Tony gave under that first push, going back on one foot (barely dodging an oyster fork) and putting a hand out to catch himself on the wall - but he stood his ground the second time, jostling his body forward under the press of her hands, squaring his shoulders, stopping. His mouth pulled to the side in a flare of irritation and he brought his hand up between them to knock her arm away, grabbing her wrist and holding it out perhaps a foot away from their faces - not tightly, but sure as hell not encouraging another blow. He might have argued - again - that this was for her benefit, I'm just giving you a heads up; or he might have said something inflammatory, like he very much wanted to, I'm not asking you, baby, I'm telling. But now that they'd allowed a moment of pause between them, however brief, now that he was just holding them in suspension ... he found it easy, for once, to say what he was actually feeling.
He should do this more often - the catharsis, the big blow-out. It really did clear the haze. Too bad there was nothing worth seeing on the horizon.
"Well, I'm fucking tired," he snapped. "Okay?" The funny thing was, he hadn't been so sure of that until right now. Before this, it had all been fear and guilt and following, pretending to trust someone else and agreeing (out loud) that this was the only option that made sense, that gave them a chance for a better ending - but, really, just going through someone else's paces because deep down, deep down, he wanted to be something ... better. (Fuck, he could never tell Rogers. ... Fuck, he was going to have to tell Rogers.) Now - now, he'd had a taste of what it might feel like to stick it to someone, and he was at once energized by what lay ahead and exhausted at the thought of turning back. He knew he was jumping off a cliff, and he knew damn well whose hand he was holding, and it made his chest tighten and his throat half-close just thinking about it, but he'd pulled himself out of steeper dives before. Sure, maybe misery loved company. Maybe he wanted her to come with. But at least falling was going somewhere. "I'm tired."
He didn't ask her if she was. That would have been a stupid question, offensive to the highest degree - how can you bear it, doesn't it just kill you, don't you wish it were different were the sorts of braindead backhanded condolences that came from idiots, assholes, and people who stood on heaps of their own shit and mistook it for moral high ground. Of course it just killed you, but you kept going because you wanted to keep living, and no one had any right to look sideways at you for it. If you didn't wish it were different, it would make you inhuman - and as much as he might have liked that to be true, sometimes, it wasn't.
"So - yeah. Fine. I'm being a selfish bastard." There was no irony in that pronouncement. Giving a damn what someone did was one of the worst things you could do for them, in his position (and in hers). He knew that. He'd lived his entire adult life that way, and it had only very recently started to come apart in pieces. "But I've given them every single fucking thing they've ever asked for," he said (no doubt the president would have taken issue with that characterization of his generous nature), "and it's my turn. I'm tired of this shit, and I'm not going to sit around waiting for them to put me to sleep. You don't like it?" He leaned in a few inches, something cruel hovering in the twist of his mouth, a lash of petulance waiting to unfurl - because she had hit a mark, and when people touched your soft places, you hit back, that was what you did. Decades of armor didn't fall away after a month of sedition. You don't like it? Turn me in, he thought. But maybe it was because he was tired, or maybe because he was too afraid, still, even here, where it was just the two of them half-naked and alone in the middle of a forest, that someone might hear him - he just shrugged. He was still the man who hid, even now, in the barest moment he'd had in years. "You don't like it, I don't know what to tell you." He dropped her wrist, abrupt. "I guess that's too bad. It's happening."