Archive of Our Own

I.

The asset does not sleep.

This is a fact, the same way the weight of the arm is a fact, the same way the targeting calculations that run automatically when he enters a room are a fact. He catalogues exits (three), potential threats (eleven, reduced to nine once he identifies the two small machines as non-combatants), and the primary subject of his current operational assignment.

Stark, Anthony E. Handler. Designation: Tony.

The workshop is loud in a way that is not unpleasant. The two small machines — DUM-E and U, he has learned their designations, has filed them under assets, friendly, non-combatant — move in looping patterns that seem purposeless until he watches long enough to understand they are not purposeless at all. They are orbiting. Tony is the gravity and they are the orbit, and the asset understands this in a way that does not require language.

He stands in the corner nearest the secondary workbench. This is his corner. He has not been told it is his corner but Tony has not told him to move from it either, and in the absence of correction the asset has determined this is acceptable positioning.

Current Objective: Make yourself at home.

He has been running this objective for eleven days.

He is not certain he is completing it correctly.

Home is not a word that resolves cleanly. He has searched it — not externally, he does not ask questions that reveal gaps in his operational capacity, but internally, turning the word over the way he turns over a weapon to check its components. Home suggests: a fixed location. Familiarity. Safety.

He is familiar with the workshop. He knows the location of every tool, every chemical compound, the precise temperature Tony keeps the space (68°F, which Tony says is freezing, how is this my life, but which he never actually changes). He knows the sound of DUM-E's motor when the small machine is distressed versus curious versus pleased. He knows that Tony takes his coffee in a specific mug — the one with the cracked handle that has been repaired three times — and that he will not drink it from any other vessel if he can help it.

He knows that Tony laughs when he is uncomfortable and goes quiet when he is afraid and that the two are easy to confuse if you are not paying attention.

The asset is always paying attention.

Whether this constitutes home, he cannot determine.

He files the objective as: IN PROGRESS. DURATION INDETERMINATE.

"Why are you lurking over there? You can sit on the couch, you know."

The asset does not flinch. He has become very good at not flinching.

"Take a day off from the creepy assassin pose," Tony says, not looking up from the schematic rotating above the workbench. "You're making me feel surveilled."

The asset processes this.

Sit on the couch is an order. The couch is the large worn structure against the eastern wall. He crosses to it and sits. His back is straight. His hands are on his knees. He faces forward at the angle that provides optimal visual coverage of the workshop entrance.

Several minutes pass.

Tony looks up.

Something moves across his face — the asset has not yet fully catalogued Tony's expressions, there are more of them than seem statistically necessary — and then Tony puts down his tools and crosses to a cabinet and retrieves a blanket, dark grey, which he drops over the asset's shoulders with a sort of aggressive casualness.

"If you insist on spending all your time in here," Tony says, "at least don't make me feel guilty about it. Get comfortable. Whatever that means for you."

He goes back to his workbench. The asset sits with the blanket around his shoulders.

Whatever that means for you.

He does not know what it means for him. He adds it to the list of things he is working on.

After a while, because the corner of the couch is there and it is not explicitly forbidden, he puts his back against the armrest. He keeps the blanket. DUM-E rolls over and nudges his ankle with one cautious claw, and the asset looks down at the small machine for a long moment, and then, carefully, touches the top of DUM-E's chassis with two fingers.

DUM-E makes a pleased sound.

The asset files this under: DATA PENDING.

II.

He watches the way Tony treats them.

This is surveillance but it does not feel like surveillance. It feels like — he does not have the word for it. He watches Tony rebuild DUM-E's grip mechanism for the third time with the same patience he brought to the first, talking the whole while (there you go, buddy, that's not so bad, I know it feels weird, just give it a second). He watches Tony let U knock over an entire tray of highly sensitive components and curse loudly and then immediately say it's okay, it's okay, come here, you're fine. He watches Tony threaten, on four separate occasions, to donate DUM-E to a community college.

DUM-E does not appear to find this threat credible.

The asset finds it — clarifying.

Tony does not hit them. Does not shut them down for errors. The threats are always the same threat: removal. Separation. Being sent somewhere that is not here, not Tony.

The asset understands this logic completely. If he were to be reassigned — handed off to a different handler, sent back, replaced — it would be the worst outcome he can currently construct. It sits at the top of his threat-assessment matrix labeled unacceptable. Tony's threats are the correct threats. They are the ones that would actually work.

He watches Tony press his forehead briefly against DUM-E's chassis after a long night, says good job, you beautiful idiot, and the asset looks away because the feeling that produces in him does not have a category he knows how to file it under.

