashed remains of a cargo plane, but on the whole it was clear that the monster had done far more damage to the Navy than the Navy had been able to do to it.

It was only while watching a group of soldiers pose for photos in front of the tentacle that Tony suddenly realized that the fight was over. The island was still shrouded in dust and smoke – a row of hangars were on fire over to the southwest – but the air was starting to clear and the Kraken itself was gone. There were no more impact tremors, no sounds of gunfire. The sea was calm and the sky was blue. Where had the thing gone?

A jeep pulled up, and several men and women got out – including Lieutenant Commander Park and a familiar figure in rather grubbied red, white, and blue. Tony went to meet them.

"Steve!" he called out, raising a hand in greeting. "What happened? Did you kill it?" Maybe Navy ordinance had succeeded where a group of warrior gods had failed.

But Steve shook his head. "We got some good hits in," he said, "but mostly we were just making it mad. Then, all of a sudden, it just left."

"It just left?" Tony echoed. He had a bad feeling about that. "You mean it retreated?" he tried hopefully.

"I don't think so," said Steve. "One minute it was giving us everything it had, and the next it just slipped under the water and was gone."

Tony realized what must have happened: "it heard something," he said. "Which way did it go?"

"Nobody knows. There was a huge cloud of dust when it knocked down the administrative building, and by the time that cleared it was gone. An infra-red camera saw it submerge over there somewhere," Steve pointed to the northeast, "but once it went under, we lost it."

Tony swore. He looked around again, but all he saw was the destruction the Kraken had left behind. Somehow an animal the size of a battleship had simply disappeared. There were any number of reasons why it might have run off, but Tony's gut told him that it had turned its attention to something it considered more important, or at least more annoying, than the fight on the island. If it hunted by south, then it had to have heard something.

What had it heard?

An imagination was one of the things Jarvis had always known humans had and he didn't. Computers dealt with numbers and logic: they took input, calculated, and produced conclusions. They did not imagine. But as Jarvis watched Miss Potts force the lock on the garage door, he realized that imagining was exactly what he was doing. In his mind was a picture of the workshop filled with ocean water. Glass was shattered, vital equipment was crusted with salt and seaweed, the suits and the backups were ruined utterly and there was nothing he could do for them or for Tony. He could see it so clearly that it seemed impossible that it would not be real.

But it wasn't. Miss Potts found the flashlight Tony kept next to the fire extinguisher in the garage, and by its beam they surveyed the damage. There were puddles and silt on the floor, and pieces of the car engine Tony had been working on Sunday night were strewn everywhere. Dummy was tipped over in a corner, but the water hadn't come up to the tops of the workbenches, and all the audio and hologram equipment appeared to be intact. Better yet, the seals on the display cases had held, and the Iron Man suits had not been damaged. They were ready to be taken out and put to use, the moment there was an AI to run them.

There would be no AI, however, if water had gotten into the vault. Its lock ran off a battery separate from the generators that powered the house, and was therefore still active: Jarvis showed Miss Potts where the scanner was. She put her eye to it, and there was a 'beep' of recognition followed by a 'clunk' as the locking bar slid back. Miss Potts swung the door open and shone the flashlight in, and Jarvis heaved a sigh of relief. The door had sealed properly, and everything inside was dry – including the backups and the surprise Tony had been building for Miss Potts.

The surprise – they might need that, but for now Jarvis ignored it and squatted down to open the drawer containing the last set of backups. A backup copy of anything as complex as JARVIS couldn't be kept on a CD: Tony had saved it on a specially built drive the size of an old-fashioned desktop tower. It weighed quite a bit more than Jarvis had expected, and on his first attempt he wasn't able to lift it at all.

"I'll help," said Miss Potts, and moved forward to do so. "Don't bend your back," she warned, showing him how to grip it. "Use your knees. If you lift with your back, you'll hurt yourself."

"Thank you for your concern, Miss Potts," he grunted, as they heaved the drive out of the drawer. Dido cleared some things off a workbench to make a space for them to put it down, and then for some reason she went and righted Dummy, giving the armature an affectionate pat.

"I always liked this one," she said by way of explanation when she noticed Jarvis watching. "Tony's so mean when he talks to him."

"You're anthropomorphizing," Jarvis told her. "And he's not even activated right now." Dummy was technically not even a separate entity, just one of the tools the central AI had available for interacting with the world.

"Tony wouldn't let me have a dog," said Dido, "so I taught Dummy to fetch instead." She sounded quite proud of it.

