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Tony can’t breathe sometimes.
It’s not a problem. It’s totally fine. She just ignores it until it goes away. Or, you know. Curls up in a corner and closes her eyes and presses her shaking hands against the floor to remind herself she’s not in a vacuum.
Same difference.
They dig up ice boy redux in 1992.
It’s a year before Tony’s house blows up with her inside it, two years after she flies a nuke through a wormhole and falls two miles back down to the city, four years after the shitshow that is Serbia.
Tony thought having Steve cruising shirtless around the tower was bad enough. But Bucky, too— well, damn son.
Steve spends a lot of time hating her guts.
To be fair, she hates his guts equally in return. At first it stings, that it’s Captain fucking America scowling at her this time, but after she gets over that, being hated is a familiar feeling. She’s happy to play her part.
Then Cap moves in, and they start getting along. They don’t stop slinging insults back and forth, but they do (sort of) stop meaning them. By the time they’re defrosting Bucky, they’re almost friends. And, see— Bucky never hates Tony’s guts, except when she steals his fries, so after a month or two of that whole “is the Winter Soldier going to kill me in my sleep” dance, they’re all caught up.
All friends. Well, Bucky and Steve are friends who also have really loud sex on a regular basis. But to Tony— friends.
Tony spends a lot of her time alone. Alone with her thoughts, alone in a crowd, just plain old alone.
With Steve and Bucky around, it feels like— it’s lessened, somehow. Lighter. They’re the only ones that are always in the tower, always underfoot. Bruce is missing, Thor is in space, Clint is with his family, Natasha is in deep cover at some other unsuspecting CEO’s company. Vision is out on some sort of walkabout. Wanda’s with him.
But Steve and Bucky are here. And when Tony falls asleep in the workshop, she wakes up to a cup of coffee, sometimes. Every once and a while there’s a box of donuts on the kitchen counter. Steve’s presence strongly discourages her from getting shitfaced and smashing stuff. Bucky strongly encourages her to brush off her rusty beer pong skills.
Sometimes, when she wakes up from a nightmare, she has Friday turn on the baby monitor function, and listens to their breathing until she falls back asleep.
Okay, so she wants to fuck them. She wants to fuck their brains out. But there’s other stuff, too.
They’re good. Too good for someone who’s been plastered across every tabloid there is, who’s posed naked for Playboy more than once, who took pride, once, in the title merchant of death.
But also: Bucky’s got maybe the smartest mouth Tony’s ever heard other than her own, and he uses it to tell dirty jokes, and most of the time Steve fails at hiding his laughter. And also: by some crazy stroke of luck, they treat her like she’s a deserving member of the team. They don’t baby her, they don’t tell her she ought to sit out. When she takes a hit, they expect her to get up.
There’s so much other stuff. She could go on, but— well. She’s a busy girl. And she doesn’t like to leave a paper trail.
They meet President Bill Clinton after they save New York.
He goes down the line, and pins medals on everyone’s lapels; Tony wore a blazer just for the occasion. When she goes to shake his hand, he leans in close (she expects a thank you for your service, or something). Instead, she gets his hand squeezing her ass and, “How’d you like to take a ride in the Oval Office?”
Tony’s got sunglasses on to hide her hangover, so she gets the added bonus of none of the press seeing her flicker of surprise.
Clinton’s not the hottest president ever, but she’s only going to get so many opportunities to check certain things off her bucket list. Plus, you never know how ugly the future can be.
Stark Industries and the Defense Department do wonderful business that year.
Here are a few facts about Antonia Emilia Stark no living soul knows:
1. Sometimes going into the suit is the only way she can ground herself. It convinces her brain that her body is real, when her body isn’t just her body anymore. When it’s more.
2. She doesn’t actually enjoy casual sex. Just— sometimes getting your rocks off and hating yourself in the morning is better than not getting your rocks off at all. And it’s not like she’s ever had sex that wasn’t casual.
3. After Serbia, after three months in that nightmare, she couldn’t sleep in a bed. She slept on the floor next to the panoramic window, one blanket wrapped tight around her. And still, the blanket was too soft.
