Work Text:
you’re all caught up inside
but you know the way
–big thief, “mythological beauty”
“Do you ever feel,” Bruce asks his therapist, gnawing at the nail of his thumb, “like your life is just – like it’s never going to amount to anything? Like no-one is ever going to remember you, or notice you, and that’s just going to be it, forever?”
“I know you said you weren’t going,” Thor says, carefully removing a boiling tube of whatever-it-is from the Bunsen burner as Bruce tries his best to recreate the results of their other tubes with dollar store pencils. “But I’d really like to go to prom with you.”
Okay, here’s the thing. Thor only ever speaks to Bruce here in science class, and it’s never usually that much more than the required amount of conversation to make sure they don’t set fire to anything and adequate small talk, but he also has a lot of feelings about Bruce, and almost all of them are that he thinks Bruce is a sweetie and he deserves more out of his high school experience than apparently having sat on his own for the past four years. He’s pretty sure Bruce is depressed, too; he always seems to walk slowly, and his eyes are like he’s never seen the sunshine before. He just wants to help. Thor can’t bear to see anyone that sad or lonely.
And since they only have however many weeks left of high school, he’s decided he’s going to do it. What’s the harm? The worst Bruce can say is “no”. Maybe “no” with a few expletives, but Thor is sure he doesn’t go in for that.
Bruce is looking up at him, and there’s a look on his face as if he didn’t know anyone could ever ask him something like this. Thor wants to give him a hug.
“Um,” he says. “It would be really nice to go with you, but – I don’t want to ruin it for you, and that’s what’ll happen, because things just aren’t. You know. Easy. With me.”
Thor looks at Bruce, somewhat surprised by this response. It’s a measured and particularly kind response, the kind that says he doesn’t usually tell people how he’s feeling for fear of ruining their mood and bottles it all up instead. “That doesn’t matter,” says Thor. “I‘m asking you anyway. I want to take you.”
Bruce seems to squirm. Thor suddenly realises that he’s starting to look as if he thinks he’s the victim of some kind of practical joke; there’s an anxiety brimming under the surface of his skin, jittery, so palpable that Thor starts to feel his own nerves act in response. He waves a hand. “You don’t have to answer right now,” he says. “You can think about it, okay?”
“Hey,” Bruce says, suddenly distracted, snapped out of his glaze of anxiety and pointing at one of their boiling tubes. “That’s not supposed to be that colour.”
“Shit,” says Thor. “Colour it in the right colour. For the grade.”
Bruce smiles at that, and Thor thinks, okay, that’s a start . Because he’s determined. He just wants Bruce to see that he’s worth things, that he deserves a good time and a life just as vibrant as anyone else’s. No matter what he thinks.
Valkyrie tells Thor he should probably stop trying to fix lost causes. “Look at him,” she says. “That guy’s just got depression in his veins.”
Thor isn’t on any of the countless committees that organise all of the weird leaving-high-school rituals, but he is friends with class president Steve Rogers, so he has a decent amount of sway and in for the proceedings. This is how he manages to get Bruce’s name in the running for the most likely to cure cancer award; he knows he’ll be up against it trying to pry the award from Tony Stark’s also very scientific hands, but he can sure as hell try. Steve says he’ll float the name around (and Steve will do just about anything to piss off Tony, even though he won’t admit it), trying not to spray too many sandwich crumbs as he eats. Bucky calls him a slob.
“What’s this even about, anyway?” Bucky asks, popping a chip into his mouth. “What did Tony do to you this time?”
“This time?” Sam pipes up. “Have I missed beef?”
“No,” Steve says, shaking his head. “Thor doesn’t really know Tony. Is this – wait, is this about Bruce ?”
“Yeah,” Thor says, taking a seat where Natasha shuffles up to make room for him. She’s either being diplomatically quiet or doesn’t care about their conversation any more than she cares about the cold pasta she’s eating for lunch. “I asked him out to the prom. I just want to remind him that – you know, people think about him, and care about him. He seems very sad and like he thinks he’s going to ruin everyone’s day if he speaks.”
“You can’t fix him, you know,” Bucky says, tossing a very small broken piece of chip at Thor’s head. “You can’t be his manic pixie dream boy.”
“I don’t want to fix him,” Thor says, brow furrowing. “He isn’t broken. I just care about him and I want him to know that he deserves that.”
