Archive of Our Own

“Look! There’s a man! There’s a man in the water!” Peter Parker shouts, loud enough that Tony can hear it inside the navigation room, over the creaking of the ship and the sloshing of the waves hitting her.

“Man overboard!” Clint’s cry follows a moment later.

Tony gives Rhodey a startled look before they’re both scrambling for the deck. He strides out onto the deck into a flurry of activity, sailors scrambling for the ratlines, for rope, for something to help them haul the man out of the water. He leans over the railing, easily spotting exactly what Peter had seen—blue coat, dark hair, and a water-logged rope trailing from his waist to somewhere behind the Iron Heart.

“Man the ropes!” he hears Yelena yell. “Fetch a hook!”

“Do we want to rescue him?” Rhodey murmurs, just before Tony spots the tell-tale piping on the edges of the man’s coat. “That’s a navy uniform.”

“How long has he been down there?” Tony asks, horrified. They’d left the Shield behind nearly half a day ago, and if this man had been floating back there this entire time, only spotted because the winds had changed, pulling him alongside… “Is he even still alive?”

Yelena, clearly impatient with how slowly things are going, jumps up onto the railing, a rope tied around her own waist.

“You’ll need this,” Tony says, passing her a knife. She normally keeps well over a dozen on her person, but he doubts she would have kept any of them for this dive. She wouldn’t want to risk any of them in the saltwater. “He’s tied himself to the ship.”

“Tony…” Rhodey says as Yelena dives, lowly enough that none of the sailors around them can hear them.

“He’s fought this hard to live,” Tony replies, just as quietly, drawing back from the railing. He’s not entirely certain that the man even is alive, but if he is, he trusts Yelena. If there’s someone to be saved, still, she’ll do everything she can to save them. He doesn’t need to keep watching, not when Rhodey is looking at him with dark, cautious eyes. “I won’t condemn him for the color of his coat.” Not like some people, he adds in the privacy of his own mind.

“Right,” Rhodey says flatly. “And your obsession with their captain has nothing to do with it?”

“He has nothing to do with it.” He watches as Yelena is pulled back over the railing, the man tucked limply under her arm. “And it’s not an obsession.”

“He’s alive,” Yelena gasps, holding Tony’s knife up for him to grab as he kneels beside the man.

Tony looks at her with wide eyes. Alive? He’d… well, not hoped, since the man is still an enemy of theirs, but he hadn’t truly expected that they would fish the man out of the sea alive. It had been a courtesy more than anything, a promise to give him a proper rest rather than just cutting him loose out of respect for his bravery.

“Get him to Bruce!” he calls, moving aside for Drax and M’Baku to grab the man. They’d been strangely fortunate in the battle with the Shield, taking only minor injuries. Bruce shouldn’t be overrun in the infirmary, should have the time to look after their new prisoner.

“I’m not ransoming him,” Tony informs Rhodey as he returns to the navigation room. “And I’m not going to simply let him go. He’s a prisoner, a…” He pauses, searching for the right words to say. “He’s a source of information on the Shield.”

“About what?” T’Challa asks, still going over the charts where they’d left him when they heard Peter’s cry. The navigator is hard to startle, harder still to drag away from his maps, and he’d stayed behind when they went to investigate. “Doubtful he can provide any insight into where Captain Rogers is going next.”

“Just general insight,” Tony blusters, not willing to admit that he doesn’t entirely know why he hadn’t just tossed him back into the sea. Perhaps it’s another dark-haired naval officer running through his mind.

Rhodey and T’Challa give each other unimpressed looks. He ignores them, bending back over the charts.

“We still have the warehouses in the south to hit,” he says, drawing a line from the Carolinas down through Georgia and into Florida. “But tell me about the offices in New York. Can we try for another hit there?”

He spends the rest of the afternoon going over the maps with his first mate and navigator, discussing the feasibility of returning to New York so soon after their last failed attempt at destroying the Stark Trading Company’s home office. He knows it’s foolish, that they’re likely to still be on guard so soon, but he has to destroy it, has to see them taken down, and he wants it to happen now.

It’s late when he finally emerges, the sun just beginning to set, casting a red gleam across the water. He spends a few moments following a pod of whales in the distance before venturing belowdecks to Bruce’s infirmary. He avoids this place if he can, discomfited by the smell and his own shameful weakness, but he wants an update on their prisoner more than he wants to avoid the infirmary.

“He isn’t awake yet,” Bruce tells him, wiping his hands clean on a rag that’s just as filthy as his hands.

“But he will?” Tony asks, picking up on the unsaid sentence.

Bruce inclines his head. “If he lasts the night. His left arm’s hurt. From what I can guess, he was trying to climb the ship and wrapped the rope around his arm. It’ll leave some nasty scars. And he’s got a bad bump on his head. Don’t know what that’ll do to him yet.”

Tony hums thoughtfully, approaching the prone man on the bunk. At first, he thinks it’s his own memories that overlay the image of Bucky Barnes on the man’s chiseled features. But then—no, he’s not seeing things wrong at all. He’s not just imagining Bucky lying on this bunk.

It is Bucky.

Bucky is dead.

That’s the only thing that Steve can imagine, that he’s dead and gone, sunk to the bottom of the sea after drowning or from a bullet from one of Iron Man’s guns in his head. He’d last seen him—his first mate, his closest friend, his… He’d last seen Bucky giving him a rakish grin before he dove off the side of the Shield, promising him that he would be back before long with Iron Man’s head clutched in his hand. He hadn’t. The Iron Heart had cut herself free of the harpoons anchoring her to the Shield and sailed away, Steve unable to follow her because of yet another one of Iron Man’s devices disabling his rudder.

The rudder is fixed now. For as long as he’s been after Iron Man, the masked captain’s toys have only ever been temporary annoyances at worst, aimed just to help the crew of the Iron Heart get away and not to actually sink the Shield. The mercy is an insult. Better to join Tony—and now Bucky—in death’s sweet embrace than to face this taunting over and over again.

“Captain Rogers?”

This was his fault.

He’s the one who dragged Bucky along after him when he went after Iron Man. But what else could he have done? Every time he closes his eyes, he still remembers the flames leaping up from the waterfront, the Stark warehouse engulfed by the blaze. He remembers the screams from the people still trapped inside the building, the stench of burning flesh filling the air. He remembers scrambling for the water barrels, everyone who was at the docks that night at his side, only to realize when the flames leapt higher that someone had emptied the water and filled them with oil.

He remembers visiting Tony’s gravesite the next morning, Bucky a sorrowful figure at his back, the grave still as fresh as it had been the week before when Tony had been laid to rest. He’d had to tell him that he’d failed to save the symbol of the company Tony had so adored, and he’d thought the shame would kill him then. He’d had no idea what was coming.

No one had known after that first attack that the Iron Man had been behind it. No one had known the depths his depravity would go to. It had been a tragedy, the gossips had concluded, but only a coincidence.

It hadn’t been until the next week when Iron Man had attempted to go after the home offices of the Stark Trading Company—to date, one of his only failures—when whispers had started circulating of a masked man and a new ship flying the colors that people had realized the attacks were related. Steve had been commissioned by Obadiah Stane himself, Tony’s own choice for successor to lead his company, to chase down the pirate wreaking havoc on the Stark Trading Company holdings and bring him to justice. Steve would gladly have done it for free. It’s the least he could do in honor of Tony’s memory.

It's been three years since then, and not only has he not succeeded, but now he’s gotten Bucky killed too.

“Captain Rogers, are you in there?”

He drags himself from the chair he sank into when he realized that the Iron Heart was long gone with Bucky nowhere to be found. The light’s changed around him, the sun long since set. The lamps should have been lit hours ago, but he hadn’t even noticed the passage of time, let alone the need to get up and light the lamps. In the dark, he sees Bucky’s cravat, left draped over the chair it had gotten draped over the previous night when they’d been undressing for bed. Steve bets that if he were to press his nose to the pillow Bucky always used, he would still be able to smell him there, the last remnants of the man who shared Steve’s heart, the other gone these three years and more. The grief nearly sends him back into his chair, were it not for another knock pulling him from his stupor.

He opens the door, just as Sam, the second mate—first mate, now, but he finds that he can’t think about that at this moment—raises his hand to knock again.

“Sir—oh,” Sam says, eyes widening in surprise. Despite his general apathy toward everything, Steve finds himself wondering how long Sam has been searching the ship for him.

“What is it, Mr. Wilson?” he asks.

“The navigators were asking as to our heading,” Sam replies, giving him a concerned look as they set off down the hall. “We’ve been dead in the water for most of the day. The men are starting to wonder if Iron Man’s damage was permanent this time. Where should I tell them to chart a course for?”

Where to, indeed? For three years, he’s chased after Iron Man with nothing to show for it except for a ruby ring he took off of the pirate the first time they clashed swords. It had once belonged to Tony, and the sight of it on Iron Man’s hand had so inflamed him he would have killed the man where he stood if it hadn’t been for Iron Man’s first mate interfering. He’d never once been able to get that close since then.

He pats his cravat, seemingly fixing it back into place, but really feeling for the ring he’s worn on a chain ever since he got it back. It’s a reminder—of his continued failing, of the flame that still burns inside him, of the single kiss they shared before Tony was ripped away from him.

“Tell them to set a course for the Widow’s,” he orders. “We need to know where Iron Man is headed next.”

There are any number of Stark Trading Company holdings still standing in the colonies. Iron Man could be headed for any one of them next. They need more information if they’re to track him down again.

He won’t let Iron Man slip through his fingers this time. This was the last time he let the pirate best him.

When Bucky wakes up, he’s lying in an unfamiliar bunk. Actually, everything surrounding him is unfamiliar. He can hear the creak of timbers and the slap of water nearby—ship, his mind supplies him with—but he has no idea where he is. Or what he’s doing here. Or—

“Oh, you’re awake.”

Bucky startles at the unfamiliar voice, reaching for something on his hip that isn’t there as he tries to lunge out of bed. Tries, being the operative word because he gets tangled up in the blankets on his way out of the bunk and lands sprawled on the floor.

“Hey, woah,” he hears, hands pulling him back up. “You’re not ready for that yet. Keener, get the captain. Tell him our new guest is awake.”

“Aye aye, Bruce,” he hears another voice, high with youth, reply, followed by the patter of steps running down the corridor.

Bucky shakes his head, dislodging the blankets and sweaty hair stuck to his face. A kind, bland face looks back at him, the owner of the hands pushing him back onto the bunk. He goes, confused by the face he doesn’t recognize and the disquieting feeling that he shouldn’t be treated so kindly.

“Where am I?” he asks, voice rusty with disuse.

“You’re on board the Iron Heart,” the man—Bruce, he remembers the kid calling him—tells him, watching him closely like he’s expecting some kind of reaction from him.

But whatever he’s expecting, he’ll be disappointed. Bucky has no idea what that name is supposed to mean to him other than that it’s clearly the name of the ship. He shakes his head again, pulling a tender twinge from the back of his head. He raises his arm to touch it, only to get distracted when he catches sight of the livid scars roping down it. They’re clearly several days old and must have been horrific when he got them, but he doesn’t remember anything about them.

“What happened to me?” he asks, starting to wonder what else is going on here.

That clearly wasn’t what Bruce was expecting either, as Bruce falls back into a chair at the head of the bed. His gaze darts over Bucky’s face like he’s looking for something that he can’t find, brow furrowed deeply in thought.

“What do you remember?” Bruce asks him instead of answering the question.

“Nothing,” Bucky says honestly. “It’s a blank. Just—” Grey. It feels like his entire memory is hidden behind grey fog, too thick to see through, too unknown to search.

“All of it?” Bruce asks, sounding concerned. He must have been a friend, Bucky decides, to sound like this about him. That feeling from earlier must have just been his unease at realizing his memories are gone.