4. When the palladium was killing her, on her last teenage birthday in 1989, she considered letting it.
People these days— Steve and Bucky included— think she doesn’t ask for help because she doesn’t think she needs it. Because she’s too arrogant, too stubborn.
She used to ask for help, from Howard. He always ignored her, so she stopped trying.
They fight some weird tiny aliens at Woodstock ’94, which is very, very muddy.
Tony gets her ass handed to her. She loses a whole leg of the armor, and has to fly around with one repulsor and her sneaker untied. There are civilians everywhere, so she can’t just ass-blast these fuckers like they deserve. They hold her face down in the mud, and some of it seeps in through her cracked faceplate, until Falcon pulls the little buggers off of her.
The mud is warm, but the way it clogs up her nose and mouth sends her straight back to Serbia.
Tony fought tooth and nail for her image. Every scrap of it.
Unflappable, unshakable, bitch. An icon, untouched by the complication of human emotions. A paragon of vices. The glass ceiling’s greatest enemy. Darling of the Yugoslavian arms industry.
Iron Man, because the suit isn’t contoured enough to show her boobs. And because no one would fear Iron Girl, anyways.
Steve finds her crammed into the corner of the workshop.
She can’t breathe. She has mud smeared on her face, in her hair. She feels like she’s dying, and it’s frustrating, because she’s not. She’s not dying, she’s fine. But she can’t breathe.
Steve sits down next to her without a word, pulls her into his lap, and breathes even. She tries to breathe with him.
Tony gets dolled up for some Avengers gala, in a one-shouldered gold gown that hugs her curves in all the right places. Her hair’s short, so she sticks a lot of pins in it. Trades in her oil grease for lipstick and mascara.
When she walks in, Bucky sees her from across the room. His gaze travels down her body, and when he makes it back to her eyes, he looks hungry. He nudges Steve, next to him, and Steve actually gulps when he sees her.
Well, damn, Tony thinks. If I’d known a little glitz was all it took. Apparently her ice boys are old fashioned.
She can feel their eyes on her all night. Her skin burns, but she does her duty, shakes the hands of senators whose signatures they need to keep doing all this. Knocks back a lot of champagne, but not enough to get her as tipsy as she pretends to be. Takes a few turns around the dance floor with Clint, who steps on her toes and blames her for it.
There are still four hours left in the gala when she ducks out. Steve and Bucky duck into the elevator just before the doors close. They stand with their backs to her, but she smiles anyways.
“So,” she says. The doors ping on their floor, and slide open. “Who wants to go first?”
Steve spends forever just kissing her. It’s an alien feeling, being surrounded. Tony loves it.
Bucky’s mouth trails hot up her leg, up the inside of her thigh. Her dress isn’t even off yet— they both shove it out of the way, so it gets scrunched around her middle. Bucky puts his face between her legs, and Steve drags his teeth over one of her breasts, catching on her nipple, and— she can feel Bucky’s scraggly chin pressing against her entrance, his lips on her clit, and—
It’s a lot. God, it’s a lot, they’re smothering her, it’s fantastic. They’re everywhere. She wants them to be everywhere.
Her hand sinks into Steve’s hair, Bucky hooks two metal fingers into her, and she feels her body tighten, digs her nails into Steve’s shoulder. Bucky sucks, hard, and she comes, feels the orgasm in her scalp.
Between the three of them, they manage to get the dress the rest of the way off, along with her ruined panties. She returns the favor for Bucky, sinks down until she feels the head of his dick hit the back of her throat, and he moans, low and wrecked. She looks up at him under heavy lashes, and he’s propped up on the headboard so he can see her, something in his eyes that’s almost—
She feels Steve’s hands on her hips, his fingers spread out over her skin, and a moment later he slides into her. He’s warm, hot, a stark contrast to Bucky’s metal fingers, and she hums around Bucky’s dick as Steve rocks into her.
It’s a nice feeling— not hating herself in the morning.
She was the first one up, oddly enough. Her reflection in their bathroom mirror looks awful, mascara turned to clumps, lipstick smeared at the corners of her mouth, probably still smudged on Bucky’s dick, back in bed. She washes her face, and pulls all the pins out of her hair. Her reflection looks a little better, except for the knotted scar where the arc reactor used to be.
