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~*~
Most of the time, Tony loved being Tony. What was not to like about being him? He was rich, successful, a genius, a philanthropist…. The list went on. He had successfully turned his company from one that specialised in weapons to one that specialised in clean energy and innovations that actually made the world a better place. Take that, Howard. Take that, Obadiah.
So yeah, okay, maybe Tony also had plenty of issues and didn’t always deal with his trauma and the drama that was his life in the best ways, but he recognised that he had a lot of privilege, okay? He knew that he was lucky to be him. But there were moments where it didn’t feel like it was so lucky, but he’d gotten used to sort of … turning them aside. Because even the people who loved him best—Pepper and Rhodey were so awesome—gave him that sort of look when he behaved like that, maybe indulging him, but it always felt like an indulgence, that thing that they did because Tony was being Tony.
Then Tony met Bucky. Rhodey had set him up on a blind date, which Tony had been certain was the worst idea ever. Rhodey did not have a good idea about Tony’s taste in men. Just, no, he got it wrong all the time. But Rhodey had assured him that he was just the go-between, and this guy was actually the friend of a guy he used to work with.
That had sounded like the worst set up for a blind date ever, but Tony had given in, because both Pepper and Rhodey had started to nag again. He didn’t know what they wanted sometimes. They got that look if too many people visited his bed, but then they got the same look if he’d been alone for too long. Yes, Tony understood that in theory there was a happy medium, but Tony had never really been a happy medium sort of guy. Surely, they had worked out by now that he dealt in extremes? Sort of … all the time?
He could lock himself in his workshop and get Jarvis to run interference for a while, but eventually, it became more trouble than it was worth to try to fend both of them off, and it was easier to just make the attempt, let it be an utter failure, and then buy another few weeks or months before one or the other of them decided that it was time to try again.
So Tony had gone on the date, and he had met James Buchanan Barnes for the first time, and it would really not be an exaggeration to say that Tony had felt immediately smitten. Which, he knew how biochemistry worked, he just hadn’t gotten laid recently—in like, longer than he was comfortable admitting to anyone—and so his body was very interested, and Bucky had checked some very obvious boxes.
In the physical department, the man was so very hot. Whoever Rhodey’s friend’s friend was, they had either taste that dovetailed nicely with Tony’s, or Tony was just very lucky. Bucky was a solid six feet tall, muscled but lean. Tony was a solid three inches—okay, three and a half—shorter, but Bucky never loomed the way some men did, like they thought they could intimidate Tony just because they were taller, as if they hadn’t noticed that they had a quarter of the IQ.
Bucky rocked the casual jeans and t-shirt look coupled with long hair and the dark, intense gaze—and then he smiled, and it was like it was fucking Christmas, his face just lit up, and Tony was floored. He didn’t think that he’d had such a visceral reaction to someone both because of their intensity and their joy in a really long time. It made him want Bucky to absolutely take him apart, but it also made him want to put that smile on Bucky’s face every day for the rest of his life. (Or you know, for a few more dates or whatever time Tony was able to get out of this before he screwed it up.)
It wasn’t just the looks. Tony had a lot of pretty people thrown at him, and of course he enjoyed them, but that wasn’t enough to keep his interest. Bucky wasn’t genius levels of smart, but almost no one was as smart as Tony was. Bucky was intelligent, asked clever questions and actually listened to the answers. Tony couldn’t explain a theory like he would to a scientist colleague, but he didn’t have to dumb it down to words of no more than two syllables, and Bucky just flat-out told him if he hadn’t understood what Tony had said, asked for clarification like it was no big deal, or just laughed and said that he was pretty sure that had gone right over his head, but it sounded cool from the 10% he’d understood.
Tony was used to people being intimidated by him—useful, in some ways in day-to-day interactions, but really not in your personal life. It was usually worse with men, because they lived in a society with lots of messed up social conventions, and it was so very refreshing to have someone seem to just … treat Tony like a person. Not by pretending that he wasn’t all the things that he was—because people did that too, and it did not work—but by … actually accepting him as he was?
Maybe Bucky just had the best first date persona that Tony had ever experienced in his entire life.
Bucky seemed extremely practical, and then it turned out that he was the biggest geek. He loved The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek and Harry Potter. No word of a lie, he had a bullet-pointed list for why Snape should have been a Hufflepuff and how everything might have gone differently if the house system wasn’t such bullshit. Tony had argued against just to watch the furrow appear in the man’s brow and his eyes spark as he marshalled another argument to explain why Tony was wrong.
Tony realised that he was going to be totally screwed, though, because the blind date was going spectacularly well.
Bucky’s lips tipped up as Tony complained about this.
“Problem with that, sweetheart?”
“Rhodey’s going to be insufferable,” Tony pointed out with a pout. “Worse, he’s going to think that this means that he can set me up on blind dates all the time.”
Bucky had assumed a serious expression. “Looks to me like you have two choices: I can throw this soda in your face and storm off.”
“Or?” Tony asked.
Bucky’s smile deepened. “You can let me take you on another date. No need for blind dates if you’re already getting regular dates on your own, is there?”
So … Bucky was amazing. It was only a matter of time until Tony screwed everything up, of course, because that was what Tony was good at, but he kind of really wanted to seize every single moment that he possibly could until that happened.
~*~
Tony didn’t like to be handed things. People who spent any amount of time with him learned that pretty quickly and got used to setting things down in front of him. It could be awkward with new people, sometimes. Rhodey and Pepper had taken things for him because they seemed to think it was too rude to leave the other person hanging, because Tony was being Tony, and they were going to interact with the world the way that you were supposed to. Tony was used to the people around him rolling their eyes but dealing with it.
So it came as a bit of surprise the first time that Tony drove Bucky to a swanky hotel in his jag, and the valet tried to hand him the ticket for redeeming the car. Bucky leaned across Tony and reached for the stub.
“Let’s let the person who’s going to remember what hotel we’re at keep the means of redeeming our transportation, shall we?” he said with a wink at the valet.
Tony climbed out of the car. “One time,” he whined. “That was one time. And ModernHaus and SoHo Grand aren’t that different.”
They were totally, one hundred per cent different, and Bucky flat-out laughed at him, the bastard, as he climbed out of the car and slipped the ticket into his pocket.
“You keep telling yourself that, sweetheart.”
And that was it. The matter was not brought up again. Tony didn’t get a lecture about certain standards of behaviour being acceptable. He didn’t get watched like a hawk to see if he was going to be weird about anything else.
Bucky just … noticed that Tony didn’t like to be handed things and made sure that Tony didn’t get handed things in Bucky’s presence, but not like he was making a huge concession that Tony should be grateful for, just like … it was a thing that he’d programmed his brain to do once he’d noticed that … it made Tony’s life more comfortable?
