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Tony has been busy these past few weeks. Desperately busy. Every hour has been occupied.
He has a lot of people he needs to hug and house, after all.
The second he was out of bed, had broken out of the brief coma that snapping Thanos’s musty purple ass sent him into, he got to work on the blueprints he had started in vain five years before but never brought to fruition. He had been hopeful, then, after their loss, ever hopeful, that someone would want to stay here. With him. Across the lake, in a cabin of their own, he was ready to build one for each of them, Steve and Tasha and Thor and Bruce and Clint, but he was given a handful of nos to replace the handful of individualized cabin designs he’d sketched up. By hand. With help from Pepper.
They’re here now, though, and Tony is so overwhelmingly relieved, so overjoyed, that he has no space to be resentful. Not when they want him now. Not when they’re all here, and Natasha was brought back in exchange for Steve’s shield, and Sam wears red, white, and blue like he was born to— his own poetic justice. Not when Peter is filling the bedroom beside Morgans, the one Tony had put together like a shrine and left untouched, door locked, waiting for this moment. Tony still doesn’t believe it. Still cracks the door open in the dead of night when moonlight paints Peter silver and purple and just stares at his profile awash, like his every dream come alive, like he’d stepped straight out of the marble statue Queens had erected in his honor. Spider-Man’s honor, rather, but the difference is slighter than any of them might have expected.
So he hands the blueprints to Happy, Pepper, and Rhodey, fully fleshed out from dimensions to materials to colors to make sure the Billie Holiday record is in their living room to the sheet vinyl for Nat’s ballet floor should come from this website because that’s what’s rated best to Sam’s bedroom should be facing east so he can see the sunrise.
And now he has a moment to rest. The first real breath since it all fell into place.
He sits on the couch heavily, exhausted, feeling the energy seep from his bones the way the peaches hanging from the tree by the porch weep in their fists after baking in the August sun.
Tony feels the warmth. He feels ripe, so ripe, despite being blind in one eye and staggering half his steps and having a heart that patters rather than hums and being down an arm.
He’s not really down an arm, he supposes. He leans back into the couch, settling into the crease he has worn into it, like burrowing, because he is safe here, now, he is safe with his family surrounding him, he can see Peter and Morgan running on the lawn through the window. He tilts his right wrist and it catches the light, stark and bright, and he squints against it. He ought to make it matte. He tells FRIDAY to make a note.
Red and gold. He snorts a little. It’s a joke more than anything, at this point. It’s gaudy, and eye-catching, and everything he is so tired of being, but Peter suggested it with a light in his eyes like staring into an archangel’s halo, and Tony found his lips saying of course— how else would I color it? Tan? I don’t want any arm matching my spoiled olive oil skin tone. It’s an accessory, we, uh— accessories first, functionality later.
Peter had laughed. Tony’s heart had flipped, his eyes had filled with tears, still disbelieving. He is so lucky. He is so lucky.
He rises slowly, leaning heavily on the arm of the couch, a little grunt slipping from between his lips from the strain. His head rushes, black dripping into his eyes and neck going cold, but it fades, the way it almost always does. He knuckles his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose and sniffs once. He can see Steve and Nat and Sam standing on the far bank of the pond- not too far, they are still close, Tony reminds himself of this- holding their blueprints before them, elbowing each other, an ease to the set of their shoulders. Steve is even height with Natasha, now. That Red guy, the Skull, the one in the history books, the one in the cloak on the cliff. He took Steve’s girth and left him his life and Tasha’s, and now Steve’s pocket bulges with an inhaler but his laugh is the same, and the set of his eyebrows, and the length of his fingers as they perch around a slim pencil. And Natasha is here. Right here. That’s the best thing she could be.
Tony takes a step forward, drawn towards them, all of them, like a bird to sugar water. He’s gotta— be out there with them. He breathes steadily, out of practice, and his feet drag a little, but he goes. He almost makes it, too. His metal palm is already on the door handle, ready to turn it, when the toe of his bum leg catches on the edge of the welcome mat, and he stumbles. The metal hand clenches the door handle reflexively, and Tony goes down hard, knees hitting the hardwood.
Pain radiates up his legs, settles in his bad hip, and the door handle comes off in his hand.
He turns gingerly to sit, favoring his right side. Breathes through the ache, the prickling pain, the rattle of his brain.
A pair of footsteps approaches, quick, someone without shoes, not one of the kids, too quiet.
Bucky Barnes’s head peers around the corner of the kitchen, half-bun and sad beagle eyes and oversized sweater and all, and he says, “sonovabitch,” hurrying forward. Tony notices he wears two different socks, and both seem to belong to Natasha, as they’re bright pink and purple and fuzzy.
