Work Text:
It was late at night when Bucky returned home. He's been on this mission for the last two weeks and all he wanted was to crawl into bed with his with boyfriends.
But when he entered the bedroom on their shared floor the bed was empty.
That wasn't the sight that he was hoping for. So he asked Jarvis if both of them were still in the building and the answer was affirmative.
Bucky didn't need to ask where exactly they were. He knew his boys to good for that. So after taking a quick shower to wash the dirt and stress from the mission of off him, he went to get them to bed.
First, he went to the gym to get Steve, so the other super soldier could take a shower while he retrieved Tony out of the workshop.
The sound of fists hitting a punching bag greeted him as soon as he exited the elevator. When he entered the gym he saw Steve taking out his frustration and worries on the punching bag. Bucky knew he had to be doing this for a while already because Steve hadn't reacted to the other person in the gym yet.
It didn't happen often that one of them didn't notice a person entering a room as soon as the elevator was two or three floors away from the floor they were on. So Steve had to be very worried.
Because otherwise he and Tony would be in bed or on the couch on their floor cuddling and watching a movie, trying to distract each other from the worries that came with one of them being away on a mission for an indefinite amount of time.
I theory Bucky was supposed to be back three days ago. It was a mission with complete radio silence, so naturally Steve and Tony were out of their minds with worry.
Now the next difficulty was to get Steve to notice him without risking Steve punching him because he didn't notice that the new person in the room was not the enemy but in fact his husband that he had missed terribly for the last two weeks.
So he Bucky asked Jarvis to play their song in the usual way.
The usual way meant that he started off silent and turned the music louder over time so that Steve could get aware of it slowly and come out of his haze on his own time.
Halfway to the song, Bucky began to notice little slip-ups in Steve's routine. He started to get aware of the world beyond his head and the punching bag.
Near the end, Steve's punches came slower and slower till he stopped altogether and let his hands sink to his sides. "Bucky?" he asked and his voice sounded so small and unsure that Bucky wanted to wrap him into a blanket and to protect him from the world and never let him go again.
And that was exactly what he was going to do. At least the first part because he was pretty sure it was against the law to keep Captain America from helping the people. He couldn't help but grin at his own thought. Tony made this joke to many times to count.
But before he could get lost in his thoughts about Tony he pulled Steve into what would be a rib-cracking hug if they weren't both super soldiers.
"I've missed you so much." murmured Steve into his neck. "So much."
Bucky didn't bother responding. He just pulled Steve into the first kiss for two weeks. When they pulled apart Steve's cheeks were wet.
Buck took Steve's face into his head and wiped the escaping tear away with his thumb.
"I'm here punk. I'm ok. Nothing happened."
They stood embraced amid the destroyed punching bags till Steve was calmer and his tears had tried. When they looked into each other's eyes again Steve spotted the first smile since Bucky left two weeks ago. First mission accomplished.
"How about you go upstairs and take a shower while I go to the workshop and get Tony?" Bucky whispered while he pressed his forehead against Steve's. "Because you really stink." At that, Steve let out a short laugh, pressed another quick kiss on Bucky's lips and left the gym to go upstairs.
When Steve was gone Bucky took a deep breath to mentally ready himself for the next part.
While Steve went to the gym to destroy countless punching bags when he had to deal with feelings he didn't particularly want to deal with, Tony went to the workshop and didn't come out for a while.
The length of his workshop binges always depended on the nature of the feeling. When Tony first realized that he had romantic feelings for Steve while being in a relationship with Bucky he didn't come out of the workshop for a week and a half.
It wouldn't have been that much of a problem if he were in his workshop in the tower. But he wasn't. He left New York to avoid any and all reminders of his failure as the perfect boyfriend-that-Bucky-deserved-and-he definitely-wasn't.
The next problem was that nobody really knew where Tony went. He wasn't in the Avengers compound upstate. That was the first place they checked when they realized that Tony left the tower without telling at least one person where he would go.
The only other place where the rest of the team thought he would most likely be was the mansion in Malibu. The problem with that was that no one knew the new location after the Mandarin-incident. No one except Rhodey who, at that time, was on a top-secret mission with the air-force so they had to wait till he got back from wherever he was.
In the end, they found him in Malibu where he was on the brink of collapsing because he forgot to stock food in the kitchen and he eventually ran out of energy bars to eat. And Tony being Tony he didn't want to order any food to the house because he didn't want anybody except Rhodey to know where the new mansion was.
That didn't really work in the end because Rhodey told the Avengers, the Avengers got him, took him home, Bruce ordered him on bed rest for a few days and Bucky clarified that he already had a suspicion about why Tony suddenly left after Steve entered the kitchen one morning still in his workout clothes.