“Okay,” Bucky says. “Because if you think you’re going to cure his depression then you’re wrong. The only person that can do that is him and his serotonin levels, or whatever hormone it is.” He turns to Sam. “Serotonin, right? Like – the S in SSRI?”
Sam laughs. “Yeah, that’s the right hormone.”
“He’s a person,” Bucky says. “Not an achievement.”
Thor doesn’t forget those words for a long time – he will remember them through college, will remember them half-asleep on the flights to Virginia, and will only really let himself forget them when Bruce graduates, throwing his mortarboard in the air and grinning like he never knew what it was like to be completely numb. He thinks on them as he jogs up to Bruce at the end of the day, hoping he isn’t overstepping or making any mistakes that would disappoint Bucky.
“Hey,” Thor says. “Do you want a lift? Maybe we could go to Starbucks.”
Bruce is unreadable if only because the usual prominent expression in his face is pain, and nothing seems to be eclipsing that enough for Thor to work it out. “Uh,” he says, and just as Thor is expecting to pass off a rejection as being totally fine, he says “okay” and is climbing into the passenger side of Thor’s Fiat something-or-other. Thor offers him the aux cord, and Bruce hesitantly takes it. It takes him five minutes before he starts playing anything, and when he does, it’s so quiet that it’s practically a whisper at the back of Thor’s mind. Thor cranks the volume. He wants Bruce to be comfortable but he thinks that their ideas of comfort probably exist on different spheres.
“I like this,” Thor says – he’s never heard the song before, and it’s what he would usually listen to, but he does like it. He’s not lying for his small talk. “Have you thought any more about prom?”
“Uh,” Bruce says, again, like all of his statements have to be preceded by a sense of wavering uncertainty, as if stable ground is too much for him to bear. “I mean – if you’re okay with knowing that I’m not any fun, then, sure, I guess. If that’s what you want.”
Thor beams. “Okay,” he says.
They sit in at the Starbucks, though Thor is more used to the drive-through; Bruce has his mocha with three pumps of vanilla syrup and Thor just has a cookies n’ creme frap. He asks for it with extra whipped cream, but he’s not sure they actually give him anything more than the usual. Bruce doesn’t say a lot to him – just decides that they should sit by the window – but he doesn’t need to. Thor is happy just to be here with him. He hopes Bruce feels the same. They talk about suits, for a bit, and tentatively agree that they’ll maybe go out together to buy their suits. Bruce says he’s never worn a suit before. Thor says his brother Loki knows all the secrets of suit fittings and can maybe pass on a few tips. He’s about to ask Bruce a friendly question about school when Bruce looks up at him, and in a quiet voice asks Thor if he can drive him home.
“You want to go home?” Thor asks – carefully, so he doesn’t sound unkind. Bruce nods. “Okay.” Since his drink is already in a takeout cup, they’re free to leave, and he stashes it in his cup holder as Bruce types his address into Thor’s Google Maps. “Hey, can you play that song again? The lo-fi sounding one.”
“Okay,” Bruce says, looking a little surprised.
“What’s it called?”
“Uh, Freak Like Me .”
Thor laughs, wondering if Bruce isn’t exactly helping himself, and then lets Bruce sit in the silence that he likes; he doesn’t live far, so it’s just over ten minutes in the car before Thor pulls up. “Do you want me to walk you in?” Thor asks. Bruce shakes his head. “Okay-dokey. Listen, just message me if you need anything, okay? Even if you want me to just bring over some boba tea sometime. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” Bruce offers softly, and then he’s out the door and disappearing up the driveway. Thor takes a moment, and then drives away, hoping that this isn’t all too much for Bruce. He doesn’t know. He wishes he did, wishes he could understand .
But he doesn’t, so he just has to try.
Bruce starts sitting with Thor at lunch two days later. He still doesn’t really speak – and if he does, it’s always to Thor and never to the others, but though Valkyrie always eyeballs him for it, she and Korg and Miek are fairly understanding of the fact that Bruce isn’t well. He doesn’t need to say it. There’s something vacant about the way he looks, as if he’s experiencing the world from behind glass.
He actually takes up Thor’s offer and messages Thor asking if he could bring over some Dunkin’ Donuts one evening; he even lets Thor stay in the house, and they spread out their unhealthy banquet on the dining table. Bruce even makes them both milkshakes in his mom’s smoothie blender.