“I know my name,” he says. “Bucky.”

Something tries the door handle, and Bucky’s gaze snaps to it, hand flying to his hip again. He sure wishes he knew what it was he keeps reaching for. Bruce immediately goes to his feet, opening the door and shushing whoever’s standing on the other side before they can do more than get his name out. He steps into the corridor, closing it behind him.

“What’s going on?” the other person—male, pleasant to listen to—asks, voice strangely muffled. “You called me down here and now you won’t let me in? You know I don’t like being here, Bruce.”

Ah, this must be the captain then. Bucky wonders why he doesn’t like being around the infirmary.

“That was before I found out he doesn’t know who he is,” Bruce hisses, clearly thinking that his voice is low enough that Bucky won’t be able to hear him. And he does have to strain, but he can still make the words out.

There’s a pause and then the captain’s voice swears in a voice that sounds much louder, “Damn. At all?”

“He says he only remembers his name. He’s not going to be able to tell you—”

“Alright, alright,” the captain interrupts. It really is a nice voice, Bucky muses. There’s something almost familiar about it, further solidifying his notion that these are people he knows, people he likes. “We’ll figure something else out then.”

The door opens again after a pause. Bruce walks inside, followed by a handsome man perhaps a few years younger than Bucky. Not that Bucky has any idea how old he is anymore, so for all he knows, their ages could be completely reversed. He’s carrying an odd sort of metal mask in his hand, hair ruffled like he’d just been wearing the mask. Bucky remembers the strange muffling sound and puts the pieces together, though he can’t help but wonder what’s so terrible about himself or the captain or both of them that he’d felt the need to hide his identity.

“So you’re our new guest,” the captain says, dropping heavily into the chair Bruce left vacated.

“Bucky,” Bucky provides. “Barnes.”

“Captain Tony Stark.” He hesitates, giving Bruce a quick glance. “We fished you out of the sea a few days ago. You have no idea how you got there?”

“None.”

Captain Stark sighs, running his free hand through his hair. “Well, welcome aboard the Iron Heart, Mr.—”

“You’re pirates, aren’t you?” Bucky interrupts. He’s been thinking about the mask, the lack of uniform between Bruce and Captain Stark, and it’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re pirates, and they were worried about how Bucky would react.

“No,” Captain Stark immediately denies, and Bucky knows that he’s right. “We’re not—what would give—absolutely not—how dare you accuse us of such a heinous and—and terrible thing?”

Bucky lets his gaze drop to the mask.

“Fine,” Captain Stark replies. “But we pulled you out of the sea. We didn’t have to do that.”

“Trust me, I won’t forget that,” Bucky replies sincerely. Captain Stark isn’t wrong. He knows what he’s heard about pirates in the past, though he doesn’t know how he knows, but he’s been shown nothing but kindness so far.

He won’t forget that.

Even if he’s forgotten everything else.

Tony finds Bucky’s statement to be completely untrue. As soon as Bucky regains his memories—and he will; if Tony remembers anything from Bucky Barnes from his life before becoming the dreaded Iron Man, it’s that he’s almost as stubborn as Steve is—he’ll forget all about the kindness Tony’s crew paid him and have them hung for piracy. But he keeps his mouth shut. Even he knows better than to argue with an injured man.

“Right,” he says eventually. “I’ll leave you to your rest.” He stands abruptly and leaves, not sure what else to do.

He’d never expected to see Bucky look at him with no hostility again. From the moment he first saw Steve again after his supposed death, both men’s eyes had been filled with so much hatred. It had surprised him the first time, so much so that he hadn’t had his mind on their fight like he should have, and he’d nearly lost his life because of it. If it hadn’t been for Rhodey, he would have died that day.

Steve’s hatred, he had expected. Steve had never liked him (not until that kiss, his mind traitorously reminds him), and he’d never liked pirates. The only time he’d ever looked at him with any sort of softness in his eyes had been in the brief moments following their one and only kiss before Obie had descended on them.

But Bucky—he’d always gotten along with Bucky. Bucky had been the man to teach him how to swordfight beyond the lessons he got as a rich man’s son. Bucky had been the one to teach him to sail and listen to him rant whenever he and Steve had been arguing. Bucky had been someone that Tony had seen himself maybe—maybe—falling in love with once he sorted out whatever was going on with Steve.

To see the hatred in Bucky’s eyes during their first battle, even masked as he was, had felt like the worst kind of surprise.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he confesses to Rhodey when he emerges back on deck. Rhodey exchanges a look with Pepper, who’s currently manning the helm.

“What, be nice to our enemy?” Pepper drawls. There’s no love lost between his crew and anyone on the Shield, and in particular, they have strong feelings about Steve and his right-hand man. Tony can’t even blame them. It wasn’t Steve and Bucky who found him after his hanging, when he’d been nearly dead and tossed aside with the other hanged men. It wasn’t Steve and Bucky who’d paid to have him “buried” as the wealthy landowner he’d been instead of tossed into a pauper’s grave. He may have ordered Steve and Bucky to be off limits for any of them to touch but he doesn’t begrudge their hatred.

“No,” he replies anyway. “Pretend I don’t know who he is.” Pretend he doesn’t know what Bucky’s body felt like on top of his when Bucky inevitably tripped him during their sparring sessions. Pretend he doesn’t know what Bucky sounds like when he laughs at whatever mess Steve has gotten him into recently. Pretend he doesn’t know every shade of grey that Bucky’s eyes turn.

“You don’t know who he is,” Pepper points out. “It’s been three years since you last saw each other. You’ve both changed.”

“You’re not helping,” Tony grouses.

“I don’t think she was trying to,” Rhodey says, snickering when Tony shoves him. “Where are we heading?”

Tony hums thoughtfully. Bucky had been trapped in the throes of heat and sea-induced fever for weeks before finally waking, during which the Iron Heart had destroyed one of the Stark Trading Company’s offices in Georgia. They’d narrowly avoided a battle with the Shield following their stop in Savannah, which was good because Savannah had had stronger defenses than they’d been expecting. The Iron Heart had been limping her way out of the harbor, battered and bruised, forcing them to stop for repairs in Spanish-owned Florida. St. Augustine isn’t exactly known for being friendly towards pirates, but then again, Tony and his crew are pretty good at pretending not to be pirates. It’d given them a chance to rest, repair, and pick up medicine for Bucky, though Tony had spent the entire stay itching to get back out on the ocean.

“I don’t know how long we can keep this up,” he admits to the other two. “Someone’s going to slip. Might be me, might be one of the crew unable to keep their mouth shut about Steve.” And he doesn’t like lying to him. When he first saw Bucky’s face there in Bruce’s infirmary, he’d accepted that Bucky was going to find out that he was Tony Stark, long since thought to be dead and buried. He’d accepted that he would face whatever hatred and vitriol Bucky spewed his way, no matter how much the thought had hurt.

To have that certainty ripped away from him leaves him feeling like the first time he went out on the Shield, feet unsteady beneath him. He doesn’t know when Bucky will get his memories back, and feeling like he needs to be constantly looking over his shoulder, keeping an eye out for an attack the moment Bucky remembers who he is, is stressful.

He can’t afford distractions right now, let alone one like Bucky. He’s so close to tearing down the empire Obie stole from him, he can almost taste victory. Bucky is an unwelcome reminder of the past he worked so hard to forget.

“Short of leaving him in Tortuga with enough gold to get him back to New York,” Pepper says quietly, “we might not have a choice.”

Bucky is allowed to leave the infirmary a few days later. He’s spent days—weeks, considering the time he was unconscious—under Bruce’s care, and he’s more than ready to be back on his feet. There’s a part of him, a part that he doesn’t remember, that aches to feel the rough rope of the rigging on the palms of his hands, aches to have the weight of a sword strapped to his hip, aches to look out at the horizon and see nothing but water. He knows by now that he wasn’t one of Captain Stark’s crew before his accident, but he was certainly a sailor of some kind.

Captain Stark extended an offer to him the previous night to drop him off at their next port with enough gold to get him wherever he wants to be, but Bucky quietly turned him down and requested to join the crew instead. It’s the least he could do for the captain and crew who saved his life. Captain Stark and Bruce exchanged inscrutable looks and then Captain Stark told him he’d need to talk it over with the crew. He came back later that same night to tell him the crew had agreed to it, but only so far as their next port, and then they’d talk about keeping him on longer.

He appreciates the offer, but he’s starting to wonder if he’d been someone the crew had known and despised before his accident because people keep glaring at him and then shaking their heads like they’re reminding themselves he doesn’t know who they are.

“Don’t take it personally,” Clint says, scurrying up the ratlines to join him in the crow’s nest. Bucky had volunteered to take the lookout position for his shift after getting tired of the looks, but he hadn’t exactly been surprised when Clint had offered to share the position with him.

“Don’t take what personally?” Bucky asks, pretending not to know the answer.

Clint snorts. “We’re pretty protective of the captain.” Bucky waits, and sure enough, Clint doesn’t disappoint. “He’s been through a lot. Wasn’t supposed to be one of us and all that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most of us turned pirate outta choice. Couple of us defected from the navy, but Tony was a rich man’s son. He was supposed to own an empire. Then a couple of his ships got sunk, so he hired out some people from the navy to help him track down whoever was going after his ships. No one was being all that helpful, so he had to try out a couple people. Long story short, he wound up with this captain—Captain Steve Rogers of the Shield. The way Rhodey tells it, and he would know since he was there, they butted heads all the time. He always thought that they was just flirting with each other like some of those older folks who fight all the time but still can’t keep their hands off each other. I don’t know how much I believe him though. He says they couldn’t get through a meeting without shouting at each other. Didn’t stop Tony from falling right in love with the bastard.”

He pauses, sighing deeply as he looks out over the ocean. Bucky is quiet for a moment, Clint’s words painting a picture in his brain—Captain Stark, young and pretty and an absolute spitfire, and the handsome Steve Rogers that he imagines as blond and blue-eyed for whatever reason, maybe because he’d look so good next to Captain Stark, all light and dark.

“Why did you call him a bastard?” he asks eventually.

“Because he is one,” Clint says shortly. “Abandoned Tony after they got caught kissing one day. Tony was worried Rogers would lose, at the very least, his commission, if not his life, so he took the fall. And Rogers let him. Guess he’d been thinking someone as important as Tony, no way, no how would they hang him.”

Bucky thinks about the pale white scars standing out against the tanned skin of Tony’s throat. “He was wrong,” he says quietly. “Wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Clint agrees, hand flexing like he’s wishing he had a drink in his hand right now. Bucky doesn’t blame him. His own hand’s itching for a gun to put a bullet between Rogers’ eyes. “Only, it didn’t take. Noose wasn’t tied tight enough or something. Tight enough to rub his throat raw but not enough to break his neck. But they thought he was dead, so they cut him down, tossed him with the rest of the criminals to be buried. Rogers didn’t even show up to the hanging. Rhodey was the one who found Tony. He sailed under Rogers’ command, and he abandoned his post to get Tony out of there. They stole a boat and a ledger from his company, which proved that his business partner was the one who set him up to be caught and killed, tracked down a crew, and here we all are.

“See, Tony’s got this quest, this obsession with burning down the company that didn’t care if he was the one running it or his business partner. And we’d all of us die to help him achieve it. But it’s not just the company he’s obsessed with. He’s obsessed with the bastard who left him to hang too. Rogers has been chasing him since the first time Tony burned down one of his own warehouses, trying to finish the job he was hired for. Probably angling for a promotion, we all think, but Tony—he’s got it in his pretty head that he just needs to prove to Rogers that he’s doing it for a good reason, and Rogers will back right off like that isn’t the dumbest thing you ever heard.”

“Pretty dumb, yeah,” Bucky agrees.

