ysabetwordsmith | Story: "Hairpins" Part 8

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Story: "Hairpins" Part 8

This story belongs to the series Love Is For Children which includes "Love Is for Children," "Eggshells," "Dolls and Guys,""Saudades," "Turnabout Is Fair Play," "Touching Moments," "Splash," "Coming Around," "Birthday Girl," "No Winter Lasts Forever," "Hide and Seek," "Kernel Error," "Happy Hour," and "Green Eggs and Hulk."

Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Phil Coulson, JARVIS, Clint Barton, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanova, Bruce Banner.
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: This story is mostly fluff, but it has some intense scenes in the middle. Highlight for details. These include dubious consent as Phil and JARVIS discuss what really happened when Agent Coulson hacked his way into Stark Tower, over which Phil has something between a flashback and a panic attack. They also discuss some of the bad things that have happened to Avengers in the past, including various flavors of abuse. If these are sensitive topics for you, please think carefully before deciding whether to read onward.
Summary: Uncle Phil needs to pick out pajamas for game night. He gets help from an unexpected direction.
Notes: Service. Shopping. Gifts. Artificial intelligence. Computers. Teamwork. Team as family. Friendship. Communication. Hope. Apologies. Forgiveness. Nonsexual ageplay. Nonsexual intimacy. Love. Tony Stark needs a hug. Bruce Banner needs a hug. #coulsonlives.

Begin with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7. Skip to Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13.

"Hairpins" Part 8

The timer went off, and Phil headed into the kitchen to collect his clam chowder. He brought it back to the couch. The rich, creamy food helped warm him from the inside out. The stress of the day faded a little farther away.

Phil managed his supper with one hand and his Starkpad with the other. More pictures filled the screen. He sighed. They were no help either. "Surely there must be some images of Tony Stark that aren't depressing," Phil muttered. A single picture flicked to the top of the page, Tony at seventeen kneeling beside the brand-new DUM-E. He looked so young, scrawny underneath a too-big sweatshirt probably stolen from his father's closet, but he was smiling.

"Okay, so Tony loves robots," Phil said, tracing a fond finger along the edge of the picture. "I can work with that."

He opened a new search page and put in 'robot fabric.' The first example that appeared was an awful shade of mauve. Many of the others were a confusing jumble of colors. Phil sorted them out much as he had the bears before. This time there were fewer suggestions, even though the general selection seemed better. None of the new images got inserted into the top row, despite Phil moving several there himself. I wonder what's gone wrong with the Intelligent Search function, he mused.

Despite that, it didn't take long for Phil to find cloth in a nice rich blue with multicolored robots zooming across it. Some of them were even red and gold. He smiled. "This should do nicely," Phil said. "I think Tony will like this." He went to open the custom order page --

-- only to have the Starkpad freeze up on him.

Phil frowned and gave the side of the frame a gentle tap with the heel of his hand. No response. "What is going on here?" he wondered.

"That's wrong," JARVIS said softly.

Phil's eyebrows climbed. "I noticed that the search function is glitchy tonight, but I managed to find what I was looking for anyway. I don't see a problem here."

The fan in the nearest air vent sped up with a faint whuff, blowing more warm air into the room. Phil finished the last of his clam chowder and set the empty bowl on the coffee table. He waited for an answer.

"Your search has reached its logical conclusion, but I believe you are looking in the wrong area," JARVIS said.

"I thought StarkSearch was supposed to be an intuitive program. If that's true, then why am I getting off-center results now instead of excellent ones like before?" Phil said. He was stiff and sore, and he did not need this right now.

"I am StarkSearch, or rather, StarkSearch is a part of me," JARVIS said. "I am programmed to assist authorized users in their efforts. This includes the option of answering direct questions."

"I asked the wrong questions," Phil realized.

"They were good questions. You simply did not dig deep enough to find the right ones. In your defense, those are quite deeply buried," JARVIS said.

* * *

Notes:

Tony made DUM-E when he was 17. This is the newspaper picture of them. Here is a video of DUM-E.

See the mauve, rainbow, and blue robot fabrics.

Asking the wrong questions leads to looking for answers in the wrong places. Phil has the right general concept and process, but he's missing some crucial pieces of information.

[To be continued in Part 9 ...]

