It took a couple seconds for Tony's eyes to focus on the man before him, rather than the picture of the two of them cast back from the other side of the room. One long beat, and then another, as the words swam around him and, in his preoccupation, he had to drag them back again to make sure he hadn't misheard them - because they didn't make any sense.
I should talk to him?
His head shot up, leaving his hand empty and open over the mantle in a wide gesture of disbelief. "What?" He looked down at Jarvis like he'd just grown a deeply offensive second head. "If I want -?"
If he'd suggested they have a nice hemlock nightcap, or go jumping out the window, or self-immolate over the stove, it couldn't have made any less sense to Tony - actually, probably more. And, as did most things that completely escaped him, it brought on a little burst of anger. His brows knit together, his hand tightened around his glass, his shoulders dropped. Nothing but nothing could have seemed more horrifying than sending Jarvis to the doorstep of a man whose one defining trait had so far proved to be that he couldn't keep his mouth shut if his or anyone else's life depended on it. Rogers, who didn't have the patience or the tact even to sit through a simple meal with a man who by all rights could have had him crushed, because he didn't like him. Why would he ever even contemplate sharing the one secret he'd managed to keep from Stane with that idiot?
He didn't have to spell out the consequences. They both knew them. They both probably thought about them more than was useful or healthy. They both knew exactly what Stane did when he found a pressure point. Someone getting a bullet through the head was the best-case scenario. Tony didn't exactly have a clear-sighted picture of his own limitations, but he knew, as much as he could, that losing Jarvis would probably destroy him. And he knew that whatever happened if the wrong people found out about him was likely to be ten times worse.
Which was all to say that it sounded, without reservation, like one of the stupidest ideas he had ever heard.
But Jarvis wasn't stupid.
And that meant he was missing something. There was some value he'd weighted wrong, some piece of the equation he hadn't balanced properly. There was some reason it was worth risking both their lives to open up communication with some half-witted troublemaker with a death wish. He just had to find out what it was. "Why would you do that?" he blurted out instead - with all his usual eloquence.