“It’s all I use it for,” he says. “Oh, uh, you want some whip cream?”
Thor nods, and Bruce brings some over to the table and lets Thor go crazy with it. When Bruce uses the cream, he rotates the glass of his milkshake to get the perfect spiral, unlike Thor’s slightly less dignified heap. Thor raises his eyebrows. “Nice trick,” he says.
“It’s, uh, my sixth week of therapy,” Bruce says, scooping up some of the cream rather elegantly with a teaspoon. Thor just uses his straw (Bruce has a whole set of reusable bamboo straws). “I – I know it probably doesn’t look like it, but I feel a little better. Like I have a chance, whereas before I just kinda thought that this was it, that this was all I ever deserved.”
“No,” Thor says, immediately. “You deserve to be happy. You deserve to have a good time.”
“Yeah, I just can’t feel that way,” Bruce says softly. “But – I don’t know, maybe someday I won’t feel this sad. If I’m lucky.”
They tuck into the donuts and munchkins, making short work of what was effectively more like a banquet than a snack. There’s music playing on the stereo in the kitchen, old folk music, tinged with sadness. When they do the dishes – Thor scrubbing and Bruce drying and putting them back into the lime-painted cupboards, Bruce says it’s Dave Van Ronk, and that he’s his mom’s favourite singer, the sound of many lazy Sunday mornings. When things were still okay , he bookends it. Thor has noticed it’s a habit.
“Why me?” Bruce asks, out of nowhere but as if he’s been wanting to ask the question for days. “For – prom. For anything. We just sit together in chem. Why me?”
“You just,” Thor says, and then stops himself, clicking his tongue. “Not just , it’s more than that. You have something about you. I don’t know what it is but you do . It felt like if I had to ask anyone it had to be you because that would mean something rather than just asking a friend out of obligation. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but that’s – for me – why you.” Thor looks at his hands. “I just wanted to try and make you happy. Even if it’s just happy for a minute or a second. I see you and I think you deserve that.”
“Those are different answers,” Bruce says, but gently, easing a glass out of Thor’s hands.
“They add up,” Thor shrugs. “To one big answer. I don’t know, I’m not a philosopher.”
Bruce laughs, and Thor feels like he’s hit a goldmine. “I can see that,” he says. “But I want you to like me when I’m not happy. I don’t want to be a project. I want you to like everything about me.”
Thor doesn’t know what to say to that, because he’s just as nervous that he’s going to fuck this up. He doesn’t want to fuck it up. He wants to do right.
“That’s why I said it was hard,” Bruce says. “Everyone wants to fix me and they feel disappointed when they don’t, because they can’t, and then they stop talking to me because I’m exhausting. People say I’m draining, and I guess I am.” He sighs. “I’m really happy you asked me, but – I’m not a project. I’m a person. I want you to promise you’ll treat me like one.” He holds out his hand, juts out his pinky. Thor nods, wrapping his little finger round Bruce’s.
“Pinky swear,” he says solemnly, and arches his eyebrows as Bruce snorts out a laugh. “What? What?”
“You – you just sound so silly saying ‘pinky swear’,” Bruce says. “You have such a serious voice. Sorry. I don’t wanna put you off being my friend or anything. I don’t have many.”
Thor laughs. “You’d have to try harder than that to put me off.”
When he leaves an hour later, Bruce even lets Thor hug him close. Bruce is small, and compact, and surprisingly warm. He looks something like hopeful, there, and comes into school every day for the next week and even laughs at some of Korg’s strange jokes.
Then he doesn’t show up for three days and when he does, he doesn’t speak.
This, Thor realises, is what Bruce meant when he said it was hard. He isn’t steady. His recovery isn’t going to be a nice little upward curve. Sometimes he smiles and speaks and other times the light from behind his eyes is gone and he looks like it’s all over.
Thor is still sitting with him when Bruce finally speaks again. It’s to ask when they’re going to work out the suit arrangement. “This weekend, if you want,” Thor says, experimentally putting an arm around Bruce’s back; and when he doesn’t complain, Thor gives him a small squeeze.
Bruce phones him, later, to talk for a bit. He says he’s putting off homework. Then, more bashfully, adds that he’s in the bath. “I put a bath bomb in,” he says. “It’s stupid, but it makes me feel better.”
“Then it’s not stupid,” Thor says. “I love bath bombs. What colour is it?”
