Therapy

“Vanessa says she’s going to beat Wade’s ass when she finds him,” Weasel says, reading off some texts from a group chat he was currently in. Bucky had to wonder if Peter and Vanessa even knew he was there because this was Weasel, breaking into a group chat to lurk sounded like something he would do. “Peter said that that probably won’t made Wade want to stick around but- oh there we go, Vanessa pointed out that Wade loves getting his beat. He’ll stay home. So he just… left?” he asks for the third time.

Weasel was a Grade A bastard and everyone knew it, but in his own weird way he cared about people. Wade was the same way, so he might be a total dick but he’d kill a man for you if you asked him to, and paid him a small fee. He’s considered having Brock killed off but he figured he might feel a little guilty for that, also he wasn’t sure he wanted to confirm Wade killed people for profit even if he’s seen the guy’s Instagram. “Yeah, he left in the dead of the night like some sort of bad television trope,” Bucky tells him, also for the third time. He had no clue where Wade went; he didn’t exactly leave him a freaking scavenger hunt to find him even if Bucky sort of wished he had. That would make this all the easier but sadly Wade, as usual, was being an asshole so finding him wasn’t much possible unless he turned up somewhere with some shame and his panties in hand.

“Great. Now I have to tell Vanessa and Peter I haven’t seen him and they’re going to chew my ass for not throwing a leash on him or something. Jesus, I didn’t think he’d actually take off, it isn’t really like him,” Weasel says, leaning against the dirty counter. Bucky hopes he doesn’t contract an STI or something because that was entirely possible in this establishment.

“He was pretty freaked out, Weasel, he has six months to live. Of course he’d run if he thought he was sparing people from watching that,” Bucky says. It wasn’t what he would do, that sounded terrifying to him, but Wade was also far stronger than he’s ever been so he could probably do all this on his own. He would try some more to talk Wade out of this but he was gone now so that clearly wasn’t an option.

“Yeah, well now we’re all going to have to guess his death date, that’s fucking depressing Bucky. He’s being stupid,” Weasel says with more meaning than Bucky has ever heard him attach to anything really. It shouldn’t surprise him considering Wade is Weasel’s best friend but it does anyways, mostly because Weasel was more known for being an absolute asshole than a caring person. He always wondered how Weasel’s wife took that but he didn’t know much about her despite Weasel talking about her frequently. Probably because he has his fingers in all sorts of illegal businesses and she could easily be used to target Weasel. Wade too, though he didn’t make a good target considering he spent time in the military and he must have had some fucking great training because he’s seen Wade take down an entire bar full of people with nothing but a push pin and a broken bottle. He might actually be able to give Phil a run for his money in the kicking ass department. Weasel himself was much less badass and preferred the running and hiding method of dealing with things. Or the hiding behind Wade method if there was nowhere to hide.

“That’s Wade’s natural state,” he jokes but it falls flat. “Look, I don’t know what to do here, Weasel, he came to me in confidence and I figured he’d stick around long enough that I could have at least pulled a goodbye out of him or something. But he didn’t, instead he ran off to do something dumb because Wade has a bad habit of doing that. He didn’t even tell me he was going to take off,” he says softly. He would have figured since Wade came to him but… Wade probably predicted correctly that Bucky would have tried to talk him out of whatever dumb idea Wade talked himself into.

Weasel heaves out a sigh, “yeah I know. He better fucking send us a post card or something before he croaks or I’m going to be pissed,” Weasel says in an attempt to joke but he sounds genuinely pissed. Personally Bucky could do without the post card because he didn’t really want to know where Wade died, that was kind of morbid.