So they talked, had a fight about Tony's self-worth-issues, made up talked again, found an agreement, talked to Steve and, over time, established the rules of their new relationship.
And surprisingly it worked.
To be honest it only surprised Tony, because he thought Steve and Bucky would eventually realize that they didn't need Tony to be happy.
But both super soldiers proofed Tony wrong time and time again and they continued their relationship without any major fights.
Till the day that Fury announced that Bucky would have to go on an undercover mission with Natasha for a week. Obviously Steve and Tony didn't want to let Bucky go. Bucky didn't particularly want to go on this mission, but he said he owed it to Fury after everything he had done for them.
To that Tony angrily answered that that was the only reason that Fury helped them in the first place: so that they owed him something. They all knew that Tony was probably right. At least partly. Fury did things for them every now and again just because he liked them.
But not this time. Because it was a hell of a lot of work and Fury had to use a lot of his favors.
This argument continued for another day but in the end, Steve and Tony, begrudgingly, had to agree with Bucky that they owed it to Fury. Tony didn't want to admit it but Fury proofed to be a great help when they were trying to get rid of the things Hydra put in Bucky's head.
But one week turned into two and not even Fury knew something and Steve and especially Tony got more worried about the minute. In the end, nothing happened except for a few scratches but Tony didn't know that yet.
So Bucky made his way upstairs to the workshop to change that, so they could cuddle in bed and eat take-out while watching some crappy movie.
When he arrived in front of the entrance the windows were on blackout and the door was unsurprisingly looked. It was normal for Tony that he would rather wallow in his despair alone, then talk to someone about it.
"Jarvis, what are the chances of you opening those doors for me?" If it was really bad tony would have disabled all the protocols that would allow Bucky to open the door without breaking them down. But the doors swished open without a problem, so there was still some hope left.
When Bucky entered the workshop the first thing he noticed was that the smell of alcohol was absent. Even if Bucky had been away for two weeks without any word on his wellbeing, Tony managed to stay sober and not turn back to alcohol to drown his problems.
The next thing he noticed was how Tony sat slumped over his desk sleeping. Which meant he had been in the workshop for the last two weeks, only running on coffee, energy-bars and no sleep at all.
Waking Tony was a bit easier, then getting Steve to notice someone when he was taking out his frustration on a punching bag.
Bucky just walked up to the desk-chair and started stroking trough Tony's hair for a few moments till Tony started to squirm a bit in his chair. He raised his head, looked around him, seemingly searching for the reason he woke up.
When he noticed Bucky he stopped moving altogether, blinked a few times before he jumped up and threw his arms around Bucky's neck and locked his legs around his hip. "You're back, you're back, you're back!" Bucky could only nod into Tony's neck, to happy that Tony was still here and didn't do anything drastic.
Well, apart from locking himself in his workshop for two weeks without coming out to eat, but in their lives, that was kind of normal.
Just as with Steve before, Tony and Bucky stood in the middle in the workshop, embracing and crying silent tears into each other's neck, before they shared their first kiss in two weeks, which turned out to be a bit more desperate then the both of them had anticipated.
When they parted again, Tony looked at Bucky like he would look at an equation he was trying to solve. "Any injuries?" Bucky just shook his head. The few scratches he had endured during the mission had already healed again thanks to the super-soldier serum. So there was no use telling Tony about them. He would just worry over something that hadn't even bothered Bucky in the first place.
"You ready to come upstairs to bed? Eat something, watch a movie, cuddle?" he asked instead and Tony only nodded enthusiastically and smiled one of his sweet smiles at him that he only did, when he was really tired.
And so Bucky carried Tony to the bedroom where Steve already waited for them in bed with comfy clothes, a movie ready to start on the TV and more takeout then any of them could ever eat.
As soon as the pair of brunettes entered the bedroom Tony let go of Bucky, ran across the room and jumped onto Steve and started kissing him all over the face. "I'm so, so sorry, honey. I should have been there for you." But Steve only shook his head. "I could say the same. You're not the only one who ignored the other one in favor of dealing with their feelings on their own, instead of talking to each other."
Bucky just smiled at the exchange from his place at the door. They were both idiots, but they were his idiots and he wouldn't want it any other way.
When Steve and Tony let go of each other, they all piled into bed, eating takeout and watching crappy movies, till Tony and Steve's exhaustion won the battle against the will to stay awake. Bucky just smiled to himself, tidied up the takeout boxes and cuddled up behind Tony with Steve on the other side.
"I love you," he whispered before he fell asleep himself.