A week later, Tony says: "You want to hand me that — yeah, the torque wrench, the small one."

The asset does not have to think about this. He already knows where it is. He retrieves it and holds it out.

Tony takes it without looking up. Then he does look up, because the asset has been faster than expected, and for a moment they are closer than they usually are. Tony's face does the complicated thing it sometimes does — the submerged thing — and then he looks back at his work.

"You've been watching," Tony says. Not an accusation. More like a notation.

"Yes," the asset says.

"Memorized the whole shop?"

"Yes."

Tony makes a sound that might be a laugh. "No one can ever figure out my organizational system, but of course you have." He holds out his hand. "Now the Phillips head."

The asset already has it. He places it in Tony's palm.

This time Tony does look at him, and his expression is doing something the asset cannot name, something warm and slightly puzzled, as if the asset is an equation he keeps getting a surprising answer to.

Tony turns back to the schematic. "Stick around," he says, which is not a new directive, but it lands differently somehow. More specific. Less like policy.

New sub-objective added: Anticipate requirements. Reduce handler burden.

The asset is good at this objective. He runs it with precision.

He does not examine why it produces something in him that previous objectives never have.

III.

He learns Tony the way he has learned everything: by observation, by repetition, by filing data until the shape of a thing becomes navigable.

Tony works at irregular hours and sleeps infrequently and eats when reminded. His hands move faster than his words and his words move fast. He laughs at his own jokes before he finishes telling them and he is kind to machines in a way he is not always kind to people and he takes things apart to understand them and can't seem to help himself from making improvements as he puts them back together.

He is also, the asset notes, regularly injured in ways he does not report.

The asset observes this pattern over several weeks. Tony comes back from missions with bruises he shrugs off, with a wrist held at an angle that suggests strain, with a deep cut above his hip that he seals with medical tape in the workshop bathroom at 0200 when he thinks no one is watching. The other assets — the other team members, the asset corrects himself, they are not assets, he should not call them that — do not appear to notice. Or they notice and believe Tony's assessments of himself. Or they are occupied with their own damage.

The asset notices. The asset does not believe Tony's assessments of himself.

On a Tuesday, Tony comes back from a mission with his left arm in a configuration that is not correct. He is talking while he walks — giving FRIDAY a debrief, laughing at something, already thinking about whatever problem he left on the bench — and the asset falls into step with him and Tony says, without missing a beat, "I'm fine."

"Your shoulder," the asset says.

"Is fine."

"The angle of—"

"Barnes." Tony stops walking. He looks at the asset with the expression that could be amusement or discomfort or both. "I appreciate it, I truly do, but I've been managing my own structural damage for twenty years, I don't need—"

"Sit," the asset says.

Tony blinks.

The asset waits. He is aware this is not how he is supposed to engage. He is aware that sit is the kind of word that runs in one direction, from handler to asset, not the reverse. He holds very still in the silence that follows.

Tony sits.

"Huh," Tony says.

The asset crouches in front of him. He examines the shoulder — not touching, not yet, reading the angles and the way Tony is holding himself, the compensations he's built into his posture. "You've done this before," he says. "The same shoulder."

"Wow, you really did memorize everything."

"The joint is hypermobile. You're protecting it wrong." The asset straightens. "I can relocate it properly. It will hurt less after."

Tony looks at him for a long moment. The workshop hums. DUM-E, who has been following this exchange with evident interest, makes a small inquisitive sound.

"It's not dislocated," Tony says. "Just—"

"Partially. The anterior—"

"Okay, fine." Tony exhales. "Okay. Yeah. Go ahead."

The asset places his right hand on Tony's shoulder carefully — this is important, the care, because Tony has startled before at sudden movements, not badly, not the way the asset startles, but enough — and then applies controlled pressure in the specific direction that will correct the problem, and Tony makes a short sharp sound, and then: "Oh," he says. "Okay. That's — yeah. Better." He rolls the shoulder. His expression shifts. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

The asset considers this. "I don't know," he says, which is the truest answer.

Tony nods, the way he nods when he is thinking about something adjacent to what was just said. Then he looks at his shoulder and back at the asset. "Thanks," he says. "Genuinely."

The asset straightens and returns to his corner.

He adds the shoulder to his monitoring matrix. He will watch the angle from now on.

Sub-objective updated: Anticipate requirements. Reduce handler burden. Monitor handler structural integrity.

IV.

"Okay but why," Tony says, three weeks later, not looking up, "are you always in the corner?"

The asset processes this. "The corner provides optimal—"

"Coverage, yeah, I got that, that's very you." Tony rotates his chair so he's facing the asset properly. He has grease on his left hand and a stylus in his right and he is using neither at the moment. "But you've been in my workshop for—" He waves the stylus. "A while now. You're allowed to move around. You're allowed to be in here without filing a defensive perimeter report."

