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“Do you want to get out of here?”
“Uh, yes, okay, please .”
Bruce steps out into the cool night air and runs a hand through his hair. “I hate parties,” he says. “I went so many years without ever going to one, and suddenly I met Tony Stark.” They’re out on some kind of balcony; at least, it feels like one, overhanging the street, the sidewalk dizzyingly far below them. Bruce hates this building, and he hates this party, and he’s starting to think he hates Tony again. What stroke of misfortune brought him to this?
Thor chuckles. “I was brought up to know exactly how to behave at parties, but it never gets any easier. A whole evening of meaningless pleasantries.” He steps over to Bruce and peers over the rail, down at the drop. Bruce wonders if he’s considering it. Probably not. Most people don’t look over an edge and start calculating the velocity at which they’ll fall. “I saw you were having a difficult time.”
Bruce sighs. “Steve thinks I have a crush on Natasha and keeps trying to set me up with her.”
“And you don’t have a crush on Natasha?”
“Nat and I are friends , Harry Burns. And I’m gay.” Bruce stills for a moment, realising these words have never left his lips before. Anxiety begins to crawl under his skin, and he looks over at Thor, only to realise that Thor is still looking at him with that beaming Asgardian smile that’s brighter than a quasar. “Don’t tell anybody, please. I only just figured it out.”
“I don’t even know what it means,” Thor says.
“I like men. I get crushes on men. Though mostly I don’t get crushes at all.”
“Oh,” Thor says. “I won’t tell anybody. How peculiar that you announce it. Do I need to tell people? I like everybody.”
“I’m talking about romance, Thor.”
“I know you are. I’m telling you that I can be romantically attracted to anybody.”
“You said everybody, so I thought you were telling me you had crushes on everybody else.” Bruce can’t help but laugh. Thor chuckles, looking down as he smiles.
“The team is very handsome,” Thor says. “I could definitely be attracted to them all.” He pauses. “Perhaps not Clint.”
“Clint is so disappointing,” Bruce says. “Like when you open the bread bin, and all you’ve got left are the ends.”
“I do not know what a bread bin is.”
“It’s - it’s where we put our bread. Do you know what bread is?”
“Of course I do. What do you take me for?”
“I don’t know the parameters here. For all I know you could be eating slime back on Asgard, or ingesting your nutrients through your bloodstream, I don’t know. So we put our loaves of bread in the bread bin and keep them there in between actually eating it.”
“This is the sole purpose of the bread bin? Do you eat a lot of bread?”
“No more than the average, I guess.”
“And it’s like - a disposal bin? Vertically oriented?”
“No. It’s just a name.”
“You are all so joyously baffling here,” Thor says, and Bruce feels an odd warmth spread through his chest. He looks away, blinded by Thor’s optimism. Maybe it’s not good for him, being around this kind of unbridled happiness. Or maybe it’s the best thing he could do. “I used to come here every century or so, and would always be amazed by the progress. Now I simply can’t keep up.” He looks over at Bruce, almost forcing Bruce to look back. He doesn’t meet Thor’s eyes, because he can’t. Bruce doesn’t do eye contact. He considers it a sign of affection that he ever feels comfortable enough with someone to not even fake eye contact. He doesn’t look at Thor’s face, which is definitely a sign. “What is it that you do? Stark said you were a scientist, and thus you’re part of the continuous human drive towards progress .”
“Progress is debatable,” Bruce says. “We progressed too much and now we’re burning the planet.”
“You’re moving forwards, but it’s a very human assumption that forward is the only correct direction.”
“I like that,” Bruce says, and smiles. He shuffles a little closer to Thor. He looks out at the sky and tries to see if he can spot any stars beyond the suffocating lights of the city. Some seem to twinkle back at him. “I actually jumped around a little, so I’ve specialised in lots of different fields. I think the one that feels the most like actual progress is conservation biology. That was the last degree I got, because I felt - like so much of what I had learned was just damage , like gamma radiation. But conservation biology is trying to save things. I wish we didn’t have to save them at all.”
“Don’t hold yourself accountable for the actions of every human,” Thor says sagely. Bruce can never quite place Thor: he’s wise yet dim, serious yet funny. Everyone is an enigma to Bruce, but Thor is one he’d quite happily work out, like a Rubik’s cube.
“What about you? Did you study anything in Asgard? God, I can’t believe I’ve never gotten to ask you these questions before. It’s crazy. We should go to lunch sometime. This is why I don’t believe in small talk.”
“I feel exactly the same. I care little for pleasantries when we could be talking about something interesting . I had a rough Asgardian equivalent to your university education, I suppose; but the process of learning for Asgardians is lifelong and always accessible. We take specific courses rather than general programmes and so learn only what we wish to. There are requirements that we take so many programmes per year in our youth, but after, it’s entirely optional. I learned a lot for my role as heir to the throne. But I think my favourite might have been a strange course I took on languages of the galaxy. There are some languages that convey meaning entirely through the intonation of three words.”
“Really? I never thought about what alien languages must be like. I guess it’s weird that you even speak English.”
“It became our own mother tongue in Asgard,” Thor says thoughtfully. “But I know the languages of all the nine realms. Even if the language I understand the most might be violence. Something I have to work on, of course.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever learn another language. I was never good at it in school. But it turns out that actually being stuck in a country where you don’t speak the language really accelerates the process, so I picked up a lot of stuff when I was on the run. Maybe we could teach each other something sometime. I would love to learn how to intone. Everybody thinks I’m too dry or irritated.”
“Then they shouldn’t be so dull as to drive you to it,” Thor suggests with a wink. Bruce laughs. A thought flits across his mind that he just saw a little of Loki in that wink, an odd reminder that they’re related, that they grew up together, and then Loki tried to kill everybody. Nobody’s perfect. Families are never perfect. Not even godly ones. “I enjoy your intonation. I’m enjoying it right now.”
“It feels easier to talk to you. Like you’re not going to gossip because you don’t know what’s actually going on.”
“Cruel, but fair.”
“Thanks for taking me out of the party. I really needed that. Most people don’t really notice things like that.”
“You intone in many ways without realising,” Thor says.
“Do you want to get out of here?” Bruce asks. “I mean, really get out of here?”
“Indeed I would,” Thor says. He’s already holding his hand out for Mjolnir. Bruce can hear the sound of glass smashing, and sees Thor chuckling out of the corner of his vision. Loki-esque; mischievous. Bruce loves all these facets of Thor. “Hang on tight.”
He realises, clinging to Thor with his eyes squeezed shut and the wind buffeting against them, that he might have a crush on Thor. Or his heart is racing from the adrenaline. Really, Bruce finds that these things are hard to tell. Thor would know the answer.