A simple no could hardly be called an outburst, but from Jarvis, it rather felt like one - and it brought Tony around a little. Roused him, at least. He still felt like he was working against a band around his chest, but he managed a poor, faltering half of a smile, and he reached to the side (his eyes still fixed on that now-black television screen) to rest his hand on Jarvis' arm.
Not his best camera face. But the habit was too strong to ditch entirely, even now.
"We'll be - look, I'm not ... It won't be me." Bullshit - he didn't even try to prop it up with a rationale, because at the moment he didn't have one. He didn't have anything but a really, really sharp-edged aversion to seeing Jarvis afraid; and unfortunately, that was rarely enough to hold up a facade, not for the man who had the most experience looking right through his. If he went in, if he went in there was no way he was coming out, and if he didn't come out, Jarvis was -
No, there was no point in going down that path. There was no reason to start imagining all the horrible things that could go wrong, he'd learned that a long time ago - you could get lost so, so quickly in vivid nightmares, all of them entirely plausible, if you didn't dig in your heels, and letting yourself be overcome by fear, however realistic, or defeat, however likely, meant you couldn't react when the moment was right, meant your responses would be off, your expressions that much less credible. Call it repression, call it denial, call it whatever: for him, it was just a survival instinct. He wouldn't think about getting hacked in half by some musclebound berserker from Two, he wouldn't think about who they'd send here to his home to clean up his loose ends, whether they'd just shoot him in the head, or pass him off to someone who'd treat him like a fucking slave, or lock him away somewhere down under the - no. He wasn't thinking about that.
He stood, the better to get himself breathing, heading - somewhere; and when he stopped to lean most of his weight on Jarvis' chair, his hand twisted into the front of his own shirt, it was half because he didn't want to go any farther, and half because it seemed like a very bad idea to try. "I won't let anything - happen." The sentence was truncated, heavy and clumsy, insufficient, but it was what he could manage. That was his job, wasn't it? Just keep them safe. Right now counting out his breaths seemed like almost too much to handle, but he'd figure it out, he always figured it out, fuck, of he didn't - "Okay?" Who he was trying to reassure was an open question. "All right. It'll be okay."