Tony’s brain, which was supposed to be his best asset, felt like it couldn’t quite interpret this new input. It seemed to be causing errors even though he was pretty sure that the input was kind of … simplistic.
“Do you think he wants something, Jarvis?” Tony asked one night.
Jarvis was silent for longer than he should have been to compute any answer.
“I think he wants you to be happy, Sir.”
That was maybe the conclusion that Tony had been grappling with, too.
~*~
Most people, when they dated Tony Stark, wanted to be with Tony Stark. Or hated the fact that he was Tony Stark. It was back to his life being about extremes. There really just didn’t seem to be a middle ground. So they wanted the circus, were the type to want to hang off his arm and be constantly photographed by the paps and probably sell him out at the first opportunity—Pepper made sure the NDAs were always signed now—or they were with him despite the circus, and it was always clear that it was something that they were putting up with.
Bucky was definitely not one of the former, and in Tony’s experience, this meant that he should be part of the latter, and yet somehow, once again, Bucky never made him feel that way. He didn’t enjoy it, but he seemed constantly to be working on how he dealt with it, coming up with things for them to do that would let them have some privacy, or using that “Don’t fuck with me” glare to get them past particularly belligerent paps.
Bucky seemed to know without Tony ever having to say anything that Tony didn’t actually love this part of his lifestyle. He’d had a lot of years to get used to it, and he had accepted that it was one of the prices for many of the other advantages to his life, but it was not in fact something that he enjoyed. He liked to grandstand sometimes, sure, but that was different from being on twenty-four/seven and knowing that anything and everything that you did in public (or that could be captured by a telephoto lens) stood a good chance of being sprayed across the tabloids. That was actually exhausting, and Tony didn’t know anyone who actually enjoyed it. But Tony had had enough party years that the assumption seemed to be either that he loved the limelight or that he deserved it.
They hadn’t gone public yet because they were still figuring out what the hell they were doing without all that public pressure, but Bucky had treated figuring out how to duck the paparazzi and do things on the sly like a game instead of a horrible imposition.
Tony was actually wearing a baseball hat, of all things, and maybe Bucky had been right, and the sunglasses that he’d worn were just a little too fashionable and didn’t actually block his eyes at all. The hotel receptionist’s eyes had narrowed, and that look had crossed his face.
“Hey, aren’t you—”
Tony had resigned himself to having his location tweeted to the world at large in about ten seconds when Bucky had leaned on the counter.
“You would not believe how often he gets that,” Bucky said with his best conspiratorial grin. “I mean, it can be a nice bonus if we get upgraded perks, but it can be super awkward if there are any misunderstandings.”
And Tony actually watched the man talk himself out of believing Tony was Tony.
“Have a great stay,” he told them as he handed over the keys. “You should do a lookalike contest or something. I’m sure you’d do great if you got a suit and worked on the mannerisms and stuff.”
Tony had covered Bucky’s face with kisses as soon as they were in the room.
“You are a genius,” he told him.
Bucky just laughed.
~*~
Tony’s childhood had not been full of a lot of physical signs of affection. He was probably a textbook case for looking for affection in all the wrong places in his twenties—and thirties, if he was being honest. By his forties, though, he’d started to admit that he was looking in the wrong places, and he had mostly restrained himself to friendly touches from a very limited number of people. Pepper and Rhodey were the two main people, and they … more than tolerated it, it wasn’t fair to them to only say tolerated, but it wasn’t natural for them, that would probably be more fair. Rhodey was military, so it seemed either to be back-slapping man-to-man stuff or no touching at all, lest anyone get the wrong idea. He wasn’t really up for cuddling.
Pepper was better about that, but after the failed romance, it had gotten a little weird, hard to figure out where those lines were, and Tony had wanted Pepper to be comfortable more than he had needed the contact. So it was mostly very casual gestures, a touch of the hand or arm here, a shoulder there, occasionally the small of the back if they were going into or out of a room. He didn’t even notice that he was doing it, sometimes, but he didn’t do it with anyone else.
Occasionally, it would strike him just how lonely he was, but he would push that thought away. It might be true, but there wasn’t anything that he could do about it, so that didn’t help anything.
And then Tony met Bucky. Bucky was as tactile as Tony wanted to be, always willing to crowd up beside him, play footsies under the breakfast table, sit with the two of them back to front on the couch, spoon in bed, hold hands. (Communal showers were a whole other issue and totally strayed into the sexy times that were also super awesome, but not the same as just the friendly tactile stuff.) Bucky would lean close when he was looking at something that Tony was showing him in the workshop, and he would put his hand on the small of Tony’s back for balance or just comfort or … Tony didn’t even know. But it was the greatest.
And the weirdest best part about it was that Bucky seemed to have a preternatural instinct for those days when Tony didn’t want to be touched, when the nightmares were the worst, all of his senses dialled up to eleven, and he needed a buffer between himself and the world, until it became manageable again.
“How can you tell?” he finally asked one day, as he curled up on the couch under the blanket that Bucky had held up invitingly.
Tony had needed almost the whole day to get out of his head, and Bucky had just waited for it. Bucky kissed the side of his head.
“Because I have demons too, sweetheart,” he said quietly.
~*~
Tony knew how absolutely, spectacularly lucky he was to have Bucky. How could he not? Bucky was the best and just seemed to slot into Tony’s life in so many unexpected but really perfect ways. (How could there be someone out there who’d been built to fit into Tony’s messy, screwed up life? It didn’t seem like it could actually be possible, and yet, Tony was living with the daily evidence of it.) Tony was enjoying every bit of him that he could as often as he could, but they weren’t actually tied to one another 24/7. In the first place, it truly wasn’t practical. They both had jobs to do, anyway, and Tony’s schedule was more than a little weird, and they had other friends and something that resembled lives that weren’t interconnected in every single way.
Plus, Tony didn’t want to scare Bucky off. Had he mentioned that he had extremes and not a lot of middle ground? Tony knew this about himself, and he knew that he could be too much for most people, that they couldn’t seem to find their feet when he was either all over them or forgot about them and went radio silent for 72 hours in a row because he’d just had the best idea and he needed to be in his workshop right now.
Tony understood in theory that this wasn’t normal behaviour, he did. He understood that people liked more … regularity than that. Reliability? Something like that. But he didn’t know how to be that. He could have really good intentions, but as soon as the next brilliant idea hit or he got distracted by a flaw that he’d noticed in something that SI was producing…. All of Tony’s good intentions went out the window. (That was probably the story of Tony’s life. Out some metaphorical window, there was a vast array of Tony’s good intentions, piling up throughout his life, very well meaning but all inadvertently abandoned.)
