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“Love is like war – easy to begin, but very hard to stop.”
-H.L.Mencken
XX
A dead man lives at the back of her mind, just beyond the edge of the wound that will never seal and he’s catching snowflakes in a memory that will never fade.
XX
In her dreams Diana is standing on a platform as if she were waiting for a train to arrive, even though some inexplicable feeling in the back of her mind tells her that no train will come.
In her dreams the train station is bare and empty, no squealing children, no whispered goodbyes and huffing engines. When she turns her head there’s but one other figure on the platform with her. It’s always the same person and it’s not who you might think.
Above the polished silver tracks stands a woman dressed in a tight leather skirt and a long sleeved purple blouse, her auburn hair tucked against the nape of her neck in a tight coil and her slender fingers wrapped around a slim cigarette.
The dream always ends like this: Diana opens her mouth to speak, to ask and the woman smirks and lifts her finger to her lips.
(Diana wakes to the blare of her alarm and blinks the sleep from her eyes, the dream peeling apart layer by layer. Outside her bedroom window a blue parrot tucks its beak under its wing.)
XX
This is the truth: There’s a gaping hole somewhere in the middle of her chest. It’s there, because a hundred years ago Steve aimed a gun at a cargo bay full of deadly poison and she felt it in her own heart as she lay trapped by Ares, a scream tearing out of her throat.
She killed the God Of War, not for herself, but for the world and for the gods, for goodness and for humanity. She killed him, because it was her holy duty as an Amazon and she killed him because he took something from her that she’ll never replace.
After, Diana picks herself up from the ashes of the burning land her dead brother left and lets her eyes slide shut.
She closes her eyes and thinks It is done, Mother.
She closes her eyes and thinks The war has ended but it will never leave me.
Diana of Themyscira returns to London and calls herself Diana Prince. Sometimes she’ll walk along the Thames and watch the people go about their lives after the war. She watches young children chase after yapping dogs and smiles. She watches men read their newspaper and women eat crumbling pastries with white lace gloves on their hands and she sips her coffee and allows herself to be proud of everything they have achieved. She sees a young man reaching for the hand of blushing girl and averts her eyes.
XX
The world calls her Wonder Woman and talks of her in awed whispers and hushed admiration.
XX
Time passes and she barely feels any of it. The war may have ended, but in its wake comes another, more gruesome and vicious than the first. She ends this one too, with grim determination and the ticking of a clock ringing in her ears.
XX
The woman at the train station is wearing an emerald green office dress and her hair falls down her shoulders in sleek waves. She takes a drag from her cigarette and smiles at Diana as the white smoke rises between them. She refuses to speak and Diana is growing frustrated, but when she inhales sharply the smoke smells of something heady and sweet, something Diana recognizes but can’t name.
The stranger cocks her head to the side and smiles expectantly.
(Diana wakes with a start and realizes: almonds)
XX
The decades tick by and Diana adapts, more or less. She watches her (Steve’s) friends live their lifes. She sits in the front row when Sammy bows before the curtain falls. She listens to Charlie sing off-key and half-drunk with tears in bloodshot eyes. She exchanges letters with Etta and Chief and loses count somewhere along the way. One by one they are all taken from and she remains endlessly helpless against the ongoing stream of time with a box full of memories under her bed.
Diana of Themyscira moves to Paris to forget. Diana Prince moves to Paris to build a life.
XX
Diana is sitting on the balcony of her Paris penthouse on a breezy April morning with a cup of tea in her left hand and the watch cradled against her collarbone in her right hand when it stops ticking. She doesn’t realize it at first, because the absence of a noise is always so much less striking than the presence of it. She opens her palm and reveals the stillness in it, another part of him forever lost to her. She weeps for it, as though he had fired that gun right there and right then.
(A hundred years later and the pain is still fresh and new, like a wound that won’t stop bleeding.)
XX
Diana looks at the woman with the auburn hair and something like long forgotten knowledge shivers its way back to the surface. She turns around and squares her shoulders, unafraid. The woman on the platform raises an eyebrow as she lifts the cigarette to her lips.
“I know my own when I see them.” Diana says.
The woman throws her cigarette into the trackbed and smiles. “When the gods went to war they knew they wouldn’t return. It is foolish to engage in a war with war himself. Yet my husband followed his brother’s call into battle and perished as the others did and when he did he left me to rule over his realm, for the underworld may never remain unguarded and the dead may never be left on their own.”
“Persephone…” Diana whispers to herself and the goddess smiles.
“I have come to deliver a gift.” Persephone says and suddenly the train station is gone. Diana turns her head and they are sitting on a porch in the middle of a field with roses and vines wrapping their way around the wooden posts of the fencing. Persephone sits in a gold plated chair, her loose hair studded with petals. A monkey with silver grey fur sits on her right shoulder and three large, black dogs lie at her feet, watchful.
Diana is in her armour, but without her shield. “What kind of a gift?”
“When the God Of War fell and you had brought the peace the gods had never hoped for…” Persephone says and rests her free hand on top of a dog’s head. Her other hand is holding a chalice of wine, so deeply red in colour that it almost leaves purple stains where it sloshes against the rim of the cup. “…there was no joy in your heart, no elation over the victory. There was just grief over something as fickle as human life. You grieved and you mourned and you wailed over the death of that man like you felt it as your own. You cried and I felt ashamed.”
“Ashamed?” Diana echoes with a hollow laugh. “Do the gods deem me weak then?”
“The gods have never considered you weak, Diana of Themyscira, but the gods have deemed you wise enough to understand that the loss of a mortal life is no more meaningful than the death of a fly to the fabric of the universe, no more than a dot on the canvas of eternity. ” Says Persephone and lifts her chalice to her lips, watching her over the rim.