The asset stands in the corner. He is aware that this response is not the correct one.

"What would you do," Tony says, "if I wasn't here? Like, if I wasn't watching, and you could do literally anything in this space — what would you do?"

The asset does not know how to answer this question. He does not understand the premise. Tony is always here, or if Tony is not here the asset goes to wherever Tony is, or if Tony is unavailable the asset returns to his quarters. The question of what would you do without me has no operational answer because the scenario is not one the asset runs.

"I would wait," the asset says.

Tony is quiet. His expression does the submerged thing.

"Come here," he says, after a moment.

The asset crosses to him.

Tony turns back to his workbench. "FRIDAY, pull up the schematics for the repulsor calibration — yeah, those." To the asset: "I need someone to hold the housing steady while I realign the coil. FRIDAY can't do it, and DUM-E," he adds, raising his voice, "will absolutely drop it."

DUM-E makes an offended sound.

"Okay, point your finger at the center coil." Tony guides the asset's right hand into position, which involves briefly holding his wrist, which the asset processes as: placement. Operational. Non-threatening. "Don't move. And — can you actually hold this steady while I—"

"Yes," the asset says.

He holds it steady. Tony works. Their hands are very close together.

This continues for forty-two minutes and nineteen seconds. The asset loses count of the milliseconds when the back of Tony's hand presses warmly against the senstive inner skin of his flesh wrist.

At the end of it, Tony says: "You're actually really useful, you know that?"

The asset files this under positive operational feedback and does not examine it further.

He does not examine why you're actually really useful has been the most satisfying thing anyone has said to him in — he does not know. He does not have the data to complete that sentence. He only knows that the sentence lands and stays and he finds himself returning to it later, in the dark of his quarters, the way he returns to objectives that aren't quite complete.

V.

The first time Tony falls asleep in the workshop, the asset does not know what to do.

It is not unexpected. Tony's sleep schedule is erratic, and 0330 is within the range of hours where he has been observed to go nonoperational mid-task. He is slumped sideways in his chair with his cheek against the workbench and his mouth slightly open and the coffee mug still in his loosening hand.

The asset catches the mug before it falls.

He stands with it for a moment.

DUM-E has gone quiet. U is in the corner running a low-power diagnostic loop. The workshop is as close to silent as it ever gets: the hum of machines on standby, the recycled air, the city outside doing its distance.

The asset places the mug on the bench.

He looks at Tony.

He should move to a sleeping surface, is the first thought. The workbench will cause neck strain. The chair is not designed for sustained horizontal loading. The asset has catalogued enough of Tony's structural complaints to know that the shoulder and the lower back are the most compromised points, and this position will not help either.

He looks at the couch.

He considers.

Then, carefully, with the particular economy of movement he uses when he does not want to cause alarm, he puts one hand on Tony's shoulder and one on his arm and says, very quietly, "Stark."

Tony makes a sound.

"You should move to the couch."

Another sound. "M'fine."

"You're going to hurt your back."

Slowly, blearily, Tony straightens, blinking. He looks at the asset with the unfocused quality of someone who is still seventy percent asleep. "Huh," he says. He looks at the couch. "Yeah, okay."

He gets up, with a particular coordination suggesting that has woken up in workshop chairs enough times that the process is automatic. He makes it to the couch. He drops onto it face-first. He is asleep again in approximately twenty seconds.

The asset retrieves the blanket from the cabinet where he has seen Tony put it.

He covers him with it.

He returns to his corner.

He does not examine why this feels like completing an objective. He does not examine why the workshop, which has been a place he monitors and processes, feels different tonight — smaller, more specific, like a word he has been trying to locate.

He sits in the corner with his back to the wall and does not sleep and watches Tony breathe and thinks about the word home and does not come to any conclusions.

Objective: Make yourself at home.

Status: IN PROGRESS.

VI.

He learns, over time, that he is allowed to have preferences.

This comes to him gradually, in the way that most things come to him — through observation, through Tony, through the specific way that Tony asks questions that do not feel like tests.

"What do you want for lunch?" is the first question that breaks the framework. He does not initially understand that it is a question he is supposed to answer. He waits for Tony to supply the operationally correct response.

Tony waits too.

The silence stretches.

"You're actually asking me," the asset says, eventually.

"That is generally what a question is, yes."

The asset looks at the options on the counter — Tony has apparently been doing something with the kitchen for the first time in recent memory, there are containers and things that are still warm. He processes the question. He tries to locate a preference.