*

If Tony saw one more fucking headline about his biological orientation he was going to scream. He had business investors pull their investments over this bullshit. Apparently lying wasn’t desirable and they didn’t like it when he listed off all the lies they told him over the last several years, making their statements moot. Discrimination was what this was, flat out, and they didn’t much like when he threw that out there too. Pepper was supportive if confused over the whole thing and Natasha told him that she ran checks on him years ago and figured this out. She had been rather confused at first but she grew to understand that clearly he didn’t work like most people did and she also figured out how not to care about that. It wasn’t like she was normal either, so she simply shrugged and moved on.

What was particularly annoying was that this whole orientation thing was actually overshadowing the fact that Obadiah was being charged with treason and terrorism. That made the business investors pulling shit all the more offensive because they essentially told him terrorism was fine, but feel like your biological orientation doesn’t match up with what you feel? Well, that was so fucked up even terrorism didn’t compare to the unnaturalness of that. In short he was rather disgusted with the whole thing.

The only bonus to this mess was the mass online response in support for him, and even better, a whole slew of people confessing that they felt the same way. Tony wasn’t much used to support like this in his past presence as a famous person or a business guy and most of that was for good reason. He wasn’t a good person and he shouldn’t have had support, even if he never was really comfortable with his public persona. But with this he had a mass influx of Twitter messages, blog posts, and other various online forums discussing him in a mostly positive way.

They were all especially enthused with this morning’s outburst because of course some idiot had to throw out the ‘special snowflake’ argument. Tony had thrown back his head and laughed and pointed out that he’s a genius, a billionaire, famous, and he’s always been flashy; his orientation not matching up with biology was literally the least interesting thing about him. If people wanted to call him a special snowflake because they were too stupid to understand a new concept and insisted that he was wrong instead of their embarrassingly small interpretation of Dom/sub dynamics so be it, but that wasn’t his problem, it was theirs.

So instead of reading the stupid fucking articles that deemed his orientation more important than terrorism he responded to quite a few Twitter messages from people who thought they were the only people who felt that way. To be honest until that moment he sort of thought he was only person who felt that way too, even if he knew that logically that was impossible. There is no way out of nine billion people currently alive, and all those that have lived before, that he was the only one who felt like this. There was simply no way, but if you’ve never met someone who’s like you how the hell were you to know that people like you existed?

Unfortunately he also discovered a whole new brand of discrimination to go along with this. If someone has felt this way before and told someone about it the subject clearly didn’t have a large platform. Outside of small online communities, or maybe some small groups in larger cities, this was never presented as an issue before. But he’s Tony Stark, his name was in the media all the time with his scientific discoveries, his sex life, whatever stunt he pulled his week, he was all over Forbes all the time, and now this was everywhere too. More than one poor sap on Twitter ended up getting fired because of their confession and he was betting a ton of people quit their jobs working for him too. Whatever then, he figured he’d hire whoever got fired if they were close enough to a store. What a great fuck you to a bunch of assholes.

Rhodey, surprisingly, had taken it well. Not that Tony expected him to be unsupportive, but he did have a bad habit of making jokes that only he found funny. Though it was Tony’s fault too, it wasn’t like he said anything to the contrary and Rhodey wasn’t a mind reader, how the hell was he supposed to know his comments hurt Tony’s feelings? All three of them, even. But he was supportive where it mattered anyways, and at first he thought the documents were fake. It helped that in college they had an arrangement of sorts, neither of them had time for a relationship and neither were really interested in one really. But Rhodey didn’t exactly have the money to see a professional Dom about his sub instincts and Tony needed an outlet, boom, if they used each other problem solved. It was free, they were good friends anyways so the trust was there, and a tentative contract was easy enough.

First hand experience apparently made all the difference given Rhodey easily accepted that biology fucked up this time because Tony wasn’t much of a sub. They tried that too, for funsies, and Rhodey spent more time criticizing him than anything. Frankly Tony did what he did any time he was stuck in the position of sub; he acted like an ass because why the hell should he listen? It didn’t help that he had authority issues he should probably deal with. It had been fun to keep people guessing though, so every once and awhile he’d suffer through a scene playing sub. Riley, because Pepper had insisted he go see the guy again, said that probably had a lot of negative effects on his mental health because of the traumas he suffered at the hands of doctors running a million and one experiments trying to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with him.