He tried, when he started a new relationship. He tried to focus on the relationship and what he wanted out of it, and it was shiny and new enough to distract him, sometimes, at least just enough for him to keep his eyes on that prize instead of everything else that was shiny. Until it wasn’t, and then his partners complained, and Tony felt guilty, and … well, it was no wonder that he’d gone with flings for so long, was it? Those, he could handle. Those had defined parameters and way fewer expectations. They were easier.
They were also way emptier, and somehow, this had led to his weird dry spell, and this had led to Bucky Barnes and the best relationship that Tony had ever had, and so despite knowing that he would screw it up because he always did, Tony was doing his best to keep it. Without being so needy that he drove the man off. Or so standoffish that he drove the man off. (Remember how Tony did things in extremes? He was trying to navigate a middle ground here. He sucked at that.)
And that was where things got a little weird. Because Bucky … was okay with it. Like, genuinely, he was happy when he was cuddling with Tony and they were practically on top of one another 24/7. And he was totally understanding when Tony disappeared into his lab for three days. He would usually visit, sometimes ask a question or two to see what sort of a state Tony was in. Tony didn’t always notice, which he would feel bad about, except Bucky seemed to be all right with that, too. Jarvis had played back the recordings for Tony, if Tony didn’t answer or didn’t answer using words that Bucky could understand, then Bucky would just set down the sandwich or apple or hot chocolate that he had made for Tony, give him a kiss on his temple, and leave him to his work. Or if Tony was at a point where he was ready to share, then Bucky would watch with manifest interest as Tony showed him what he was working on and talked about how awesome it would be.
Pepper liked how clever he was, and she was genuinely happy about his inventions that helped people, but she had at least half an eye for how his inventions would work for SI. It was what made her a good CEO. Rhodey had an eye out for military upgrades and just couldn’t get as excited about the random inventions, though he always congratulated Tony. But Bucky, Bucky seemed to both enjoy it all for its own sake, that little science-fiction geek at heart, and to enjoy it because Tony enjoyed it, and that always gave Tony a warm fuzzy feeling.
So, anyway, the thing was, Tony knew that he had it good. He had it so good that he didn’t quite know how to deal with it beyond being certain that he was going to screw it up at some point. But he was, genuinely, trying not to screw it up, which meant that when he got a warning from Pepper after the latest Charity Black Tie Gala, he panicked.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She had eyed him like he was missing the obvious, which was a look he got pretty often. He was good with all the science stuff, but sometimes, the everyday stuff that “everyone” understood was something that just … passed him by.
“Tony,” she said, looking kind of despairing. “You spent the whole night with an array of beautiful women and men all over you.”
“But—it’s—that’s what you do at a charity gala!” Tony protested. “I can’t help it when people are all over me.”
Everyone knew that, didn’t they?
She sighed. “There are going to be at least four articles tomorrow about which of them you probably spent the night with or are in a secret relationship with or should be in a relationship with. You’re not doing anything to shut it down, Tony.”
And sure enough, the next morning, there were all sorts of articles and speculation, and looking at not just the people all over him but the way that he looked at them, the body language, the smile, he worried that Pepper was right.
And being Tony, he drastically overcompensated.
Bucky called him.
“Babe, not that I don’t love chocolate, candy, stuffed animals, and flowers, but is there a reason that I have enough to feed and deck out my entire workplace, Steve, and everyone who’s ever bought one of his paintings?”
“I … just wanted you to know how much I appreciate you,” Tony blurted, hoping that he didn’t sound as wild and panicked as he thought he did.
There was silence for a moment. “When are you free?”
Jarvis flashed Tony’s calendar at him. “Six thirty tonight.”
“Come over. And make sure Happy stays, okay? We’re going to need him.”
With a sinking feeling, Tony agreed, “Okay.”
They tended to spend more time at Stark Tower than at Bucky’s. It was bigger, had better amenities, but most importantly, it had Jarvis and Tony’s workroom, so if he had a brain wave, it was easy to capture it, and he didn’t have to, like, defer his thoughts, which was technically possible but not at all something that he enjoyed. What if the inspiration went out the window as quickly as it had come, and the entire idea melted away? What if it was the solution to world peace or a way to give everyone a cellphone, or—
Anyway, the point was, Tony liked being in Stark Tower, and Bucky enjoyed the bots and the workroom and Tony’s really comfy bed and the rec room, and it just … worked really well to hang out at his most of the time.
But they went to Bucky’s occasionally, Tony not wanting Bucky to feel like Tony was too rich to even tolerate his normal lifestyle. Bucky usually just laughed.
Tony was pretty sure Bucky wasn’t laughing right now.
Happy drove Tony over to Bucky’s, and despite his desire to procrastinate—maybe flee the country, there were some business partners he could visit in Japan right now, weren’t there?—Tony was there at six thirty, just like he’d said he’d be.
Bucky answered the door, and Tony blinked because … okay, wow, that really was a lot of flowers and candy and chocolate and stuffed animals, wasn’t it? It was, uh, certainly eye-catching, but Tony could see how maybe it would be considered excessive by, uh, kind of any standard.
Tony hadn’t been sure what to expect—apart from the worst—but Bucky gave him a soft kiss like he usually did and then tugged Tony inside.
“Come on in. Don’t take your coat off.”
Tony froze and then made himself step all the way in, because if Bucky was going to throw him out, it would be better to get it over with, and if it at least happened inside, then there was less chance that someone was recording it from the hallway and it would end up all over the internet. Tony had gotten used to all sorts of embarrassment for all sorts of reasons, but if there was a way to not have his heartbreak smeared all over the world wide web, he would appreciate it. (Or not, like, heartbreak, that was Tony being dramatic. He would just be … hurt by the status change in his personal life. Right? Right. He’d gotten used to Bucky, was all.)
Then he was all the way inside, and he could see that Bucky had a bunch of the stuffed animals in garbage bags already, and there were bags for the chocolates as well. His heart sank.
“I think we’ll need to carry the flowers more carefully, I don’t want to wreck them, but I wanted to try to make it as few trips as possible, you know?”
Tony did not know. Tony was pretty sure that getting your soon-to-be-ex to come over and help you throw out the gifts that he had gotten you was a line that even he knew was maybe a bit extreme, but he’d always been bad at those cues, so maybe he was wrong. Only then they’d gathered up a bunch of those bags and carried them not to the garbage room, but out to Happy, and started to fill as much of the car as they could with it.
“We’re going to the hospital. I went to a couple retirement homes already this afternoon, but I thought you might like to help.”
And slowly, Tony realised that Bucky was not throwing anything out. He was taking what even Tony could admit was an excessive number of gifts and was making sure that they were being redistributed to people who would appreciate them, who were in the hospital and would be cheered by flowers or a stuffed animal or the occasional sneaked chocolate, depending on what they were in there for. They had to make two trips, but Tony watched as Bucky charmed his way into every location, watched the faces of people as they lit up as Bucky or Tony made a delivery.
