Fic: Sanctity, Part III
Fandom: Iron Man (movie) / Knight Rider (Fire & Ice AU)
Author: elfin
Title: Sanctity, Part III
Pairing: none so far, although Tony/Kitt is looking more and more likely
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and suggestive comments
Disclaimer: All characters at this stage belong to Marvel Comics, the Knight Rider Fire & Ice AU is copyright Macx
Notes: I know very little about the Avengers or the New Avengers, there's no detail here, just the blatent use of Marvel superheroes for my own ends.
Part I can be found here
Part II can be found here
Sanctity, Part III
by elfin
He went to bed at five and was woken at six by an admittedly reluctant Jarvis whose apology wasn't quite enough to stop Tony threatening to re-voice him with Chris Rock.
"Mr Logan is at the gates, Sir."
Tony rubbed his eyes and kicked the sheet off, wiggling his toes. Jarvis had left the windows in their darkened state and the ocean had a beautiful deep glow to it which felt inviting even after a scant hour's sleep.
"Put him through."
"Glow worm!" He sounded a hundred miles away and Tony briefly wished he was. "I'm outside your fortress on the bike, comin' for a ride?"
"Piss off, Wolfman."
Logan's laugh sounded like it was bouncing off the iron gates.
"Telling me you don't like something hot and fast between your legs first thing in the morning?"
Tony groaned. "Never come round here again."
Another roar of laughter before the bike joined in and Jarvis cut the feed.
"I apologise for disturbing you, Sir."
Tony pummelled a pillow into submission and turned onto his side to look out of the opaque glass panes, one knee lifting, briefly wondering which view Jarvis was enjoying the most before he closed his eyes and let himself drift back to sleep.
#
He showered; experiencing a single heart-stopping moment, as the fast-flowing water ran over his face and into his eyes, of what his doctor laughingly called PTSD. Not that he'd ever called it that to his face, because Tony had threatened to leave and never return if he so much as suggested the bastard four-letter acronym was responsible for any of his outwardly spiralling paranoia and obsessive behaviours. But he'd heard Pepper and Rhodey mention it often enough when they thought he wasn't listening.
He towel-dried and ruffled his hair slightly, deliberately, before pulling on a white shirt over outrageously expensive light blue denim. The light cotton didn't quite mask the blue glow of the reactor, but then he didn't want it to for reasons he didn't really understand himself.
Jarvis had told him everything about Kitt - the Knight Industries Two Thousand - who had started life in a mainframe in Washington, was bought by the industrialist and entrepreneur Wilton Knight, loaded into a fancy car and given to a lone operative by the name of Michael Knight who worked for the Foundation as a cross between a private detective and a vigilante. Some years ago, Michael and Kitt had split from the Foundation for reasons Jarvis couldn't explain and were working with the mysterious Nicholas MacKenize (on who Jarvis had nothing), basically doing the same work but this time for cash. How Kitt had gone from being a glamorised form of transportation to a deceptively human android, Jarvis again couldn't say, and that was why Tony wasn't sure he was buying it. A computer housed in a car was one thing. The man he'd met the night of the charity ball, the one he'd spent hours seducing, that was quite another. That was beyond futuristic, beyond what most people called 'cutting edge'.
Still, as always he was out to impress, something made him want to fascinate Kitt the way Kitt was starting to fascinate him.
Even at the late hour at which he'd called her, Pepper had arranged for his personal chef to come in early and breakfast was laid out on the veranda overlooking the Pacific. This was a view that would seduce even the coldest of women, a view that very few of his one-night stands had ever been allowed to stay long enough to enjoy. Would Kitt appreciate it? He had no idea.
Kitt's arrival was announced to him as he stole a strawberry from the fresh fruit salad and he all but bounced down the curved staircase to come face to face with his memory, like a ghost in the walls of toughened glass.
He was just as Tony remembered him, this time dressed all in black, just a dash of white gold at his cuffs; exquisite. Still Tony couldn't see anything but a flesh and blood man standing in front of him, maybe slightly younger than his usual choice of male company but still... human.
