Chapter Text
“I’ll be honest with you, Tony,” Bucky says as they’re driving away, “I didn’t exactly expect to be taking on a mate right now, so, I ain’t set up properly to have an omega in the house. I was thinkin’ we could stop and eat somewhere on the way home, since I ain’t got a lot in the fridge to choose from.”
“Ok.”
“Is there anywhere in particular you’d like to go?” Bucky asks him, looking at Tony out of the corner of his eye.
“Anywhere’s fine,” Tony says, keeping his head down. He still looks like he’s in shock, but that he’s maybe, possibly trying to keep up hope. Bucky doesn’t begrudge him his hesitance.
“How about Applebee’s, then?”
“Do they have a dress code?” Tony asks, fiddling with the seam of his jeans.
“Nah, they ain’t that kind of restaurant.”
“Um, in the interest of full disclosure, I, uh, kind of have trouble keeping things down sometimes,” Tony says, “I’m pretty high strung, so, sometimes I just throw up for no reason,” he says nervously.
Bucky takes a steadying breath, knowing that if his scent turns angry right now, it will only upset Tony, because he won’t understand that Bucky’s not angry at him.
“That’s bullshit,” Bucky says while merging to get onto the freeway, “I’m sorry, Tony, but it is. That’s not bein’ ‘high strung’, that’s a classic symptom of bein’ in prolonged distress.”
“I’m not in distress,” Tony says immediately, but then hunches in on himself like he thinks he shouldn’t have spoken, let alone contradicted Bucky.
“Ok, I need to make sure you understand somethin’, Tony,” Bucky says, keeping his voice soothing and calm, “I know you ain’t got no reason to believe me yet, but I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hit you, or grab you so hard it leaves bruises, none of that. You are in distress, Tony, anyone could see it. You’re too skinny, your skin looks like sandpaper, and you’ve got patches of hair that are so thin they’re almost bald spots. They’re supposed to take away omegas in your condition from alphas, even though it don’t happen nearly as often as it should…”
“Why’d you take me then, if I’m in such horrible shape?” Tony asks, his scent going sad and sour and fearful.
“Because I couldn’t just leave you with that asshole,” Bucky says, keeping his eyes on the road even though he wishes he could see Tony’s face more steadily, not just in sideways glances.
“But why? Why would you care?” Tony asks.
“Because. … Because my Dad put up a sign in the office of the shop when he first opened it. It says, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,’ and I’ve been lookin’ at it pretty much every day of my life, and tryin’ to do what I can. I’m just a mechanic from Brooklyn, I can’t change the world, Tony. But when I saw him draggin’ you down those stairs, I knew I could save you. That’s why,” Bucky tells him, getting a little emotional at the injustice of it all.
Tony is in tears by the time Bucky’s done, but he doesn’t smell scared anymore.
“You do realize you’re in distress, right, Tony? In all honesty?” Bucky asks him gently, finally getting off the freeway when their exit comes up. He isn’t sure what he’ll do if Howard fucked Tony up that badly in the head, as well as with his physical condition, if he truly, legitimately doesn’t understand that he’s in distress…
Tony rubs his hand over a red, irritated patch of dry skin on the back of his wrist.
“I know.”
“Ok. That’s a starting point, at least,” Bucky sighs.
“What are you going to do?” Tony asks him, still hesitant.
“I’m going to take you out for a nice meal, that’s what. And tomorrow we’ll go get the things we need for takin’ proper care of an omega. For right now, we’ll just take it one day at a time, ok? We’ll get you some chicken strips or somethin’, if you have trouble with keeping things down. Somethin’ nice and mild,” Bucky assures him.
“Can I have ranch?’ Tony asks quietly, biting his lip afterward.
“Of course you can.”
“What about a milkshake?”
“Sure, no problem.”
“What about ribs?”
Bucky smiles, seeing exactly how Tony’s testing him. He reaches over real easy and takes Tony’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Whatever you want, Tony.”
“Oh. Ok,” Tony says, still disbelieving.