Tony made more monetary donations in a year than the vast majority of people could make in ten lifetimes, and he schmoozed with the best of them at charity events—that was what had started this whole thing, Tony remembered—but he didn’t do a lot of hands-on giving. And this was … this was nice, really nice, and Tony liked that he was doing it with Bucky.
He felt much better by the time they finished donating the last of the items and returned to Bucky’s apartment, where there were two flower arrangements, three little boxes of chocolates, and one stuffed bear. Tony picked it up for something to do with his hands as it occurred to him that maybe Bucky was just a really awesome person—Tony already knew that—and he’d wanted all of that stuff to go to a good use before he dumped Tony’s ass.
What Bucky said was, “I’m pretty sure there isn’t an anniversary or a special holiday or something that I missed, so I’m guessing that was you apologising for something. You want to tell me what for, sweetheart?”
Tony was definitely glad that he had the bear in his hands. He could tug at its limbs, peer at its eyes, see how it was put together and think about ways that he could make it better. And it was easier to address his comments to the bear. The bear wasn’t going to talk back or impact his emotional well-being, now was it?
Less coherently than he’d hoped—Tony’s brain was still supposed to be his best asset, wasn’t it? Why didn’t it work better in moments like this?—Tony launched into what was a cross between an explanation, an excuse, and something that he was aware was a pitiful plea for understanding about the charity gala.
And then Bucky laughed, and Tony looked up at him, caught in the crinkles round his eyes and the genuine lightheartedness in his eyes, and he hoped, desperately.
“Oh, Tony, please tell me you’re not going to do this every time you have to do a charity event. I mean, it’s nice for the recipients and all, but it’s actually a lot of deliveries, and it kind of makes a mess of my apartment.”
Tony was not … totally sure what was happening, but that … did not sound at all like Tony was getting dumped. It definitely sounded like there was a future, and that they were together in that future, because Tony was still going to charity events, and he was connected to Bucky, or he couldn’t give him—or not give him—gifts, right?
He must have looked as confused as he felt, because Bucky tugged him into his arms, where Tony went willingly, slotting against him like he belonged there. It really was like Bucky had been made just for him, or he had been made just for Bucky, which was a radical idea, because Tony had spent most of his life feeling like he was a piece of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit anywhere.
“Sweetheart, you can flirt to your heart’s content at events like that. It’s your public persona, and I get that. We already talked about being exclusive, and I trust that if you ever wanted to change that, or decided that I wasn’t what you wanted anymore, you’d talk to me. Right?”
Tony could only nod, because that … was how he’d thought that they worked before Pepper had brought it up, and it had suddenly seemed like he was totally wrong, and must be doing something wrong, and that made sense, because Tony always did something wrong.
“You wanna eat some of these stupidly expensive chocolates and watch The Fellowship of the Ring?” Bucky asked.
Tony nodded again, because he really, really did.
~*~
Going public had been a scary step for Tony. He’d been “caught” with so many people over the years that it felt like hardly a week went by that his name wasn’t being tied to someone in the tabloids, but there weren’t actually that many people that he’d actually been dating. Ty, disastrously, Sunset, disastrously, and Pepper … slightly less disastrously. She’d at least not turned out to be a terrible person. She was an awesome person, Tony was … more than a little bit of a mess, and they were definitely better off as friends, with her running his company and him getting to spend a lot more time actually inventing things, doing the work that he cared about. And somehow, despite the way most of his life went, they had been able to remain friends and mostly-functional co-workers.
Anybody else could best be termed a fling, probably, and were more likely to be a one-night stand. It was much easier to take people home for a bit of fun but not to have to deal with them after that.
Except when it came to Bucky, Tony wanted to deal with him all the time. Like, constantly, which was weird for him. Perhaps in part because Bucky seemed to have this … wordless, unknowable skill at navigating Tony. Tony had truly never experienced anyone else doing it before. But they spent time together as a couple, and it was great. They spent time apart, and that worked too. They texted and talked on the phone, and that was fun. Sometimes, Bucky joined Tony in the lab, and he was genuinely enthusiastic about what Tony was working on, but he was also perfectly willing to play with the bots (how could Tony not love a man who loved his bots?) or just quietly read or work on his own thing. He made sure that Tony ate more regularly than Tony would have on his own, but he did so unobtrusively. He didn’t nag, and he never made Tony feel guilty about ignoring him.
They even got to collaborate a little from time to time because Bucky’s left arm was one of the new prosthetics from Hammer Tech that had used the supposedly cutting edge neural connections from Dr. Zola.
The more time Tony spent with Bucky, the more ideas he had about how it could possibly be improved, and he had a whole file of mods that he thought he could make. But contrary to what some people thought, Tony could, occasionally, be tactful. And even he recognised that picking apart your boyfriend’s prosthetic arm wasn’t what everyone would consider romantic.
But juvenile or not, Tony was pretty sure that boyfriend was the official term now, because they had been sighted enough times that a reporter had asked the question yet again, and instead of talking around it, Tony had said, “Yes, Bucky and I are dating. We’ve been dating for some time. Oddly, we actually value our privacy, which is why we haven’t mentioned it before. Thank you.”
Back in Stark Tower on Tony’s personal floor, Bucky had asked, “Are they actually capable of feeling guilty?”
“As a breed, no,” Tony admitted with a sigh, flopping down beside Bucky on the couch. “You might get the odd one who actually tries to be decent.”
Bucky just looked amused, immediately squirming around so that Tony could cuddle up to him, resting against his chest, just the way he preferred.
“So I’m going to be treated to the full circus?”
Tony hummed an agreement. “Media shit show. I mean, not as bad as if you were carrying my baby or secretly married or actually an alien, but—”
Bucky laughed. “Didn’t I tell you that I was from Pluto?”
“Not a planet,” Tony said automatically.
“Do I have to come from a planet if I’m an alien?” Bucky challenged.
Tony rolled his eyes, trusting that Bucky could sense it.
“They’ll be looking for skeletons in our closets, and of course, I’ve got plenty. All the major relationships or suspected relationships or maybe relationships will come out. Someone will probably do a super classy retrospective.”
“Oh, should I keep my eye out for it?” Bucky asked. “Look for tips? Rank us all on a ten-point scale?”
“What criteria would you use?” Tony asked, allowing himself to be distracted.
They spent far too long coming up with a ranking system for something that neither of them were actually going to use, but it made Tony feel a lot more hopeful about the whole thing.
~*~
It went mostly the way Tony expected, at first. Lots of digging into his trysts. Lots of surmise about what he saw in Bucky and how long this relationship would last. The really low-end ones were already speculating on all the people that Tony had probably cheated on Bucky with, despite the fact that they hadn’t even given an amount of time that they’d been together, and without a time frame—But logic didn’t sell headlines.
