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Every morning, like clockwork, Bruce gets a coffee and reads by the sea. At home he reads on the beach, and at New Asgard he sits on the sea wall bundled up in layers and clutching a takeaway cup. It’s his insistence on a sense of normalcy. He also finds that he doesn’t necessarily prefer one to another; though the New Asgardian beaches are hardly a picturesque sunny scene, there’s something nice about the grey hues of the clouds, the briskness of the air, and the churning of the waves, a reminder of the rawness of nature. She will be who she is, and fuck your Platonic ideal of a beach.
Several of his books have, in turn, been rain-spattered.
He’s almost fallen asleep in the middle of The Left Hand of Darkness – a venture out of his usual nonfiction leanings – when a hand touches his shoulder and he glances up into the face of his fiancé. It’s a marriage of convenience and for political purposes, but still, Thor picked him for a reason and it’s because they inevitably light up every time they see each other. They’ve been good friends for years, have seen each other at some of their worst moments, and possess the ability for bickering that would make an old married couple proud, and seeing as Bruce had no plans to ever marry for love, he’s fine with marrying a friend.
“Hi,” Bruce says, placing his bookmark and snapping the book shut. “Is it that time already?”
“No, I’m five minutes late,” Thor says cheerily. “Come on.”
In preparation for the wedding, the two of them have been privy to an ungodly amount of paperwork; Bruce is immensely thankful that he makes enough money to afford a lawyer and has to worry about none of it himself, and the rest of the paperwork is managed by the extensive legal team of the Asgardian royal family. Still, he has to have a lot of things explained to him and needs to be involved in the process, and he has a lot of documents to sign. The lawyers are currently in some sort of heated debate over what titles and stylings Bruce will receive, because Thor’s own title has become nebulously unclear, and he’s just glad that he’s not involved in that except to ask for nothing particularly austentatious. (“Well, you know how the, uh, the British royals always get these stupid titles like Duke of Edinburgh– I don’t want one of those, come on, I don’t get to lay claim to individual cities as well. I don’t know any of these places and they can have their own earl if they want.”)
Thor, at least, is also no great lover of paperwork, and always comes to pick him up when it’s time. Bruce, in turn, always buys him a pastry from the coffee shop. Today it’s a pain au chocolat. Thor will eat anything without complaint, but Bruce has spent a good deal of their engagement figuring out his favourites (anything with chocolate, and any kind of tart) and purchasing appropriately.
“They’re making stamps for the wedding,” Thor says. “I’m going to ask if I can have input.”
“Why, so you can put Mjolnir on a stamp?”
Thor goes quiet for a moment and Bruce, to only slight chagrin and larger amusement, realises he’s given Thor the idea. He’s not going to object to it.
“Banner…”
“Put the hammer on the damn stamp,” Bruce says with a laugh. “I know it was important to you.” He deposits his coffee cup sideways into the nearest bin as they walk and smiles at passing citizens, still not quite sure he deserves the awestruck looks he keeps getting. He’s just a guy. He’s not even green right now. All he did was say yes. “Do we get any other ceremonial things? Have you seen those Princess Diana plates?”
“Who’s Princess Diana?”
“Oh my God, Thor .”
Thor agrees, on the walk, that they should have an entire set of memorial wedding crockery, and then that they should adopt it into both of their respective houses and drink their coffee out of their wedding mugs every day. They argue over whether Bruce should be in Hulk form or not (“I just think Hulk green on a dinner plate would be really unappealing”). They stop to give an awestruck tourist directions. On the whole, by the time they arrive at the town hall, they’re so late that Miek chitters furiously at them all the way to the meeting room.
Having intended to live the rest of his life mostly solitary, with the occasional outing for conferences or Thanksgivings, Bruce thinks this might be a considerable upgrade.