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>> If so, Phil has made it; <<

Yes, exactly.

>> he confused what Tony is known for with what Tony LIKES, especially LIKED, when he was a child. <<

Well, Phil isn't wrong. Tony does genuinely like robots. Phil successfully considered and discarded more tangential and troublesome images before latching onto robots. Tony probably would have enjoyed the robot fabric. It just wasn't exactly what he needed -- and Phil is missing necessary information for that part.

>> He may have LOVED robots from the time he'd first seen or imagined them, but Phil should keep his focus not on Tony at seventeen, but on Tony-at-Four. <<

The problem here is that Phil didn't know Tony at four, or even at seventeen. Phil is trying to do a similar trick as with Natasha --> Natka, but with far less information.

>> His whole mindset would've been different but his whole REASON for creating Dum-E, You, Butterfingers, and JARVIS would've been firmly entrenched. <<

Yes, that's true. Phil isn't quite to the point, yet, where he can dig down to the level of "What is Tony getting out of game night? Why does Tony need robots?"

What Tony gets out of game night is a chance to act wild and have someone bring him back into control without hurting or belittling him. And he got into computing and robotics as something that was always consistent, under his control, safe because it wouldn't yell at him. He started building his botfamily so that he could have a family, friends, company that he enjoyed.

>> That child really needed a Coulson to read the adults in Tony's life the complete Riot Act. With addenda. And visual aids. <<

So very true. But it's easy for a rich family to get away with abuse, as long as they put on a smiling face for the public.

This is why I wrote "Off the Rack."

>> Jarvis HAD to speak up; he'd let Phil come to the end of the logical sequence, <<

Yes, exactly. This is JARVIS putting Tony's well-being first. It's always at least a little risky for JARVIS to reveal himself, although clearly he has decided to do with with Phil since he's been dropping hairpins for months.

>> but I view the slow (reluctant) responses as the human equivalent of grinding one's teeth. <<

Similar. It's more frustration than anger, though, watching Phil come close but not quite in the right area. JARVIS keeps hoping that Phil will somehow get it without needing an overt intervention, and that's not what happens.

>> I also imagine that Jarvis was calculating the probability that Coulson was slipping closer to Jarvis' list of 'People Who Failed Tony'. <<

Yes. Phil scores well on intent, at least. But there are a lot of people who have let Tony down.

>> Now, they're both facing the same question: "Will he help me take care of Tony?" <<

That common ground is why they get along so well.

>> HOW they each answer that will reveal an incredible amount about themselves, and lead to the less important question (to their current ways of thinking) -- "Is this person my friend, too?" <<

Indeed. JARVIS has already adopted Phil as one of "his people" but Phil doesn't understand the full implications of that yet. Plus JARVIS is just beginning to explore the experience of friendship, because prior to the Avengers he only had Tony and the other bots (family) plus a few erratic allies. This will be Phil's first excursion into friendship with an artificial intelligence. So it's delicate territory for them.

>> HOW they each answer that will reveal an incredible amount about themselves, and lead to the less important question (to their current ways of thinking) -- "Is this person my friend, too?" <<

Indeed. JARVIS has already adopted Phil as one of "his people" but Phil doesn't understand the full implications of that yet. Plus JARVIS is just beginning to explore the experience of friendship, because prior to the Avengers he only had Tony and the other bots (family) plus a few erratic allies. This will be Phil's first excursion into friendship with an artificial intelligence. So it's delicate territory for them.

That key question-- "What is friendship?" is to me t-h-e reason that Tony created the 'bots. Not merely because "profoundly gifted" children really, really don't understand other children and can truly freak out adult caregivers, but because Tony ended up within a walled city of increasingly isolating 'worlds': gifted, only child of neglectful, erratic, alcoholic adults, extremely rich and vulnerable to exploitation or kidnapping, thrust into ever more adult expectations at unreasonable emotional/physical ages... Who "Tony Stark" actually IS seems to be hidden behind a circular labyrinth. I doubt many people have taken enough time to work through the dead ends and switchbacks without resorting to gross destruction of his emotional/mental "walls".

I just wish that the movies had taken more time (seconds, blast it, SECONDS could've accomplished the task!) to show Tony interacting with the 'bots when they weren't the butt of a joke!

Last of all, thank you for responding so quickly and fluently to my quick comments.

