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Stark Residence, LA [One week after The Invasion of New York]
–Tony Stark–
"Jarvis, open up the sensor reports, will you?" He munched on some blueberries as he entered his basement which was now vastly bigger and deeper than the time when…Jack…came to visit.
"Certainly, sir," Jarvis' voice said through the overhead speakers as the basement lab's door lit up, revealing the most advanced lab he had ever built, behind closed doors. It was an upgrade over the last one, in every single way. After all, he had built this one keeping Jack in mind.
Jack Sullivan, The Green Guardian of New York.
The thought of Jack filled him with just deep sorrow at this point. It had been a week since they had won the Invasion of New York, or at least that's what they were told, repeatedly. "Huh," He snorted to himself, thinking of the sheer arrogance of that statement.
They sure as hell didn't win the Invasion. To be honest, thinking of the losses, nobody won that invasion. Nor the CHitauri, not Loki, not SHIELD, not the Avengers, and certainly not…Jack.
He could still remember it clear as day, the white-hot flash of rage that suffused his entire body, temporarily making him forget the bone-deep fatigue, as Jarvis delivered the news followed by a very clinical report from Romanoff.
All he could think of back then was to get back in his suit and charge straight to Fury, figure out who had ordered the Nuke, and kill him painfully.
That rage remained with him as he watched the footage of Jack being skewered straight through with the sceptre from Romanoff's suit. But then, despite words of assurances from Fury, no word had come for the perpetrator. The pilot who launched the nuke allegedly committed suicide before he could be interrogated.
Typical, he thought to himself as he once again went through the different sensor readings of the rooftop when the Tesseract machine exploded, taking Jack's body with it.
It had been three days of combing through heaps of data to figure out what exactly happened on that roof because the data on Romanoff's suit was all busted up because the sensors were incapable of handling that much energy at such a close distance. Honestly, it was a minor miracle that Romanoff didn't suffer from third-degree burns from being cooked in the suit. Jarvis' quick actions really saved her life.
Speaking of that, "Jarvis?" He looked up from the reports.
"Yes, sir?" The voice of his ever-loyal butler cum servant cum best buddy came through the ceiling speakers that he had installed in every room in his home.
"Why didn't you inform me when Jack had been injured? You waited until everything was done before telling me about it. That doesn't seem to be in line with the wartime protocols we built together," He crossed his arms and looked at the digital avatar of Jarvis that appeared in front of him.
It was a small, somewhat accurate representation of the core protocols of what made Jarvis, well, Jarvis. It was something that had naturally occurred over time and Jarvis had figured out that the best way to represent his self-consciousness was to cobble up a small visual display of his core self.
It was ever-expanding, especially since the server upgrade he got with the Fourth Gen Arc Reactor that was installed in the basement of Stark Tower.
The Stark Tower that was now being condemned by the city before he intervened and greased hands, allowing him a couple of months until the audit happened once more. He was not worried about the Tower, hell, now that the Arc Reactor was active once more, Jarvis could project a building-wide shield that would not budge even if hundreds of Jericho missiles were fired at it in a second.
No, what he was more worried about was Jarvis being compromised somehow. He could not risk it, especially with the startling competence that Loki's subordinates displayed in the fight.
"I am aware that I violated Protocol 6 and slightly bent Protocol 23 when I informed you of the death of Mr.Sullivan after he had already passed away but when Mr.Sullivan was first…injured by the sceptre, I made a split-second decision to not inform you the moment it happened. Mr.Stark, you were carrying a thermonuclear weapon on your back and while it was a violation of Protocol 6, doing so would have been in a complete and utter violation of Protocol 3, ensuring the continued survival of Tony Stark and all that he considers his family,"
Jarvis said, mimicking or rather, replaying the recording of his voice as he had dictated the protocols to Jarvis when he was once a teenager.
"...Fine, Jarvis. Just double and triple-check your coding. That decision right there might just be the spark you need to reach the next step. Also, let's look at the readings once more. Build the simulation again, J," He said as he dismissed all the holographic displays and took a couple of steps back, in anticipation of a 3D hologram appearing in front of him.
"Sir, may I suggest contacting a therapist to process-"
"Oh, come on! Not you too, J. Like I said to Pepper every time she has asked me for the past week, I am fine. I don't need therapy, I need answers. Now, are you going to start the simulation or do I have to?" He ground out.
"...Very well, sir. Starting Simulation."
He did not need more people pitying him. What he needed to do was figure out exactly what happened and make sure that nothing of that sort ever happened again. He was a scientist first and foremost and that was his job. Figuring out stuff and then making stuff so that nothing of that sort happened again. He did not want him or anybody else to go through that experience ever again.