“Green,” Bruce says. Thor can hear, over the phone, the sound of splashing, and even though he’s alone in his room, he hides his smile and blush behind his hand. “It’s my favourite colour. Would it be over-the-top to have a green suit?”
“No,” Thor says, thinking about Loki and his penchant for deep green hues. Loki has always looked good in them. “I’ve been thinking about blue. Maybe a light blue.”
“You’d look good in that,” Bruce says. “Are you doing a braid in your hair?”
“I’m letting my brother do my hair,” Thor chuckles, knowing that he’s definitely leaving his look in fate’s hands. But he trusts Loki – if Loki can be trusted with anything, it’s with aesthetics. Loki always looks flawless. “We’ll see how that goes.”
There are a few moments of silence, and Thor’s stomach drops from its fuzzy happiness when he realises that he can hear Bruce sobbing lightly. “I’m sorry,” Bruce says. “I just – I never thought I would be this sad like this. I thought by now I would be someone else, someone different. I thought it would be over. But I’m just the same. I’m still just… me.”
“For what it’s worth,” Thor says, voice soft, “I’m glad you’re you and not someone else.”
“I just wish that I wasn’t like this,” Bruce says.
“Then who would you be?”
“The person I want to be.”
“I don’t know if anyone is ever that,” Thor says. “I think you just have to make the most of being who you are. I don’t know if that helps. I just hope it does.”
“I mean, you’re right, but just knowing that isn’t going to change things,” Bruce says. “But – thank you. For trying. And at least I’m crying in the bath, since it’s all just water anyway.”
“Yeah,” Thor laughs. “You really planned this one out. Would other Bruce do that?”
Bruce cancels the first suit shop. They rearrange. The second time, he hasn’t shaved and is wearing an oversized sweater, but he holds Thor’s hand the whole way round and it feels nice. They find nice matching pastel suits in blue and green, and Thor is overwhelmed by how good Bruce looks. Bruce’s wardrobe is all utility, soft edges and little pouches; in a suit, with a shirt, Thor can see the peek of his chest hair, the curve of his elbows.
Thor likes him every which way. He just also likes seeing new ways.
Then Bruce is back in his sweater and they’re having fries at McDonald’s, just like that.
They shop for a little longer than that – Thor has always been a mall person, likes wandering through clothes shops and running his hands through all the fabrics, and Bruce spends a small eternity in Barnes and Noble looking for something new to read. Thor fetches him books from the top shelf, and Bruce ends up leaving with nothing, but he seems content anyway.
“Hey,” Thor says. “Mind if I take the suit? My brother can take it in a little for you.”
“Okay,” Bruce says. He leans his head against the window in the car.
When Thor pulls up in the driveway, Bruce looks at him for a long time and says, “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay,” says Thor.
He stays until it’s time for dinner in the Banner house, and then excuses himself to get home and cook. Bruce follows him to the door, and this time it’s him who puts his arms around Thor first, burying his face in Thor’s shoulder. Thor is pleasantly surprised, and he traces circles onto Bruce’s back for the moments they’re pressed together.
He didn’t mean, when he asked Bruce to prom, to fall so steadfastly in love with him.
“I would ask,” Loki says dryly, “if you could get any sappier, but I don’t actually want the answer to that.” He’s finished nipping in the sides of Bruce’s blazer a little and taking in the trousers at the hips, and now he’s embroidering a little snake on the inside of the collar (“just because,” he says). “Why don’t you tell all your cute friends this instead?”
“Because I wanted to tell you ,” Thor pouts.
“Do all the snogging at his house. I don’t want to walk in.”
“We’re not there yet .” Thor chews at one of his nails. “Do you know what the votes look like for the yearbook awards yet? Is there gossip ?”
“Steve is practically smear-campaigning Tony to anyone who will listen and Natasha is doing a great job at teaching everyone who Bruce is. Attendance at the STEM revision club that he co-runs is up by almost ten people a week thanks to Natasha, and the votes are neck and neck.” Loki looks up, raising his eyebrows. “Honestly, brother, you say I’m full of mischief but you’re the real hound dog, aren’t you? Next thing you’ll be paying me to rig him for prom king.”
“I’m just trying to be nice,” Thor insists. Loki laughs.
“If he ever finds out, he’ll be furious. It’s not nice , it’s disingenuous . Really, I always thought you were the moral one.”