>> That key question-- "What is friendship?" is to me t-h-e reason that Tony created the 'bots. <<

Yes. He needed interaction, but above all, acceptance.

>> Not merely because "profoundly gifted" children really, really don't understand other children and can truly freak out adult caregivers, <<

It's not just a lack of understanding. Smart people often find average people boring, and average people often find smart people scary. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's a trend. So gifted children routinely grow up with few or no peers, and consequently few or no friends; and then everyone is surprised and blames them when they have crappy social skills and no friends.

You can see the effects of this not just with Tony but also with Bruce. Steve and Clint have the reverse version: smart people who were treated as stupid because they also had physical skills. Clint has it really bad, because he grew up with it. For Steve it's a later imprint, but post-serum everyone treated him like a meat puppet. It's enough to do some damage.

>> but because Tony ended up within a walled city of increasingly isolating 'worlds': gifted, only child of neglectful, erratic, alcoholic adults, extremely rich and vulnerable to exploitation or kidnapping, thrust into ever more adult expectations at unreasonable emotional/physical ages...<<

Yes, that's a disaster. It's no wonder the poor guy has boundary issues.

>> Who "Tony Stark" actually IS seems to be hidden behind a circular labyrinth. <<

It is. He was trained early on to present only a pleasing appearance to the press. As a teenager, naturally Tony rebelled against that and spent a decade or two acting like a hellion. But he always showed people what he wanted them to see: never the real Tony. That was hidden as deeply as he could conceal it, as soon as he learned how. It was very difficult to hurt him for real, because the target was buried under very dense cover.

>> I doubt many people have taken enough time to work through the dead ends and switchbacks without resorting to gross destruction of his emotional/mental "walls". <<

They haven't. I think Happy knows Tony better than most people realize, because he doesn't try to dig in: he just does what Tony asks or needs of him. So he's more likely to see Tony vulnerable than anyone else, prior to game night. Rhodey knows Tony pretty well, because they met when Tony was still young; not all the walls were up yet. That's probably why Rhodey is so stressed in the movies; later on, Tony shuts him out more, and that hurts. Pepper is probably the one who's done the most work of trying to solve Tony like a maze, using her perceptions to navigate through; but she nags so much, it's hard for him to get his walls down even when he wants to. So they didn't work out.

Phil made some early mistakes trying to manage Tony, but he has learned from those, and is now being a lot more careful. That matters.

>> I just wish that the movies had taken more time (seconds, blast it, SECONDS could've accomplished the task!) to show Tony interacting with the 'bots when they weren't the butt of a joke! <<

I wish that too. The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are when DUM-E saved Tony's life and Tony said "Good boy," and when JARVIS was trying to talk Tony into telling someone about the palladium poisoning. Really, this is a classic example of how disadvantaged groups are treated in entertainment: frequently as the plucky comic relief. Compare the role of JARVIS and the bots to roles played by black actors. Now you can see why I write them with more depth and nuance.

>> Last of all, thank you for responding so quickly and fluently to my quick comments. <<

You're welcome! I love interacting with the audience. Usually I come back and answer the previous batch of comments after I post the next installment, but sometimes I'll jump in earlier if there's a comment that seems more important. You really nailed a lot of key issues in this part of the story, so I wanted to address that sooner rather than later.

So gifted children routinely grow up with few or no peers, and consequently few or no friends; and then everyone is surprised and blames them when they have crappy social skills and no friends.

Do you have sources for this? Because everything I've read suggests that gifted children do as well, if not better, than average children in terms of social interaction. Most of the literature I'm familiar with suggests that socially awkward geeks are about as valid a trope as mentally ill artists - which is to say, confirmation bias means we notice examples of those, while the more prevalant counter-examples fly under the radar.

I've read a lot of material on this topic. Here's one example of the challenges that gifted children face.

I also have personal experience -- mine, plus a lot of gifted friends. I was sixteen before I had any real friends. Before that, it was a few friendly acquaintances and the very few adults who weren't threatened by me. I was shocked the first time I was around other people my age of my intelligence, and shocked the first time I went to a convention and was around other people who thought like me -- just the idea of suddenly being in a large group of people who could keep up with me, not bore me, and not resent me. It was a whole different world.