"The left one," he says finally.

Tony hands him the left container. Inside are noodles with vegetables, something with sesame, warm and dense. The asset eats it standing at the counter. He is aware this is not typical eating behavior. Tony also eats standing at the counter because he has forgotten, as he usually does, that chairs exist for this purpose.

"Good?" Tony asks.

"Yes," the asset says, and means it, which is new.

This becomes a data point. He has a preference. The preference was solicited and acted upon and nothing bad happened. He files this under: ONGOING.

Two days later: "You want the window open or closed? I never know if you run hot or cold."

He processes. "Open."

Tony opens it. The city comes in. He had not known he wanted this until it was happening, until the air moved differently, until something loosened that he had not known was tight.

He adds the window open to his list of preferences.

The list is small. He is growing it slowly, one item at a time, in the same careful way he approaches any objective where the parameters are unclear and failure is possible.

Preferences (current):

• Noodles with sesame

• The window open

• DUM-E's sound when a task goes well

• The grey blanket

• The corner of the couch

• Tony working nearby

He thinks about the last item on the list for a long time.

It is the first preference he has identified that is not about a thing.

VII.

"You've got a face for this," Tony says one evening.

The asset is sitting on the couch. Tony has given him a tablet with something on it — not a mission brief, not a training document, something Tony has described as fiction, you're allowed to just read things for no reason — and the asset has been reading it for forty minutes. He is not certain he understands why people do this. He is also not certain he wants to stop.

"A face for what?" the asset says.

"Reading." Tony is not looking at him. He is working on something with very small components that requires the magnifying attachment on his glasses, which changes the geometry of his face in a way the asset finds — interesting. "You get very still. Which is saying something, given your baseline stillness is already pretty alarming."

The asset looks at his own hands. The tablet. The words on it.

"I like it," he says, which is true, and which he identifies as a significant data point: he has identified a preference in real time, without a direct solicitation.

Preference identified spontaneously: Reading. Fiction.

He notes this down internally with a satisfaction he cannot entirely account for.

"Yeah?" Tony glances over. "What is it?"

"There is a man who is learning to be human after not being one for a very long time."

A pause. "That's—"

"He finds it difficult," the asset adds. "The human parts. They are easier than he expected and harder than he expected in different places than he thought they would be."

Tony puts down his tool. He turns to look at the asset properly. His expression is doing the thing the asset cannot file.

"You want more?" Tony asks, after a moment. "Books, I mean. I can—" He waves vaguely. "Peter have a lot of them. In the actual paper form, which is apparently the sign of a man with too many opinions, but. He's got them, and I can borrow them, because I'm willing to introduce you to reading fiction but I'm not far gone enough to buy physical, ink-and-paper books."

"Yes," the asset says.

"Okay." Tony turns back. "Remind me tomorrow."

The asset will not forget to remind him. He notes, with something that is adjacent to warmth: tomorrow is an assumption. Tomorrow the asset will still be here. Tomorrow is planned for.

Sub-objective added: Ask about books.

VIII.

The night it goes wrong starts like other nights.

They come back from the mission in pieces. Not literally — though Rogers has a cut above his eye that has already closed, and Romanoff moves like her left side hurts, and the asset himself has three broken ribs that are already knitting — but in the way of people who have been shaken against each other and found the friction. The debrief is loud. Rogers's voice carries even when he is not trying.

The asset stands near the door. He tracks Tony, who is standing slightly apart from the group and holding his left arm at an angle that suggests the shoulder is worse than he is letting on.

He had prioritized Tony in the field. He would do this again. The math is simple: the others notice when they are hurt; Tony does not always notice, or does not always say. Tony is the handler. The handler's operational continuity is the primary objective. This is not complicated.

Rogers does not see it this way.

He watches Rogers's face when Rogers looks at Tony. He watches Tony's face when Tony stops arguing and goes somewhere else behind his eyes.

He went somewhere far, the asset notes. Farther than usual.

This is new data. He does not like it.

Later, Tony comes to the workshop the way he always does when things are bad, and the asset follows, the way he always does, and Tony stops in the middle of the room and turns around.

"Can you—" Tony's voice is wrong. Stripped of something. "Can you just go. Go find Steve, or — I don't need you here, okay? I didn't ask for this. Just go."

The asset's processing stutters.

Go find Steve.

He runs it again. And again. He runs the associated matrices — handler directive, compliance required, transfer of operational authority — and all of them return the same result, the one at the top of his threat-assessment system, the one labeled unacceptable.

The reassignment. The removal. The threat that would actually work, deployed.