Howard hadn’t been impressed when everything came back fine and Tony remained insistent that no, he was not a sub thank you. He hadn’t even connected the two until Riley mentioned it but the tests they often involved stuffing him into submissive positions and measuring brain waves and shit. All they got that was that he was angry and yeah, they didn’t even need a test to figure that out. But as much as he didn’t want to admit it Riley had a point when he connected his childhood trauma to his inability to be in any sort of submissive position now. He linked that back to Tony’s issues with authority but Tony was pretty sure that was actually the daddy issues talking there. It certainly affected the way he viewed medical professionals now anyways, he avoided hospitals like the plague and had zero faith in any sort of psychology or psychiatry. He was particularly resistant to taking drugs for any sort of mental health issue.

Riley didn’t push it at least, unlike the last idiot he had been stuck with. That whole experience was made worse by the fact that Agent had discovered he was being paid off by Obi to fuck with Tony’s head. Tony hadn’t exactly been eager for Pepper to stuff him back into therapy after that but she pointed out that Riley came from a source that technically had nothing to do with his previous ‘doctor’. He had been tempted to point out that his idiot doctor sent him to Sam who sent him to Riley but Sam flat out called his doctor an idiot so clearly he didn’t much agree with his practices. So, against his better judgment he slinked back to make another fucking therapy appointment with Riley. When Riley asked him why he was there given that he seemed to have less than no interest in being there he told him about Pepper.

Imagine his surprise when Riley told him to not bother coming back, that therapy wasn’t for anyone but yourself. He was even more surprised when Riley told him to be selfish is he was going to go the therapy route because the person who needed help was him, not everyone else around him. The point was to change his thinking and to help him specifically, not to appease everyone else around him.

*

Sharon is perched on the couch with her tea looking at him intently, “seriously, what’s wrong with him? Does he like… have a bag of his own hair in a shoe box under the bed or something?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him.

Bucky frowns, “who the fuck do you know that has a shoe box of their own hair under their bed? And no, Steve doesn’t have a hair shoe box, what the hell? I think his mom kept a clipping of his hair from his first hair cut but I think he threw it out when she died.” That didn’t stop Sharon from peppering him with about a hundred more new questions that were more questionable than the last.

“Come on, there has to be a reason he’s single that isn’t related to you. Has no one tried to hit on him?” she asks.

“God, everyone who is single or in an open relationship or has shady morals has hit on Steve in our general area. The guy is freakishly obtuse, half the time he thinks they’re just being nice unless they all but throw themselves at him. Then he’s mostly just not interested, to be honest I think he might be demisexual but he doesn’t know it yet. He’s never dated, or had an interest in dating, anyone he wasn’t friends with for at least a few months. You’re an anomaly,” he says. By all means Steve’s strange and tentative relationship with Sharon made no sense according to Steve’s usual dating pattern. Not that he’s dated a huge amount of people but he’s dated enough to have an actual pattern.

She sits back in her seat, “to be honest I don’t think he’s all that interested but he’s difficult to read, which is a weird position for me to be in. Usually I can figure people out in ten minutes or less so this is weird for me. In a weird way I think he’s dating me because of that offhand comment you made when we met and that is just not right,” she says. Bucky snorts because that sounded like Steve, realizing he hurt someone’s feelings and then doing what they wanted him to. The problem here was that that was Sharon because of a stupid comment he made and Steve probably wasn’t even aware of it. “I still think something is off but I can’t figure out what, I mean by all means the guy is perfect. Maybe I’m just having a hard time accepting that someone could possibly even be that good.”

“Are trust issues a spy thing or do you and Phil both just happen to have trust issues?” he asks. Of course Phil hid it better than Sharon, who seemed to be far more blunt with what she meant by her words. He suspected that she tempered her words as much as Phil though, even with her bluntness.