"I remember that," Jarvis realized. She'd told the robot arm to retrieve a thrown ball and give it back to her. The AI had been able to adapt a subroutine to the task fairly quickly, but after only a couple of sessions Tony had ordered Dido out of his shop, telling her it wasn't a playroom. At the time Jarvis hadn't wondered why she wanted to do that – it was simply a thing he'd been ordered to do.

Dido was giving him an odd look. "You do?" she asked, biting her lip. "I don't remember you being here that day." Her frown deepened, and Jarvis wondered what she was thinking. Was she realizing that she didn't remember him being here at all?

"Now's not the time for swapping robot stories," Miss Potts said.

"No, of course not," Jarvis agreed, grateful for the change of subject. "We need to see whether the computer is damaged."

The hardware filled a second room, down a few steps from the workshop. The door at the top of the stairs normally opened with a manual code, but with the computer down it would have unlocked automatically in order to let Tony make whatever repairs were necessary. Jarvis opened the door and directed the flashlight beam down into the darkness. It glinted off liquid, and he felt something sink inside of him.

Miss Potts stood on her toes to look over his right shoulder, and Dido bent down to peek under his left arm. "Oh," he heard Miss Potts say. "That's not good."

It wasn't good at all. The racks of processors that made up the main hard drive were sitting in knee-deep water.

Jarvis took his shoes and socks off, then rolled up his trouser legs and waded in for a closer look. The water was murky and cold, and feeling invisible objects beneath the surface brush against his shins got his imagination working again. There wasn't likely to be anything in there but bits of cloth or paper, but he couldn't stop himself from picturing slimy living things... or worse, dead ones.

He concentrated on inspecting the damage. There was about eighteen inches of water in the room – the drain in the floor must be clogged with dirt or debris. Silt clinging to the shelves suggested that at the height of the flood the water had been as much as a foot higher. It was lucky the computer hadn't been running during the flooding – as it was, the modules that had been sitting in the water all day were certainly ruined, but those higher up could still be saved. If there'd been power flowing, the whole machine would be fried.

Jarvis swallowed to wet a throat that had gone suddenly dry. If there were any part of the house that really deserved to be called JARVIS' body, this computer was it. A shudder passed over him as he ran his fingers along the top of one of the grey boxes. These two objects were so different, so completely alien to one another – the computer built of silicon and wire, and the body built of flesh and blood and bone – and yet both of them were him. And by removing him from the one to place him in the other, Dr. Strange had saved Jarvis' life.

That was something he hadn't thought about yet, but it was true, wasn't it? If he'd been in this computer during the flooding, or even worse, during an actual tsunami, the hardware would have been destroyed and the software, without recent backups, irretrievably lost. But he hadn't been here. He'd been where Stark was, fast asleep in a motel room in Arcadia.

He looked up at the two women waiting at the top of the steps. Dido was concerned in the way anyone might have been about a flooded basement and a broken computer, but Miss Potts looked utterly horrified. She had a hand over her mouth, and was staring not at the hardware or the water but at Jarvis himself.

"Oh, Jarvis," she said, extending a hand to him. "He can fix it. Don't worry. Tony can fix it."

Jarvis nodded. Miss Potts knew – unlike Dido, she knew who he was, and she knew what seeing this computer half-destroyed meant to him. Somehow, that actually made it a little less upsetting, as if his emotions were a physical weight that could be lessened by sharing them with another person. That was the other side of empathy. Had Tony felt a similar relief upon seeing that Jarvis understood his guilt?

Tony could fix it. That was true, and Jarvis had absolute faith in it, but right now Tony wasn't here, and without him it was up to Jarvis himself to get it working. He knew what he had to do, but now that he was here standing in front of it, he still had a moment's doubt. Something in him still wanted to say 'no' and seek some other solution, some alternative that wouldn't mean rendering himself redundant. He could do that. He could choose. But a choice was, by its nature, between two options: he could walk away, but he could also stay here and do what he knew had to be done.

He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and chose.

It felt like letting go, as if he'd been standing on the edge of an abyss and stepped off. He knew he'd be broken to bits when he hit the bottom, but for some reason there was no longer anything frightening about that. It was out of his hands now and in an odd way, that felt rather peaceful.

Jarvis loosened his tie and pulled it off over his head, then removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. "Dido," he said, "I'll need your help removing the damaged units."

She nodded and sat down on the steps to take her own shoes off.

"Miss Potts," Jarvis added, "I'll need some tools. Please find me a screwdriver, a set of wire cutters, and a roll of black electrical tape – if they're not in the red box on the far counter, they're probably sitting out on one of the workbenches. I will eventually also need a soldering iron. It's on the table next to Dummy."