He has made too many errors. He has caused friction. He has prioritized incorrectly, or correctly but in a way that was too visible, or he has been here too much and become a burden instead of an asset, or he has been watching and Tony finally noticed how much he was watching and found it wrong — he runs through the list rapidly, trying to identify the failure mode, and cannot isolate it, which means it could be any of them, which means it could be all of them.

"I'll do better," he says. His voice comes out strange. He does not often use it, not for things like this. "I can — I know I've been making mistakes, I know I'm not — I'll do better. Please don't—" He stops. Starts again. The words are hard to organize; they keep arriving in the wrong order. "Hit me. If I've failed. Or freeze me. I don't—" He makes himself stop. He makes himself look at Tony. "I don't want to go to him. Please. I'll do better. Tell me what I did wrong and I'll correct it. Please."

The silence is very loud.

Tony has gone very still.

"What," he says, very quietly, "did you just say to me."

The asset waits. He is good at waiting.

"You—" Tony crosses the distance between them in four steps and stops just short, and his face is doing something the asset has not seen before. Not the comfortable expressions. Not the performance ones. Not even the submerged ones. Something underneath all of those. Something raw in a way Tony does not usually allow to be visible. "You thought I was punishing you."

It is not a question so the asset does not answer.

"Bucky." Tony's voice has changed. Softer and more direct and missing all its usual protective covering. "Winter. Hey. Look at me."

The asset looks at him.

"I'm not—" Tony exhales. Stops. Seems to be reordering something. "I was having a bad night. Rogers was being an ass and I was taking it out on you, and that was wrong, that was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I'm not sending you anywhere." He says the last part carefully. "You're not going to Steve's. You didn't do anything wrong. You did the opposite of wrong."

The asset processes this.

"I always think you're going to hurt me," the asset says, because the words are already coming before he decides to let them, because something has been opened that is difficult to close. "But I never want to protect myself. From you. That's—" He stops. "I've noted that. As unusual."

Tony is quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he says finally, with a care that is unusual for him, with a slowness that is unusual for him, like he is carrying something that can be damaged. "Okay." He reaches out, the right hand, telegraphing the movement before he makes it, and puts it briefly on the asset's shoulder — the metal one, the safe one — and squeezes once, and lets go. "I'm going to remember you told me that."

DUM-E rolls over and nudges the back of Tony's knees with evident purpose.

"I know," Tony tells him. "I'm working on it."

He looks at the asset.

"Couch," he says. "I'm going to look at you, and you can take look at me, and then we're both going to sit down, and you're going to tell me one thing. One thing that you actually like. Food, sound, whatever. Just one thing."

"DUM-E," the asset says, because it is the first thing he finds when he reaches, "makes a specific sound when a task goes well."

Tony's face does the thing the asset cannot categorize, the one that goes directly to the unfiled folder.

"Yeah," Tony says. "He does." He turns toward the medical kit. "That's a good one."

The asset sits on the couch. He takes the grey blanket without being told.

IX.

After that night, something changes.

Not externally — the workshop is the same workshop, the corner is the same corner, DUM-E still requires periodic rescue from the consequences of his own enthusiasm. Internally, something in the asset has shifted in a way that does not fully resolve. A calibration that can no longer find its previous zero point.

Tony does not send him away.

Tony says come here and hand me that and are you hungry and stay. He says stay the way people say it to something they want to keep.

The asset notices this. He notices it with increasing precision, which is the opposite of what good intelligence work usually looks like; he is supposed to become less reactive to data over time, not more. But this data seems immune to desensitization. Every instance of Tony looking at him, every instance of I'll get your opinion on this, you've got good instincts, every instance of Tony falling asleep with the asset six feet away and apparently finding this unremarkable — all of it registers with the same acuity as the first time.

He does not know what to call this.

He adds it to the unfiled folder. The folder is getting very full.

"Can I ask you something?" Tony says, one evening.

"Yes," the asset says, because the answer to this question is always yes.

"What do you remember? Before." Tony is not looking at him. He is doing the thing where he asks difficult questions while appearing not to: working on something unrelated, making it easy for the asset to pretend the question was not asked if he cannot answer it. The asset has come to understand this as a form of kindness. It took him a while to recognize it as such. "Not the mission stuff. I know you've been over that with the others. I mean—" He pauses. "Do you remember anything that was just yours? That they couldn't take?"

The asset considers this for a long time.

"Cold," he says finally. "I remember being cold, but not from the ice. Before the ice. The winter. There was something I liked about it." He watches his own hands. "I can't get it back clearly. It's more like — the shape of it is still there. The outline of something I liked."

Tony is quiet.

"Liked winter," he says, finally, with something soft in his voice. "Yeah. That tracks."

