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1.
Natasha and Steve are the only two people in the world allowed to touch Bucky. Steve feels honored to be on such a short list, even if he is clearly in second place. Natasha and Bucky share similarly painful pasts, and she brought him comfort when he first came back to them. In the past year and a half, they’ve progressed from Natasha whispering to Bucky in Russian and petting his hair to Natasha… well, she might still be speaking in Russian, but it’s less of a whisper and more of a moan and Steve should really not be thinking about it.
They’re in a tiny one-bedroom cabin deep in the Smokies. It took five hours to drive here after tracking down and capturing a HYDRA scientist in the outskirts of Atlanta. It might have taken less time but it had started snowing when they got into the mountains, and according to Natasha, nobody “down here” knew how to drive in the snow.
The safehouse might look like someone’s vacation home from the outside, a sweet little weekend getaway, but the heat is broken, so it’s not as cozy it ought to be. When they’d arrived a few hours ago, Steve had immediately volunteered to take the couch and leave the bedroom to Bucky and Natasha. They had protested, but not much. They did root through the closet and pile almost every blanket in the place on top of him, despite his insistence that he’d slept outside in colder places.
He might rather be outside right now.
It’s probably forty-five minutes before the noises stop, not that Steve is counting. He sighs in relief and closes his eyes. Maybe he can finally get to sleep now.
The bedroom door opens and clicks shut, and Steve can’t help but lift his head and look up. It’s dark in the room, but Natasha is wearing a white t-shirt, making her easy to spot.
She’s wearing a white t-shirt and plain black underwear and nothing else.
Steve closes his eyes forcefully and hopes she’s just sneaking to the kitchen for a glass of water, but he’s not that lucky. She pads over to the couch and then perches her nearly bare ass on the edge of it, far too close to him.
Steve didn’t fit on the couch lying on his back, so he’s lying on his side with his knees bent. Natasha sits in the little space between his thighs and his chest, angling herself toward him. Her thighs are naked—she must be freezing—and he tries not to look at them, but looking up turns out to be an even worse idea. Natasha is not wearing a bra, and the heavy press of her breasts against her tight t-shirt stretches the fabric so thin that it might as well be sheer.
Steve explained to her once before that he’s ninety-five—well, ninety-seven now—not dead. She seems to have forgotten that. He has four blankets on top of him and it’s not enough. Forty blankets wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to actually be dead not to respond to her like this. Her hair is mussed and she smells like sex.
She smells like the sex she was just having with Steve’s best friend.
Steve clenches his hands in the blankets, wrinkling them and hoping they disguise what’s happening in his lap.
“Steve,” Natasha says softly. She puts a hand on his shoulder and then draws his touch down his arm. Rationally, Steve knows he can’t tell that her hand is warm through all the layers of fabric between them. Her touch feels hot anyway. “Are you okay out here? We were worried. If you’re not warm enough, you could always—,”
“I’m fine,” Steve grits out. “Just fine. Don’t need anything. Go back to bed, Nat.”
“Okay,” she says, and he can’t for the life of him figure out why she sounds so disappointed.
2.
Natasha kisses him on a mission to keep their cover. They’re on a street corner in Paris instead of a mall escalator, but other than that it’s exactly like it was in DC. It’s warm and sweet and Steve likes it just as much, except that he feels a hundred times worse about liking it now that Nat’s with Bucky.
“You always look so sour after I do that,” she says. She’s misinterpreting his expression, but he doesn’t correct her. “Next time James can do it.”
“I won’t have to jump to reach you, either,” Bucky says over their comm link. Steve can’t see him because he’s perched in a building somewhere way up high, watching their backs, but Steve can hear the flash of a smile in his voice.
“We have work to do,” he tells them, because he doesn’t want to joke about kissing either of them.
3.
Steve doesn’t like parties, as a rule, but he’s a social butterfly in comparison to Bucky. Still, he’s happy enough to sit on the couch with Bucky in the far corner of Tony’s massive living room. It’s progress that Bucky even agreed to come here, and truth be told, Steve doesn’t mind being a wallflower with him.
