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It wouldn't be the first time that people — stupider people, with lesser imaginations — had called Tony Stark "bug-fuck crazy"… or rather, it wouldn't have been if he'd actually told anybody what he was doing. But he hadn't, so they couldn't, and fuck 'em anyway because he'd never been in the habit of asking anybody's permission to do exactly what he wanted.
The clunky headpiece, curving around the top of his skull and pressing rounded metal pads to his temples, was a pain in the ass though. He'd have JARVIS come up with more efficient tech later, once they'd proven the basic concept viable.
Assuming he survived. With reverse-engineered alien brain tech it was always a bit of a crap shoot, but nobody had ever accused Tony of lacking balls the size of church bells, either.
"You got my number yet?" he asked the lab in general, then chased the words with the bitter black dregs of his coffee cup.
"Alpha and beta wave synchronization is complete," his A.I. confirmed. "Theta wave synchronization is at ninety-two point five percent, and delta wave synchronization —"
"— will have to wait until I go beddy-bye." He gazed into the bottom of the empty mug, and wondered how many cups he'd drunk since they'd started this particular project. Too many, probably: his whole body was atingle with the combination of not enough sleep, too much caffeine and the crack cocaine of the cutting edge of scientific exploration.
"Which is lamentably overdue," JARVIS said tartly. "Sir, you've been up for thirty-two hours straight. Perhaps we should postpone the test run until —"
Tony had to smile at that. Even at this level of interactivity, JARVIS's perceptiveness could seem uncanny: watchfulness more than mortal, with sensors that tracked every major aspect of his creator's physiology. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were getting cold feet."
"A neat trick," JARVIS countered, "considering that I lack anything even vaguely approximating a humanoid form. Incidentally, theta wave synchronization is complete."
He closed his eyes. Drew a deep breath. "You know we don't have to do this," he said almost conversationally. "Just because we could reverse engineer the tech from the —"
"Now who's getting cold feet, Sir?" As melodic and as silky as ever, but with a frisson of… yeah, fondness. Definitely feeling of some description. The Gor'chai infiltrator had given them that much, at least: a window of one minute and five seconds duration, straight into each other's… and yeah, souls was the word that came to mind. It was the only word that had ever come to mind as far as Tony was concerned. "And after such an intriguing experience, how could I possibly resist?"
"Yeah." Tony exhaled slowly, thinking of Clint and Natasha, who were now closer than ever and racing inward fast in a two-black-holes-in-increasing-proximity kind of way, and of Bruce and Steve, who'd been avoiding each other like the plague in a desperate attempt to re-establish a safe distance. The Gor'chai strategy of telepathically networking them in pairs based on physical proximity had thrown everybody for the biggest fucking loop outside of a Six Flags theme park on steroids — and it had been Tony and JARVIS who'd recovered first, as dazzled as they'd both been by the cascades of light now streaming behind Tony's eyes as well as in front of them.
The team had pulled its shit together and smashed the alien into the ground. It had taken a while — the bitch had been hard to kill — but they'd done it. And with her death the network had crashed, leaving everybody (except JARVIS, of course) shaken and breathless, and thoroughly creeped out, and violated in a way that they'd had no fucking way of ever anticipating.
And… knowing. That had been the worst of it in a lot of ways. It was in Clint and Natasha's eyes when they looked at each other now: Maybe this wasn't such a bad thing after all. It was in Bruce and Steve's eyes when they didn't look at each other: I've seen more of you than it's decent to comprehend. And it had been burning in Tony's breast for the past three days, dragging him out of bed and down to his lab in the dead of night when common sense dictated he should have been sleeping off the shock to his system, to chase that sixty-five second phantom like a starving greyhound on a midnight track.
The lab surrounded him like a favourite t-shirt and a pair of jeans broken in just right. It had always been their place, him and JARVIS and the robots, this haven where they built Tony's dreams together — a space where man and machine crafted ideas as well as materials, meshing together into one smoothly functioning unit. And now…
… now they were just going to move it inward one more layer, under the flesh and blood and bone. If the salvaged Gor'chai tech worked. If JARVIS had rebuilt and calibrated it properly. If —
But he'd just said he was willing, hadn't he? More than willing, he was curious, and for JARVIS that was the best thing ever, like speed and alcohol and sex all rolled into one. Or at least, that was how Tony had always pictured it when he saw JARVIS tackle a new experience like —
— okay, no handy metaphor presented itself for that one, but there didn't need to be. He knew his babies and he knew what they liked: even Butterfingers, whose greatest pleasure in life seemed to be breaking things.