"And machines," the asset says, because he's said this much, and Tony asked. "Something about how things worked. Why they did what they did." He looks at the workbench. At the neat ordered tools. At the schematics above it, which he has memorized entirely and could reproduce from memory without error, not because he was ordered to but because he found himself doing it and could not explain why. "I think I would have liked this," he says. "This work. What you do."

Tony puts down his tool.

He looks at the asset.

"You want me to teach you?" he says. "For real, I mean. Not just handing me things. Actually learn it."

The asset runs this through his objectives matrix.

New objective offered: Learn the work.

He can identify no operational reason to accept this objective. It is not mission-relevant. It will not increase combat effectiveness or reduce handler burden or serve any function he has been trained to value.

He cannot identify any reason not to want it, either.

"Yes," he says.

X.

Learning the work takes a long time, and the asset is not always good at it.

Tony is a specific kind of teacher: impatient with vagueness and endlessly patient with genuine confusion; fond of ten explanations where one would do; prone to getting so interested in his own tangents that the original lesson disappears entirely. He corrects errors with no, try it like this instead of the words or actions the asset automatically braces for, and it takes a long time — longer than the asset would like to admit — before his body stops preparing for the correction and simply listens to it.

"You flinch," Tony says, one afternoon, not unkindly.

"I know," the asset says.

"Does it help if I — should I narrate? Before I move?"

The asset considers this. "You already do."

Tony looks at his own hands. "Do I?"

"Yes. You began doing it—" The asset calculates. "Approximately three weeks after I arrived. You slow down before you reach across me. You say what you're doing before you do it." He pauses. "I noticed."

Tony is quiet for a moment. He looks away, at the schematic, and something in his jaw does the subtle thing it does when he is feeling something he would prefer not to be feeling.

"Yeah," he says. "Well." He picks his tool back up. "Show me the coil configuration again. You were almost right the first time."

The asset shows him the coil configuration again.

Almost right is new. Almost right means he can get to right from here. He adds this to the list of things he is learning about working, about this, about the specific language of almost and try it like this and yeah, there you go that Tony speaks fluently and the asset is learning slowly, one word at a time.

"This is interesting," the asset says, one night. Very late; Tony has forgotten to note the time and the asset has chosen not to remind him because they are in the middle of something and the middle of something is the part that is hardest to get back to.

"Hopefully," Tony says, distracted.

"The mechanism. The way the energy moves through—" The asset stops. Tries to find the right words. Vocabulary for this work is a subset of his existing knowledge that he is actively expanding, but the expansion is uneven; sometimes he has the technical terms and sometimes he has the concept but not the word and sometimes he has neither and has to point. "The path it takes is not what I would have expected."

Tony looks at him. Something shifts in his expression. "Okay, explain."

The asset explains.

Tony listens.

When he finishes, Tony is looking at him differently — not differently badly, differently in the way of someone who has been surprised in a direction they are glad about.

"You actually see it," Tony says.

"See what."

"Why it works. Most people — even good engineers — they learn what it does, but they don't see why it moves the way it does. That's—" He stops. "That's the part that took me until I was nineteen to figure out how to explain to someone else."

The asset processes this.

"It is similar to ballistics," he says. "The path. The variables."

"Right." Tony looks at the component between them. "Right, yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way but — yeah." He looks at the asset. His expression is in the unfiled folder. "You're going to be insufferable at this eventually, I can tell."

The asset does not know how to respond to this.

"Is that—"

"A compliment," Tony says. "In the dialect I'm speaking. Yes."

The asset adds this to his vocabulary notes: insufferable, in Tony's dialect, means good. He is unsure how widely applicable this translation is.

He files it anyway.

XI.

He begins to understand, slowly, that Tony is lonely.

This is not obvious at first. Tony occupies space loudly and people are always near him, and he produces the impression of someone surrounded. The asset has been learning to distinguish between things that look the same and are not the same, and the distinction here becomes legible after enough hours of observation.

Tony is surrounded. Tony is not accompanied.

He talks to his machines the way people talk to someone who is listening. He works at hours that are not social hours because social hours have run out. He tells jokes in empty rooms and does not seem to notice they are empty. He keeps a specific mug because it is continuous with something — the asset cannot determine what, exactly, but something old, something that was present before the shop and the tower and all of this — and he repairs it rather than replacing it and uses it even though the cracked handle is not ideal and the asset has offered, twice, to fix it properly.

"Don't touch the mug," Tony said the first time.

"I could seal the crack and—"

"Don't touch the mug," Tony said again, and this time the asset understood it was not about the mug.

He does not touch the mug.