For a month or so, he doesn’t get to enjoy any more of the New Asgardian breeze; he’s called away on business, and then more crops up, and then he has an international conference in Tokyo. In the first week he notices no absence, used to the peaceful solace of his own company; in the second, he finds himself missing Thor. While the God now owns a mobile phone, Bruce still hails a karasu to send a message, sick of the sound of his own thoughts. He sees so many things that he wants to tell Thor about, thinks of so many questions he has, and scribbles as many as he can fit onto a scrap of paper.
We should come here together sometime, he writes. I keep seeing things and thinking you would like them.
Still tired from his travels, he’s relieved to return to New Asgard for a round of fittings, where he hopes the tailors will be nicer than Luke Jacobson; he knows that they have a big job fitting for his Hulk-sized body. Thor meets him off the train and they hug warmly at the station, the last vestiges of winter still present in the crispness of the spring breeze. Bruce has asked him before if he has better things to do, but Thor chuckled at him. “I’m just a figurehead now,” he said. “All the time in the world.”
They have several hours before the fitting, so Bruce unpacks while Thor catches him up on the idle arguments that become all-encompassing in the wedding preparation committee.
Everywhere he went, he used to go in silence. He passed by unseen and unnoticed, and to have noise and to be seen feels like something he always yearned for but could never have been brave enough to really want . It’s funny how things change. He feels rather mellow in his old age, but finds joy in the way that this is contrary to his expectations. Some other version of Bruce would scoff at the idea that someday he would live by the sea and feel the salt on his tongue and know intimately what it felt like not to be afraid.
“Thor,” he says, interrupting as they head out the door for one of their infinite number of coffee dates, “I really like it here. I want you to know I think it’s beautiful.”
“I don’t think I can take any of the credit for that,” Thor says, more truthful than modest because he’s never in his life been modest , but Bruce has a different perspective on the truth.
“I think you can,” he says. “You got us here.”
“Loki would’ve liked it,” Thor says. “I think of him every time I feel the cold.”
“And he never ever would’ve said that,” Bruce says with a laugh. There are touches of Loki everywhere, rendered lovingly in their concessions to excess: a statue of him with ridiculously large horns on his helmet, the New Asgard AmDrams and the performances they put on outside every summer. He never particularly liked Loki – trying to kill each other will do that – but he knows that there would be no Thor like this without that fierce and all-encompassing love in his life.
“I’m glad you like it,” Thor says. “I was worried I was being selfish, asking you to marry me and taking you away from home.”
“No,” Bruce says. “This is actually really fun. I’m getting to have an adventure without the almost dying bit.”
It really is – fun, that is; and nice, to live in a world where he doesn’t feel that death is waiting on his doorstep.
The fittings are awkward, as they tend to be, but the tailors don’t insult Bruce’s supposedly abysmal sense of style and ‘inherent dullness’. Bruce will be wearing a suit to the wedding, though it’s brown rather than black to match the colour palette of Thor’s tunic and they’ll be adding Asgardian embroidery detail. And he’ll be in Hulk form, which makes him feel terrible about all the extra work, but it was the Asgardian team who insisted upon it.
He’s starting to look actually rather good; the tailors are doing a phenomenal job, and this is the first thing he’ll be wearing in a long time that’s intended to look nice rather than be functional. He awkwardly lets them know that the trousers are a touch on the tight side for his liking, and then he’s free.
Thor’s outfit is more complicated, and Bruce sits at the side and watches the tailors murmur and take notes. He thinks the God looks great already: the tunic is wrapped around the waist with a band embroidered with runes, and as extra panache for the ceremony he has a cape, the length of which is the subject of fierce debate. Beneath it, he has loose and billowing trousers.
Bruce is busy admiring how good he looks when he’s asked for his opinion on the cape, and, knowing that to give an answer would be to take a side in the great cape war, shrugs and says “I don’t know anything about fashion”, which is equally dissatisfying but keeps him neutral. Thor shoots him a look that reads help me .