“And that’s why we’re protective of him, see?” Clint asks, leaning back against the mast. “Because the kid’s gonna get his own heart broken on this quest.”

And Bucky doesn’t necessarily disagree, but as they fade into a companionable silence, Clint having apparently decided that Bucky was alright, he can’t help but wonder: what does any of Clint’s story have to do with him?

The Widow—called Natasha to those who know her, though even they can’t say as to what her surname was—owns a tavern in Savannah where all are welcome, pirate, navy, criminal, officer alike. For as long as Steve has known her, Natasha has claimed herself to be neutral ground, unwilling to get involved in disputes, but more than willing to end them. Steve has sat himself next to friend and foe both in her tavern and only ever known her to make an exception for one man, not that Steve has ever thought he would set foot in there. Natasha’s hatred for the Iron Man is as well-known as it is mysterious. Steve himself, despite knowing her since before she was the Widow, has no idea why she despises the pirate so much.

He's always wondered, though, if it has something to do with the name of the tavern—Yelena’s Haven.

“Well, well,” Natasha drawls as he pushes open the door. She’s leaning against the bar in a shockingly red gown, standing out in the gloom of the taproom like a jewel at the bottom of a lake. “Captain Steve Rogers, back again so soon. It was lovely to see our humble town burning this month. Was that your fault?”

He levels a glare at her. It burns that he’d been so close to Iron Man, that only days after he’d left Savannah, Iron Man had struck here. Natasha’s information can’t always be expected to be true, but he pays her well enough that it should be. Telling him that the rumor was that Iron Man was headed for Virginia only to have to turn right back around was galling. He doesn’t know what right she thinks she has to blame him for her failure to provide accurate information, but he needs to correct that real quick.

“You know that it wasn’t, Widow,” he snarls, slamming a bag down on the countertop. It jangles pleasantly in contrast to his tone, and Natasha whisks it away a moment later. “You need better spies out there. What have you heard about him?”

Natasha’s own glare deepens. Steve used to like her, used to respect her and view her as an ally, but it angers him that she sees no difference between him and the pirates he hunts. They’re at war, for all England won’t declare it, and it’s past time she saw that.

“I’ve heard you should get your own spies if mine aren’t good enough,” she hisses, to which Steve scoffs.

“I pay you enough for good information.”

Natasha growls, so low he almost doesn’t hear it above the noise in the taproom. He meets her glare evenly, staring her down. He refuses to let himself be intimidated by this slip of a woman when it’s her own damn fault her town burned.

She must realize that he’s not going to back down on this because she sighs and says, “New York. I’ve heard he’s headed back to New York.”

Steve frowns. Less than a year ago, Iron Man attempted to destroy the New York offices for the Stark Trading Company, his second attempt since he first destroyed their warehouses. Returning there so soon would be unlike him.

“You’re certain?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t.”

Steve thinks about her tip about going to Virginia and doubts that her standard of certainty is as high as it used to be, but he needs the tip too badly to keep doubting it.

“Why are you still hunting him?” Natasha asks curiously. “I know that Stane no longer pays you. I can’t imagine that the navy is still sending you after him. You’re all but a pirate yourself.”

“Never compare me to one of them,” Steve snaps. He is nothing like a pirate. The navy may not have specifically put him on Iron Man’s tail, may have told him to bring in any pirate he finds, but he won’t rest until Iron Man is brought to justice.

He wasn’t able to save Tony, locked away in prison as he was. Perhaps his jailors had thought him likely to rescue him if he hadn’t been locked up (in the middle of the night, alone in his bunk, he thinks they may not have been wrong). Tony was killed, and that is entirely Steve’s fault. He should never have kissed him in such a public place, should never have ruined his virtue and reputation like that.

He couldn’t save Tony, and now he can’t even save Tony’s company. Natasha’s right, Obadiah Stane doesn’t pay him anymore, though from what Steve can tell, the officer who’s taken his place is even less effective in catching Iron Man. But none of that matters because he would do it whether or not he was commissioned to hunt down Iron Man. Tony’s company, Tony’s legacy, is in jeopardy. Steve can’t fail him again. He won’t fail him or Bucky again. He will catch Iron Man.

Natasha is still eyeing him curiously, but when she opens her mouth again, it’s not to ask about Steve’s motivations, but to tell him something else instead, something that he’d heard but dismissed as rumor.

“Iron Man has taken on a new crew member,” she tells him. “A man, with dark hair and scars running the length of his left arm. My spies tell me he does not know himself, that Iron Man himself gave him his name. If you can find him, convince him to give you his loyalty…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but then, she doesn’t need to. He understands what she means. The new crew member could be a source of information on Iron Man, someone who might not even know about their shared history.

“Thank you,” he tells her and fishes another couple of coins out of his coin purse. He slides them across the bar to her, and they disappear just as quickly into the folds of Natasha’s dress.

“Do not fail again,” she instructs. “I’m tired of giving you information you fail to act on.”

The nerve. As though she thinks she owns him.

“Give me better information and I won’t,” he snaps back and stalks out of the tavern before she can reply.

Tony Stark, the dreaded Iron Man from what Bucky has overheard from the whispers whenever they make port, is not nearly so bad as what he’s been made out to be. From what Bucky has both remembered from his foggy past and heard from people, pirates are supposed to rape, pillage, and plunder their way across the great oceans. But Stark keeps an iron fist on his crew, and as best as Bucky can tell, he does his best to minimize damage where he can. They’ve made port twice more in an attack, and both times, Stark has had his eye set on specific targets—the Stark Trading Company’s holdings—and ignored the rest of the town. From what little bit he can tell considering he hasn’t been allowed off the ship, Stark isn’t the monster he’s been made out to be.

Clint had told him as much all those weeks ago in the crow’s nest, but knowing and experiencing it are two very different things. In the weeks since he first woke, he’s had the opportunity to watch as Stark anxiously paced outside the infirmary while Bruce tended to one of the cabin boys who’d been injured during his shift. He’s watched Tony empty the contents of his purse for a beggar on the streets and rescue a kitten the size of Bucky’s hand from three stray dogs (the kitten, once washed, is pure white and has been affectionately named Al by the crew as she saunters around the ship). It makes him wonder what Rogers must have been thinking to look at a man like Stark and not fall in love with him.

He doesn’t have much opportunity to talk to Stark. Whether it’s just the way the circumstances work out or Stark is avoiding him—and Bucky knows which one he would put money on—he hasn’t had a chance to talk to the captain since those first few days when he was in the infirmary.

But then there’s this night when Bucky can’t sleep, his dreams troubled by bright blue eyes and saltwater filling his nostrils and mouth and an eerie gravestone wreathed in fog with a name that he can’t quite make out. When he finally emerges onto the deck, it’s to find Stark whirling around the deck, sword fitting in his hand like an extension of his arm. It becomes quickly apparent that Stark is practicing the same move over and over again and just as apparent that he keeps getting it wrong. It looks—though Bucky isn’t sure since Stark isn’t sparring with a partner—that he’s attempting a sort of twisting motion while flicking his blade behind his head that would help him dodge two simultaneous attacks at once. But his feet aren’t in the right position, though Bucky isn’t sure how he’s so certain in that fact, and it makes him slip to his knee every time he tries the maneuver.

“You need to shift your stance,” he says abruptly after watching Stark for nearly ten minutes.

Stark startles, not badly enough to drop his blade or fall over himself, but enough that he nearly loses his balance when he whirls around. His eyes widen almost imperceptibly when he sees Bucky and then narrow.

“And what would you know of it?” he asks. The words are accusatory but the voice is curious, thoughtful.

Bucky shrugs. No one’s given him so much as a dagger on this ship, let alone a sword, so he can’t speak to his skills as a swordsman, but he’s certain that if Tony were to adjust his feet, he would pull the maneuver off easily.

“I’m not sure I do,” he says instead of stating his conviction, “but you can hardly do it anymore wrong than you are now, could you?”

“I could stab myself,” Stark points out dryly. Bucky inclines his head, waiting. Stark looks at him for a long moment, dark eyes unreadable, before he jerks his head in a stiff nod. “Thor, lend him your sword.”

Bucky jumps a little. The Iron Heart is staffed by a light crew during the night hours, he knows this, but he hadn’t realized any of them had been watching. He accepts the sword that the silent Thor—a big man, broad and looming, not the sort of man Bucky would want to cross blades with—extends to him.

“I think,” he says slowly, thinking through what he’d watched Stark doing a few minutes earlier, “that you’re trying to do this—” He twists, arching his back as he jabs his sword behind his head. Even as he executes it, he knows that he’s got it right, the movements coming to him as easily as breathing, and he proves it when he doesn’t stumble to his knees the way Stark had. “The problem is that you’re not keeping your feet far enough apart, so they’re getting tangled over each other when you twist.”

“Huh,” Stark remarks. “Do it again?” He watches as Bucky demonstrates one more time and then shifts into a near perfect imitation of his position—near, but not quite.

“Here,” Bucky murmurs, stepping forward. “Let me—” He nudges Stark’s feet apart with one of his own feet and puts his hands on Stark’s hips to turn him just a little. Stark, startled, quickly glances up at him, eyes wide. Bucky quickly lets go of Stark’s hips and steps back, trying not to think about how they had felt in his grip. “Uh, try it like this now.”

Stark does, and even before he’s finished executing it, Bucky can tell that it’s going to be perfect. A broad grin spreads across Stark’s face, lighting him up beautifully, and Bucky’s breath catches in his throat.

“You should—you should try it again,” he stammers. “Make sure you’ve got it down.”

“Right,” Stark agrees and executes it over and over again until Bucky is convinced that Stark knows it well enough to try it against someone else. He smoothly steps into position and stabs towards Stark’s middle, biting back a smile as Stark twists, angling his sword just enough that the blade swishes past Bucky’s ear instead of through his head.

“Perfect,” Bucky breathes, Stark’s own breath warm on his cheek. They’re standing only inches apart from each other, close enough that Bucky’s lips could skim Stark’s jaw if he stretched only barely. He trails his gaze down from Stark’s eyes to his lips, red even in the moonlight, and the dip of his linen shirt, revealing the pale white scars on his throat. “Perfect.”

“Bucky,” Stark whispers.

“Oh, well done, Captain!”

Thor’s exclamation jolts them both out of their poised stillness, pulling them apart as surely as if he’d laid hands on them. Bucky quickly hands Thor his sword back, trying to calm his breathing. Stark is gripping onto the railing, staring out over the dark sea. He looks wild, torn, frightened.

Bucky opens his mouth to say something, to reassure him, to offer comfort, he doesn’t know, but the words fail him, and he bows his head instead. “I think I’ll retire, Captain.”

He’s almost belowdecks when he hears Stark’s voice quietly say, “Tony.”

“Sorry?” He pauses and looks back. Stark looks frightened still, but resigned, appearing in the moonlight like nothing so much as a man who knows he’s making a deal with the devil.

“Call me Tony.”

It had almost been an accident, Steve thinks when he remembers that moment. He and Tony had been arguing about a missing ledger. Tony had had a suspicion about Obadiah Stane, and he’d compiled a ledger with the help of one of the girls who cleaned the office—a tall, pretty redhead, if Steve remembered her correctly—that he’d claimed would prove that he was right Stane was claiming ships were being lost when they were secretly being sent to Spanish-owned Florida to outfit the Spaniards with guns and swords. When Tony had first broached it to him, Steve had been willing to consider it, but he’d been unable to find any proof other than Tony’s words and the ledger that he hadn’t seen—and never would, for it had somehow, mysteriously, gone missing from Tony’s locked office.

Tony had claimed that as further proof and tried to send Steve to arrest Stane right then and there. But Stane had been every bit the wealthy landowner that Tony was, and Steve couldn’t have just laid such claims at the magistrate’s feet without any proof.