“Is it really disingenuous if it means that people do know him? Everyone’s still voting the way they want to. Now his name is just in the running.” Okay, Thor knows it’s still unethical. He knows it’s not completely right, and there’s a little pit of guilt sitting at the bottom of his stomach. But he also knows the opposite: the way that people know Bruce’s name, and the way that they’ve begun to say hello to him in the corridors, and what Loki has just said to him about people attending his STEM club. There is some kind of balance here.
He just wishes he knew what it was.
He should probably ask Steve.
Steve is almost always busy, because he’s Steve and he does almost every extracurricular known to man, but Thor is lucky enough to catch him at a good time; Steve brings some boba for all three of them, including Loki, and Thor ushers him into the kitchen. It’s hard to set out a whole predicament, because the more he talks the more he feels bad. Steve sips at his tea.
“You should tell him,” Steve says, as if it’s obvious. “Relationships are built on trust and honesty. You told your friends about him and they’ve been telling other people. You wanted to support him.” He smiles. “And it’s not only you trying to fudge the vote. Everyone is. Don’t worry about it. At least you’re not making it yourself.”
“He probably doesn’t even care about the awards,” Thor muses.
Steve laughs. “He cares about you , though, doesn’t he? You two are sweet.”
“I hope he does,” Thor says.
“He does,” Steve says.
Prom sneaks up on Thor; in fact, time in general sneaks up on him. At the start of the year, it felt like there was so much time left until graduation; and now, it’s just a few weeks. There’s something strangely existential about knowing that he’ll be leaving for college soon, like the breaking of a protective bubble.
Bruce’s eyes are red when he opens the door. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he says. Thor knows that he shouldn’t, but he feels his gut plummet.
It’s not fair to feel like that. He knows Bruce struggles. But he can’t stop the feeling, either: he can just deal with it in the way that he knows he should.
“That’s okay,” he says. “Do you want to try, or do you want to stay home?”
“I want to try,” Bruce says firmly; Thor has never heard that much emotion in his voice, and he nods, shutting the door behind him. “I’ll put the suit on and see how I feel. Is that okay?”
“Of course it is,” Thor says, trying his best to sound reassuring, because he means to be reassuring. He doesn’t want Bruce to even have to ask him if it’s okay. He just wants it to be okay. “Oh, Bruce. I brought you this.” Thor holds out a boutonniere; he had spent a long time poring over which kind to buy, and looking up flower symbolism of the Internet, and in the end had simply bought the ones he thought would look best with Bruce’s suit. Bruce pauses, taking it in his hands.
“Oh,” he says. “This is really pretty.” Thor sees his eyes start to shine under the lights of the corridor, and puts a hand on Bruce’s back, ushering him into the kitchen. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Thor, I feel like such shit, I just– I don’t know if I can leave the house.”
“You don’t have to,” Thor says softly, realising that he still has a hand on Bruce’s back. He starts rubbing little circles there, and swears that Bruce seems to tuck into him. “We can stay in.”
“I want to go,” Bruce says again.
Thor times it. It takes Bruce fifteen minutes to get into his suit, and Thor is pretty sure not all of those minutes were utilised effectively.
God, he can’t imagine how much energy it must take for Bruce to do things. How tiring it must be for every task to feel monumental. What it must feel like living in a world where you want to do things and are trapped, suffocating under the weight of your own misery. Not that it has to be misery. Bruce has described it to Thor before as a void of nothing, just a wall of numbness in his chest.
Thor would not say this to Bruce’s face, because Bruce would never believe it, but he thinks Bruce is incredible.
And he’s beautiful.
He looks good in green.
“Hey,” Thor says, putting down the bowl of cereal he was helping himself to. “Wow, Bruce.” He smiles, big and wide because he just can’t help but smile at the sight. “Do you want me to shave you or are you going for the sexy stubble effect?”
“Nothing is sexy on me,” Bruce assures Thor, so they end up in the bathroom together, Thor trying his very best not to accidentally nick Bruce’s face. There’s something strange about shaving someone else – it’s the act of doing for someone else something you so often do for yourself, like doing makeup or tying a tie. Thor hasn’t shaved like this in a long time; he just trims his beard.
There’s something intimate about it, too, being so close. Thor can hear each breath Bruce takes. He breathes fast.