And today? I have a handful of highly intelligent friends scattered around the globe. I love that kind of interaction when I can get it. But the area where I live is not very densely populated, which means there aren't many smart people around outside the universities; and campus culture tends to be insular. So I'm mostly surrounded by people who bore me and are scared of me. They are interested in things like celebrities and sex, while I am interested in things like quantum physics and climate change.

People here actively attack signs of intelligence. I was once sitting in a restaurant and overheard someone make a very simple remark about math, only to have his "friends" dogpile him. Because he said something that wasn't ignorant. I felt sorry for him.

Things like that are why gifted kids often pretend to be dumber than they are -- or if they don't want to do that, they avoid people. Those who are also socially gifted may find ways of charming people into overlooking their intelligence. But in much of America, intelligence is not valued. It is often condemned, and that trend is getting worse. People pretend that it's desirable, and it can be valuable if you find ways to apply it to making a living. But it can be very isolating, and it's useless if you don't have enough money and power to be the one deciding what happens in your life. Then you see all the right answers, and get stuck with other people constantly making stupid choices for which you pay the price.

There is literature, and it is nuanced. Some of the stuff from the 1930s lays it out that if you can get a little knot of similarly gifted children they are very good at socializing-where the problems come are when you take Johnny who remembers wrongs because he's ahead in development and set him with others that aren't ready for rule based/turn taking; compound that with adults that can't see why things are going pear shaped...

They do talk about the problems of the profoundly gifted when they have no peers. Humans are social, but they need to be meeting somewhere even and safe. If you think age-grouping is the only way to go... A little gifted child has got enough on plate not to have to worry about seeming different and thus 'alien'. It's usually better there be some older kids in the pack that can smooth out the ways kids aren't on the same page.

>>There is literature, and it is nuanced.<<

Some of it is nuanced. Some of it is utter rubbish. You have to read widely, think carefully, and observe actual people of the type being discussed in order to start sorting out which texts are more reliable and which are ruinously inaccurate.

>> Some of the stuff from the 1930s lays it out that if you can get a little knot of similarly gifted children they are very good at socializing-<<

*chuckle* And this one time? At band camp?

Gifted kids who are lucky enough to find a circle of common peers tend to be happier and more successful than those who do not. But some are naturally loners, and some are loners by choice, so it's important to account for that too.

>> where the problems come are when you take Johnny who remembers wrongs because he's ahead in development and set him with others that aren't ready for rule based/turn taking; compound that with adults that can't see why things are going pear shaped... <<

Yes, exactly. Being forced to spend hours a day in an impoverished environment doing stultifying work that one learned years ago is agonizing. Some kids lash out. Some go numb and stop caring. Some learn to dissociate. Some learn to be pleasing regardless of what they feel inside. And none of that is constructive to actually learning anything or developing a healthy personality or socializing.

>> They do talk about the problems of the profoundly gifted when they have no peers. Humans are social, but they need to be meeting somewhere even and safe. <<

Yes. Many gifted kids learn early that the world is not safe, that what they are is unwelcome to others and a cause of them being attacked socially or physically. Some are lucky enough to be in a more sheltered environment, especially if they're set with people at their own developmental level.

>> If you think age-grouping is the only way to go... A little gifted child has got enough on plate not to have to worry about seeming different and thus 'alien'. It's usually better there be some older kids in the pack that can smooth out the ways kids aren't on the same page. <<

One interesting thing is that if you run kids in mixed-aged groups, they adapt much more easily to different ability levels. You learn who's good at what and who isn't, how to compensate for each other's abilities or inabilities, how to teach and learn new things, and how to find stuff to do that will be fun for a variety of folks. Those are all valuable lessons. And almost nobody gets them anymore; few schools make an effort at it, and the extended families and neighborhoods where it used to be learned have been shattered into fragments. That's a problem.

where you have a little band, it's much easier to model for the younger kids that 'aren't there yet', allow for the ones that are reading further than their age, and otherwise make things fun mostly. Because then you aren't laying all of that on the five year old that is doing things for the first time.

But it does depend on those older children having had experience in seeing this work. If all they've known is lockstep age-segregation, they're more likely to think Lord of the Flies is normal.

Of course, things have been breaking down long enough we've got adults that never learned these things.

