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"I'm not carrying a torch for him."

At least he managed to sound convincing, even if there was the shadow of hurt in big blue eyes. A better lie than he usually could manage, because this lie wasn't for himself, it was to protect someone who had always been more important than himself.

"And if you want to be casual with him, then you say it now and spare him the heartache. I know Bucky, and that-- that man who spoke to me in there was my Buck. He doesn't say he loves someone just anytime. If he's with you, then he's there for the long haul, so you've gotta decide if that's what you want too."

Somehow this had turned into the shovel talk.

"You have a good man inside you, Tony. It doesn't always show, but I'm asking you-- begging you, to dig deep and be that man for Bucky. If you care about him as much as he said he cares for you, then I'm happy for you both."

“I don’t like to share.” Tony said that without meaning to sound cruel or possessive. “And I’m not trying to pawn him off on you. Or on anyone.” That had gotten him in trouble before. Bucky told him not to say things just because he thought other people wanted to hear them.

His lips pressed together smugly and he exhaled with a slow, measured sigh.

“I love him too. I’ve loved him since I was a kid. I don’t care how that sounds. I don’t care if that wasn’t always him either. But he saved me. And now I want to save him. But it’s not my damned choice, Rogers. I’m never going to take that from him. I just need you to stop pretending. If you don’t want to get in the way, and I would appreciate if you don’t, then don’t look at him that way. Be a friend and nothing else. Or just take him from me now and spare us all.”

A wild part of Steve wanted to take him up on that second offer. He wanted to storm up to the bedroom where Bucky had locked himself in and confess that he had loved him since the moment he met him. He wanted to tell him that one of the reasons he had been so desperate to go to war, was to watch Bucky's back.

But he wouldn't.

It wasn't the right thing to do. Bucky had chosen Tony and he wasn't going to stand in the way of that, even if his selfish heart wanted it. But neither was he going to lie to Tony.

"I'm not going to get in the way. I always knew that he'd end up with someone else, and I made my peace with it a long time ago. He's my best friend, nothing is going to change that, and I'd never begrudge happiness for either of you. But I swear to you, Tony, if you hurt him then I can't promise to look the other way."

“I wouldn’t expect you to. My teeth will be here to break if I step out of line. And you can have the first swing.” He offered Steve his hand, because this was a gentleman’s agreement. He still figured this would only last so long. Bucky latched onto him because he was as good as he could get at the time. He’d said that Steve was just a friend, that he only loved him as a brother and nothing more right up until Steve confessed that he was gay.

And boy, had Bucky’s tune changed. Tony was sure that they’d end up together but he wasn’t going to sacrifice his own happiness for the while that he had until Bucky finally came clean to everyone and went where he belonged.

Once Steve shook his hand, Tony more or less kicked him out. “I have someone to talk to that needs to be told that he’s not wrong or evil. His isn’t my house but I’m going to ask you to leave anyway. Write him a note, Rogers. Send him a burner phone. Be you. He’ll come around.”

Tony would get that handshake, but he would also be pulled into a hug whether he wanted it or not, tight against the rock hard muscles of Steve's chest. Only for a moment, a hug between friends rather than anything else, and Steve was utterly earnest. Despite his jealousy and heartache, he really was happy for them too.

"I'm glad he has you, Tony. Thank you for looking out for him."

And with that, he'd turn and go as he'd been requested to do, shoulders sagged as if he were Atlas with all the weight of the world on them. FRIDAY informed Tony that James hadn't moved from his room and was, currently, sitting in the empty bathtub all scrunched up. She could override the locks to let him in if he wanted?

“Nope. Let’s not break into anywhere.” Tony jogged up the stairs and paused there at the top. The crash of whispers was almost too much and he grabbed the railing, closed his eyes and willed them away. Rogers will die, chanted over and over... if these things hadn’t been happening to him since he was a boy, Tony would blame the Scarlet Witch for everything. Especially that nasty little thought. He needed a drink so badly... he needed Bruce so badly right now.

But all he had was himself. And Bucky.

Tony pulled himself together and wandered towards the door, feeling ill, and lightly knocked on it.

“Let me in. Cap’s gone.” Bucky had two minutes and if he decided not to answer, Tony was going downstairs to hit the god damn mother fucking bottle.

It took almost a whole minute, but eventually the door slid open to reveal a penitent looking James. He was ashamed about running, but also still ashamed about the perverse nature of his desire for more than one person - and both men to add insult to injury.

"I really screwed this up, didn't I?"

