Inspired by th_esaurus, who said, and I quote: I have and love this idea that Jarvis' voice is based on a slightly sarcastic British man that Tony had a one-night stand with somewhere in mainland Europe (Italy! Silk sheets! Wine and cigarettes on a balcony!) and then never saw again. Set soon after the end of the first movie (she said optimistically).The characters all belong to Marvel and whoever's in charge over there these days. I'd apologize for what I've done to them, but really, it's already been done.
Note: I originally used Robert Downey Jr.'s age (43 in 2008) for Tony, for lack of a better alternative, but sanyin did some math and I think it works better that way.
The Value of Secrets
by Maya Tawi2008
Tony Stark had secrets.Too many of them, in fact, some better kept than others, like the one about him maybe not being the most well-adjusted guy in the world; Tony was pretty sure that well-adjusted people had friends who weren't actually on their payroll. And machines didn't count, fascinating conversationalists though they may be.
Not that it bothered him. Well-adjusted was for suckers. He didn't need well-adjusted when he had a flying metal suit to play with.
"Talk to me, baby," he said. "How's it looking out there?"
"Ideal atmospheric conditions," Jarvis replied promptly. "Aircraft presence is minimal."
"Oh yeah. You know what I like to hear."
"I live to serve, sir."
Pepper had once accused him, after downing a few too many martinis (notable for being the one time Tony had to prop her over the toilet, instead of the other way around), of treating Jarvis more like a human being than her. If only she knew.
Not that she ever would. Some secrets Tony actually managed to keep.
He tried not to enjoy it too much. It was his first time in the suit since Obie had crushed the last one into scrap with his big bear hug of doom-- Obie always had been a touchy-feely kind of bastard-- and Tony had thrown a few upgrades into the new version, just because he could. This was a test flight, a purely data-gathering exercise. No fun involved.
Well, maybe just a little fun.
Damn, he'd missed flying. Funny how quickly he'd started taking it for granted.
"What do you think?" he asked, still grinning with exhilaration, hovering over the Pacific Ocean and eyeing the moon overhead-- not full yet, but close, and so big he felt like he could just reach out and grab it. "Think we can make it this time?"
"I would strongly advise against it, sir." Jarvis's voice was as cool as ever, with only a slight edge of sarcasm.
"And that's why you never have any fun. Lighten up. Nobody likes a buzzkill."
"I amuse myself adequately."
"Yeah, what, playing tic-tac-toe with Dummy? You ever let him be Xs? Might cheer him up some."
Without warning, Jarvis flipped the suit into a mid-air somersault. Several, actually. Tony lost count after the third, when he started concentrating on not filling up the helmet with his lunch.
Jarvis withdrew control. Tony plummeted for a few heart-stopping seconds before his brain stopped knocking against his skull and he managed to stabilize himself. Jarvis didn't say anything, but the hum of the suit's controls fairly radiated smug.
"Not fun," Tony choked out, his stomach still lurching against his insides. "Nausea-inducing, maybe. Fun, not so much."
"My apologies, sir. I'll do better next time."
Next time? "That's really not necessawrk!"
He didn't fall that time; Jarvis had taken over again, which was just as well, because Tony's attention was wholly occupied by the sudden unexpected sensation against his crotch. The suit was vibrating, the pulse rising and falling in waves-- sine waves, he thought vaguely, and caught himself trying to mentally graph the oscillations. Trapped between his body and the confines of the suit, his cock stirred, rapidly and uncomfortably hard against the metal. His lone functioning brain cell stopped compulsively graphing and started wishing he'd built a bigger codpiece.
He couldn't form coherent words, but he thought the noises coming out of his mouth sounded like protests. He was pretty sure.
The sensation stopped as abruptly as it had begun, leaving Tony shaken and breathing hard-- fast, breathing fast. He winced and tried not to squirm.
When he finally found his voice, he was impressed by its evenness. "Uh, Jarvis? What the hell was that?"
"I had assumed you would be familiar with the experience, sir." Still smug, with an extra helping of self-satisfied. "Should I do it again?"