When she pads out of the bathroom, they’re both awake. Steve’s standing, hands on his hips, and— isn’t that a sight.
“Morning, boys,” she grins. They turn. Bucky smiles, a bit, soft, but it falls away quickly. Tony feels like she’s missing something. She stops, a few feet away from the end of the bed. “What’s with the frostbite?”
Bucky gets out of the bed. And— yeah. He’s still got her lipstick on him. “Look, doll,” he says. He starts to come toward her, hands twitching like he wants to touch her, but he stops himself. “Last night was… “
“Mind-blowing?” Tony supplies. “A paradigm shift? Masterful?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, doll, all those things. You were— fuckin’ spectacular. But it was— “
“A mistake,” Steve cuts in. He locks eyes with Tony, and that’s what does it, that’s what sinks her, because his eyes are just as blue as they were last night. Bluer, even. “I think we all had a little too much to drink, and you’re gorgeous, and— we’re all human.”
Bucky says, “It can’t happen again, doll. It shouldn’t’a happened the first time.”
Tony knows this conversation. She’s just never been on this side of it. It sucks, it really sucks. She feels naked, not because she actually is naked, but because she’d never been in love with anyone until them, she never thought sex meant anything, until it did, only it didn’t. Of course it didn’t.
She puts on a sultry, confident smile, even though she feels anything but. “Lucky for you two, I only need one night to leave a lasting impression.” She meets Bucky’s eyes, and he still looks hungry. Something twitches, deep inside her, sore and empty.
She takes a step closer. Steve’s eyes track her. “But. Give me the morning after, and you’ll remember me in the afterlife.”
Round two feels like saying goodbye.
Everything is realer, sharper, in the pale morning light. The red slick of Steve’s lips, the scrapes her nails left on his back, pink and barely-there. The way Bucky’s eyelids flutter when she sinks down onto him.
She doesn’t shower for three days. She doesn’t want to wash them off her.
Tony opens her serious alcohol cabinet for the first time in months, and when she comes around she’s built a whole new suit.
She figures her drunk brain will probably understand how to pilot it better than her sober one, so she’s smashed when she steps into it. She crashes it in the Arizona desert, and Rhodey has to come out to get her, in War Machine.
It’s a bad night. He tries to take her home, she tries to punch him, and he blasts her into a mountain. She deserves it.
She goes out clubbing, and makes a show of dragging boys out into her limo.
Happy always drops them off on the sidewalk a few blocks after they clear the paparazzi, but no one has to know that. Tony has a reputation to uphold, after all.
If it had just been Steve, it would’ve been better. Steve might’ve said it just to hurt her. When she first met him, he called her a philanderer, which is just 1940s talk for slut. So, maybe, from him, it wouldn’t have been true.
But Bucky’s never lied to her. Bucky tells her you look like shit, get some sleep. He told her I killed your parents, the second his programming cleared up enough that he remembered.
So, it’s true. From both of them, it’s true. You’re hot, we’re human. Sorry.
Tony flies to France, calls Pepper, and tells her she’s going on a business tour of their European partners. In that order.
The motions of buying and selling and schmoozing are very familiar. She’s been going through them since she was twelve and Howard decided she might as well learn the ropes. He didn’t teach her the ropes like she was a girl, either— he taught her like she was a man. Taught her how to treat high-class waitresses like sex objects and how to guzzle scotch with the best of them.
It calms her down. It’s like she’s a teenager again.
She goes back to Monaco for the F1 Grand Prix. She shouldn’t have.
The bathroom tile is clammy under her palms. She doesn’t feel grounded. The last time she was here, she was dying, and then she almost got killed. She almost got Pepper and Happy killed.
She calls Steve. Bucky picks up. She manages to say, “Talk to me. Please, just.”
“Alright, doll,” Bucky drawls. She can hear an edge of something strained in his voice, but it’s soothing, just to listen to him. “I’m making orange cranberry muffins, these beauties I learned to make in the back of this little hole in the wall in Brooklyn, me and Stevie used to sneak into the kitchen and… “
She focuses on his voice, and breathes.