Tony had felt betrayed, and Steve had felt that Tony was being naïve, and they had argued, right there in the hallways of the Stark Trading Company offices, shouting at each other about trust and honor and righteousness. And Tony had been beautiful, whiskey brown eyes sparking fire in the lamplight, hands gesticulating wildly as he spat arguments at Steve, and Steve had lost his mind.

He'd stepped into Tony’s space and then kept pushing forward until Tony’s back had hit the wall and Tony was looking up at him with dark, heated eyes.

“What are you doing, Captain?” he’d breathed.

“What I should have the moment I met you,” he’d replied and taken Tony’s face between his hands and kissed him. Kissed him not like a blushing bride should be kissed at the altar, sweet and chaste and gentle, but like a man kissed his lover in the privacy of their bedroom when the lamps were turned low and the stillness of the night wrapped around them. Kissed him madly and passionately, Tony’s hands clutching his jacket to hold him close, tasting the bitterness of the coffee Tony paid handsomely to have shipped from Africa. Kissed him until all he could breathe, all he could taste, all he could think was Tony.

Kissed him until Obadiah Stane came around the corner and shouted, breaking them apart. That had been the last time he’d ever seen Tony. Steve had gone to prison, watched over day and night, and Tony had been hung.

A week later, the first of the Stark holdings had burned down, Iron Man’s name rising to the forefront, and Steve had found his vengeance.

He doesn’t know why it’s Tony he’s thinking of when Sam brings him the sketch one of their informants in Georgia drew of the man without his memory who had joined Iron Man’s crew. He doesn’t know why it’s Tony he’s thinking of as he stares down at familiar features he’s traced in the darkness a thousand times over. Tony and Bucky aren’t very much alike when they stand next to each other. Bucky is broad with eyes like the sea after a storm, brown hair so dark it was nearly black. Tony had been smaller, lither, eyes like the sun filtering through whiskey and hair with more copper highlights to it. He doesn’t know why it’s Tony he’s thinking of when he looks at Bucky’s likeness on the page except that—

Except that he loves them both.

“Did you see?” he asks Sam hoarsely, barely able to breathe through his mingled grief and relief. Bucky is alive.

Bucky is alive.

“I saw,” Sam says quietly.

And just like that, Steve’s thoughts turn furious. Bucky is alive—and Steve left him on that monster’s ship.

It’s a miracle Iron Man hadn’t had him killed the moment they pulled him from the sea. It’s a miracle—and a nightmare all at once. He can only imagine the torture Iron Man’s put him through these past months. No pirate is known for their kindness or mercy, and Iron Man isn’t singular among them. Part of him wonders if Bucky’s lost his memory at all or if it’s something Iron Man has forced him to say—or even a trick on Bucky’s part to protect himself from Iron Man’s wrath.

Steve clenches the paper in his hands, anger coursing through him. What right does Iron Man have to take this away from him too? This, on top of everything else he’s stolen from him? What right does Iron Man have to steal both of Steve’s loves?

“We must find him,” he spits, Iron Man’s mask swimming in his vision. “I won’t leave Bucky to be slaughtered by that monster. We find Iron Man—and this time, we won’t rest until either he’s sunk or we have.”

The problem with Bucky, Tony muses bitterly as he watches Bucky spar with Yelena, the two of them laughing about some joke or another, is that Tony had already been halfway in love with him when his stolen moment with Steve had gotten him arrested. Steve had gotten his blood pumping with every argument they found themselves in. When he was with Steve, images of blood-tinged kisses and grasping hands and tangled bedsheets had danced through Tony’s mind. Falling in love with Steve had been a battle every step of the way, refusal to admit that he could ever feel anything other than hatred for the self-righteous, stuffy naval captain.

But Bucky hadn’t been like that. Bucky had been gentle hands on his waist, correcting his stance as he taught Tony a new move. Bucky had been a lingering kiss on the back of his hand at a party and slipping out to find the first mate later and dancing together in the moonlight where no one could see them. Bucky had been fluttering feelings in his stomach and apologetic smiles every time the Shield returned to New York with more bad news.

And then Iron Man had happened, and Bucky’s warm, sweet smiles had turned to anger and fury and hate. Tony had never truly believed he could ever have even one of the men he loved—never mind both; that would never have been accepted anywhere—but the first time he’d seen the look on Bucky’s face as they fought on a plank of wood straddling the Iron Heart and the Shield, he’d realized that any deep-buried dreams he might have had about one day telling Steve and Bucky about the truth regarding the circumstances of his death needed to be let go of immediately. It was never going to happen. It never could happen, and the sooner he got over it, the happier he could be.

But now he has Bucky on his ship, and Bucky keeps looking at him with that soft look in his eyes that Tony remembers from his youth. He works hard and never once complained about the difficulty of the jobs he was given by Tony’s vengeful crew, no matter how asinine they might have seemed at the time. And as the months have passed, Tony’s crew has even come to accept him.

No, more than accepting of him, they’ve come to know him as one of their own.

And Tony hates it because he knows—he knows—that this can’t last. Bucky doesn’t seem to have realized yet that he was once a member of Steve’s crew—more than just a member; his right-hand man—but that won’t be the case forever. Someone will say something, forgetting that Bucky doesn’t remember, or Bucky himself will remember it one night, and the truth will be out. He’ll look at Tony’s crew and Tony, and he won’t see the people who fished him from the sea and gave him a home when he had none. He’ll see the people he’s spent so long hunting. He’ll believe himself to be a hostage—and really, would he even be wrong to believe so?

Tony had taken him, taken him and saved him when he would have died, but taken him nonetheless. He knows exactly who Bucky is and where he came from, and he’s said nothing. He knows that Bucky’s missing memories frustrate him sometimes, when he can’t remember why he knows something, but he hasn’t said anything about Steve or the Shield or their shared past. He doesn’t know why exactly he hasn’t said anything, but he hasn’t (no, that isn’t true; he knows why, and it’s because he’s so afraid that the way Bucky looks at him will change), and the longer he waits, the worse it will be when the truth comes out.

“You’re being very quiet this evening,” Bucky says, joining him by the railing.

Tony doesn’t look over at him, too afraid that if he does, he won’t be able to stop looking. He keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon instead and on the setting sun kissing the ocean. He can see a few dolphins in the distance, chasing each other through the waves, and he wonders if they’re set to have a storm tonight. Every other time he’s spotted dolphins, it has stormed. A little superstitious to believe one precedes the other maybe, but there’s no harm in recommending preparations anyway.

“Tony?”

He fights back a shudder. He doesn’t know what possessed him to tell Bucky to call him by his name, except that Bucky had only ever called him Mr. Stark when they were younger, and he’d wished to hear his name fall from Bucky’s lips just once. It had been a mistake. He likes it—too much—and he doesn’t know that he can ever go back to Mr. Stark and Iron Man now that he’s had the chance to hear Bucky call him Tony.

“I’m just thinking,” he says eventually.

“About Rogers?”

That draws his attention away from the ocean as he frowns up at Bucky. “What?”

Bucky shrugs and then grimaces, right hand coming up to rub the scars on his left arm. The welts have long since faded, but he’ll carry the scars of that rope wrapped around his arm for the rest of his life in all likelihood.

“Clint told me once that you have a look when you’re thinking about him. I took a guess.”

“Oh.” Tony turns back to the water. He supposes it’s true, after a fashion. The guilt has been eating away at him for weeks that he separated Steve and Bucky. Steve has never been far from his mind, not when he has to look at a reminder of his past every time he sees a flash of dark hair and stormy eyes.

“I hate him,” Bucky says lowly, loathing etched into his voice. “I hate him for abandoning you, for—”

“He didn’t know,” Tony interrupts. He doesn’t know if it’s true or not. He’s always wanted to believe it was, always wanted to believe that Steve would have come for him if only he had known, but it’s always been mostly wishful thinking. He only says it now because he can’t bear to hear Bucky deride his captain like that. “He doesn’t—save your anger for someone who deserves it.

Like me, he doesn’t say.

Bucky sighs. “I wish you—” he starts to say, but then stops, and Tony is too afraid to know what the rest of the sentence would have been to ask. After a moment, Bucky’s hand on the railing shifts, his pinky just barely brushing against Tony’s.

Tony freezes, the small, simple touch blazing through him like fire on oil. Bucky carefully doesn’t look at him, doesn’t move closer, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t do anything that might startle him. Every part of Tony’s body aches to lean in closer, even as it screams to run away, to put a stop to this before he can have his heart broken again.

Instead, he inhales shakily and stays where he is.

“Captain Rogers,” Sam says, passing Steve the spyglass as he emerges from his cabin into a flurry of activity, “the Iron Heart was spotted.”

Steve’s heart leaps into his throat as he lifts the spyglass. Sure enough, the Iron Heart’s signature red paint runs along the wooden panels to the ship’s stern. He lifts the spyglass a little, hoping to spot Bucky on the deck, but though the ship herself is visible, it’s too difficult to make out details of the crewmembers scurrying across her decks. The Iron Heart isn’t sailing as smoothly as she should be, as she always has. She isn’t quite limping either, but—

“She took on damage from the storm,” he breathes, a warm knot of hopefulness dawning in his chest at the realization. “We have a chance to catch her. Make ready the cannons. Prepare the men for battle!”

Not just to catch her, he thinks grimly as orders are shouted and men jump to do them. A chance to finally put an end to this once and for all. A chance to take back what had been stolen from them. A chance for Steve to finally put the ghosts that have been haunting him these last several years to rest.

The Iron Heart is flying the colors when they pull up alongside her, that strange triangle within a circle on top of which the great skull rests. Steve could have sworn he’d seen the design, or something like it, before—not the skull, he’s seen that on every pirate flag he’s ever come across, but the triangle and circle. It’s hauntingly familiar, but he’s never been able to place where he’s seen the design in the past.

It catches his eye now, flapping in the last remnants of the wind from last night’s storm. If he’s lucky, he’ll never have to see this hated flag again. He’ll send it to the bottom of the sea along with the rest of the Iron Heart’s damned crew and thrice-damned captain.

“Ready the cannons,” he orders, voice easily carrying, even as he hears Iron Man shout the same across the water. “Fire!”

A sea battle is no great thing, no matter what tales his men tell the pretty girls they find when they go ashore. It’s firing at each other over and over again, hoping that one of his men will hit something critical and cripple the other ship or that they’ll come within grappling range before their own ship is crippled. In this battle, it’s hoping that they’ll come close enough to board. Steve doesn’t want to trust that Iron Man will sink below the waves should his ship sink. He wants to run the pirate through with his own sword, watch the blood drain from his body and the light from his eyes from right in front of him.

The Shield shudders as a lucky cannonball slams into one of the spars on the mizzenmast. Splinters rain down upon them, Steve’s eye tracking the spar as it hangs by a few planks before giving up and crashing to the deck. Someone screams, run through or crushed beneath the spar, but the battle is too busy for Steve to try to figure out who it was. He offers up a prayer for their soul and grimly presses forward. It’s just another travesty that Iron Man will have to answer for once he’s caught.

They’re too close now for cannons, even for Iron Man’s modified cannons capable of doing great damage at a closer range. This is the time for guns, and Steve himself lowers his rifle to his shoulder.

He knows other naval captains who would never dare to lower themselves to fire a gun, who would never lift a finger until they were close enough to board and could draw their sword. But Steve isn’t one of them. He refuses to send his men into any danger that he himself wouldn’t be willing to enter.

“Get them belowdecks!” he hears Iron Man shout and grits his teeth. Iron Man’s voice has always angered him. The first time he’d heard it, he’d nearly stabbed himself with his own sword, certain he’d heard a ghost because Iron Man’s voice sounds like a deeper, raspier version of Tony. It feels like the cruelest trick fate could play on him, to make him hear the voice of the man he loves in his greatest enemy.

