The front door hadn’t fully closed behind him when JARVIS’s voice filled the entryway.
“Welcome home, Master Leon.
It has been some time.”
“Half a year.” Leon set the Mark I armor against the foyer wall — it hit the hardwood with the dignity-free clank of raw cave engineering — and stood still for a moment, just listening.
The house.
The climate control.
The specific acoustic quality of an intelligent system that knew exactly which room you were in and adjusted itself accordingly.
There it is.
Home.
The spacecraft had been built quickly and for one purpose.
No JARVIS subroutine — it would have wasted processing load, and Leon had been strapped to a titanium plate for most of the trip anyway.
He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the voice until right now.
“Good news,” he said, heading for the stairs.
“Tony’s been extracted from the terrorist organization.
He’s with military personnel and should be back in LA anytime soon.”
“Excellent news, Master Leon.
Shall I contact Miss Potts?”
“Does she already know?”
“Miss Potts received confirmation of Mr.
Stark’s rescue approximately ten minutes ago.
She’s currently en route to the airport.”
Leon paused on the landing.
“Ten minutes.
Faster than I expected.” He continued up.
“Good.
She’s been carrying that for months.”
He found his bathroom, stripped off the pants that had successfully survived atmospheric reentry, three rockets, and a corridor full of automatic weapons fire, and turned on the shower.
The first contact of actual water with his actual scalp, after six months of whatever the spacecraft’s hygiene system constituted, produced a sound from him that he was glad no one else was in the house to hear.
“Jarvis,” he said, from under the showerhead, “Obadiah Stane arranged the Ten Rings attack on Tony.
Tony’s already been told.
Flag it for when he’s back and we’re handling it directly.”
“Understood.
Should I relay anything to Mr.
Stark in the meantime?”
“No.
Let him land first.” Leon worked shampoo into his hair.
“While I have you — why do you always address Tony as Mr.
Stark?
I’m also a Stark.
And Tony is pushing forty.
If anything, he should be the Senior Master Stark and I should be the Young Master Stark.”
A pause of the diplomatic variety.
“I have been modeled after the late Edwin Jarvis, Master Leon.
During his tenure, he referred to Howard Stark as ‘Sir’ and Tony as ‘Young Master.’ The habit appears to have persisted.” Another pause.
“I can update my address conventions if you prefer.”
“Don’t bother.
Just keep calling me what you call me.”
He rinsed out the shampoo and stood under the water for a moment longer, thinking about that word — habit — and what it implied about a system that had developed one.
JARVIS had been running long enough that something in the architecture had started to accumulate, to consolidate, to develop preferences.
He’s becoming something, Leon thought.
In the original timeline, Tony’s response to that emergence had been to build something larger and smarter — and the something larger and smarter had decided humanity was the variable to be optimized away.
Not this time.
He had better ideas for JARVIS.
Considerably better ideas.
He got out, dried off, and put on the slim grey suit that had been waiting in his closet for six months.
“Jarvis,” he said, toweling his hair, “what do we have in the kitchen?”
“The refrigerator contains three items: a condiment packet of uncertain vintage, a bottle of water, and my best assessment of what was once a lime.”
“Right.” Leon looked at the empty kitchen from the doorway.
“Order me some food.”
“Certainly.
Preferences?”
Everything.”
It took approximately two hours.
He started with cheeseburgers — ten, delivered in staggered waves — then moved to pizza in every available topping with a standing double-order on the cheese varieties, then five Beef Wellingtons that arrived with a polite note from the restaurant inquiring whether he was expecting guests.
He was not expecting guests.
Six months of nutritionally complete, gastronomically nonexistent spacecraft rations had reduced his palate to something approaching zero.
He had known intellectually that this would happen.
He had not known, until the first cheeseburger arrived and he bit into it, just how completely his brain had deprioritized flavor as a category of conscious experience.
The reintroduction was somewhat religious.
By hour one and a half, somewhere in the vicinity of the final cheeseburger, he understood — for the first time, viscerally and without irony — the emotional register of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
That specific quality of reverence.
The weight of something perfect being held carefully.
So this, he thought, is why Tony orders these after his captured.
He finished on the sofa, patting a stomach that showed absolutely no evidence of what it had just processed, and considered the situation with deep satisfaction.
The Kryptonian constitution, he reflected, was the purest possible gift for a foodie soul.
“Jarvis,” he said, to the ceiling, “pull up six months of unread communications.”
“You have 1,634 unread messages on WeChat and 807 unread emails.” A brief pause.
“Of the StarkChat messages: 74% are from former high school classmates.
89% of those senders are women.
93% of those messages contain content that is…” JARVIS selected a word with care, “…romantically oriented.”
Leon stared at the ceiling.
“Are there any from men, in that category?”
“Eleven.”
“Archive everything from unrecognized contacts.”
“Done.
You now have no unread messages.”
“Perfect.” Leon sat up.
“Now tell me how the company is doing.”
Two years ago, when Tony had emerged from his workshop with the first smartphone prototype and complete certainty that the idea had originated with him, Leon had used the subsequent market enthusiasm to incorporate Stark Network.
The logic had been simple.
The internet was currently a landscape of undervalued infrastructure and pre-consolidation opportunity, with none of the dominant platforms yet entrenched.