Maybe she doesn’t have daddy issues, but she does have Obie issues.
Obie issues, if she really thinks about it, translate to trust issues. Because Obie was one of three people on earth she could trust, and then, suddenly, he really wasn’t.
So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Steve and Bucky. That they tossed her out on her ass.
It still did.
Tony goes blonde for a few months.
She isn’t nuts about it, but Steve and Bucky really seem to hate it, which is a good selling point. The press are convinced it's the beginning of a mental break.
They might not be totally wrong.
The shit storm with O.J. Simpson takes the spotlight off Tony’s blonde hair.
She decides it’s time to go back to brown.
The UN is fucking useless. Tony hates them.
She and Steve go to petition them to let the Avengers intervene in Rwanda. The security council says they’re sending peacekeeping troops— fucking peacekeeping troops, to the middle of a genocide. Tony already knows they won’t make a fucking difference.
The Avengers could. They could. But the UN won’t fucking let them. So she puts on the suit and Steve picks up the shield and they take out their anger on a sparring mat.
Sometimes, when Tony can’t sleep, she goes looking for trouble.
“Friday,” she says, conversationally. The TV is turned on to CNN, and they’re covering a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. “How long would it take me to get to Java?”
After 37 hours of search and rescue, she sleeps much better.
Bucky tugs his fingers through her knotted hair. He comes away with soot on his hand. “Is this ash, doll?”
Tony stuffs half of a cranberry orange muffin in her mouth. “Maybe.”
Steve wanders into the kitchen, still in his pajamas. He gives Bucky a sleepy kiss, and turns to Tony. His forehead crinkles adorably. Her heart hurts. “What’s in your hair?”
“Ash,” Bucky says.
“Ash?” Cap repeats.
Tony chews, and swallows. “I popped by Indonesia. It’s a little sooty over there right now.” She stuffs the other half of the muffin in her mouth, and picks up her mug of coffee.
“Hold on,” Steve snags her by the arm as she tries to walk past. He looks stern, but over his shoulder, Bucky gives her an amused look. She grins a little, but tamps down on it to turn back to Steve. “You should’ve brought us with you.”
Tony swallows again. “What, and waste all that fuel on carrying you two lugs? Fat chance.”
“Tony,” Steve says, in his Captain voice. “We’re a team. We work as a team.”
Sure they do. Truth is, the Avengers haven’t operated as a team for a while. Tony loves them all to death, but— they’re never all in the same place at the same time. Hell, only some of them are ever on earth. Steve and Bucky might still be a team, on and off the battlefield, but it’s not a team Tony’s part of. It’s a team she occasionally guest stars on, at best.
“Listen, Capsicle,” she says. “It wasn’t like— a thing. I just wasn’t doing anything. No biggie.”
Bucky chuckles quietly and turns back to his pan of eggs. Steve still looks disapproving. “Tony,” he says.
“Good talk,” she says, before he can gain steam. “Gotta shower.”
She gets it, now. Her father’s cynicism.
The world is mostly shit. There are a few good bits thrown in. She thought Steve and Bucky were gonna be her good bits, and— they are. They really, really are.
She’s just not theirs.
Tony makes it on the August 19th 1994 cover of Time Magazine. She’s kind of flattered, until she finds out that the headline is going to be Vestigial Heroes (why the Avengers should amputate Iron Man before it’s too late).
She frames the issue anyways. It’s a good picture of her.
Oprah invites her on the show. Tony’s never watched Oprah, but she’s all for women’s empowerment, so she goes.
It turns out to be not so empowering. She’s expecting questions about the Avengers, about her new green energy initiative at Stark Industries, maybe about her appointment of Pepper as CEO. Instead, she gets, “So, Tony. I think we’re all dying to know. All those handsome superheroes you work with… is there any romance brewing?”
Tony hears Steve murmuring sweet nothings into her hair. Feels Bucky’s hands inside her thighs, the metal biting.
