Was there any better argument for putting heads together than this - than the unexpected brilliance you could dig up, every now and again, with four hands better than two? All of Tony's solutions to this particular problem had been, as his usually were, grand and showy and couched in terms of abstract goals, appeals to Rogers to help him tell a story, make a piece of propaganda, use the platform the Games offered to send his final message to the people. That might have worked - who knew? But it would have required a cast of several, probably, and a fair amount of acting even in the best case scenario. This, though, was perfect. Simple. Focused. Personal. Sentimental. It required only a single liar, and she a well-practiced one. And he could see how it might sink its hooks into Rogers in a way that nothing Tony would have conceived of ever would have done. He was aware that the man had a weakness for the innocent, the vulnerable - but it was a kind of weakness that was a little too foreign to Tony to allow him to exploit it with instinctive ease.
Lucky for him, he had a teammate. He looked back at her, piecing it together in his mind for a moment before his smile started stretching out, slow and flat, to one side. "This is good," he said, beginning to nod. "This is good. I think he'd go for it. I think you're right. If you tell him - he'll buy it." Tony would have made a hash of that, probably; not that he didn't know how to let something explosive fall into a conversation as easily as a dropped note, but the key here was the emotion. If he had a conversation with Rogers about the value of the life of an unborn child, there was precisely a zero percent chance it didn't end in Rogers deciding Tony was even more of a monster than he already thought him. It was better coming from the expectant mother than from the guy willing to use the expectant mother's condition to win sympathy. "He'll stick with you, which'll help his chances. It'll be interesting - you've never been pals. People here will want to know what's up, which will keep the Gamemakers from just blowing his head off, first thing. We'll have to be prepared for him to let it slip, but that won't matter to them, not if they've already decided you should win."
It was very good. The worst potential complication was probably discovery, which ... "Whoever's least likely to deny it, that's got to be dad. Rogers will be able to talk to both of them - Bucky less directly, but still. If they rat us out, we'll lose him for good. It might be easiest just to let Clint in on it." Then, at least, there wouldn't be any nasty surprises when Rogers somehow found a way to share his secret with the entire country. As a strategy, it had its downsides, most notably that Tony had absolutely no idea how far he could rely on Clint to keep up the charade, especially under what could be the very heavy weight of Rogers' trust and earnestness. He'd seen plenty of people fold under their own guilt. (Not many of them had won the Hunger Games, but - still.) "Either way, it buys us at least as much time as he can keep his mouth shut." He grinned; his arms dropped, and he let them swing back a little before setting his hands on his hips again, less defensive, now, if not quite jaunty. "That's really good. I would never have thought of that. A baby. Shit."