With both of them.

"Just-- I guess you better come in, sit down, we should talk." He owed Tony that much, at least, a proper explanation to go with the heartache.

Wow. He thought he might have a few months here of hand holding and video games. But no. ‘We should talk’ was the universally accepted way you start a breakup. Tony might have outwardly grimaced, but he entered Bucky’s room with its strange mismatch of styles and sat where he was directed.

He tried to bet himself something to pass the horrible time as he did so. Was Bucky breaking up with him to be alone and then eventually go to Steve or was he going to go immediately?

Tony was guessing the former.

He knew it was fatalist to do these things but his romantic life was shit, he constantly had memories of other romances with friends (or just fucking them, that happened too). The difference was that Tony knew that the whispers and the hallucinations weren’t real. He didn’t love Steve or Bruce or (yuck) Loki. He just had weird thoughts about them.

“Whatever it is, I’m going to understand.”

"At least that'll make one of us, because I'm not sure I even understand."

Bucky was no longer freaking out quite as badly as he had been, no longer spiralling out of control, but that panic had been replaced with a void of energy, as if he had given up completely. He waited until Tony had sat down in one of the chairs he had scattered around, before taking a seat on the table just across from him.

"I think there's something wrong with me, I mean really wrong, because I really did want to kiss Steve then. But I don't want to leave what we have, you're something different to me to what Steve is, and I can't explain it. I know it makes me a monster to feel that way about two people, and I'm sorry."

He had to make a choice, assuming either one of them would want to be with someone so like a deviant with his apparently insatiable desires.

"I don't understand what to do, and I don't know how you could forgive me, but I guess that's what I'm asking you to do. I swear I won't act on this."

“Why are you sorry? You haven’t done anything to forgive. You’re a human being, James and I hate to break this to you, but sometimes human beings want stuff that they probably shouldn’t. Remember when I asked you about what to do when you want a whole lot of people?” Tony wasn’t blameless in this. He would never act on feelings he felt disconnected from, of course…well. Not anymore. In his twenties, he used to follow every hallucinated memory, every possibility. He couldn’t filter them out from what was real and what wasn’t.

It had gotten him into so much trouble.

“What you and I have… It’s emotional. If you want something physical with someone else, I’m not going to stand in your way.” He wondered how adult he was being if he hated saying this. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t love me. And who isn’t attracted to Steve Rogers?”

Tony was a better man than a lot of people gave him credit for. Even though it was obvious how much the idea hurt him, James actually believed that he would let the man he was supposedly stepping out with go to someone else and not actually kick him to the curb for it.

"You're attracted to Steve?"

Perhaps that's not what he should be taking from that, but it just took him by enough surprise to pull him out of the other nonsense he was feeling.

“I’m not blind, Barnes,” Tony said, letting the conversation turn lighter and easier than it had been. Bucky didn’t deserve to dwell on how evil he was feeling, especially when it was very, very normal to be feeling the way he was. He’d never had a college period to experiment. Tony wasn’t about to expect him to suddenly decide to want to settle down and after his last relationship, he was pretty sure that wasn’t in the cards for him either. He was too old. Too broken. No one wanted him for who he was and no one could understand his particular brand of mania. “We’ve spent five years being sort of friends and at each other’s throats. The night you first broke into the Tower, I was trying to get up the nerve to call him. Our relationship is tense and complicated, the tension is likely all on my end and yeah. Yeah, I find him stupidly attractive and, to be honest, if I could get him out of my system, I would.”

There. Surely Bucky would understand that he wasn’t totally evil now for thinking about straying. Or maybe he just assumed it was something in Tony’s wheelhouse to want that.

He was pretty much a documented womanizer.

With men, it was a little more on the downlow.

This is one of the reasons why he loved Tony, he got him in a way that Steve didn't. He knew that if he'd tried to say this to Steve, he'd just keep insisting that Bucky wasn't evil and that he'd step aside, because obviously he wanted someone else more. But to hear that he wasn't the only one who felt that way, it made him feel more normal and less like he might be the scum of the earth.

It was still surprising.

"Did you ever think about asking him out? Now that you know that he's-- like that, would you think about it?"

He didn't want to break it off with Tony, not at all, but he wanted to know how deep these thoughts went. Sharing wasn't a topic he was at all comfortable with, he was far too confused with just one relationship, but this was all theoretical.

