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Tony tends not to weep over spilled milk. Mostly because (a) he's lactose intolerant, so (b) it tends to be someone else's problem, (c) he doesn't actually know where the mops are, (d) he only has a vague inkling of what mops are.
"Hey, mops are those rags on the stick, right, not the scratchy stuff?" he asks Wilson, who gives him an incredulous look. "Never mind. So, what's the verdict?"
"Steve should change his locks," Romanoff says, getting off her knees and turning the knob, while doing something absolutely magical with her fingers which results in the lockpicks disappearing into the leather folds of her sleeve.
"Steve should change his maid, too." Tony carefully judges the puddle of milk as crossable and hops over it, narrowly avoiding a shard of glass, from a broken bottle.
"Steve doesn't have a maid." Wilson's hand is on Tony's shoulder, holding him back, which is an annoyance, but one Tony allows, once he takes a careful note of what his eyeballs are feeding into his visual cortex.
"Good god, and I thought I was a slob." Tony kicks the remains of the milk bottle aside, and follows Wilson's footsteps. Romanoff is already standing in the middle of the room, her face impassive but for the flickering of her eyes. "Either that, or Rogers finally learned what a party is."
"It wasn't a party," Romanoff says tonelessly. "It was a fight."
"Thank you, Sherlock." Touching is probably a no-no. Not that they particularly want to get the police involved at this point. Or any point. Truth be told Tony's having doubts about all uniformed forces these days. Who knows if the Illuminati haven't infiltrated McDonald's staff? And Tony likes his burgers without unordered enlightenment, thank you very much. "Any clues?"
"The lock hasn't been picked before." Romanoff magicks a gun out of thin air and holds it loosely at her side. "They got in through the window. Rogers walked through the door with his groceries and dropped them."
A paper bag has been kicked under the shelf, in addition to the milk, and a few apples have rolled out. On the bright side, the apples are the only visible bits of red that Tony can see. "There's no blood spatter, which is good, I'm guessing?"
"Blood smears, slightly less good." Wilson straightens, nudges the pieces of a coffee table aside. Underneath there are several unmistakably rusty spots. "No bullet holes though, good. And not much blood."
Romanoff takes one last look at the books scattered across the floor and her manicured fingertips lock around the handle of her pistol. "Search the rest of the apartment. Stark, stay behind us."
"I have a gun," Tony reminds her, holding up his red-and-gold gauntlet and jabs at the control panel with the fingers of his other hand. The wrist portion whirrs and reports. "Actually, I have three guns, a Taser and a laser. The laser is the most fun."
"Stark, stay in front of us," Romanoff amends, and rolls her eyes. Wilson makes a face like he really wants to snigger, but feels the gravity of the situation won't allow him to get away with it, so he's holding it back for a rainy day.
Romanoff glides through the debris to the door on the opposite wall, flattens herself against a wall and motions them forward, before she ducks into the dim corridor and into the barely lit space on the right. There's relatively little damage there, Tony can see from the door. Just whatever the hurricane's blown in on its way from the living room, where Wilson's still giving the floor a once-over, and discovering additional bloody spots, judging by the occasional muttered curse.
Tony, meanwhile, fixates on the single bright spot on the dark hardwood floor: a glint of light on a tiny, triangular edge of a plastic wrapper. It's lying practically in the open door to the master bedroom, with the rest of the set several feet further in. "Well, either Summerween is now an adult type of thing, or Rogers discovered fun," Tony says over his shoulder as he picks it up, turns back to the master bedroom, and says exactly nothing else, because there's a gun in his face.
Okay, not in his face. The gun is level with the very important areas of his very expensive, very comfortable, very bespoke casual slacks, which he would rather not have ridden with bullets when they are in the dryer, much less when his wearing them. Certainly not in the place the gun is level with.
Fortunately, the muzzle of the gun is pointed at his face.
"Hey, long time no see," Tony says and waves, forgetting for a moment that he's wearing the gauntlet with armed lasers.
"Wake him and die," Rogers manages to communicate through sparse movement of his lips and a twitch of his eyebrows, altogether a feat, since he's lying on a battered mattress (oh look, better call CSI Wilson in, this looks like quite a few a bloodstains) in a pile of shards that might have been a bedframe once, and the feathery remains of several ducks, floating gently with every wisp of wind that makes it through the cracked window.