“Wait, you bought the spy thing? No one buys the spy thing; everyone thinks that’s a joke which… you actually know a spy? What’s his name? His real name? Is he even really a he?” she asks, eyes narrowing at him.

“Uhh,” Bucky says for lack of a better response, “pretty sure Phil’s actually a guy but now that I think about it I have no clue what his last name is. He’s never mentioned it, but I mean he calls to Phil so I’m guessing that’s his name. So you make a habit of telling people you’re a spy?” he asks. That was a little weird considering she was actually a spy judging from her reaction to his comment.

“Oh please, he probably calls to a half a dozen different names, that doesn’t matter. And no, I usually give people a whole laundry list of occupations but occasionally it’s fun to tell people you’re a spy and have a good laugh about the improbability of that. The joke’s on them because I actually am a spy and now I’m going to have to kill you because you know,” Sharon says, dead serious.

Bucky eyes her suspiciously, “you’re not serious about that, right? Because I feel like I shouldn’t have to die because I happen to know another spy. Ex spy. Maybe current spy, he’s in an identity crisis right now so talk to me in a month when he figures it out,” he says. To his knowledge Phil was still skirting around Clint, which was going to end terribly because Clint was more perceptive than Phil liked to give him credit for. Plus it was a dick move to not tell Clint about his picking up his old job anyways, however temporary that might have been.

“I probably don’t have the clearance level to do it myself,” Sharon laments and Bucky shifts away from her a bit. “Oh jeeze, I can’t just kill people, Bucky, that’s still illegal even for spies. I can’t believe that spy joke backfired on me; I thought you were joking when you said you knew a spy. Who even knows spies? Well, who knows they know a spy,” she corrects.

“We didn’t at first but I was dating this guy for awhile, and he wasn’t all that great and Phil found out and lost his shit. He beat the hell out of him with a sack of flour; do they teach you that in spy school? Do they have a spy school?” he asks, frowning. How the hell did someone even go about becoming a spy? And how the hell did he know so many spies? He felt like knowing two spies was excessive but then he recently started dating a billionaire and previously dated the scum of the earth. He had a knack for finding the weird and unusual ones.

“Spy school is a thing, that’s all I can say about it. And no, they don’t teach us how to beat people up with sacks of flour but they do teach us to use our environment to our advantage so apparently that was a sack of flour. I kind of want to know this guy, he sounds like fun to hang out with,” she says, grinning. Yeah, Phil would probably like Sharon too. They both did that passive aggressive smile thing when they didn’t like what someone was saying. He wondered if that was a spy thing too, or maybe Phil and Sharon happened to be a lot alike and both were spies. Did spy school have a certain personality type that they went for? Probably.

“You’d get along with him, I think,” Bucky tells her. They could bond over that time Phil beat Brock’s ass with a sack of flour. That was probably the coolest thing Bucky has ever seen, that and Tony’s holograms, because those were legit apparently.

“Mmm, probably, we can bond over spy things. I’m guessing the guy that was here earlier in the week wasn’t your Phil? And he wasn’t your boyfriend either, which makes his presence here without you for three days a little weird, especially when he took off in the middle of the night,” Sharon says, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. Right, she was a spy, of course she would notice things.

“Did you happen to see where he went?” he asks somewhat hopefully.

“‘Fraid not, should I have noticed?” she asks, head tilted to the side.

“No. That was Wade, a friend of mine, he just got diagnosed with terminal cancer and he’s pulling a cat and running away to die somewhere. None of us know where he went, which was probably the point, but we’re worried. And how do you know I’m dating someone?” he asks, clueing in to all of what she said a bit too late.

