Tony Stark (616), cool exec with a heart of steel (tonystark) wrote in marvelesque,
"I'm sure no one would suspect Captain America of using his connections or pulling strings," Tony teased, putting his hand over his RT node in a mock pledge of allegiance. "Well, except those of us who have actually been those connections, anyway. It's your call, but there's nothing wrong with making contact to get a foot in the door." Tony and Steve had always had very different management styles. It was probably one of the things that made them an effective team, even though it made Steve really annoying sometimes. While Steve's background was the battlefield, Tony's was the boardroom: a dichotomy that was perhaps most apparent when it came to communication and transparency.
Steve, from what Tony could tell, rarely found himself in a position where there was any need to be this brand of shady. Maybe it had been different before Tony knew him: Steve certainly hadn't gotten any lucky breaks during his childhood, though Tony doubted that he had the necessary connections to work the system at the time. But as Captain America, Steve could generally get whatever he needed with a polite smile or a Cap speech. If Steve wanted a meeting with the president, he showed up at the Oval Office and the president cleared his schedule. Partly because Steve himself was a pretty important guy, but it didn't hurt that people genuinely liked him.
Tony, by contrast, had never inspired that kind of trust and loyalty. The problem wasn't unique to Tony; not being Captain America was a burden he shared with a nearly unanimous majority of the world's population. But when you didn't have a smile like a sun god, you sometimes had to use shortcuts to gain someone's cooperation. In contracts, mergers, acquisitions, you were working towards the same goal with people who weren't necessarily on your team. People you didn't want knowing more than they needed to. People you didn't trust entirely, because on some level, you were both sort of trying to screw each other. It was as true in salary negotiations as it was in large federal contracts: sometimes you needed to know the right people, to send the right gift basket, to attend the right parties, in order to succeed. They called this "networking." Presumably because the guys in PR thought "friendly manipulation" still sounded a little too sketchy. But the fact of the matter was that sometimes, you just needed someone to vouch for you.
"It would have been nice if someone had managed to take one in," Tony sighed, scrubbing at his beard and contemplating the sentinels' design. In generalities, it wasn't hard to guess at how they operated, but he'd never gotten a chance to inspect them. And it was somewhat difficult to make predictions about the elements of a complex design when all you really knew about the designer was that he was a crazy bigot. "If they're EMP sensitive, I can work on something that will knock them all out, at least temporarily. But then it'll be a matter of either getting close enough to plant them on the bots, or making a pulse strong enough to knock them all out at once. The problem with the latter is that it could take a lot more than the bots offline. Comms, SHIELD crafts, me. I'm not sure how Extremis would react to an EMP, but I doubt it'd be good. If we go that route, I may need to take a backseat on this one, help the team remotely. Which is probably a good idea anyway, if Magnavox is going to make an appearance."
He paused for a moment before looking up at Steve, regarding him with a slight frown. As much as he liked to make fun of Steve for not understanding this newfangled phone technology, he was pretty sure that Steve would have been perfectly capable of calling him if this were all he wanted. "Something else on your mind? Your golden retriever face seems a little more ASPCA commercial than usual."