“I don’t kiss and tell, Oprah,” she says. “Besides, I’m more of a lone wolf.”
LA parties are usually the remedy for an overactive brain.
Tony fucks Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks in the same night. Jodie Foster gets sloppy drunk and propositions her, but she’s not quite desperate enough that she’s willing to experiment with her sexual orientation (yet).
It scratches an itch, but it doesn’t fill the void. They never leave her head.
Tony gets shot. Not Iron Man, Tony. She swears to God it was Justin Hammer, but she can’t fucking prove it.
Not from a hospital bed, at least. And Pepper won’t let her get up. Even though it was just a fucking flesh wound. Through and through. And, okay, maybe there were a couple extra bullets in her leg. But really— it’s nothing. She can design a wheelchair. A flying wheelchair. With weapons. It’ll be great.
“No, Tony,” Pepper says, patiently. She’s sitting at the end of Tony’s bed, legs crossed primly. The only sign that she’s spent the last eight hours waiting for Tony to come out of surgery is a single lock of hair, out of place. “And don’t even think about trying it, because there are two very unhappy supersoldiers in the hallway.”
“Fine,” Tony mumbles. And, because she wants to see their faces: “Why are the supersoldiers in the hallway?”
“Because you get talkative when you’re drugged,” Pepper answers easily.
“Right,” says Tony, remembering Serbia. “Good idea.”
“And I want to ask you some questions.”
Tony turns her glare on her ruthless ex-assistant. “You bitch.”
Pepper smiles sweetly. “If you’d just talk to me like a normal person, I wouldn’t have to wait for Justin Hammer to shoot you.” She uncrosses and re-crosses her legs, like they’re in a business meeting, not a hospital. “As it is, morphine is the only way I get any honesty. So. Tony. Tell me about Steve and Bucky.”
Tony tries to keep her mouth shut. She fails. “I fucked them,” she says. A flicker of surprise goes over Pepper’s face, which is sort of gratifying. “I’m in love with them, I— fuck. I want to have their babies.”
Where the fuck did that one come from. Pepper is watching her with wide eyes, now. “I slept with them,” she continues, “and it meant something, for me. And then in the morning they gave me that talk— the talk I used to make you give the morning after. You know the one. You basically wrote it.”
There’s no pity on Pepper’s face. Tony’s glad. Her eyelids are heavy.
She never really thought about whether she wanted a family. It was never really on the table.
But Steve and Bucky feel like family to her. She thinks she’d like to wake up with them every morning. She’d like to argue with them, and forgive them fifteen minutes later, in bed. She’d like to have someone to come home to. Or two someones.
And a couple little Steves and Buckies wouldn’t be so bad, either.
The next time she wakes up, she’s alone.
The room is dark. Her heart beats painfully in her chest, but there’s no blue glow. She tries to sit up. Something in her side hurts. She falls back into bed. Her heart speeds up, her lungs feel like they’re contracting. She can’t breathe—
The monitors beep wildly.
Here’s something Tony said to Yinsen, in Serbia: “I’m fucked up.”
He smiled. “I know,” he said. “You’re human. We all are. It’s okay.”
That was the first time anyone ever told her human was something she was allowed to be.
She can’t breathe.
The door to her hospital room crashes open. There are a lot of nurses, and voices, and white jackets. Then there’s a metal hand on her knee, and she looks down, and Steve’s holding her hand. Bucky’s squeezing her leg through the sheets. She finds Steve’s eyes in the pandemonium, that bluest blue.
“Get them,” she tries to say. “Out, just— you two. Everyone else, Steve, get them— “
Somehow, he translates that. He turns to the nurses, the doctors, and herds them back towards the door. “She just needs some space,” he says, in his Cap voice, and shit, space, and now Tony’s in a void, and she tries to press her hands down against the bed but it’s not working. “Trust me,” Steve is saying, to the medical professionals, “we’ll take care of her, everything is fine.”
Fine, Tony tells herself. You’re fine, you’re fine, you were talking to Pepper earlier, shut up you stupid brain. But she’s still gasping in massive gulps of air, a desperate wheeze even to her own ears.
