You shouldn't apologize for things that aren't your fault. Tony looked up at him again, at that - still rather haggard, rather wary, but with a layer of something blank laid over it. He honestly hadn't expected to get off quite that easily - they were both surprising one another, it seemed. He'd thought he was in for a rockier reception on that score in particular, because he could see - he honestly could - how someone might have misinterpreted events as they transpired and come up with the idea that he bore the ultimate responsibility for designing that thing; for hauling it to Eight; for setting up the show. He knew he hadn't tried quite as hard as he could have, quite as fast as he could have, to calm things down.
And he'd planned to have to fight his way through this point of the conversation. Which just went to show: don't make fucking plans. He worked better without them, anyway.
But one of his other little maxims was: when someone handed you something good, don't shove it away. He was, historically speaking, pretty bad at following his own advice in that regard. But this time - he managed. "You're welcome," he said after a brief silence. "Not - too welcome, I don't want to do that again." He took up his glass and sat back in his seat - an incorrigible fidgeter - somehow succeeding in at once slouching and looking profoundly unrelaxed. Watching Rogers, a touch more intensely than could ever have been considered polite, he could feel the weight of all this unrelenting in his stomach. "But I don't think they'd have shot you. You're not that big a pain in the ass. Even if you were -"
He paused, rubbing unhappily at his temple with the back of his thumb. He wasn't used to saying these things this freely. There was a certain code he preferred to stick to, a kind of talking-around; but he didn't expect it would be understood. "When they kill people like us, there's always a pretense, right? Not just an excuse. The optics have to be good. They're never the ones who kill people. Obviously. That's the whole point of all this shit. We kill each other. Like - your romantic rival poisons your drink." He made a quick, off-hand gesture at Steve's glass, and took another long drag off his own. "And everybody knows what happened, sure, but everybody knows what happened."
The we/they distinction he'd tried to preserve during their shouting match back in Eight had dissolved, which he didn't love - but he wanted Rogers to talk to him. He might as well try to make common cause any way he could. "It's a pretty simple game." What you're saying is dangerous. "And you have to admit, man - you're not great at it." But you're not wrong.