"In May, your uncle Thor had planned a little getaway for our group to celebrate my birthday. It was originally just going to be me, Thor, Val and Jessica, which none of us were opposed to. But Thor felt weird about leaving Matt out since he was my boyfriend and it was my birthday, plus he didn't feel right about purposely avoiding the topic of our camping trip when Matt comes to the bar with us all the time, so he invited him. It was alright, though, because Matt wasn't free due to school. So it was going to continue being just the four of us, but then Val accidentally mentioned it to Bruce, and invited him in a panic. Bruce was free, unlike Matt, so he came. Then the 28th of May finally came, and we were all setting up our tents in the woods. What we didn't know was that day would be one of the most happening days. It ended up being known as The Day And A Half in 2000."
MAY, 2000
Jessica finishes her tent first, adjusting her sleeveless shirt and looking around, "You guys aren't done yet?"
"Almost done!" Val calls out. "We can go looking for firewood after I'm finished with setting mine up."
"Sure," Jessica nods, squinting at Thor and Bruce who were setting up their tent. Their tent was bigger than Tony's, Val's and Jessica's since they two people instead of one, so of course their tent were taking a little more effort to set up. Jessica asks, "You boys need any help?"
"All good!" Thor replies, taking a bunch of tent poles from Bruce's hand and stepping away from him to figure it out. "Just need to get these in order and the rest will be easy."
"Do they seem a little weird to you?" Tony asks, tilting his head in Thor and Bruce's direction. Jessica looks back at them. Tony can see the P.I. gears in her brain turning as she tries to figure out something about them.
She finally nods, "Yeah. Probably the heat getting to them, Thor definitely didn't think this through. Maybe they'll be better in the evening when it's cooler."
Tony sits down in the dirt, setting up some tent poles, "Do you think Thor's annoyed because he didn't invite Bruce in the first place? Because I'm fine with him being here, Bruce is a good friend."
Jessica replies, helping him with some remaining tent poles, "Could be... But if Bruce is your friend and you didn't mind him being here, then why is Thor so bothered about his boyfriend being here?" Before Tony can answer, Jessica changes the subject, "Bruce said earlier that we didn't pack enough food for all of us, so I'm gonna go to that convenience store we passed and get some stuff from there. You want anything? Val said earlier that she just wants sandwiches and I'm getting cheap beer."
"Maybe some double A batteries, my electric fan's running low," Tony says. "Drive safe."
"Yeah, yeah," Jessica says dismissively. She says something to Thor before he passes his car keys to her and she leaves the campsite.
"About an hour later, I got a call from the local police, saying Jessica asked for me. Apparently, she'd gotten into a fight with someone at the convenience store and needed someone to bail her out. Obviously, I went. Since Thor's car was with Jessica, I didn't want us to bring two cars back, so I walked instead of taking Bruce's. It was a long walk and nothing really happened on the way to the police station, so I'll tell you what happened at the campsite while I was gone before I talk about Jessica at the police station."
"You're doing that wrong," Bruce sighs in frustration, taking down the tarp and rearranging it. "It goes here. Not there. Why would it go there?"
Thor rolls his eyes and Val pauses in her organising of inventory. Since she'd finished up her tent and was waiting on Jessica to return to find firewood, she decided to go through the stuff they brought for the day and a half. She was mentally splitting the things up between the five of them until she'd heard Bruce get annoyed and looked up in time to see Thor himself getting annoyed, which was a rarity on his own.
"Thor is a kind soul by nature and never got irritated at anybody, so it was a surprise that he was starting to get sarcastic with Bruce of all people. I didn't believe it when your aunt Val told me."
"If I'm doing it wrong then do it yourself. I'll go collect firewood," Thor says.
Bruce sits down in the dirt, half-heartedly holding up a hand to call Thor back, "No-- Don't be like that."
"Don't be like what? If you're going to be annoyed with me then either do it somewhere else or when I'm not here!" Thor says loudly. Val can sense that it was going to escalate if she didn't intervene, so she quickly walks over to them, stepping between the two men.
"Hey, let's all calm down, yeah?" Val says, placing her hands on Thor's chest to lightly guide him away from Bruce. "Thor, it's hot, right? Let's get some water in you." Bruce huffs and goes back to finishing the tent and Thor follows Val to Bruce's car; Since Jessica took Thor's to the convenience store, they moved the supplies into Bruce's car to keep them at the campsite. Good thing they did since Jessica isn't coming back for a while.