There was also what Tony thought was really quite unnecessary speculation about the impact of Tony’s time being kidnapped on his choice of partner. The fact that Bucky had been in the military, had been a sharpshooter, had briefly been a POW had all come up. His parents were dead, and reading between the lines, his sister, Rebecca, had told reporters to go fuck themselves when they’d tried to get “the real story” from her, but there just wasn’t much to tell. Bucky’s longstanding friendship with the artist Steve Rogers was made a big deal of, with plenty of speculation about the truth about that “friendship”.
There had been a few tense days, where Bucky clearly didn’t know how to react to the intensity of the attention on him and those around him.
“He’s like my brother,” Bucky said with a grimace of distaste. “Also, Peggy would nail my dick to the wall.”
Tony had met both Steve and Peggy, and he had to agree that Peggy Carter was terrifying and should not be messed with. Awesome, but like Pepper, not to be messed with. And she was in military intelligence. That was just asking for trouble.
But the thing was, Bucky was a genuinely good individual. He didn’t have any angry exes around. His family wasn’t eagerly waiting to dish dirt on him. He had a distinguished military career, and he was a kind, law-abiding citizen. He helped the little old lady who lived next door with her groceries and taking out the trash. That was the kind of guy Bucky Barnes was.
And so eventually, even the most rabid tabloids seemed to run out of things to say—apart from the usual efforts of showing Tony with a pretty person of any gender and reporting that he was “up to his old tricks” and Bucky was “old news” already.
Fortunately, Bucky had an excellent sense of humour, and he always liked to guess what Tony had actually been doing when the photo was taken before he got Tony to tell him. Tony had started grading him on creativity, and the suggestions had gotten sillier and sillier and Tony had been filled with something that felt a lot like hope.
That was until the morning that he had woken to the news that Tony was dating Bucky out of pity and guilt—because it was one of Tony’s black market weapons that had blown off Bucky’s arm. There had even been a fucking photo.
And Tony had done what Tony did best, had actually yelled at the other man once he’d established, that yes, this was actually a fact that Bucky had been aware of.
“I didn’t know it was public knowledge, Tony. I didn’t know that anyone would—”
“They’re investigative reporters!” Tony yelled. “They investigate! That’s what they do! And in case you didn’t notice in all this time, they don’t exactly mind the polite conventions and only report on nice, friendly topics! I don’t like being ambushed!”
Bucky’s eyes had been wounded before his face had shut down, and he’d offered a tight nod and left.
Because Bucky had been actually ambushed by a goddamn Stark weapon and had his arm blown off and Tony was yelling at him about a photo in a tabloid.
Fuck his life.
Because Tony didn’t learn from his mistakes, he yelled at Rhodey, too, until they established that no, Rhodey didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and no, of course he hadn’t set Tony up with someone he’d known had been injured by one of Tony’s weapons.
And then Tony had locked everyone else out and had locked himself in to his workshop. He told Jarvis that he did not want to be disturbed for anything, and he studiously ignored the call count that his know-it-all AI had left in the corner of his screen that showed him how many times Bucky had tried to call him.
Tony had work to do.
~*~
Tony did some of his best work under pressure, and he had produced some astonishing results when he was in pain, feeling or actually being tortured, and being crushed by guilt, so he liked to think of this as highly productive time. He could cram most of the feelings far back where they wouldn’t get too much in the way, and he could just make himself do the math, work the problem, science the shit out of everything, because that was what Tony was good at. He might be terrible at everything else, but he was good at science—sometimes so good, that he built really terrible weapons and then because he was so terrible at people, he didn’t realise that his most trusted advisor and friend was selling them on the black market—but other than that, really good at science, and ever since that desert, he had put all of his focus into science to benefit humanity.
He wanted to help people, even if what he most seemed to do was hurt them.
He’d threatened to shut Jarvis down if he kept telling him how long he’d been down here or how long it was since he’d last eaten—Dum-E brought him smoothies occasionally, they were mostly edible, it was fine—so Tony genuinely had no idea what day it even was when he asked Jarvis for an updated schematic and he piped in a conversation from somewhere.
“Why aren’t you going in there?”
It was Rhodey, sounding genuinely pissed.
Tony stiffened at the first syllable coming out of Bucky’s mouth.
“Well, first of all, I don’t actually have access. He locked me out when he locked the rest of you out. And second of all, he is a grown ass man. He gets to make his own choices.”
“Even when he hurts himself?” Rhodey challenged.
“Sometimes, yeah. I mean, if I see him doing something that hurts him, I’m probably going to try to talk to him about it. But I’m not his keeper. At the end of the day, the person who takes care of Tony is Tony.”
“And I suppose you don’t see anything unhealthy about this?”
Ah, Pepper was there, too. It was an intervention that Tony actually wasn’t present for and shouldn’t even have to deal with, except Jarvis was so being dismantled … as soon as this conversation was over, because Tony couldn’t stop listening now that it had started, dammit. He hadn’t heard Bucky’s voice since Tony had been a total asshole and blamed the victim for something that was the exact opposite of his fault.
“I doubt that he’s getting enough sleep or enough food,” Bucky said, and he sounded both worried and fond, which, Tony frowned, that couldn’t be right, could it? “It’s not the first time he’s got like that since I’ve seen him, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. He gets going in his head, and he forgets about everything else. And right now, I wouldn’t interrupt him even if I could.”
“You want him to suffer or something?”
Rhodey. Belligerent.
“Not ever,” Bucky said softly, refusing to be drawn.
Tony let out a soft exhale.
“Tony’s too smart to think for more than a really pissed minute that I got together with him as some weird ass plot to get revenge. And that means he knows that I got together with him because I like him. And that means that he’s already worked out that I like him regardless of what happened with my arm, because we have already clarified that I knew what brand of weapon it was that caused my injury.”
Tony … wasn’t sure that he felt as smart as Bucky seemed to think he was in this particular moment.
“That doesn’t upset you?” Pepper asked.
“Do you think I’d be going after Justin Hammer if it had been a HammerTech weapon? Does someone go after the heads of Colt or Glock because that’s the brand of gun that was used to harm them? That actually makes no sense whatsoever. And even if I did blame Tony for any of it, which I do not, just to be clear, then he’s already done the things that I would have wanted him to do about it. He stopped making the goddamned weapons. He cleaned house and got rid of the people who were actually the ones selling the weapons to the black market. So no, maybe it’s not Tony being the healthiest that he could be right now. If I got to pick, then I’d want him to be cuddling with me, and we could watch episodes of Star Trek and he could pick apart the science and then get distracted by something that he could definitely invent right now that would be even better.” There was warm affection in Bucky’s voice. “But Tony decided what he wanted to do right now. This is how he thinks. This is how he helps the world. And I think, sometimes, this is how he processes trauma. And that’s something that Tony gets to decide how to do because if therapy has taught me one thing, it’s that everyone processes grief and trauma differently. Sure, there are some bad ways to do it, but there’s a scale, there are ways to reduce harm. Tony knows how I feel, and when he’s ready, I’ll be here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”
Tony was apparently as stunned as Rhodey and Pepper, because everyone was silent. Tony cleared his throat.