It’s Tony’s birthday, and Thor brought him some kind of special Asgardian treat. It’s a spicy and rich honey-colored liquid, and Steve couldn’t pronounce its name before tasted it and he definitely can’t pronounce its name now, but he doesn’t care. He hasn’t felt this relaxed in seventy years, or maybe ever.
“It worked on you, huh,” Bucky says, and it’s clear from the way he’s looking at Steve that it worked on him too.
“Yeah.”
There’s loud music playing. Steve has worked hard to become literate in modern pop culture but he still has no idea what this is. Whatever it is, it’s making Natasha laugh and spin Pepper around the room.
“You used to like to do that.”
“Still do,” Bucky informs him. “If there’s not so many people around. But I’m happy here now. I like watching.”
Neither of them says anything for awhile. Natasha and Pepper have broken apart now, but they’re both still shaking their hips to the beat. Steve tries to keep his gaze away from Natasha. He never told Bucky about the night in the cabin. He feels dirty just thinking about it.
Probably because he’s spent a lot of time reflecting on it with his dick in hand. In his alternate version, Natasha sits down on the couch with the perfect curve of her ass pressed shamelessly against his thighs, then she leans forward and kisses him so he knows exactly what she wants. Then she takes his hand and pulls him up off the couch and drags him into the bedroom, where Bucky is waiting.
But that’s not how it happened and Steve shouldn’t be thinking about it.
Bucky relaxes luxuriantly against the couch, letting his head loll back and his legs spread. His thigh is pressing into Steve’s. Steve might shift away if he weren’t high. But it feels nice to touch, so he doesn’t.
“God, how did I end up with a woman like that,” Bucky says. He lays his head on Steve’s shoulder, his attention still rapt on Natasha. Steve lets him. “Look at her, Stevie.”
“She’s beautiful,” Steve agrees, and he doesn’t even feel bad for thinking or saying it, because Natasha is beautiful.
“God, yeah,” Bucky says. “And she’s soft and she smells good and she tastes even better, Steve, I wish you could—,”
“Bucky,” Steve interrupts. Bucky used to do this a lot, before the war, tell Steve about all his girls. It was a game they played in the dark of their apartment. Steve’s goal was always to come without making a sound or getting noticed at all. He got very good at it. They never talked about it. They especially never talked about how Steve got as excited thinking about Bucky as he did about some hypothetical girl.
Steve didn’t know Bucky remembered that game, or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s just high. Regardless, they can’t play here, in public, and they definitely can’t talk about Natasha while she’s right across the room. The game seems cruel, now that Steve knows Bucky gets to go home with Natasha at the end of the night and Steve will be going home with his right hand.
Bucky touching him is too much to bear. “I’m tired,” Steve says, standing up. “I’m gonna turn in.”
Bucky frowns at Steve, and then at the space on the couch where Steve used to be. “Okay.”
“You’ll be alright here?”
Bucky shrugs then lays his head against the back of the couch, repositioning himself like a cat that’s been disturbed from its favorite napping spot. He gives Steve one last look, then turns his sleepy attention back to Natasha.
Steve leaves without saying goodbye to anyone.
4.
“You never told me he was so cute.”
“Bullshit. I did nothing but tell you he was so cute.”
“Still have full hearing in my right ear,” Steve informs them, feeling exactly as grouchy as he has every right to be.
It’s Steve who got hit with a blast of energy from some device in the corner of the HYDRA warehouse they were taking apart, and it’s Steve who is now returned to his former tiny asthmatic chronically ill self, and it’s Steve whose uniform is hanging off him in folds, but somehow it’s Bucky who’s acting the most freaked out. He is currently carrying Steve, bridal-style, out of the warehouse.
Since he regained consciousness a few minutes ago, Steve has been protesting, but he stops once he sees the panic on Bucky’s face. If it makes Bucky feel better to cart him around, then fine. Maybe he is a little dizzy.
“It’s a good sign that he’s being an asshole,” Bucky says to Natasha, like he’s reassuring himself.
“I am fine,” Steve says. “I lived most of my life like this, I’ll remind you.”
