"That's right," Tony agreed, tugging at another piece of chicken and letting his eyes linger on Jarvis despite the fact that he would pretty clearly have preferred to avoid them. "Basically forever ago."
Five or six years, actually, but when that was roughly a quarter of one's earthly existence, it seemed like an eternity; too much had changed in that span of time to consider its two extremes to be within the same lifetime. New home, new role, new friends (if the same general breed), new sources of the same old pressure to shut up, behave, be better, produce. He had this thing in his chest, which no longer quite horrified him, which - now that he'd more or less stopped growing - no longer woke him up with the desire to claw it out because he could feel it like something alien inside him. He'd begun to convince even himself of the line he delivered to everyone else: that he was proud of it, that it was part of him, that the doctors could pry it away from his cold, dead body. There was no end to what could become normal - to what could start to seem necessary.
This still wasn't normal. Far from it. He was still keyed to Jarvis's every move, to what nuances of expression he could make out in the shifting shadows of the light from the television, now blue, now green, now the bright orange of a particularly dramatic fireball. His peripheral vision was shadowed, doubling the edges of everything he saw as though he were looking through an imperfect sheet of glass, but he was fairly certain he saw a smile - not a reaction he'd elicited from anyone in the past few days. His stone-faced bodyguards and his exasperated minders at work might as well have been faces on a screen, for all they responded to him. It was like they knew it was what he craved - and they probably did. He hardly made much of a mystery of it.
Tony slid his plate to the corner of the coffee table and kicked back to lie along the length of the couch, more or less in reach of his dinner (and with a slightly better view of his new audience); he rested his glass, now approaching half empty, on his abdomen. Odds that he would sped the night here were steadily increasing. "I thought about going that way, for a while. Gamemaking. But if you can't be the head guy, I don't really see the point. All this seniority crap is just - a bunch of geezers looking out for each other. Not the way you get actual ideas going, you know? I'd rather work on my own and do something real. Life's too short to work your ass off and let someone else take the credit." Twenty-something years old, and already wise; what a gift.