Story: "Hairpins" Part 8

[ysabetwordsmith]

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 ...]

Comments

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[pinkrangerv]

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.

Re: Is there such a thing as a "perfect mistake"?

[ysabetwordsmith]

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.