Barnes stops in a crouch right before Tony. He has no issues with balance. He’s like a goddamn tree these days, grounded and peaceful, if a bit weary of the wind. (Tony, in this case, tends to be the hurricane to Barnes’s willow.)
“Head rush?” Barnes asks softly.
“Tripped, actually,” Tony says, and his tongue feels too big for his mouth. His heart patters, step-step-skip. A little faster than usual. Tony can’t help it. He’s so happy, he is, but he’s still scared. It’s in his DNA. It’s more a part of him than anything else, the fear, and having come to know Barnes- Bucky, not the Soldier, or the Asset, or any other quasimodo of them all- has assuaged the fear, sure, the man is a teddy bear that walks, he’s charming and shy and responsible and quiet when he isn’t enormously, intoxicatingly gleeful, but Tony is still afraid; the way Barnes is written in gold ink to be good, Tony is written to be terrified, bone-shakingly so.
Barnes’s gaze locks on the door handle in Tony’s grasp. “Still getting used to that?” he says, gesturing with his head towards Tony’s prosthetic.
“Guess I got a little overly enthusiastic,” Tony says.
Barnes stares for a moment, then holds his hands out, palms up. “C’mon, pal,” he says. “Lemme help you up.”
Tony meets Barnes’s gaze, all blue-bags and heavy lids. Barnes’s voice is like fucking honey. Smooth and quiet. This man is not evil. Tony allows himself to settle, listening to it. To take the step off the dock and trust the sea to buoy him. He extends his own hands.
Barnes wraps a hand around each of Tony’s wrists and hauls him up, his grasp slipping to Tony’s elbows to steady him around the inevitable resultant head-rush.
“Thanks,” Tony says. “Sorry if you were— busy, I’m sure you were doing something, didn’t mean to, y’know, distract ya’.”
Barnes shakes his head, dropping his hands. “Not at all. I was, uh, just looking out the window, really.”
“Me too,” Tony says quietly.
“Seems unbelievable,” Barnes says, leaning forward a little, almost conspiratory. Tony has noticed this about him. Complete inability to recognize personal space with anyone. He treats them all like extensions of his own limbs, like they’re a puzzle and he’s clicking them all into place around him. Tony thinks Barnes might be the last piece at the center. The one that completes the puzzle. Locks them all in place, here. “Having them all here, together, alive. Happy.”
“Yeah,” Tony says.
Barnes’s face is probably less than a foot from Tony’s, and Tony thinks this is the first time he hasn’t felt uncomfortable to be drawn into Barnes’s eclectic orbit, just because he’s forcing himself. “I don’t think I ever thanked you,” Barnes says, “for all of this. Everything, from— the battle, the fuckin’ snap, sure, and solving it all— even if it wasn’t for all of us, even if it was just Peter driving you to it, thank you. And, Christ, thanks for keeping us here, now. It means the world to me and— Steve, too.”
Tony gapes at Barnes’s sweet sincerity, then shuts his mouth. Cracks his jaw.
Maybe all he’s had to do to work this out, this whole fucking time, was try to trust him, and Barnes would meet him in the middle. Christ. Something in his chest settles.
“Barnes, this is— not something you need to thank me for. I’ve been wanting the team to live together since the beginning, with the— twenty-twelve, with the tower, I designed a tower in the city for all of ‘em to stay in, but they, uh, weren’t into it.” Tony clears his throat. He doesn’t know why he’s saying this. He’s never once been able to shut his mouth. “So— yeah. Don’t thank me. This is the dream. Always has been.”
Barnes’s face softens, the lines carving across it made smooth. He pouts a lip at Tony and says, downright joyful, “you’re a fuckin’ sap, Stark!”
“Hey,” Tony says. A beat. “I mean, yeah, you’re right, but don’t act like you’re so surprised.”
Barnes tilts his head side to side, still grinning. “Sure, I’m not surprised. I’ve seen you with your kids. But I thought it was just— being a good dad, I dunno, not whole-hearted fuckin’ softness.”
Tony shrugs a little. He doesn’t deny it anymore. It’s easy to be soft, now that he doesn’t have to stow his consciousness behind eight layers of glass just to make it through the day. No more speeches, no press conferences or fucking— galas, he’s done with it, so he can toss his shell. Leave it at the door. Here, he’s all underbelly. It’s probably just the first time he’s let Barnes see it.