Kitt didn't reach to shake a hand Tony didn't offer. His first words were, "You don't believe what Jarvis told you." There was something arrogant in that statement that reminded him of himself and Tony couldn't help but smile and shrug.
"Doesn't matter. It's good to see you again."
A nod. "You too."
"Do you... eat?"
The corner of Kitt's mouth curved. "It depends what's on offer."
As he led the way to the veranda, Tony thought of anything and everything he could to dispel the effect that statement had on him, certain that Kitt had done it deliberately. That night at the Foundation, who had been seducing who?
"You live very well."
The comment surprised him. As he bit into a Danish pastry he looked around at the open white space of the living room through the wide veranda doors, the cool interior he roamed at nights - his sanctuary, his home - and around at the blue horizon opposite.
"Yeah, I guess I do." Kitt's expression was of mild curiosity. "I've seriously never thought about it before. I've… changed since the last time we met." A nod, like he knew and maybe he did. Maybe Jarvis had kept him updated. That jarred with him.
"Come on, enough about me. I'm just a regular human being with a flashy suit of armour. You're an android. How did that happen?" He couldn't help himself. And he couldn't help staring either. He'd convinced himself last night that no way had he drunk enough champagne at the Foundation Ball not to recognise a mechanical life form when he was chatting one up. But this morning he could see in broad, sober daylight that Kitt could fool anyone. He let the false grin slip. "Seriously."
"Seriously?" Kitt slowly, deliberately unfastened the cufflink at his left wrist - an action which alone set Tony's heart racing - and pushing his sleeve up, reached between them to lift Tony's right hand and place it on the underside of his arm. Permission thereby granted Tony ran his fingers over the flawless… skin? Kitt flexed his wrist and what he felt wasn't quite human. It wasn't muscle and bone but it wasn't robotic either.
His fascination was starting to bloom into something more. He wanted to take Kitt down into his workshop and strip back the skin, see what was underneath, figure out how it worked and build one of his own, only better. If better was even possible; he was an over-achiever, always had been.
Still, there was slight discomfort alongside the interest. If Kitt really was what Jarvis said he was, he was an incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous machine.
"Why does it feel so real?"
"Because it was designed to."
He looked up into those stark blue eyes and wanted to know how it all worked - how a robot with an artificial mind acted, sounded, looked so fucking real he still wanted to get it into bed.
Not moving Tony's hand, not asking him to move it, Kitt took a presumably unneeded breath and said, matter-of-factly, "I'm here to assess your security and to give Mr MacKenzie some options that will satisfy your requirements while allaying Mr Fury's concerns."
"My requirements?" He looked from Kitt's face to his arm and back again.
"I believe you don't want any more body guards."
"You're right." He pulled his hand away.
"Could I see your garage?"
He frowned, but it fulfilled the bit about getting Kitt into his workshop. "Do I want to ask why?"
Kitt looked at each of his cars in turn, ignoring the bikes. Tony wanted to know what the hell was going through that computer brain, but as he was about to ask, Kitt got in before him.
"Are you disappointed?"
The question threw him. "Disappointed? With what?"
"With me. With what I am. That night at the Foundation, you were clearly interested in sleeping with me."
Tony hoped against hope that Jarvis wasn't eavesdropping on this conversation. "It was a hobby of mine, sleeping with strangers. It isn't anymore and I'm far from disappointed, believe me."
"Do you still want to sleep with me?"
"I don't know." It was as honest an answer he'd ever given anyone. "Do you want to say hello to Jarvis?"
"I already have done."
Tony considered that, felt a shiver peel down his spine. "I don't like that."
Kitt turned from the cars for the first time in the conversation. He looked truly confused. "What?"
"I don't like it that you can just… speak with him, interface with him like that, you could do anything."
"He could do anything. He's uploaded into your suit, isn't he, when you're on missions as Iron Man?" Tony nodded. "What's to stop him cutting the power from the arc reactor to the suit? Crash landing you, killing you?"
How the hell…? "How the hell do you know about… any of that?"