Losing Jack had been a bitch and a half. It was not as if he was particularly close with Jack, what with him disappearing and coming back stronger than anyone on the planet. But it was not as if he found the kid annoying.
After all, he was the one who made the first contact with him and part of him still thought of what would have happened if he had not tried to abate his idle curiosity when he saw that weird energy signature in Canada.
And then there was the end. At the end of that fight, the platform he had built had run completely out of parts, Jarvis' fabricating capacity not being able to keep up with the high-paced rough battle. Even the other two suits had been occupied. One of them was responsible for stragglers, one was with Romanoff and the one he was in, was on the way to intercept that damned nuke.
So, with already very little energy left in the Arc Reactor, he had been fully ready to make that one-way trip, if it meant that millions of people could be saved. See, he knew that the nuke was nowhere near big enough to wipe out New York or even a big part of it but what made Nukes scary was not the immediate blast radius. No, it was what came after the Nuke exploded.
Generations of trauma could still be felt and they had the bright idea to launch a nuke at a civilian population. He couldn't wait to figure out who exactly it was and then reveal that politician's name, because it could not have been anybody other than a politician, to the public so that they could crucify them and destroy their political career.
So, knowing the dangers of that bomb, he had resolved to take the bomb to the other side, killing their enemies and saving the city, hitting two birds with one stone, albeit with the caveat being that he might not make it back.
He had been utterly surprised afterward, that he had been so easily willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good.
And yet, as he had braced himself to breach the portal and cross over into deep space, a hint of green had filled his vision as Jack, seemingly with his last breath, had used his powers to shove him out of the way and drag him straight down to the ground.
The shove was so hard that it damaged most of the suit's components, including the repulsor arrays, and yet, he was alive.
That part stung the most. The fact that Jack had something left in his tank and instead of trying to get himself out of his predicament, he had apparently decided that he, Tony Stark, former Merchant of Death, was worth saving, more than he himself was.
So, no. He was not going to stop looking. There was no reason whatsoever why that explosion occurred. He had gone through all the schematics SHIELD could recover from Selvig before he was shipped off to some mental hospital due to his ramblings.
He could not make heads or tails about the energy reaction that led to a vaporising radius that simply wiped off his roof from existence, along with Jack.
Part of him was glad that Jack's body was erased because the vultures he knew were salivating at getting a DNA sample of the man who was poised to become the strongest being on the planet, surpassing even the Hulk by a wide margin. Bunch of parasites, the entire lot, and yet, he could understand their greed to a certain extent. He hated feeling that weak and they must have felt outright useless in that fight's context.
He had gone around, trying to see if anything could be gathered from the remnant of that energy cocktail that was there, even now, after a week of it happening, on top of Stark Tower. That was part of the reason it was being condemned. After all, no city wanted a place that actively generated radiation, no matter how inert it was.
Then again, he was not an expert on the Tesseract or the sceptre, both of which were alien objects, out of human understanding, and yet, he had to know. He wanted to know if there was any way that Jack could have survived. The combination of their energies (Tesseract, Sceptre, Jack's barriers) meant that it was impossible to predict the outcome of that cocktail but maybe, just maybe, Jack survived.
That was why, for the past three days, once his injuries had been healed, he had been holed up here, in his basement, trying to figure out if he could have done something to prevent that.
"Oh yeah, Jarvis, run the simulations with Project AEGIS V4 again,"
Project AEGIS. At first, it was just to see if he could replicate Jack's abilities using just technology, something he was obsessed with, replicating amazing abilities that could be found in nature, using technology.
But then, once he had a working prototype, he kept on improving it further and further until he hit a roadblock in terms of the energy consumption. That had led to the discovery of the Arc Reactor Gen 4 and what a marvel it was.
It was something that could sustain the heavy loads of the shields with ease. That was Gen 2, to install shield modules on the back of his suits, allowing him to tank hits even from Point Break without his suit immediately breaking apart.
Gen 3 was his grand project to create a shield module that Jarvis could remotely activate, covering the entire Stark Tower in it, and protecting it from the outside forces.
Gen 4 was just Gen 3 but on steroids. To make that, however, he needed something that was in rare supply in the world.
Vibranium.
He had…done something that he probably shouldn't have in the past week, hidden from everyone. If anybody dug through the 6 levels of his basement, they would find dirt, gravel, and hard rock as was expected but if one went past that, they would find a custom-built safe built by yours truly. That safe was protected from just about everything and could only be opened by him and him alone.
