Chapter Text
Iron Avenger is ready. Now all it needs are three pilots.
Steve and Bucky, as a pair, are ready to pilot, both in Drift compatibility and physical fitness. Steve and Tony are Drift compatible, and with his new enhancement, Tony can physically keep up with Steve. And, finally, Tony's brain can shoulder the neural load of all his awesome upgrades.
Now it's time to see if all three of them, as a triad, are Drift compatible.
"Record everything, all angles," Tony mutters to JARVIS, half aloud and half in his head, as he speed-walks his way to the Kwoon. "If it falls within specified paramaters, send it to Nicky." Tony only wants the Marshal to see if the impromptu Drift compatibility test he's planning is successful.
As he walks, the conscious portion of his mind not watching where he's going is watching Steve and Bucky spar deliciously from several different cameras. Subconsciously—but in a way he's somehow tangentially aware of nonetheless—he's also re-running the numbers he and JARVIS collected in his newest scans against Iron Avenger's piloting specs and requirements, and deciding that now that he's got nanoarmor, he'll start the match without gauntlets or boots—let that be a surprise to see if Steve and Bucky can anticipate a sudden shift in his fighting style.
Tony waits hidden just outside the Kwoon, and continues monitoring the fight. He's not at all worried Steve will recognize his heartbeat; his whole body's been regrown in optimal condition, so his heart won't sound like the broken thing Steve's familiar with and no doubt memorized, just as Tony realized Steve'd memorized Bucky's heartbeat when he got all weird when Bucky, supposedly dead, was waiting in the adjacent room.
Bucky looks a little on edge, a little worried. He's been that way since Thursday night, when he found out he unwittingly turned Tony's heart into a bomb. Tony wants Bucky focused on matching Tony rather than being distracted by him though, so he decides Bucky will be his first target. When Bucky's back is to the door, Tony takes a deep breath, lets all the adrenalin coursing through him propel him at superhuman speed through the wide doorway, and launches himself at Bucky, one knee primed to hit his upper back and knock him over.
Steve notices Tony first, seeing as he's facing the Kwoon doors. His eyes widen and suddenly he's smiling, a beautiful, blinding, excited thing that Tony tries very hard not to be distracted by. Through a camera, Tony watches Bucky notice the change and tense in wary suspicion. Steve backs up and opens his mouth to say something.
Tony is inches from slamming into Bucky's back when Bucky suddenly whips around and catches him by the calf and thigh. He can tell Bucky's plan was to use his momentum to hurl the surprise attacker away, but when Bucky sees who it is, he gasps and stumbles mid-movement, and seems to forget to let go. "Doll—?"
Tony grins a little manically and materializes a gauntlet on one hand. "Think fast!" He rockets forward with enough force to knock Bucky backward. Bucky starts falling—
—and Steve steps in, yanking Tony off course and off Bucky, and attacking Tony himself. His eyes are dancing. "You're faster," he observes, doing what seems like his level best to take off Tony's head at the shoulders. When Tony returns fire with his fist, Steve lets the blow glance off his forearm and grins wider. "And stronger."
"Not like you guys," Tony says when they withdraw to eye each other like predators and plan their next attacks. Gleefully, Tony realizes that three days ago that little volley of theirs would have already jacked up his heart rate and shortened his breath. But Tony's heart rate now is only slightly elevated, and he's not even breathing hard. "I should get a handicap," he says anyway. Steve won't agree any more than he did last time, but maybe Tony can con agreement out of Bucky.
Who climbs warily to his feet and studies them both, expression inscrutable. His eyes narrow. And he just… walks off the mat. Heads to the back of the room where his and Steve's belongings are piled on the floor.
Tony's worry that he miscalculated, pushed Bucky the wrong way, is all the distraction Steve needs to rush back in on the offensive.
They're starting to do the thing again, the near-Drift thing: anticipating and reacting to one another's blows and blocks before they even start, dancing around the mat eerily in sync, evenly matched so perfectly it's almost uncanny from the outside looking in.