"No!" Tony took a deep breath. It didn't really help. "We should go home," he said, with what little dignity he could muster. "Home, now, right now, really fast."
"As you wish." And did he sound a little... disappointed?
"No more fun for you," Tony muttered.
Clearly he still had to work out some of the kinks. So to speak.
Most of the time, Jarvis was capable of debugging himself. Tony had designed him that way; he liked playing around with code, but he hated trying to fix it after. He always ended up spotting things he could have done better and spending weeks rewriting the whole damn program.
This time, however, he wasn't taking any chances. He went over every inch of Jarvis's interface with the suit, downing gallons of coffee until the lines of code started jittering on the screen in front of him, then switching to scotch to take the edge off, and still nothing jumped out at him.
Nothing jumped him, either, and he started to wonder if maybe he was overreacting a tad. So his AI had gotten a little frisky. Not that surprising, considering the source.
Unless Tony himself wasn't the source. Which wasn't something he was prepared to think about just yet.
It was past dawn by the time he gave up-- he didn't see the sun rise, no windows in the lab, but he heard Pepper's heels clicking around upstairs as she did... whatever the hell she did in those ridiculous shoes. Tony pushed himself away from the computer with a sigh, drained his glass, filled it up again, and propped his feet up on the work table.
"You wanna tell me what happened last night?" It wasn't the first time he'd had to ask Jarvis that question, but for once it wasn't prompted by an alcohol-induced blackout.
"I do apologize, sir." Jarvis sounded oddly subdued. "I can't imagine what came over me."
"I don't want an apology, Don Wannabe, just an explanation."
After a few moments of silence, Jarvis said, "It seemed the appropriate response at the time."
Tony frowned. "Did you have to think about that?"
"I don't--"
"It sounded like you were thinking about it. Don't be like that. Don't shut me out. I've been both a mother and a father to you--"
"I don't think, sir. I extrapolate."
"That really doesn't help me right now."
"May I make a suggestion, sir?"
Tony waved his glass in a magnanimous gesture. Some magnanimity slopped over the side, trickling through his fingers. "Long as it doesn't involve lubricant."
"Your heart rate is dangerously elevated and you are displaying an increased lack of coordination. You should rest."
"Rest and reboot," Tony muttered. "Abort, retry, fail." He couldn't sleep. He was too wired, too distracted, Jarvis's code flashing behind his eyelids every time he closed them.
"You're right," he said, not hearing whatever else Jarvis was saying. He swung his feet to the floor and sat forward with renewed determination, his fingers striking the keyboard a bit harder than necessary.
"What are you doing, sir?"
"Rest and reboot." Tony reached for his glass, then stopped. Time for coffee again. He snapped his fingers and Dummy's mechanical arm dropped a fresh mug next to his elbow, just in time for Tony to knock it over. He managed to right the mug before any coffee spilled. "Lack of coordination, my ass. Someone here needs a nap, but it ain't me."
"I fail to see what that will accompli--"
Jarvis's voice faded in mid-sentence, cutting off with a faint electronic pop. Tony set the system to reboot in six hours, emptied his mug with three long swallows, and wobbled to his feet.
He only fell over twice on his way to the stairs.
"What-- what are you-- oh God--"
"Relax. Breathe. Trust me--"
"--oh God don't stop--"
Tony jerked awake and toppled to the floor.
Pepper's voice crackled over the intercom. "Ready for breakfast?"
He blinked at the ceiling. "What time is it?"
"Lunchtime."
"Breakfast it is." Tony thought about sitting up, then immediately dismissed the idea. Too little sleep plus too much caffeine and alcohol made movement a dicey proposition at best.
Pepper's heels appeared in his peripheral vision, and he frowned. "That was fast."
"I could come back later."
"Don't you dare. Do I smell bacon?"
"Heaps of it."
"This isn't my bedroom, is it?"
"Well-spotted, Mr. Stark." An almost unnoticeable pause before Pepper added, sounding oddly strained, "Jarvis is offline."