“Hey,” Barnes says, and he’s quiet again. “Howsabout I teach ya’ how to control your strength with that arm? So you don’t rip any more handles off doors.”
Tony thinks his brain spasms in his skull, full short-circuit, he worries they’ll have to turn him off and then on again. It’s not that Barnes isn’t nice, because every day since they properly met he’s been nothing but a gentleman to every person around. Tony just doesn’t know how to accept this. It’s too fast, he’s just— let himself be in Barnes’s presence without losing his shit and now Tony’s supposed to accept a favor from him?
He also doesn’t know how to admit the fact that Pepper has been helping him with everything- from working him into his shirts to brushing his hair- while he figures out how to balance the power of the arm with his tendency to be far too impulsive, to pull things too close, too fast.
“C’mon,” Barnes says, nudging Tony in the ribs with an elbow. “We can be metal arm bros.”
Tony would have to be a heartless bastard to say no to that.
“Fine,” he says, and he sniffs a little, but he’s also got a grin tweaking the scarred corner of his lip, so it evens out. “Fine, teach me, oh great master.”
Barnes grins.
---
“Alright,” Barnes says, standing before Tony in the living room, his hands folded behind his back. “The things I couldn’t do anymore after Shuri gave me this new grabber were stupid things. Shirts. Holding glasses. Buttons.”
Tony nods. This explains the array of t-shirts and cups before them. Then, “if I break Pepper’s good glasses, I’m so busted. The ones with the blue rims? She got those from Crate & Barrel. She loves those. She’ll shank me with the shards in my sleep.”
Barnes nods once, solemnly. “We won’t use those, then.”
Barnes picks up a sweatshirt of his, and gestures for Tony to do the same. He grabs a fleece.
“Okay,” Barnes says. He slips both arms through the holes, lifts his arms straight up, and lets the sweatshirt fall loose over him, poking his head through last. It musses his hair, half of it slipping from the bun and into his eyes. He blows a puff of air at it, trying to get it out of his face, and fails, but still smiles a little.
Tony feels his lips spread into a smile of their own accord.
“Like that,” Barnes says. “Easy does it. Let gravity do the work for you.”
Tony nods. “Easy peasy.” He inches his arms in, freeing his hands through the ends.
“Watch the elbows,” Barnes warns, but he’s a second too late, and Tony’s right arm stretches the neck too far, tearing the zipper apart.
“Shit,” he says.
“I know how to fix that,” Barnes says. “I’ve been stitching the holes in Stevie’s socks since we were thirteen and his ma started taking the long shifts.”
Tony hums a little, pressing his lips together, his cheeks going warm.
Tony slips the fleece the rest of the way on, gloriously enough, not breaking it any further. “Well, I guess I can add getting dressed to my resume,” he says.
Barnes flips him two thumbs up. “That’s more than you could say five minutes ago, ain’t it?”
“Sure is,” Tony says, but he feels stupid about it because why is he celebrating getting a shirt on?
It makes Tony want to hide under a bench in the lab for the rest of his life, never to be seen. His cheeks are still red, he can feel it, but he’s done worse than this, done worse than ripped a sweatshirt, he’s leveled cities without knowing it, ha! What is this, compared to that. What is this to be humiliated by when he’s committed evils, when he was the Merchant of Death before he was twenty-one?
Barnes must sense his growing bitterness because he taps Tony’s foot with his own. “Oy,” he says. “Get outta’ your head, alright? This is about doing things and— not thinking about it.”
Tony stares at him for a moment and wonders who is the older, of them two. But he listens. Boxes it away. “Whatever you say, Master.”
Barnes nods primly. “Damn right, I’m the master. Listen up real good, kid.” And he picks up a glass- a cheap one, not one of Pepper’s good ones, because he listens and he cares, Barnes- using his metal hand. It doesn’t shatter. Doesn’t even creak.
Tony can’t remember the last time he used anything other than plastic.
“Grab it slowly,” Barnes says. “If you close your hand too fast, the way you normally woulda’, then you can’t gauge how quick to shut your hand. You could overshoot it and that’s— how you crush it.”
“Yup,” says Tony. “Sounds about right. Okay, so—” Tony leans on the edge of the coffee table and angles his hand to grab the cup, claw-like. It doesn’t tremble, though his flesh hand does. “Why am I nervous. Why am I about to puke right now.”
Barnes gives a light snort. “Just me here, Stark. This is nothing I haven’t done myself.”
“I know,” Tony grumbles. “Guess I just don’t wanna break the glasses, or something.”
He begins to close his hand slowly, palm against the glass, arcing his fingers. When his fingertips touch the surface, Barnes says, “good, good, slower now, though,” and Tony whines, “I know,” and his hand closes around the glass delicately.
