Chapter Text
“He’s adorable. Like a feral kitten. However did you get him to follow you home?”
Steve did not even bother dignifying that with a response, and “Tony,” Natasha said, like droll warning.
“I can’t take you seriously either. You look like you rolled out of a hipster’s closet.”
She glanced over at Tony with her blankly innocent Natasha look and said, “What can I say. I’m, how would you put it, hip to the trends.”
“My God, no.”
Meanwhile, Bucky was prowling the perimeters of the empty flat. He looked down at the view of Manhattan, and then said, “I don’t like it.”
“I already told you,” Tony said, “Pepper has an interior designer already picked out for your personal consultation, it won’t even look the same furnished—”
“We’re too high up,” Bucky said, flatly.
Then Bucky went round and, well, he didn’t cling to Steve’s side, but he was hanging around very closely in the vicinity of it, standing between him and Sam. He was like a vaguely skittish but quite potentially lethal shadow. He stood very straight with his hands hanging loosely, and said, “In the scenario of an attack, we’re too high up for an effective exit strategy. I doubt even Steve would survive a fall from up here.”
Tony frowned at Bucky as he said, “This tower has stairs and a second emergency elevator with reinforced construction and it’s own back-up power source. I’ve got a suit that stays with the tower, again for emergencies, that JARVIS has protocols for using in the case of an attack. The suit should get you out safely. I’ll even give you the access code for that one, personally, since I can tell that would make you feel better. That’s assuming antagonistic forces even get up this far. We have state of the art security all through the tower. Not to mention, half the time we’ve got the Hulk living just downstairs. I mean, Dr. Banner is abroad a lot of the time, being a do-gooder or whatever he’s doing, but this tower is his home base in the United States, pretty much.”
“You sound like a very lonely individual trying to get people to come and stay at your house,” Natasha remarked.
Steve actually laughed at that, Sam was smiling too, and Tony said, with exaggerated hurt, “You wound me. That’s cold, darling, truly it is. I won’t even mention that there’s a floor for you too, if you want it.”
“I prefer my living arrangements to have, shall we say, more anonymity.”
“And the flat with a view of Central Park isn’t going anywhere, all the same.”
Meanwhile, Steve was looking over at Sam inquiringly and Sam shrugged. “Hey, it’s up to you, man. This is where you and Bucky are potentially staying, not me.”
“I think… this is a lot of space,” Steve said slowly. “Too much space. This front room and kitchen is bigger than my whole last apartment.”
“When are you going to start living, Captain Frugality?” Tony wanted to know. “You save the world, and yet you chose to live in a broom closet. Not anymore, Steve. Here we have style and security and, hey, it’s not even going to cost you a penny. Think of it as appreciation for, I don’t know, battling evil and saving the world at least three times and being so wholesome the rest of us want to chuck you out of a window.”
“Tony, we don’t want to accept charity—”
“Speaking of which, I’d even suggest you spend the difference on charity. Be more of an intolerable do-gooder, I won’t hold it against you.”
“We haven’t even decided if we want to stay yet,” Steve said, but more gently now. “I think we should take a few days.”
Tony pulled out his phone and started texting something into it, like he was ignoring Steve. “I’ll have Pepper’s interior designer come by in an hour. You and Bucky over there can consult with her and we’ll have the place furnished by the end of tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to give you kids the star treatment at my bar. That would be back upstairs, so chop chop.”
Bucky lingered, looking round at the empty room and at the glass of the windows, and Steve put his hand to Bucky’s shoulder. Tony said, watching them, “Look. I’m not trying to be pushy. I’m sorry if that’s how I come off, it’s just the way I am. But I’m only offering a place like this because I know the feeling, like being a moving target. Or to know that your loved ones can be targets too. Me: I was stupid enough to announce that I was, in fact, Iron Man. You two: well, aside from Steve being Captain America, we all know that there’s always the possibility that Hydra could come after Bucky again. If it were me, I’d prefer to simply not make it easy for them.”
“Your floor looks like a castle,” Bucky remarked.
Tony looked over at Bucky in way that was somewhere between inquisitive and accessing, and Bucky said, “Your floor: with the stone and the metal and the glass. It looks like a castle. Or a stronghold.”
“I knew you were a smarty-pants,” Tony said. “The flooring itself’s not actually stone—just looks like it, but Pepper can go comfortable barefoot on the stuff—but yeah, it’s nice, isn’t it?”
“You boys coming?” Natasha asked from the elevator. “Sam’s dying of thirst over here.”
“I never said anything,” Sam said.
“I’ll show you the R&D floors later,” Tony said to Bucky. “We’ll see if we can get you set up with a project, or whatever, or maybe your first project can be to design some kind of emergency flight kit since you’re so concerned, now wouldn’t that be swell.”
“Tony,” and it was Steve, that time.
“Shutting up now, shutting up,” Tony said, and stepped into the elevator.