Finally, finally, the Shield comes close enough to board the Iron Heart. Steve grasps his sword in one hand, clutches a rope in the other. One way or another, he reminds himself, this ends today.

“Prepare for boarding!”

Tony hears Steve’s yell as though from far away. He’d known, the moment Clint had shouted that he’d spotted the Shield on the horizon, that it was leading to this. The Iron Heart had taken on too much damage from the storm, a damaged mast, a rent sail, to outrun the naval ship. He, Rhodey, and T’Challa had spent the time before the battle trying desperately to work out a way to escape without crippling the other ship. Well, he says that they tried to, but the reality is that he is the only one with a vested interest in keeping Steve alive, and he knows that. If Rhodey and T’Challa had their way, he knows, they would have sent the Shield to Davy Jones’ locker long ago, and today would be no exception. It’s Tony who has never wanted to gamble with Steve’s life, still too caught up in his emotions to kill the man who’s trying to kill him.

But today, with the Iron Heart damaged the way she is, he’s coming to realize that in this instance, there is no third way. It’s either the Iron Heart or the Shield. They can’t both make it out of this. If they let the Shield recover easily, she’ll catch right back up to them.

“We have to cripple them,” he realizes. By the way neither Rhodey nor T’Challa react, it’s something that they’ve known for a while, but were only waiting for him to catch up. He has the sudden, bitter thought that he wishes he’d read the writing on the wall earlier, when all it would have taken is one well-placed cannonball to ensure their freedom before they take on any more damage. But if wishes were fishes… well, Tony would have been sprouting gills long ago.

“T’Challa, take M’Baku and Thor across to the Shield. Take three of the bombs with you—the small ones. We’ll give you enough time to destroy one of the masts.” He doesn’t tell him to try to destroy something that’ll still allow the Shield to limp back into port. T’Challa has sailed under him long enough that the reminder will come as an insult, and at this point, they don’t have the luxury of picking their targets.

“What are we going to do?” Rhodey asks as T’Challa disappears from the cabin, the noise from the battle briefly rising before the door closes again.

“Something spectacular,” Tony breathes, slipping out the door as well.

He emerges into chaos. Steve’s crew has boarded, fury written across each and every one of their features. They know about Bucky, he realizes with a disquieting feeling in his stomach. He doesn’t know how, but they do. His eyes automatically search Bucky out, praying that he gets to him before Steve’s men do.

It’s hard to spot him through the haze of smoke lingering over the ship from the cannons and gunpowder, but—

“Rhodey!” he shouts, clutching Rhodey’s shoulder. “The fog! We can use the fog makers!”

The fog makers had been something that Tony had invented as a child, a way of heating up water into steam and then rapidly cooling it by passing the vapor through metal pipes in the bowels of the ship until it emerged through a small porthole as a dense fog. They’d used it before to escape but only when it was dark, the drop in temperature helping the fog condense. He has no idea if it’ll even work with the day as hot as it is, but they have to try.

“I’m on it,” Rhodey growls back before whistling a sharp pattern of five ascending notes. The whistle cuts through the pitch of the battle, calling the cabin boys to him. “Go rescue your boy.”

Tony looks in the direction of Rhodey’s nod and finally spots Bucky. Bucky is standing over Clint’s fallen form, Clint’s bloodied sword clutched in his hand,, and Tony can only spare an instant to pray desperately that Clint is still alive, before he spots the three naval officers coming up behind him. None of them are Steve, and Tony doesn’t know if that makes things better or worse as he sprints for the side of the ship. He leaps onto the railing, catches one of the ropes dangling from a mast, and throws himself off the side, swinging around in a wide arc.

He manages to time letting go perfectly, and he barrels directly into the officers, one of them screaming as Tony impales him on his sword. The other two crumple, hitting the decks hard enough that neither of them rise. Tony slits both of their throats before they can become a threat again. He wishes it didn’t have to be this way, but he won’t risk Bucky getting hurt again.

“I hope you have something planned,” Bucky mutters as Tony rises and takes up a position guarding Bucky’s back.

“Oh, do I,” Tony murmurs back.

He doesn’t know how long they stand there, fending off attackers who would take Bucky and kill both Tony and Clint. Time tends to lose all meaning for Tony during a battle, his mind more focused on the here and now. But eventually, he realizes that it’s been getting harder and harder to see the men in front of him, and he can’t see the Shield at all.

“Where’s that fog coming from?” Bucky hisses.

Tony shoots him a vicious grin over his shoulder.

“That’s us?”

He likes the way that sounds, the way Bucky so easily includes himself as one of them. He opens his mouth, not sure if he’s going to say that out loud or if he’s going to haul Bucky into a filthy kiss—both seem equally likely—but it’s then that there’s a loud BOOM!

A terrific explosion splits the battle. Fire lights up the sky, twisted into horrifying shapes in the fog, and the cracking of the mast rips through the din.

“The Shield!” someone on the Shield shouts, followed by a retreat back to the crippled ship. Even capturing the infamous Iron Man isn’t more important than keeping the ship from sinking, it seems.

“Cut the lines!” Tony yells, taking advantage of the opportunity. He tosses up a prayer that T’Challa and his men will make it back to the Iron Heart in time before they cast off, but he can’t waste a moment, not for the doomed crew of the Shield to realize their bad fortune and swarm back onto the Iron Heart or for the damage to be less severe than it sounded and risk losing precious time for them to escape.

He himself sprints for the harpoons the crew of the Shield had used to tie them to each other, but he doesn’t get far before a shape looms out of the fog—blond hair and blue eyes and a snarl marring his beautiful features.

“You!” Steve growls. “You took everything from—”

He doesn’t have time for this. He dodges Steve’s wild swing, comes up underneath his guard, and slams the hilt of his sword into Steve’s head. Steve collapses like a sack of potatoes.

A moment later, the Iron Heart shudders as she’s released from the Shield.

It’s nearly a full day before Bucky sees Tony again. Tony is busy ordering the crew around, getting Steve and those captured amongst the Shield’s crew hauled into the brig, organizing the removal of the bodies from the decks, making sure that the repairs needed for their own mast and sail are well under way, conferring with T’Challa’s small team that the explosion on the Shield would be enough to let them get away safely—not, Bucky thinks, that it truly matters, with Steve in chains on the Iron Heart.

All told, it’s nearing dawn the next day when Bucky finally looks around, exhausted, and realizes that Tony is nowhere to be found. He picks his way across the deck, raising his eyebrows in a silent question at Pepper when he finds her.

“He’s in his cabin,” Pepper says, jerking a thumb belowdecks. “Go get some sleep. I know you’ve been working this entire time. Someone should have come to relieve you.”

“We’ve all been working hard,” Bucky replies. “I probably just got a little lost.”

He heads down, knocking on Tony’s cabin door. Tony’s voice, when it calls for him to enter, is raspier than it usually is. He steps inside, ducking to avoid the low door, and frowns when he spots Tony massaging his throat. There’s an open jar of what looks like some kind of cream sitting on the table in front of him.

“You alright?” he asks concernedly.

“Yeah,” Tony rasps, then coughs. “Yes. It’s just—battles are hard enough on the scars—” Bucky’s eyes trail down to the silvery scars marring his throat—“and someone got ahold of my neck earlier.”

Bucky frowns. “I missed that.”

Tony shrugs. “We got separated at one point. I killed him. There’s nothing more to say.”

He dips his fingers back into the cream and starts to soothe it across his throat. Bucky watches him for a moment, longing to do that himself, to take care of Tony in this one, small way, and before he can stop himself or think better of it, he’s offering just that.

“Let me do that for you,” he says lowly, almost pleading.

Tony looks at him for a long moment, eyes dark and unreadable before he nods and says, “Okay. I’m tired enough I think I’ll fall asleep into the cream if I do it.”

Bucky smiles and kneels in front of him, breath catching at their closeness. The last time they were this close, they were crossing blades in that ill-fated tutorial. He’d hoped that it would lead to more lessons, even if he can’t remember where he would have learned them from, but Tony had taken to avoiding him as much as possible. There’d been that small moment they’d shared on the deck just before the storm, but it had been all too brief.

Tony’s skin is warm, the scars as smooth as silk under his fingers. Like this, he can feel Tony’s pulse rabbiting away, from fear or desire or lingering exhilaration from the battle, he doesn’t know. He only knows what he hopes it is.

“I wish I had killed him for you,” he says quietly, rubbing the cream gently into Tony’s skin.

“Who? The man who—” Tony gestures at his throat.

“Rogers.”

Tony goes very still under him, his pulse seeming to skip a few beats before starting back up again. “Bucky,” he breathes.

“I would,” he vows, keeping his eyes fixed on Tony’s neck. “For what he did to you? I can’t imagine why you’ve put him in the brig instead of throwing him overboard, but I could go down there now, and—”

“Bucky, you don’t know what you’re asking,” Tony whispers. Bucky finally looks back up at him, startled to find tears glimmering in his eyes. Without thinking, he reaches up and wipes them away, even more startled when Tony leans into the touch. They sit there, Bucky’s hand cupping his cheek, for a single suspended moment.

“Don’t I?” he asks finally and leans in to kiss him.

It’s brief, fleeting, before Tony is pulling away from him. Bucky already misses the soft plushness of his lips, the lingering taste of him.

“We can’t,” Tony says regretfully. “It’s—Bucky, you don’t even know who you are.”

“I know,” Bucky replies. Tony gives him a shocked, fearful look, and he continues, “I am one of your crew. I am an excellent swordsman, and I’m someone whose past you don’t want me to remember, even though it’ll never change how I feel about you, because above all else, Tony, I am a man who loves you.”

When he kisses Tony again, Tony lets out a small, choked sob against his mouth, but it doesn’t stop him from fisting his hands in Bucky’s shirt and kissing him, hopelessly, desperately, lovingly, in return.

“He wanted to kill him,” Tony admits quietly to Rhodey. He’d left Bucky asleep in his bed—fully clothed since neither of them had been up for anything more strenuous than holding onto each other and exchanging soft, slow, sweet kisses—and ventured out onto the deck after a few scant hours of sleep to share what had happened. “Steve, I mean. He sat there and told me that he wanted to kill him, and he felt nothing.”

“So he feels nothing,” Rhodey begins, but Tony isn’t blind. He sees the same disquiet in Rhodey that he himself is feeling now.

“He doesn’t know!” he says furiously. “He doesn’t know what Steve means to him because he doesn’t remember, and it would kill him if you or I or even he killed Steve only to have his memories return suddenly, and I’m terrified that he’s going to go behind my back when I’m too busy to keep an eye on him and kill Steve himself and break his own fucking heart!”

“Tony…”

“I don’t know what I should do, Rhodey. I shouldn’t have kissed him, I know that. We have too much of a history that he doesn’t even remember. I should have pushed him away and told him that we couldn’t or—you don’t look surprised.”

Rhodey shakes his head slowly. “I’m not. I think we all saw where that one was going. Clint was taking bets on whether it was both of them or just Bucky.”

“When? Back before—?” He gestures at his throat.

Rhodey grimaces. He’s never liked looking at them, not since he found Tony in a pile of other hanged men, hauled him out of there, and nursed him back to health in the most private place he could think of—a newly built ship that hadn’t even set on her maiden voyage yet, just waiting for the last of her commissioned officers to arrive. She had been the ship they’d stolen when they set off to tear down Tony’s company brick by brick. She was the Iron Heart.

“Both,” Rhodey says. “Either.”

Tony hums. “I think I loved them both then, though I could scarcely reconcile loving one man, let alone two. And I… I still love Steve, Rhodey.”

Rhodey makes a thoughtful noise before his expression turns considering. He asks slowly, as though he’s puzzling his sentence out even as he says it, “Do you think if you removed your mask to him, he would understand and give up on his quest?”