Bucky’s hand on her leg is the only thing that feels real. He reaches for her with the metal one, clamps down on her neck, and that feels real, too. That feels almost like the suit. Then Steve is back, and he sinks one hand in her hair and puts one on her hip, a gentle pressure, and gets up close in her face and just breathes.
It’s like they’re smothering her, again. Tony breathes with them, and her eyelashes are wet, and if she could just get enough air to her brain she’s sure she’d be embarassed. As it is, all she feels, as her lungs find solid ground, is a shaky relief. “That’s it,” Steve says, soft and low, right next to her ear. “Just breathe.” Just relax. “You’re safe.” We’ve got you. “Let go of it, whatever it is. Come back to us.” Come for us. Again. Again. Again.
Tony’s hand lands on Bucky’s human arm, and she squeezes. He presses his lips to the side of her head. “You’re good, doll.”
“I just can’t breathe sometimes,” she says, after.
After the doctors and nurses have swept through, and left her and Steve and Bucky sitting in the hospital room like they’re in the wooden splintered ruins of some natural disaster. Everything seems too still, except for the slow repetitive movement of Bucky’s metal thumb over the knob of her wrist.
“It’s fine,” she adds, when they don’t say anything. “It’s not a problem.”
“Course it’s a problem,” Bucky says.
Yeah. She’ll never say it out loud, but— yeah, it’s a problem. It’s terrifying, every time it happens. Tony dreads the day when it sets in in the middle of a battle, when they’re counting on her. When her having to curl up in a corner might mean them dying.
Instead of saying that, she says, “It always passes. It’s fine. I just wait it out, and it goes away.”
Steve looks like something inside him is rending painfully in two. Tony suspects it’s because of her bull-headedness. It usually is. She wants him to wrap her in his arms. She wants him to kiss her, like he did that one night.
“Tony,” Steve says softly. “How long has this been going on? Since New York?”
Bucky wasn’t in the Battle of New York, 1990, but he’s heard about it. She feels his hand tighten on her knee. “No,” she says. And in a rare burst of honesty, “It got worse right around then, but. It started after Serbia.”
“Serbia?” Bucky asks.
Tony meets his eyes. He looks like he really wants to know, like he’s genuinely concerned. So does Steve, when she looks over at him, but she doesn’t have the energy to tell them right now.
“Later,” she says, and doesn’t mean it. “Just— not now.”
Here’s another fact nobody knows about Tony:
5. The first time she had sex, she wasn’t ready. She was fifteen, and the boy was eighteen, and they were at a college party, music pounding downstairs and voices just outside the door. Howard had just died, and Tony thought this was just the thing to make her feel alive again. In control.
Skip the first kiss, go right for the penis vagina action. He was sloppy, and there was a red solo cup crunching under her butt, and it hurt, and Tony didn’t come.
She hated herself in the morning.
(She tried again the next night, after the funeral. It wasn’t any better.)
Tony handles things herself.
One of the things Howard used to tell her that she actually listened to was: You’re a Stark. You don’t need me to wipe those tears for you, because you’re gonna wipe them yourself.
Starks are strong.
Tony wins the Nobel Prize in Physics that year.
She’s the youngest one ever to do it. The third woman, and the first woman not partnered with a man in her research. She wins a full year before her father did— at age twenty-four.
She has to limp on stage on crutches, but it’s worth it.
There are a few moments in Tony’s life that she holds as the happiest.
Seeing Rhodey running towards her in the Serbian forest. The first real test flight of the Iron Man suit. That time the president grabbed her ass. The proud night Pepper finally drank her under the table. Bringing Bucky home.
Sleeping with the loves of her life. That one time.
Tom Cruise calls her up for round two.
Tony figures it’s worth a try. She rips her stitches riding him, and has to talk him through patching her up in the massive bathroom at his Scientology villa. Credit where credit’s due, he’s very game about the whole thing.
It doesn’t achieve her desired goal, but it’s still fun. He’s a lot of fun in a little man.
There’s a gala coming up, so she sends that gold dress out to get dry cleaned.