Then something moves in Tony's periphery. Instinctively, he blocks and dives away.
A staff glances off his momentarily-armored forearm as it streaks right through the spot Tony's head just was.
Steve, the asshole, just takes a casual step back and catches the damn staff that was aimed at him.
Tony wants to lick into his smug pink smirk. Steve really is a punk.
If Tony hadn't been busy wanting to jump Steve for being an effortlessly smoking hot badass, he'd have noticed more quickly that Bucky caught the one aimed at him and is now duel-weilding staffs.
Guess Tony was supposed to keep that second one. No matter. He'll get it back. He springs to his feet outside striking distance of his boyfriends and extends his assessing predator gaze to include Bucky, whose two staffs and extended reach make him the arguably bigger threat.
Bucky's grinning, cocksure and with a hint of the swagger Tony absolutely loves. "Sure you're ready for this, doll?" He twirls both staffs like he was born making hand-eye coordination his bitch, and Tony is glad he has so much more processing power now, because that casual display would've been all he could focus on before.
Well, that and wondering how much trouble they'd be in if he jumped his obnoxiously sexy boyfriends right here in the Kwoon. Tony's got armors and JARVIS, and now Extremis. Between those three assets he could probably keep everyone out of the room and video feeds—Wakandans included.
Luckily, the rest of Tony is still paying careful attention to his surroundings, so even as he's imagining Bucky handling his dick just as deftly as those staffs, he is also mostly focused on the match and easily snarks back, "Sure you're ready to get your ass handed to you by someone who was literally born yesterday?" His grin widens; he knows what's about to happen.
Bucky frowns. "Born ye—?"
Steve lunges at Bucky. Who blocks, yes, but falls back a step to do it. "Head in the game, Buck," Steve taunts.
Bucky jabs the staff not stuck blocking Steve's at his stomach. When Steve dodges, Tony takes the opportunity to slip into his spot and grab what should've been his staff. He twists it away from Bucky, with some extra propulsive power from a strategically placed repulsor boot. Bucky evades the hit, but loses the staff.
Tony jets back a few steps and winks at him.
"Brat," Bucky says with a stomach-swooping amount of affection.
"Jerk," Tony retorts. He's pretty sure he's allowed to say that now.
When Bucky grins at him, Tony grins back.
Their grins widen. "Punk," they say together, and turn on Steve.
After that it gets progressively more amazing. Tony had slipped into that headspace with Steve of anticipating and countering and attacking like both were gliding through the steps of a choreographed dance, but the longer the three of them duck and weave and spin around the mat—and jet, in Tony's case—the more Tony slips into a similar headspace with Bucky. It's uncanny and wonderful, holding and thinking with what feels like two minds in tandem with his own. Staffs change hands; sometimes one of them has two and attacks the unarmed one, and sometimes the person with two tosses one to the unarmed man and they go after the third. The teams shift and break and re-form, eddying like water in a tidepool. Bucky attacks Tony in styles he's unfamiliar with, but somehow Tony still anticipates where to be to evade them, or how to step and twist to use those attacks against one man or the other, or both. Bucky and Steve are wary without seeming to know why in the two seconds before Tony materializes three repulsors along his side and uses them to exeunt stage left faster than their staff and arcing foot can land blows.
No one's scored any hits in the last two minutes.
They're moving together perfectly.
It is abundantly clear they're a Drift-compatible triad. (Suck it, Nicky!)
Still, it's a little boring sticking so close to the ground. Maybe it's time to put on boots and—and—
Oh. Tony's eyes widen minutely as he has an epiphany. He starts to grin. This… Steve vs. Bucky vs. Tony—who is sometimes wearing repulsors in normal and/or crazy places—isn't the highest tier their sparring match can reach.
Iron Avenger can fly. Tony'll be in charge of its flight, yes, but if Steve and Bucky are his co-pilots, they'll be helping him fly too.
"Shit," Bucky says, jumping back instinctively.
"Tony," Steve says, half warning, half wary, backing into a different corner of their default triangular starting position.