Oh, and the gun he's holding, that's a concern too.
"Sure, sure. No worries." Tony takes careful notes on how the core of the pile of blankets Rogers is cradling to his chest has a tuft of dark hair escaping its folds, how the bedroom is even more of a disaster than the living room, and, again, Captain Star-Spangled Tights is pointing a gun at his head. "See if I ever come rescuing you again."
He closes the door on his way out, leans against it and breathes. So that was fun.
"Hey Romanoff," he calls, in a stage whisper, pocketing the foil wrapper with a grin on his face. At least three more were scattered carelessly among the feathers. Ain't no party like a Rogers party! "Call off the rescue mission."
A low, velvety voice breathes a "what?" into his ear.
"Rogers' got it. Let's get a burger."
"What do you mean Rogers' got it?" Wilson blocks what little sun gets into the corridor with his fabulous chest and it's only an accident of angle that allows Tony to see he's frowning.
"No problemo, situation under control. Moving on. Don't open this door, there be monsters. I need a coffee." See, Tony is actually pretty stupid, on top of the genius thing. One has to be truly, epically stupid to be as brilliant as Tony objectively is. He's the guy who can and will poke the Hulk, for kicks. He's not so stupid he'll ignore the fact that when Steven "My Blood Group is Apple Pie" Rogers threatens to end you, he means it literally literally.
"Stark…"
"Now I know I sent him an espresso machine on top of the basket of rubbers. Let's see, where do nonagenarians keep their caffeine supplies? Ah ha!" Bingo. Nonagenarians keep their one-of-a-kind coffee makers on a shelf in their kitchen. They also keep the beans in the cupboard above it, and it looks like the bag is only half-full, it's almost like Rogers is human after all. Tony pulls the bag out on almost drops it in horror when he beholds the label. "Good god, no wonder Rogers is so cranky. I wouldn't use those for my bi-monthly facial scrubs, let alone drinking."
Romanoff glares at him impatiently. "Are you going to share with the class?"
"Look, I didn't exactly get precise instructions, okay? I was told to go and wait outside, over a mug of refreshing coffee."
"Really," Romanoff drawls, offering up three clean mugs.
"Would I lie to you?" Tony upends the bag over the coffeemakers bean compartment. Ah, the rattling of cheap coffee beans in one-of-a-kind espresso machine… Almost as heart-wrenching as the despairing wail a Lamborghini lets out when you fill it up with regular petrol. "Does Rogers do sugar, or does the dew of the universe sustain his abs all on his own? Shame about the milk, any of you take milk? Tweety-bird? Charlotte's Web?"
Romanoff wordlessly holds out a half-empty bottle and closes the fridge door with a swing of her hips. "Steve doesn't like to be out of milk."
"I'm partial to cappuccinos," Wilson tells Tony meanwhile, although it's hard to wrap one's ears around the sound with Wilson's head literally crammed up a cupboard under a sink. "Sugar should be in the jar beside the coffee."
There is a suspicious, crusted-over jar filled with white stuff beside the space previously occupied by coffee. "White sugar! Someone ought to have a chat with the good captain, white sugar will kill you." Tony inspects the milk bottle, appropriates a mug and applies steam, until the infernal cow-juice is fluffy like a cloud. "Say, what are you looking for down there?"
"A bucket." Wilson crawls back and holds up a round, hollow plastic cylinder which he then fills with water.
"Excuse me?"
"Someone's gotta clean up the milk," Wilson explains, and Tony sets aside the mug of triple-shot cappuccino he's just produced, cocks his head and makes a grand, sweeping motion that gathers the ruin that is Rogers' living room into the sphere of his attention, wraps and holds it up as exhibit A, the conclusive, undeniable, incontrovertible proof that the case is hopeless, the apartment should be burned to the ground and rebuild from the ashes.
"I'm pretty sure the mop is not going to cut it with the coffee table. Or the bookshelves." The bookshelves have been thoroughly splintered; small wooden fragments lie around the room, intermixed with scattered books.
