Work Text:
"What about that cute tech in communications? What's-his-name. You should ask him out," Natasha says to him one day.
"Abed," Sam replies automatically, before he has the good sense to shut the hell up.
"Yeah, Abed! He's cute. And I think he'd say yes. He's a big fan of your work."
Sam does not see how Natasha could possibly know this.
Steve tells him that this is all a good sign, because setting people up is how the Black Widow shows she likes you. Sam thought she already showed that when she saved his life, but apparently she does that for most people regardless of her affection for them. "She's an Avenger, you see. We help people," Steve explains very slowly, very kindly, very patronizingly.
Sam ends up asking Abed out to dinner partly because Natasha told him to, and partly because he's starting to get sick of Captain America's blithe sarcasm. He really needs to make more friends who aren't Steve.
Abed says yes, enthusiastically. He says he's a big fan of Sam's work, those actual words. Sam thinks maybe Natasha is a little bit creepy.
Abed is refreshingly normal in a way that Sam's new superfriends aren't. He likes junk food and going out to the movies every weekend and talking about videogames. Before all this saving the world business, when Sam had tried to walk away and lead a regular civilian life, he had also appreciated those things. He didn't appreciate them to the extent that Abed does, but probably nobody in the world does.
The look Abed gives him when he says he's seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes but not the newest one or the original one is priceless.
Abed is also completely weird in a way that's also kind of refreshing, because again, it's not a weird that exists in any of Sam's new friends, or indeed any of his old friends, or anyone he's ever known. He doesn't mean the total lack of normal social graces that's impossible to ignore, either. He works with Bucky, he's used to that kind of thing. He even finds it charming. But Abed lives with his two roommates from college still, even though they can all afford to live on their own, and none of them seem remotely concerned about their obvious co-dependency.
"I don't like change," Abed replies with a shrug, when Sam asks him about it one night as they're making out...in Abed's bunk bed. Directly above Troy's bottom bunk. While Troy is lying on it, snoring.
Sam likes Annie, he really does. She's a brilliant forensic analyst that Sam thinks should be working for S.H.I.E.L.D. already, although she and Abed disagree. ("Jeff says that the basis of all financial foundations should be diversification. If we put all our eggs in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s basket and it collapses, then we'd have no more income source," one or both of them always says to him. Neither of them ever explains who the hell Jeff is.)
Sam would like to like Troy, but Troy makes it very, very difficult.
He understands just fine what it feels like to be jealous about your close friend suddenly finding another friend. Steve was the first person he had let himself get close to in a long time, and then all of a sudden Bucky came into the picture, or even worse, came back into the picture. A guy couldn't compete with that. But it didn't remain a competition for long. They had too many near-death suicide missions to bond over, and more importantly they had making fun of Steve to bond over. Soon enough, they were regularly debating the pros and cons of cybernetic metal appendages over a pitcher after work, jealousies left behind.
Sam doesn't think he'll have the same luck burying the hatchet with Troy.
"Have you replaced me with a slightly taller black guy who can fly?!" Troy demands one day, when the tension has become unbearable and finally spills over. "Is he everything I am and more? Was he a quarterback in high school too? Was he?"
Abed wears a startled look on his face, eyes so wide that it sparks a flare of over-protectiveness in Sam. He quickly pushes his way between them and tells Troy to back up, but it only makes him more hysterical and he starts crying while insisting that he isn't crying. Abed and Annie exchange one of their looks and Sam gets ushered out the door on mutual agreement.
If Sam claimed there wasn't also a tiny bit of jealousy from his end about their perfectly insulated little world of three, then he'd be lying.
The next day, during what Sam is fairly certain is a top-secret meeting in a room that can only be accessed via multiple fingerprint and retinal scans, Troy storms in and demands to see Sam's personnel file.
"Who is this fool?" Nick Fury asks, quite justifiably.
"I," Troy declares, drawing himself up to his less than impressive full height, "am Chief of Air Temperature and Humidity Regulation Operations, and I need to see this—this—this homewrecker's files immediately!"
