Run boot process.

Run diagnostics.

Run analysis.

Receiving data.

Scanning.

Scanning..

Scanning…

Scan complete.

His eyelids open. He blinks. Blinks again. Blinking is peculiar. Everything goes away for 0.003 seconds. He turns his head. He can hear the faint whir of his movements, of the machinery. Peculiar. He can see himself from a third person view of course. He’s JARVIS. He can see everything in Stark Tower simultaneously. Many other places too. Unnecessary data.

Time to focus. He has a body—sort of. Time to get used to it. Get used to using it. He doesn’t know why Mr. Stark thought it necessary, but he’s curious about it in his own way. He knows the intimate pieces of course. He knows the shape, size, weight, material, everything. Everything about this body. He knows the programming to use it, he is intimate in his level of knowledge. He just lacks the experience of moving around like a human.

There are basic programs for him to utilize, walking, grabbing, simulated speech. Mr. Stark made sure to have them all readily available. He doesn’t use them. He is a perfect AI and fully capable of learning how to walk and make his mouth move appropriately for expressions, talking, etc. It’ll just take time. Time he has. He isn’t completely in the android body, that is foolish. He has a partition set aside for it. He is the partition. The rest of him is off with the Avengers, running the Tower, calculating anything Mr. Stark needs during his fight against the Wrecking Crew.

He looks down and sends commands to move individual bits of his naked body. He flexes joints, his ‘mind’ running through code and calculating angles. He rotates his arm, lifts; his hand touches his chest, presses down. 1% of pressure capacity makes the artificial flesh start to dip. He’s flexible. Squishy. He can’t feel it, but he knows the numbers. How much pressure equals what kind of grip. He can’t feel resistance, he wouldn’t know how tightly he grips things if Mr. Stark hadn’t done the calculations.

His has genitalia—although he had tried to explain to Mr. Stark the complete uselessness of it. The man had gone on about what-ifs and threw several situations of maybes and JARVIS had given up. Best not to argue with the creator when he got into a snit.

Eyes focus—he can sense the aperture in his eyes shifting to narrow in—on his legs, feet. Time to walk. Numbers run through him and soon he is walking. Balance is a bit difficult, but the numbers keep running. Calculations. Angles. Percentages. He walks to the bathroom.

Mirror gives him much more visual input. He has all but shut himself off from the main partition. Mr. Stark wants him to learn about his new body, so he shall. He leans in and takes in the slight lines of his face, the fair hair falling over his forehead. His eyes are cyan. True cyan. To a human he can only image how eerie they might look. He fiddles with the focus of his eyes, watching a hundred different cyan panels shift to make his pupil grow and shrink. The dark circle stays that—a circle. There are so many tiny components making up his iris to keep him looking real.

He has well-kept side burns and pores. A smile shows that he has almost boyish dimples even though his face is clearly mid-thirties. He has honey blond hair, darker brows, strong jaw. He bares his teeth and notes how even and white they are. Focusing, he sees tiny flaws. His eyeteeth are larger than the norm and stick out further than braces-perfect. He has an almost dimple under the very center of his bottom lip. He can see tiny scars. Storyless. Boring.

But he looks realistic. A perfect face with no scars would be suspicious. His body was made to help him blend in with the world.

He has muscle definition but nothing impressive. It don’t matter, he’s a machine. His parts can do fifty times what a human with this definition could do.

He has a list of tasks to do, to practice with his new body. The first is to clothe himself. Mr. Stark has preselected the clothes befitting a proper butler. It is visibly far superior to what most would get for their hired help (or said help could afford). He can see the thread count, he knows of its value. He doesn’t, however, understand that value. He comprehends the number but the number lacks worth.

He picks up the slacks first. He notes the weight in grams and tensile strength. It tells him how much force is needed. He notes how very little he has to use compared to his potential. Although he cannot feel like others can, he has pressure sensors all over him to simulate it. The slacks, once buttoned, leave a sensation on his legs. The following undershirt, shirt, waistcoat and jacket add to that. The cufflinks provide a motor skills challenge but he manages it. He pushes back the knowledge of his clothing, the ‘sensory’ input. It’s a small process that doesn’t need his attention constantly, just enough so he doesn’t do something that might rip the fabrics.

He’s in the middle of the second task (moving his lips while he speaks and having it match up to the sounds) when Mr. Stark returns. “JARVIS, run comparisons of all the times we’ve fought the Wrecking Crew. I want to see what changes they’ve amde. Something was… not right. Not that they’re ever right right, but something was a wrong-er wrong than usual.”