Wilson takes all that in and, unimpressed, lifts the bucket and a plastic bottle of something on which a perfectly good lemon was wasted. "But unlike the coffee table the milk will start to smell. Already started, in fact."
"What is with that guy?" Tony asks Romanoff, who is watching Wilson's very competent mop-work take care of the mess in the door.
"He's military," she says. "And he has a point, milk spoils easily. Plus, he's a good guy."
Tony possessed pre-existing awareness of the fact milk spoils, in the same way he was aware that elephants are big and mammoths extinct. It was a nice piece of trivia that impacted his daily life not at all. "Being able to handle a mop makes him a good guy?"
"He's using a rag and a bucket, not a mop. Secondly, can you handle a mop?"
"I can build a robot that is a smart mop."
"My point is made."
"What! I'm a good guy!"
Romanoff quirks her lips at him, and snatches the mug he was collecting the last, precious drops of caffeine into and takes a sip. "Not bad," she says, and goes to war with the sugar jar, heaping the white death into her drink until the contents of the mug resemble nothing as much as coffee syrup.
"It's not making you any sweeter, just so you know," Tony tells her before doing the exact same thing. Wilson returns from the bathroom, bucket and rag rinsed, and makes a grab for his cappuccino. He, at least, is clever enough to abstain from excess sugar consumption.
"It's good," he says in appreciation. "If your business ever goes south, you can always open a Starkbucks."
Tony doesn't dignify that with an answer, or eye contact. He has to stop himself from legitimizing the absolutely offensive pun with a retraction of the cappuccino, even though he strongly feels it would be well within his rights as a proud coffee snob.
"The couch is mostly whole." Romanoff wanders into the warzone, mug of coffee-flavored sugar in hand, and nudges it with her toe. "Oh woe is me, where is a big, strong man to right an upturned couch for a lady."
"You want to show off, Mr. Good Guy, or should I?" Tony asks and wiggles the titanium-and-gold-alloy of the gauntlet.
Wilson quirks an eyebrow and hides behind his fluffy beverage. "Teamwork is a foreign word to you, isn't it?"
"It's not my fault I'm at my most efficient alone." Tony huffs, puffs, and casually flips the broken couch over with one, only slightly augmented, hand. Sometimes his technological genius astounds him. "There! Oh hey, this doesn't look like a complete wreck." It's true, the couch doesn't look too terrible once it's standing upright; sure, the right side is mangled from the bottom up, but there's still enough space to seat half a football team. Romanoff takes a seat on the ravaged armrest, the mug cradled in her small, girlish hands that Tony has seen tear through aliens. She takes stock of the living room again, her gaze sliding from one crash-site to another, and her frown deepens.
Perhaps it's because of that look that Wilson crosses his arms and grins at Tony. "So you're saying you're an Iron Me, not an Iron We?"
"That was even worse. What are you, a graduate of the clown college?"
Wilson sniggers.
"Stark," Romanoff says. "Why are we on stand-down?"
"Because there's no emergency?"
"There was a fight here."
"Yeah, but Rogers' got it."
"Stark…"
"He may have implied bad things will happen to me if I make noise. Bullet related things."
A corner of her mouth trembles. "He threatened to shoot you?"
"I'm not liking how funny this seems to you."
"It's a little funny," Wilson says. "And a little far-fetched."
Thankfully for the state of Tony's sanity – it did cross his mind; yes, he will admit he allows the possibility that he imagined the gun and the threat, solely because it's so far-fetched – that's the moment Rogers appears in the living room doorway, like a majestic walrus slipping from a concrete pool bank into the cerulean waters of the kiddie pool.
The brave Captain stumbles, curses the existence of toes under his breath, and looks around blearily. His hand is curled around the gun, even now, which might be the reason he's not actively wearing a shirt. Tony has seen Rogers on his off days, and he's of the opinion that Rogers' idea of a T-shirt is akin to a peaceful protest against the concept of t-shirts in general, as they qualify, at best, as passively not wearing a shirt.
