poeticterms | (no subject)

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The thing about the Stark house is that it looks perfectly normal unless you are paying attention.

Perfectly normal houses are not covered in quite so many discreet cameras. Nor do they have pressure sensors under the driveway to record where guests choose to park. (Jarvis is already learning Cal's favourite spots in the loop.)

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Cal can be astonishingly unobservant, but for once, Sherlock won't complain. It's just as well. Of all the revelations Cal might have about this household, that is probably the one he most needs to be shielded from.

The kitchen is spotless. It is very much Sherlock's territory. But there is a very friendly kitchen table, suitable for eating pizza at.

Sometimes Cal is selectively unobservant. It's not as frequent as it once was, and friendship with Sherlock has actually begun to sharpen his observational skills a little, but there are still times in his life when it's a necessary tool for survival.

He's going to need to come to terms with the truths about the Stark household in bits and pieces to be able to accept this one. For now, it's incredibly easy for him to overlook.

That table looks convenient! Cal will take a seat.

And Sherlock will preemptively get out an appropriate number of plates.

"When do we expect the pizza?" he asks thin air.

"Twenty to thirty minutes," thin air replies.

Thin air is a very helpful substance.

"That's convenient," Cal remarks. "Half the time on the phone, they forget to tell you."

And when that happens, he usually forgets to ask.

"I never forget to ask."

Sherlock laughs.

"That would be kind of crappy programming."

Cal is mostly addressing Sherlock, but also sort of including Jarvis. If only because Jarvis was the last - uh, conversational participant to say actual words.

"Oh, indeed."

He can tell from long experience that Jarvis is laughing with him, although there is of course no outward indication.

"On the contrary. Writing a forgetful AI would take a considerable effort."

"Really?"

Cal was thinking more along the lines of glitchy software. Or - something. Everything he knows about actual AIs comes from the movies, and he is pretty sure that (for example) Jarvis is not out to kill them all.

Probably.

"Oh, yes," Sherlock agrees. "To forget something, you need a memory more like a human's than a computer's." He puts on his Tony voice. "A real bitch of a coding job," back to his natural accent, "or so I'm told."

Cal doesn't even blink at the change in voice. Something else he's getting used to.

"Okay," he acknowledges. "I meant more like the, uh, coding screwing up or something."

"For a program written by an eleven-year-old, Jarvis is astonishingly robust."

"Damned by faint praise," he deadpans.

"- what?"

. . . that is not a piece of information Cal had possessed before.

Oh.

Well.

Sherlock quietly recalculates, and decides that yes, he can let this slip. It's too verifiable to sustain a lie. If Cal figures something out... well, Sherlock has no desire to stand in the way of Cal figuring things out.

"Tony started work on Jarvis when he was eleven," he says, quite casually. "He's received some upgrades since then, of course. Grown up a little, you might say."

". . . oh."

Obviously, Cal knows that Tony, and Sherlock, are very smart, and he's long since noticed that Tony does a lot of stuff with engineering and computers and things. But he's used to being around people who are smarter than him, so he hadn't given it a lot of thought.

- he's thinking about it now.

He raises his eyebrows.

"Huh," is Cal's eloquent conclusion.

Maybe he'll process this more later.

"Yes, I suppose he is a little unbelievable. But his precociousness was always a mainstay of the household."

Childhood is a dangerous topic, but as previously established, he doesn't entirely mind.

Cal is aware once again of how something isn't jiving right here. Of how, when referring to their childhood (right up through their parents' death), Sherlock talks as though Tony is the only one whose existence was even acknowledged.

(The computer must be named after the Jarvis who raised him.)

He's begun to have his doubts about the generally accepted theory that Sherlock's change in identity was a reaction to grief, because there don't seem to be a lot of reasons why Sherlock would grieve for Howard and Maria Stark at all. Maybe it's simpler than that.

Maybe he just didn't want to be the boy whose parents ignored him in favor of his brother. Sherlock Holmes is brilliant, accomplished, his stories still loved a century after they were written. Why not be him instead?

Cal's approach to this is still not to ask. Sherlock will tell him if he wants Cal to know. And if he never wants to talk about it, then - fine. Without Obadiah Stane's intervention, Cal probably never would have told Sherlock about Uncle Grahame, so he's in no position to complain.

So Cal tucks all these thoughts away again as he says,

"I can't even remember what I did when I was eleven." That was almost seven years ago, after all.

"Neither can I," he jokes.

It's literally true, after a fashion—he never was eleven, technically speaking.

"Well, that was when I kissed a girl for the first time," Cal amends.

He was also precocious in some ways.

"But that's about it."

Dryly: "Good heavens, a headstart on Tony. Now that is impressive."

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