Chapter 4
Diana stays in France. Mostly. She travels and tries not to get involved, but sometimes... sometimes the world doesn't let her rest.
Some people know her, from before. Peggy Carter keeps Diana's secret in a vault with all of her own secrets, and Diana isn't worried she will tell it. Steve is propably somewhere, Chief must be wandering Siberia by now, like he's said he wants to.
But there are other people who remember. People who Diana doesn't know. An old man on the street, eyes large and unblinking, a little girl and her grandmother, beaming and pointing. Some accuse Diana of impersonating, and she thinks of herself then and of herself now and she agrees.
She does not learn to love humanity again, her faith and naivety are gone. Diana awaits the start of a third war (because by now she knows it's going to happen, because the wars never end, they never stop). She tries to keep away from them, not get involved, and she hears the people cry, hears the weapons and hears children cry, and it's like she is on a battlefield that stretches across the whole world, wars fought everywhere, and she can't escape.
She can't fight wars anymore. Not alone.
Because that's what she is, ultimately. Alone. She has no one by her side, no Steve and no Peggy and then Charlie passes away and Diana doesn't know what to do, so she escapes, leaves a mourning Etta and a tired Sameer and goes as far as she can.
Diana doesn't try to fix her loneliness, refuses to acknowledge she is lonely. Loneliness is a good way of life, unattached and free, she can go anywhere. Be anyone except herself.
Because she is Wonder Woman, a hero, a face that sometimes is seen on the page of a newspaper, a character for the public to place their hopes on, to make her what Steve Rogers was as Captain America.
Diana of Themyscira does not excist anymore.
Wonder Woman disappears in the 80's and is assumed dead. The world forgets.
(For a while, when they don't need her. There is a criminal, a monster of a man in the beginning of the 21st century, and Diana takes care of him, just barely keeps him alive.)
Diana Prince enters the world in the mid 90's and gets a job in an art museum. Diana Prince is proper and gentle, and fits into the scene of high class easily and seamlessly, has painted lips and nails and sits on the edge of the chair and smiles with a twinkle in her eye.
No one makes the connection between Diana Prince and Wonder Woman.
Sometimes Diana wonders if there is one.
When he wakes up sixty four years into the future in a SHIELD base, Steve throws his head back and squeezes his eyes shut. He sucks at dying.
They teach him about the future, what has happened, who has died. Peggy is still alive, and he is told SHIELD was formed by her and Howard. No one tells him about Diana. No one talks about the year after the war.
Nick Fury, despite his smug smile and promises about 'there is nothing I don't know', has not found out Steve didn't go to ice when the world thought he did.
Steve feels admittedly smug.
Fury lets him go after two weeks, and Steve escapes to Europe. He's, naively, thinking SHIELD wouldn't follow him, but on his second day in Paris, he confirms the blond man who looks nearly homeless is, in fact, following him. So, not yet willing to confront the guy, he's escaped into an art museum that is advertising a passing exhibition of artifacts that derived from Japan. It takes his breath away, all they've found and restored from times before him, statues as old as tales and paintings of life once lived.
And there, in between catching his breath and gaping around, he sees a woman who looks exactly like Diana. Except she is poised and soft, with a red dress and black heels and painted lips and nails. She's identical to Diana aside from the way she acts, and Steve's heart aches worse than when he visited Peggy. It's one thing to see a friend has aged, it's another entirely to see the carbon copy who won't know him.
Except she turns her head while she talks, her eyes sweeping over the crowd in practiced ease, a motion skilled spies and soldiers know to use well. Her eyes return to him briefly, widen, and before Steve knows what's happening, she's excused herself from her company. She strides towards him, with the easy grace of a woman used to walking in heels. He meets her eye, the twinkle and smile upon her lips painfully familiar. Despite he knows this could not be Diana, he also knows it could not be anyone else. So, when she stops in front of him, smile warmer and eyes softer, he accepts her hand readily.
"Diana Prince," she says with the same authority Diana had introduced herself to Peggy with, with the same easy rolling of her name. 'Prince' is unfamiliar to his ear, a cut off version of the 'Princess of Themyscira'. He wonders if that is exactly what she did.
"Steve Rogers," he says gently, watches her eyes gleam. Her red lips stretch farther, reveal a little teeth.
"A pleasure."
They go for lunch. Neither brings up the fact they are sixty four years into the future unaged because of their shadowers (though, Steve does wonder what's her excuse). Instead, they talk to each others like strangers. Steve tells where he's been, what he's seen, and Diana does the same and tells him how she became a curator for Louvre. Halfway through their meal, she gnaws at her lip and then smiles softly.
"I hope you know this is not a place to be discussing business in," she says, slowly. Her eyes tell a different story and Steve knows she has noticed too.