Once the two of them are out of Bruce's earshot, Val asks, "What happened?"
Thor shakes his head, taking a drink of the water she gave him, "Just a minor argument. Nothing much."
"You're my best friend, Thor," Val says, sitting down next to him. "I know when you're lying."
"Turns out, Thor and Bruce haven't been very smooth-sailing for a while. Thor told Val about how the first year actually went pretty well until one of Bruce's co-workers joked about how it's taking them forever to move in together. At first, they'd humoured the thought, until they realised they had very different ideas about how they wanted to go about it. Thor didn't want to move to Bruce's part of the city because he didn't want to live so far from the rest of us. Bruce didn't want to move to our part of the city because it was quite a ways away from Metro-General and his other workplaces. Eventually, the arguments stopped being about moving in and started being about each other."
"Thor, you have got to do something about this! You can't keep arguing forever," Val points out.
Thor struggles to find the words but ultimately settles on, "It's... I don't know what to do, because we've been great for twelve out of the thirteen months we've been together. What if this is just a rough patch that we end up getting over?" Val looks at Bruce, who had completed the tent and was writing in a notebook under its shade.
"Val thought about how different Thor and Bruce were. Bruce was a little bit uptight and tried to keep things the way he knew it to be. Thor was a little more adventurous than that. Bruce spent his free time doing science and math, Thor spent his watching Star Wars. They didn't even live in the same part of the city. She thought about how she was right thirteen months ago."
She says, "One more argument today and you're talking about it, okay? I'm not having you guys ruin Tony's birthday. You planned this camping trip, so please just make sure it doesn't get worse than Jessica getting arrested."
"Fine, I promise. One more fight," Thor mutters. "I'll help Tony finish his tent."
Val nods, saying, "I'll go get firewood. I doubt Jess and Tony will be back in time. Both of you, behave until I get back."
"Fine, yes," Thor replies, tone only slightly irritated. Val knows it's not directed at her and more at how he was going to be alone with Bruce until Val returns. She doesn't know if that makes her feel better or worse.
"I'll get to aunt Val collecting firewood in a while, but I promised you aunt Jessica's part of the story, so here we go. I reached the police station after a peaceful half hour walk. At this point, it was around about 3PM or so."
"Hey, I'm Tony Stark," Tony says at the front desk. "I'm bailing someone out."
"Name?" the clerk asks, keyboard clacking loudly; Tony wondered what she was even typing when he hasn't even told her Jessica's name yet.
"Jessica Jones," Tony answers. She nods and types some more before raising the phone. After a few quiet words, an officer comes out and gestures for Tony to follow her. Tony follows the officer to the holding cell.
The officer asks, "Does your friend get in fights often?"
"No," Tony answers. It's the truth; Jessica never fought anyone, but they all knew she packed a severe punch, especially if she was drunk.
"Hm," she says, unconvinced. "Anyway, here she is. Here are her belongings, she's free to go."
"Thanks," Tony says, taking the paper bag with Jessica's wallet and phone and Thor's car keys in it. He goes to the cell, which had been opened so Jessica could exit. "What the hell were you thinking? Are you drunk?"
"I didn't even get to buy my alcohol when they got me," she scoffs. "But I promise this isn't what you think it is. I wouldn't ruin your birthday on purpose."
"Then Jessica told me about how she got into the fight. She'd met an ex-convict at the convenience store. That wasn't the problem, though. According to her, this ex-convict can't even harm a fly. The problem was with a man who tried to touch her... in a no-touch zone. Let's just say that. And the ex-convict had seen him so he punched him. And when the guy punched him back, Jessica hit him so hard that he toppled over a shelf. The cashier called the cops on her after that, which pisses me off. Wrong person, dumbasses. But Jessica was fine. The guy didn't touch her because the ex-convict, who she only knew as Scott, had helped her. So while we were in Thor's car driving to the convenience store so I could get the stuff we had to get, Val was looking for firewood. At this point, it's around 4PM."
Val stumbles onto another campsite in her unsuccessful search for firewood. There were three men and one woman present. One of the men spots her and waves, "Who are you?"
"Um, I'm Val," she answers, stepping out into full view. "I was looking for firewood. Do you know any spot I could get some?"
The woman replies, "Hogun here got us a whole load of firewood, so we can give you some of ours. We've got more than we need." Hogun stands to grab some firewood to give Val.