Tony laughs humorlessly. “Steve couldn’t stand me even before I was Iron Man. I may have loved him, but he has never felt anything for me other than frustration and irritation.”

Rhodey hadn’t been a high-ranking member of Steve’s crew when they had first met. It had been sheer coincidence that Tony had ever met him at all. Steve had taken him out on the Shield when they were in New York during the beginnings of their partnership to prove to him the Shield’s capabilities since Tony had been doubtful that such a small ship—and such a young captain—could ever manage to track down whoever was stealing Tony’s cargo. He hadn’t found his sea legs yet and nearly pitched right over the railing when Steve’s helmsman, then a surly brute called Rumlow, brought the ship around a little too fast (now long since dead; Tony may have wanted to keep most of the crew of the Shield safe, but Rumlow was one man that he felt no shame in turning away from when he saw Rumlow slip from one of the harpoons). It had been Rhodey who lunged for him and caught him, and they’d been close friends ever since. Steve had always disapproved of their friendship, sporting an expression like someone had waved a dead fish under his nose every time he saw the two of them together. Tony doesn’t know if Rhodey had had a promising future in the navy, but he doubted that Steve would have ever treated him as a confidante after Tony met him. Rhodey may have seen how frequently they fought, but it’s unlikely he would have ever known about Steve’s poor opinion of him before Tony’s arrest or thought that it was anything other than prolonged flirting, particularly as Tony has never wanted to talk about it.

Rhodey’s brow creases. “He kissed you, though. He destroyed your life.”

“Madness of the moment,” Tony suggests. Sometimes, in his darker moments, he’s wondered if Steve was put up to it, if it was some plan that Obadiah hatched and that’s why Steve never faced any blame for their moment of indiscretion. It’s a thought that he’s never dwelled on though. He doesn’t know that he can deal with it being the truth.

Guilt swirls inside him. He has wondered in the past if removing his mask would put a stop to all this. If the reason Steve has chased after him for all these years is because he’s seeking revenge for the man destroying his lover’s legacy and finding out that they’re one and the same would put a stop to his quest. If revealing himself would put an end to the chase and the fear and death that’s pervaded his life for so long. So many sailors—good sailors, good people—have lost their lives to this chase, and he’s afraid that it’s all been for nothing, that he could have stopped this years ago.

But he’s more afraid that he’ll take off that mask and see nothing in Steve’s eyes but renewed hate. That he’ll receive that confirmation of what he’s always known—Steve has never loved him, never even thought fondly of him.

And the day that happens, three lives will be ruined.

Steve is held alone belowdecks, save for the guard standing watch near the stairs. He knows he wasn’t the only one taken captive, he’d seen a few of the others being led below as well, but none of them are being kept near him. He supposes, if he was absolutely forced to give Iron Man credit, it’s a decent plan. It’s what he would have done in this situation if he’d been in the pirate’s place. Keeping them separate stops them from having the chance to form a plan to escape and suborn the ship. But he isn’t exactly in the mood to give Iron Man any credit.

As though summoned by his thoughts, the door at the top of the stairs opens. In the brief moment of daylight flooding in through the opening, he sees Iron Man’s hated mask appear before the door shuts again, plunging them back into darkness.

It’s enough for Steve to lunge to his feet, snarling. He’s never been able to keep his head around that featureless mask, too infuriated by his failure both to protect Tony and his company to keep his thoughts straight.

His eyesight adjusts back to the darkness, lit only by a single lantern, just in time for him to see Iron Man pause on the steps. It’s uncharacteristic of the bold pirate, who has always seemed so sure of himself, always having a plan. The guard steps forward at Iron Man’s hesitation, but Iron Man holds up a hand to stop her. They exchange quiet words, the guard seeming frustrated by something, but she eventually bows her head and leaves. This time, when Steve’s eyes adjust again, it’s to see that Iron Man has moved closer, taking a seat on the floor across from him.

After a long, uncomfortable silence, when it becomes clear that Iron Man has no intention of speaking first, Steve asks angrily, “What are you doing here? Just come to gloat, have you?”

“I think I should be asking you that question,” Iron Man returns.

Steve scoffs. Isn’t it obvious? “I seek justice for the lives and livelihoods you’ve destroyed. You seek nothing but wanton destruction.”

“Is that what you call it? Justice? While I burn buildings for nothing but, what? Mindless pleasure?”

“Is that not what you do?” Steve retorts. From where he stands, that’s all that Iron Man has ever done. His vendetta against the Stark Trading Company is odd, to be sure, but it speaks nothing of the justice that Steve has sought all these years for the insults done to Tony’s memory.

“Perhaps I’ve sought justice myself, hmm?”

“Is that what you call it?” Steve scoffs again. “You kill, you burn, you destroy, and you try to call it justice?”

“And what about you?” Iron Man snaps, sitting forward. For the first time since he entered the cell, he seems agitated, difficult as it is to tell hidden behind the mask. His fingers drum against the wooden boards in a strangely familiar tic. “I know your past, Captain Steven Rogers. You destroyed an innocent man’s life for your pleasure.”

Steve sees red. He leaps to his feet, throws himself against the bars, clutching them in his hands. “Don’t you dare speak to me of Tony in that manner!” he shouts.

“Oh? Feelings from the uncaring?” Iron Man jumps to his own feet, stalking forward until Steve could almost reach through the bars and rip that hateful mask from his face. “Why? Why should I keep my silence about him? What is the Stark heir to you?”

“I loved him!” Steve roars, heedless of the way Iron Man falls back a step, stiffening.

But only a step, and Iron Man quickly recovers, getting right back in Steve’s face. “You killed him!”

“I know!”

Silence rings.

“I know,” Steve whispers again, the anger leaving him. He slumps, unable to get Tony’s horrified expression when they were found out of his mind. He’d tried so hard to find someone, anyone, who would help him get Tony out of there before his death, but he’d failed. And he’s kept failing him ever since, and now, he’s failed Bucky too.

“Give him back to me,” he says lowly, the anger returning to him.

“What?” Iron Man asks. “Who?”

Steve can’t imagine why he should even need to ask. “Bucky. You stole him from me.”

“Rogers—”

“I know you’re holding him prisoner.”

“How can I be holding him prisoner? He doesn’t remember who you are!”

“Because you won’t let him!” Steve shouts.

“Let him? I’m not—”

“You’ve taken everything else from me,” Steve says, senseless to reason. “He’s the only person I have left, and you took him.”

“He’s free to go as he chooses, yet he chooses to stay.”

“Because he doesn’t know any better! Would you allow him to leave if he did?”

Iron Man stills, and in his silence, Steve can read his answer. Bucky is a liability, a hindrance; if he’d remembered himself, if he’d remembered Steve, he would have been tossed overboard without a moment’s hesitation.

“Let us end this now, Iron Man,” he breathes, a plan coming together in his mind. “Let us trouble each other no longer. Fight me for him. Should you die—”

“Or you,” Iron Man interrupts coolly.

Unlikely, Steve thinks to himself. In a fair fight, he’s only known one man to beat him, and that man would never be a part of their duel. Even so—“Should either of us die, then it will finally be over. Fight me or are you too much of a coward to agree?”

Iron Man regards him for a long time, long enough that Steve starts to wonder if he truly will decide not to. But then—

“I accept.”

“Tony knows that he doesn’t have to do this, right?” Bucky murmurs to Clint as he watches Tony and Rhodes have a hurried whispered conversation on the quarter deck. He wonders what they’re discussing, if Rhodes is trying to talk Tony out of his duel with Rogers same as Bucky had an hour earlier or if they’re discussing some strategy to bring him down—and they will defeat the naval captain. Bucky will accept nothing less.

“I think he thinks he does,” Clint mutters, keeping an eye on Rogers on the other side of the deck. Thor had been the only crewmember to volunteer to assist him, too honorable to consider giving him a dull blade or tripping him up. Bucky doubts he would have been so kind in his place. He’s been studiously ignoring the pleading looks Rogers has been shooting him, trying to ignore the odd pangs that keep passing through him each time Rogers’ shoulders slump. He thinks it must be because he was once a member of Rogers’ crew, but it feels like an incomplete explanation.

The captains take their stances, swords at the ready.

“To the death?” Rogers asks, voice carrying clearly over the silent decks.

“To the death,” Tony replies, muffled behind his mask.

From the start, Bucky can tell that Rogers isn’t up to his usual standards. He doesn’t know how he knows that, but whether it’s the captivity or the anger that’s clouding his movements, Bucky knows that Rogers isn’t fighting nearly as well as he should be. Rogers should be a much stronger swordsman, one of the best on the high seas, not this… mockery of a sham.

Tony bends over backwards, narrowly avoiding a sweeping cut, and—

“You would’ve lost your head if I hadn’t been paying attention,” Bucky teases, slowly circling the young Stark heir.

Tony is lithe and lovely, on the cusp of manhood, a mischievous smile turning his features into stunning. If it weren’t for Steve’s conflicted interest, Bucky would have seen if Tony were interested in a tumble when they first met. But Steve is interested, for all that he professes his distaste and hatred, and Bucky isn’t the sort of man to—

“Bucky? Are you alright?”

He’s doubled over, he realizes, looking up into Clint’s concerned face. Clint’s hand is on his shoulder, supporting him, turned so as to block him from Tony and Rogers’ views. He doesn’t know if it’s to protect him or them from distractions, but he appreciates it anyway.

Through a gap under Clint’s arm, he sees Tony chasing Rogers across the deck. He’s never had a chance to truly watch Tony fight, not outside of a friendly spar or a chaotic battle. He isn’t the best swordsman, Bucky realizes, and that might have ordinarily been a problem, but not when Rogers is as wrongfooted as he is.

“I don’t know why he hates me,” Tony says quietly, leaning against a wall, Bucky at his side. His eyes are fixed on Steve some distance away, holding a discussion with Obadiah Stane. Tony had tried to join them, citing new knowledge about the attacks on their ships, but Stane had paternalistically patted his head and sent him away to “practice your fencing or whatever has caught your fancy today.”

Tony had turned to Steve for support, but Steve had just turned away with an uncomfortable look on his face.

“I want to like him. You seem to, and so do all of the men who sail under his command, but I don’t understand it.”

Bucky shifts. There’s so much that he could say about Steve, so much that could sway Tony’s affections in Steve’s direction, but he doesn’t want to. He can already tell, from the way that Tony’s eyes linger on Steve’s form in his uniform, that he shares the same attraction Steve holds for him, and he has no desire to push them closer together. Steve’s affections are a dream that he has long since given up when it became obvious that Steve would never return them, no matter how obvious he’d been.

But he isn’t willing to give up on Tony’s yet.

“Bucky? Bucky, you’re worrying me. What’s going on?”

Clint’s words come at a distance, pleading and desperate, and Bucky wants to reassure him, wants to promise him that he’s alright, but the flood of memories have him locked in their grip now, and he’s helpless to do anything but be dragged along in their wake.

He’s naked in Steve’s bed—they’re discreet, even now, though no one on the Shield would ever turn them in, but Steve would never risk another love like he risked Tony. He learned his lesson.

Steve is standing by the windows, lost in thought, muscled frame outlined by the moonlight. He gets like this sometimes, always after yet another futile battle with Iron Man, but it’s never Iron Man who he’s thinking of. It’s brown curls and whiskey-warm eyes and a sharp tongue that could rival any sword.

Bucky has never minded sharing Steve’s affections with a ghost. After all, Steve shares Bucky’s with the same ghost. If there’s anything that he begrudges, it’s that Steve never turned to him until after Tony was gone, but even that is a distant hurt now.

He knows his place in Steve’s heart, and he has no reason to be jealous of a dead man.