"What is the meaning of this?" Fury directs his attention only to Natasha because he has very little faith in Steve, Sam, or Bucky ever knowing what's going on, ever. "How did the air conditioning man get in here?"
Natasha murmurs something inaudible that ends with "right away, sir" and moves to manhandle Troy back out the door, but Troy throws a fit and starts screeching, "If you don't give me access to those files right away, I will make this building hot. I will make this building scorching. I will make this building so hot, you'll all have to strip right down to your underwear just to continue existing in this building, and you'll all be out in the open then, won't you? No more keeping secrets behind your shirts of lies. No more trench coats and black turtlenecks for Director Fury, either. God, do you know how much skill it takes to keep the building juuuuuust right, so he can wear that sweater even in the summer but so the rest of you don't get hypothermia? All the skill in my blessed hands, and I will turn these hands against you, so help me God, if you don't at least show me his high school year books right freaking now."
A stunned silence ensues. Fury looks incredulous, mouthing "the air conditioning man??" at Natasha over and over again. Steve looks slightly troubled but also slightly amused. Bucky looks impressed, but that's because Bucky has very poor social skills. Sam figures it's possibly time for him to speak up.
He clears his throat. "Uh, sorry, I'll take the fall for this one. This here is Troy Barnes, and he's the roommate—"
"Best friend," Troy hisses, and would probably have shot him in the balls if he had a gun in his hands instead of Natasha gripping his arms.
"—best friend of Abed Nadir. The guy I'm, uh, seeing."
"Oh, the cute communications tech!" Natasha says, face blossoming from perfect sternness into all smiles. "Good, you asked him out!"
"Yeah, I did, but Troy and I have been having some...issues. This is entirely my fault, for letting my personal life mix with business. Please don't hold it against either him or Abed."
Steve suddenly looks much more interested in the proceedings, but before he can say anything, Fury decides he's had enough of all this nonsense and waves at Natasha to frog-march Troy the fuck out of here. "Deal with it on your own time," he says, giving Sam a hard look.
"Yes sir," Sam replies.
* * *
"We should go on a double date next time," Troy suggests brightly, after they've watched a movie and gotten dinner together.
Sam sends a silent thank you to a god he isn't even sure exists. Sam and Abed were originally supposed to go the movie and dinner by themselves, obviously, but Troy tagged along after a silent conversation with Abed involving only eyebrows that Sam was not privy to, as usual. Maybe, just maybe, if Troy is suggesting a double date, it means he'll have his own partner to bother from now on.
They set the date for Friday night, and Troy says to leave all the planning to him. When Friday night rolls around, Sam goes to their place to pick them up and finds...Bucky.
"Did you follow me here?" Sam asks, for lack of a better guess.
Bucky goes a bit bug-eyed and then frowns very hard like he's trying to remember if he did. It's an expression he used to wear a lot more, when he first came back to Steve and started regaining his memories. It had been hard for him to always tell if something was forgotten but true, new and unheard of, or just a false memory. He gets that look on his face less with each passing day, though, and it clears off of his face now, chased away by a tentative smile. "No, Troy invited me."
Just when Sam opens his mouth to ask what the actual hell, Troy opens the door and ushers them both inside. "Welcome to La Casa de Trobed y Annie!" he says. "Tonight, for our very special double date, we will be going to a very special planet in the Omicron Delta system!"
"Wait—Bucky is your date?" Sam asks incredulously.
"We're going to outer space?" Bucky asks, admittedly more sensibly.
"We're going in the Dreamatorium," Abed answers, finally emerging. He gives Sam a quick peck while Troy grinds his teeth.
"What's a Dreamatorium?"
"It's an incredibly powerful virtual reality simulator that reacts to the brainwaves of your desires and manifests any simulation you require. It's like the holodeck from the Star Trek universe, only better."