"Hey, hey, oh Captain, my Captain! Can we salvage your late afternoon with a coffee?" Tony flips another mug from the shelf just as Rogers comes into the light and narrowly avoids spreading porcelain shards of Washington D.C. love on the hardwood. Rogers looks like he spent the night in a box of heavy-weight cats which got thrown into a washing machine, and if Tony hadn't found the condom wrapper first, he'd be having a heart attack right about now. There are several deep cuts along his forearms – defensive wounds, Tony's extensive knowledge of Bones tells him – a webbing of vivid scratch marks on the right side of his torso, bruises on the left. Something vaguely resembling rope-burns crosses his foot and wrist. Tony isn't saying many of those bruises are finger-shaped, but they totally fucking are, holy shit, Captain America had crazy kinky sex, call the press! "Kudos to you, Rogers, I couldn't get through Fifty Shades for fear of boredom and here you are, making it an exciting reality. Good job."
Rogers looks at him like he isn't making sense at all.
"Steve," Romanoff and Wilson say in sync, and that's when Rogers notices them, takes another step into the warzone, which coincidentally reveals that he isn't alone. His shadow takes its sweet time rendering into the owner of the tuft of dark hair, who is (a) male (although in retrospect "him" should have clued Tony in, oops), (b) scruffy-looking (which explains the spectacular case of beard-burn that colors the star-spangled… everything, upon closer inspection), (c) wearing a shirt that can't possibly belong to Rogers, on account of the fact that the pectorals are a suggestion rather than a glaring marble sculpture thinly veiled by space-age polyester/cotton blend.
Behind Tony guns are being drawn and battle positions assumed, which seems a little excessive, especially since, as the next step reveals, the hobo-sex-kitten looks like his box of cats was a much tighter fit.
"Hot fucking damn," Tony says and tops it off with a whistle. The guy's barefoot, and in fact pantsless, making do with underwear that's probably Rogers' (who isn't wearing any, thank you sweatpants, for riding the line between obscenity and teasing with grace), and the shirt which can't be Rogers', as previously noted. He's got nice long legs, Tony makes a point of noting. "Gotta give it to you, Rogers, you’ve got great suction to go with those pearly-whites."
Wilson, who is standing just close enough to be in Tony's peripheral vision, looks half-scandalized and half in posh old-lady shock. "Because of the hickeys," Tony explains helpfully. "All over the place." Yup, there's a neat chain up from the ankles all the way to the inner thighs, framed nicely by some rather vicious scratch marks, then presumably the rest of the way up as well, as there's one peeking over the stretched collar of the shirt. Tony wouldn't be surprised if it turned out the dark spots, which make the navy shirt stick to the very nice chest, were blood. It kind of makes him want to do a cheer and possibly a hand-stand.
"Steve," Romanoff says again.
"Stand down," Rogers orders gruffly. "Please." His grip on the handle of the gun tightens, and from what Tony can see so does his death grip on his kinky honey's right hand, too. "I don't want to kill you."
"Okay, this is getting unhealthy." Tony sets the mug down and walks into the middle of the room, very deliberately leaving his gauntlet on the kitchen counter. "Can we all put the guns away? I'd feel so much better. I'm sure we all would."
"Mr. Stark, you don't know what you're dealing with," Wilson says. Hobo-sex-kitten has no fans in this crowd, looks like, which is a shame, because Tony already moved him into the top ten of his favorite people. Possibly even the top five.
"Have you ever seen Captain America pissed off and territorial? Because I maybe skimmed top-secret WWII reports, on account of how dare anyone lock cabinets around me, and lemme tell you, early 1945, right after his boyfriend took a swan dive, was a crazy time to be around men in blue tights. The moral of the story is, don't shoot at whoever's standing closest to Captain America, else you get fucked up."
Wilson has the gall to snort at that. Even Romanoff expresses polite feminine amusement. "You have no idea," Wilson manages. "You seriously don't."
All the same, both he and Romanoff put their guns away, and Rogers… tries, but one of his hands is too busy to assist, the sweatpants he's wearing won't cooperate, so what actually happens, blowing Tony's entire goddamned mind, is that the long-legged hobo reaches around, takes the gun from Rogers' unresisting hand and, still one-handed, releases the magazine, drops it on his foot, bounces it, snatches it from the air with shiny metal fingertips and places both the gun and the magazine on the shelf by the door.