It’s raining and getting dark when they’ve finally stopped fussing over him, and Thor looks more exhausted than if he’d gone out and beheaded Thanos again just for good measure. Bruce is about to propose getting pizza on the way home when Thor asks if they can go home via the beach. Well, fuck his Platonic ideal of a beach, because it’s cold and the rain is coming down in sheets now and the sky above the waves is a vivid grey, but Thor is practically skipping along the sand; he probably likes this better than the sun, actually. He is the God of Thunder.
Bruce isn’t sure if it was coming or if it was by Thor’s miraculous doing, but right on cue comes a flash of lightning and the accompanying rumble, and Thor turns around to beam at him.
“This is much better!” he says.
Bruce, for the rest of his life, will never be able to pinpoint exactly what compels him. He thinks that, in the end, it’s probably the combination of it all: the thrill of the storm, the smile on Thor’s face, the dawning realisation that for weeks everything he has seen he has wanted to tell Thor about, the vision of a future where they’re going to be together and the happiness he finds it fills him with.
He leans down and kisses Thor and it’s so easy it’s like they’ve been doing it all along; Thor puts a hand on the back of his neck and draws him in deeper. When he touches Thor’s hair, it’s damp from the rain, and he wants to laugh at how much of a cliché it is to be kissing in a downpour. He should be too old for this. He isn’t.
“Let’s get pizza,” he says, clearly a hopeless romantic.
They have pizza first, sprawled out on the floor, and then somewhere in the middle of a board game about buying things with tokens that make a satisfying clack , they push it aside and have the kind of awkward sex you could expect from somebody who has never used this body for that purpose before and is a little afraid he might break something. Still, it’s nice. Bruce can’t even remember the last time he had sex at all, and he likes the ambient noise of the storm, the pitter-patter of the rain on the windows. Thor lets him pick some music, so he picks the Harry Nilsson album that opens with “All I Think About Is You”. Thor seems to like it.
“I’ve been told it’s Midgardian custom for the couple to have a first dance at the wedding,” he says, and Bruce groans before he even finishes the sentence.
“Please don’t make me dance in front of everyone.”
“I want to dance with you,” Thor insists. “Even if it isn’t in front of everyone. We could do it in private, or– or everyone could dance at the same time so it isn’t just us.”
Bruce, who has found himself being more or less tested by every aspect of having an Asgardian wedding, still cannot find it in his heart to say no to his future husband and his beautiful and earnest eyes. “In private. Just us. And I want to pick the music since it’s my tradition.”
“I thought we could dance to this,” Thor says. The album has progressed as they’ve lazily resumed their game, now devoid of strategy and in favour of the easiest moves, and is playing “Lean on Me”, which Bruce has to admit to liking almost as much as the opening track. He finds something touching about dancing to this, a song they’re listening to in a vulnerable moment and on the day they let their feelings move into a different realm of physical touch.
“Okay,” Bruce says. “Pretty good choice.”
“Thank you,” Thor says, and obliterates the moment by buying a card Bruce was saving his tokens for, thus beginning a frantic and wordless board game war against each other. Other people have often had a poor view of Thor’s intelligence, but in Bruce’s experience, he’s sharp as a tack and with a wit honed by having Loki for a brother. He certainly doesn’t let up for the next five minutes, and wins by once again stealing a card right out from under Bruce’s nose.
Bruce is about to make some flippant remark about how he’s cancelling the wedding for that when the landline rings. Everywhere else in the world, people are giving theirs up; in New Asgard, it’s the second most common form of communication right after birds. “I’ll get it,” he says, pulling his shirt back on as he walks through to the kitchen. He grabs the phone from the hook. “Odinson residence, this is Bruce.”
“Who answers the phone like that?” the voice on the other end asks. “What happened to ‘hello’?”
“One, everyone here; two, the Asgardians literally used to say ‘ahoy-hoy’ instead of hello,” Bruce answers. “Ahoy-hoy, Jen.”
