"He lacks an organ between his ears," Tony snapped, knowing before the words even left his mouth that he should rein himself in. He could see Jarvis' discomfort, the way he shrank just slightly - and for viscerally adverse reactions, there was nothing like the feeling that he'd lashed out and clipped Jarvis in the process. The thought of chiding him, or bowling him over, or dismissing him, was intolerable in large part because it would have been so easy, because the power to do so wasn't shared. Not that he never bit when he should have kept his mouth shut; not that he never had anything to apologize for, in his own tortured, roundabout, deficient way.
But there weren't many people who could make him force himself to have this kind of conversation at all, never mind reasonably. This was it. This was as good as it got. He finished his drink (distressingly easy - only a finger or so left), and stretched to refill it from the decanter sitting just out of reach. Armed again with a full glass, he moved away from the fireplace, suddenly uncomfortably hot, and took up instead behind Jarvis' chair, leaning his elbows on the back - not so much looming as sagging.
"And that's what - you want that?" He was trying to make himself pick out a logical path, no emotion and no bombast, but his sentences were only half cooperating. "War? That's what that is. Sure, in one district it's nothing, in all of them it's not better. It's hell. I told Rogers -" He drank, a necessary stabilizer against the still-fresh memory of all the things he shouldn't have said. "I told him, it doesn't matter how many times you stand up, how much cannon-fodder you've got, when the other side has the ammunition. And they do. They have it for years. They have all the big guns." He paused, tripping up again over the proper pronoun to use. "We have all the big guns."
And he had access to all of them. By no means was his control complete, or unmonitored, but ... it was there. It was substantial. Really, if he wanted, if he decided one day that it would be better to -
Burying his nose in his glass again, he tried to derail that train of thought before it carried him too far. "We don't have to do anything," he murmured, with less energy and far less discomfort - that we was the one he was used to, just the two of them. "We could let him play himself out - hell, I could have him out of the picture tomorrow, if I wanted to. We could just ... stay where we are." In the world they'd learned to navigate. He tried a smile, one of his usual charming lopsided invitations for everyone to take note of how very untroubled he was. It kind of felt like a flop. "It's not so bad. Right?"
At least it was safe. Sort of. Relatively speaking. Most of the time.