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“Pls come to Bucky’s room rn” the text read.
Steve looked at it, blinking sleepily. He checked the time: almost 3 am.
The text didn’t disappear with the remains of Steve’s sleep, black letters unchanged below the weird pictures Tony had a habit of sending him. Even after years of friendship — as they had grown to call it — Steve rarely got what Tony meant by most of them.
Mostly it was cats in odd positions.
(Once, Steve responded by saying the cat looked a lot like Tony. He hadn’t really meant to do it. He’d been in the hospital at the time, wounded after a battle, barely awake. Tony hadn’t been there, stranded in another country. In times like those, he often sent a lot of strange texts. Steve liked to think that it was out of worry.
Unfortunately, blood loss led to not ideal — tactical — decisions, so instead of, say, answering that he was well, Steve texted back “it looks like you”. Okay, truth be told, he wrote “it kooks liike you”, but it was understandable enough. And it did look like Tony, Steve could swear, even if he couldn’t reason it well enough. It was a kitten, after all. Small. Black. With intelligent eyes. Very cute.
Tony didn’t answer for hours and then sent a picture of a golden retriever with a paw in a cast.
As Steve came to realize after years of avenging, trying to talk to Tony was sometimes just as hard and unpredictable as facing several insane villains with unknown powers.)
Now, his latest text didn’t make any sense.
“JARVIS,” Steve asked, “are Bucky and Tony alright?”
“Both sir and Sergeant Barnes are in optimal physical health.”
JARVIS made Steve feel frustrated sometimes. The AI was like that often. He fully (and politely) answered questions and yet wasn't any help.
(He often wondered how some of the AI’s idiosyncrasies came to be: from Tony himself or by growth, by the evolution of a synthetic mind? It was an astonishing food for thought. Nature versus nurture argument, changed to fit the future. This reflection mostly circled back to the pure awe Steve felt at being around Tony’s genius.)
Steve still felt a bit of relief, mixed with that frustration. No matter how irrational it was — of course they were alright, if something happened, he would be notified in a very different way — it was comforting to hear.
“Are they alright in ways that are not physical?” Steve tried next, feeling like a small child who tries to extort what he will get for Christmas out of an adult.
“Both of them are feeling well, although sir could use some sleep,” and the fondness in JARVIS’ voice was now more pronounced.
At that point, Steve’s phone made another sound.
“We know you aren't sleeping COME HERE”
And that? That was just weird, Steve thought, putting on a shirt and making his way to Bucky’s room. Not the strange requests at night, but Bucky and Tony, together. They weren’t hostile to each other, not since a long time, but they weren’t exactly friends, either. Friendly may apply, sure, but more in the sense of friendly snarkiness. Sam once called them frenemies, making Bucky laugh for minutes as if he had never heard anything more ridiculous. He told Sam they were frenemies, which quickly turned into playful insults — that was a common feat for them. Steve didn’t pay much attention to it, still being stuck on Bucky laughing. So carefree and genuine.
It had been happening more often, in recent months. With Sam and Tony, too, even if it was in between harsher words than Steve would have liked.
But all of that didn’t add up to Tony and Bucky doing something together, and at night. That was odd. Steve wasn’t sure they had ever been together by themselves. Not that he wouldn’t like that: two of his favorite people, together — of course, he would. That would feel like a dream come true. A dream.
(That thought made him a little antsy, because the dreams he sometimes had about his two best friends — well, the less he thought about them, the better.)
Unfortunately, he knew them both enough not to hope for a miracle. Not to imagine all three of them in peace and happy. Together. Most probably, they were up to no good.
He knocked. The door opened just an inch, showing Tony — and god, was it weird to see him on the doorstep of Bucky’s room, more so in the darkness of the night. It caused a feeling in Steve’s stomach he refused to identify for now.
Steve kind of stopped and tried to say something but didn’t. Probably because his brain was still half asleep. Tony, on the contrary, didn’t look tired at all. He was wearing a tank top and sweatpants, very different from his usual put-together attire, a bit of his stomach, arms and clavicles showing — there was more skin than usual, Steve noticed. An effect of the serum, he supposed. Making him always notice everything, catalog and remember every sight.
Tony smiled, eyes slightly manic.
“Steve! Goodie, you’re here.” And Steve suddenly felt breathless at the pure affection that was clear in Tony’s voice, in his face.
