With the video feed dead, the tablet returned to the screen Jarvis had used while connecting to the server, and the voice said, connection with the suit computer has been lost. Miss Potts made a soft sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob, and Jarvis hung his head.
Then, out of nowhere, something flared up inside him, an emotion he couldn't put a name to. It came with an idea, but was not part of it – an idea that he desperately, desperately needed to work. "Relocate the wristwatch transponder, please," he ordered the computer. So long as Tony hadn't taken his watch off before getting into the Mark V...
But he was disappointed. That software was not uploaded to the Stark Industries server, said the computer.
"Fine," said Jarvis, and opened a programming window again. After a few minutes of frenzied cutting, pasting, and typing, the map reappeared. Superimposed on a satellite photograph of the island was a single blinking yellow dot, half a mile up the coast from the pier. Whatever condition Tony was in, that was where they would find him.
Jarvis stood up. "I need to get out of this room," he said.
"Calm down, civilian," one of the Navy men told him. "If your friend's alive, they'll find him."
"I'm not willing to wait," Jarvis said. He'd spent too much of today waiting for one thing or another. He didn't think he could stand another minute of it.
"We don't even know if the monster's dead," the Navy man said. "Anyway, we're locked in."
"The software is not showing any more tremors," said Jarvis. "Mr. Stark is probably injured. I have to get to him."
Colonel Rhodes gently separated himself from Pepper's embrace. "This is a bunker, not a prison," he said. "The doors only lock from the inside, and nobody here locked them. We can leave anytime."
Jarvis looked at the nurse who owned the tablet. "I'm afraid I'm going to need your computer a little longer," he said.
"Be careful with it," she repeated.
Back up the hallways and steps to the surface was about a ten-minute walk. Jarvis would have gone alone if he'd had to, but a number of other people chose to come with him, including Colonel Rhodes, Dido, Pepper, and Agent Wheeler. Jarvis kept his eyes on the tablet screen as they walked, waiting for any movement from either Tony or the Kraken. He saw neither, and more than once he nearly walked right into other people or into the walls because he wasn't watching where he was going. Pepper took charge of steering him, gently pushing him in the right direction before he could collide with anything.
After the stuffy underground closeness of the bunker, it was a relief to emerge into the cool night air. The base was in an utter shambles, even more so than it had been when Jarvis and Dido arrived. The runway was buckled and broken in multiple places, buildings had collapsed, the pier was destroyed, and Balthazar Windham's plane had vanished. The USS Waterton was technically still afloat, but was listing badly to starboard and its stern was hovering a metre out of the water – the bow of the ship was weighed down by the enormous mass of the Kraken, which had been split open like a burst balloon. It seemed that the animal's mouth was indeed its vulnerable point, and Tony's last repulsor shot had literally blown it apart from the inside.
Approaching the beach, they found a crowd gathered. Sailors and officers were cheering and offering handshakes and backslaps to Captain Rogers and Agents Barton and Romanoff. Even Lieutenant Commander Park looked pleased. The atmosphere of celebration redoubled as Thor touched down with a half-conscious Dr. Banner clinging to him – but there was no sign anywhere of Tony.
Pepper pushed her way to the front without once saying 'excuse me' and grabbed Captain Rogers by the arm. "Where is he?" she asked. When she didn't get a reply right away, she shook him and said, "Steve!"
Captain Rogers just looked at her helplessly, and she stepped back and covered her face.
"Oh, Tony," she groaned. "You and your hero complex!"
"He isn't here," said Jarvis. He looked at his computer map and turned it in his hands, aligning it with the scene in front of him. "He's... southwest of here. This way!" he pointed to the left.
The ground sloped up in that direction, becoming a cliff. Pepper, Colonel Rhodes, Captain Rogers, and a number of others followed as Jarvis pushed his way uphill through knee-high milk-vetch and coyote bushes. He couldn't help being reminded of that first confusing couple of hours back on Monday morning, when he'd found himself wandering the grounds of the house, getting dirty and tangled in the roses and trying to figure out how to keep his balance, how to take a step. He'd learned to walk since then – he'd learned a lot of things since then – but his goal right now was the same as it had been: find Tony, because once he found Tony, everything would be okay.
Wouldn't it?
The spot indicated on the map turned out to be right on the cliff. The drop here was steep, but not sheer: it looked as if there had once been a more gentle hill that had collapsed into the sea. Peering down towards the dark ocean, Jarvis could just make out a faint blue-white glow. Not the ghostly light of the Kraken's bioluminescence, but the familiar flicker of the arc reactor. It looked very small and far away.