“I asked for the most recent schematic, Jarvis,” he told his AI.
Who would maybe survive to be smart and invasive another day after all.
“My apologies, Sir,” Jarvis said smoothly. “I must have misunderstood.”
Presented with the schematic, Tony was able to make the adjustments that he’d thought of, refining the prototype again. He was pretty sure that another twelve hours or so of work, and he could have an actual working model, though there’d need to be plenty of adjustments once he saw how it actually worked in the real world.
Which had really only been going to happen if Bucky was willing to test it.
He was starting to suspect that Bucky was a lot smarter than Tony had realised.
He tapped on that stupid notification icon that Jarvis had just kept moving around the screen instead of removing and drank his smoothie and secret stash of chocolate-covered blueberries that Bucky had started hiding in the workroom when he visited all the time as he listened to or read the messages.
The thing was, none of them were angry. Not any of them, not even that first day.
Hi Tony, it ’s Bucky. I hope that you’re feeling okay. Clearly, tempers got a little frayed with this last newsbomb, huh? Peggy’s on a rampage and promised that she’d crush the leak once she found it. Call me when you’re ready. Love you.
They were all like that, full of affection and patience that Tony was sure that he didn’t deserve, only Bucky had kind of already addressed that, seemed to be sure that Tony deserved more than Tony had ever thought was true. Didn’t blame him for how he was reacting but had also made clear that he didn’t blame him, period, even if Tony blamed himself. Because he believed that Tony was an adult and that he had the right to have his own reactions and process his own feelings in his own time.
Tony was … pretty sure that he had never experienced anything like that sort of acceptance from anyone, ever. And he’d think that it was just like him to have screwed it up, except … maybe he hadn’t? Somehow? Because Bucky understood him better than anyone had ever understood Tony before, and didn’t seem to expect Tony to be perfect, just … cared for him.
Tony really didn’t know what to do with that, which probably told him all sorts of things about how messed up his life was, but … that didn’t mean that it couldn’t get better. Didn’t mean that he couldn’t work to make it better.
Tony yawned, the motion taking him by surprise. He’d crashed a couple of times on the couch when Dum-E had threated him with the fire extinguisher because he’d nearly set himself on fire with the soldering iron again, but it could definitely not be considered quality hours of shut-eye, nor the normal number of hours that someone would have in a standard period.
“How long until the prototype is ready, J?” he asked.
“Five point seven hours, Sir.”
“If I catch some zees, can you make sure it’s pretty and ask Bucky to join me here in six hours? And wake me so I make it down here again?”
“Certainly, Sir.”
Maybe it was a little cowardly to get Jarvis to relay the message, but Jarvis sounded smug and satisfied anyway, so whatever, he was making his AI happy, what was the problem?
In the elevator, Tony realised how much he stank, so he took a quick shower, scrubbing off all the accumulated sweat and grime, and then fell into bed.
He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
~*~
Five point nine or so hours later, Tony was trying not to jump out of his skin, prototype under a drop cloth and everything, just waiting for Bucky to get there. Jarvis had confirmed that Bucky had got the message and said he was going to be here. There was no reason for Bucky to not be here, not given all of his messages from before—not unless he changed his mind, or there was a terrible accident, or—
The door to the lab opened and Bucky came in. Tony almost sagged for a moment and then jumped straight in.
“Hey,” he said, because he was terrible at this sort of thing. “Glad you could make it.”
Because pretending like Tony hadn’t completely overreacted was the healthy, mature way to deal with this. He whipped the drop cloth off the prototype.
“So, I made you this. I mean, if you’re interested in it. If you’re not interested in it, then I can obviously adjust it so that it can be a prototype for someone else. I mean, it’s going to be useful technology anyway, so you should definitely not feel like this is anything that you have to do if it’s something that you would rather not do. But it has a ton of improvements compared to your current one, I’d been thinking about it for a while, but I didn’t want to just jump right in there, because I know some people would find that weird, and I was trying to respect your boundaries, which, obviously, I am terrible at in general, but I do try, sometimes, just maybe not with the consistency that others would understand or appreciate. I’ve got responsiveness up by at least 36%, weight down by 62%, the best of kinetic charging in there, an improvement of at least 93%—honestly, I don’t even know what Justin thought he was doing—so you should rarely need to charge it externally, but if ever there’s an extreme power drain for some reason, time to charge is down by 43%, and I think it’s a lot prettier, which, I know, is not the primary concern here, but if you’re going to make something, why not make it functional and aesthetically pleasing, right?”
He jumped in again before Bucky could consider responding.
“Tactile sensitivity should be improved by at least 41%, and I think I can improve upon that once I actually see how it acts in the real world, and—”
“Tony.”
Bucky’s voice was no-nonsense, and Tony finally cut off his babble, made himself look up at the other man because he’d addressed his entire spiel to the prosthetic arm in question.
“Hmm?”
“It looks amazin’, and I would like to hear a lot more about it, but not right this second. Right this second, I’d like to hug my boyfriend. Is that all right?”
Tony had spent most of the last what had proved to be almost two weeks assuming that he didn’t have a relationship anymore because he was an idiot. He’d understood intellectually that Bucky was not of the same opinion when Jarvis had interfered. But it was still different to actually hear it out of Bucky’s mouth, addressed to him.
And he’d really, really like a hug.
He nodded, and Bucky slipped around the table that Tony had kept between them because he was good at that, and wrapped his arms around him. Tony let out a shuddering sigh and leaned right into him, hugging him back as tight as he could.
Bucky ran his hands up and down Tony’s back.
“You are the best,” Bucky told him. “And we can prototype to your heart’s content, I promise. But I’m hoping we can maybe eat some popcorn and watch a movie and cuddle a whole helluva lot first. What do you say?”
Tony melted further into the man’s embrace. He was so warm. How had Tony managed for almost two weeks without all this coziness?
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Tony managed to croak out, because it seemed to be the only possible response.
It was even worth having to pull out of the hug in order to be able to move, because Bucky flashed him one of those knee-melting smiles that Tony loved so much.
Bucky put Tony in charge of picking a movie and finding the best blankets while he got drinks and popcorn. This was a sensible division of labour given what had happened last time Tony had tried to make the popcorn—he’d been distracted for a maximum of, like, four minutes, but it turned out they’d been four crucial minutes—but in truth, all of the blankets were awesome, so practically speaking, this mostly meant curling up on the couch with a pile of them and flicking through movie options on his big tv screen.