The press is bound to notice that she’s worn the same outfit twice in the past century. Tony thinks it’s going to be worth it, just to see the ice boys squirm. Maybe. Hopefully. She wants them to squirm. If they don’t— well. That’ll suck.
She’s only recently been cleared to walk on her own two feet, so it’s flats instead of heels. She doesn’t like feeling so short as she walks into the room, but hey— she makes do with what she has.
What she has, apparently, is Justin Hammer. Fresh out of prison, at her fucking gala. Tony sees red.
Being Tony, she marches right up to him and yanks him away from the crowd of investors he’s laughing with. “Well, well, well,” he grins smarmily when he sees her. “Looks like I hired a shitty hit man. Sorry, sweetheart.”
“I’m disappointed, Hammertime,” she says, playing along. She’s still got a death grip on his elbow. “Next time, do better.”
“Oh, I fully intend to,” Hammer drawls. “Right now.”
The gala, it’s safe to say, is a fundraising disaster.
Tony does get to kick Hammer through a window, which she’s pretty happy about. He lands in one of her rooftop pools, which she’s not so happy about, but— well. You win some, you lose some.
Hammer dropped a bomb on her security systems that means half of Friday’s safety and pre-warning protocols are going to need re-writing. It’s going to be a long night for Tony, sitting up in the workshop. It’ll be good for her— she hasn’t pulled an all-nighter to do code in a good long while.
She lost track of her ice boys somewhere in the chaos, so she never got to see if they were going to squirm or not. It’s a real shame. No matter— there will be other galas. That was the last chance for this dress, though. There’s a rip down the skirt, a big one. She ditches the dress for an Iron Man sweatshirt and some shorts and sits down to work.
She’s only fifty lines in when she hears someone come through the workshop doors. Or rather, two someones. Friday’s not online to give her a warning, so she reaches for a repulsor gauntlet and unfolds out of her chair, as—
Steve and Bucky power around the corner, hot on each-others’ heels. They look winded, like they ran here. Tony puts down the gauntlet, and says, “Hey, guys. What’s up?”
Steve’s shoulders slump. Bucky’s across the floor to her in two enormous strides.
“Tony,” he says, “you’re okay.” And then he’s lifting her off the floor, and— kissing her. She makes a noise against his mouth, starts to open her lips, but then he’s gone, and Steve’s hand sinks in her hair, he’s pressing kisses to her forehead, her nose, her eyes, and—
“Wait,” she manages to say. “Wait, wait— no.”
She rips herself out of their arms, gets back on her own two feet. Her hair is a mess, her lips are slick with Bucky’s spit, and she feels like her whole life has been turned into one big mess. Bigger than it was before, at least. “What are you doing?” she asks.
Steve’s hands twitch at his sides, towards her, like he’s actually holding himself back, and fuck, that’s. Steve. Jesus. “We thought you were,” he says, haltingly. “We lost you at the gala, and we lost track Hammer, and we thought— shit, Tony.”
“We thought we lost you,” Bucky says, lowly. “Tony, can I please just— “
Her initial inclination is to say yes. Instead, she says, “So what?”
“What do you mean?” Steve asks.
“So, you thought Hammer killed me, and you— what? Suddenly regretted missing out on another chance to get me in bed?”
And fuck, does she want to let them take her to bed. She almost thinks she could take ripping her heart out, getting out of bed before they woke up like a good whore, if it meant hearing Bucky say her name while he came, again. If it meant getting Steve’s hands in her. She’s not too proud to pass on that.
“You don’t,” she says, because she’s frustrated. This is frustrating— this happening all over again. “You don’t actually want me. You want each other, you just like the novelty of having another warm body in bed every once and a while— “
“Tony,” Bucky tries to interrupt, but she’s on a warpath.
“No,” she says. It’s dumb. She was trying to get them to squirm earlier. But she can still taste Bucky on her lips, and she’s mad. “I’m not going to bed with you just so you can scratch some itch, you can just go fuck each other— “
She starts to turn away, but Steve snags her arm and pulls her back. That seems to be a theme, with them. She glares up at him, arm tense in his hand. “Steve, let go— “
“No, I’m not going to fucking let go,” Steve snaps. “Because I love you.”