The shelf is missing its other side, so the gun slides until a book on the joys of yoga stops it from tumbling to the floor, but who really cares about the gun, the guy's wearing armor. Except he's not wearing armor, the fingers are a perfect match in size for his right hand, and Tony actually completely forgets to care what is going on. How dare anyone produce more advanced technology than he does! How dare they not inform him of the fact! He moves to correct this obvious cosmic oversight, which proves to be a bit of a mistake: he doesn't mean any harm, he just wants to look at it, so it's totally unfair that he finds himself in a chokehold, dangling helplessly from an iron fist.
"Don't touch Bucky," Rogers hisses.
"Steve," the hobo whispers, safely hidden from Tony's evil grasp by the mountain of murderous muscle. "Let him go."
Rogers lets go.
"Fine, fine, don't touch, don't wake up, that list gets any longer, you're gonna have to box him up, you know? I just wanted to look at his cool metal hand!" He feigns a cough, just to make Rogers feel bad, and takes a step back on shaky legs. "Bucky? Do you have a fetish or something? Not that it's not convenient, there is a reason Jarvis is called Jarvis, and I once dated four women called Megan in a row, sorely because of convenience, but—" And this is when he gets a really good look at the mystery hobo, at least the portions of him that aren't his nice long legs and shiny metal hand, or the hickeys sucked into his skin. Nope, this is the moment Tony Stark takes the time to look at the face of the man who banged Captain America, and the universe goes swirly and star-shaped for a good long while. "Holy shit!"
"Go back to making coffee, Stark," Romanoff tells him from a distance, and a firm, but polite, hand on his shoulder, one that has military flyboy written all over it, ensures spatial overlap between Tony Stark and the coffee-making zone.
"Wilson," Tony hisses urgently, "Wilson, tell me I'm seeing things."
"We all wish you were."
"But Barnes is dead. Seventy years dead. He's so dead and gone his grave is being repurposed as a municipal park."
Wilson sighs deeply and a fathomless darkness settles in his eyes. "Believe me, if you knew what I know, you'd be praying that was the case."
"Careful with statements like that, Rogers might hear you."
Thankfully Rogers isn't currently interested in hearing things. He shuffles to the couch, crowds Can't-Possibly-Be-James-Buchanan-Barnes-I'll-Accept-Bigfoot-First into the corner of it and sits down, just shy of his lap. It's a good thing hearing things is low on his agenda, because Wilson heaves a deep sigh and adds, "Believe it or not, those were his sentiments before they were mine."
"So are you ever going to share, or is this just small-talk, because I have to tell you: I'm terrible at small-talk. How does Rogers take his coffee?"
"Cappuccino with plenty of sugar."
"And Mystery Sex Hobo?"
"Intravenously," Wilson says dryly.
"One of these days you will stop being funny. Not today, but sometime soon."
Wilson sighs. "Man, I wish I was trying to be funny. Just be careful, okay?
Tony makes the cappuccinos and heaps sugar into both. Because he is awesome, he finds cocoa and dusts the mugs lightly through a sieve and a long-pronged fork, for added stripes. "I don't care what you think," he tells Wilson, who does get props for careful facial hair maintenance, but loses said props for employing the hair in an unfairly sculpturesque dubious eyebrow rise. "Coffee-making is an art."
"No, by all means. Just don't come crying to me when Rogers makes your soul weep by not noticing."
Wilson makes an unfortunate amount of good, yet painful, points. Rogers doesn't look at his artwork of a coffee at all, merely takes the mug, raises it to his lips, takes a sip and hisses when it proves too hot.
Mystery Sex Hobo, on the other hand, spends thirty seconds staring at the offered mug, takes it with his exquisitely crafted metal hand, which, even though most of it is hidden by his sleeve, makes Tony feel a little warm under the collar, stares at it for another thirty seconds, then promptly downs half of it. He'd have chugged it whole, if Rogers hasn't flailed dramatically, nearly dropping his own mug, and knocked MSH's aside.
"Bucky, no! It's too hot. You'll hurt yourself."
MSH goes back to staring at the mug, frowning at the remainder of the coffee inside and then at Rogers. "It's not boiling."
"But it's still too hot."