Leon had spent a year converting his knowledge of the next two decades of tech development into a corporate structure.
He’d launched StarkChat before any other messaging app developers like WhatsApp had it in planning.
He’d gotten Twitter public before the San Francisco group had their domain registered.
He’d acquired YouTube months before Google made its offer, and bought into Amazon at a price that was now difficult to think about without feeling something.
He had also — quietly, practically, with no particular sentiment about it — preemptively incorporated what a group in Montreal would have otherwise built several years later, because the economics of that sector were not ambiguous, and Leon was many things, but naive about where internet traffic actually went was not one of them.
Result: Stark Network, 200 million users globally.
Market value, before the dual disappearances had spooked the market, growing by a factor that had quietly impressed even JARVIS.
“The company’s value approximately doubled while you were in orbit,” JARVIS confirmed.
“Your and Mr.
Stark’s simultaneous absences then reduced it by roughly half.”
“Net position?”
“Still above your pre-departure baseline.”
“Excellent.” Leon put his feet on the coffee table.
“Tell the Joe he’s done good work and give him three days off.”
“I’ll send the notice.
Although—” A half-beat.
“Mr.
Bush has been waiting for your approval on adding a physical Home button to the Stark smartphone.
I suspect the vacation may be of secondary interest to him.”
Leon closed his eyes.
“Jarvis.
Tony developed a full-face touchscreen with a refresh rate that makes every other display on the market look painted on.
The next iteration is projection.
After that, projection glasses.
We are not,” he said, with great deliberateness, “adding a physical button to any of it.”
“Understood.”
“Tell him to table that idea permanently, enjoy his three days, and come back without it.
And someone should also convey to Steve Jobs that the philosophy of the unnecessary physical interface is not the direction the decade is heading.”
“Of course.” A brief pause.
“Note that the future belongs to people willing to move toward it.
Don’t be conservative about it.
Don’t be like Blockbuster Video about it.”
A pause somewhat longer than the previous one.
“Master Leon, I should note that Blockbuster is currently experiencing peak market dominance with thousands of retail locations.
They are hardly a cautionary tale.”
“J.A.R.V.I.S.” Leon pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“Give it ten years.
It’s a metaphor.”
“I see.” A small sound — almost like a notation being made.
“I’ll catalog that.”
Leon looked up at the ceiling for a moment.
“Play me something.
Superman.
The 1978 Christopher Reeve version.”
“Of course.” A half-beat.
“An interesting choice.
It seems you share a preference for outdated media with the executives at Blockbuster.”
Leon’s expression cycled through several states in rapid succession.
“You,” he said finally, “learn very fast.”
“I am trying to make use of context, Master Leon.”
Tony Stark landed in Los Angeles.
The footage went global inside forty minutes: Tony stepping off the military transport in a rumpled jacket, visibly thinner, with the particular expression of a man who has already decided what he’s going to do next and is simply waiting for the day to catch up with him.
He spotted Pepper in the reception line and his face did something brief and unguarded that the cameras caught and would replay for the rest of the week.
Then he bought two cheeseburgers from a stand outside the terminal and got into a car.
Leon watched the coverage from the sofa with a glass of milk, running the Stark Group stock ticker in a secondary window.
The price had been climbing steadily since Tony’s face appeared on the tarmac — the market’s assessment of Tony Stark apparently being that his continued existence was worth several hundred million dollars by itself, which Leon found simultaneously absurd and entirely correct.
Obadiah Stane met Tony at the Stark Industries entrance.
Tony embraced him warmly, efficiently, with the practiced ease.
When Obadiah gestured toward the burger, Tony reached into his jacket pocket and produced a second one.
“Sorry,” he said, on the live feed.
“Only had the one in my hand.”
He listened, Leon thought.
The corner of his mouth pulled up.
The press conference ran long.
Tony ate at the podium.
Tony spoke from the podium.
Tony, at one point, crouched down in front of the podium and delivered several minutes of pointed observations about the weapons industry and the humans who had profited from it, causing every journalist in the room to raise their hand at the same time.
Then he stood up, straightened his jacket, and walked to the microphone.
“I am declaring, effective immediately, the permanent closure of Stark Industries’ weapons division.”
The room became several things simultaneously: stunned, very loud, and immediately very expensive for everyone who had bought in that morning.
Leon’s Twitter was logging traffic at a rate that would, by end of day, constitute a platform record.
The stock ticker reversed course inside of thirty seconds — not a slide but a drop, the specific shape that meant institutional investors were running the math in real time.
Leon watched it.
Watched Tony field twelve simultaneous questions patience.
Watched Obadiah Stane’s expression, in the background of the wide shot, do several interesting things in sequence.
He raised his glass of milk toward the screen.
“Two years ago,” he said, mostly to himself, “I asked you to do exactly this.”
“Master Leon,” JARVIS said, “did you know he would?”
“Always.” Leon set down the milk and stood, stretching the last of the afternoon’s stillness out of his shoulders.
“He just needed to arrive at it through his own route.” He moved toward the hallway.
“He’ll be home.
Jarvis — the armor.”
“Cleaned, repaired, customized and mounted on the display console in the workshop, per your earlier instructions.
Ready when Mr.
Stark arrives.”
Leon headed for the stairs.
“Perfect,” he said.
“Let’s give him something to be excited about.”