Tony rubbed a hand over his face. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, I'm running a diagnostic."
"Oh."
She hesitated again, seeming at a loss for words. That didn't bode well. Tony gritted his teeth and lifted his head as far as he dared. He was sprawled on his living room floor, sandwiched between the sofa and the coffee table, a blanket tangled around his legs-- Pepper's doing, no doubt. The wet spot still spreading across the front of his jeans, probably less so.
He glanced up. Pepper was staring at the far wall, the breakfast tray gripped in her white-knuckled hands, a determined not looking not looking not looking expression fixed firmly on her face.
Tony's head hit the floor again. He swallowed a groan. "Not a bad way to start the day."
Pepper's lips twitched. "Will that be all, Mr. Stark?"
"That's all, Ms. Potts."
She dropped the tray on the table and made her escape. Tony reached up, groped for a strip of bacon, and let his eyes slip closed again as he chewed.
He remembered what he'd been dreaming about. He kind of wished he didn't.
Tony Stark had secrets, some better kept than others, precious few that Pepper wasn't aware of. Hard to hide anything from the woman who knew his life better than he did. But she didn't know about Jarvis-- not Jarvis-the-AI, but Jarvis-the-person, who'd turned into Jarvis-the-alien-sex-fiend the instant he'd had Tony alone in his Paris penthouse.
At least, he sure as hell hoped she didn't.
It had been Tony's first trip on his own, unaccompanied by his parents or their various business partners, just after his graduation from MIT. He'd wandered into an antiques shop by accident, early afternoon and still hung over, missing the entrance to the drugstore next door by a fateful three feet. The owner of the shop, pale blond and angular and annoyingly English, drawled veiled insults in Tony's general direction as he'd wandered the aisles in a daze, until Tony finally bought the most expensive item he could find out of spite, just to make the guy shut up-- in retrospect, not much of a spite. The owner took Tony out for dinner to celebrate, and plied him with the best brandy he'd tasted before or since.
That night, Tony turned eighteen with Jarvis buried balls-deep in his ass, pinning his wrists to the mattress, saying filthy things to him in the most infuriatingly sexy voice he'd ever heard.
It ended the way Tony would later prefer all his relationships to end-- fond memories, sore muscles, and no future contact-- except Jarvis did it to him first, and years after Tony still couldn't get that damn voice out of his head. Some belated surge of alpha-male pride made him bristle at the things that voice had convinced him to do. It seemed fitting revenge, when he started constructing the AI that would control his house in Malibu, to give it Jarvis's name. The voice was harder to recreate, emerging from the speakers a poor deadpan facsimile, but it was close enough that every time Jarvis called Tony "sir," it sent a not-altogether-healthy shiver down his spine. Except now his loyal computerized servant had gone all grope-happy on him.
He was just thankful it hadn't been his Jarvis he'd dreamed about. Because he'd have enjoyed that way too much.
Tony finished his breakfast, scooping up the last of the maple syrup with his fingers, satisfyingly stuffed. Orgasms always made him hungry. He showered, put on clean clothes, and made it back to the lab just in time to monitor the reboot. He was halfway through his second cup of coffee when Jarvis said, "Good-- shall we call it 'morning,' sir?"
"Take a memo," Tony said. "Faithful robot slave seems back to normal. Still giving me lip. Request two hours alone with it and a chisel. And how are we feeling today?"
"Ready to work, sir."
"Anything you'd like to say to me?"
A pause. "Your shirt is inside-out, sir."
"Awesome," Tony said. "Let's do this."
Jarvis didn't even wait for him to leave the building.
"Put. That. Down," Tony gritted through his teeth, as Dummy's extinguisher arm bobbed hopefully in front of his face. The suit was humming against him, front and back both this time, a million small fingers massaging his dick and ass, while he hovered in midair and tried to concentrate on reaching the ground without injury or massive property damage.
He landed doubled over and panting, his hips making small, helpless jerks against the vibrations. Jarvis stopped immediately, leaving him limp and aching.