The concept takes a while to sink it. Eventually MSH nods. He doesn't rush that, either: his eyelids drop and with them his whole head, until his unkempt fringe falls from behind his ears, then looks up again, with the defiant air of a five year old with a live frog in his hands, who just decided the frog will from now on be a part of the family and is moving into the guest bathtub. "I'm hungry."
"Order food," Rogers says immediately. Not to anyone in particular, Tony is galled to note. His gaze sweep the room barely noticing anyone alive, and returns to his MSH.
Tony refuses to think of the Mystery Sex Hobo as Bucky Barnes. Because, no.
"Steve," Romanoff starts saying, but Rogers doesn't even look her way.
"Order food, Natasha. My wallet is somewhere in here."
If MSH weren't so obviously a robot scanning its mainframe Tony would say his lips twitched in a smile. "Under the seat of the broken chair, by the toppled vase with lilies."
Romanoff exchanges a tense look with Wilson, who goes to the broken chair by the toppled vase with lilies and retrieves a wallet. On his way back he grabs a handful of take-out fliers, whose pile miraculously survived the nuclear blast that swept the rest of the apartment, and hands them to Romanoff.
"What would you like?" Romanoff asks, flipping through the selection and glaring like it's a courtesy question, because they would be having is hobo head on a stick, anyway.
That, inexplicably, makes Rogers falter. He looks down into his mug, then at MSH, who is continuously watching him, and says nothing.
"Barnes," Wilson says in a transparent effort to curb the rocketing tension. "When did you last eat?"
Really, Tony is starting to understand and appreciate the point of Wilson. He's like a color-adjusted, gender-flipped Pepper: a pinnacle achievement of the human race's attempts to improve itself. Maybe he should persuade the two of them to have a baby, get the second coming done all the sooner.
MSH, to Tony's displeasure, reacts to the name Barnes (which: no, Tony didn't spend precious brain space memorizing World War Two reports only to have them proven incorrect), blinks and cocks his head. "Thirty-eight hours ago."
"What did you eat?"
"A cheeseburger."
"Did you throw up?"
"Yes."
"Okay then." Wilson picks out a Chinese take-out menu from between Romanoff's fingers and flips through it. "I could eat. Natasha? Stark?"
"Mu Shu pork," Tony and Romanoff say simultaneously.
"Great. Hi," Wilson says into his phone. "I would like two Mu Shu pork meals, Kung Pao shrimp, and sets three, four and six. Yes, with dessert. I'd also like three extra portions of jasmine rice, egg drop soup and wonton soup. Actually two of each of the soups, and as little seasoning in them as you can manage. Yeah, all of it at once, please."
He rattles off the address, accepts the total and hangs up, just in time to watch Mystery Sex Hobo stand up and, hindered by the increasingly confused Rogers, make his way out of the living room to—Yep, he's throwing up. Tony looks at the ceiling and whistles. "Now will someone please explain? Anyone? How big a threat can he be, if he's puking?"
"How deeply were you attached to your Bucky Bear?" Wilson asks, when Romanoff gives no sign she wants to be the aforementioned someone.
"Between it and my dad, I'd probably choose the bear. Why?"
"That's really James Barnes. The original. In body, at least."
Tony takes the news in stride. "Right… and the very famous tumble he took off the train and into an icy ravine was what, early test of a new Olympic sport? Because I gotta tell you, I did read a book once, a Howling Commando memoir in fact, and the descriptions of the ravine contained words like 'deep' and 'rocky' and 'pointy' and 'freezing', and the general idea was 'do not fall, never, ever, because you will certainly die and make Steve sad'."
"Steve says when he found Barnes during the war he's been experimented on." Wilson refolds the menu absently, trying not to think too hard about what he's saying. "He thinks Zola'd been trying to recreate the serum, and Barnes actually took to whatever concoction he mixed up. Enough at least to survive the fall."
"Okay…" Tony retrieves his coffee from the kitchen and returns frowning. "Here's my problem though: you keep using the word 'survive' and yeah, I can buy surviving a tumble like that, which still doesn't explain why he's throwing up in a bathroom well into the twenty-first century, instead of peacefully rolling in his grave after a lifetime of being subject to dodgy medical practices of the fifties."