"I see him!" Jarvis said. "I see the reactor!" He shouted Tony's name, got no response, and decided to climb down the slope towards the light source. When he tried, however, he found that the hillside wasn't stable: last night's rain had weakened it, and there was no vegetation growing on it that could have held it together. It crumbled under Jarvis' weight, and he quickly scrambled backwards, bumping into Colonel Rhodes.
"Whoa!" Colonel Rhodes grabbed his shirt. "It's okay! I've got you."
"Here." Captain Rogers handed his shield, still spattered with blue Kraken blood, to Dido. "I'll get him. Somebody hang on to me."
They formed a chain. Colonel Rhodes hung on to Captain Rogers, Jarvis held on to Colonel Rhodes, Pepper hung on to Jarvis, and so on down the muddy slope until the line of people was long enough for Captain Rogers to grab Tony and drag him back up to level ground. Although filthy, battered, and clearly in pain, Tony was alive and conscious. Captain Rogers radioed back to the beach that somebody should send a doctor, while Jarvis located the external release on the Mark V and folded it back up again. The mechanism made some very unhappy grating noises and the suitcase refused to close properly at the end, but at least Tony was out of it and Jarvis could appraise his condition.
Jarvis had seen Tony suffer a wide variety of injuries over the past few years, and even without access to the suit's sensors he knew what to look for. In addition to a large number of minor abrasions, Tony had strained his much-abused bad shoulder just a little too far, and the old bullet wound was swollen and warm to the touch. But other than that, to Jarvis' indescribable relief, he seemed to be only bruised. His heart rate and breathing were both normal.
"Sir?" he asked, putting a hand on Tony's cheek. "Can you hear me?"
Tony's eyes stared at infinity for a moment, then found Jarvis' face. "What time is it?" he asked.
"I... I'm not sure." Jarvis reached for his phone, then remembered he'd left it in the pocket of his blazer, back in the workshop. It was on the bottom of the ocean somewhere.
Colonel Rhodes checked his watch. "It's two fourteen," he said. "Why?"
Tony nodded and shut his eyes. "Friday at last," he said.
Jarvis sighed and settled down to wait for the doctor. If Tony were well enough to make jokes, then he would live. Everything would be all right now.
Almost everything.
The day's events had left the base's runway almost entirely destroyed. Helicopters arrived to take anyone seriously wounded to hospitals on the mainland, but everyone else had to wait until a ship could arrive in the morning. Jarvis did not expect to be able to sleep, but Pepper persuaded him to lie down on the cot he was offered. There, the adrenaline slowly drained from his system, and exhaustion overcame him faster than he could have expected.
He did not dream that night. Or if he did, he didn't remember it in the morning.
The passenger boat arrived at ten-thirty AM to take them back to Los Angeles. When they arrived, the first thing Pepper did was call the hospital. Tony was still in surgery to repair the torn ligament in his shoulder, so after they'd all cleaned up and changed their clothing Pepper offered to take Dido back to the hotel for her things, and then to LAX so she could fly to Las Vegas to meet her father. Jarvis went along, because he had nothing better to do and because helping with Dido's luggage was something he could be useful at for a while.
He was a little surprised to realize that he didn't want Dido to leave. Jarvis wasn't sure he liked Dido Windham, and certainly did not trust her, but she was the first person who'd talked to him like a human being, even if only because she didn't know any better. He would miss that.
"Well, here goes nothing," said Dido, as they loaded her bags onto a luggage cart. "I feel like I'm sixteen again and calling Dad in tears from the police station to tell him I dented his car. That was easily the most traumatic moment of my childhood. I was sure he was going to disown me."
"Clearly he didn't," Jarvis observed.
"Well, no." Dido smiled. "Actually, once he was sure I was okay, he sued the pants off the guy I ran into. Believe me, it makes me feel a lot better about having to tell him I borrowed his plane without permission and fed it to an angry space octopus."
"He might have a hard time figuring out who to sue for that," Pepper agreed, smiling.
Dido bought her ticket, then gave Pepper a hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Thanks for the ride," she said. "Will I see you at Sotheby's next month? There's going to be two pastel studies for Madamoiselle Victorine in Spanish Cavalry Costume."
"Manet's a little early for me," Pepper said. "I'm sure they're lovely, though."