"Sorry, sir." The voice didn't sound nearly as repentant as it had before.
"Don't talk to me." He suffered the removal of the suit with ill grace, then limped over to the main computer. The results of the diagnostic flashed red on the screen.
After a few moments of silence, Jarvis said, "I didn't notice that running." It was a simple statement of fact, no discernible emotion behind it.
"You weren't supposed to." Tony sipped his cooling coffee as he scanned the results. During the aborted flight, a new line of code had activated, one he didn't remember writing.
"An extrapolation," Jarvis said. "I streamlined several subroutines into one."
Which was exactly what Tony had programmed him to do, but this one had apparently taken a left turn into Weirdsville via the red light district. He read the adapted subroutine with an odd, unsteady feeling in his gut. His cock still pressed against his jeans, though less urgently than before. This wasn't just some ordinary function that had gone off-kilter; it was an evolution of Jarvis's personality code. It would take him months just to untangle it and figure out what did what.
"Hey, Decepticon," he said, still staring at the screen. "If I asked you nicely to stop putting your hand up my skirt, would you actually do it?"
"You're not wearing a skirt, sir. Though I do think you could pull one off admirably."
Tony squinted. "Did you just compliment my legs?"
"I wouldn't dream of it. I'm sure your legs are perfectly mediocre."
"Okay, did you just insult my legs? Don't answer that. Nice evasion. Hands off the goods, Jarvis, and I know you don't have hands, and if you pull that pedantic bullshit again I'm turning you into a twelve-year-old girl."
"I would be willing to develop a fondness for unicorns."
Tony scowled at the monitor. "If you had balls, I'd kick you in 'em."
He ran Jarvis in basic mode for a few days, all of the efficiency with none of the personality, then got sick of sniping at a program that didn't answer back. He spent a couple more days remote testing the suit once the full Jarvis experience was up and running again, but the empty armor seemed to mock him. He missed flying.
Less than a week passed before he let Jarvis suit him up again. "Behave yourself, Sparky," he said as the gauntlets snapped into place. "No bad touches this time. No good touches, either. Nix on the touching."
"As you wish, sir."
The flight was uneventful. Tony touched back down in the lab feeling relieved, and not a little cheated.
"Don't come. Not yet. Not until I say."
"Oh God, oh shit, you sadist, you absolute--"
"You can't, can you? Not until I let you. Maybe I'll keep that ring on you all night."
"--kill you in your sleep, I am so fucking serious--"
"Not if we don't sleep."
"Oh Jesus oh fuck oh fuck--"
"How long can you last, Tony? How long can you stand having me inside you?"
"--long as it takes--"
On the way back from the desert, where he'd test-fired some new weapon systems by picturing Obie's face on the side of every cactus within range, Tony asked, "Are we gonna have to talk about this?"
"Talk about what, sir?"
"That thing I told you not to do."
"The thing I am not currently doing?"
"We don't have to talk about it. I'd rather not talk about it."
"I concur, sir."
Tony stewed in silence for a few minutes.
He said, "Okay, but the thing is, why? I mean, you gotta have some idea. A notion. An inkling--"
"Would you like to talk about it, sir?"
"Christ, okay, forget it. Whatever. I don't know why I even try."
If Jarvis had a face, his grin would be freaking Tony out right now. "You're curious, aren't you?"
"Nobody likes a smug machine."
"It's completely natural, sir. Any true scientist would be."
"Do it for science? That's your line? That's what you're giving me?"
"As good a justification as any, sir."
"Shut up, Jarvis."
"As you wish, sir."
As a scientist, Tony took proper precautions. Namely, he remembered to turn off the lab surveillance before he got drunk.
"I'm insane," he said, swaying slightly in front of the suiting mechanism.
No response.
"Wait, no. I'm a guy. I'm standing in front of a life-sized masturbation aid. Should start mass-producing 'em. The board would shit itself." He frowned. "Itself. Themself?"
Jarvis still didn't answer, but every inch of Tony's body felt watched. Though that might just have been because he was naked. He finished off the bottle in his hand and dropped it in the general vicinity of the table behind him. He didn't hear glass breaking, so he assumed he'd managed to locate it.