“Well I’m not an idiot, you don’t need to be a spy to know what those dopey ass faces you make at your phone mean. Besides, you were gone for three days and you weren’t at your closest friend’s house. I gather that you’re on bad terms at the moment but Steve told me you were a creature of habit so I figured a new relationship would explain you breaking habit. You know, the honeymoon phase and all that,” she says, waving her hand around dismissively. “So, dating anyone I know?” she asks, obviously as a joke but she actually probably did know Tony. Well, know of him.

“I don’t make dopey faces at my phone,” he mumbles, “and to be fair my entire life has been pretty uprooted for the last three months so habit had been lost to the wind. And no, probably no one you know,” he lies. She’d have to live under a rock to not know who Tony was but he was unsure of who, if anyone, he was allowed to tell at this point. Security and media and such were kind of issues and he didn’t count Phil because now he knew that Phil knew the guy the whole time and didn’t even say anything. And he looked so surprised when Bucky brought him up too, and not in a ‘oh you met a celebrity’ kind of way either. Asshole.

Sharon gives him a ‘yeah right’ look, “honey, I’d have to live in a cave to not know who Tony Stark is. Nice try though,” she chirps, looking pleased with herself.

“I… what… how?” he stutters out, shocked that she knew.

She uncurls her legs from under herself and sets her tea aside, walking over to his door and pulling his keys out of the dish on the small table sitting there. “This,” she says, holding up a small trinket Tony had attached to his keys before he left, “is meant to cancel out any sort of bugs planted in the immediate vicinity. But more than that this is a very, very specific and highly efficient model that isn’t available to the public. Actually, it isn’t available to most anyone so unless you know Stark personally there’s no way you would have one. Which begs the question of how you know him, and why the hell you would need something to cancel out bugs in your house. But with that whole Obadiah business that makes sense, it’s entirely possible that he knew about your relationship even if no one told him about you, hence the bug detector. Plus his sex life has been surprisingly lacking recently, about as long as you’ve been dating your new guy according to Steve so the timeline matches. Also you left your contract sitting on the counter and no one can miss that signature, it’s very distinctive.”

“All that buildup that was essentially shit because you saw the signature? Really?” he asks.

“What? Can’t a girl enjoy some dramatics once and awhile? Keeps you sharp,” she says in a pleased tone. No, she could not, but she only laughs when Bucky tells her that.

*

Tony pets Bucky’s hair slowly and rhythmically, grounded by the action despite the hectic nature of his life as of late. He missed this, having someone around regularly. He hasn’t had an arrangement like this since Rhodey and that was almost more of a business arrangement to benefit them both, not an actual intimate relationship. Well, not that part of their relationship anyways. In the end it happened to be convenient anyways because there was a whole bunch of shit Tony hadn’t even considered and Rhodey required a ridiculous amount of aftercare, which had always been Tony’s favorite part anyways. It was more intimate, and softer, than the rest. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to him that sensual BDSM was a thing, thanks Howard, but Rhodey had far more experience and no problem directing. Tony was a quick learner and he quickly gathered what he liked best, namely stuff that didn’t hurt much if at all. He had no desire to hurt someone, even if they enjoyed it he didn’t, it reminded him of Howard far too much and it left him feeling sick for days.

“You okay?” Bucky asks, shifting his position to look at Tony. He was currently curled up on his chest, sitting between Tony’s legs. Rhodey used to fall asleep like that all the time and Tony would have to do homework on his head. He was so pissed when he found out by waking up unexpectedly one day to find a notebook on his head. Tony had laughed for like two hours at Rhodey’s indignation and Rhodey refused to let Dom him for like a week, but he gave in when he started getting squirrely.

“I’m fine,” Tony says, offering Bucky a reassuring smile.

“You sure? You were getting kind of tense,” Bucky says. Was he?