Bucky keeps holding his hand until they get to the restaurant. Dinner goes over well, with Tony managing to keep his food down. He doesn’t eat very much in general, but that’s ok, Bucky is fully prepared to start with baby steps. The waitress gives Bucky a sideways look, but she doesn’t know he isn’t the one who brought Tony down this low. When they leave the restaurant, he pulls Tony into a hug before they get into the car.
“You did great at dinner,” he says, placing a kiss on the top of Tony’s head. All omegas need praise and affection, plus a big dose of physical contact, to stay healthy. Poor Tony looks like he doesn’t know what to do with it when Bucky gives it. But he’ll get used to it, Bucky will make sure of that.
It’s still a bit of a drive back to Bucky’s place from the restaurant. They listen to the radio while Bucky drives and Tony looks out the window. When Bucky finally parks in front of the shop, he waves at the building and says, “Well, this is us.”
Tony nods, getting out on his own without any prompting from Bucky.
“It could use a coat of paint, but the structure’s sound,” Bucky says kind of apologetically, because he’ll admit he’s let things go a little bit in the last couple years.
“You live in the shop?” Tony asks.
“Nah, above it. It was my parent’s place, and when they passed away, well, it came to me, bein’ their only biological child…” Bucky explains, getting Tony’s suitcase out of the back and taking him to the family entrance around the side.
“An only child and an alpha,” Tony adds quietly, but he winces afterward, like he expects Bucky to be offended.
“Yeah… Although, there’s a resolution on the House floor right now, to change inheritance laws so that omegas can inherit,” Bucky says.
Tony gives him a look like he’s surprised Bucky knows that.
“There is. It’ll never pass, but it did get there,” Tony answers.
“You never know…” Bucky says, trying to keep a positive attitude as they climb the stairs to the upper rooms.
Tony just shrugs as he climbs with him.
Upstairs is a three bedroom apartment, albeit a small one, though Bucky never had any hope of using all the space on his own.
“Here’s the living room, and there’s the kitchen, and there’s a bathroom down that hall. This is the room I grew up in, the other was Ma’s sewin’ room off and on... I moved into the master a few years after they’d been gone, and I didn’t really have any use for either of these, so now they’re just sittin’ empty. So if you wanted a room for somethin’ you could use one of them,” Bucky says, not really sure what Tony’s interested in or what his hobbies are.
Tony nods, a skeptical look on his face.
“And the other you’ll save for a baby’s room?...”
“Let’s get you good and healthy for a while, then we’ll see,” Bucky says casually, not wanting to possibly insult Tony, “If kids are somethin’ you want, we can look into it, down the road…”
“But not right away, at least,” Tony says, as if looking for confirmation.
“Honestly, I think carryin’ a baby would probably be dangerous for you right now, Tony.”
“Probably, yeah, um, I agree,” Tony says, letting out a breath.
Bucky pulls him into a hug, just holding him for a minute. “I told you, I’m not going to hurt you,” he reiterates, “And that includes getting you pregnant when you ain’t strong enough for it.”
Tony nods in his arms, not making any move to pull away. “I’m assuming we’re still doing the whole ‘legal mating’ thing, though…”
Bucky blushes a little. “Well, I should probably read through that contract I signed word for word to make sure, but, uh, yeah, that’s usually required.”
They break apart to head back out to the living room, where Bucky picks up his copy of the contract.
“Would you mind if I showered, while you do that? I didn’t know any of this was going to be happening today…” Tony asks, running his fingers nervously through his hair.
“Of course. There’s a bathroom in the master, which, I was going to show it to you anyway too, so...” Bucky trails off a little, leading him to the bedroom on the other end of the house. “This is where we’ll sleep,” he says, showing Tony the king sized bed, “Bathroom’s right there. Oh, I’ll clean out part of the closet for you too, my stuff’s just kind of spread throughout it right now…” Bucky adds.