"Thank you," she says. "You are?"
"Sif," the woman answers. "That's Hogun, you already know, that's Fandral and Volstagg. You're here alone?"
"With friends," Val says. "But something came up so I'm looking for firewood myself." Hogun gives her a bag with some firewood in it and Val thanks him.
Sif offers, "Do you want to merge campsites? We don't mind."
"Nah, this was a birthday trip for a friend. I invited someone on accident and it turned out to be a bad decision," Val says regrettably. She'd been kicking herself for her big mouth telling Bruce about the camping trip and then awkwardly inviting him without asking Thor or Tony first. She thought Bruce would say no like Matt did, since he had been too busy to even celebrate New Year's Eve with them. He was surprisingly available and came along and now he and her best friend are arguing on Tony's birthday. "I just hope they don't make a scene. I'd hate to ruin his birthday."
"That's awful. Have they tried this thing called apologising?" Fandral suggests, cheeky smile on his face. "I hear it does wonders for repairing disagreements."
"This is way past apologies, I think," Val says. Sif shifts aside, welcoming Val to sit with them. She decides she's not in any hurry to get back and sits, continuing, "Neither of them have done anything wrong... They're just so annoyed with each other. They're like a bomb about to go off any minute."
Volstagg tries, "Maybe they need some alone time to talk? Perhaps they'll be alright by the time you get back."
"See, I'd believe that, but they looked ready to kill each other when I left," Val laments.
"Your aunt Val talked to them for a while. I'm not telling you the whole conversation because it'd just be a repeat of Thor and Bruce's argument, so I'll just skip to 5PM, when Jessica and I were back at the campsite."
"Hey, boys. Miss me?" Jessica asks, lifting a case of the alcohol she had been so happy to get her hands on. Tony silently notes how the two men were on opposite ends of the campsite. Thor smiles and walks over, taking his bag of Oreos from Tony.
"I always miss you," Thor says. "Why'd you get arrested?"
"She beat a jackass," Tony answers.
Thor grins, high-fiving Jessica, "Nice."
Jessica walks over to Thor and Bruce's tent and gives Bruce the chocolate bar he'd asked for. when she gets back to Thor and Tony, she asks, "What's up with him?"
"Nothing," Thor says. "Oh, Tony. I set up your tent, can you check if it's comfortable? I'll help you fix it if anything's wrong." Tony gives him a thumbs up and leaves. As soon as he's in his tent, Thor fills Jessica in on the argument and his conversation with Val before she left to get firewood.
"I agree with Val, one more argument and you have to talk about it," Jessica says. "But you better not ruin Tony's birthday."
"I'm trying!" Thor whispers. "He keeps getting on my nerves!"
"By the time 6PM rolled around, Val came back and she, Thor and Jessica spent forty-five minutes starting a fire. It was taking so long because they kept joking around and purposely taking their time with the fire. They thought it was funny. I thought it was funny too, so I let them be. I wanted to call Matt anyway, and it was as good a time as any. It was 6:45PM by then, I knew Matt was free. I went to the roadside to talk so there wouldn't be their noise and because there was better reception. When I was gone, Thor and Bruce had their final argument about taking too long with the fire. It got a little heated -- no pun intended."
"Hey, stop it!" Jessica says over their argument. She would shout, but she didn't want to risk Tony hearing the fight from where he was, not when he was on a birthday call with his boyfriend.
"Him first!" Thor says childishly. "He started it!"
"At least I started something!" Bruce retorts. "You can't even start the fire!"
Thor groans sarcastically, "It's called having fun! Maybe if you got your head out of your as--"
"Okay. He said some not very nice things here."
Val and Jessica's eyes widen as they watch the anger grow on Bruce's face. Bruce shouts, "Oh, don't you start, motherf--"
"Okay! I'm just going to cut right to 7:30PM. By the time I came back, the fire had been started and Val and Bruce weren't there."
"Where're Val and Bruce?" Tony asks, looking around.
"Taking a walk," Jessica answers. Thor flashes an amiable smile at Tony, reaching over to grab the bag of wooden sticks and marshmallows.
"Melted marshmallows?" Thor offers.
Tony sits down next to them, "Sure. Light 'em up, buddy."