“Oh, well I’m alright. Just thinking of college actually,” he says honestly. What a weird time in his life. Everyone else had been so much older, so much more experienced and they expected him to be too, but he was just a kid and he never did get a chance to be one. Rhodey was the only one who ever seemed to remember that he had so much life experience to catch up on and he was the only one with enough patience to allow him to grow. Everyone else rolled their eyes and expected him to get with the program even if it made no sense to expect a fifteen year old to act like someone in their mid-twenties. But by his mid-twenties he had turned Howard’s company into a multi-billion dollar venture, revolutionized the industry every other week since he was twenty, and had more Nobel Prizes than he even knew what to do with. He had more accomplishments than most people would get in a lifetime by the time he was twenty five and it fooled people into thinking that was life experience. It wasn’t and it showed in his behavior.

Bucky snorts, “good old college. I remember those days, all six of them,” he says, snickering.

“Really?” Tony asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, I got there and pretty much decided fuck that and dropped out. My mom was so pissed but hey, the parties were great.” Bucky shakes his head, smiling, “I thought I knew everything then, now I regret dropping out because I literally amounted to nothing. I mean I probably would have ended up in the same place, but I’d be a bum with a degree. That’s like, slightly better.”

“Depends on who you ask. I was such a disappointment to my father and I have seven PhDs, four Masters degrees, and two Bachelors degrees. I also made his company more successful than he ever could, shut down the most profitable section and bounced back in a way that’s literally never been seen before, and I did all that before I was thirty. I mean he wasn’t around to see me wipe the floor with his legacy but still. I have two PhDs, a Bachelors, and a Masters degree by the time he died and he was still mad I didn’t do more. He wasn’t even impressed with JARVIS. JARVIS is still the only semi autonomous AI system in existence and no one has any idea how I did it. Shit, half the things I did before I was twenty were impossible let alone after but Howard would still think I could have done more,” he says bitterly.

Nothing he did was ever good enough; Dummy could make toast for fucks sakes. Everyone else’s robots could barely walk and Dummy could make toast. He built that bot when he was thirteen because he thought it would be cool, he didn’t even try and it was still better than everyone else’s twenty years later. “Plus you’re cute, you can get by on your looks,” Tony says, grinning in an attempt to ignore all that other stuff. From the look on Bucky’s face he didn’t do a good job of it.

“If I may, sir, Howard Stark was an embarrassment and a terrible father and you are far better,” JARVIS tells him, interrupting the conversation.

“See? He’s loyal, how many loyal robots that insult shitty parents do you know?” he asks.

“I actually don’t know any and to be honest I could have done without JARVIS because he’s creepy,” Bucky says.

“You offend me,” JARVIS tells him.

“That doesn’t make you less creepy, Jesus Christ. Anyways, creepy robots and shitty fathers are depressing. And Howard sounds like a grade A bastard, what the fuck was even wrong with him? Didn’t he only have one PhD? Maybe he was just jealous that you were better than him. But whatever, that’s sad and little angering so what were you remembering about college?” Bucky asks, walking into more depressing shit without even knowing about it so Tony laughs.

“Nothing that was less depressing, honestly. It was a weird time in my life, by the time I got my first PhD most people would have been almost done high school. It didn’t exactly make experimenting with things easy but Rhodey had a pretty jam packed schedule, so he used to let me Dom him because neither one of us had another outlet. Anyways, I very quickly discovered I hated pretty much anything related to inflicting a considerable amount of pain, which fucking sucked because that’s pretty much all Rhodey’s into. But the aftercare, which he needed a lot of, I loved that. Soothing him and petting him and whatever, that was nice. I mean I still felt sick for days, and guilty, and I lost more sleep than usual, but I learned a thing or two so that’s nice,” he says. It was knowledge that was nice to acquire, but he never really did have that kind of connection again. Establishing that kind of intimacy with a one night stand was difficult and until very recently he wasn’t even interested. Too much trouble, too many ways it could al go wrong.

God knows he didn’t want to drop some poor sub on their ass after establishing the kind of relationship he wanted, it required an extreme amount of mental involvement and a breakup would be disastrous for everyone. How he ended up in this arrangement with Bucky was… well more of an accident, he wasn’t looking for a relationship he just fell into it. With Bucky it was easy though, natural. Other people weren’t quite that simple.