"Relax," Tony says, forming the nanites on his back where they can't see. When they're good to go, he says, with a shit-eating smirk, "I'm just trying to give you a leg up." He rises into the air and rockets between them. As he passes, he directs the nanites and the repulsors propelling them from his back to Steve and Bucky's feet. The two men dodge admirably, so Tony lightly shoots them to keep them still; he hadn't actually fired on either before now. The nanites take those precious, stunned milliseconds to slither over Steve and Bucky's bare feet and up their calves before the two can finish rolling to their feet.
Steve glares at him, and his own now-gauntleted feet, with undue suspicion. "A leg up, Tony? Really?"
But meanwhile—slowly, delightedly—Bucky starts rising into the air. He stops when his boots are level with Tony's, a few feet off the ground. "Holy shit," he raves. "Stevie, you seein' this? Fuck! This is awesome, doll!"
"I believe 'brat' is was the word you're looking for," Steve says, supremely unimpressed and tapping his staff in his opposite hand like the kind of dom Tony would gladly get on his knees for.
Tony motions at him with his staff. "C'mon. Up! Our Jaeger flies, honey. You gotta learn sometime."
Steve raises an eyebrow even as he colors prettily at the endearment. He looks balefully between Tony and Bucky's delighted, expectant faces, and finally huffs.
Tony and Bucky know he's capitulated.
A moment later, there's an adorable little furrow between Steve's eyebrows, and Tony is proudly watching him figure out what to do and ascend to join Team Hoverboots.
There's a definite learning curve to flying—but then, Tony had had only rudimentary martial arts training when he first took to the skies, and never flown anything bigger than a backpack-sized remote-control drone. Learning to fly was easier for Rhodey, Carol, and Sam; the military trained them to fight, so they were very aware of their bodies and how they took up space in the world, and they were all also trained pilots, used to seeing and experiencing the world from a cockpit, where vertical is a suggestion and not so much a natural law.
Tony knows W'Kabi knew martial arts and how to pilot that space Bugatti, and Steve and Bucky are PPDC-trained martial artists amazing at piloting Jaegers, so he's pretty sure they'll get the hang of flying quickly enough to make things interesting.
He offers a few tips, a minute demonstration or two since they're fast learners, and, after a few fumbles, Bucky turns to him like he's been airborne all his life and reaches out. "Thanks for the leg up, doll. Gimme a hand?"
Steve groans while Tony laughs and Bucky winks.
"Don't shoot anything," Tony warns as he pulls together a repulsor and enough nanites for a gauntlet. "You burn it, you buy it. Fury's law." He sends the little ball of nanites floating over to Bucky and watches with pleasure as they slide like quicksilver across his palm and between his fingers, the last of them coalescing as they stop their crawl to finish hugging his wrist.
Tony's breath hitches.
Well, hell. Bucky looks really good in fire-engine red.
Steve wants a gauntlet too, so things are more evenly matched, and then he and Bucky practice with those for a minute or two before, by unspoken agreement, the three of them shift back into their sparring triangle. Tony ignores the small crowd of Avengers that continue to gather in the doorway. He needs to pay attention to this match, because he can tell Steve's about to be a little shit.
"Just so I'm clear," Steve says, "you burn it, you buy it, right?"
Tony's eyes widen. "Do not—"
"You sonofa—" starts Bucky.
Neither finish, because Steve fucking shoots them, and then it is on.
Tony's got the advantage of being a seasoned flyer up against two yahoos who've only been flying for ten minutes, but Steve and Bucky are still better at hand-to-hand combat, and the way they tackle flight issues reminds Tony of reading Ender's Game way back when: the moves they're pulling are off-the-wall unexpected, sometimes highly ill-advised, and often earn them a bruise or two, but nevertheless tend to achieve their primary objective.