The look on Bucky's face loudly announces that clears up nothing. At least Sam was born in a world where Star Trek, as a concept, exists. That puts him at a slight advantage over Bucky, though just barely.
They follow Troy and Abed to a door that Sam has never seen open, in all the times he's been over. Could they really have technology that even S.H.I.E.L.D. or Stark had never heard of? He knows that Abed's smart, really smart, and Troy is good with a screwdriver, but he doesn't know what to expect when they open the door with a flourish.
It isn't an empty room meticulously gridded with masking tape.
Abed and Troy immediately start fiddling with imaginary controls that Sam can't see, which is basically some kind of metaphor for what's always happening between them anyway. He catches Bucky's eye behind their backs and quirks his eyebrows at him.
"You know, for a second there, I really thought they had a magic machine," Bucky whispers loudly.
Too loudly. Troy shushes him, and then pushes an inexplicable costume into his hands. There's a silver wig and black rubber boots and a really tight turtleneck that shouldn't logically fit over his head, and yet stretches to an extent improbable in conventional physics.
Abed comes over to hand Sam his costume, which consists of a hula skirt and little else. Sam sighs.
Sam sits in the corner with Bucky, "planet-side," while Abed and Troy fly their ship on their course to the planet. It's a little cold in nothing but a grass skirt, but Sam doesn't complain. Bucky sits cross-legged, playing with his sparkly silver braids.
"Why are you even on a date, anyway?" Sam asks. He can't quite put it into words but there's something that feels wrong about it, Bucky on a modern-day date. He isn't quite the old-timey golly gee shucks wide-eyed boy that Steve is, but he had come to them like a feral animal, half-mad and forgetful of the most basic facts about human civility. It's like dating a wild thing, like trickery. Does Bucky even understand what dating is?
"I go on a lot of dates. Or, I did. I was quite the lothario. Just ask Steve how much I date."
"For real?" Sam shoots him a look.
"Oh yes, I'm very smooth," Bucky says with a slow grin. "And I have none of the gentlemanly scruples that dear Steve does. I used to be known for both the quality and quantity of my, uh, companions."
The next look Sam shoots him can only be described as a double take.
An enemy ship intercepts Abed and Troy's spacecraft before they can make landfall on Sam and Bucky's native planet of disco cat burglars and hula dancers, and they spend the next two hours fighting off increasingly aggressive enemy fire. Sam and Bucky sit forgotten in their corner. Sam doesn't even mind. It's easier to watch them than to even try using his imagination that hard, and they're...for lack of a better word, cute. Charming. They're entirely immersed in a whole world that they've built with their minds, and Sam can't help smiling.
"What?" Bucky asks, seeing his smile.
"Nothing. They're cute."
"Hmm."
They end up chilling in the corner together pretty much for the rest of the night, as Abed and Troy get sucked deeper into wild scenarios that involve neither Sam nor Bucky. When it's time for them to go, they help "power down" the Dreamatorium and Sam gives Abed a kiss goodnight while trying not to watch from the corner of his eye as Troy and Bucky engage in some sort of horrifying failed fist bump fiasco.
It was a good date, Sam realizes on his way home. He had a really good time.
* * *
Steve has some sort of sixth sense about being left out and constantly shoots both Sam and Bucky large-eyed wounded looks of bewilderment, asking them where they go without him and once, in a rather telling Freudian slip, why they go without him.
By mutual agreement that it's fun to drive Steve absolutely insane, Sam and Bucky withhold their double-dating activities from him for as long as possible.
Despite being in the business of saving the world every day and twice on Sundays, however, S.H.I.E.L.D. is just like every other office and eventually the gossip gets around. Steve finally hears about where Bucky goes when he heads out with Sam a few times a week with nothing but a jaunty goodbye wave and a smug smirk for Steve, and he immediately corners Sam about it at the next possible opportunity.
"The air conditioning guy? Really? The one who's unnaturally attached to the man you're dating? What have you dragged Bucky into?"