Bucky frowns at him though, “you probably shouldn’t have done that, Dom drop sucks and pushing yourself doesn’t much make it any better. Why didn’t you safeword out? Or Rhodey, he would have noticed,” Bucky says, but he doesn’t sound judgmental about it like most people would. More like he was concerned and Tony appreciated that, people were so judge-y sometimes and he really could do without.

“One, what the fuck is a Dom drop? And two, we were both young and inexperienced, by the time we even realized something was wrong it was way too late and several years after the arrangement ended. Neither of us, but especially me, had been with enough people to notice that the dynamic was way off and neither of us made much of an effort to do much but talk basics. That was stupid of us both but you can’t really expect people to get it perfect on the first try. Unless they’re you, you’re like a fucking unicorn you’re so perfect, if I didn’t know any better I would have thought I made you specifically to match my tastes.” He couldn’t believe that he found this guy in a support group of all things. Who would have thought therapy had a use after all? It wasn’t the intended one by any means but hey, he’s always been a little weird like that.

“Inexperience sucks because people yell at you for not getting things right the first time. I got that a lot when I was young and I have no clue how that was supposed to help. A simple explanation would do, thanks. And Dom drop is sort of like sub drop in that it usually happens after pretty intense scenes, or if they aren’t into it, or if it just drains them a lot. Apparently it makes you really tired and shaky, or guilty depending on the scene or the pain levels involved, and emotionally exhausted. It can last for a few hours or a few days and whatever after care works for you is what you need but that’s different for everyone so. There isn’t really much talk about it but it’s a thing,” he says. Yeah, so Tony knew because Bucky just listed off his symptoms perfectly. He missed the inability to focus and the lack of sleep, but everyone was different, however Bucky came across that information he might not have found that. Or maybe it was something that was specific to him, that was also possible.

“Oh. Well that would have been useful information years ago when that happened regularly. It doesn’t really happen now but I’ve done a lot of learning since then so I don’t usually find myself in a situation that leaves me feeling like shit later,” he says. He was Googling Dom drop later though, for research purposes. “See? Clearly you were made for me,” he says.

Bucky smiles slowly but the color on his cheeks indicate how much the statement meant to him, “just reiterating information,” he mumbles.

“Important information that I didn’t know about that could be relevant later. Don’t sell yourself short, you’re a lot more impressive than you think you are. I mean I didn’t expect you to be so… easy, honestly. Considering how we met I figured you would have had a lot more trust issues with me- not that I’m complaining or anything. Actually, it’s flattering that we work so well together.” Trust like that in what he would consider a short time was impressive, and given recent events and Bucky’s lack of running for the fucking hills like he maybe should that trust translated to some level of loyalty too. That was almost more flattering considering he now had a very real and very frightening idea of how dangerous it could be to date him. But Bucky hadn’t even flinched, he had been understandably stressed sure, but he didn’t even look like he had even considered leaving. Most people would have run screaming for the hills, Tony included.

“And if I’m not always so easy?” Bucky asks softly, worried.

“So you’ll have a bad day, even unicorns have bad days Bucky. I know at some point something’s got to give because things can’t run smoothly all the time, that’s just how things work. Just because I expected to deal with some of those issues sooner rather than later doesn’t mean that I think it’ll never happen. When you have a bad day we’ll deal with it, no big deal,” he says. It was something everyone should be prepared to deal with, Doms and subs couldn’t be perfect one hundred percent of the time, that was impossible. Sooner or later one of them would do something to irk the other or drop or whatever and they would deal with it then.

“Oh,” Bucky says softly, “well usually I’m pretty difficult so fair warning, apparently you’re a unicorn too.” Tony grins, laughing softly at that and hugging Bucky a bit tighter before going back to petting his hair.