And there it was. Tony set his spoon down and dropped his chin into his hand, looking off toward the kitchen - as though he were trying very, very hard to keep himself from flying off the handle (although it was more likely he was actually considering what the man behind that wall would think if Rogers' nose happened to bleed all over the tablecloth). His other hand clenched into his napkin, he pressed his lips into a line, and a few different retorts raced through his mind, from feigned indifference to the depths of pettiness - but when he looked at Rogers again, he came out with the worst that he had.
"No, that's right. They didn't do them much good." He stared at him, right in the eye, challenging him - not overtly riled up, but with nothing but blank aggression on his face, an open dare. "I'm not sure how they could have. Do your friends help you out of hovercraft accidents? I mean - wow." He cocked his head, a mockery of innocent curiosity that wasn't so much dripping with sarcasm as it was surging. "Tell me more about that."
Because this was exactly what he was talking about. Saying things like that out loud, directly referencing things it was dangerous even to hint at - it was so reckless, it was so flagrantly in violation of all the unspoken rules that applied to everyone else (so why not you?) that he couldn't resist bringing the full threat of it to bear on him. Go ahead, he wanted to say: say it wasn't an accident. Say it to his face, to the man who shook hands on a regular basis with the man who'd had the Starks murdered, the man intimately connected with the people at very the top. Go on. Be brave. See where that gets you.
It got you where it had gotten the Starks. It got you where it had gotten Jarvis. No - no, it didn't get you there. Those were the places bravery left the people around you. Where bravery got you was where it had gotten Tony (well, where stupidity had gotten Tony, but, again - same thing), if you were lucky enough. No doubt Rogers would see it a different way, but Tony was glad he was alive; he was glad he had his tongue; and he was glad he'd lived long enough that the remorse and self-loathing had faded into background noise, like a middling case of tinnitus. He'd made a mistake, he'd been punished, and he'd shaped the fuck up - he was a good boy now, and he was so intensely, royally pissed off about it that it made him want to take Rogers' head off for not bending over and taking it the same way he had.