"Jessica, Thor and I spent twenty minutes eating s'mores and talking about anything until Bruce and Val came back. I still didn't know what was going on, I just assumed everyone was being weird. But by then, even though it was just 8PM, it was getting pretty dark, so we let the fire keep burning and agreed to go to sleep. It's not until 8:20 or so that Thor tapped on the outside of my tent."
"Thor?" Tony asks, unzipping it to let Thor in. Once Thor is seated in the tent, Tony zips it back up. "What's up?"
"I'm so sorry, Tony. I really wanted this to be a good birthday for you," Thor starts.
Tony frowns in confusion, bookmarking the book he'd been reading so he could focus on Thor, "What do you mean? Today's been fantastic. Jessica beat up a jackass, Val got us some pretty good firewood, I mean that stuff's still burning. Bruce is here --"
"That's the problem," Thor says. "Bruce is here."
Tony stares at him before asking, "Things getting shaky between you two?"
"It's been shaky for the past month," Thor admits. "We had four arguments and that's just today. We had our last one just fifteen minutes ago and that's why I'm here, I didn't want to be in the same tent as him. We were arguing about the most ridiculous things. The first argument today was about attaching tent poles wrongly, the second was about setting up the tarp, the third was just a screaming match while you were on your call with Matt and our last one was about how my music was playing too loudly in my earphones. It's not even at half vol--" Thor cuts himself off, saying, "I'm really sorry I'm dumping this on you on your birthday. You deserve a better birthday that isn't spent fixing my love life."
Tony pulls Thor into a hug, saying, "Come on, Thor. You're my best friend. Your problems are important to me no matter what day it is."
Thor returns the hug gratefully, "I love you, Tony."
"I love you too, buddy," Tony replies. "Now, about Bruce... I don't want to tell you how to run your relationships, but at the sound of things... maybe it's best if you guys call it quits. I know it's been good for most of it, but it doesn't sound like it's just a rough patch."
"I thought so," Thor sighs. "It feels like such a waste. I should have listened when Val said we had nothing in common."
"Doesn't matter if she was right or not," Tony says. "This is about you."
"Thor spent the night in my tent. It was a little cramped since mine was for one occupant only, but I was happy to not be alone, and Thor was happy to be in my company, so we were both fine with it. The next morning, Thor got up a little earlier than I did, like he always did, and left the tent to start on clearing up the campsite. Coincidentally, Bruce was also awake. So, of course, this started."
"For God's sake, maybe if you had any common sense instead of being such a bitc--"
"Oh. I can't say that."
"Oh, just shut the fu--"
"Actually, I can't say any of it. This went on a while. Eventually, the big line dropped."
"Maybe we should end it here, then!" Bruce almost shouts.
"Maybe we should!" Thor replies just as loudly. The both of them pause and Thor sighs, throwing a hand up in exasperation, "Look, what matters is that we tried. We tried our best and it didn't work out. It happens sometimes, that's life. And I like you a lot, Bruce, but we just weren't meant for the long road."
Bruce gives him a long look. Thor sees every movie they'd seen together, every morning they'd woken up in each other's apartment, every meal they'd shared. Every smile he'd ever been given by Bruce. And then he sees all of that fade away as Bruce says quietly, "Goodbye, Thor."
"Goodbye."
Bruce walks away to his car, his things already in the backseat. Thor stands at the side of the road until Bruce's car is no longer visible before he shakes his head, running a hand through his hair before he returns to the camping site. By the time he came back, the others were awake. Val and Tony were taking down their tents while Jessica is already packed up, sitting on the hood of Thor's car drinking from a bottle.
Val looks around and asks, "Where's Bruce?"
Thor replies flatly, going down on one knee to dismantle his tent, "Gone." The other three of them exchange looks before Val and Tony abandon their tents, all of them moving to help Thor with his own.
"It's kind of insane how much happened in just a day and a half," Tony comments above the silence.
Thor says, "Tell me about it." Though the reply came off a little sassy, they all knew him well enough to know he was upset. Jessica reaches for her bottle and gives it to him.
"You know what?" Jessica asks, her own attempt to comfort Thor. "You've still got us."
Thor manages a faint smile, taking the bottle from Jessica, "Yeah... I still have you guys."
"After Bruce left, Thor helped us pack up our tents into the car. Val was right all along. They had nothing in common. That was the day Thor realised that he was searching for what he really wanted in life and he had absolutely no idea what that was. Lucky for him, it was coming his way. He just didn't know it yet. But that's a story for another time."