Tony's drink halted halfway to his mouth during Rogers' little outburst - and then, for the first time since his arrival, he stared at him with a hint of what might have been actual offense (and more than a hint of blank disbelief). He wasn't a man who put a lot of stock in rumors, because he was on intimate terms with the ways in which they operated and because, frankly, sometimes it was hard to remember which ones he'd personally started - but Rogers wouldn't know a joke if it bit him in the ass was apparently all truth. Because that was very nearly the first thing he'd said all night that hadn't been a joke.
"That's not dramatic," he said, throwing his free arm over the back of his chair. "That's just how you say hello to guys like y - you know. Guys like Thor." He somehow managed to bite back guys like you, a rare show of tact in the face of Rogers' insistence upon bristling at everything. "Musclebound meat-heads who care about honor, and shit like that. You're sure that doesn't ring a bell?" (Tact, with Tony, had a half-life comparable to some of the more esoteric radioactive isotopes.) "Come on. If that's dramatic, what are you? Standing in a corner with your bread and water, thinking about - death. Please." He didn't think of himself as dramatic, any more than he thought of Odinson as stupid (well - no stupider than he thought everyone was), any more than he thought Rogers was some kind of dour ascetic. More to the point, it felt unfair to him to bring a man's public performance to bear on him as though it were something real. Didn't they all do it? Weren't they all supposed to do it? The notion that he was supposed to be the man he said he was - that he ought to be held accountable for the image he presented - provoked a knee-jerk response in him that was deeply defensive.
Not least, perhaps, because he knew on some level that he probably should be. "And now you're here mugging for the servants, I mean - talk about drama. But I don't want to talk about this." He could always tell, having had a great deal of practice, when he was running a conversation right off the rails and into a ravine, but his methods of trying to put it back on track were shockingly rudimentary; I don't want to talk about this really didn't work as often as he wished it would. He drank to cover a faint wince. He hadn't been able to put a very precise finger on why he wanted to talk to Rogers, but whatever the reason, it hadn't been to get his back up even more. Oh, well. He made a half-hearted attempt to push things back toward pleasantries. "How's the soup?"