“We can go,” Bruce says. “I don’t know if I can stay long. But we can go.” Then, softly, “I wish my mom could’ve been here.”
Thor takes a picture of Bruce in the corridor, then a few more gratuitous ones with cheesy posing involved, for his mother. “I’ll get these printed,” he says to Bruce.
“Thank you,” Bruce says, putting his arms around Thor. “I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you.”
Prom is an overblown affair, Thor decides. Really, he doesn’t care how decorated the venue is or the quality of the band or how good anybody looks – what makes the evening is the company of his friends. He and Bruce arrive at the same time as Valkyrie and her girlfriend Carol, who is wearing a suit so sharply tailored that Thor is first rendered speechless and then demands a picture so that he can show it to Loki. Carol laughs.
“This is my ass-kicking suit,” she says. “It’s so powerful that straight men will fear me. That’s the theory.”
“It’s so powerful,” Thor says. “I don’t know whether to look at you in awe or look away because I feel so unworthy.”
“Aww, you’re worthy,” Carol insists, then turns to Bruce. “No-one should look that good in green but somehow you are absolutely killing it. Come on, let’s go in, we can’t deprive everyone of these looks.”
Inside, Bruce tells Thor that he wants to maybe talk to just a few people at a time and that he wants Thor there, so that’s how they do it. First, Sam and Bucky, understated cool, Bucky with a particularly pretty bun.
“Hey,” he says to Thor when Sam and Bruce are talking about something else. “You better be treating him right.” Then Bucky pauses, looking at him. “I mean, he looks pretty good, actually. Is he allowed to look that good in green?”
“I’ve tried to listen to him,” Thor says, feeling flushes of anxiety work their way through his chest. It’s unusual: he never really gets anxious about anything except report cards, and he doesn’t like the feeling much. It makes him feel like he needs to lie down. “And support what he wants, and not push him to do anything. And be there for him.”
Bucky shoots him a sympathetic look. “Then that’s all you can do,” he says, clapping Thor on the shoulder. “You’re doing good. You just have to remember that Bruce’s only saviour is himself, and you’re golden.”
“He’s stronger than he thinks he is,” Thor says, which seems to feel strangely intimate when it rolls off his tongue. He blushes lightly, and hopes that no-one will notice under the already very pink strobe lights.
“Sure he is,” Bucky says. “So’s everyone. Imagine if people knew what they were capable of. The world would be nuts.”
They see other friends, talk to them and chat, and Bruce seems to loosen a little as the night moves on. He doesn’t dance, of course – Thor knows he can’t convince Bruce, because what kind of event would it be if Bruce danced , but Thor is allowed to dance with Steve for a few songs, both of them acting as if they’ve never seen a person dance before. Steve is on his own; suggestions were tossed around that he take several people on a friendly basis, but they all seem to have secured dates of their own, so now he’s just the designated dance partner. He doesn’t seem to mind.
“Do you think he’s having a good time?” Thor asks. Steve glances over his shoulder at Bruce, who’s mid-conversation with Tony, and has begun gesticulating wildly.
“Oh yeah,” Steve says. “The best time he’s gonna get.”
They’ve been there for an hour when Bruce reunites with Thor, linking their arms and leaning into him. “Can you get me out of here?” Bruce asks. He sounds tired, and Thor nods, quickly bidding as many farewells as he can cram into five minutes before they head back out into the dark. There’s something of a chill in the air – that, or the room was just oven-hot. Bruce’s hair is starting to stick to his forehead with sweat, and Thor is glad that his was so thoroughly braided earlier.
Bruce puts on Big Thief when they get into the car. He and Thor have very divergent music tastes, but this is where they converge.
And Bruce is playing Mythological Beauty , which is their favourite song.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t stay longer,” Bruce says.
“No,” Thor says. “It’s okay. I’m really proud that you came.” He leans across, slowly running a hand through the short sides of Bruce’s hair. Bruce seems to stop breathing, looking at Thor with such reverence that Thor feels like the bottom of his stomach might drop out. “Even when you didn’t feel like you could. If we had just driven up here and gone home that still would’ve been amazing, but you went further than that.”
A beat passes, and Thor sits back and starts the car.
Thor stops the car in the driveway.