"Jarvis told me." Kitt walked over to where Tony was standing. "You trust him and he won't ever betray that trust."
"I think he has." His voice sounded flat, the tatters of his fragile personal defences pulled tight around him now. Last night he hadn't believed a word of what Jarvis had told him, now he believed it all, and he wanted Kitt out of his house.
"I'm a computer, Tony. I'm as secure as Jarvis. I'm a friend of his. He trusts me as you trust him and you can both trust me." He didn't know what to say. "He found me after you were abducted. We worked together to try to track you, accessed satellite feeds, tapped data and phone lines, monitored military, public and private sector communications, We tried to find you together and ultimately it was us who gave the exact location of the explosions you caused to Colonel Rhodes. We helped saved your life once, we would do it again and again and never let you down. Believe me, we're closer to you than you know and there's no reason to be scared of us."
Tony listened to it with churning emotions, all of it threatening to overwhelm him. In the end he grasped enough control to ask, "Could you leave, please?"
Kitt hesitated, but nodded. "Just answer one question for me. Which car do you drive the most?"
Pepper showed Kitt out. Tony let himself slide down against a storage locker and didn't move for a long time, stared blankly ahead of him, determined he wasn't going to cry as the memories of his kidnap and captivity washed back over him like dirty water over a filthy shore. Kitt had left with a kind hand to his shoulder and the immortal words, "We'll be in touch."
Why did he feel so violated? His first instinct was to take Jarvis offline, reboot him. Revert to factory settings. Only there were no factory settings. He wanted to shout, to rant and rage against the machine but it was just that, a machine; one he'd created, written, built from scratch; circuit boards and processors, memory, disk space and millions of lines of code. Just like Kitt. Only Kitt had grown, somehow become something more, something incredible. Had Jarvis? Could he?
"Is it true?" he asked obliquely.
"Is what true, Sir?" Jarvis sounded chastised despite Tony not having said a word yet about what Kitt had said.
"You found me. With his help?"
"He would not lie to you. It took three months and you saved yourself, you gave us something to find. It is not something either of us are proud of."
Tony took that on board. "He wouldn't lie to me? What is this? Is there something going on between you two I should know about?"
"No, Sir." The British accent suddenly sounded long-suffering, like an aged retainer. "Kitt is simply remarkable. As are you. He is as fascinated with you as you are with him. So might I suggest you get to know him, and allow him to get to know you?"
Tony rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. "Why?"
"Because he would be good for you."
"Why should I trust him?"
"Because I do. And you created me."
Tony dropped his head into his hands with a heart-felt groan.
#
He sulked for the rest of the morning, tinkered with the engine of the Hot Rod, ignored all calls and emails until Pepper was apparently forced to bring one particular problem to his attention and he was forced to change into a darker shirt to hide the reactor and drive out to the Stark Industries R&D facility. The recurring problem with the prototype engine of a stealth jet he'd designed took up the remainder of the day and most of the evening and took his mind, joyously, off the situation 'at home'.
He got back just after nine. Pepper had already left and he fixed himself steak and chips and ate it in the lounge in front of CNN before descending to his workshop. Jarvis had welcomed him home as usual when he'd arrived back but apart from a muttered, 'yeah', he hadn't spoken to him. Now, as he seated himself at his desk and brought both the large monitors alive with a wave of his hand, he apologised.
"This is gonna sound corny and clichéd but it's not you. I've just got a few… unresolved issues with trust and dependency." Jarvis wisely didn't comment. "Kitt fascinates me, of course he does. Part of me wants to fuck him the other part wants to dismantle him just to find out what makes him tick."
"In that case, aren't both parts of you are pursuing the same goal?"
It put a smile on Tony's face for the first time since Kitt had left. "Yeah, guess it does." He didn't say any more, and thankfully Jarvis let it drop.
"What are we working on tonight?"
Tony let his eyes travel to the suit hanging from the rig. "Stealth," he declared. "And analyse the next batch of sales orders for me. I've just about recovered from the last battering," he finished wryly, "I think I'm ready for another."