Tony’s brain short-circuits. “Bullshit,” she says.
Bucky takes the opening that her neural lapse has given him, and sweeps her up to sit on the desk, so they’re eye-level. He looks her dead in the eye, and says, “I love ya, doll.” Tony’s breath leaves her body. “We didn’t wanna be another notch on your bedpost. But— if that’s all we’re ever gonna be. It’s alright with us.”
“Fuck,” Tony says, and grabs him.
When she was hopped up on morphine:
She told Pepper, “I remember the exact shapes of their dicks.” Pepper tried to get her to stop talking, but she was on a roll. “Bucky’s is a little curved to the right, and Steve’s is so fucking thick.”
It was Pepper’s fault for getting her talking.
The sex is different, this time.
Tony’s off her game. They do all the work. Steve presses I love you into her stomach, lips moving over the hollow between her ribs, and her hands shake when she sinks them into his hair.
Bucky murmurs against her neck, “Honest truth, doll,” and she unravels.
Afterwards, she says, “You have questions. I can hear them banging around in your heads.”
She puts herself on the footboard at the end of the bed, sits up on it in Steve’s rumpled dress shirt. The two boys are still laid out in the ruined sheets, and they watch her with clear, attentive eyes, like she’s going to bolt again. Which is fair. “I’m going to give you a window, because I’m a benevolent tyrant,” she says. “Two questions each. Go.”
To their credit, they don’t beat around the bush. Steve pushes himself into a sitting position, closer to her. “What happened in Serbia?” he asks.
“I got abducted,” she says. It comes out easier than she expected. “Got a big hole blasted in my chest. Had to be hooked up to a car battery. Got waterboarded a little. Built the Iron Man mark 1. Escaped.”
After a moment, she adds, “The whole thing was a setup by my legal guardian. He wanted the company.”
Bucky reaches out and latches onto her ankle. He tries to pull her into the bed, but she’s not going, not yet. “Come down here, doll,” he murmurs. She just raises her eyebrows at him.
“Next question.”
Steve has another one. “Why didn’t you call us, when the Mandarin was after you?”
Tony hesitates for a second, because she’s never actually thought about it until this moment. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she says. “That even if I called— you’d still leave me alone.”
Steve looks hurt, and this time, when Bucky pulls, she goes. She sinks into his lap, grabs Steve’s face and kisses him. His lips are earnest, and Bucky’s hands move to her waist, just holding her there. Steve pulls away from her mouth, just long enough to say, “We would come. Whenever you called. No matter what.”
Just long enough for her to say, “Yeah. Okay.”
Bucky’s only question is, “Do you love us?”
She would accuse him of leading the witness, if this were a courtroom. As it is, it’s a bedroom. So she only skims her lips over his chin, reaches down to find his slightly right-curving dick, and says, “What do you think, idiot?”
Steve smothers a laugh in the curve of her shoulder.
The next time Tom Cruise calls, Bucky answers.
Tony snatches the phone from him, but not before things get dicey. Apparently Tony’s been selected as Tom Cruise’s new scientology wife. Bucky’s not happy. It would be funny, if it didn’t make him so handsy.
He fucks her against a wall, later, though. So there’s an upside.
The UN tells them they’re really, really not allowed to intervene in Yemen.
Steve and Tony try to duke it out in the sparring ring again, but they end up with the armor discarded in pieces around them, clothes half-off, every thrust sliding her across the mat, so Steve has to pull her back.
Clint walks in, swears, and doesn’t come back to the tower for three weeks.
Sometimes, when Tony can’t sleep, she wakes them.
Rolls over in between their big, warm bodies. Kisses her way down Bucky’s torso, mouths at him through his underwear. Feels him start to harden before he’s even awake. Feels Steve stir under the sheets next to her, hears the sleepy, wet moan as he leans over to suck Bucky’s lower lip into his mouth.
Sometimes, she still has to run off and clean up an earthquake. But she’s only human.
The world is still mostly shit.
It’s just shit with a little sunshine in it, now.
(That’s a terrible analogy. Whatever. She’s not a poet.)