“J, help me make a decision.”
“That’s cheating,” Bucky called from the kitchen area.
“You didn’t say I couldn’t get advice,” Tony called back, because this was banter he knew, this was banter they’d done before, this was okay.
Jarvis did indeed pick a film for him, which Tony appreciated, because he honestly did not care what they watched, just that they were watching something together, and that meant that the field of choice was unbearably large, and he would have dithered for an unacceptable amount of time.
Bucky appeared with the popcorn and sodas and told Tony to “budge up” so that they could settle on the couch just the way that they always did. He kissed Tony on the side of the head.
“It’s okay, Sweetheart,” he whispered.
Maybe it was really sinking in that it was. Tony was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it seemed like there maybe wasn’t another shoe. (Had it got lost in another dimension? Been set on fire? Been disintegrated in a freak accident? Maybe it didn’t matter.)
And then the movie started, and Tony saw that Jarvis had picked Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Tony threw a piece of popcorn at the screen.
“The one with time travel? That makes even less sense than normal? Really, J?”
Bucky piped up, “Excellent choice, Jarvis. I like the whales. It has an important environmental message. And silly jokes.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Jarvis said.
He sounded very smug again. Tony was sure that he had not programmed this much smugness into his AI.
Tony leaned back against Bucky’s warm chest and prepared to destroy every bit of pseudo-science that had ever been written about in the film.
In reality … he most dozed and listened to Bucky’s chuckles, which reverberated through his chest and told Tony that everything was right with the world. It was remarkably soothing.
Bucky roused him with a kiss to the head and a gentle shake of the shoulder as the credits were rolling.
“Come on, Sweetheart. You’ll regret it in the morning if you don’t sleep in a bed.”
“Jus’ slept in a bed,” he managed to complain.
“You’re actually supposed to do it every night, Tony,” Bucky pointed out, fond and exasperated. “You wanna tell me how many times you slept in a bed while I was away?”
“Sir slept in a bed today, Master Barnes,” Jarvis said primly.
“Tattle-tale,” Tony muttered.
“You sayin’ you don’t want to get in bed with me?” Bucky asked.
“I always want to get in bed with you,” Tony answered truthfully.
“Then what kind of a genius are you?” Bucky asked with mock scorn. “This is a solution even I get. Come on.”
And Tony, who’d been sure up until roughly twenty-four hours ago that he wasn’t ever going to get to sleep with Bucky again, went.
~*~
Turning the prototype into a functioning arm for Bucky was one of the most rewarding experiences of Tony’s life. Tony loved when his science was actually realised, turned into something in the real world that people could actually use, that made their lives easier. Tony liked to invent for the sheer joy of inventing, but he loved when it went beyond fun theory.
More than one person had told Tony that he was really intense—extremes, remember?—and that keeping up with him was exhausting, that it was too much to deal with. Although Rhodey and Pepper had both evidently decided not to say anything, he’d seen the big eyes and the worried looks and knew that they were concerned that he was going to be too intense for Bucky, that he was going to turn whatever it was that they were into something that was all about science or work—that he would, in short, mess things up like he usually did, or not have un-messed them up from last time.
Rhodey and Pepper had both been super relieved when Tony had come out of the workshop and started eating and sleeping again. They’d given him hugs and told him they’d been worried about him and told him that none of this was his fault. And the thing was, Tony had maybe started to believe them, but it wasn’t because of anything that they had said, it was all because of what Bucky had said, his ability to look at the world in a way that Tony didn’t and to believe in Tony in a way that Tony didn’t think anyone ever had before, a way that made allowances for making mistakes and screwing up but … was okay with it.
Tony wasn’t the only one who had nightmares or bad days or just needed things to be quiet sometimes. Bucky maybe wasn’t as messed up as Tony was, but he had his own issues, and that seemed to make him way better equipped than most people were to understand Tony. Or maybe it was just a gift that he had, an innate ability to understand Tony no matter what.
Bucky had already had time to process the fact that a Stark weapon had been used to take his arm, and he had given Tony time to work through the same realisation. He’d let Tony have his time to process and create, and he had made it clear that he was really excited about the arm and he thought that it was going to be revolutionary, but the success or failure of the arm didn’t have anything to do with their success or failure.
“All right? Can we try that?”
And Tony, who was used to measuring his own success and failure in dozens of different ways that often related to what he made or created or could sell to someone had … drawn a deep breath and had nodded, had agreed to try. So despite the worried looks that he would catch sometimes from Pepper and Rhodey, or the slightly odd glances that he would get from the techs or scientists at SI, the fact that Tony’s boyfriend was the primary tester for the prototype of what Tony intended to be a whole new product line of SI somehow … wasn’t a problem.
Bucky used his arm every day, obviously. And he cared a lot about science and innovation. And he loved Tony—he’d said so, in every single message that he’d sent to Tony while Tony had been having his little arm-creating meltdown. So despite the fact that some of those things maybe shouldn’t have all worked together, they all came together anyway, and it meant that there was tinkering and laughter and dates—and on one memorable occasion, a really intimate moment that had switched to a brainstorming session and tinkering on the arm. In retrospect, that should probably really not have been a thing that Tony had done, except … Bucky had been on board with it? He had shifted gears the same way that Tony had, and they had totally managed all of the fun stuff, too, it had just been a little delayed, and Bucky had seemed as grateful as Tony had for the way that Tony had come up with to increase the feedback and sensitivity.
It wasn’t perfect, there were still moments of friction, little annoyances here and there, one awful lab session where someone had misread a setting, and Bucky had been nearly knocked unconscious by an overload on his nerves where they connected to the prosthetic. He’d had a flashback, which Tony would never, ever wish on anyone, but taking care of Bucky had probably been the only thing that had prevented Tony from firing every single person in the lab on the spot. The time it had taken for Bucky to recover had been enough for Tony to recover at least a little bit of his equilibrium. Taking his boyfriend home and getting to take care of him had helped, too, and by the time the morning had come round and they’d woken up curled round one another just like they usually were, Tony had already known that Bucky was going to tell him that accidents happened.
“We’ll be more careful,” Tony said.
“Well, not going to lie, Sweetheart, I definitely won’t mind if that never happens again,” Bucky agreed. “But we all make mistakes.”
Some people made mistakes that cost lives. And sometimes, you just read a number wrong and hurt someone you didn’t ever want to hurt. You probably shouldn’t get fired and blacklisted for eternity because of it. Or should you?
Bucky laughed and kissed his temple.
“No, Tony, you don’t need to fire anyone.”