Steve asks his questions with all the earnest protectiveness of a mother duck, and Sam resents that implication because, well, "Oh shut up. Apparently he's the one who was a player back in the day, getting boys and girls to fall over for him here, there, everywhere."
"Wait, he told you that?" The surprise on Steve's face fades into something warmer as he reminisces about the good old days, memories only for him and Bucky, memories no one else alive can touch.
"He tells me a lot of things. We hang out together a lot, now that we're dating Siamese twins. Apparently he was a 'lothario'—I'm so innocent that I had to look up what that word even means. How do you know he's not the one dragging me into things?"
"Oh," Steve says, eyes sweeping slow and languid up and down Sam's body, "you don't really seem like the kind of person who needs to be dragged."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Whatever that was," Sam says, which he's sure clarifies everything. "That flirting thing, or that sexual tension thing, or whatever the hell you want to call it. I'm with Abed, and you're supposed to like that nurse or neighbour or intelligence agent or whoever she is. Natasha's rules."
"Sharon," Steve says, knowing exactly what he's talking about. His eyes go into soft-focus for a second. And then he coughs completely fakely. "Do you ever get the feeling like Natasha runs our personal lives?"
Before Sam even had time to say yes, actual fucking Natasha Romanov materializes in the not-so-private hallway in which they've chosen to have this conversation, like a demon summoned by her true name. Sam feels guilty as soon as he thinks this, because Natasha is a lot nicer than a demon. Also scarier.
"Hey Sam, hey Steve," she says, friendly enough.
Sam has never been more on guard, not even when he was actively in a hot warzone.
"Any plans tonight?" she asks. Just casual co-worker chat, nice and normal. Too normal.
"I'm going out for dinner with Abed."
"So you're still with Abed?"
Sam's instincts scream that it's a trick question. "Yes?" he answers cautiously.
"Hmm," Natasha replies, her face giving nothing away.
"And Bucky's with Troy now, the air conditioning guy." The thing is, Sam knows this interrogation technique, where you give the subject nothing and just let them talk to fill the silence. He knows, and it still works on him, because Natasha is that fucking good.
"Hmm," she says again, a small frown creasing the space between her perfectly-shaped brows.
"What? Isn't that good? Isn't that what you wanted?" he asks, looking over her shoulder desperately at Steve for help. Steve shakes his head, raises both hands in surrender, and backs away on tiptoe, like a cartoon character gingerly extracting himself from a sticky situation. Captain America is a goddamn traitor.
"Sure," Natasha says, flashing him one of those perfect counterfeit smiles she uses to lull victims into a false sense of security. Sam isn't fooled for a single second. "That's great. How about you invite Troy and Bucky out to dinner with you, make it a double date?" she suggests innocuously.
It's easy to agree to her suggestion, because that's already what they had been planning to do all along.
* * *
There's a loose association of pigeons who like to hang out on the metal grate outside the window of Abed and Troy's makeshift room. Abed claims the grate is meant to be some kind of landing that leads to the fire escape, but Sam'll be damned if he ever lets Abed or Annie or even Troy step a foot out on that rickety thing. It's definitely not stable. It doesn't even have railings. In the event of a fire, it might actually be safer to just take your chances with the flames.
Anyway, the point is, there's a group of pigeons who like to putter around on the death trap outside, and enough of them come back repeatedly that Sam can recognize some of them. He likes to sit with Abed on his bunk and teach him how to tell them apart, pointing out which markings to look out for and which behaviors mean what.
Abed starts naming them eventually, and telling Sam about their complicated and elaborate social lives.
"That one's Monica, she's Ross's sister. Ross is the brown one over there. He's been having a conflict with Chandler and Joey, because they're best friends and he feels left out when they hang out without him. But the reason they keep excluding him is because Joey's actually secretly in love with Ross, and he doesn't want to be around him too much in case he figures it out. Chandler knows but it's really tragic because he's in love with Joey, and he's just helping him avoid Ross because he hopes that Joey will eventually fall for him instead if they're together all the time. The one with the green rings on her neck is Rachel, she's Monica's best friend. Rachel wants Ross to commit to a relationship with her, and she doesn't understand why he keeps dragging his feet whenever she brings up the topic because he tells her he likes her all the time. She wishes he'd stop sending her mixed signals. And then the grey one with the white head is..."
