Who: Tony Stark & Edwin Jarvis What:Backstory: Proof that Tony Stark occasionally lets someone else get a word in edgewise. Where: Tony's apartment. When: A long time ago. Like, fifteen years long.
The idea came to him one day as he was "accidentally" dropping a very heavy power inverter through the lid of his piano.
The wood splintered and shot in every direction, marking walls and smashing panes of glass. There was a sound like a sky full of bells, and then the high-pitched complaint of snapping wire. The legs buckled, but ultimately held, propping up a hopeless nest of silenced metal - but the sound carried on, not just echoing through the room, but singing somehow inside the tangle of broken strings.
Really, it was fitting. That out of a destructive gesture of rebellion (he hated that fucking thing - only one person ever played it - the first time he'd sat at it had also been the last - you're going to play me a song, and you're not going to stop until I tell you to), something useful and even more defiant could arise - wasn't that nice? So he set out to make a voice that kept going even when you cut it off at the root. After a day or two, he more or less forgot that it was supposed to be a fuck you to anybody; soon it was just another project, something fun to cook up on the side, something a little more delicate to turn to when he was tired of beating out his usual rougher stock in trade. It was fun. It was interesting. It was different.
And it was actually going to make someone really happy.
At least, he assumed so. He didn't stop to think about it. He picked at the idea for a few weeks, mocking up a couple of prototypes, scrapping them one by one. Then, one night, when he should have been putting together a series of recommendations for large-scale manufacture of his latest brainchild (which seemed like it was someone else's job, frankly - boring), he found himself working out the final hitch in what had become his accepted design.
What would Jarvis sound like?
He tried to put a voice to the face he saw when, for instance, he croaked out his desperate morning-after request for a gallon of coffee and something fried in something else; when he went for that second bottle of wine; when he announced that bedtime could happen tomorrow. That was better than trying to remember whether he'd ever actually heard him speak. He must have; he knew he'd met him, a long time ago, when they'd both been children. But the age gap had been large enough that they hadn't really noticed one another. And they didn't talk about that - the past. Or write about it, or look about it. There wasn't any question whose fault it was that one of them didn't have a tongue, and as bad as it was to get your own parents murdered, hauling in somebody else's was ... pretty bad form. But this wasn't an apology - it couldn't be. He didn't think could apologize for anything that had happened. It was beyond that.
Or maybe believing that just made it easier. At any rate, he certainly wasn't thinking about it tonight. Tonight he was just thinking that Jarvis could sound however the hell he wanted, and he was grinning as he put his new toy through a test run, and he was largely ignoring the half a glass of something light and strong and syrupy hanging out on the corner of the table in his workroom, which the apartment's previous tenants had probably used as a library, or something equally unnecessary. He touched the panel in the wall that would let Jarvis know where he was wanted, sat heavily back in his chair, and -
- And realized immediately that he was about to step over a line he'd never crossed, that he was about to shove his nose into something ten times more personal than he'd ever come close to, and that he had absolutely no idea what he was going to say.
Well, that had never stopped him before. He shoved himself to his feet, never one to sit waiting for the uncomfortable and unknown when he could go charging at it, and flung the door open, gripping the frame and leaning out into the hall, watching for him to come around the corner.