Tony laughed, dark and low and a little terse, the kind of thing that was standing in for something else. If you don't laugh, you'll ... What? Slowly collapse into brooding panic, probably. "Out of hand. Yeah." He swallowed about half of what was in his glass. "You could have a future in communications."
A wave of pointless fear washed through him, just a minor aftershock of the feelings he'd been battling all day. Jarvis hadn't been hurt, no one had yet started blaming him for anything, Stane didn't seem to think this had been his fault, if he even thought of it as a problem (a question which thus far seemed pretty open). He could stop dwelling on the what-ifs, the chilling pictures of what could have gone wrong, that kept suggesting themselves to him. It wasn't like him, getting hung up on the dire consequences of what could have gone wrong. He didn't like it. It felt stupid. Sentimental. Worst, it wasn't something he could fix - because nothing was broken. It was like a glitchy indicator light, showing ALERT where nothing was actually malfunctioning.
"I don't know what they were thinking. Any of them. I mean - enemy?" He made that damned sign, or a choppy, sharp, contemptuous rendering of it. "I'm not their enemy. What did I ever do to them? I've never even been there before. Once. I've been there once. And nothing would have happened if they hadn't ..." He trailed off, frustrated. He didn't know why anything had happened in any case; wasn't their protest so laughable as to be best ignored? Sure, when you raised your hand to the Capitol it hit you back ten times harder, but he'd always thought that treatment was reserved for people who could actually do damage. What was the point of kicking a bunch of bony-looking factory workers while they were down? They could make hand signals all day, and it wouldn't make one iota of difference in the way the world kept turning. Why turn the guns on them?
He reached up to scratch at one of the smears of blood (dry, darkened, difficult to see against the dark fabric of his jacket) that Rogers had left behind when Tony had dragged him behind closed doors. He didn't spend a lot of time steeping in nuanced contemplation of metaphors, but - that one was pretty hard not to read. "Well - fuck." He snorted, bitter. "I'm their enemy now, huh. You know, I didn't even fire it. I told them not to." But he had no doubt that if he went back and looked at the footage, that wouldn't be the story it would tell.