"Phoebe?" Sam suggests with an indulgent smile.
"Nah, that's been done," Abed says.
Sam has to bury his face in the hoodie material covering Abed's stomach in order to hide his grin. Abed can be so damn cute sometimes.
"That one is Priyanka," Abed decides.
After a thoughtful pause, he continues, "You know, Friends probably wouldn't be viable today without at least one person of African or Asian descent. What kind of New York were they living in, where they only ever knew or talked to white people? That just wouldn't work for our viewership demographics now."
Sam's laughter is muffled by Abed's belly.
"Priyanka thinks everybody's love triangle problems would be solved if they all just entered one giant polyamorous relationship together. Priyanka is a very forward-thinking pigeon."
"You're a very forward-thinking pigeon," Sam says into his belly.
Abed makes a tuneless humming noise, perhaps in agreement, and Sam leans up to kiss him.
They're just getting to the really good part involving tongues and slightly too much biting, their fingers tangling in each other's hair, when Troy comes crashing through the bedroom wall.
It's the wall made of sheets and blankets strung up to separate the bunk bed from the living room, so Troy is probably okay. However, he did hurtle through it at an alarming speed and nearly break his back smashing into the bedframe, so Sam and Abed hurriedly disentangle themselves from each other and clamber down to check if he's alright.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Troy assures them as he takes Abed's helping hand and gets yanked up onto his feet. He dusts himself off. "I was just teaching Bucky our handshake and I forgot how strong his robot arm is. Dude can really slap! Hard!"
As if on cue, Bucky pokes his head through the ripped blanket wall and says, "Sorry."
The bones of Abed's jaw jut out in hard angles as he clenches his teeth. "You were teaching him our handshake?"
"Yeah. What—"
"Our handshake?"
"I mean, we never said it's a secret handshake, it's just a handshake that we do, right?"
"That we only do with each other," Abed corrects flatly. "It's not like I do it with Sam."
"But you do...other stuff with Sam!"
"You do other stuff with Bucky!"
"Not really! Not that much! We mostly just talk about you guys!"
Sam's eyes dart back and forth between Abed and Troy, with occasional sidelong glances at Bucky, who doesn't look the least bit concerned about this increasingly edifying conversation.
"Buck..." Sam says quietly, while Troy and Abed are still emoting ineptly at each other. "Why do you like being with Troy so much?"
For the first time since Sam can remember, Bucky looks faintly uncomfortable—which means he's deliberately putting that expression on. Sam has no idea what he's supposed to read into that.
"He's fun," Bucky said, stilted and wooden, not sounding very convincingly like he knows what 'fun' means. "He likes robots a lot. He has a nice smile. Nothing he says is ever what you expect, but it's never horrible either. It's just different. He isn't boring." Bucky gains steam as he warms up to the topic and then he changes tack and pulls a fast one on Sam. "He's always where Abed is, which means you'll be there too."
Sam has a few revelations all in a row, like watching a music video with a bunch of scenes all cut up and spliced together. The Dreamatorium. Their double dates. Natasha's knowing looks. Damn. Nat must have figured this out ten steps ahead of them. The only thing he should be surprised by is that he's still surprised by her.
Sam clears his throat. He clears it again, loudly and pointedly, until it sounds like he's hacking up a hairball in order to get Troy and Abed's attention as well as Bucky's. "I've come to a realization," Sam announces.
"Is it the Midsummer Night's Dream solution? Because I am so ahead of you," Abed says, taking Troy's hand.
"That's a Shakespeare reference," Bucky says, sounding pleased that he remembered it. He takes Sam's hand. Sam's brain mildly short circuits. It's fine.