Diana clenches her fingers against the skin of her thighs, presses her eyes closed against the ache of the past and the stinging of tears. “What kind of gift did you come to deliver?” she repeats and opens her eyes.
“A hundred years have passed and your heart is still bleeding over that man. A hundred years have passed and you have recovered from every wound that has been inflicted upon you, but this one. ” Persephone smiles, tilting her head and when Diana was young her mother had told her that gods took joy in toying with human life and that their games were as cruel as they were wondersome and suddenly Diana understands every word of it. “I have come to tell you that what has been lost to you may be returned.”
Diana’s heart soars and drops. She swallows. “To what price?”
“Price?” The goddess asks.
“Everything comes with a price.”
“Most things do…” Persephone says. “…gifts, however, tend to come for free.”
(Diana wakes panting and sweating with her silk sheets tangled around her feet and her hair matted to her forehead and the back of her neck. She reaches under her pillow and retrieves Steve’s soundless watch, pressing it to her heart.)
XX
(She’s dying, she knows this. She may have been born from the blood of the gods, but not even she can lift the rubble on top of her. She closes her eyes for just one minute and all she sees is Steve’s endlessly blue eyes and a village in the middle of a war zone, snow falling heavily around them as they sway. She can almost feel his hands on her body and his breath on her skin where it stirs her hair, can almost smell the leather and the ash on his skin.
“Diana…” Steve says softly, his eyes catching hers and his fingers clenching at her waist. She smiles at him and reaches out to trace the shell of his ear with her fingertips.
“Steve, I…” she starts, but he interrupts her.
“Diana…” he repeats firmly with a sense of urgency. “…you can’t stay.”
She frowns, looking away, up at the broken church towering over his shoulder. “I don’t want to go back.”
Steve smiles sadly and brushes her hair back over her shoulder as he did all these years ago. “If you don’t return neither of us can.”
She regains her wits with a gasp and goes on.)
XX
The air is cool and crisp, stars stretching above the city and the Eiffel Tower sparkles in the background. Diana just stopped a minor robbery, targeting a jewellery store and is now following the sound of a car alarm howling in the distance. She turns a corner and approaches the back of a man examining the blinking taillight of the car. She raises her shield and tilts her head, taking a step closer.
“Excuse me.” She says politely, in English and the man whirls around with his hands up, his lips moving around an apology Diana cannot hear, because all she hears is the blood rushing in her own ears, all she hears is the echo of a plane exploding one hundred years in the past.
Steve stops short, freezes where he stands and a single word falls from his lips.
“Diana…” He breathes, his blue, blue eyes filled with a yearning that resonates with the ache in her own heart. He takes a step in her direction and Diana shakes her head, staggers backwards.
(“All the gods have to give from their death bed is smoke and lies, my child.” Her mother says, an eternity ago, perched on the edge of her bed.)
“Diana.” Steve repeats louder, on a laugh and takes another step. Diana drops her shield and runs. She hears Steve calling her name from behind her, hears her own footfalls and is suddenly, painfully reminded of another occasion when their roles were reversed and he almost looked back, but didn’t. She doesn’t want to turn around and face the reality of it, an illusion sent by the gods perhaps, a cheap parlour trick and nothing but or a diversion fabricated by those who seek to see her gone. Her own past, twisted and used as a weapon. The only thing she can never struggle against staring in her face.
She rounds a corner and finds herself back on Persephone’s porch, panting and lost.
“You!” she seethes and points a finger in accusation. “What did you do?” One of the dogs stands up, growling and hackles raised, but Diana ignores it.
“Why, my niece…” Persephone says calmly and silences the dog with a flick of her wrist. “…it seems to me that you need to learn some gratitude.”
“Gratitude?” Diana spits back at her and anger rises within her like water in a cave, like blood filling a fresh gunshot wound. “For mocking me?”
“Mocking you?” the goddess laughs and steps closer to her, a white rose cradled between her pale fingers. “Did I not tell you that I had a gift to give?”
“On what terms?” Diana pants, desperation and hope winding around her heart, like the flowers growing around the fencing. “What do you expect me to give in return?”
“What could I ask of you, that you haven’t already given?” Persephone asks around a smile and the garden vanishes and Diana is left in the dark alleyway, high red brick walls lining the street on either side, the bustle of the city a faint noise in the background. Steve rounds the same corner that she did and stops short when he sees her standing there. He’s right there in the same uniform that he died in, panting with his left hand pressed to a stitch in his side. His right hand is holding her shield. Her heart clenches and jumps in her chest and everything inside her screams in hot, disbelieving joy.
“So…” he says and clears his throat as he keeps his distance. “…I’m not sure, if you’ll believe me, but that never happened to me before. Like, usually it takes between one and three seriously lousy pick-up lines until the girls take off running, but…uhm…” he trails off and stares at her, shrugging helplessly, something joyful and amazing shining in his eyes and reflecting in her heart.
“Steve…” Diana whispers, breathless and disbelieving, and steps closer, her own footfalls against the cobblestone street lost to her ears, the world around them moving impossibly slow and impossibly fast at the same time as it loses any kind of significance to her. His eyes stay locked on hers as he waits for her to approach. A sudden, broken noise somewhere between a wail and a laugh escapes her mouth as she delicately touches the tips of her fingers to his jaw, sliding up to thread them into his hair, her hands framing his face. He shudders, the shield falling between them, as his own hands come up to cup her elbows, his whole body falling forward to bury his face in the slope of her shoulder.
Steve mouths her name into the side of her neck in breathless wonder and she is home.
XX
A dead man lives in her polished Paris apartment and he’s cooking pancakes in a kitchen he hasn’t fully puzzled out yet.