Tony takes in every detail he can in the quick run through he gets, noticing a few stray socks laying on the floor, and an old bowl of cereal sitting on the dresser, but aside from that, things are pretty clean, just like the rest of the house. There aren’t a bunch of used condoms in the trash or sex toys sitting out, so that’s a good sign too. And there are no empty bottles of alcohol rolling around, that’s probably the biggest thing Tony’s happy not to see. Not that it’s a sure fire guarantee, but it at least gives him hope. You can bet he noticed that Bucky didn’t order any alcohol with their dinner either.
“I guess you’ll have to use my shampoo and stuff for tonight, we’ll get you your own tomorrow,” Bucky promises as he gets Tony a fresh washcloth and towel.
“I’ll need my suitcase...” Tony points out, making a move to step around Bucky to go get it.
“I’ll get it for you,” Bucky says, giving him a reassuring smile. Then he leaves Tony alone to go fetch it.
Tony knows it won’t take hardly any amount of time for him to come back, so he pushes down his burning desire to snoop around more. This man now controls every single aspect of Tony’s life. He’d like to know as much about him as quickly as possible, just out of pure self-preservation.
“Here, I’ll set it on the bed so you can look through things. It sounded like you didn’t even get a chance to pick what you wanted to bring,” Bucky says, setting it down. It’s a large, expensive piece of luggage, hopefully the maid was able to fit a good selection of Tony’s things in it.
“Thanks. Yeah, I’ll just grab some clothes right now,” Tony indicates.
“I’ll be in the living room, reading through the legal stuff, if you need me,” Bucky says, “Feel free to poke around if you need to,” he adds, “My Dad always told this story about how my Ma went through every single box, cupboard, and drawer in the house after they got mated, I guess it’s like an instinct thing… Anyway, I don’t mind. What’s mine is yours, now,” Bucky says, giving him an encouraging smile.
Tony tears up a little, because it’s a display of trust he wasn’t expecting at all.
“I’ll come out when I’m done, then,” he agrees.
Bucky gives him a hug before he goes. And he shuts the bedroom door behind him. Tony stares in wonder at the closed door for a moment, then shakes himself and turns to open his suitcase.
The first thing he sees when he opens it is his diploma from M.I.T. laying right on top. Tony can’t help it, he starts crying outright when he sees it nestled safely in his M.I.T. sweatshirt. God, he was such an idiot to believe that his father would ever see him as more than just an omega. He probably only let him go to school because it meant he wouldn’t be around at the mansion. Tony hugs the framed document to his chest for a moment, silently thanking Anna for her thoughtfulness.
He also pulls out a six pack of the meal supplement shakes that Jarvis would try to get him to drink when his stomach got so bad that it couldn’t handle solid food. And buried deep inside the toe of a sock as Tony’s digging through the clothes, he finds a foil packet of pills hastily labeled with a sharpie.
Take 1 each morning for 2 days after an accident.
The peel off paper on the backside labels the drug as levonorgestrel.
Tony’s eyes widen, and he shoves them back into the sock quickly, because what Anna’s done is illegal, at least in the state of New York still. If Bucky can be believed, he won’t be needing a plan b, but it’s far too early to just be trusting the strange alpha outright. There are three more socks with the same packets hidden in them, enough to last Tony a whole year of heats if need be.
He leaves everything in the suitcase, just pulling out the clothes he needs to change into, and hoping he’ll have a chance to put things away discreetly later once Bucky’s made some space for him. The whole house is kind of sparse to begin with, so Tony can’t imagine he has that much to move around…
Since he was practically invited to, Tony does snoop around a little, but he doesn’t find anything alarming. There’s a pack of open condoms in the bedside drawer and a bottle of lube that’s half empty. The other side looks like kind of a catch all junk drawer, which Tony supposes will be his now… Bucky isn’t hiding anything in his sock drawer, unless you count a pair of silk boxers that have red lipstick kisses printed all over them. Hopefully those were a gag gift.
The bathroom is just as minimalist as the rest of the house, with a blue rug in front of the tub to keep from slipping, and one hand towel that’s seen better days. In the medicine cabinet, there’s an old prescription for prozac that expired six years ago without a single pill being taken from it. Tony knows, because he gets curious and counts them.