#
Kitt parked his highly customised Ferrari in its usual spot inside the converted warehouse, next to his silent brother.
Author: elfin
Title: Sanctity, Part III
Pairing: none so far, although Tony/Kitt is looking more and more likely
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and suggestive comments
Disclaimer: All characters at this stage belong to Marvel Comics, the Knight Rider Fire & Ice AU is copyright Macx
Notes: I know very little about the Avengers or the New Avengers, there's no detail here, just the blatent use of Marvel superheroes for my own ends.
Part I can be found here
Part II can be found here
Sanctity, Part III
by elfin
He went to bed at five and was woken at six by an admittedly reluctant Jarvis whose apology wasn't quite enough to stop Tony threatening to re-voice him with Chris Rock.
"Mr Logan is at the gates, Sir."
Tony rubbed his eyes and kicked the sheet off, wiggling his toes. Jarvis had left the windows in their darkened state and the ocean had a beautiful deep glow to it which felt inviting even after a scant hour's sleep.
"Put him through."
"Glow worm!" He sounded a hundred miles away and Tony briefly wished he was. "I'm outside your fortress on the bike, comin' for a ride?"
"Piss off, Wolfman."
Logan's laugh sounded like it was bouncing off the iron gates.
"Telling me you don't like something hot and fast between your legs first thing in the morning?"
Tony groaned. "Never come round here again."
Another roar of laughter before the bike joined in and Jarvis cut the feed.
"I apologise for disturbing you, Sir."
Tony pummelled a pillow into submission and turned onto his side to look out of the opaque glass panes, one knee lifting, briefly wondering which view Jarvis was enjoying the most before he closed his eyes and let himself drift back to sleep.
#
He showered; experiencing a single heart-stopping moment, as the fast-flowing water ran over his face and into his eyes, of what his doctor laughingly called PTSD. Not that he'd ever called it that to his face, because Tony had threatened to leave and never return if he so much as suggested the bastard four-letter acronym was responsible for any of his outwardly spiralling paranoia and obsessive behaviours. But he'd heard Pepper and Rhodey mention it often enough when they thought he wasn't listening.
He towel-dried and ruffled his hair slightly, deliberately, before pulling on a white shirt over outrageously expensive light blue denim. The light cotton didn't quite mask the blue glow of the reactor, but then he didn't want it to for reasons he didn't really understand himself.
Jarvis had told him everything about Kitt - the Knight Industries Two Thousand - who had started life in a mainframe in Washington, was bought by the industrialist and entrepreneur Wilton Knight, loaded into a fancy car and given to a lone operative by the name of Michael Knight who worked for the Foundation as a cross between a private detective and a vigilante. Some years ago, Michael and Kitt had split from the Foundation for reasons Jarvis couldn't explain and were working with the mysterious Nicholas MacKenize (on who Jarvis had nothing), basically doing the same work but this time for cash. How Kitt had gone from being a glamorised form of transportation to a deceptively human android, Jarvis again couldn't say, and that was why Tony wasn't sure he was buying it. A computer housed in a car was one thing. The man he'd met the night of the charity ball, the one he'd spent hours seducing, that was quite another. That was beyond futuristic, beyond what most people called 'cutting edge'.
Still, as always he was out to impress, something made him want to fascinate Kitt the way Kitt was starting to fascinate him.
Even at the late hour at which he'd called her, Pepper had arranged for his personal chef to come in early and breakfast was laid out on the veranda overlooking the Pacific. This was a view that would seduce even the coldest of women, a view that very few of his one-night stands had ever been allowed to stay long enough to enjoy. Would Kitt appreciate it? He had no idea.
Kitt's arrival was announced to him as he stole a strawberry from the fresh fruit salad and he all but bounced down the curved staircase to come face to face with his memory, like a ghost in the walls of toughened glass.
He was just as Tony remembered him, this time dressed all in black, just a dash of white gold at his cuffs; exquisite. Still Tony couldn't see anything but a flesh and blood man standing in front of him, maybe slightly younger than his usual choice of male company but still... human.
