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“Context matters,” Tony said, watching as some poor sap tried, hard and unsuccessfully, to pick Natasha up. “It doesn’t matter that she’s famous. It doesn’t matter that we’re famous. She’s out of context here, and so he doesn’t recognize her.”
Bucky knew that, he did. He wasn’t a spy, he’d never been a spy -- being a spy involved a lot more initiative than the Winter Soldier ever had -- but he had trained some of the Red Room girls and he knew the basics. The later Winter Soldiers, they’d been spies. But they also hadn’t needed Bucky’s decades of conditioning in order to work for Hydra. They’d volunteered.
“Still, all three of us, in a bar where we saved the city not eight hours ago,” Bucky muttered. He didn’t want fame, not really. But since he had it… not being recognized was freaking him out, just a little. He kept waiting for the shoe to drop. It was one thing to wear a baseball cap and gloves in fucking Romania when no one was looking for him, and be one with the public. It was another thing entirely to be both one of the saviors who’d defeated the mad Titan, and be dating both Tony and Natasha, and be completely unremarkable.
Tony, he would have thought, would have been even more recognizable than Nat, but it turned out that when Tony wasn’t trying to get people’s attention, he blended into the background even better than a spy.
“But if someone recognized us, then we wouldn’t have this amazing display to watch,” Tony pointed out, grinning. The hopeful candidate at the bar was leaning in closer to Natasha now. “Watch,” Tony said. “Any second, he’s going to say something earnest and heartfelt and put a hand on her shoulder.”
“I hate the sex kitten routine,” Bucky said. He loved Nat -- both of his partners, in fact -- because they were competent. And lethal. The fact that they were also, completely unbiased on his part, the most fucking gorgeous people on the planet, well, that was just bonus.
Sure enough, there went the hand on Nat’s shoulder, and she practically smouldered at the guy. Bucky tightened his grip on the bottle of not-entirely-terrible microbrew, feeling the pressure warnings in his metal hand ping as he got close to reaching the structural integrity of the glass.
“Except when she’s using it on you,” Tony pointed out, smirking. “Any minute now, she’s going to get tired of toying with her food and throw him across the bar. Or stab him.” He pressed his leg up against Bucky’s under the table, though, a comforting counter-pressure.
Bucky watched her, then mimicked her voice, a trick he’d learned probably under Hydra, but honestly, he couldn’t remember. His mimicry was terrifying, he’d been told. Mostly, these days, he used it to get Sam in the suds, but he wasn’t above stretching his comedic routine.
“I don’t think I could ever stab someone. I mean, let’s be honest. I can barely get the straw in the Capri Sun,” he said, pretending to be Nat, complete with fluttering eyelashes, involuntary blush on his cheeks, and the way his gaze flickered from Tony’s face to the table. He traced a little circle on the tabletop in the condensation from his drink.
Tony cracked up laughing, loud enough that several other people in the bar turned to look. But still, none of them twigged to who they were. Just a couple of bros getting a brew on their way home from work.
Once he’d stopped chortling, Tony glanced back over his shoulder at the bar, then drank the last swallow from his own beer, bared throat working as he tipped the bottle back. He set it down with a satisfied sigh. “Come on,” he told Bucky. “Time for a fresh round. Want to completely ruin the guy’s evening while we wait for the bartender?”
Bucky almost said no. He still wasn’t used to making a scene just to make one, but then he noticed the guy’s hand had moved down Nat’s arm, fingers coming precariously close to the swell of her breast, and ended up resting on her thigh.
Bucky pushed back from the table and got to his feet. “Oh, hell yes.”