“You could put him down, maybe,” Natasha suggests, very gently, to Bucky. Steve shoots her a grateful look. He might even forgive her for the cute comment, if she succeeds in getting Bucky to back off a little.
“We don’t know what happened,” Bucky says. “We don’t know what that thing was.”
“I’m gonna hazard a guess that it was meant to de-activate the super serum.”
“Cute and a sense of humor,” Natasha says. “What a catch. I can see why you don’t want to let him go, James.” She puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and he stops and reluctantly sets Steve on his feet. Standing disorients Steve, but he hides it by making a show out of holding up his pants, which is now very necessary.
“We’re lucky to be so close to home, but it might make it hard to keep this under wraps, which I think we can all agree is the best course of action. James, I need you to go out and pick up street clothes in Steve’s size before you bring the car around. I will call Tony and Bruce and get them out here to take a look at the device, and Steve and I will wait here.”
Steve bristles at not being given a task, now that he’s useless again, but he keeps his mouth shut. Bucky nods tersely and then strides away. Once Bucky’s back is turned, Steve allows himself a shiver. It was much, much warmer being cradled against Bucky’s chest. He hadn’t realized it was so cold out here, when they entered the warehouse earlier. Now every breath makes his throat want to seize up.
“Hey,” Natasha says. She pulls him into a hug. They’re about the same height now, and she feels so much more solid than he ever gave her credit for. He knew she was strong, but she was so much smaller than him that it never really registered. He feels like a reed in her arms.
Bucky worrying about him was nothing new—it was old, maybe the oldest thing in his life, one of the last remnants of who they used to be—but Nat doesn’t show her hand so easily. Steve can’t remember the last time they hugged. They’ve definitely never hugged like this. As the blast of energy lit up the room, Steve had blacked out from the pain. It occurs to him now that it must have looked, for a moment, like he died.
She held it together and made jokes while Bucky was panicking. Now that things are quieter, and now that nobody else is looking, she’s reassuring herself. He wraps his arms around her waist.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m okay.”
“Yeah,” she says. She lets go, steps back, collects herself. Right now, Bucky would say something like don’t you ever do that again you asshole but Nat never asks for things like that. The thought is crushingly sad.
Bucky pulls up in front of the warehouse in their borrowed ride, somebody’s old Honda sedan. It’s beige and a little dented. Bucky always picks cars that people’s eyes slide right over. Steve puts his shield in the trunk and then gets into the back seat, surprised by how much roomier everything feels when he’s nearly a foot shorter. Natasha gets into the passenger seat. From the driver’s seat, Bucky hands him a plastic bag full of clothes, and then they’re off.
“Ninety minutes till we’re back at your apartment, Steve,” Natasha says, checking her phone. “Bruce wants to see you—is it okay if we meet at your place?”
Steve nods, pulling a plain grey t-shirt out of the bag. He waits for Natasha to turn her eyes back to the road before he takes off the top half of his uniform. Steve has been partially naked in front of Natasha before, but somehow being without the serum makes him feel even more exposed.
She turns back to look at him just as he’s pulling the t-shirt down over his head. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry.”
“You sound real sorry,” Bucky says, giving her the barest hint of a smile. It’s a good sign that he’s being an asshole, Steve thinks, and smiles. It’s been almost an hour now and Steve is fine, other than the host of ailments he had before the serum, maybe a few cuts and bruises, probably a lot of aches and pains to come later this evening. He already misses his enhanced healing.
There’s a cranberry-colored hooded sweatshirt in the bag. Bucky always used to worry about him catching cold. Steve pulls it on to put another layer between his body and Natasha’s gaze. He’s sure Bucky would be looking, too, if he wasn’t driving, but at least Bucky has already seen him like this. If it were anyone but Natasha, Steve would stare right back until they turned away, but Steve likes Natasha too much to do that. It’s natural for her to be curious. He is, after all, a curiosity—a science experiment, a museum exhibit. He ought to be accustomed to attention.
Peggy had stared, once. But he doesn’t look like that any more.