He looks up at Barnes, eyes wide.
“Look at you!” Barnes says. “Alright, now try to pick it up.”
“Doesn’t that seem like— pushing it, can we not count this as a rousing success and call it a day?”
Barnes levels him with a glance. Sometimes Tony can see how Barnes was intimidating even before being brainwashed by Nazis, with that handsome pout and his heavy brows. “Never thought of you as someone who stopped anything halfway through,” he says.
Well, if that doesn’t rub Tony the wrong way. “I’m not,” he snaps, shifting uncomfortably. “I’m not,” he repeats, and it’s whinier. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and lifts the glass. He waits for the woosh of it slipping out of his grasp, but it never comes.
His eyes shoot open. “Ah!” he says. “Aha!”
“I’m farklempt,” says Barnes. “Look at you. Is this what it felt like when Morgan walked the first time?”
“I honestly think I was more scared just now than I was when she walked,” Tony says, “and that’s saying something because I had two panic attacks that day.”
Barnes rolls his eyes and begins collecting glasses. “I’ll put these away. Get ready for the next step.”
“What’s the next step?” Tony says. A fool, he is a fool.
Barnes’s grin becomes sharp. “Sparring.”
---
“I…” Tony says, shifting his weight foot to foot. “I’m not ready for this.”
“Yes you are,” says Barnes. “You think you’re gonna hurt me? You won’t.”
“I know I’m not gonna hurt you, I think you’re gonna kick my ass into the stratosphere! I’m not ready to free-fall from space again, I still have nightmares about that to this day. Ten years! Ten years it’s been!”
“C’mon, you hock,” Barnes says, and Tony is suddenly aware of the way Barnes towers over him. At least six inches taller. And built like a brick shithouse, Gesu Cristo.
Barnes’s flesh elbow comes slowly towards Tony. Tony’s forearm comes up to block.
“Not the flesh one, dummy,” says Barnes, rolling his eyes. “You’ve got in a built-in weapon. Use it.”
Tony grunts.
Barnes comes at him with a kick this time, and Tony parries it with his metal arm. This feels— well, he remembers this. He’s done this forever, sparring with Happy, with Natasha, with Pete. He hooks his metal elbow around Barnes’s ankle and twists, sending Barnes sprawling head-first towards the mat, but Barnes catches himself on his hands and does some fancy front-handspring sort of thing, flipping forward and taking Tony down onto the mat with him. He pins Tony with a knee, then has the audacity to look chagrined.
“Sorry,” Barnes says. “I got overly excited there, I think.”
“You think,” Tony wheezes under Barnes’s weight.
Barnes shifts off him quickly, then offers him a hand up. Tony takes it, and they face each other again.
“That was better,” Barnes says. “At the risk of sounding like a damn schmuck, a regular opponent wouldn’t’a’ gotten outta’ that as easily.”
Tony nods. “Okay. Should we— try again?”
Barnes chooses to throw a punch rather than answer. Tony dodges, feigns a swipe at Barnes’s ribs, then lands a glancing blow off his chin. Barnes’s legs sweep Tony’s out from under him and he lands hard with a huff. A sharp pain shoots up his leg and burns in his hip. Hitting the ground so many times in one day is— not kosher.
“Ouch,” Tony says.
“Drama queen,” Barnes says, but his eyes trace Tony’s figure to make sure there are no lasting injuries. “C’mon, up and at ‘em. If you can get a solid blow on me, I’ll call it for the day.”
“Ain’t that a treat offer,” says Tony, and he pushes himself up this time, shaking out his bad leg to loosen it.
The next shot, Tony glances off Barnes’s flesh shoulder, and Barnes stops him right away. “Okay— close,” he says, rolling his arm, “but if that had hit me full force, pal, you woulda’ disconnected my shoulder.”
“Oh,” Tony says. Then, “shit.”
“Yeah, shit,” Barnes agrees. “Okay, again, but you gotta pull that punch a little. Go— half strength, half of that, and it’ll still be enough to ground someone without smushing their brain.”
With that lovely image in mind, they go three more rounds, Tony growing sweaty and slow and Barnes growing edgy, a little sharper, more insistent, when Tony finally, in a bout of frustration, lands a hit on Barnes’s cheek with his metal knuckles. The impact rings up the arm, aches in the stump of his shoulder, and Barnes stumbles backwards.
The bruise blooms so quickly, it seems like watercolor paint dripping too loose off a paintbrush.