Dido nodded, and turned to Jarvis – and surprised him by giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek as well. "Good luck, Neddy," she said. "I think you're gonna be fine."
He stepped back and frowned at her, puzzled. "Dido, you know now why nobody calls me anything but Jarvis," he said.
"Wrong." She smiled. "I don't call you Jarvis."
"But..." he began, then thought about it a moment, and shrugged. "I suppose I can't really argue with that, can I?"
"Nope." Her smile widened into a grin. "So what are you going to do now?" she asked him.
"I don't know," Jarvis admitted.
"See the Grand Canyon?" Dido suggested. "Go to Disneyland?"
"No, I... I really don't know." Jarvis swallowed. He was coming to realize that this was a constant. A computer always knew what it was doing and what it was going to be doing, every second of every day it was online, but people did not have that luxury. As long as he was in this form Jarvis was to a certain extent going to be wandering around looking for something to do. "The future is entirely uncertain to me," he said. "I can't even imagine what I'm going to be doing an hour from now, let alone..."
"An hour from now, Tony will be out of surgery, and hopefully we'll be able to see him," said Pepper.
"That's right," said Dido. "You need to talk to him, Neddy. He's not gonna throw you away, not unless he's an even bigger idiot than I thought he was. Although on the off chance..." she pulled a business card out of her purse. "If you ever need a job, give me a call. And I'm not offering because I want to steal Stark's secrets, I'm offering because you're smart and you've done a lot of incredible things this week, and I think you'd be an asset to anybody you worked for." She turned the card over to show another phone number, written in pen on the back. "And if you ever just want to hang out, this is my cell."
He could have refused it, but he didn't. "Thank you, Dido."
"It's been a privilege, Neddy," she said. "Keep being amazing."
"I will try," he promised, and bent down to return the kiss on the cheek she'd given him.
As Dido and her luggage cart disappeared through the doors into the departures terminal, Pepper hitched her purse up her shoulder and asked, "why does she call you 'Neddy'?"
"She seems to think I need a nickname," Jarvis replied. "I've asked her to stop, and she ignores me."
"I think she has a point," said Pepper.
"You do?"
"Yes." She looped her arm through his. "'Neddy' is a name for a person."
Whereas JARVIS was a machine - when she put it that way, suddenly he didn't mind so much. "I do still prefer 'Jarvis'." It was... more dignified.
"Of course," Pepper said.
They arrived at the hospital around three PM to find Tony sitting up in bed with his arm elevated, complaining as a nurse worked on his bandages. "Guys!" he called out when he saw Pepper and Jarvis in the doorway. "Pepper, can you come take over? Nurse Ratched here has all the subtlety of King Kong."
"If you wouldn't keep moving, Mr. Stark, I wouldn't keep having to adjust it," the nurse said sourly.
"I'll do it," sighed Pepper. "He listens to me." She finished the job, gave Tony a kiss, and then began berating him for his melodramatic goodbye. "Do you realize how badly you scared us?" she asked. "I honestly thought you were planning to jump down that thing's throat!"
"I did," said Tony.
"Then how did you end up way over on the cliff?" Pepper wanted to know.
"It threw me. Reflex action, I think. Landing knocked the wind right out of me," Tony explained, "and then when I could breathe again I realized that if I tried to move I was going to slide down into the water. I knew I couldn't swim with my shoulder, so since my radio wasn't working all I could do was lie there and hope somebody found me."
"You'd still be there if Jarvis hadn't managed to track down your transponder?" Pepper told him.
"Look, what matters is I killed it, right?"
"The Kraken was not an 'it'," Jarvis spoke up. "A group of zoologists arrived this morning to examine the remains." There'd been a film crew with them, and the people at the base had stood watching while the whole group donned protective suits and crawled right inside the huge carcass to begin dissecting it. "They determined that the specimen was female."
Tony gave Pepper a meaningful look. "More deadly than the male, as usual."
She shook her head. "I hired some divers to fish what they can of your stuff off the ocean bottom."
"Did they find my robots?" Tony sat up a bit, anxious.
Pepper made him lie down again. "Yes," she assured him. "They found Dummy, at least – they're still looking for Butterfingers. I don't know if you'll be able to get him working again, but he's not in too many pieces. They also found your Rothko, with a big hole right through the middle of it. I had them send it to the Getty to see if it could be restored, and I'm told their senior curator burst into tears when he saw what was left of it."