They cross blades again, but this time, Tony lets go of his sword with one hand, using that arm to pin Steve’s arm against his side. He uses his newfound leverage to twist Steve’s hand backwards. The pain causes Steve’s hand to release its grip on the pommel, sending the sword flying backwards. People scramble out of its trajectory, but Bucky doesn’t even notice it, frozen in place.

He knows that move.

He taught Tony that move.

Things slide into place like a key in a lock. Tony’s familiarity, his hesitation to share anything about Bucky’s past, his reticence in their kiss and the doomed expression on his face when they’d parted. He knows what Tony’s past is—he’s known for as long as he’s been on this ship, but suddenly he knows how he fits into Tony’s past.

“Tony,” he breathes—but he’s not the only person who remembers the day Bucky had taught that maneuver to Tony, and his gasp is echoed only a moment later when Steve gasps—

“Tony?”

Steve stands in the doorway, watching Bucky instruct the Stark heir. They’re working on something that Steve has always privately called Bucky’s signature maneuver, though it’s too flashy and too lengthy to be used in any true battle outside of a duel for show. It’s a disarming maneuver, and though Tony is a gifted swordsman, who’s picked up most of Bucky’s lessons easily, this one appears to be giving him trouble.

“Alright, let’s try it again,” Bucky says patiently when Tony stumbles, sending his own blade flying.

“I don’t know why, I’m never going to get it right.”

“Ah, you might surprise us.”

Steve can’t help his snort at the comment. As though Tony could do anything else. Tony is nothing but surprises. Steve has no idea if Tony will ever learn this move correctly or not, but whatever he does do, he’s sure that it will be surprising.

Tony, however, hears the snort and looks over at him, shooting him a dark glare. “There’s no need to sound so unconfident in my abilities, Captain Rogers. I’m well aware of my own shortcomings.”

Startled, Steve starts to say, “No, that’s not what I—” but a pointed look from Bucky silences him. He never manages to say the right thing with Tony, and it’s frustrating.

It’s bad enough that he can’t tear his eyes away from Tony’s graceful form when he moves, but every word that comes out of his mouth seems to be taken as an insult. And to be sure, plenty of them are—Tony inflames his blood like no one he’s ever known—but just as many of them are meant to be soft, gentle compliments, only Tony never sees them that way.

Tony’s triumphant cry brings him back out of his musings with a jolt, giving him just enough time to see Bucky’s sword spin out of his grip.

“Tony?” he repeats, but even before Iron Man turns back to him, he knows that it’s true. The pieces are fitting together in his mind—Iron Man’s strange familiarity, his insistence at pushing his questions about the Stark Trading Company, though Steve can’t imagine at his single-minded quest to destroy his own company. As though from a great distance, he hears someone ordering Bucky to be removed and someone else to look after him, but he finds that he can’t think about that when Tony—the man he has continued to fail since his presumed death—is alive.

Before anyone can stop him, least of all Tony, he darts forward and rips the mask from his face, revealing the features that he’s dreamed about for the last several years. Tony is a little older than Steve last saw him, his face a little more lined and weathered, but he’s still every bit as beautiful as he remembers him being.

“It is you,” he whispers, conflicting emotions warring for dominance in his heart. There’s the elation at seeing Tony alive again after spending so long thinking he was dead; the ever-present guilt that Steve hadn’t been able to escape with him, now coupled with a new guilt that someone—Rhodes, perhaps?—had succeeded where he had failed; the confusion that it’s Tony himself who’s attempting to dismantle his family’s ancestral company; the rage that Tony had never once spoken of his survival to him, who he must have known grieved him.

“You’re alive.”

Tony bows his head, strangely quiet when Steve remembers him to have been quick with a quip. “Yes,” he says eventually, the sound nearly lost on the breeze.

And it’s the rage that wins out.

“You never told me,” he hisses.

Tony tilts his head, glancing at someone behind Steve and then back to him. “Was I meant to?” he asks. The question only makes him angrier.

“It might have been nice,” he says. “To know that you were alive, to know that I had not killed you as I thought I had.”

Tony scoffs openly at that. “I didn’t know I was meant to know that you cared.”

Indelibly hurt by Tony’s claim, he takes a step forward, only to stop when he hears the slither of steel against a leather scabbard. It isn’t Tony who starts to draw his sword, but he understands the threat anyway.

“How could you say that?” he asks instead. “I cared for you; I mourned you.”

“Then you have a strange way of showing it. Refusing to believe my claims that there was something strange going on with my company, kissing me where anyone could see, leaving me to rot and die alone.”

“I had no choice! I was held prisoner just as you were. I didn’t even know they had hung you until after you were already—” He stops, unable to say the words out loud when he knows now that they were all a lie, that Tony had made certain he believed them to be the truth. Had Tony sat here on his ship, laughing at him all this time? Had he ever even cared that Steve hunted him?

“I chased after you for years,” he says lowly. “Was that a joke to you? To see me so convinced of my own failure to protect the man I loved and his legacy?”

Tony shakes his head, but it’s his words that damn him: “Steve, I thought you hated me.”

Steve stills, taken aback. They argued, yes, but—before he can say anything else, Tony looks around at the crew members still watching them, grabs his hand, and drags him belowdecks.

Tony can hear Bucky’s voice floating up through the deck as he pulls Steve into his cabin, which at least gives him the reassurance he needs to know that he’s alright. He’d been too frozen by panic at Steve’s realization to pay attention to Clint getting Bucky into the infirmary and then too distracted by the argument to follow afterwards, so it’s good to hear his angry voice.

Distantly, he wonders what Bucky is so angry about. He has a feeling that he knows. It would be nice to think that Bucky is just worried about him being left alone with Steve, someone who’s been actively trying to kill him for the last several years, but he suspects otherwise. It’s far more likely that Bucky is upset because Tony has been lying to him all this time instead, not just about his survival after the hanging but about Bucky’s own past. He doesn’t blame him for being angry. Anyone would think that what Tony has done is monstrous. It was monstrous. What right did he have to hide Bucky’s past from him? No matter the danger it would have placed him in, he should have told him.

He drops Steve’s hand as soon as the door closes behind them, leaving him standing there as he crosses the room to brace himself against the desk. It’s dangerous, perhaps, to turn his back to Steve, but now, for the first time since they met, he doubts that Steve would harm him.

Steve loves him.

The revelation is both impossible to believe and yet makes everything about the past years make sense. Tony has never been able to understand why Steve would chase after him with so much single-minded doggedness. Steve is stupidly honorable, to be sure, but even he must have known that his chase was futile. To be in love with him, to want justice for the damage Tony wrought to his legacy—it makes the pieces fall into place.

And yet—

He can’t believe it. He won’t believe it. It conflicts too much with the truth that Tony has known for so long—that Steve despises him, that the kiss had been either a malicious act of sabotage or a mistake in a heated moment but never an honest declaration of hidden feelings.

And then there’s Bucky, whom Tony loves and has loved for almost as long as he’d had feelings for Steve. He doesn’t know what Steve and Bucky’s relationship is currently—or was, before Bucky had come aboard the Iron Heart—and he doesn’t know how the turn his own relationship with Bucky has taken will affect that. He doesn’t even know if Bucky will ever want to see him again now that he knows the truth, though his heart aches at the thought of such a permanent parting.

“Tony—” Steve starts to say.

Tony’s hands tighten on the wooden edge of the desk. “Don’t,” he interrupts.

Steve inhales sharply, but does as Tony ordered and quiets. Tony looks out at the sea beyond the window, deep and fathomless and unknowable. He wishes it were one week earlier when Steve was a distant hurt in Tony’s heart. He wishes that he could go back to when it was simple, when he knew what Steve thought about him and all he had to worry about was stopping his crew from mutinying against him for letting Steve escape unharmed yet again.

“You hate me,” he says eventually.

“Tony, no,” Steve says, dismay clear enough that Tony can picture his face even though he’s turned away from him. “No, I could never—”

“That wasn’t a question. I know what you think you feel for me, but Steve—”

“Don’t you dare tell me how I feel.” Ah, there’s the anger. “I love you whether that’s something you can swallow or not.”

“Whether I can swallow it? Have you never once wondered how you’ve managed to live this long? I have had you at my mercy more times than I can count, but I’ve let you go over and over again because of the unfortunate depths of my feelings for you. You, however, would have killed me where I stood and celebrated Iron Man’s death.”

“I didn’t know—"

“Exactly! As I never knew where I stood with you,” Tony shouts. Suddenly, he can’t bear to keep facing away from Steve. He whirls, only taken slightly off guard by the stricken expression on Steve’s face. He forces any guilt aside—it’s he who has been wronged. He was the one who was hung, who was hunted, who was forced to abandon everything he’d ever known. “A kiss should be welcomed, not leave one wondering whether it was all a set up to have one killed.”

Steve jerks. “You must believe me, my feelings for you aside, I would never have attempted such a low, underhanded trick.”

Despite his anger, the confirmation of what Tony has always clung to believe no matter the scorn from his crewmates is a relief. He’s always wanted to believe that Steve is an honorable enough man that he wouldn’t have resorted to something so shameful—but Steve’s release and his own death sentence had left him wondering more than once in the dark of the night.

And it’s that reminder—that he’d questioned, more than once, the sort of man that Captain Steve Rogers really was—that leaves him hollow.

“You must know, Steve, I never knew where I stood with you. I never dared to dream that you would share my attraction, but I wanted to believe you would believe me when I brought you the proof of Obadiah’s wrongdoings. But we were so contentious. We never went more than a single meeting without yelling at each other. You stand there and claim you love me, but I don’t know how to believe that, particularly not after what happened.”

Pain and sorrow etch themselves into Steve’s face as he quietly says, “I’m not… good with this sort of thing. But I did try to tell you. I—”

“But it wasn’t enough,” Tony interrupts.

Steve flinches, and Tony suddenly doesn’t know what else to say. He excuses himself, pushing past Steve to leave. Someone is standing right outside the door, but he doesn’t stay long enough to see who it is. Likely just someone that Rhodey posted to stand guard.

He shakes his head, trying to clear it. What he told Steve is the truth—anything that Steve might have felt for him, anything he might have done to tell him, it wasn’t enough. Their relationship—or lack thereof—was horrible for them, even disregarding its near-fatal ending. Nothing that Steve says now can change that.

Bucky watches Tony go, wondering if he should follow him or if he should continue with his original plan. There’s a part of him—the part that remembers being nameless and alone on an unknown ship, surrounded by people who clearly didn’t trust him—that wants to chase after Tony and reassure him that he isn’t going anywhere. But there’s also a part of him—the part that has sailed under Steve for half his life and been in love with him for even longer—that yearns to slip inside the cabin and hold his old lover close.

It's that side that wins out, and he opens the door, quickly stepping inside before anyone passing by can see him. Knowing their anger towards Steve, he can only imagine what they would think if they saw him.

“Tony, I—” Steve starts to say, turning to face him, only to stop when he sees who has actually entered. His expression turns heartbroken, devastated at the sight. He’s still just as handsome as he was the last time they saw each other though, and Bucky’s breath catches in his throat. “Bucky.”

“Steve,” he breathes. He’s not sure who moves first, but they’re in each other’s arms. Steve is dotting kisses across his cheeks, his closed eyelids, his mouth. Bucky is holding onto him just as tightly, feeling tears prick the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t realized how much losing Steve had felt like a missing limb until this moment when things slot into place and everything just feels right.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve whispers into his hair. “I thought that I had gotten you killed.”

He doesn’t say the rest of it, but then again, he doesn’t have to. Bucky has been there for the sleepless nights when guilt and nightmares tormented Steve into wakefulness. He had thought he’d gotten Bucky killed, just like he’d gotten Tony killed. And now they both know the truth—Tony is alive, and Steve’s guilt would be misplaced if not for one thing. He should be dead; only a god-blessed fluke spared his life. But it isn’t even just Tony’s death that guilts Steve’s heart now—it’s the knowledge that if not for Tony’s brilliance, he would have been dead a hundred times over, only this time it would have been at Steve’s—or Bucky’s—hand.

