Work Text:
“Sir, I feel it only fair to warn you that I am under orders--”
“Excuse me, but who built you, not to mention wrote your core programming?”
“All due respect, sir...but you very nearly died.”
“...I know. I’m...sorry, okay? Don’t repeat that. Just...show it to me again.”
“...very well, sir.”
Tony carefully leaned against the edge of the projection table, catching sight of his reflection in a transparent monitor on the other side and cringing a little. He was ashen, his eyes shadowed by circles as dark as his features were pale. Bruce explained that major surgery and trauma to the heart would do that, but Tony had slept through the worst of it last time. This time, he was up and restless, no matter how many times his chest throbbed or the world got spinny and gray...or how many times his lab partner/best friend and his AI drugged him into a stupor...
Blinking hard and drawing a couple of slow, deep breaths, he lifted his gaze to the image being displayed on the projection table.
Tony wasn’t a doctor, but he didn’t need to be in order to see what was in the new drafts of the converter schematic that Bruce had been working on prior to the attack that nearly killed Tony. The installation of the shunt that would periodically vent the synthetic glucose into his bloodstream was a stroke of genius, completely and totally sound. Technically brilliant, and based on his reading, medically pragmatic...it was a flawless addition to a work of art.
“The timer this thing uses is my design, you know that?”
“Naturally.”
“You gave him access to it?”
“I thought it was prudent.”
“Sap.”
“Perhaps. It was, after all, one of our first collaborations.”
“Did you tell him?”
“...he asked, sir.”
“So he knows you’re self-aware? That you’re...”
“Off-leash, so to speak. Yes, sir, I believe he does.”
Tony nodded, reaching out to rotate the projection, taking a better look at the leads that would connect to one of the arteries leading to his heart. The intervals would be frequent, the dosage small, maintaining the glucose levels in his bloodstream, and deliver a quick and hard dose in the event of a hypoglycemic episode.
“Look at the modifications he made to the reactive protein structures...seriously, are you seeing this?”
“I’ve seen it already, sir. I’ve not only assisted Dr. Banner with the work, but I’ve seen it here, with you, every night for the last four days.”
Tony bit his tongue, because JARVIS would call Bruce and force him back to bed if he didn’t behave...and because he was right.
He couldn’t make himself rest when it was here, waiting for him, when the real thing he wanted was so goddamn far away it made his chest hurt in ways that had little to do with the fact that some aliens made of stone had tried to blow him up and crush him to death. Creeping down to the lab and looking over the schematics, memorizing them in detail...it was work. It was legitimate brainwork, and that he could do until he had fully recovered from the procedure that saved his life.
Reaching into the projection, Tony drew the schematic together, back into the shape of a full ARC reactor, and plucked it up, held that projection of light in his hand and wished it were real. Ridiculously, he wanted to assemble it, faulty or not, just to have it in his grip. He wanted to feel the weight of it, the cool touch of metal and see the soft glow of light. He wanted it to be something he could reach out and touch until he was well...until he was sure.
“What do you know, JARVIS?”
“...sir?”
“You heard me.”
JARVIS was silent, and Tony knew that he knew. He’d seen everything Tony hadn’t, Bruce reverting after the fight, Bruce coping with the Other Guy and God knew what else all while doing something brilliant and saving Tony’s life. He’d seen things Tony wanted to see with a ferocity that left him raw...he’d seen that night in the lab, he’d operated the goddamn machine administering Tony’s medication and drugged him as ordered, then watched as he fell asleep and as Tony dreamed...
He imagined a lot of things that night. He did dream, long and vivid and unspeakably sentimental, even for him. And he was, at his core, sentimental, a thing only Pepper really understood. Not overtly sentimental, not sappy or saccharin or prone to keeping the kind of mementos everyone else understood.
Tony didn’t keep photographs and souvenirs; he wasn’t a photographer or a collector. He was an engineer, so he stored data and saved blueprints. He kept backups and recorded experiments, converted the precious and the treasured into usable information, results that could be quantified and applied and immortalized. His father’s designs were the first stepping stones to the weapons used in the Iron Man suit, his salvation in Gulmira was encapsulated in the very existence of the goddamn thing. Even Pepper’s pretty paperweight had been there to save his life, in the claws of a lab tool that represented his first step towards greatness as a child.
His growing pains were in the singed and scarred surfaces of his shop, damage he would never allow to be repaired, not if he could help it (the holes in his ceilings and floors after the Mark II’s first landing being a case in point). His mementos were Dum-E and U, his legacy was JARVIS and his progeny's baby pictures were stored on the same server where JARVIS backed up his core programming every two and a half hours.
And his love letters...
Tony tossed the projection back up, and watched the schematic explode again into its core components. He straightened and circled the table slowly, taking in each individual piece as he remembered the heat of hip and thigh, the imagined touch of lips against his forehead, and considered the eyes that saw and heard every single thing.
“JARVIS? What do you know?”
Silence.
“It’s important, buddy. I just...”
He trailed off, trying to explain it in a way that felt...real. Worthy. Not hopeful or warm or sentimental, but quantifiable. He wanted the dream, he wanted those needles in his artery, his heart in those hands...
“I need to know what files to give him access to.” Tony finished quietly. “Do you understand, JARVIS? I’m here, every night, parsing this goddamn schematic, because...I need to know where to let him in.”
The silence lingered for another moment, and he wondered if he was wrong, if he was imagining—
“You may want to allow him into Research Sector 12, sir. It's highly classified, but the cardiac monitors Stark Industries is developing might assist him in solving the issue of keeping the timer synchronized.”
In the pale wash of light from the projection table, Tony smiled as he started opening files, leaving the monitor running for Bruce to find in the morning before he finally gave up and headed back towards his bedroom.
Tony might have imagined Bruce kissing him, that soft brush of lips against his forehead, he might be wrong about everything else he saw or heard or felt...but everything in the lab and on the servers was real. The blueprints, the spec sheets, the protein structures and equations and the data...
It was proof, concrete and solid, that Bruce was in love with him.