“Rogers? I don’t think we’d work. We have a mutual dislike for the other. He’s too... everything I don’t want to know that I’m not,” Tony said truthfully. “But I’d fuck him.” He was more than just a little rude about that, a smirk on his lips, as if to tell Bucky that it was all right to be a little bit awful sometimes. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, really. And Steve wasn’t even there to know what they were talking about. “I think we would probably have a fight for whose on top too.”

And that thought made him out and out laugh, childish, like a school boy.

“And don’t tell him I said this but I think he’s a little dumb for me. Nice to look at though.”

He expected Bucky to stick up for Steve’s intelligence, and if he did, well Tony would just laugh again.

It was exactly what he needed, and Steve allowed himself to move so that he was sat next to Tony instead, arm touching his arm. Perhaps it was okay if they both had issues with wanting Steve, as long as neither of them acted on it. Maybe they really couldn't be blamed, maybe what Tony said was true and nobody could help wanting Steve Rogers.

"He's the dumbest guy I ever met."

He'll not be defending Steve's intelligence. Sure, he's book smart and he's good at tactics, good at a lot of academia things... but he's also dumb as a brick when it comes to self preservation.

"I once saw him face down eight full grown guys when he was thirteen because he saw them steal a nickel's worth of corn from this guy's stand. That is not the action of a smart guy."

“Wow. But a nickel in 1930s money is more like a thousand dollars today right?” Tony teased, knees opening so that his could touch Bucky’s. It was a comfortable thing, the way that they were interacting now, and that Steve Mr. Perfection Rogers was the butt of their jokes just made it all so much better. Tony shrugged at the face he was given. “Some guys don’t know when to stay down. I like tenacity. But again, that’s better for bed than it is for dating. For me, at least. I don’t even think we could play video games together, so that’s a big red X.”

But that didn’t mean that Bucky couldn’t do what he wanted and Tony wanted to make that clear. They were laughing now, but the meat of the moment was something else entirely.

Tony took Bucky’s hand. It was the first time he’d actually ever made the first move to touch the man, but he needed his attention here.

“Let me try to say this in terms an old fogey like you might understand.” He cleared his throat and put on a terrible accent that was half British and half Southern Fried Kentucky instead of Brooklyn. “You hitched your wagon to mine pretty fast, pal. No strings gotta be attached and if you decide you’re not interested in me, we won’t stop being friends.”

Despite the fact that he liked to be the one that took the initiative in things like this, Bucky didn't mind when Tony took his hand and curled his fingers to trap his hand inside his own. He shook his head, tiny smile falling away from his face now that they were back in the serious territory again... even with that stupid accent.

"Tony-- the reason this is tearing me apart so much, is because I want to attach those strings to you. I don't just want to kiss Steve, I want to kiss you. You balance me and make me feel human in a way that nobody else can, not even Steve. I don't know how to explain it to you properly, but I love you both in different ways. It's like you fit together to make everything I need."

That sounded incredibly selfish, didn't it? Like neither one of them were enough alone. He didn't mean it that way, he was just trying to explain.

"You're not my second choice or my safety choice, you're first choice. But-- so's he, and that's where the mess comes."

“You probably need to work on defining what you mean by ‘different way.’ It sounds like the same way to me,” Tony said. “Do you love me romantically? Do you love me as a friend? You said you want to kiss me, hold my hand, stay with me. Do you want to have sex with him? I’m talking objectively. I can understand if you never want to have sex again. I just want to understand.”

And once they hashed that out, all without Steve having a say, of course, they could figure out where to go from there.

It would be difficult.

It would be an adjustment. But there was such a thing as polyamory. Some couples had open marriages, some had girlfriends or boyfriends that they didn’t share, or ones that they did. The modern human relationship was an interesting one.

But Bucky needed to be eased into that concept little by little.

Bucky couldn't quite understand how Tony was being so calm about this. This was the same man who freaked out and seemed to assume that people were going to leave him if they even dared to show interest in another friend, and yet he was having a conversation about his potential lover finding someone else sexually attractive like it was no big deal at all.

He was an enigma that Bucky might never crack.

"I don't know how to define it, Tony. I don't even get it myself. Yes, romantically, both of you. Yes, sexually, both of you-- you know, in theory. But it's how you make me feel, different, it's the sides of me your bring out."

But yes, he wanted to love them both in the same way if they were only going by the technical definition.

Tony didn’t know if he was going to be okay with this. But what else did he have right now? From the sound of what Thor and Steve said, they were all good and well fucked anyway. Shit happened. Life was short. Being jealous of Steve Rogers was par for the course. His dad made him feel the same way after all. Maybe it was just fate.

