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Okay, so the thing is, Bucky and Steve are like that couple that you see in movies but don’t actually believe exist. They’re the kind of sickeningly sweet that has you making faces in public and considering making OKCupid profiles in private. Not that Tony ever would. Make an OKCupid profile, he means. Hah. Yeah. That is definitely a thing he would never ever do. More than once, anyway.
The other thing is, Tony has never been able to talk, at least not out loud. It’s, you know, the ‘nonverbal’ part of being a nonverbal autistic. He types for most people and signs for friends—Pep, Rhodey, Clint, obviously, and Natasha, if they count as friends. (They do.) Steve started learning after he found out. He smiles with heartbreaking sincerity when Tony comes to him in a rage, as angry as his text-to-voice program allows him to sound, saying he doesn’t need Steve’s pity, and Steve just says simply that he thought it might be a good way to get to know Tony better. Tony doesn’t know what to say after that, in text or sign, so he just leaves and works his feelings away like he always does. They never bring it up again, but Steve responds to Tony’s bleary signs in the morning for coffee, and sometimes he interjects in Clint and Tony’s silent conversations, and eventually Tony feels comfortable enough to sign to Steve when it’s just the two of them. So. Captain America is his friend too, he supposes. And, he amends, Bruce, who doesn’t know sign but does know science, and when they’re in the lab on a 27-hour science kick they don’t need to talk much anyway.
Bucky shows up a while later, disheveled and distant and with a bashed-up arm. Tony doesn’t say anything when Steve crashes into Tony’s workshop and into Bucky’s (now functional) arms, and he doesn’t say anything when Bucky turns to Tony and speaks for the first time in a voice rough with disuse, “Thanks for fixing me up, doc,” and he doesn’t say anything when they go up to Steve’s room together and leave him behind.
Because here’s the last thing, and that’s that Tony is Bucky and Steve’s soulmate. Curled around his left bicep in neat cursive writing is “Mr. Stark” and around his right in a much messier scrawl is “Thanks for fixing me up, doc”. And they turned black when they spoke, which is how that works when you meet the right one, so. No questions there. But there also aren’t any questions that Bucky and Steve are perfectly happy without him. They don’t even know he’s theirs. No voice, no words. He’s not going to crash their party by suggesting, hey, I know it was illegal for you guys to be together in the 40’s, but it’s 2016 now, baby, wanna throw some polyamory into the mix? And also your third is an autistic jerk with the social skills of a particularly socially-challenged aardvark, a tendency to hyperfocus on engineering and not on relationships, a checkered past a mile wide, and a reputation even wider. Oh, and you guys were my special interest when I was younger. That’d go over just swell, to borrow Steve’s vernacular. He’s not going to risk it.
So he doesn’t talk about it, and he’s fine. Like, they were hot, and nice, and pretty much everything the stories he obsessed over as a kid said they would be, but he didn’t have feelings for them or anything messy like that, so it was fine. He’d be fine.
That logic worked perfectly well until, of course, he developed feelings for them.