“You’re making this shit up now,” she says. “Anyway, I just saw you on TMZ.”
“What am I on TMZ for?”
“Making out with your fiancé on the beach like you’re in The Notebook . Is that what happens in that film? I have too much self-respect to have seen it,” she says, and Bruce swears he hears a crunch like she’s eating. He rolls his eyes. “You’re all over Reddit; everyone says you guys are proving that love is real or something. I mean, the pictures are really cute.”
“I know you’re not calling me to tell me that you think my paparazzi pictures were cute.”
“I want the wedding gossip! C’mon. It’s been ages.”
“Jen.”
“I had a shit date.”
Bruce really misses that nice lawyer from New York, who he had a slight crush on himself; he was perfect for Jen, and now she’s having to deal with all the worst and weirdest men in the world again. “Sorry,” he says. “Okay, wedding gossip. Well, it took them a month to argue over what official title I should get.”
“What did you get? Sixth Earl of– uh– Lancayorkshire?”
“Prince consort. There’s two kings in New Asgard, both Valkyrie and Thor, so they thought it would be easier not to have three.”
“That’s really disappointing. I was looking forward to telling my future dates that my cousin was the King of Asgard.”
“I don’t think I’m pompous enough to be king. Prince is pushing it.”
Like the good cousin that he is, he manages to conjure up enough gossip to keep her entertained. Really, he doesn’t know that much of the gossip since he likes to stick to the fringes of the wedding; there are people whose job it is to plan the whole thing, and they’re very intense, and all he wants to do is provide the occasional input and just let himself be moved around on the day. He’s looking forward to Jen coming, because doubtless she will know all the gossip before noon and be filling him in instead. And he tells her that now she can tell her dates she’s royalty, even though he has no idea if that’s true.
When he finally gets off the phone, Thor has fallen asleep on the floor.
The world almost ends and neither of them have any idea because there are other heroes on the job now, and the months until their summer wedding pass in an easy haze of falling in love. One of the perks Bruce was offered in return for the wedding to make it tactical for him was an advisory position at the University of New Asgard, which is still mid-construction, but he gets to visit the site anyway and speak to some teenagers who’ll be of age to apply and enrol when it’s finished.
His family arrives before the day of the wedding and, in a complete inversion to his usual well-practised emotional restraint, he lets himself cry in front of them because he wishes that his mother was here and wishes that she could have seen him this happy, and because he has his inhibitor on they can bundle him in for the kind of hug that feels like a weight lifted from his shoulders.
He’s pretty sure he never would have cried in front of anybody a year ago, but life is beautiful enough to change.
“Your mother would’ve loved him,” his aunt says. This is easy to say, Bruce thinks, because everybody loves Thor; it’s almost impossible not to, because he’s so kind and funny and earnest. Bruce has seen him be more deliberately obtuse to others in the past, but it feels like it’s falling away as time passes.
The wedding is a rush of ceremonies and being directed around and fussed over at every opportunity; he barely gets a moment to be present until the feast, which he has to admit to have been looking forward to. It’s a smorgasbord of different types of food, from the traditional to New Asgardian favourites like pizza, and presented in buffet style along the two great long wooden tables so that they keep having to walk around and swap chairs. It’s very social: by the time Bruce sits next to his own family, they’re closer to the drunk side of tipsy and have spoken to what feels like half of the town. He still hasn’t managed any time alone with his husband, but he supposes they’ve had plenty of time for that before and will have plenty of time after.
“This is blowing literally every other wedding I have been to out of the water,” Jen says when they finally end up next to each other. “I haven’t even eaten this much at a Thanksgiving. So, what’s your secret to bagging the galaxy’s hottest man?”
“Shared traumas,” he replies. “Plural.”
“Damn.”
