Re: Steve and Tony
Tony's face snapped back up, tight with an anger that was very close to the surface - flashing in his eyes, pulling at the corner of his mouth. If you can't bring yourself to believe it? That was one of the most infuriating things he'd ever heard. Rogers' unthinking, ironclad confidence in his own correctness, his utter disregard - his outright dismissal - of the eventuality that had sunk Tony into the most miserable, helpless fear of his entire life, it was ... Wait. Was this what condescension felt like? It was terrible. It made him want to crack his glass across Rogers' brick wall of a forehead. It made him want to leave words in the dust and just drag the man bodily down into the dirt.
... Which was not a setting in which he had much of a tactical advantage. The fact that he remembered that at all was an indication of how strongly ingrained was his instinctual sense of when he was being watched; if no one he cared about impressing had been lingering in the next room over, he probably would have clocked him. Instead, he sucked down the rest of his drink in one go (in case he did give in, later, to the urge to throw it - waste not), and slammed the glass down on the desk with a rather disappointingly high-pitched click. "Yeah, that sounds about right," he snapped, tense, "if the guy running everything was a fucking moron." He shoved himself to his feet, allowing himself a step toward Rogers and a brief fantasy of bending his nose out of shape for him - literally. "I don't get it - you trust me to hang around after you're gone, pulling off a nationwide coup, whipping the whole country up into a riot, but - what, it's too much of a stretch for you to think I might be able to figure out how to hide ten-odd people in a country that's half wilderness? I'm the guy you want running the show from up here, once half our damned mutiny is dead, but you just can't even imagine how I could do it without Stane looking over my shoulder, with some actual fucking help?"
Underneath all of this, and nowhere close to finding voice, was the knowledge (not new, exactly, but forming up more concretely with every passing day) that he did need help - specifically, that he needed Rogers very much alive to pull this thing off. As a martyr, he wasn't entirely useless, but he was right: it was too early to expect the Districts to revolt and be able to succeed. If Rogers died the very meaningful death he seemed to have such a hard-on for in the arena, a few weeks from now, Tony couldn't see it accomplishing much beyond dispiriting a lot of people he needed to be very, very spirited indeed. Sure, there would be some anger, but not enough - and not organized. It would be a flash in the pan. And then, where did that leave him? Where did that leave the revolution? It left it voiceless. Tony could give anyone the means to speak, he'd proven that already, but the words ... Well. No one was rallying to him, he knew that, no matter how much he might have disliked it. If any of this was going to take off, he needed Rogers, preferably kicking and screaming all the way to the finish line.
Which meant he had to win this argument, because getting Rogers out of the arena was the only way he wasn't going to wind up throwing himself in front of a spear. But in a head-to-head fight, that wasn't going to happen. Rogers was too stubborn by half.
"I'm glad you're so sure I come out of this breathing," he continued, trying to think, trying to come up with some way to bait him into the proper position. It wasn't hard to supply the heat and ire he needed to buy time - that came perfectly naturally. "I'm glad you're so sure you can drop this in my lap and expect everyone to fall into line behind me. Because once you've bled out on whatever fucking hill you pick - without you, I don't know what this shit looks like."