By the time they got back to the lab, the extremely apologetic technician had spent the entire night overhauling the feedback system so that it had better warnings and an automatic cut-off if readings went above tolerable levels. (Which, oh my god, yes, what had Tony been thinking? If the arm was badly injured, neural feedback should absolutely cut off.)
“Great work, really good job turning a mistake into an excellent lesson learned with workable improvements for the future. Don’t worry, Bucky said I can’t fire anyone, everyone makes mistakes. Now go home and get some rest, because I have seen that look before, and it usually ends with me nearly setting myself on fire accidentally. Go on.”
The readings indicated that there was still some inflammation in the cap end of Bucky’s arm, so they were going to take a day off with no prosthetic at all and make sure that he fully recovered.
“Wanna go out to lunch?” Tony asked. “There’s a new Indian place I thought you might like.”
Bucky had agreed, and off they went. Tony realised belatedly that Bucky sometimes got a lot of looks, surreptitious second glances, when he wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, like people saw that he was missing an arm, then had to look again to make sure that he was missing an arm and then wondered why he was missing an arm but were theoretically too polite to ask about it.
Tony focussed on Bucky, because one or two arms didn’t change anything at all about the essential person who had decided that he wanted to be with Tony and had done so through some weird ups and downs and some really great times and some occasionally shitty ones. And as Tony kept up some light chatter and asked Bucky about what was going on at work and whether Steve had gotten up the guts to ask Peggy to marry him yet—“She’s gonna do it, I swear to god, but Steve really wants to be the one, and she knows that, so she’s been waitin’, but he is just, such a chicken about this, which is the dumbest thing ever given it’s a miracle he made it to adulthood, all the windmills he tilted at when we were kids”—Bucky slowly relaxed across from him.
Maybe it wasn’t just Tony who needed to know that Bucky accepted him just as he was. They shared food, tried not too make too much of a mess, gulped a collective four mango lassis when one of the really hot dishes proved to be really hot, and had a wonderful time.
Reporters were waiting when they left the restaurant, and one of the asshats actually went there and asked what it meant that Bucky wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, was it a way to deal with Tony’s guilt about what had happened.
Tony was pretty sure he was going to be arrested for assaulting a member of the press, but then Bucky grabbed his arm and stared the reporter down.
“Please,” Bucky said, “continue your speculation. I’m sure that all of your colleagues and the eager public would like to hear all about your opinion on my disability and how I manage it.”
Collectively, the mass of reporters swung around to look at the one moron, who got the deer-in-the-headlights look that showed that his hindbrain did actually work sometimes.
Bucky looped his right arm through Tony’s.
“Good day, everyone.”
“Oh, my god,” Tony said, once they were out of hearing distance. “What even is wrong with people? But you, you are amazing. I love you, James Buchanan Barnes.”
Bucky leaned into him. “I love you too, Tony Stark.”
~*~
It took several more months before they had a fully functioning prototype, but Bucky was full of effusive praise for how much better it was in so many ways compared to how the old one had worked. He said that everything was so much easier, so much more like his actual arm that he even sometimes forgot that this wasn’t his real one, which was the highest praise that Tony could ever imagine.
Plus, Bucky agreed that it was really pretty, and he didn’t seem to mind at all that Tony really liked it and that he would run his fingers over and over it when they were snuggled together on the couch.
“Testing the feedback,” Tony would mumble, though they both knew he wasn’t doing any such thing.
“Real good,” Bucky would whisper back, a shiver whispering across his body at Tony’s gentle caresses.
Yeah, there were lots of reasons that Tony had been invested in making this arm the best arm out there. He really did want to create the best prosthetic limbs for people who needed to use them, but there were definitely immediate benefits that Tony got to experience up close and personal.
SI was working with the military, Veterans’ Affairs, and a variety of hospitals to set up the expanded trials, and Pepper had already green lit the subsidy program that would help make sure that the prosthetics weren’t available only to the wealthy or well-insured. Tony definitely wanted everyone who needed to to be able to benefit from his tech. Bucky smiled extra at him, and well, that was all the payment that Tony needed.
~*~
It was almost a year since their first blind date when Tony spirited Bucky away on his private jet and flew them to Venice.
Bucky was pretty used to Tony doing what he considered slightly over-the-top things as though they were normal, so he didn’t raise more than a token objection. (Tony’s jet had reduced its carbon emissions by 50%, and Tony of course did carbon emission offsetting as he worked to get to carbon neutral.)
“You always said you’d like to see Venice!” Tony pointed out.
“I’d like to see space, but that doesn’t mean—”
Tony’s eyes lit up.
“No, Tony,” Bucky said, but he was laughing, and Tony was one hundred per cent sure that he could make that happen.
He briefly considered changing his plan, but then he decided that no, he could not wait that long, even though it would be really cool. And in comparison, Venice seemed completely reasonable.
Then Bucky learned why Tony had brought him here.
He stared wide-eyed at Tony, on one knee in the gondola, with a ring made from the first metal prototype of Bucky’s arm.
“I love you,” Tony told him earnestly, hoping the gondolier wasn’t recording this but not actually caring if he was. For Bucky, Tony was pretty sure that his heart was always on his sleeve. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and you make me believe that this can actually work, because you understand me in a way that I don’t think anyone ever has before, and me being me and you being you just … works. You don’t expect me to be perfect and you let me work on my mistakes, and there are days where you’re grumpy or days where I hate the world, and we just … fill in those hollow spaces in one another.”
Bucky smiled at him, and Tony sucked in a breath.
“That smile, right there. The first time I saw it on our very first date, I thought that I wanted to keep putting that smile on your face every day for the rest of your life. Let me try, please. Marry me? Right now?”
And the smile grew even wider, even as Bucky’s eyes widened and he breathed, “Pepper’s going to kill you. Peggy’s going to kill you.”
Steve had finally proposed, but the wedding wasn’t for another year.
“I’m not making Steve’s mistakes,” Tony said with a huff. “He’s so lucky that woman is crazy about him.”
“I’m totally gone on you, Sweetheart,” Bucky said immediately. “We could have a ten-year engagement, and it wouldn’t matter.”
“I don’t want to wait,” Tony said promptly.
Tony liked to go at things full speed ahead.
Bucky huffed out a laugh. “Stevie’s going to be as insufferable as Rhodes with his ‘I know a guy who knows a guy’, and Sam is probably going to be pissed he didn’t get to make a speech at the wedding.”
“We can throw a ‘So you can tell us I told you so’ party when we get back?” Tony suggested.
And Bucky laughed. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
Tony perked up. “Yeah?”
Bucky was nodding. “Yes. Let’s get married.”
Peggy did yell, and so did Pepper. Sam and Steve and Rhodey all said variation of “I told you so” and were really smug. And Tony and Bucky really didn’t care, because they were totally married, and it was the best thing ever.
~*~