"I do," he nods. "But I don't have any other place to..."
"My apartment is just around the corner," Diana says and gives a little smile, a hum of amusement.
"I'm afraid I wasn't quite truthful with you, Steve," Diana says, after they'd retreated to her apartment. It's large, one of those modern flats that overlook the city of Paris.
"Regarding what matter?" Steve asks, tries not to be nervous. Diana glances at him, amused.
"We Amazons live long lives, yes, and I've barely started on my own. Yet, the kind of power I possess, to be named the Godslayer," she chuckles, "cannot be brought to life from clay." She turns to him, smiles a wonderful smile. Steve takes her hand, almost clings to it desperately.
"Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and Zeus, God of Thunder, the King of the gods."
Her hand is warm in his, fingertips cold. They brush against his, startling. Her pulse is normal, like of any human.
"God," he breathes, "you're half god."
Diana smiles prettily, her hand turns in his and the other comes to rest on the back of his hand.
"Yes. Half Amazon, half god. My mother brought me up to believe she sculpted me from clay. It isn't long when I learned the truth."
For a second, Steve fears he might hurt her, that his grip is too strong for her fingers. Then he reprimands himself; he is still a human, she's a god. A god. He shouldn't be surprised. Amazons themselves are myths, or were, until Steve crashed upon their shore. Diana had spoken about the gods casually, as if the stories she'd recited had actually happened.
Apparently they had.
"It doesn't change anything," Diana says then. Steve blinks up at her. "They're all dead. Nothing that happens will be because of the gods."
Steve squeezes her hand harder, her bones shift on her hand, at the pressure where Steve usually breaks a phone.
"What happened to them?" Diana doesn't pry her hand free, but she uses it to take him to the couch. Gray, sleek, comfortable. She sits him down, positions herself on top of the white coffee table.
"War. Ares kept killing the gods, until no one was left. I killed Ares."
She does not elaborate, and Steve lets her leave it at that. He knows war, intimately, and he knows Diana has fought more of them than anyone should ever be expected to fight.
He doesn't need the details of her story, not this one, if she isn't willing to share them.
He returns to America with his tailers, marches up to SHIELD and lets them take him in, treat him like he is fragile and breaking, ignores how true that in a way is, and wallows in his anger and sadness.
They give him an apartment and an allowance, like the government wouldn't owe Steve thousands. It's money he never asks for and money he doesn't particularly need.
Diana reaches out to him, with letters, because she must know SHIELD, must understand that privacy is not a thing in Steve's life anymore. Her letters are delicate, written in elegance and smell of her fragrance, and because of them Steve buys a kit for the sole purpose of writing her back, and a box where he can keep her letters.
The letters he writes are not nearly as pretty, his handwriting is absolutely horrid, which Diana claims is surprising, because you draw with such askilled hand, and they don't begin with 'dear Steve' -which in part is because her name is Diana and not Steve, and because writing down 'dear anything' just makes Steve feel like he lives in Victorian England.
Steve also has no idea what the hell he should write in a letter, so he usually only decides to send whatever drawing he's recently finished. It's kind of rude of him to give loads of them to Diana, but it's not like he's expecting her to keep them. Anyhow, Diana compliments his art without question, and it warms Steve's heart, and sometimes she sends him pictures of their current exhibitions.
It goes on for about a year or so. Fury calls Steve about the Avengers, Loki tries to invade Earth, and Diana's letter arrives, two weeks after, inquiring if he is alright and should she be worried. It's sweet, and also makes useless the about ten drafts he's written for her about the whole ordeal.
Steve sends her a five page story, detailing each Avenger and parts of the battle. Most of the space is taken by Stark, who Steve can't decide a thing about, but he feels Diana might dislike. What he writes about Natasha is scarce, and he doesn't mention it was her and Clint who were tailing him in Paris, but Steve imagines Diana and Natasha would get along well.
He details Thor, who Steve doesn't find as absurd as he should, given that Diana is his friend, and asks her how multiple gods work.
("I am sorry to tell you this, Steve" he imagines she wrote this not sorry at all "but the Asgardians are not in fact gods, no matter what they wish to tell you. They are aliens." Steve can't figure out if she means this or not.)
Then they don't talk about it. Steve sometimes updates her if he sees the Avengers again, and Diana politely sounds interested, which is a feat because writing letters is the slowest form of communication Steve takes part in these days and he is driven insane by how long he has to wait for a reply and barely even remembers what he wrote to her.
And so a few months pass, Steve goes on a few missions of SHIELD's behalf, smiles to the neighbor and breaks punching bags, until one day Diana responds to his for-once-colored still life with a simple 'I'm coming over to New York.'