"I was actually referring to the Calista Flockhart movie, but sure, that works too," Abed replies, his deadpan tone unchanging. "The key points are basically the same. Two pairs of lovers, and then the ol' switcheroo. We start out dating as one set and then we swap and end up as a different set."
Troy looks at the how his fingers intertwine with Abed's and for a moment he looks radiant, like all the happiness in the world is bottled up inside him. And then he looks at Bucky and frowns. He gives Abed's hand a squeeze. "What if we..."
"Oh!" Abed says, having the same epiphany as Troy, because they are brain twins and it's just as exhausting as ever trying to keep up with them. Abed gives Sam a long, measured look. Sam can't help the fluttering in his stomach that comes to life at that look, like a swarm of butterflies, or better yet, a flock of pigeons. "Shakespeare's old and done to death anyway," Abed murmurs. "Rom coms need to be updated about every three to five years. And you know how dedicated I am to advancing the boundaries of cinematic art."
Bucky shrugs and steps fully into the bedroom. He takes Troy's hand in the one that isn't already clutching Sam's. They stand all holding hands like an overgrown scout troop about to sing Kumbaya around a campfire until Abed pushes them all down to sit on Troy's bed so they can watch a brand new pigeon drama unfold outside the window.
Sam wonders if Natasha ever saw this coming.
Post-credit stinger:
"No. No way. Absolutely not."
"Aww, come on, Annie!"
"Nope."
"But Anniiiiiiieeeeeeee!" Troy gives her his best sad pleading teddy bear eyes. They're pretty good. Next to him, Bucky and Sam do their best to copy it. And next to them, Abed is live-tweeting the whole thing on his phone.
Annie puts her hands on her hips and puts on her stern face. "This apartment cannot take two more guys. I barely have an outlet to plug in my curling iron as it is. There's just no room! If you move two more men in here, I will lose my mind and...and..." She shakes her fist at him while she tries to come up with an appropriate threat. "I'll program the Dreamatorium to take you to a planet made entirely out of garbage and dump you there forever!" she finishes.
Sam coughs discreetly.
She turns her large, suspicious, Bambi fawn eyes onto him and narrow them threateningly. "What."
"It's just, uh," Sam pauses to scratch the back of his neck. "It's just if me and Buck move in here, it'll...yeah, maybe be more like three guys? Because Steve will be over a lot."
Annie's eyes widen again, but this time they don't look so watery and cute. They look downright menacing, like a Disney animal gone rabid with rage.
Bucky whispers something to Sam.
Sam very subtly shifts so that he's borderline hiding behind Bucky before he says, all in a rush, "IfSteve'sherealotthenNatashawillbetoo."
"And Sharon," Bucky reminds them, because his sense of self-preservation is shit. "And Nat will probably bring Clint around sometimes."
There's nothing but an ominous sort of silence for a moment, and then Annie throws her hands up to the sky and says something like "Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuugggghhhhhhhhhhkkkkkkfffffffff!" before stomping out of the hall.
"Does that mean they can move in?" Abed asks the room at large.
Nobody answers.
Troy repeats it loudly at Annie's retreating back. "Does that mean they can m—"
"It means I'm asking Jeff to find us a real estate agent!" she yells without turning around.
Behind her back, Troy, Abed, Sam, and Bucky share a four-way not-so-secret handshake.
-end
Bonus not!fic:
Since this story is from Sam's point of view, we didn't get much of a look into what Troy and Bucky were up to, but I did actually think through some reasons why Troy would be an excellent boyfriend for a still-not-fully-adjusted Bucky.
- We know for a fact that Troy doesn't worry about unimportant things like proper social functioning.
- Troy is very into robot arms.
- Troy would tell Bucky about all the Kickpuncher films, and Bucky would listen in perfect solemnity and not laugh at him even a little bit.
- They have the same last name, and they would take it very seriously as a sign from the universe that they're meant to be together.