Nobody has brought up what they’ll do if this is permanent. It’s polite on Bucky and Nat’s part, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t come to that conclusion on his own. Maybe he can still be useful. He has experience to draw on. And medicine’s a lot better now than it used to be.
Level-headed optimism doesn’t do anything to make him feel less exhausted and bruised. He lays his head back and closes his eyes.
He wakes up in his own bed. Bucky is sitting next to him, with his back propped against a pillow and his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him, as casually as if he’s reading a magazine at the beach. He’s not reading anything, of course. He’s just looking at Steve.
Steve has to sift through his memory for a few minutes. “Nat?” he says. “And Bruce?”
“I told Bruce to come back later so you could rest,” Bucky says. “Nat’s in the kitchen calling Sam to come over with dinner.”
“You didn’t have to stay in here with me.” What time is it and how long has Bucky been here? The curtains are shut and Steve’s phone is on top of the dresser on the other side of the room.
“Nobody ever believes me when I tell them you were even bossier before you got big,” Bucky says, melodramatic and long-suffering.
Steve rolls his eyes, and Bucky rolls onto his side and drags Steve toward him, fitting Steve’s back to his front and curling around him. Steve doesn’t protest. Bucky had to watch him almost die today. They’re not crossing a line or betraying Natasha. Besides, it feels good.
The bedroom door opens.
“Hey, Nat,” Bucky mumbles into Steve’s hair, making absolutely no move to loosen his grip or shift even one inch away from Steve.
“Natasha,” Steve says, guilt heating his face. “Sorry, we were—,”
“Shh,” she says. “Stop talking.”
Then she gets into bed facing Steve and wraps his arms around him. She smiles at him and then at Bucky over his shoulder. Steve feels a little weird about it, but he also feels warm and safe and happy, so he shoves his hesitations away. If near-death experiences don’t earn you friendly cuddling, then what does?
5.
The effects of the serum return and life goes back to normal, or not quite. It’s been two weeks since their last mission and everyone is getting antsy. Bucky pokes and prods at Steve every time they pass each other. At first, Steve thinks Bucky’s just teasing him about getting the serum back, but it goes on far too long for that. One morning in the tower, Steve is getting coffee in the common room and Bucky brushes by him and jabs him playfully in the bicep. Steve finally loses it and catches him by the wrist. Bucky breaks his grip easily, then presses Steve bodily against the fridge.
Tony wanders by, his attention mostly on the coffee mug in front of his face, and mutters, “Get a room.”
Steve is already uncomfortably warm, sandwiched between the wall of Bucky’s chest and fridge, but his cheeks heat even more. He can’t blame Tony for thinking about it, not when he’s thinking about it himself.
“Gym,” Steve says, hoping it doesn’t sound like a desperate attempt to change the subject. “Spar me. In the gym.”
Bucky grins and steps back. “I thought you’d never ask.”
They take the stairs all the way down to the gym to warm up. “If you’ve been trying to goad me into a fight this whole time, you could have just said so. I would have said yes.”
Bucky gives him a look that Steve isn’t sure how to interpret. “You say no a lot,” he says, and then he’s pushing his way through the double doors to the gym before Steve can respond.
Steve doesn’t know what he would have said, in any case. Bucky sounds grouchy, but the edge in his voice is covering up genuine hurt. Is he upset with Steve? Has Steve done something wrong?
Their sparring is a blowout. Steve is distracted. Bucky knocks him to the mat time and time again. After the seventh time, while Steve is lying flat on his back and utterly humiliated, he grabs Bucky by the calves and topples him to the floor. They wrestle, and it feels more like being a teenager than a highly trained, genetically enhanced supersoldier. It’s thoroughly undignified.
Bucky pins him to the mat, sitting on him firmly and keeping his hands on Steve’s shoulders. He leans over Steve, and there’s a moment when their faces are so close that Steve could count Bucky’s eyelashes if he wanted to.
He wants to kiss Bucky.
But he can’t, so he channels all his energy into twisting his hips beneath Bucky. He rips one arm up from the mat and pushes Bucky down as he flips both of them. When Bucky hits the mat, Steve straddles his waist and pins his shoulders down, mirroring their earlier position.