It gets especially interesting when they gang up on Tony and exchange a Look. It's a mere flick of the eyes, but Tony clocks it and wonders what's about to blow up in his face for the half-second lag it takes him to realize they're moving the repulsors from the heretofore constant positions on their feet and hands. Steve has watched Tony do his Flying Jaeger Bushido, and Bucky had that spontaneous nanorepulsor cannon idea for Iron Avenger, and they both saw him materialize repulsors on his side to blast himself left when they were fighting on the ground, so the knowledge clicks into place just before Bucky's gauntlet starts sliding swiftly and sensuously from his hand up his bare arm to sprawl decadently across his chest—before he fires it, propelling himself away in time for Steve to slip into his vacated position and catch Tony in a sidewinder hard enough that he drops the staff he used to block it and barely evades the booted foot propelling an enhanced knee at his face.
It goes on like that, drifting back and forth and in and out and up and down together, until the last staff's been dropped and they're all breathing hard in their hovering triangle, nanites crawling here and there both to move repulsors and to feint at moving repulsors to trip each other up.
What happens next is Bucky's fault. It was bound to happen, yes, but the switch that flips them from fight to fuck is still all Bucky, 'cause he's a goddamned menace. Tony cannot be held responsible for riding that wave.
Bucky, in his imminent cockteasing wisdom, has figured out Tony likes seeing them both in his tech, which means Steve's caught on too, and Tony knows they know, because they're a bit of a hive mind at the moment.
Bucky's eyes spark, and though his loosening posture is almost imperceptibly different from his mid-air fighting stance, he's suddenly radiating "fuck me" energy from every pore. The asshole moves not one, but two sets of nanites at the same time. One hugs its way up his arm and across his broad shoulder to sprawl across his neck like Tony's hand suddenly wants to, and the other movement is on his leg: a boot liquifies and winds around his calf, tendrils up his inner thigh, and lingers as the section it left behind catches up and surges over it to finger-crawl up Bucky's chest in a very suggestive mess.
The grin on his face is edibly cocky. He's got Steve and Tony on the ropes now and he knows it. The two don't even have to look at each other to know the plan: tackle Bucky, drag him to the ground, and retrace those nanite trails with their fingers and tongues.
Bucky lets them knock him out of the air, and laughs his way to a hard landing on his back.
Steve pulls him into a headlock and traps Bucky's arms with his legs. Bucky titters and writhes, but Tony can tell he's moving more to tantalize than escape, and uses the distraction to recall all their nanites to his RT unit. If his boyfriends are stuck on the ground, they can't fly out of his reach. Luckily, neither even tries to engage him in a battle of wills to control the tiny bots flowing down their bodies to trail up Tony's arms. Could Tony have them float back to him on their repulsors? Yes. Would it be as sexy or require as much groping? No. No, it would not.
The right choice is obvious.
Tony's sliding his hand up Bucky's leg, bridging the distance between himself and his slithering nanites—and also, coincidentally, Bucky's cock—when Nick "Cockblocker" Fury's voice jags through the air like a mirror crack: "Enough!"
For a moment, all three men freeze.
Bucky starts snickering first. He was already laughing, so it comes as little surprise. He's only first by a fraction of a second though, because all three are suddenly giggling slumped across the floor and each other, a little manic, embarrassed, and on edge because goddamn they're all horny as fuck and in the middle of the goddamned Kwoon.
Nick soon darkens their slowly separating pile of limbs. "I suppose you'll be asking for a Drift test now," he says drolly.
Steve pulls himself together first. He's such a choir boy, good god. He clears his throat and sits up, radiating boy-next-door charm, and says, "You suppose correctly. We're down three Jaegers and just had a double event. Seems unwise to keep benching a Mark-5 that can fly."
Tony and Bucky get themselves under control and sit in silent support of Steve while he and Nick stare unblinkingly at each other, two faces that give away nothing housing two intense, stubborn, calculating glares.
At long last, Nick sighs. "Rogers, you are determined to be a thorn in my side, aren't you."
"Not sure I know what you mean, sir," Steve says innocently, while the three of them climb to their feet with such synchronicity it must look like they practiced.
Nick snorts. "Sure you don't. You three: my office, five minutes."