But that said, he didn’t want to always think that there would be sexual tension whenever Bucky went to hang out with Rogers. He didn’t want to stay at home and stew about it. If he knew... if it was on the table for Bucky to explore himself, maybe that would help.

“It’s pretty common, you know? People dating more than one person. Even in a marriage. If everyone knows and is okay with it, it’s not cheating. You just put rules in place. It’s not like a business transaction, it’s a relationship. I’ll have FRIDAY send you some studies. People aren’t meant to be monogamous. Some people can be but it’s not realistic.”

Tony wasn’t a good guy. He was a horrible guy who was trying to do anything he could to make someone else happy. That didn’t make him good. That made him selfish. A happy Bucky would stay.

It was like Tony were telling him that the sky had suddenly turned orange and everyone had found out that they were perfectly capable of breathing water, all of this was so unbelievable and absurd. That the world had changed so much in its values and morals in just a few decades... it was so weird.

"...then... then you do it."

He leaned forwards to look Tony earnestly in the eyes.

"I want you to be fulfilled in every way and I know that I can't do that, not yet, maybe not ever. So you go, find someone else, and still be mine too. If that's really how it works, I'll think about Steve."

It didn't seem fair if only one of them should have multiple partners, this way felt less like cheating.

Shit. That wasn’t what How he wanted it to come out. And he didn’t actually want Bucky to think about Steve either. This whole thing was spiraling out of control too quickly. Trying to give Bucky a choice was going to tear him apart.

He offered his hand to the other man, glancing at him sidelong. “How about this. If I ever decide that I really need to get the beak wet and you just can’t... then I will. Look somewhere else. I just don’t feel like I really need to right now.”

This felt too real. This felt like he’d had this conversation before.

Except James had brown eyes and no dimple in his chin... Tony tried to banish the memory— How could his life converge so much with the memories he’d had of someone else?

Was he supposed to bury James in the sand too?

It probably didn't matter if Bucky thought about Steve that way, because there was no way that Steve would agree to be in a relationship with someone who was seeing someone else, that just wasn't how he was laced. It wasn't how Bucky had been brought up either; but then, his Ma would have had a heart attack at the idea that her son was stepping out with one guy, let alone two.

He slid his hand into Tony's, feeling the callouses rub against his palm. It always seemed odd to him that his own hands weren't calloused with how many weapons he used and how much fighting he did, but the serum kept his skin soft and supple.

"Tony-- I chose you, my first choice, so if this doesn't work out or-- no matter what happens, you're gonna be the one I pick."

“Don’t say that,” Tony said, turning his own dark eyes towards James before it dropped to the way that they held their hands. He liked that. It made him feel centered, just having something tangible, something to hold. James was real to him the way that Banner, in that memory, just wasn’t. Thankfully he was able to overlay the two and then send the ephemeral one away. He brought the man’s hand to his mouth and kissed smooth knuckles, eyelashes long enough to gently tease his skin. “Don’t choose me because I got to you first, or because you decided to kiss me in the kitchen on an impulse. And don’t choose me because I love you. We’re taking this slow for a reason. You need it slow, but I do too. I was with Pepper for a long time and she put up with some really difficult shit. I’m not-- I’m not attentive enough sometimes. I work long hours. I’m selfish. I’m… Well I’m like that kid you sort of remember, James. Except I just look a lot older. So… Let’s not make those kind of deep promises, not yet. We can be together, as much as you’re able to be with me, but I’m not tying you down.”

He actually refrained for the inappropriate comment that was about to follow. That was a big deal for him, even if Bucky could never know it.

“I just don’t want to be an excuse. You stay or you go because that’s what you want, or how you feel. But don’t put this obligation shit on me.” Not when he remembered making rings out of Bucky’s god damned dog tags. Not for himself, but for Steve Rogers. Tony squeezed his eyes shut. “Can we table this for a little bit? My head’s killing me,” he whispered.

He hadn't meant it like an obligation, more to assure Tony that he had been his first choice and that meant something, but he had the wrong words clearly and he couldn't seem to find the right ones. Maybe it didn't matter, he'd just have to find a way to pick through this tangled maze of a path and figure out which the right direction was, and then prove himself worthy of this man through action rather than word.

His brow furrowed in concern, though not panic because he knew that Tony was given to headaches and voices.

"Sure-- but seems to me that you should see a doctor about this. You've been keeping it under with alcohol too long, but there's real help for things like this these days. You don't have to hide it or be ashamed of it."

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