[ What she's saying is true, but for reasons she's not entirely privy to, it's entirely implausible. He's not even to the point yet where he can consider a handful of scenarios and pick which one is least damaging and most likely to work - all he'll do is get bogged down in the scenarios.

So when he looks at her, again, finally, it's not like he did when she first voiced the idea but more like a visible placing of his trust in her expertise here. It's very thin, tentative, tightrope walking trust, with a thick, dense cloud of 'But I'll need so much help, I don't know how to do this.' surrounding it.

And this is effectively what he was hiding from her. This brokenness, this fear, all of this anxiety and inefficiency. She managed to wade through the rest of everything else and now he's more or less one hundred percent open to her, and while that should be terrifying, all he's feeling is a little numb. Like it'll hit later, but right now while it's happening that would be too much to handle. Self-defense mechanisms - Tony's built out of the things. ]

I can't - think... of them. I just loop in the memories, it doesn't ever - it doesn't go that well. [ oh well nice idea maybe some other time ] I don't care how we... - as long as there's no water. We can't start with water.