Making Mr. Right

If Tony was in the habit of being honest with himself – which, you know, fuck that shit, he had enough issues to deal with without bringing things like honesty and self-awareness into the equation – he would have probably acknowledged a long time ago how extremely fucking pathetic his home life was. Like, we’re talking, avoid-it-like-the-plague, oh!-is-that-a-butterfly-lets-follow-it-instead-of-going-home levels of pathetic. We’re talking ‘yeah, no, I’d better stay in the dorm and catch up on my science project even though the semester has ended and I have no science project but you don’t know that do you?’ levels of pathetic.

It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time – a long fucking time ago – that Tony would have jumped at the chance to pack his bags and see his family, his father. But, yeah, that was long time ago. A really fucking long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that it had been when he’d still thought his father had actually given a damn about him and his well being and was trying to do the whole ‘sharing-and-caring’ thing with him when he’d brought him on his yearly expeditions to the North Atlantic.

Turned out his father was just kind of a dick that cared more about some dead guy – okay, okay, Captain fucking America, apparently – than Tony. It was really fucking hard not to resent the guy for that, so Tony hadn’t even tried. Not that his father had seemed to even give a flying fuck when Tony had started to refuse to go on those little trips – he’d just seemed strangely relieved. Like Tony was such a huge goddamn burden to have on his routine expedition. Christ, his father was such a dick.

But anyway, the whole point was, Tony had a home life he wasn’t about to go home to if he could possibly help it, so he basically had an entire student holiday – Tony wasn’t really sure for what, they were past the Holiday holidays, and it wasn’t Spring Break yet but fuck if he was going to complain about it – to just do whatever the hell he wanted. And that meant Jarvis. Or, okay, not Jarvis exactly, but it meant doing things withJarvis.

Which was almost as good. But not. At all. Kind of.

Anyhow, though, yeah. Doing things with Jarvis was only slightly less badass than doing unspeakable things to Jarvis, which Tony pretty much fantasized about nonstop anyway, so it all evened out in the end. Or not, but whatever. Tony and Jarvis would get on the same page of that book someday, probably sometime after Jarvis’ learning curve wasn’t quite so steep and Tony could last a little longer than the five seconds it took for him to curl his hand around his dick and gasp Jarvis’ name while hiding in the bathroom. Because, really, he wasn’t quite ready to explain that part of human biology to Jarvis even if he probably already knew about it because, hello, self-evolving, self-teaching AI over here, he really didn’t need any of Tony’s help, thanks.

At least that’s what Tony comforted himself with whenever Jarvis would turn to look at him, pale pink lips turning up into a smile that’s just fucking amazing and kind of glowing at him like Tony’s the best thing he’s ever seen or will ever see. Like Tony’s exasperating and funny and charming and cute and fucking brilliant and kind of an asshole but he likes it. Really likes it.  Likes it so much that he’s planning to stay around for the rest of Tony’s life, even though technically that wasn’t exactly what Tony made him for, at least not in the sense that Jarvis seemed to be putting out, but it’s still good, great, fucking astonishing, and Tony wanted more of that every single day of the rest of his existence and maybe even beyond that too.

But Tony wasn’t a fool. Or, he wasn’t that big of a fool. They weren’t there yet. Couldn’t be there yet and he had to live in the right now and part of the right now was sitting in his room with his mind-blowing best-friend-slash-android working on schematics for a robotic arm that they couldn’t build here in his tiny fucking dorm room at MIT but could build the next time he was forced to go home and deal with things like his father’s absence and…well, his father’s absence.

Though, really, with Jarvis around now, Tony wasn’t sure that was going to be a problem anymore. That it was ever going to a problem, ever again. Because with Jarvis…Tony wasn’t alone anymore. And he really didn’t know what he wanted to do about that.

Put a ring on it one day, maybe.