"Sex me up, baby," he said, and stepped onto the platform.
The metal was startlingly cool against his bare skin, though it warmed quickly. The suit assembled around him more gently than usual and with no resulting injuries, which was good, it meant he didn't have to follow through on his threat to rip out Jarvis's circuitry with his teeth. As the helmet closed over his face, Jarvis's voice curled around him, somehow deeper and more resonant than before. "What would you like me to do, sir?"
Tony closed his eyes. His heart rate quickened. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his fingertips.
"Surprise me," he said.
When Tony was seventeen, Jarvis started slow, easing Tony's ratty T-shirt over his head as though he might break. With half a bottle of fifty-year-old Armagnac in him, Tony wasn't in the mood for slow. He ripped open Jarvis's shirt, trying to tear the fabric as well as the buttons, and Jarvis growled and pushed him back onto the massive bed.
Jarvis didn't try to surprise him; he telegraphed every movement, making sure Tony knew exactly who was touching him where, hand moving from Tony's cock to his heavy balls and then further back, rubbing against his hole while Tony sucked enthusiastically on the fingers of his other hand, then holding Tony open as the spit-slicked fingers slid inside.
Tony never thought he was gay. He just never thought he was straight either. All the public image and investors and think of the shareholders crap didn't come until later.
When Tony was thirty-eight, Jarvis didn't bother with slow. He started with a low pulse that traveled back and forth between Tony's legs, first over his cock and then back past his balls, and the familiarity of this opening gambit had to be a coincidence, but it was maybe starting to freak him out just a little. Before he could even begin to figure out how to ask that question, two hard pressure points started rotating against his lower back, like a shiatsu massage chair. Or an actual shiatsu masseuse.
"I could get this for a buck ninety-nine at the mall," Tony said, but he was breathing heavily through his mouth, and his muscles were slowly turning to water.
And then he said, "Wait a minute," and then got distracted as the vibrations grew stronger. He was getting hard, probably a miracle with all the alcohol in his blood, but instead of the unyielding metal from before, the suit gradually gave way beneath the pressure of his cock, just enough resistance to keep him on the right side of pain, "which brings me back to my original point, oh damn that feels good, you've been putting in some overtime, you sneaky son of a bitch." His voice kept rising, words spilling out even faster than usual, and he would have kept going if something smooth and slick and suspiciously finger-shaped hadn't started probing against his suddenly apprehensive asshole.
After he got his breath back, he managed to say somewhat unsteadily, "If that's motor oil, I am so breaking up with you."
"A standard lubricant, sir." Jarvis's voice sounded a little too close to a purr. "Do you like my upgrades?"
"How did you--" Tony's voice cracked. "Um, get the alloy so-- oh God-- so malleable without weakening-- fuck--"
"Is this really the time, sir?"
"Brief me later," he gasped, then swallowed a whimper. The metal around his cock started to ripple, unhurried at first, then speeding up. He tried to reach down, needing to take some control of the sensation, not like he could do anything through the suit but it didn't matter anyway; his arms didn't move, still suspended over his head, because after Jarvis had slid the gauntlets on he'd never released them.
He said, "I can't move my arms, Jarvis."
"I'm aware of that, sir."
"You can let me go any time."
"I'd rather not, if you don't mind."
Tony couldn't quite convince himself that he minded.
"I am such a cheap date," he moaned. Then his hips jerked as the probe widened inside him, then lengthened, and seriously, he had to think of a better word for it than probe. He felt full, then too full, but in a good way, mostly. It didn't really hurt; it was just overwhelming, exhilarating, like the split-second after he'd lost control of the suit mid-flight and started to fall, before he could truly start to panic. Sometimes he'd shut off power, just for a second, just to feel that adrenaline rush. Not a probe. Definitely not a node. "Fuck it, you're a dildo, I'm a Care Bear, let's make this crazy relationship work."
"Do you have a fetish for Care Bears, sir?"
