The Bachelor: 10 Men 1 Stark (The Bachelor Marvel Au)

Tea Leaves n' Cotton Candy

"The menu is red." Thor said, looking up at Bruce.

"Yes, I know." Bruce said, confused.

"I thought you were obsessed with the colors of things." 

"Only when normal things are weird colors!" Bruce said, defensively. Thor smiled and shook his head as Bruce looked through the menu.

"You wanna go look at the boats? Best part about this place, besides like a bunch of other things." Thor asked, causing Bruce giggled slightly.

"They're not private?" Bruce asked.

"Well the spots are rented, but no we can walk along the docks."

The waitress came back over to take their orders and Thor let her know they were going to the docks and would be back inside. The two got up and headed outside, walking down the dock to the furthest row of boats. 

"This one's a Century, my favorite boat here. We used to have one when I was a kid, but it needed new motors and those are expensive and we needed two. It's still being 'fixed.' My father, his girlfriend and my grandparents and Loki and I would take it out. We would fit three all dogs on there, one of them was basically a red wolf, but for the adoption technicalities they said she was a husky because you can't have a pet wolf. Kind of how they lie about dogs ages at shelters so they don't have to put them down." 

Thor continued to ramble on about the boats, talking about what kind of boat it was, who owned it, who had previously owned it that spot, what kind of boat they had. The sun had barely come up over the water, giving everything a light blue hue. They were halfway back to the restaurant when the waitress popped her head out and yelled to the boys that their food was ready. As they were walking back Thor continued to talk about the boats. Bruce started to brush their hands together and eventually just barely placed his pinky over Thor's. Thor, without stopping his sentence, just grabbed Bruce's hand an carried on as if nothing happened. 

They sat back down at their table and started eating and conversing again.

"So, why were you up all night again?"Thor asked.

"I was reading."

"Of course. What were you reading?" Thor asked, laughing at Bruce's cute nerdiness.

"This book, totally different from what I usually read but it was so good. (srsly read it) It was called 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime' or something weird. It's about this kid with autism who runs away with his rat and oh it's so good."

"I'm assuming you finished it?"

"Of course."

"So tell me what happens. Tell me the story."

"You care?" Bruce asked, confused and not wanting to bore Thor.

"If your telling me I care." 

"Okay," Bruce gave Thor a weird look but continued to rave about the book, (not that yall are gonna read it but if you do, spoilers, also i may be remembering some of it wrong i read it like 6 months ago) "so, this kid Christopher has autism right? And his neighbor's dog dies and he doesn't quite understand what happened, but he found the dog murdered with one of those garden forks for hay..."

"A pitchfork?"

"Yes, thank you. The dog is murdered with a pitchfork and Christopher finds the dog and the neighbor thinks he did it, which is preposterous because he loved the dog. So then he tries to figure out who actually killed the dog and he gets into trouble with his dad for uncovering a bunch of gossip on the neighbors. So he gets scarred and runs away to his mom on a train and takes his pet rat and almost loses the rat. That was nerve racking. So he finds his mom and his mom has this boyfriend and can't take care of him so she takes him back home to his dad and stays with them for a while and the dad finds out the new boyfriend is beating on her. And then it just ends."

"What do you mean it ends?" Thor asked, confused.

"Well the whole book is about him finding out who killed the dog and getting on the train to his mom, who's like 2 states away, and avoiding the police who are looking for him because he's a missing child, so they get him back home and hes still mad at his dad but has agreed to spending 5 minutes a day with him for a week and then the next week 10 minutes and so on and then it ends." Bruce said, very invested in telling the story.

"Your kidding."

"No, it just didn't have an ending."

"Well who killed the dog?" Thor asked, also now very involved.

"The moms boyfriend."

"What?"

"Ya, the mom left the dad for the neighbor's husband and then they ran off together. So the neighbor got a new boyfriend and he got jealous and killed the dog."

"Interesting."

"Very."

They spent the rest of the morning like that, talking, drinking coffee and looking at the boats coming and going, leaving Steve, Strange and Loki to deal with everyone's hangovers.