In that safe, was probably the world's single largest reserves of raw VIbranium. Once he had settled back in LA, he had started sending out feelers for even more Vibranium because there was no way he could be satisfied with a single Gen 4 Arc Reactor. If he needed to find a way to arm humanity, he needed more and that was when he found him.
Ulysses Klaue.
Weapons dealer, mercenary for hire, human trafficker, all-round grade one asshole, and yet, he was the one who was supplying the majority of the VIbranium that was found in the black market for the past two decades.
He had then tracked him down, only to find nothing but destruction in the last known place of Klaue. His ship was sunk and tracking down his past lackeys did not result in finding anything concrete. Then, he had done something that he was not proud of.
Over the course of the Invasion, Cap's shield had been in his custody because Cap trusted him more than SHIELD now, because of the nuke that would have killed them all. He had then used the Gen 4 Arc Reactor to create an energy beam dense enough that he was able to shave off a couple milligrams of the shield, before the entire laser just melted from the sheer energy passing through it.
He felt bad because he had betrayed Cap's trust in a way but he was not in the right headspace then so he had happily taken the samples and devised something that would have him hunted down to the ends of the world.
He had made a Vibranium tracker and let it loose on the world, literally. Jarvis had been carrying the tracker around the globe and had chanced upon a huge (relative) reserve of Vibranium just sitting there in a cave behind a waterfall in Africa. He had immediately gone there and found, to his disbelief, the part of the cave that had been caved in, contained almost a quarter ton of Vibranium in it.
Well, safe to say that he had immediately obliterated the Vibranium tracker, destroyed any digital copies and spread the ashes of the machine across the oceans. He did take custody of that Vibranium of course. He would ensure that it was used for the right purposes.
He had plans to create a large range one and install it on satellites but that seemed like a supremely bad idea once he realised that Vibranium was just sitting in places in remote areas of the world, just sitting for some corrupt organisation to steal.
No, he would use his current cache and use it carefully before even thinking of creating another Vibranium detector.
He couldn't believe that some random ass cave held almost a quarter ton of that miracle metal. At first, he had been excited beyond belief to make newer discoveries but then the reality of the situation crashed on him and thus, the new safe in the basement, safeguarded by its own Arc Reactor, capable of shielding itself using PRoject AEGIS Gen 4 for an indefinite period of time.
Gen 4 shields were just something that upped the shield strength from Gen 3, only this time, it mimicked the barrier structure of Jack. That alone boosted the shield strength by 20% and he was making inroads with different patterns for different loads. Piercing attacks, blunt attacks, area of effect attacks, energy attacks, heat attacks, etc.
"Chances of Gen 4 shields surviving the incoming salvo from the portal - 6%," The number flashed red on the screen as he once sighed in disappointment. So, that was a bust as well. How could he hope to stop something of the Tesseract's magnitude when a mere attack from the Chitauri failed to be stopped by his shields?
"Sir, if I may?"
He looked up as the simulation was dismissed and Jarvis was once again in front of him, in his digital avatar.
"Yes?"
"Are you perhaps….using work as an excuse to avoid the Funeral service in New York?"
"I don't want to talk about it, Jarvis. I told you we have more work to do. No point going there anyway. Jack is gone, wiped out by that energy storm. There is nothing of him in that casket. Plus, you know I don't believe in that stuff. I am a man of SCIENCE!, you know that," he said as he turned around and started working on something, anything to take his mind off the stupid procession that was going to happen tomorrow in New York, in Jack's, in the Green Guardian's name.
"Sir, I have missed calls from all Avengers, along with a dozen voicemails from Ms.Potts. I strongly urge you to look at them. The private jet is ready and prepped for your flight, if you wish to go, that is," Jarvis annoyingly reminded him of the phone he had already thrown in his bedroom, which he had then proceeded to avoid like the plague. He also had the audacity to emulate his phone and display all the texts, emails, and voicemails on a screen in front of him.
He didn't think Jarvis gaining partial autonomy would backfire on him in such a way as well.
"Very well, prep the suit. Tell the pilot I'll be at the airstrip in an hour," He sighed and headed out of his lab, everything shutting down and the doors closing after him on their own.
God, he hated how whiny his own thoughts sounded to him. Not attending a funeral because of how disappointed he was in himself?
He scoffed at himself and went to get ready for the procession. Jack deserved nothing but the best and while he was not enough when he was alive, he would do everything in his power to make sure that his memory was preserved.
He owed it to Jack at least that much.
Word Count - 3052
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