“He thinks I despise him,” Steve says when they separate, his expression anguished. His hands twist in the dirty fabric of his coat, stained from the battle and his imprisonment.

Bucky’s immediate instinct is to reassure him that he knows the truth, but he pauses before he speaks. His months with the crew of the Iron Heart have given him a perspective he wasn’t afforded before. Truth be told, he can see where not only the crew but even Tony himself would come away with that sort of conclusion. Even Steve’s quest for justice for Tony’s legacy could just as easily be seen as their hiring out by the Stark Trading Company. From Tony’s perspective, it probably does look very much like Steve despises him.

And suddenly, Bucky is conflicted. Before, when he couldn’t remember anything, he hadn’t known that there was anything to miss. He would have been content to sail with Tony for the remainder of his days, until they either retired to some distant island or were sent together to the bottom of the sea. But he knows different now. He knows that there was someone who was looking for him, someone who had mourned him. He doesn’t have just his obligation to Tony to consider here.

“Bucky?” Steve prompts, sounding as though it isn’t the first time he’s asked it.

Bucky ducks his head and admits, “I don’t know if I can leave here with you.”

“You believe Tony would allow us to leave?”

The question is curious, not judgmental, but it still causes Bucky’s hackles to rise. This is why Tony has such trouble believing Steve’s words because he is—and always has been, he’s starting to realize—so quick to disbelieve Tony’s claims.

“Of course he would,” he snaps. “He isn’t the monster people—and apparently you—believe him to be.”

Steve holds up his hands, startled. “I never said he was. I only—” He stops, his shoulders slumping as realization dawns on his face. “This is why, isn’t it? This is why he thinks I set him up that day.” He looks at Bucky sadly. “And now I’ve lost you too, haven’t I?”

Bucky doesn’t quite know what to say to that. He wants to tell him no, that he’ll stand by his side just as he has his entire life. But he’s heard so much of Tony’s story over the last few months, and he worries that he can’t trust Steve anymore. Not to betray him; contrary to what Tony thinks, Steve could never be the type of man to do something so cruel. But to do the right thing when it means listening to someone who’s opinions disagree with his own? He isn’t sure he can trust Steve to do that.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead, helplessly.

Steve closes his eyes, pained, and nods. And all Bucky can think to do is step back in and pull him back into another embrace, trying, as best he can, to offer him comfort.

Steve finds himself avoiding Tony in the following days. It isn’t anything that he set out to do at first, but then he’d noticed he was ducking from Tony’s gaze whenever it swept over the crew—he hasn’t been locked up again, but he hasn’t exactly been encouraged to roam either, and he wouldn't want to betray Tony’s trust like that either when it’s clear that whatever feelings Tony has for him, they pale in comparison to the lack of trust he has in him.

He notices that he’s ducking Tony’s gaze, and he realizes that he wouldn’t know what to say even if their paths did cross. And once he’s realized that, he becomes more purposeful about it. He doesn’t know if it’s that Tony knows he needs the space to think or if he’s only taking advantage of the space Tony has carved out for himself, but he’s grateful for it anyway.

There’s much that he has to think about. In Tony’s eyes, Steve has wronged him. At first, it’s something that he wants to instinctually deny. No one wants to be told that the person they love doesn’t know if they can be trusted. Steve has always looked upon himself as an honest man, a man of honor, but he’s starting to wonder if what Tony had needed was a man who could bend his rigid moral code for what he needed (someone like Bucky, his mind carefully doesn’t say).

So he uses the time that he’s been afforded to observe and to learn, and what he learns is telling.

Tony’s men—and women (and Steve avoids saying anything when a lithe, blonde woman introduces herself by a name he’s heard a thousand times in Natasha’s bar)—adore him. He doesn’t know any of their stories or how they came to be in Tony’s employ (other than Rhodes, who had left Steve’s crew for Tony’s, and Steve can’t be angry about that when it means that Tony had lived), but he doesn’t need to when it’s clear that they stay from loyalty and love rather than any sort of obligation.

He learns that Tony rarely wears the mask unless he’s delivering food to the members of Steve’s crew still under heavy guard, a kind gesture that Steve appreciates. He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised that Tony doesn’t wear the mask amongst his crew— it’s likely heavy and uncomfortable just going by the shape of it—save that one of the many theories surrounding Iron Man is that he wears it to hide some horrible disfigurement, and perhaps Steve had given that theory more credence than he’d realized.

He helps where he can. He has never liked to remain idle. Keeping busy gives him a peace he would never be able to find sitting in that cell or in Tony’s cabin. It’s hard enough at night when he can’t see the waves lapping at the sides of the ship, when he can’t even see the hand in front of his face. He chose a life at sea for a reason, and the closeness of the cell gives him undue stress.

Few of the crew accept his aid when he first offers it, and he doesn’t blame them for all that he wishes they would. He’s done little to endear himself to them over the years, and their protective natures for their captain only exacerbates that. But then Yelena asks him for news of her sister while she’s lighting the lanterns one night, and he’s only a little surprised when she accepts his help on the higher, harder to reach lanterns. Then Riri assigns him to wash dishes after supper one night, and Bruce asks him to roll bandages.

And while he’s sitting there, as unobtrusive as he can make himself—though he sees both Tony and Bucky watching him with inscrutable expressions more than once—he listens and he learns even more than he had when they were wary of him.

He’d never once put more thought than necessary into how much work Obadiah Stane put into the company. Tony had been—and still is—young; of course, he would work under the guidance of an older advisor. And Tony had, from the very first moment Steve had met him, been more preoccupied with spending time in the forges than in the offices, so it would only be natural that Stane would make up the difference. Truthfully, he’d never thought anything of Obadiah Stane until Tony had started telling him about a missing ledger and proof he’d put together with one of the girls in the office—Pepper, he knows now—that Stane was stealing from the company and betraying the Crown.

But he listens now, and he realizes just how much he had disregarded when Tony had first tried to tell him about Stane’s treason. The crew speaks of cargo going missing at sea, their ships mysteriously sunk to obscure any proof, and Stark-branded weapons turning up in Spanish-owned Florida. Pirates attacking Stark ships were why Steve was hired by the Starks in the first place (and, oh, the irony looking back on it), but now he hears about the survivors who speak of a man called Raza, known to work for Stane. He hears about the fine carriages Stane has purchased and the expensive horses he’s bred, coming from money no one could source. He hears about the land-bound caravans going missing on their journey from New York to the Carolinas, attacked by supposed bandits and left behind as burned husks, their valuable weapons missing.

He listens, and he thinks that perhaps he should have listened all along instead of dismissing Tony’s concerns in favor of kissing him.

“May I speak with you?” he asks Tony quietly one night while Yelena and Clint are dancing a jig on the deck to Thor’s fluted tune. Tony is leaning against a wall, booted feet stretched out in front of him. The play of the lamplight on his face casts him in a devilishly handsome light, and as it has so many times before, Steve’s breath catches.

Tony glances behind Steve at someone he nods reassuringly to. He turns back to Steve, studying him for a long moment before he shrugs. “Very well.” He climbs to his feet, surprisingly willing to take Steve’s hand.

Footsteps on the wood alert Steve to Bucky’s presence, and he turns to his old first mate, closest friend, and lover. Bucky glances between the two of them like he’s not sure who he should support. Either way, Steve needs to speak to the both of them, so he offers, “I’d like to speak with you as well, if it’s alright with Captain Stark.”

Tony hums thoughtfully, then nods. “Lead the way, Captain Rogers.”

Once the door to Tony’s cabin has closed behind them, he turns to Steve, who stands awkwardly in the center of the room as though he isn’t sure where—or if—he’s allowed to sit. Bucky, who has taken to spending his evenings with Tony, mostly discussing the small changes they’ve seen occurring in Steve over the past weeks though there have been some small intimate moments as well, has no such problem and drops into his preferred seat on top of the desk, propping his feet up on the chair. Tony remains by the door, certain that he’s going to want to remain standing for this.

“Well?” he asks when Steve doesn’t immediately begin talking.

“I have,” Steve says haltingly like he’s only just now finding the words to say, “treated you poorly in the past. I have been condescending because of your age and the way Stane spoke about you, and it has made me question whether I truly loved you or just the idea of you if I could not see the impressive man that you already were.”

Tony blinks at him, surprised. Out of all the things that he’d expected Steve to say, this wasn’t it. This is an admission of being wrong, something he’d never thought Steve would say, but also—

“So you don’t love me?” he clarifies, inexplicably hurt by that. He has always seen Steve for who he was, and he has always loved that man.

“Yes,” Steve starts to say, then shakes his head. “No. I’m… not sure. I—I was attracted to you, I don’t want you to believe that I wasn’t. And I’m not saying that I think the concept of us would be a mistake because I’m still attracted to you, and I very much believe that I could love the man you’ve become just as easily. What I’m trying to say—I’m not good at this, Tony, I’m sorry.”

“He’s trying to say that he should have believed you when you told him about Stane,” Bucky interrupts quietly. “And that he’s sorry, he hopes you can—”

“I can take it from here,” Steve says though he shoots Bucky a grateful look for giving him a hand. “I’m sorry. I should have at the very least listened to your proof instead of insisting it didn’t exist. And I see it now—it’s not your legacy that you’re destroying; it’s Stane’s. I hope that one day you can find it in your heart to forgive me and maybe, possibly, be willing to give us a second try, one that we built on respecting and listening to each other.”

Relief floods through Tony, and when he looks at Bucky, he sees the feeling mirrored on his face. He’d never thought he would ever hear Steve apologize, but it’s all he’s wanted for years. “I just wanted to hear you say that you would stand with me against the man who was trying to destroy my family’s name and have me killed.”

“And I will,” Steve promises, “but that I’m sorry for this too—because I want to help you dismantle Stane’s empire, but I can’t be a pirate with you, Tony. It isn’t in my nature. I can’t betray the oaths I made to the Crown and sail off into the sunset with you, much as I wish I could.”

“I know,” Tony says gently, stepping in close to Steve. “I know you can’t follow me—and I wouldn’t want you to.”

Steve’s head jerks up, a hurt expression on his face. Tony smiles at him though and cups his hand in his cheek. Steve inhales shakily, leaning into the touch.

“You wouldn’t be the man that I love if you abandoned your oaths,” Tony continues. “Right now, without a way to contact the Shield, the plan is to return you to Savannah, but we can take you wherever else you prefer. And then—”

“Perhaps giving you a head start might not be so bad?” Steve suggests, a gleam in his beautiful blue eyes. “And maybe standing aside when you make your move? And maybe, if you would be willing to give me some notice, we might find ourselves in the same harbor for a night or two?”

“I think we could manage that,” Tony murmurs, leaning up to offer the second kiss they’ve ever shared. Steve takes it gladly, slow and gentle and sweet, the opposite of their first kiss in nearly every way. It sends small thrills shooting through Tony’s body, making his fingers and toes tingle.

“That’s a real pretty sight,” Bucky says when they separate, having moved closer during the kiss to stand just behind Steve. “Wouldn’t mind seeing it more often myself.”

Steve turns his head to give Bucky a kiss of his own. Bucky is right—it is a beautiful sight. “And you?” he asks once the kiss has ended. “Who will you sail with?”

Bucky smiles apologetically. “I think you know the answer to that, Steve. Besides, someone has to keep an eye on Tony. Keep him from getting into too much trouble.”

“Hey,” Tony protests lightly, but Steve just nods.

“I’ll miss the two of you.”

“Well,” Bucky says, dark eyes a little sad and a little heated, “guess we better start making up for lost time now, then, huh?”