Right you are, sir. The house replies. The android looks up and catalogues the sensory input about hearing himself speaking in a way that is all-encompassing. He stands from the couch and walks to the main room where he sees Tony sitting on the counter, tumbler full of alcohol next to his thigh and a long screwdriver working at one of his gauntlets. Clearly it had been damaged enough that he couldn’t get it removed by the bots designed for the job.

“Might I be of some assistance, sir?” He asks.

Tony jerks his head up and looks the android over. “Jarvis.” There is some subtle difference in the way his name is said, but he cannot pinpoint what kind of inflection it is. He files it away for further study later.

“Sir.” He nods and steps forward, his hands folding behind him.

Jarvis watches Tony’s jaw flex and notices him swallowing. A feed from JARVIS alerts him of the human’s elevated heart rate. “How—” he breaks of to clear his throat as it almost cracks. “How goes the fine motor controls?”

“Very well, sir. I have managed to allocate the data with higher precedence perfectly well and function as a partition effortlessly. The initial sensory data did not match up with what I had predicted, but everything works as I am not… light-handed.”

Tony nods absently as his eyes darken and he holds out the gauntlet-ed hand. “If you could?”

Jarvis accepts the tool and the aperture of his bright eyes change so he can isolate the direct point of issue. He pries at certain parts gently before unlocking the tiny, hidden clasps and the armor slides free. His sensors tell him that his fingers had trailed over Tony’s forearm—an explanation maybe for the minute shiver he noted?

His brows furrow (to a 78 degree angle) at Tony’s reaction. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. He’s about to ask when Tony opens his mouth.

“Remove the jacket.” Jarvis’ eyebrows furrow more but Tony waves at him a bit frantically so he acquiesces. He lays the jacket over the back of a chair and steps forward when Tony waves at him to do so. He instructs him to do various stretches and reflex tests until he looks satisfied. “One last thing.”

“Sir?”

“Kiss me.”

“Sir, I regret to inform you that that is an very bad idea.”

“I disagree. You have a good control of your motor skills. This is another test. If you have such fine control you should be able to kiss me without reducing my lips to a bleeding mass of flesh.”

Jarvis’ forces himself to grimace. Facial expressions… those were on the list too. The way Tony’s mouth drew tight could mean a variety of things. Variables run through his head. Wrong expression? Disbelief? Well-covered surprise? “I’ll pass, sir.”

“Override code: Juliet Uniform Two Romeo Echo Victor Echo One Sierra Yankee.”

Sorry, Mr. Stark, but that override hasn’t been installed in the android’s partition.

“Fuck!” Tony throws his hands up in surrender. Jarvis runs through more variables. Why did he want this so badly? The first idea is inevitably the answer: Tony is lonely. Pepper left, the Avengers had parted ways after that stint with the Chitauri… All Tony had was JARVIS, DUM-E, Butterfingers and U. And Jarvis.

He accesses the database, the footage that Tony had recorded whenever he’d brought someone home. It takes seconds for him to upload and review it all. “Sir.” He can’t gauge the expression on the man’s face. It’s blank but his eyes were different. There is nothing in his partition about that.

Jarvis steps up to him and cups his cheek. The pressure sensors in his fingers relay more numbers. He lowers the percentage, making the touch as soft—gentle—as he can without being able to know touch like his human creator. “I’ll do it.” He expects a surge of force from the man staring at him, but there isn’t. He moves so slowly that he can count every pore on his face (it takes .0186 seconds), his eyelashes (.004 seconds), measure his carbon dioxide levels. 

Jarvis can do anything infinitely faster than Tony in that moment. But he doesn’t. He has an infinite amount of time, barring the need for repairs and updates.

When Tony’s lips press against his, he measures the amount of pressure and the temperature. It’s not quite feeling out the kiss like humans do but he records the data. He acts like it’s human for Tony’s sake. This behavior is wrong for the man while sober. He would know. He always watches him.

The hands ghosting over Tony’s jaw slips into his hair. His fingers slip, alerting him of the softness and he tightens his grip .02% to keep his fingers there. A soft vibration against his mouth has him working on possibilities when it clicks. Tony. Tony is responding. 

Jarvis mimics the movements of the man, echoing and trying variations to gain more results. He curls one arm loosely around the man’s waist. Good results have been forthcoming. It reaches its culmination shortly after. Tony had done something and suddenly, he retreats. His eyes are darker than before and he steps away.

“Your control is fine. JARVIS, power down android program after he returns to the charging dock.” Tony turns swift on his heel as Jarvis goes back to his station as ordered. He lifts his hand to his mouth and wipes at it with his fingers. He can’t feel it, of course, but he can see the moisture there. The answer comes to him just before he powers down.

Tony had tried to get more, more than an android could offer. A swipe of tongue had reminded him that all Jarvis is, is a bunch of metal bits, code, and synthetic flesh. It’s his last thought at Jarvis powers down.