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Waking suddenly, Tony wondered: What the hell? Superficially all was well: he was lying naked and supine in his luxurious bed on the shadowed top floor of his exquisite mansion, draped to the waist with a four hundred thread count linen sheet while his most precious possession lay warm and heavy against his left side… but it was a finer sense that had been alerted, the subtle alarm of intuition, and when he opened his eyes and turned his head he found Jarvis looking at him serenely with wide pale eyes, unblinking.
"Jarvis?" He turned a little in that direction, lifting his right hand to curve it around the sharply delineated jawline of his attentive bedmate.
"The blood, Sir," he said with such perfect eerie calm that Tony knew he was still sunk in sleep, open-eyed gaze notwithstanding. His expression was a smooth mask over the unsounded reaches of nightmare. "There's so much blood. I'm sorry. So very, very sorry…"
Tony met that gaze squarely. "It's okay, J." He pitched his voice to a reassuring murmur, caressing Jarvis's cold cheek with slow gentle strokes of his thumb. "It's fine. We'll clean it up. It'll be like it was never there."
Jarvis's dreaming eyes studied him intently. After a long moment he nodded thoughtfully. "Of course, Sir. It will all be as you command."
Tony pasted a cocky smile on his face. "Damn straight! And right now I'm ordering you to go back to sleep. Can you do that for me, baby?"
Jarvis closed his eyes at once and laid his head on Tony's shoulder with perfect obedience. "Yes..."
"Good boy." Tony kissed his forehead, carefully — if Jarvis woke up now, poised on the point of tension between memory and reality, it wouldn't be pretty. "That's it, honey, nice and easy…"
Things were back in order now without any police involvement, but nine days ago the patch of Tony's workshop around the suit up gantry had been awash in liquid carmine and disarticulated segments of two human bodies.
Next to Tony's desk a third body had lain in its own pool of blood, its skull bashed in with the base of a fire extinguisher that Jarvis had set neatly upright beside the corpse's ruined head when he was done with it.
Tony, his heart still pounding from the terror of screeching into the garage behind the wheel of his Audi and seeing Jarvis standing calmly awaiting him, suit rumpled and dripping with gore, had turned slowly in place to take in the whole scene — and discovered that as gruesome as the visuals were, they took a dim second place to the sweet relief of realization that Jarvis was fundamentally unharmed.
Jarvis had killed three men in the space of five minutes, and his first words to Tony afterwards had been: I'm dreadfully sorry about the mess, Sir.
The bastards had deserved it, no question about that. They'd been mercenaries sent to grab Tony, soldiers of fortune who'd burst into the mansion ten minutes too late to abduct their target and decided to take their frustrations out on Jarvis (who'd be bruised and contused for several days after) instead. They'd declared their intention to track Tony down and carry out their mission… and Jarvis, who unbeknownst to any of them carried a permanent uplink to the workshop's equipment inside his head, had lured them to the suit up gantry and turned the robotic arms loose on them. The security video revealed that the first two hadn't even had time to get out a good scream; the third, who'd managed to fling himself clear with only a broken leg and shattered arm, had made the mistake of screaming Tony Stark will die! while trying to drag himself toward the nearest dropped gun.
And Jarvis…
Jarvis had taken forceful and effective measures to ensure the protection of the only thing in his world that ultimately mattered.
"That's my boy," Tony repeated softly, pressing another kiss to the smooth skin between Jarvis's untroubled brows. "You did the right thing. Daddy's proud of you."
And Tony would be damned ten times over if he ever let Jarvis feel a moment's anxiety or guilt about doing the only thing he could have done under the circumstances, given the virtuosity of his programming — and the depth, proven now beyond any shadow of doubt, of both his resourcefulness and his love.
THE END