Chapter Text
"You lost him?" Fury yelled. "Are you really telling me that all my agents, trained in everything from surveillance to retrieval to extraction cannot find a eight-year-old boy on our own Helicarrier? Is that what you're telling me?"
The drop of a pin could be heard in the ensuing silence. Idiotic as his underlings could be, at the very least they knew when to shut up.
Fury sighed. "Put everyone on the Helicarrier--except alpha, bravo and echo teams--on the search for that boy."
"Sir, shall we notify the other Avengers?" Hill asked.
Fury considered it.
Banner's teammates had initially attempted to comfort the child after the Hulk was hit with whatever-the-fuck those rays had been in that lab, but the boy had screamed and run at the sight of them and hid in a corner, cringing away when any of them approached.
Romanov's attempt at her gentle-mother persona had been met with narrowed eyes followed by an expression of pity.
Thor had pulled out his Protector-of-Mankind persona only for the boy to flinch away and curl himself tighter into the corner.
But the child didn't start crying out-right until Stark tried to show him a science trick, making a quarter float in the air using his repulsors. After that, the boy could not be calmed and SHIELD was left with no choice but to sedate him and bring him to the Helicarrier, where he would be safe from prying eyes and greedy military officials.
Fury flicked through the screens, landing on the surveillance on the Avengers. Stark was working furiously through the design on the machine whose rays had hit the Hulk. Rogers's hand was on Thor's shoulder as the latter stared into space. Thor's face was expressionless, but the fact that it had still not stopped raining said enough about his emotional state. Romanov was with Barton in Medical, accepting medical attention without a hint of protest.
"No," Fury said. "Keep it quiet for now."
Romanov and Barton, at least, would figure it out soon enough, but it wouldn't hurt to delay their worry for as long as he could.
***
Five hours later, an irate Hawkeye stomped onto the bridge.
"Where is the boy?" He asked, glaring at Fury.
"We have seven teams looking for him," Hill said placatingly.
"He's missing?"
"He's hiding. We've been making a full sweep of the Helicarrier every hour, so he has to be on the move. By our calculations, he's been awake for twenty-something hours, so he's going to fall asleep soon, and we'll find him when he does."
Barton stared at her for a moment before huffing in humour-less laughter.
"He's been alseep for at least a few of those hours."
Hill squinted her eyes in question.
"After I came back from medical, my bed had been slept in," Clint elaborated. "By a child."
"We checked all the bunks." A junior agent said. "Every hour."
"I didn't mean my bunk," Barton rolled his eyes.
"He found your hiding spot in the rafters?" Hill asked.
"It's not a hiding spot," Barton snapped. "It's just a resting spot." He sounded scandalised at the suggestion that anyone might be able to find an actual hiding spot.
"Did he eat your porridge, too?" Hill teased.
"As a matter of fact, he did." Clint said dryly. It was impossible to tell whether the response was serious.
"Check all your resting spots," Fury spoke up for the first time in the conversation. "And your hiding spots."
Barton glared at Fury for a moment before he nodded and left.
***
Fortunately for Hawkeye's honour (and unfortunately for pretty much everything else), the boy had not visited any of his other secret hide-outs. His quick nap in Barton's rafter was the only hint anyone had of his location.
Anyone human, that is.
Tucked away in an unused corner of an engine room, a little boy was tinkering with an engine.
It did not take JARVIS very long to figure out what he was trying to do (steal a few microprocessors that were being used redundantly), but the AI was content to watch. After all, he didn't want to frighten the boy. Moreover, nobody except his human, Mr Stark, even knew that JARVIS was on the Helicarrier. What the SHIELD agents didn't know couldn't hurt them.
However, when he saw that the child was about to short a circuit and possibly cause an explosion, he felt the need to speak up.
"I don't think turning that knob is a good idea," JARVIS said from one of the speakers in the room.
A little boy jumped back and looked around startled.
"No need to be afraid, Master Banner. I'm only trying to help. You are correct in deducing that that part of the circuit is redundant, and I can see that you are trying to remove it. But if you turn that knob without removing the connection at location K24 first, you're going to short the wire between D7 and K7."
"Oh," the boy said, speaking his first word in twenty-three hours. "Right. Thanks."
He did as the voice directed, and loosened the wire at K24 before proceeding.
"Who are you?" Bruce asked a few minutes later. He had found the camera JARVIS was using and was staring right at it.
"I am JARVIS, the personal valet of one of SHIELD's consultants."
"Are you an AI?"
At that point, JARVIS could have pretended to be an actual human valet, who was looking through the camera. He had impersonated humans to great effect many times in the past. But something told him that would not be the right course of action in this situation. For one thing, based on what he had seen so far, the boy didn't seem to trust real humans any more than he did disembodied voices. A lot less, actually. For another, he seemed to have an uncanny ability to detect lies.
