Tony took his napkin, more out of habit - Jarvis offered, he accepted, that was the way it went - than from any real intent to use it; indeed, he deposited it almost immediately beside his plate, where it would do no good for him or the furniture. "Well," he said, with an uncomfortable sort of shrug, "she's good at hiding things." It was true that he'd have endangered her no matter what he did - telling her, not telling her, that didn't make much of a difference. It was that he'd done it at all that caused the problem - and he wasn't going to stop that, was he? No - he'd made his choice, they'd all made a choice, and people were going to be endangered, people were going to be hurt. If he would be sorrier about some than others, if he would be more displeased to have some of them on his conscience ... He didn't quite know how to cope with it, yet. This entire process was unwieldy, from the logistics to the moral maneuvering. "What should I do, just - go out there and sneak around and let her find out the hard way?"
His delivery was pretty arch, but it was an honest question, and one he'd have trusted Jarvis to answer before he did. But it came too late - he hadn't asked, hadn't stopped to think through all the consequences, and now it was done. The hypothetical didn't matter much. And what do I do now was a question it hadn't occurred to him even to ask, because of course the answer to that was: the same thing he always did. Make himself ubiquitous and unforgettable, until the people he'd offended forgave him out of sheer fatigue. If anything went horribly, miserably wrong, fly by the seat of his pants and trust it to correct before he went careening into a wall. It was strange how different his sense of strategy could be for personal relationships than it was for politics and for this little thing they were planning. For the latter, he had one; for the former, he ... did not.
The intersection of those two strands was going - awkwardly.
But this wasn't as thorny or as chilly as he'd built it up in his head, really. Things seemed less dire now than they had while he was smashing up Natasha's kitchen, or drinking himself into oblivion on the train, and perhaps that should have been a lesson to him - but instead he just let himself relax slightly, easing back against his cushions again. Maybe this stuff would settle in his stomach without issue; maybe he would slip through this night with none of the awful repercussions he'd imagined. "Passcodes are better, anyway." He shut his eyes for a moment, focusing on what he hoped, hoped was the diminishing pain in his - nope, there it went. "I'm still lobbying for 'Edward.'"