What he understands, eventually, is this: Tony keeps things that have been repaired rather than replaced. The mug. The machines. The asset has watched Tony fix DUM-E's grip mechanism so many times that it has become a kind of language — I would rather do this again than give you up. He watches Tony patch armor that would be simpler to remake, mend code that would be faster to rewrite, and the pattern is consistent enough that the asset can extrapolate the principle.

He is not sure what to do with this extrapolation.

He holds it. He holds it for a long time without adding it to any operative file, which is unusual for him. Usually data becomes objective becomes action. This data is sitting in a different place, some pre-processing space he didn't know he had, and he is letting it sit there while he determines what it means.

He thinks it means something that does not have a tactical application.

He thinks that is okay.

XII.

The first time Tony looks at him like that — the first time the asset identifies the look correctly, not as a subcategory of handler regard or positive operational feedback, but as what it actually is — they are standing at the workbench at 0130 and the workshop is quiet except for the machines and the city and Tony is showing him something about load distribution in composite materials.

Tony reaches past him to adjust the display. His arm is close to the asset's arm for approximately three seconds.

Tony notices. He knows because Tony pauses — not fully, not enough that it would be visible to anyone not running the calibration the asset runs constantly on this particular subject, but a pause, a beat, a breath taken and released carefully.

Then Tony moves back to his side of the workbench and continues explaining, and the asset continues listening, and nothing is said— but the asset has the data now.

He is very careful with data like this. He files it somewhere with a great deal of padding around it and does not compress it down, does not reduce it to operational parameters, lets it stay in the form it arrived in: he noticed. He paused. He chose to continue.

He does not add a sub-objective.

He is learning that some things should not be objectives.

Weeks pass.

He and Tony work on things that are not missions. He and Tony eat together in the kitchen at odd hours, and one of them — usually Tony, but sometimes the asset, who is getting better at offering rather than waiting — retrieves the correct food. He and Tony talk — not about the work, sometimes, but about other things, about the books the asset has been reading, about Tony's theory that all great engineers have a specific kind of stubbornness that the rest of the world calls arrogance, about the city outside and where the asset might want to go in it once he is ready to want to go somewhere.

"I want to see the bridges," the asset says, on a Thursday.

"Yeah?" Tony does not ask why. This is one of the things the asset has come to value about him: he does not often ask why in a way that means justify this. He asks it the way he asks it about machines, like the answer is something he is genuinely interested in.

"I have read about them," the asset says. "I think I remember something about—" He stops. "The shape of them. The way cables carry weight. It is the same principle as—" He touches the workbench. "I want to see it big."

Tony looks at him.

"Okay," Tony says. "Sunday. I'll drive."

"You drive terribly."

"I drive expressively. That's different." Tony picks up his coffee. "Sunday. We'll do the bridge. I know a place we can see it from that most people don't know about."

Most people don't know about it. The asset stores this. Tony is going to show him a thing that is not commonly known. Tony is going to show him something specific and personal and usually-private.

"Okay," the asset says.

He is getting better at saying okay. He is getting better at understanding that okay is allowed to mean yes and I want this and something that does not yet have a word.

XIII.

Sunday happens.

The place Tony knows is a walkway above the river, accessible through a gap in a fence that Tony navigates with the ease of someone who has used it before, and from it the bridge is very large and the cables do exactly what the asset thought they would do — hold the weight in visible geometry, make the math legible, suspend something massive in a way that looks improbable and isn't.

Tony watches him look at it.

"Good?" Tony asks.

"Yes," the asset says.

The city is bright and cold and the river moves below them and Tony is standing close enough that the asset could, if he chose, determine the precise distance between them without instruments. He does not measure this because he has been working on not measuring everything.

"I had this," the asset says, after a while. "Something like this. Before. I think I used to go to places just to look at things."

"You think?"

"The shape of it is there." He had said this before, about the cold. The same word: shape. The outline of something without the interior. "I think I liked the city. Not for any reason. Just — liked it."

Tony is quiet. Then: "You can like it again. The same one or a different one. Either's allowed."

The asset considers this.

"A different one," he says. "I think. This one." He looks at the bridge. "This city."

Tony makes a sound beside him. Something small and warm.

They stay for a long time.

On the way back, Tony drives expressively and the asset grips the door handle and does not tell Tony that he is doing it because Tony knows and seems to find it funny in a way that the asset does not mind being found funny. He has learned the difference between laughing at and laughing with and Tony does the second one.

"You okay?" Tony asks, at a light.

"Yes," the asset says.

He means: yes, the bridge, yes the city, yes the gap in the fence, yes the coffee afterward, yes the drive home, yes your voice when you said either's allowed — yes all of it, all the way down.

