"Why the furrowed brow, dear heart?"
It was Bruce speaking, because he was still alive after using the Victorian endearment with a balance of mockery and affection that only he seemed to be able to express effortlessly and consistently. Tony erred too much on the side of the former and Steve on the latter and so she found them best taken together. However, she had Pepper's measure and Bucky's and so taken never involved her ostentatiously large California King bed which she hardly minded, having a taste for neither vinegar nor honey. She could have said as much to Bruce but she didn't need to; he already understood.
"I think Tony must have spent hours on this…joke. It must be a joke, it can't be real," Natasha said, closing the book and pushing it across the table. Her latte was still warm but the foam was a sad bit of lace around the edge, like a worn negligee, and about as appealing.
"Why do you say that?" Bruce asked, not reaching for the book or even glancing at it. His dark eyes were quite intent and calmly curious but she didn't feel she was a specimen or an equation to be solved. There was a warmth to him when he relaxed she hadn't known she would be so fond of and she liked the discovery and the knowledge of how he would nod if she told him, a professor pleased with his student's insight. He hadn't got Steve's bright, enhanced perfection or Bucky's dour grace, but there was something about him…
"It's a bit crazy, the way Tony is. The main character has a traumatic upbringing, she's orphaned and put to work in foster homes and nearly thrown out of the last one, but chapter after chapter, all she cares about it is having red hair! The utter agony of it!"
Natasha knew it was predictable, trite even, but she couldn't help flipping her own auburn hair over her shoulders, tucking some behind her ear. She'd honestly never thought of the color of her hair though men seemed to. A great deal and described in frankly execrable poetic ramblings as a sunset or a fire, as if the unoriginal words whispered into her ear would unleash some erotic goddess and not her contempt at the cliché and its cliched expectation. Tony appeared to have taken another tack, as he so often did, creating this elaborate fantasia of snow-drifts and leaf-fall and endless moaning about the massive, unending burden of red hair.
Bruce reached out and pulled the book over, his hands as gentle rifling through the pages as she'd ever seen them with an injured bystander's compound fracture. He laughed, quite loudly, and she thought, at least Tony's joke landed with someone. He pretended to care very much, but Tony just wanted someone to laugh, he wasn't truly that picky as long as the subject wasn't wasn't an upgrade to Jarvis or something, anything to do with Pepper.
"No, we can't blame Tony for this one. This is Anne of Green Gables and I don't remember very much about it, I didn't read it but it was my cousin Jennifer's favorite and I recall Anne is known for her…profound dismay about her hair. Tony didn't write this, not as a practical joke, though I agree, he could have. The prose is rather…florid and exuberant," Bruce said, letting his fingers trail along the text that tripped along the page, passionate and Canadian in a way she'd thought was impossible and thus, Starkian.
"This is a real book?" Natasha exclaimed.
"Oh yes, beloved of many. They have a museum on Prince Edward Island to it. You might hang in there, I think Anne has a few good whacks to get in. Or I can find you the mini-series. Jennifer watched that until the VCR broke," Bruce replied. Jenny had wept, as bitterly as Megan Followes ever had, and with better reason. In today's dollars, those videos might as well have been encased in platinum and she'd been forced to borrow the library's scratched up copy after the VCR vomited out the tape, warm to the touch but unrevivable.
"If we're going to kill time watching old TV shows, I'd rather we find "Murder, She Wrote" on Hulu. I like that Jessica Fletcher and her wake of destruction. She never seems very bothered by any of it and the world is nearly as full of stupid people as it really is," Natasha said. She might come back to the book before bed. She would not admit it, but she wanted to see if Anne got the dress she wanted and it seemed like Josie Pye had it coming. She mostly believed Tony hadn't written the book to tease her except for the Pyes—they seemed like a Stark addition and she wouldn't have put it past him to somehow alter a first edition, just to needle her.
"Well, you have the remote," Bruce said, sitting back, all comfort in his half-zipped hoody and worn jeans, that arm he rested along the back of the sofa, the scent of a clean man, the monster safely hidden except in the slight wariness of his eyes, the faint absinthe cast of his five-o'clock shadow. She tapped the buttons and Cabot Cove was on the screen, tinkling and deadly and utterly able to be broken apart and remade, a little heaven. Anne would sigh at the waving gold sea-grass, the blue chicory flowers; Natasha only waited for death and the (elderly) maiden and Tony's next drone delivery of dulce and bear-claws and Bruce's next eddy of warm, desirable laughter.