“You took away her plausible deniability,” Jarvis pointed out, because it was a thing that needed saying. Fine, he understood the impulse… though, admittedly, it was a stretch to understand it in the context of Tony’s usual motivations, which tended along a more self-serving route. He loved the other man, but years spent in his company had worn away the shine of assuming Tony’s thought processes might, at some point, involve other people; himself excluded, because habit alone would dictate Tony thought about him, like it or not. Their safety and well-being was so tangled up together now that it was impossible to avoid thinking about, especially with risk running high for someone to notice that the wrong questions were being asked and attention had diverted into less unassuming channels.
Sighing, he nudged a napkin in Tony’s direction. It was a lost cause, but it made him feel better to try. “She would’ve been able to say, sincerely and without any prevarication or deception, that she didn’t know and it would be true. Now she’s got something to hide, and I doubt it’s something she wants to conceal.” For obvious reasons, really. No one wanted to be caught holding this bomb. Even Jarvis, who had dug in his heels and insisted, knew that he didn’t want to be seen with any level of involvement. Small mercy that no one would suspect him of anything. Possessions were rarely suspicious, and if they were, it was due to some weird form of paranoia and not any genuine reason to have concern.
Of course Rogers had come up. He was always going to come up, because there was one name with no distance between it and trouble. Fortunately, no one had any reason to think Steve and Tony could even stand to look at one another. Steve and everyone else? That depended on the gossip one was trading in, really. It went through colorful phases.
For sheer lack of anything else to say, Jarvis snorted and took a careful sip of the water he held. No sense in letting it go to waste. “We aren’t having meetings. No one could decide on a secret handshake.” Oh, look. He had something else to say after all. Sarcasm was catching, apparently.