“I don’t even know what it was,” Bruce says. “It felt easy to be his friend, and then it was so easy to fall in love with him I didn’t even notice it happening. I don’t know what he saw in me, but…”
“What? You’re a catch. You have more PhDs than common sense, you’ve got that Shrek thing going, you’ve saved the world like five times… Plus, shared trauma! You’ve seen every shitty side of him and kept loving him anyway. He’s seen all the shitty sides of you and he still likes you. King shit considering most men see, like, one mental health diagnosis and start shit talking you to everyone they know.”
Bruce glances across the table, where Thor is regaling his family with the story of going through the Devil’s Anus. He’s suddenly struck quite strongly with the depth of his love; he almost feels faint with it. Fuck. He loves Thor so much and he wants to be forever and he wants to keep seeing that smile.
“Dude,” Jen says to him. “Are you still there?”
“Sorry,” Bruce says. “I was thinking about when I used the Infinity Gauntlet, and it was– a lot, and when I came back round and everything hurt and I didn’t know if what I did had been enough, and he was there, and he was stroking my forehead. Nobody liked him then because he was struggling, but he was still there for me.”
“Aw,” she says, shouldering him. “Okay, fine, I’ll find some cute guy to go through lifelong trauma with and hope it works out.”
“Good luck with that,” Bruce laughs.
They finally get a moment alone together as the feast is wrapping up and the tables are being moved to the side so that the dance portion, which begins with the hearty singing of old Asgardian songs, can start. Glass is being swept up from the people who got drunk enough to smash them on the floor to show their appreciation. Thor is looking radiant in his tunic, having long since shed his cape. Bruce reaches over to tuck some of his loose hair behind his ear, near to where he has Loki and his parents’ hair braided into his own.
“This is a stupid question,” Bruce says. “But Jen got me thinking. Thor, what– what do you like about me?”
Thor does not treat this like a stupid question, and considers it thoughtfully, twirling the new ring on his finger. (Bruce has two rings considering his size-changing situation, which he still thinks was a little much.) “I like that you see and care about me as a person. I like that you’re a bit ridiculous about science. I think you’re braver than you think you are and I think you’re very beautiful. I can’t think of what there is about you that I don’t love.”
Bruce wants to bowl him over, but this is a public place and there are photographers wandering about, so he kisses Thor softly instead. “Did it sneak up on you?” he asks.
“Mostly,” Thor says. “But then you sent a raven from the other side of the world and then I was hopeless.”
When the tables are moved, Thor steps up to the platform where the band will soon play and sings an Asgardian ode to the dead. He isn’t a great singer, but he isn’t bad, either – his voice is steady and true, and Bruce sees many Asgardians wiping their eyes at the song’s close as the band come to play something more upbeat. Asgard, as it turns out, has a variety of group dances that Bruce gets roped into, but they’re all of a distinctly chaotic flavour and being good at these dances doesn’t seem to be possible. He spins and is spun around by almost everybody else at the wedding, and has to take a break three songs in because the world refuses to stay still and he doesn’t want to drop and crush someone.
He doesn’t recognise the man next to the water jug, so asks for his name as he pours himself a glass.
“Mobius,” the man says. “Congratulations, by the way. You two are a lovely couple.”
“Thank you.”
“I went to, uh, a ceilidh once, in Scotland. And they had a lot of dances like these but even faster and I don’t know how they kept dancing, I thought I was going to hurl after the first one.” Mobius laughs.
Much to his disappointment, Bruce has barely taken a sip when Valkyrie starts yelling at him from across the room to get back over here, so he chugs his glass, spares an apologetic glance at Mobius, and tries to catch up with the steps he’s missed. He’s sure she’s kicking his shins deliberately. “Come on!” she says. “The Big Guy would have danced this better than you.”
He survives – just about – and is so tired by the time that everybody has left and he gets his private dance with Thor that they don’t have the energy to do much except hold each other and sway.
“This is it,” Thor says gently.
“Good,” Bruce says. “I like this.”