"Exactly," Tony said, suddenly almost too eager, practically lunging to the edge of his seat - his hands came up as though he were setting the stage for something, maybe raising the curtain once more on that awful show they'd put on together. "Exactly. I saw the people in Eight. I saw a crowd of - however many hundreds of people that was, getting mowed down by one guy who didn't even break a sweat. I bet you he didn't even blink. That's what I'm talking about."
He looked Rogers in the eye, and thought, absently, that the back of his neck felt cold; his skin was prickling, he realized. He wasn't someone who often thought about lines when he was crossing them, who stopped to dwell on danger and let it sink into him before he walked right into it - there were things he didn't do, and words he didn't say, but those limits had been beaten into him so long ago that he navigated them on autopilot. Tripping one of those wires produced an actual physical response. It was sobering - but he knew how to fix that, didn't he? And, if he were being perfectly honest with himself, it was a little exhilarating. That was something he hadn't felt in quite a long time, and like the scent of something attractive, elusive, and long-forgotten, it made him breathe in deeply - bent on more of it.
Time to take the plunge. "If that's what you're up against, you need a lot more than good intentions and a few hundred people behind you. You need firepower. Like - we're not talking metaphors. The actual kind." Any reticence he might have shown earlier seemed to wash away entirely, like a wall behind a flood. It didn't exactly feel good, talking like this, but it felt - addictive. "You can't talk about these things like - like there's a tide, and it's shifting, like it's something that's just happening. There's not some swell coming out of nowhere to buoy you up. That isn't how tides work. They're - well, you know what tides are. Or - maybe you don't. Anyway, it's complicated. It's not important." (His faith that Rogers knew how tides worked was roughly zero, considering District Eight was landlocked, but even someone with his poor rhetorical skills knew this was neither the time nor the place for a lecture on the gravitational effects of various celestial bodies.) "The point is, there are reasons all this is going on, and if you want to be a part of it, you need the whole picture. Intelligence. You don't have it." He hastened to add: "Nobody does. Not all of it. You have to piece together the right people, with the right connections, or you get caught with your pants down when the tide shifts again, because - that's what tides do. Intelligence, and firepower. You don't have those."
He'd forgotten to drink. He raised his glass to his mouth again - but drew it away when he remembered the direction he was supposed to be headed. The script was good for something, anyway. "I do, though. Plenty of both." Then he drank.