Bucky smirks up at him, not at all defeated. He looks very happy to be exactly where he is.
Steve flushes. This was a bad idea.
“That was nice work there, at the end,” Natasha says, and Steve looks up, startled and embarrassed. He’d had no idea she was there. Natasha was like that, of course, but still, he should have known somehow. She steps closer to the two of them and offers Steve a hand. Bewildered, he takes it and extricates himself from Bucky. Then he steps away from Natasha as quickly as possible. He’s not hard—thank God, it would be impossible to hide in sweatpants—but he’s blushing and sweating and his heart is beating far too fast for the casual sparring match they just had. He can’t risk glancing down but he’s sure his nipples are hard beneath the blue t-shirt he’s wearing.
Bucky lies on the floor until Natasha offers her hand to him, and then he springs up easily. He did just kick Steve’s ass seven out of eight times. He’s got a reason to look pleased. Also, he gets to sling his arm around Natasha’s waist and let his hand drift down the curve of her hip, which is about a thousand more reasons to look pleased.
Bucky drops a kiss on the top of Natasha’s head and says, “Hey, Steve, how about we—,”
“Nah, I’m—I’m tired,” he says. “I’m gonna go clean up.” He gestures vaguely at the ceiling, thinking that the showers are on another floor, before remembering that they’re just off to the left. Damn it. He starts walking to the left and hopes they don’t notice.
1.
“Steve,” Natasha calls. “Wait.”
Steve comes to a halt on his way out of the gym. He takes a deep breath. They’re your friends, he thinks. Stop thinking sexual thoughts about them and everything will be okay. He turns around, and the two of them are standing there, still casually touching. It’s not intended to make Steve ache with longing, but he can’t help it. They’re both so beautiful. They’re also the only people who’ve touched him in weeks. He might be going a little crazy.
“So what is it that you look for in your partners?” Natasha asks him, like that’s not the most loaded question in the universe.
Steve sighs. “I thought I forbade all conversation on this subject.”
She doesn’t apologize. “I just want to know, since it so obviously isn’t either of us.”
“What?”
“Steve.” Bucky lets out a bark of laughter. “We’ve been trying to get you in bed for months. Since that night in the Smokies, at least. Longer, if we’re counting the rest of my life. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
Steve blinks. “I… haven’t noticed?”
“We weren’t exactly subtle,” Natasha says, and now that Steve considers it, her showing up at his bedside in her underwear in the middle of the night seems a lot less like a cruel taunt and a lot more like an invitation. He’d been trying to nobly sacrifice his own happiness so that the two of them could be together, and this whole time, all they had wanted was for him to join.
“Oh."
“‘Oh’ he says. ‘Oh.’ I’ve been agonizing for weeks and he says ‘oh.’” Bucky drops his arm from Natasha’s waist in favor throwing his hands up in the air. Then he marches over to where Steve is standing and puts both hands on his shoulders. “Are you or are you not going to let me fuck you, Steven Grant Rogers?”
“Hey,” Natasha interjects. She crosses her arms over her chest. “I plan to be there too.”
“While Natasha watches or otherwise participates,” Bucky amends. “Or bosses the both of us around, more likely.”
“I don’t appreciate your tone,” she tells Bucky, and he shuts up faster than Steve has ever seen him shut up. Then Natasha looks at Steve and says, “And not just sex.”
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Cuddling and companionship and feelings of love and support and all the other stuff Nat’s too tough to admit she likes.”
Natasha swats his ass. He doesn’t look at all chastised. Still, Steve imagines it was easier for him to say all that as a joke about Natasha than it would have been to say it outright. There’s a reason it’s taken this long to arrive at this point, and it’s not entirely Steve’s fault. He didn’t understand until the two of them approached him together. Maybe with all three of them, they can get somewhere.
Steve is smiling too wide for his face. “Well, when you put it like that,” he says.
“No,” Bucky says. “No more jokes or innuendos or interruptions. Yes or no, Steve?”
“Yes,” he says, and kisses Bucky on the mouth. After a minute, Natasha slips a hand between the two of them, and he leans down and kisses her too.