Finally, he decides he better actually get in the shower. While he’s washing up, he thinks about the fact that while Bucky’s definitely older than him, he can’t be past his mid 20’s, so his parents must have died awfully young. And it sounds like they both died at the same time, from the way Bucky talked about it. So it must have been an accident or that they had a really strong bond... Almost all prescription medicines “expire” a year after they’re filled, so Tony would guess that whatever it was happened seven years ago or more.
Thinking about that kind of stuff only distracts him for so long though. His instincts are at war with each other, the natural omega one to want to please his new alpha, and his trained one to want to cower and hide from a new alpha. Tony’s been to college, he’s learned a lot of things that Howard would never approve of, especially about the truth of an omega’s nature.
Tony always hated being one, because his body never seemed to be on the same page with his mind. He wanted to learn and discover and invent, but he’d be laid up in bed, sick to his stomach for days, usually after Howard hit him, he now realizes. He wanted to put on welding gloves and build things, but if he ignored how they chafed against his already irritated skin, he’d be bleeding and have open sores on the backs of his hands for a week afterward.
Then he went to college and discovered that it wasn’t that he was weak for being an omega, it was the abuse that he was suffering that made him unable to function normally. He’d even start doing better and better as the semester went on, only to go home for a holiday and end up nauseous again. He’d always assumed the nausea stuff was from stress, but now Bucky’s perspective makes several things they would never come right out and say in his classes make sense...
Things had been in a downward spiral since he graduated a year ago, but there was nothing Tony could do about it. Howard owned him, and Howard would treat him any damn way he pleased… Even so, though, he hadn’t thought of himself as being in active distress, not before Bucky pointed it out… Distress was a whole different level of bad shape, wasn’t it? Like the difference between being sad and being depressed… It was almost impossible for an omega to pull themselves out of distress on their own.
Tony shuts off the water, knowing he can’t stall forever under the spray. There’s no way a contract his father used doesn’t include the ‘legal mating’ clause, so he and Bucky are going to have to have sex in order for his transfer as a mate to be binding. He dries off quickly, then takes a moment to examine the new set of bruises Howard gave him on his upper arm before he signed him away. They’re still a deep red color and will definitely be purple and blue by morning.
He doesn’t have any cosmetics with him, so there’s nothing he can do to hide them. Bucky knows though, the situation he was in, so hopefully he’s not too put off by it… The t-shirt Tony picked out for pajamas doesn’t cover them all the way, but he supposes he won’t be wearing it for long.
“Hey, did you make it all the way through the legalese?” Tony says when he exits the bedroom, trying to keep a light tone.
“I did… Jesus, is that what he just did today?” Bucky says, zeroing in on the ring of bruises immediately.
Tony nods, not sure what to say.
“Tony… If you need a little time…” Bucky says, rubbing his other arm soothingly, implying to heal up or something before they have sex.
Tony feels a little spike of fear, but it’s not at the prospect of having sex, it’s at the possibility that Howard might demand him back and that things wouldn’t have been consummated properly. Sure, Bucky’s life looks decidedly more middle class than what Tony had pictured for himself, but the fact of the matter is, Howard was always going to get rid of him eventually. And the looming reality was that it would be to some rich asshole who would treat Tony just like Howard had.
How many times over the years had Tony wished and hoped that he would end up with an alpha who was kind, yet ultimately dismissed it as a pipe dream?
“Bucky,” Tony says, stepping forward slightly so that he’s basically putting himself into the alpha’s arms, “You’ve been nicer to me in the last two hours than Howard has for the last twenty years, give or take, that I was owned by him. I’ll take my chances with you,” he nods, reaching out and wrapping his arms around Bucky’s waist hesitantly.
“Oh… Ok,” Bucky says, putting a hand on the small of Tony’s back, “I won’t let you down, Tony.”
“Ok,” Tony says back, more because he thinks Bucky wants to hear it than that he really believes it yet. But oh, does he want to...
“Let’s get some lotion on you, then we’ll work our way up to the rest of it, alright?”
“Sure.”
And with that, Tony lets himself be lead back into the bedroom.