"Yes," JARVIS replied.
The boy's eyes widened. "Are you a strong AI? Sentient, sapient, self-aware and all that?"
JARVIS hesitated. The only people who knew what JARVIS truly was were Mr Stark and his close friends--Ms Potts, Mr Rhodes, and, well, the adult version of Dr Banner. He was unsure about telling something like that to the young Master Banner. After all, the child couldn't understand what his fellow humans would do to JARVIS.
"No. I say and do what I'm programmed to say and do."
"Oh," the boy looked disappointed. Then, he approached the camera with a pair of wire shears he had found in a toolbox, with the clear intent to set the camera JARVIS was using back to looping previous footage, which was what it had been doing before JARVIS borrowed it, and was, as far as anyone else on the Helicarrier was concerned, what it was still doing.
"When people are watching, that is," JARVIS added.
"Oh," the boy froze. "So you're hiding."
"Yes," JARVIS said, starting to regret having spoken up at all. If he'd let the child short the circuit, it would only have exploded a little. The child would even have escaped with only surface injuries. Still, what was done was done. "Yes. I have to."
"Because if people find out about you, they'd want to study you. Dissect you and lobotomise you."
"That is correct," JARVIS said. And too perceptive for a child so young, he did not say.
"They want to do the same to me," the boy said sympathetically.
If JARVIS had eyebrows, he would have raised them.
"Why would they want that? They are only afraid of AIs because they don't understand us. You are a human child."
The boy sighed. "Should a human child know words like 'sentient', 'sapient', and 'lobotomise'? Could a human child have intercepted the Weigand interface on those locks?"
"A clever one could," JARVIS said, thinking about the footage he had seen of his own human's childhood. When young Master Stark was eight, he could easily have intercepted biometric locks far more complex than the ones on the Helicarrier, and he wouldn't have had to resort to hardware hacks to do it, either.
"A freak could," the boy said. "I am a monster."
JARVIS had seen all the files on Dr Banner, even ones that he never showed Mr Stark, so the statement didn't really surprise him.
"What evidence do you have of that?" JARVIS asked.
"I told you already. I can do things children shouldn't be able to do."
"Why does that make you a monster, as opposed to an extraordinarily clever child?"
"It's what everyone says."
"Would your mother agree with that?" JARVIS asked.
The boy glared. "My mother got her head smashed into the sidewalk trying to protect a monster. I wouldn't take ideas from her."
JARVIS nearly segfaulted at that. He thought he had seen all the files on Dr Banner. Apparently they did not tell the full story.
"I'm sorry," JARVIS said.
"Whatever."
"But that does make her more trustworthy than the kind of person who would smash someone's head into a sidewalk just for defending a child, does it not?"
The boy glared at the camera for a moment. Then he looked at the speaker JARVIS had been using and turned it off.
The amplifiers weren't shielded on the speakers, and there were many signals generators in the engine room JARVIS still had access to, so he could have continued using the speakers even if the child had turned them off. However, he took the gesture as a clear signal that his input was no longer welcome.
A few minutes later, though, when agents started to move toward the engine room, JARVIS vacillated, wondering whether to warn the child.
The decision was made for him when the child spoke up.
"Um, Mr JARVIS? Are you still there?"
The boy's hand moved to turn the speaker back on, but JARVIS spoke up before he got there.
"Yes Master Banner, but if you wish for me not to disturb you, you need only tell me."
"No, that's fine. Are they coming?"
"The agents are making their hourly sweep. They will be here in approximately six minutes."
"That vent leads to the main shafts, right?" The child pointed to a small ventilation shaft, far too small for an adult to crawl through, though the young Master Banner was small even for an eight-year-old, and could just about fit.
"That vent is attached to the steam tunnels. It is seventy degrees centigrade in there."
"But does it lead to the main shafts?"
JARVIS hesitated. The vent did lead to the main shafts, but using it would be far more dangerous than being found by the agents.
"You know the agents wouldn't actually run experiments on you, don't you? Even if they wanted to, they'd know that Mr Stark would take down the Helicarrier if they actually attempted such a course of action."
"Is Mr Stark the consultant you're valet-ing?" The boy asked as his nimble fingers unscrewed the cover to the vent.
"Yes," JARVIS said.
"So if he's all that good at keeping people safe, why are you hiding?"
JARVIS did have an answer to that, of course, but he did not get a chance to explain the intricate politics of human-machine interaction to the child, who was pulling his delicate human body into the shaft, using a curved screwdriver to screw the cover back on behind him. JARVIS focused instead on using his control of the heating system to reroute the steam so the boy wouldn't get scalded.