Bruce undoes his seatbelt, leans across the car, takes Thor’s face in his hands, and kisses him. It feels like everything – soft, hard, gentle, desperate. Thor puts one hand on Bruce’s back, steadies him into place, and with the other caresses Bruce’s soft cheek. Bruce is making desperate little noises in his mouth, and he puts their foreheads together.
“If I say I’m sorry, are you going to just tell me this is okay again?” Bruce asks. Thor laughs, and feels Bruce’s body move with the roll of his shoulders.
“It’s more than okay,” says Thor. “You make me feel so many things. So many.”
“You make me feel,” Bruce says, and then stops, trying to find the words; Thor can see him working through them. “I don’t know. You make me feel like everything is going to be okay. And you make me feel like everything I do is okay. There’s a voice in my head telling me I’m a lazy piece of crap and then… and then there’s you.”
He kisses Thor again, slow this time, slow like he’s savouring every moment.
“Do you think you could stay?” Bruce asks.
Thor phones home and lets them know he’ll be here; Bruce’s mother comes home and he shows her the pictures he took and he wishes he could frame the smile on her face. He finds out that Bruce brushes his teeth with a strawberry-flavoured kids’ toothpaste, and that he watches National Geographic to fall asleep. “I used to watch Crime and Investigation,” he says, “but it gave me nightmares.”
Bruce has a double bed, so there’s room for Thor. Bruce lies shirtless, lets Thor work his fingers through the tangle of hair on his chest and begin to memorise the details there. Thor feels comfortable in a way he can’t even begin to articulate.
Thor kisses Bruce again when they wake up, and wonders if he’ll ever get tired of it. Bruce cries over his coffee.
“Is it that bad?” Thor asks. Bruce laughs through his tears.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s awful. Drink the chocolate milk.”
Thor picks Bruce up early on the day of graduation, and it’s another unprecedented good day: Bruce seems to have managed about three in a row, and he looks something almost akin to cheerful as they sit down in Starbucks. “I feel like I’m going to wake up and just find out that the past three years have been a coma,” he says, stirring his frappuccino with the straw. “I shouldn’t even be allowed in college. I’m functionally an idiot.”
“You’re not,” Thor says, running his hand through Bruce’s curls. “You ran that club.”
“I mean, I know academic things, but I can’t even do my own laundry without turning everything pink.”
“Oh, everyone does that,” Thor reassures him.
They put their mortarboards on for the car ride to school, both looking a little like squares in their full graduation robes. Bruce says he feels like a shit wizard. “They have to embarrass us the most on the last day,” he says.
The graduation ceremony is, of course, full of dull speeches by teachers and followed by a moment where Steve raises the roof before moving onto the yearbook awards. He’s always been a good speaker and dispenser of life advice more generally; it’s why Thor always goes to him for help. “So,” Steve says. “I just wanted to remind everyone here that your value is not defined by the number of votes you get and if you did or didn’t win an award. You’re all amazing, and you should never judge yourself by anyone else’s progress. All you can do is be you and that’s the most we can ask for. So, now that I’ve trashed these awards, here they are.”
Tony edges Bruce out of most likely to cure cancer , but Bruce’s eyes still shine when he hears that he came runner-up; he squeezes Thor’s hand.
The real disbelief, though, comes later.
“Alright,” Steve says. “So, this award wasn’t actually by public vote. We decided it together as a committee and were all immediately agreed. I’d like to introduce the new outstanding achievement award. This award goes to someone for whom just getting up can be an impossible task – but one that he carries out, day after day. Against all the odds, he keeps coming to school and working hard, even when it feels as if he can barely talk. Bruce Banner, you are nothing if not a hero. We’re so proud. This award is for you.”
When Bruce cries this time, Thor realises that, for the first time, as he holds Bruce, these are tears of joy. Not of pain or sorrow or suffering or frustration; just of happiness. Mixed with a little pain, maybe, because surely it can’t be easy to be reminded of your own difficulties; but happier than most tears.
Steve comes round after the ceremony. He hugs Bruce, and apologises for the unexpected speech. “After everything Thor told me,” he says, “it just felt like I had to acknowledge your strength.”
“I’m not strong,” Bruce says. “I just… keep going.”
Steve casts a backward glance at Thor. Thor shrugs, but turns back to Bruce, taking his hand across the table. “Don’t you think that is strong?” he says. “Always keeping going.”
Thor thinks that, for a second, he breaks through. Bruce smiles. “Maybe,” he says.