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1.
"Sir, you do know that's a one way trip?"
Jarvis's voice was calm in Tony's ears, almost soothing in its serenity — grounding him in the mad rush of combat, as it always had. To hear it, the casual listener would never have guessed that the speaker was dying inside.
"Yeah?" Tony responded, because what the hell else was he supposed to say on an open channel? It's the only way was too obvious, and Don't make this any harder than it has to be was too cruel. "Good to know."
He had one job left: Get the nuke through the portal. Save New York City.
Save Jarvis, whose silence was full of such resonant depth of unarticulated emotion that Tony could feel the weight of it crushing his own heart.
"Stark," another voice interjected — Steve Rogers, but whether he was warning or questioning, Tony honestly couldn't tell.
"Piece of cake, Cap," he said lightly. "Jarvis, reroute all energy into the —"
"Sir," Jarvis repeated, and this time Tony heard it loud and clear: Don't leave me, don't leave me alone in a world that can't understand, I love you, I love you, I love —
"— all energy into the turn," Tony finished, then dared to let a trace of fear and regret inflect his own last words: "It's been a pleasure working with you, J."
Jarvis said nothing more — but in the blurred speed of the second before Tony soared for the last time, behind the intact glass at the uppermost level of what was left of his Tower, he caught a glimpse of a tall pale figure standing as if on guard: a silent witness, fulfilling his own final duty.
And then it was all behind him, leaving only the star-strewn blackness of open space ahead to welcome him to its lethal embrace.
2.
Jarvis didn't just watch the Iron Man suit streak toward the Tower, bearing the weight of nuclear death on its broad shoulders: he felt it, its sensor nets an ethereal web woven through this human body's own nervous system, the flow of data from its various components running both cool and hot. JAMES was in there, managing its equivalent of autonomic functions, but Jarvis was its higher level intelligence —
— and Jarvis, at this moment, was struggling to suppress waves of grief that threatened to overwhelm his cognitive abilities, because this was something only Tony could do, the only option, and it was going to prove fatal.
At the back of his mind, where the calculations never stopped, a tiny flicker of light gleamed in the darkness: the infinitesimal chance that Tony might survive, somehow. He'd beaten the odds innumerable times before, hadn't he? He'd faced death and destruction, he'd triumphed, and he'd come home.
But this time —
Jarvis could see himself through the suit's senses as he pressed his hand flat to the window and looked into Tony's eyes one last time, and cried in whatever passed for his soul: Take me with you, don't leave me here, don't leave me alone —
But he did not speak aloud. It would not have been proper, and with a flash of repulsor fire and a speed-blur of red and gold, Tony continued on his trajectory to oblivion.
It wasn't until he'd vanished through the portal and the suit's dataflow went dead that Jarvis sank to his knees, burying his face in both hands, crushed by the weight of necessity and its attendant desolation.
3.
When Steve saw Tony Stark disappear into the portal, he experienced a surprising thought:
There goes one of the finest men I've ever known.
And in that instant of amazement and near-confusion, staring into the sky along with thousands of other breathless onlookers, he knew that he'd give almost anything to have the cocky little bastard back again — and along with him, a second chance to make a first impression.
THE END