He says: "Yes."

Tony nods.

They drive.

XIV.

The moment does not arrive in the way that moments are supposed to arrive, according to the books the asset has been reading. There is no precipitating crisis, no obvious inflection point. What happens is: it is a Wednesday, unremarkable in every external feature, and Tony says come here from across the workshop in a voice that means nothing except I want to show you this, and the asset crosses to him, and Tony shows him the thing he wants to show — a new configuration for the repulsor that changes the efficiency by eleven percent, which is significant — and then Tony looks at him and the asset looks at Tony and the data that has been sitting in its padded file for months is suddenly very present.

"Hi," Tony says, which is not what you say when you are standing this close to someone you are going to show a technical innovation.

"Hi," the asset says.

Tony looks at him. Not at the schematic. Not past him or through him. At him, specifically, in the specific way that the asset has filed and refiled and failed to adequately categorize for a very long time.

"Can I—" Tony starts. Stops. This is unusual; Tony does not often stop in the middle of a sentence. He tries again. "Is it — would you — I'm asking," he says. "I'm asking if it would be okay."

The asset has not been asked that before. The word okay applied to him, to what he might want, to the asset as a subject of a question rather than an object of one.

He runs a brief check. He locates the data. He identifies the feeling — not with complete certainty, he does not have complete certainty about very much when it comes to feelings, but with enough certainty to proceed.

"Yes," he says. "It would be okay."

Tony leans in, slowly, telegraphing the movement, and presses his mouth to the asset's for a moment. Warm and careful and not — not nothing. Nothing does not feel like this. Nothing does not produce this cascade of processing, this sudden silence where all the tactical calculations usually run.

When Tony pulls back, the asset is very still.

"Okay," Tony says. His voice is different. "Good. That's — good."

"Yes," the asset agrees.

DUM-E, who has been watching this with what can only be described as invested attention, makes an extremely satisfied sound.

Tony closes his eyes briefly. "DUM-E, I swear to god."

The asset looks at DUM-E.

DUM-E makes the sound again — the one the asset identified and catalogued months ago, the first preference, the thing he had told Tony when Tony asked him to name one thing he liked. The sound of something going well.

"Yes," the asset says, to DUM-E, quietly. "I know."

XV.

He thinks about the word home for the last time on a Friday, sometime in what he estimates is the third month since he started running the objective.

He is on the couch with the grey blanket. Tony is at the workbench, doing the thing where he mutters through a problem as if externalizing it will give it better answers. The window is open because the asset asked and Tony opened it without asking why. DUM-E is recharging in the corner. U is doing something complicated with a component that it will probably need help with later and which the asset is already prepared to assist with.

He is reading. The book is the third one Tony has given him and this one is about an expedition — people in extreme cold, navigating toward something, surviving each other as much as the environment. He has opinions about the expedition's navigation choices. He will tell Tony these opinions later. Tony will tell him he is wrong and then ask him to say more, which is Tony's way of agreeing.

He looks at the room.

He looks at Tony's back, curved over the workbench, and the mug with the repaired handle, and DUM-E's charging light, and the blanket over his legs, and the window and the cold air and the book.

He looks at all of it.

He opens his internal files. He finds the objective that has been running for months, incomplete, duration indeterminate.

Objective: Make yourself at home.

He considers the data.

He considers the noodles and the window open and the corner of the couch and the word Sunday said in advance like a promise. He considers you're going to be insufferable at this eventually and the mug and the bridge and hi said close and careful. He considers DUM-E's sound, the satisfied one, the one that means this went well.

He considers Tony, who repairs things rather than replacing them.

He closes the objective.

Objective: Make yourself at home. Status: COMPLETE.

He turns the page.

Across the room, Tony mutters something technical and frustrated. Without being asked, the asset says: "The load path goes through the secondary coil first."

A pause.

"That's — how did you—" Tony turns around. He is doing the expression, the warm puzzled one, the equation-he-keeps-getting-a-good-answer-to one. "I was thinking this for twenty minutes."

"You were saying it out loud," the asset points out. "I was listening."

Tony looks at him.

He smiles — fully, without the protective covering, the real one, the one the asset had not seen for a long time and then had seen more and more, which he has come to understand as something Tony is also learning, something they are learning together in the same slow way you learn to hold a new tool.

"Yeah," Tony says. "I know."

He turns back to the workbench.

The asset turns back to the book.

Outside, the city does its city things. The window stays open. The light in DUM-E's corner blinks steady and warm.

The asset reads, and the objective is closed, and he does not file a new one.

He does not need to.

He is already here.