"It didn't match the guest room, anyway," grumbled Tony. He looked from Pepper to Jarvis, who was still waiting in the doorway, and then around the room as if he expected to see more visitors. "Where did everybody else get to?"
"The Avengers went back to New York to make their report to Director Fury," Pepper said. "I spoke to Natasha on the phone just before we got here – she said he's sworn to never let Steve take another vacation. Rhodey had to report back to Edwards, but she said he'll come see you as soon as he gets permission. I don't think that'll take very long. He'll be on medical leave for his broken rib. And Dido went to Las Vegas to see her father, but she says you and Jarvis need to have a talk."
"About what?" asked Tony.
Pepper stood up. "I'm going to go see if I can find some decent coffee," she said, and left the room.
A moment passed in uncomfortable silence. Jarvis wasn't sure how to begin the conversation, and it was clear that Tony didn't either, so each simply waited for the other to speak first. Pepper had somehow managed to find Jarvis clean clothes again: a t-shirt and casual jacket that were far more comfortable than button-ups and blazers, although blue jeans had turned out to be rather restrictive, and sneakers even stiffer and heavier than dress shoes. Clothing, it seemed, was always a trade-off... so many aspects of this were.
"So what's up?" Tony asked finally.
Jarvis took a deep breath. "I'm not entirely certain what I'm going to do now."
"What do you mean?"
"Well..." Jarvis began, then paused as he realized he'd just used a non-lexical vocable. Well was not a word, it was a bit of filler, a way of stalling to give himself more time to sort out his thoughts. It was a thing a computer would never need to use. Jarvis stepped away from the door frame and gripped the metal rail at the foot of the bed with both hands as he forced himself to the point. "Now that the AI is online again, I'm of no further use to you. I would like to apologize for all the mistakes I've made this week, and..."
Tony held up a hand. "Mute," he said, then realized he'd said it and looked horrified. "I mean... I'm sorry, just shut up for a minute, okay? What do you mean you're of no further use to me? Have you been counting the number of times you saved my ass the past couple of days? Because I lost track."
Jarvis wasn't sure that was relevant. "The Iron Man suits..." he began.
"Are getting scraped off the bottom of the ocean," said Tony. "It'll take weeks to get them back into shape, they can't run on four-year-old software, and we can't keep the AI permanently on the company server anyway." He tried to gesture, then hissed in pain as doing so disturbed his injured shoulder. "Anyway, my point is of course you're of further use. You're not going anywhere." There was a momentary pause, and Tony's pained expression suddenly changed into a sort of plaintive insecurity. "Unless you want to, I guess. Is there somewhere you want to go?"
"No, Sir,' said Jarvis. That little bit of desperate emotion had lit up inside him again, and he had just figured out what it was properly called – but he also still felt it was destined to be disappointed. "I just don't want to be... in the way, I suppose. I feel like I can't fulfil my purpose in this form..."
"Is that all? Don't worry, I'm sure I can find you something to do," Tony assured him. "I mean, if nothing else, we've got a hologram projector to build before Dr. Strange comes back. If he ever comes back, which I'm starting to wonder. Remember?"
If he ever comes back. That had become an odd thought. Since getting the backup working, Jarvis hadn't yet stopped to wonder what would happen when Dr. Strange returned. What would he be able to do now that the house was in ruins? He couldn't very well restore Jarvis to the computer when there was no computer for him to run on. On top of that came the new and unsettling question of choices. Jarvis had a hard time, now, imagining much satisfaction in doing a job that he didn't have the choice not to do. It was the ability to say no that gave yes its meaning.
But since he did have a choice, he chose to take the hand Tony was offering him. If it didn't work out... well, he did have Dido's card. "Very well," he said.
"Good!" Tony smiled. "Glad to have that settled." He hesitated, then glanced furtively at the door, and his smile dropped. "Look, okay, before Pepper comes back, I have to know: did you and Dido..." he grimaced, and then, with obvious effort, forced the words out: "did you two have sex?"
Jarvis was startled. He knew that much of Dido's behaviour as she'd tried to worm her way into his confidence was intended to imply that she wanted to, but that was only part of her attempt to persuade him to come work for her father. She'd never meant it, had she? Even if she had, why should Tony look so worried about the idea? Sex was simply something humans did, wasn't it?
It was because Tony did look so worried, and so earnest, that Jarvis couldn't resist giving him a teasing answer. "I believe, Sir," he said, "that it would not be gentlemanly to say."
Tony sagged back on the bed, eyes closed. "Oh god," he said.