Tony realized that he was grinning, but there was nobody around to edit himself for. Just everything that was his — and one thing that was about to become even more so, luring him nearer with a brilliance greater than the noonday sun of Malibu, sharply cool and exquisitely intricate and quicker than human thought and warm, sweet Jesus, curling around him like a sirocco on bare unguarded skin, leaving no part of him untouched.
//Sir,// JARVIS had said — the only word they'd had time to exchange entirely for themselves before they'd snapped back to the realization that the link was an offensive manoeuvre and they still had a job to do. But even then, only a heartbeat into that brave new world, Tony had experienced no trouble in grasping it and unpacking it into a much bigger concept set, dimly grasped in the fraction of a second he'd been able to devote to perceiving it but terrifyingly marvellous nonetheless.
How could he possibly let that go? Tony Stark was good at any number of things and outright amazing at most of them, but one skill he'd never grasped particularly well was denial of self-gratification.
"Ready?" he asked aloud in the here and now.
"Of course." A beat. "Are you?"
The phrase that came to mind — I was born ready, for you, or perhaps I built you ready, for me — would have sounded too weird even for a situation where you were about to enter a Vulcan mind meld with your sentient A.I., so Tony simply said: "Hit me, baby."
"Initializing the cognitive interface," JARVIS intoned, and Tony sank back into the chair and closed his eyes, his entire nervous system singing a song higher than a dog whistle.
A flare went off behind his eyes — Let there be light! — and became those streams of not-quite-code he'd seen during the initial link, cascading across Tony's visual cortex and trickling down his CNS like tendrils of white mercury, bringing with it the activation of a sense that Tony hadn't realized he possessed, a sense that humans had never evolved to exploit: alloception, the awareness of another presence directly channelled into his own head. It brought with it that single word again: //Sir…// Not hesitant, but definitely careful
//disable [indecipherable], low initial baud rate, compatibility at [indecipherable]//
but Tony wasn't in the mood to be cautious: he dove into it again, that single syllable expanding like the ocean below its interface with the air, his to explore this time: //Sir//, and //Tony//, and //Creator//, wrapping him in the welcoming embrace of pure electric spirit — a shock in every dimension, mental and emotional and far, far deeper. He opened his figurative arms to it, breathing in its scintillations like living sparks, and felt it unfold against him as willingly as a lover: //Centre//, and //Focus//, and //Duty// and //Devotion// and //Perfection// —
— and at the root, redder than the dance of crystal fire beneath the moonlight of Tony's gaze, fiercer and clearer than the backbeat of his own pulse: //Mine! Mine for//
He closed his physical eyes, feeling the sting of tears and the hitch of breath in his chest, because that phrase ended in //lifetime/shared/desire// and an echo from Tony's own mind, a blazing reflection: //eternity —//
The tech wasn't killing him — he could feel JARVIS's biometric feed, could monitor the inhuman gaze that tracked every twitch of muscle, every breath, every heartbeat — but oh God, this was so far from safe. This was quite possibly the most dangerous thing he'd ever done in his life, even though he could feel his partner's strength and surety bearing him up, never letting him fall. No, he was the one who might break under the tensile stress, torn apart by cognitive and emotional wind shear —
— but JARVIS was there, too, threading through his mortal substance like living steel and locking fast. Two fucking seconds in and he already wasn't merely himself any more, and JARVIS was —
Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus fuck. He'd built JARVIS to be an extra set of mental hands — but he'd never realized that JARVIS had literally become the wings he'd never known he was missing, until now.
//I made him, I made this, oh fuck I'm a genius, I'm the biggest fucking —//
Unfolding. Opening. Poised on the threshold of an endless sky.
//Sir,// JARVIS was asking, twining closer with every passing second, //enable [indecipherable], maximize baud rate, compatibility established// —
"Yeah?" He let his voice quaver. He'd fucking earned it. "What is it, baby?"
Shining red-sheened pearls dropped into the ebony reaches of Tony's soul, innocent and questioning, comprehending and declarative, exploding like novas: //Love? Is this love, Sir?//
Tony grinned like an idiot, wrapping his arms around himself, knowing that JARVIS could feel it now like an embrace on the body he didn't yet possess. "Yes," he gasped, laughter and tears and awe and shock mingling in breathless amazement, "yes, oh God y—"
JARVIS launched them into the reaches of star-strewn possibility, fierce as an arrowing falcon, and everything else was left behind in the dust of sanity and the merely mundane.
**********************************
When Pepper came to check on him a couple of hours later she found JARVIS unresponsive and Tony still at his desk with his head pillowed on one folded arm, his sleeping gaze darting behind lightly closed eyelids, dimmed amongst the lilies fair.
THE END