"Right," said Miss Potts. She vanished from the doorway, then returned a moment later. "You know, Jarvis, if you're going to call Tony and Dido by their names, you can call me Pepper."

"If you like, Pepper." That was easier than calling Mr. Stark 'Tony', although Jarvis didn't know why it should be.

While Pepper collected the tools for him, Jarvis reached into the water and felt around for the cables that connected the multiple processors. Human hands, he mused, were actually quite well-designed for such a task. In the darkness and dirty water, it was nearly impossible to see what he was doing, but having a sense of touch allowed him to find his way around the boxes and wires with relative ease. If he'd tried to do this using one of the robots, he might well have damaged the computer, the manipulating arm, or both. Fingers found the rubber-coated connecting cables quickly, and pulled them out of their ports one by one.

"What are we doing, exactly?" Dido asked. "Remember, I'm not a computer person. Keep the words to two syllables or less."

Jarvis thought about that request for a moment. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I'm going to need a few with three. The main processor was designed as a series of connected units," he explained. "Tony intended them to be easy to isolate, repair, or upgrade. We'll have to remove the water-damaged ones and re-route some of the wiring. If what remains is not enough to run the older AI, we can upload part of it to the server at Stark Industries." He hoped they wouldn't have to do that. Using two separate machines would slow response time considerably.

Dido nodded. "So why is it that she wants you to call her Pepper, but she still calls you Jarvis?"

"I told you," he said, "nobody calls me anything else."

"Well, does she realize how rude it sounds?"

"This really isn't an appropriate moment, Dido," said Jarvis.

Pepper returned with the tools he'd asked for, and he began removing the screws that held the damaged units in place. It was delicate work, and the cold water numbing his fingers didn't help. At one point his hand slipped, and he accidentally drove the end of the screwdriver under his thumbnail. There was a flash of pain, and when he inspected the injury, he found blood welling up under the nail. He stuck it in his mouth for a moment, then carried on. Once the screws were out, he pulled the module from its slot and gave it to Dido, who carried it up the stairs to set aside.

While Jarvis and Dido worked on that, Pepper tried to clean out the floor drain. It made a juicy gurgling sound as she pulled out handfuls of wet muck, and then the water suddenly began to drain away. This made Jarvis' job a lot easier, and as with typing or using cutlery, his dexterity with the screwdriver improved quickly as he practiced. Soon the women were taking turns carrying the waterlogged processors up to the workshop and stacking them against the wall. Tony could look at them later and decide if any of them could be salvaged.

Once the damaged modules were gone, Jarvis had to bridge the gaps their removal had left in the circuits. He checked and double-checked them, making sure all the connections were sound, and clipping, taping, and soldering loose wires into place. It wasn't as tidy as Tony would have made it, but it would do, and Jarvis was definitely getting better with his hands: he didn't burn himself once.

At first he didn't want to think too hard about exactly what he was doing. If this were, in a way, Jarvis' corpse, then the thought of disassembling and rewiring it was a difficult one to deal with. It got slowly easier as he began to make peace with the fact that once this machine was running again, he would no longer be needed. These parts did not belong to Jarvis anymore, and when he was finished he would probably have ensured that they never would again. Performing surgery on his old body was easier when he knew he would live on in the new one... even if he had no idea as yet what kind of life that would be.

With the last connection in place, he counted the remaining units and multiplied by the power he knew to be contained in each. If he remembered the specifications for the backup correctly – and he could see no reason why he wouldn't – then it should be enough with a little to spare. With Pepper's help, he lugged the backup drive down the steps and slid it into the place he'd prepared for it. Dido drove in the screws, and Jarvis plugged in the connectors.

"Ready?" asked Pepper, who was standing at the top of the stairs with her hand on the main power switch.

"Ready," Jarvis nodded.

She threw the switch. The formerly quiet room filled with the faint, warm buzz of electricity, a sound Jarvis found very familiar and comforting. Lights flickered on in the workshop, and a holographic screen popped up.

"Looks good!" said Pepper.

Jarvis squelched across the still-wet floor and climbed the steps to the workshop. The single large screen was showing a reboot menu, asking if he wanted to install the backup AI and overwrite anything currently on the hard drive. Jarvis tapped in the confirmation code, and was greeted by a request for authorization: the scanner had not recognized his fingerprints. He entered an override, and pressed the 'confirm' button.

An image of gears turning represented the computer thinking. A progress bar slowly filled. The lights in the room got brighter, and a number of other screens and holograms flickered to life – and finally, a voice spoke:

I am online.