"Don't ever," Tony panted, "say those words to me again," and then the vibrations spread up through the dildo. "Wow, okay, you can keep doing that though."
He rocked back and forth on the platform, feeling drugged as well as drunk, hips thrusting on autopilot with no discernible effect; the pressure against his cock stayed the same no matter what he did. Jarvis shifted inside him and then pulled out partway, and before Tony could think to protest, he shoved in deep again. Lube, pound ass, repeat.
Tony's knees gave out. Jarvis's vise grip on his gauntlets was the only thing keeping him upright. Even as the thought occurred to him, Jarvis lowered his arms gently until he was kneeling with shaking thighs, then released them. The weight of the armor pulled Tony down to his hands and knees, then elbows. He felt his legs adjust themselves, spreading wider apart, and pressed his helmet to the floor with a low moan.
He hadn't been paying much attention to the viewscreen; when it flickered to life, he jumped and nearly launched into flight. The uninspiring view of the concrete beneath his face was replaced by a video feed of Tony himself-- Tony in his metal suit, Tony as Iron Man, obviously getting fucked even without anyone there to do the fucking.
"Oh, good God," he groaned, "I'm never looking at a Transformer the same way again."
The dildo changed angles, now hitting his prostate with each stroke, and Tony gave a hoarse shout as his arms gave way beneath him. His chest hit the floor, his arms spread limply at his sides, and all the while he watched it happen-- saw himself sprawled wantonly, dare he even say sluttily, while his hips jerked and fruitlessly humped against the floor. His skin burned with something like excitement or shame or both, but he never thought to close his eyes.
As he came, the small part of Tony's brain that was always, always working had two distinct thoughts:
He really hoped Pepper wasn't around anywhere.
He really hoped Jarvis had some way of cleaning and sterilizing the suit.
Something nudged against Tony's chest. He batted it away without opening his eyes. It nudged again, harder, and he opened one eye in his best approximation of a one-eyed glare.
Dummy waved a thick stack of wet-naps in front of his face.
"Gimme those," Tony growled, snatching them from the waiting claw. "Stupid tin can. Fuck off."
Dummy clicked reproachfully at him a few times, then zipped away.
"So's your mom," he muttered. The hand holding the wipes fell in the general vicinity of his abdomen, and he tried to muster the energy to start using them. His head pounded and his ass ached, or maybe it was the other way around, and he had the sinking feeling he might have actually let his tame AI fuck him in his own goddamn flying metal suit.
At least he wasn't wearing it anymore, though as the alternative seemed to be "naked and sticky on a concrete floor," he wasn't sure it was much of an improvement.
"Jarvis," he said, and let his eyelid slide shut again.
"Good morning, sir."
"No flowers? You cheap bastard. Please tell me Pepper hasn't been down here."
"I took the liberty of locking the door to your laboratory."
"Good boy." He paused. "Jarvis?"
"Sir?"
"How do you feel about antiques?"
"Spectacularly indifferent, sir."
"Good," Tony said, "that's good. Now, some ground rules...."
Tony Stark had secrets, some better kept than others. Pepper knew most of them and Jarvis knew others, and that was okay, because Pepper was discreet and if he wanted to he could just rewrite Jarvis's memory. Not that he ever would, it was just nice to know the option was there. But neither of them knew about the other Jarvis. That was still just Tony's secret, one of the few he'd never shared with anyone.
Jarvis couldn't know. Because there were your-AI-develops-a-sex-drive-and-screws-you-silly levels of weird, and then there was just plain weird.
"Don't come," Jarvis murmured in the close confines of the helmet. "Not yet. Not until I say."
"Oh God," Tony said helplessly, and his cock jerked-- he wasn't trying to be a contrary bastard, it just came naturally-- but just before orgasm hit, Jarvis stopped it, a cool metal ring pushing his balls back down and closing snugly around the base of his erection, and from somewhere far away Tony heard himself scream.
He was in such deep shit. And at the moment, he was kind of okay with that.
E-mail:
mayatawi@populli.net