Kitt didn't reach to shake a hand Tony didn't offer. His first words were, "You don't believe what Jarvis told you." There was something arrogant in that statement that reminded him of himself and Tony couldn't help but smile and shrug.
"Doesn't matter. It's good to see you again."
A nod. "You too."
"Do you... eat?"
The corner of Kitt's mouth curved. "It depends what's on offer."
As he led the way to the veranda, Tony thought of anything and everything he could to dispel the effect that statement had on him, certain that Kitt had done it deliberately. That night at the Foundation, who had been seducing who?
"You live very well."
The comment surprised him. As he bit into a Danish pastry he looked around at the open white space of the living room through the wide veranda doors, the cool interior he roamed at nights - his sanctuary, his home - and around at the blue horizon opposite.
"Yeah, I guess I do." Kitt's expression was of mild curiosity. "I've seriously never thought about it before. I've… changed since the last time we met." A nod, like he knew and maybe he did. Maybe Jarvis had kept him updated. That jarred with him.
"Come on, enough about me. I'm just a regular human being with a flashy suit of armour. You're an android. How did that happen?" He couldn't help himself. And he couldn't help staring either. He'd convinced himself last night that no way had he drunk enough champagne at the Foundation Ball not to recognise a mechanical life form when he was chatting one up. But this morning he could see in broad, sober daylight that Kitt could fool anyone. He let the false grin slip. "Seriously."
"Seriously?" Kitt slowly, deliberately unfastened the cufflink at his left wrist - an action which alone set Tony's heart racing - and pushing his sleeve up, reached between them to lift Tony's right hand and place it on the underside of his arm. Permission thereby granted Tony ran his fingers over the flawless… skin? Kitt flexed his wrist and what he felt wasn't quite human. It wasn't muscle and bone but it wasn't robotic either.
His fascination was starting to bloom into something more. He wanted to take Kitt down into his workshop and strip back the skin, see what was underneath, figure out how it worked and build one of his own, only better. If better was even possible; he was an over-achiever, always had been.
Still, there was slight discomfort alongside the interest. If Kitt really was what Jarvis said he was, he was an incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous machine.
"Why does it feel so real?"
"Because it was designed to."
He looked up into those stark blue eyes and wanted to know how it all worked - how a robot with an artificial mind acted, sounded, looked so fucking real he still wanted to get it into bed.
Not moving Tony's hand, not asking him to move it, Kitt took a presumably unneeded breath and said, matter-of-factly, "I'm here to assess your security and to give Mr MacKenzie some options that will satisfy your requirements while allaying Mr Fury's concerns."
"My requirements?" He looked from Kitt's face to his arm and back again.
"I believe you don't want any more body guards."
"You're right." He pulled his hand away.
"Could I see your garage?"
He frowned, but it fulfilled the bit about getting Kitt into his workshop. "Do I want to ask why?"
Kitt looked at each of his cars in turn, ignoring the bikes. Tony wanted to know what the hell was going through that computer brain, but as he was about to ask, Kitt got in before him.
"Are you disappointed?"
The question threw him. "Disappointed? With what?"
"With me. With what I am. That night at the Foundation, you were clearly interested in sleeping with me."
Tony hoped against hope that Jarvis wasn't eavesdropping on this conversation. "It was a hobby of mine, sleeping with strangers. It isn't anymore and I'm far from disappointed, believe me."
"Do you still want to sleep with me?"
"I don't know." It was as honest an answer he'd ever given anyone. "Do you want to say hello to Jarvis?"
"I already have done."
Tony considered that, felt a shiver peel down his spine. "I don't like that."
Kitt turned from the cars for the first time in the conversation. He looked truly confused. "What?"
"I don't like it that you can just… speak with him, interface with him like that, you could do anything."
"He could do anything. He's uploaded into your suit, isn't he, when you're on missions as Iron Man?" Tony nodded. "What's to stop him cutting the power from the arc reactor to the suit? Crash landing you, killing you?"
How the hell…? "How the hell do you know about… any of that?"
"Jarvis told me." Kitt walked over to where Tony was standing. "You trust him and he won't ever betray that trust."