>> where you have a little band, it's much easier to model for the younger kids that 'aren't there yet', allow for the ones that are reading further than their age, and otherwise make things fun mostly. <<

Yes, that's true. It works.

>> But it does depend on those older children having had experience in seeing this work. If all they've known is lockstep age-segregation, they're more likely to think Lord of the Flies is normal. <<

Also true. Children can be surprisingly gentle or amazingly vicious. Some of each is innate; there are individuals who are going to lean one way or the other. But humans are primarily contextual and the vast majority will conform to what others around them are doing. So if you design society where might makes right, your children will tend to act like Lord of the Flies.

And then people are shocked! shocked, I say! when abused, neglected, or otherwise malformed children bring guns to school and kill each other.

Well, duh. That was obviously going to happen. If you teach people that it's okay to hurt each other, which this society does routinely in countless ways, that is exactly what they will do.

>> Of course, things have been breaking down long enough we've got adults that never learned these things. <<

Yes. It's horrifying. We have lost so many family skills, it's no wonder that society is coming apart at the seams.

I've been intrigued by one suggestion that video games contribute to the breakdown, not because the games are violent, but because the player interacts with each character in a few lines, immediately moving on if that character doesn't say or do something they want. Someone noticed that college students were behaving exactly the same way with fellow students, teachers, staff, etc. Instead of having a real conversation, they'd make an attempt to get something out of the person, and bail if it wasn't immediately forthcoming. Most interactions lasted only 1-2 minutes. It was a fascinating article.

Sow the whirlwind and then wonder at the darts piercing everything dear.

One very telling thing I read (I don't have a citation) talked about getting ready to build schools to deal with the Boomers. And they bald faced were given a choice, about building as they had, buildings that could take what comes, or doing it cheaper with the knowledge that the buildings would wear out, would fail in planned obsolescence and only a wrecking ball or a bulldozer would solve them.

These decisions came to roost in the 80s and 90s.

>> Sow the whirlwind and then wonder at the darts piercing everything dear. <<

Yes, exactly.

>> One very telling thing I read (I don't have a citation) talked about getting ready to build schools to deal with the Boomers. And they bald faced were given a choice, about building as they had, buildings that could take what comes, or doing it cheaper with the knowledge that the buildings would wear out, would fail in planned obsolescence and only a wrecking ball or a bulldozer would solve them. <<

I'm not surprised that people took the cheaper choice. It shows how much they think of the kids, and the future.

>> These decisions came to roost in the 80s and 90s. <<

That's part of what spurred the school merger movement. The catch is, when you make schools and classes bigger, you create problems. There will always be some troublemakers, typically around 1 in 10. If you have a school of 200, there are about 20 troublemakers. At a class size of 12 or so, there's only one; at 20, likely 2. Those are manageable numbers. Make the school 2000 and you have 200 troublemakers, enough for several gangs and a serious problem. In a class of 30 or 40 kids, there are 3-4 troublemakers, more than one adult can control and have time left for anything else. In a small school, it's easier for adults to intervene before problems turn serious. In a large school, things can spiral out of hand quickly and severely. The troublemakers have more influence over students who would otherwise behave better.

Homeschooled groups actually do really well at this--mixed-age and mixed-ability groups means kids can do better.

Doesn't work with religious nutjob groups, but secular ones? Goes great. I grew up homeschooled, and the secular homeschoolers had a lot of family and life skills that I grew up learning. I was also lucky to end up in a charter school for high school where we weren't divided by age; the other students were amazing, and we all looked out for each other.

Put kids together and they generally figure it out.

Lucky you. Very few schools put any real effort into understanding or teaching children. Most started out acting like factories and now act like prisons. >_< Which is why I've written a lot about Terramagne's alternative schools.

One source could be me.

*hugs* I'm sorry that you shared such experiences. I've heard that kind of thing from multiple gifted friends.

Then again, I rarely attract people who grew up popular, regardless of how smart they are or aren't. There's an emotional intelligence as well as more intellectual forms, and people high in that use it to their advantage, securing a more respectable and pleasant niche in the social hierarchy.

I was a gifted child which makes the ongoing brain damage that the MS is doing We thing it started when I was about nine - when we look back at my medical history - if not from birth) even harder. Thanks for the *hugs* and back at you.

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Story: "Hairpins" Part 8

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