It was a heady feeling to have Tony’s friendship, Steve reasoned. Tony, too used to betrayal, was a hard person to gain the trust of. It was especially true in Steve’s case: they didn’t have the best beginning, and the road to what they had now, to friendship, to that affection, was a thorny one.
“Is everything—” he started asking but was immediately interrupted by:
“We’re having an orgy. Do you wanna join?”
Steve choked.
“Don’t call it like that,” came Bucky’s voice from inside the room, and it was a familiar tone, exasperated and yet amused, the tone Bucky used a lot on pre-war Steve. It was the tone Steve came to associate with all of their shenanigans.
If Steve had the ability of rational thinking at that moment, he would have begged, probably, for a logical explanation, waited for Bucky to say that it wasn’t — it was — well.
“If it’s three persons, it’s a threesome, not an orgy,” Bucky continued with the same tone, coming closer.
It was a great tone. That tone made you think of a kind, patient teacher, someone who would be good with kids, Steve thought hysterically.
“I think the circumstances are—” Tony turned away, his grip on the door loosening, opening it a bit more, and Steve kind of tuned them out because Bucky came into view.
He was very shirtless. His hair was in a messy bun, his eyes were sparkling and soft, and he had that look. The look that Steve remembered from their youth, the look he always got when a real pretty dame was clearly feeling lenient toward him, the same look that always made Steve unsettled with a feeling he used to call jealousy. Envy of the things Bucky got up to in dark corners or quiet rooms — or Steve imagined him to, because no dame was that much lenient back then — and that look was now for Tony.
Bucky bit his lip in a smile, leaned closer, and his arm found its place around Tony’s waist, metal fingers caressing the naked skin.
Steve didn’t have a damn idea of what the hell was going on.
Steve — very rationally — considered the possibility of it being a dream.
Steve realized that in dreams like those he did not usually act like a poleaxed moron.
“That’s a very different configuration, babe,” Tony was saying, “we have three people, two of them with enhancements, in stamina and refraction, some cyberpunk vibes, an armor with the capacity to hold down a super soldier, a box of toys, an atmospheric setting and a tentacle machine with a rudimentary AI. It counts.”
Bucky hid his face in Tony’s hair, laughing softly.
Steve wanted to lay down for a bit.
Instead, he remembered that he was not one to give up or run from danger, tried to ignore certain happenstances in his pants, and decided to act.
“What is — is this a, a prank? What is going on? Since when are you — why — why are we here?”
Fighting the war was so much easier.
“Because we broke the bed in the penthouse!” Tony answered happily, turning back to him, eyes shining.
He didn’t seem to regret the bed’s demise.
“What he means to say, Stevie,” Bucky said, rolling his eyes a bit, “is that we’re tired of subtle. We like you. We want you in our relationship. With sex or no sex, your choice.”
“But preferably with it, I put in a lot in setting up this orgy.”
“Not an orgy.”
“Totally is.”
“Your. Relationship?” Steve interrupted.
Two pairs of eyes turned to him again, now serious.
“Uh-huh. That thing we’ve been doing for the last couple of months? In which we tried to involve you too?”
Steve stared.
Their faces became serious at his silence. Tony was now looking downright uncomfortable, and Steve — Steve really had to do something about that, had to fix it, but. But.
He didn’t have enough brain functions ready for that yet.
“Okay, this doesn’t seem to work as smoothly as we hoped. Should we reschedule? Is it the night thing? We could repeat this in the morning. Or not, if we misread things, totally okay, let’s forget that and never talk about it again—”
“Wait. Wait. You want a relationship with me? Both of you?” There was an embarrassing hitch in Steve’s voice, at the “both”. He tried to ignore it.
Tony’s face softened, and Bucky reached for Steve’s hand, holding it tight, anchoring him.
“Yes. We do. What do you think?” Bucky’s voice was soft, so soft. Honest and serious.
Steve possibly needed a breath. Maybe an inhaler. Definitely a serious, long talk with both of them about how all of it would work. About what was — apparently — happening for the last months. He needed a lot.
It all could wait.
He braced himself, reaching for the feeling in his stomach, the fluttery one that wasn’t jealousy and wasn’t friendship, and tried to act the way he did in his dreams.
“I think we should do some, ah, hands-on research. To, uh, define the correct name.”
They grinned and yanked him inside the room.