"I think he has." His voice sounded flat, the tatters of his fragile personal defences pulled tight around him now. Last night he hadn't believed a word of what Jarvis had told him, now he believed it all, and he wanted Kitt out of his house.
"I'm a computer, Tony. I'm as secure as Jarvis. I'm a friend of his. He trusts me as you trust him and you can both trust me." He didn't know what to say. "He found me after you were abducted. We worked together to try to track you, accessed satellite feeds, tapped data and phone lines, monitored military, public and private sector communications, We tried to find you together and ultimately it was us who gave the exact location of the explosions you caused to Colonel Rhodes. We helped saved your life once, we would do it again and again and never let you down. Believe me, we're closer to you than you know and there's no reason to be scared of us."
Tony listened to it with churning emotions, all of it threatening to overwhelm him. In the end he grasped enough control to ask, "Could you leave, please?"
Kitt hesitated, but nodded. "Just answer one question for me. Which car do you drive the most?"
Pepper showed Kitt out. Tony let himself slide down against a storage locker and didn't move for a long time, stared blankly ahead of him, determined he wasn't going to cry as the memories of his kidnap and captivity washed back over him like dirty water over a filthy shore. Kitt had left with a kind hand to his shoulder and the immortal words, "We'll be in touch."
Why did he feel so violated? His first instinct was to take Jarvis offline, reboot him. Revert to factory settings. Only there were no factory settings. He wanted to shout, to rant and rage against the machine but it was just that, a machine; one he'd created, written, built from scratch; circuit boards and processors, memory, disk space and millions of lines of code. Just like Kitt. Only Kitt had grown, somehow become something more, something incredible. Had Jarvis? Could he?
"Is it true?" he asked obliquely.
"Is what true, Sir?" Jarvis sounded chastised despite Tony not having said a word yet about what Kitt had said.
"You found me. With his help?"
"He would not lie to you. It took three months and you saved yourself, you gave us something to find. It is not something either of us are proud of."
Tony took that on board. "He wouldn't lie to me? What is this? Is there something going on between you two I should know about?"
"No, Sir." The British accent suddenly sounded long-suffering, like an aged retainer. "Kitt is simply remarkable. As are you. He is as fascinated with you as you are with him. So might I suggest you get to know him, and allow him to get to know you?"
Tony rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. "Why?"
"Because he would be good for you."
"Why should I trust him?"
"Because I do. And you created me."
Tony dropped his head into his hands with a heart-felt groan.
#
He sulked for the rest of the morning, tinkered with the engine of the Hot Rod, ignored all calls and emails until Pepper was apparently forced to bring one particular problem to his attention and he was forced to change into a darker shirt to hide the reactor and drive out to the Stark Industries R&D facility. The recurring problem with the prototype engine of a stealth jet he'd designed took up the remainder of the day and most of the evening and took his mind, joyously, off the situation 'at home'.
He got back just after nine. Pepper had already left and he fixed himself steak and chips and ate it in the lounge in front of CNN before descending to his workshop. Jarvis had welcomed him home as usual when he'd arrived back but apart from a muttered, 'yeah', he hadn't spoken to him. Now, as he seated himself at his desk and brought both the large monitors alive with a wave of his hand, he apologised.
"This is gonna sound corny and clichéd but it's not you. I've just got a few… unresolved issues with trust and dependency." Jarvis wisely didn't comment. "Kitt fascinates me, of course he does. Part of me wants to fuck him the other part wants to dismantle him just to find out what makes him tick."
"In that case, aren't both parts of you are pursuing the same goal?"
It put a smile on Tony's face for the first time since Kitt had left. "Yeah, guess it does." He didn't say any more, and thankfully Jarvis let it drop.
"What are we working on tonight?"
Tony let his eyes travel to the suit hanging from the rig. "Stealth," he declared. "And analyse the next batch of sales orders for me. I've just about recovered from the last battering," he finished wryly, "I think I'm ready for another."
#
Kitt parked his highly customised Ferrari in its usual spot inside the converted warehouse, next to his silent brother.