“Hey!” Barnes says excitedly, grinning as his eye swells. “That was good! There you go. Knew you had it in you.”
“Ah, geez,” Tony says, panic rising in his chest, why does Barnes look so goddamn chuffed, “let me grab ice, let me— the swelling, what the hell, why is it so fast? Why is it so swollen already?”
“Oh, don’t sweat it,” Barnes says, waving Tony away as he leans up onto his toes and tries to tilt Barnes’s head by the dimpled chin, to see if he damaged the eye at all.
“Don’t sweat it,” Tony repeats thinly. “Don’t sweat it, he says, as his face turns purple and green. Yeah, sure, don’t sweat it, I’ll show you sweat.”
Barnes laughs, shoving Tony away good-naturedly. “That was a gas,” he says, and Tony thinks he likes the way he smiles, even if his face looks like a Monet. All crinkles at the corners of his eyes like he’s made of tissue, and a spread of bright white teeth. A sweet face, despite the stress lines carving across it. And Tony’s colored it again. “A chesid, but a real enjoyable one, huh, pal?”
Tony feels— not the same. Not the same, he can’t match that grin. He sits on the mats. Lays flat.
Barnes stares at him for a fraction of a second before mirroring the movement. He crosses his palms over his chest.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Tony says. His heart is pounding in his ears and he’s sure Barnes can hear it the same way he’s sure Barnes knows he isn’t just talking about right now. “I never did. Not really.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you, either,” Barnes says. “Just played out that way. We’re past it now, Tony, don’t— you shouldn’t feel bad. We were all wrong, all of us. It’s done now.” Barnes breathes for a moment before he adds, “the end of the world brings people together like nothing else, I’d wager.”
Tony snorts. “Sure,” he says. His heart still lies heavy in his chest.
“That’s not the only thing on your mind, is it?” Barnes says.
“No,” says Tony. “Nope.”
“No one will understand what’s bothering you better than I will,” says Barnes, and Tony bites hard on his lip.
“It’s mortifying,” Tony says quietly. “Having to relearn how to live like a normal fucking person, do everything I’ve done since— birth, since fucking birth. Walking, I couldn’t walk right between the bum leg and the added weight of the arm. It’s light, it’s balanced, it’s a great arm, I’m good at what I do, but it’s on the same side as the leg and I— walk like a fucking pirate now.” Tony sighs deeply. “I can’t hold a fucking fork in that hand without bending it. I’m too nervous to hold Morgan with that arm, to hug Peter. Fuck.” Tony’s eyes are stinging. He’s cried a lot these past few weeks. Peter had softened him and Morgan fully melted him and now he’s like a fucking McDonald’s soft serve cone, always on the verge of being liquid. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed in all my life. And I pissed in the suit in front of— people, lots of people, very many people.”
Barnes shifts, turning his face towards Tony, meeting his gaze. His eyes are like water under ice, pale blue and distantly sharp, but with a layer of soft frost over them, the type kicked up by a pair of skates. “It’s gonna feel like that for a while,” Barnes says. “I spent months running from Steve because of how embarrassed I was. I— Tony, I forgot to eat. Forgot to sleep. I had to set reminders in my phone to take a fuckin’ shower, and I was traipsing through the sewers of Eastern Europe at first. I smelled like a porta john on legs. Recovery sucks. It sucks,” he is emphatic, he spits the words like bullets, like they’re unwieldy and oblong on the tongue, “but you’ve just gotta do it, and let your people help you out along the way.” He takes a breath and nudges Tony with an elbow. “Pal, I’ve got no fucking pride left. None. And I’ve never been happier.” He shrugs, shirt rasping on the hardwood. “I’ve got Steve and Natasha and a whole battalion of friends, now. It’s— the most I’ve ever had. And I’m working through my shit. So I can get better, and make the most of it.”
Tony stares at the ochre lights blinking above them. Follows the top of the mirror wall with his eye, a sharp edge to a blunt corner.
“Ya’ hear?” says Barnes.
“Yeah,” Tony says. “Yeah, I— I hear.”
Barnes nods and gives Tony a soft smile before clapping him on the shoulder, squeezing the base of his neck. “You’ll be just fine. Give it time. Let it happen.” He sits up with a huff, cracks his neck, and says, “I’m getting old. A hundred and six is… a lot.”
“Father Time wishes he was as spry as you,” Tony says. Then, “hey, thanks. Bucky. Thank you. Really.”
The smile he gets in response is luminous. “Nah, pal. All part of being metal arm bros, right?”
Tony feels a smile spread on his cheeks. “Yeah,” he says. “Damn right it is.”