Well, that put paid to his smile. This didn't happen often, having the pretenses and gentle self delusions he offered with a wink and a nudge (follow me around this elephant in the room) slapped out of his hands - and it only ever seemed to come from two people, who, strangely enough, occupied opposite positions on his tolerability spectrum. He didn't like to think of it as "dying" - in fact didn't think of it that way, almost never, not even wracked and exhausted and desperately trying to dream up some reason that this month, he was indispensable. He wasn't dying. He was just ... having some trouble making the rent on time. If he could pull it out of the bag one more time, and one more time again, and one more time again -
It was bullshit, though. It was a way to keep going in intolerable circumstances, because even when things were unbearable, the truth was: he didn't want to die. Whoever had said it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees had either never felt his liver shutting down, or had never had a reason to get out of bed in the morning in the first place. Death terrified him enough that it wasn't an out he'd ever take, and while at least this is taking action really wasn't an argument calculated to appeal to his adamantine sense of self-preservation, the logic was solid. Sure, that was how he should have felt. He was dying anyway; might as well make it worthwhile. It was hard to feel that way when you were this busy trying to stay alive, though.
Right now, the truth had one extra weapon at its disposal: confronted directly with Jarvis, Tony couldn't quite beat back the question he usually managed to swat away before it lodged itself too firmly in his mind. If he died ... what happened to him?
It gave Jarvis currency in this debate - more than he'd have already had. Tony looked down at the back of the chair (onto which Rogers was bleeding via Tony's jacket, making trouble even when he wasn't fucking here). "Maybe," he said, begrudging the word with every line of his face, his shoulders, the stiff hunch of his back. "Maybe it is. It's still not a bet you make on long odds. You don't just - throw in on that because you don't have anything better to do." He raised his eyes to him again, not quite stone-faced - a little of the dread of the inevitable working its way into his expression when he saw the way Jarvis was looking at him - but set, digging in his heels. "You have to think there's a shot. Some kind of shot."
And give him a few days to think up an escape plan, just in case one of the eight thousand things that seemed like they might go very wrong did in fact occur. Damn it.