Work Text:
Under the night sky, she dreams. The lull of the boat bears her away, the slap of water on the hull, the press of Steve’s arm to her own. When she sleeps, she flies, the clouds bright white puffs that she dances through.
In the morning, Steve tightens a halyard and she says, “I am a pilot, too.”
“You are?”
“I have a plane,” she says. “I built it.”
“Did you,” he says. His head tips slightly. “You have engines? Internal combustion?”
“What is that?” she asks.
“It makes our planes…go.” He ties the line off on a cleat. “And crash. When they fail.”
“The one I built is faster than my mother’s, and it will not be shot down in the world of men.”
“Could have been handy to get to London,” Steve says. “I’m not above a little seasickness.”
“My mother would have known if we had taken it.”
“Your mom knew anyway,” Steve said and Diana turns to the horizon. Her mother had touched just there, on her cheek. Diana presses her fingers to the same place.
…
Her bed in London is hard and the only fur she has to wrap around herself is her cloak, now stained from the city and sprayed through with salt. She burrows into it and pushes away the scratch of a blanket. Wool, Etta had called the fabric. Diana does not care for it.
When she closes her eyes she sees the white cliffs of home, tumbling waterfalls, grasses waving their seed heads, and hears the gentle snort of a newborn calf, calling for its mother’s milk.
She blinks awake. With her back propped against the headboard - wood, no sensible stone here - she draws her knees up and rests her chin on them.
She does not jump at the knock on her door.
“You all right?” Steve asks through the door. “Your light’s still on.”
She straightens. “Come in.”
“I didn’t know-“ The door edges open. “Are you decent?”
She picks at the gauzy dress Etta left for her. Steve, his head around the door, immediately looks at the ceiling.
“What do you sleep in?” she asks. “This is not comfortable.”
“A, ah, shirt. Sometimes. And shorts.” In the lamplight, his cheeks are red.
Diana does not know what shorts are. “I will take one of your shirts.”
“It’s just- it’s part of my pilot’s uniform. Underneath, it, I mean. It’s not- you have a nightgown.” He swallows. “Clearly.”
“You have a uniform to fly?”
“We all do.”
“I want your shirt.”
“Ok.” He nods, his eyes still on the ceiling. “Let me- I’ll get one. For you.”
When he returns, he takes only two steps into the room. From there, he throws her this shirt. It is soft. And thicker than the cloth she is wearing. “Thank you,” she says and rises from the folds of her cloak.
“Oh, um-“ Steve edges backwards. “I should-“
She sniffs at it. It smells of him, though faintly. That men would smell so different than women was yet one more piece of this world she did not know to expect.
“It’s clean,” Steve says. His shoulder bumps into the door and he tugs it open and then closed behind him. From the other side, he calls out, “Goodnight.”
She leaves the thin fabric dress she was given on a chair and sleeps in Steve’s shirt. In her dream, the calf pushes to its feet, bleating into the warm dew of Themyscira’s night.
…
She will not spend their night sleeping. He smiles when she touches his lips. Bites playfully at her fingers and she puts her chin on his breastbone and smiles back, draped over him.
“Do you like flying?” she asks.
“I love it.” He winds his fingers through her hair. It feels so nice. “You really fly?”
She purses her lips at him. “Is that one more thing your women don’t do?”
“Well.” He sighs. She likes when he licks at his lips like that. “Yes.”
“I am very good,” she tells him. She tips her hand through the air, banking around a moonbeam that falls through the window. “Very fast.”
“In that case, I’m sorry my introduction to you was a crash landing,” he says. His nose wrinkles.
She kisses him. “I am not.”
When she realizes she is dreaming, she blinks away the splash of waves at the shore, fishing nets, the crabs that scuttle up the sand.
“Steve,” she whispers and he stirs. “When did you start flying?”
“A couple years ago. When I enlisted.” He yawns. “You?”
“A couple thousand years.”
She touches his forehead where it creases. “Huh,” he says. His arm tightens around her shoulders. “You would be pretty good then, wouldn’t you.”
…
After Steve- After he- After everything, she doesn’t sleep. She lays down because Sameer will not rest if until she does, and because Charlie pats her too roughly on the shoulder, and because Chief may hug her again if she does put her head on a pillow, but she does not sleep.
She cups Steve’s watch to her chest and watches the planes in the sky. She would have flown higher, faster, up and away with the gas, and leapt from the burning wreckage to find Steve here, alive, waiting for her.
I wish we had more time, he had said. She closes her eyes and behind her eyelids she sees his smile, hears his voice I love you.
You are my greatest sorrow, she thinks.
She will not dream, for it may be of the bright ball of an explosion, the face of her mother, the ache for what she does not have, all that she cannot keep at bay if she sleeps.
…
In the hours before the sun rises, the monument is empty of visitors. A policeman patrols down the block and a man waits outside a hotel in a buttoned uniform. But many mourners have come and gone and Diana is simply one more among them.
She unpins the photograph of Steve.
In her apartment - cramped, dark, and damp more often than it is not - she slips it beneath her pillow and wants to believe she will dream of his hands, slow on her skin, how his eyes lit when he smiled at her.
At night, she props open her window and holds the photograph before it. The wind flutters the corners and she lets it drift down to the bed, borne on those air currents.
…
On the boat, they pointed the bow towards the constellation Aquila, the keeper of Zeus’ lighting bolts, so backwards again would be to sail towards the charioteer, Auriga. She picks the stars out of the sky, holds Steve’s map and Steve’s compass, and traces to where she came from. She will fly back again. She will alight on her mother’s shores and spread the news of her conquest, her triumph. She will walk once more on white sand and feel Themyscira’s sunlight on her cheeks, and at the full moon she will pick hyacinth from the hillsides to lay at Antiope’s grave.
She wakes in the morning and the stars are gone and home is a blank space on the map that held all of what she knew. She can still smell the blossoms on her fingers, but the light here is weak and gray.
…
“Personal effects,” Etta says.
Diana only knew him days. Etta for years, Charlie and Sameer and Chief for-
“-Take them, dear.” Etta presses the box into her hands. It is too light to hold what remains of the life of a man such as Steve.
She puts it on the foot of her bed and leaves it there for three days, her feet knocking into it while she sleeps. She dreams of her mother stroking her back, of Steve landing in a bounce of wheels and the whir of a propellor See? I’m back, I made it, I love you.
Slowly, she lifts the lid. Letters, from his father. A medal, for valor in combat. A diploma - this, Etta has to explain to her. A dog’s collar. Diana has seen dogs, and the leather around their necks. She holds it, cracked and worn in places.
In the corner, a folded, crumpled piece of paper.
Garbage, she thinks, but does not throw it out.
Years later, she learns. A paper airplane.
…
“I’d like to see that plane of yours. If we’re ever- when we get done with this. I’d like that,” he whispered that night- their night. His chin was against her forehead, his cheek prickly with stubble. There was a spot on his shoulder that her head fit perfectly. She wondered if the women at home knew that. That men have a place on them made to nestle into.
It is invisible, she would tell him if he were here. She did not say that then, but she thinks she should have. You cannot see it.
Really? He would draw her closer. His face would scrunch in disbelief and she would stretch and kiss him.
He will never see it even if it were not invisible, but all the same, in her dreams she shows him.