"Hydra found him. Hydra kept him," Romanoff contributed, staring at her hands. "Hydra pumped more of their serum into him. Far as I've been able to tell, after that they took their time taking his brain apart and programming him to assassinate people, then put him in cryostasis when they got bored."
Woah, Tony thinks.
"Woah," Tony says. "Well, that sucks."
"Barnes is dangerous, and Steve's compromised." Romanoff glares at her fingernails. "He is no longer rational."
"But he does have a point." Wilson, despite the fact that he's watching the bathroom like a falcon, doesn't seem nearly as tense. "And anyway, if your past best friend, whom you believed to be dead, randomly showed up, wouldn't you be a little compromised?"
"I didn't have friends."
In a perfect world Tony may have been able to stop the screechy CAW CAW noise that makes its way out of his throat. He's rather fond of this imperfect vale of tears, though, and so he pointedly stops nothing. "Oops, Freudian slip."
"How was that a Freudian slip?" Wilson asks, looking between them.
"I said didn't." Romanoff is still looking at the floor, but she is less tense now. She actually smiles at Wilson, which, wow, girl, got a theme going, or what? "Alright. Let's take a chance on Rogers' good judgment."
"A man can't be wrong all the time." Wilson crosses his arms and he and Romanoff share a look Tony can't decipher, so he settles for ducking into the corridor out of the living room, just because the faint sounds of retching have stopped and were supplanted by nothing. The lack of noise is a double-edged axe, sometimes it can be more worrying than a cacophony of explosions in Tony's experience. Pepper likes to say that's because it means he's thinking and thus coming up with more atrocities to commit against the common sense, and hey, she is not wrong about that.
So Tony snoops. He tries to be stealthy about that, because the last thing he needs is to walk in on, say completely out of random and nowhere, a super-soldier blowjob, augmented by a cool cybernetic hand. That would be terrible and his eyeballs might never recover.
(That is a filthy lie, his inner Pepper tells him sternly, you so want to walk in on that. You want to take notes and pictures. You want to record it on your phone and make it into your screensaver, and possibly Cap's screensaver too.
She is not wrong about that, either.)
Luckily, that’s not the case (goddamn it). Rogers is plastered to Barnes' back, with his sensible golden haircut resting on the other man's right shoulder. His arms are twined around Barnes' waist, fingers splayed. Barnes, in turn, is staring at his face in the mirror with an unmoving toothbrush hanging from his foaming mouth. The fingers of his right hand are loosely twined around the handle, and the left is resting against Rogers' forearms. He gives the toothbrush a jerk until its tip bulges his cheek out and drags it back across his teeth, before pulling it out of his mouth with a wet pop.
"Steve," he says quietly, and smiles.
Rogers looks up from what was probably a quiet contemplation of job well-done on the hickeys, and catches his man's eye in the mirror.
"Bucky," he says, and fuck damn it if it isn't only the second time Tony's ever seen him smile. Who knew it only took a goddamned miraculous resurrection from a great fall. He creeps back to the living room, where Wilson is sharing his thoughts on some weird-ass diet – is that how he stays fit? If yes Tony will happily accept a beer-belly – that ignores all the good stuff like food, and substitutes it as the stuff that you need to fill you up, but also need actual food to help down, like rice, or broth, or steamed carrots. Health nuts, seriously.
"So when's the food getting here?" Tony asks, rubbing his hands together. "I'm starving."
Romanoff rolls her eyes, but she gets up and between the two of them and a roll of tape they get the dining room table to stand up with only a minimal wobble. It barely manages to support the barrage of cartons filled with steaming food Wilson unloads from a cardboard box, once the peppy Chinese kid makes off with their tip, but Tony actually earned those engineering credits, and they come through. Go team MIT and the inventors of duct tape!
"So," Tony asks the table in general, but with a meaningful nod at Rogers in particular, once it's been established that plain rice and wonton soup, minus the actual wontons, makes Barnes a very happy and fulfilled sex hobo, "do you think I can take a look at that arm now?"
He's not sure he deserves having a spring roll thrown at his head, not really. But Rogers is sort of maybe smiling at him, and Romanoff is outright laughing, so he figures it can't be all bad.
Like hell he's letting it go, however.
THE END