Chapter Text
Diana hasn’t been in the field much since 1945, or at all, really, when a wormhole opens above Manhattan in May 2012 and aliens pour out of it.
She’s in D.C. at the time, as luck would have it, curating some pieces for the Louvre from the Smithsonian, and happens to see live footage of the invasion on the TV screen of the Museum café. Taking a deep breath, she’s out of the rotating doors and on her way to New York a moment later.
Suddenly, she’s glad at her ever-paranoid self for the armor and lasso at the bottom of her bag.
It’s chaos when she arrives in Manhattan. There’s people screaming and buildings collapsing and grotesque-looking aliens just about everywhere she looks.
But amidst the chaos, she can spot a few individuals fighting back, keeping the aliens within a ten block radius of the wormhole. Iron Man is among them, flying around the outskirts of the battle and keeping it contained, and she almost startles at seeing the Hulk, who most believe is a conspiracy or myth, jumping between buildings and ripping at the aliens. The rest she can’t make out or recognize. Besides, there’s no time.
She throws herself into the madness head first. There’s a few civilians left, shouting and panicking and running for their lives, and Diana directs them to where she knows the coast is clearer. The few police officers that haven’t fled the scene take over for her, so she leaves them in her wake.
Slashing the disgusting creatures as they come in her way, Diana jumps up to the roof of the 34th street Target to get a vantage point. From here, at least a dozen stories up, she can see the scope of the problem. And, fuck , is it a big one.
The aliens are not only strong and resilient, but there are so, so many of them. And they just keep pouring out of the portal. Iron Man, the Hulk, and whoever the rest are are doing an amicable job of keeping them contained, but it’s only a matter of time until the sheer number of creatures overpowers the few of them.
Diana really, really hopes someone is working on closing the wormhole.
She’s trying to figure out the best way to help when she spots a cluster of aliens closing in one one of the fighting individuals. The man, tall and built, is dressed in a skin-tight bright blue material that Diana would snicker at if she had any time, but with the creatures ganging up on him and his strength giving way to exhaustion, she leaps over the buildings toward him instead.
With a thud, she lands beside the fight and takes out the aliens from the outside in. They don’t see her coming from the back, so it fights her way through easily. By the time she gets to the man, he’s on one knee, bracing himself for a blow that won’t come -- she just decapitated that particular extraterrestrial -- with a big, round shield, red and blue with a star in the middle.
It looks familiar.
The man seems to notice that the blow isn’t coming and lowers the shield enough to reveal a confused, still on guard frown.
Diana’s breath is knocked out for a moment. For just a second, the stranger in front of her had looked just like Steve. The blue eyes, blond hair, and strong jaw were almost enough as it is, but the determined fire in his eyes as he faces a fight bigger than himself is what really did it. He even does a similar double-take at her not-so modest armor.
She almost misses that he’s talking to her.
“Who are you?”, he demands as he straightens. His uniform is even more ridiculous up close, and if Diana just had a moment to think she could definitely place where she’s seen it before.
“The person that just saved your ass.”
“Well, uh-” He looks a little startled. “Thanks.”
He’s about to open his mouth again when a loud crash in the building to their left calls for their attention. Two or three small alien ships are making its way over to them.
When the man, Not-Steve, turns to her again, it’s with a seeking look his eyes.
“Can you fight?”
Diana nods determinedly. “That’s why I came.”
Not-Steve looks relieved. “Great.” He rolls his shoulders and motions uptown to where she can see a few small explosions go off in the sky. “We need to steer these motherfuckers up toward 28th. If we cluster them enough, Clint can take out the whole bunch.”
With no time to ask who Clint is, Diana gives him a curt nod and takes off to wrangle up some aliens. Judging by the way they’re already on her tail, they shouldn’t be too hard to lure in any direction.
When she looks back to see how Not-Steve is faring, he’s already running, slashing his way through the creatures with an impressive speed. Whoever he is, he can’t be human.
They fight long and hard, but the creatures don’t seem to let up any. They just keep coming.
In the hurry of the battle, Diana channels all her energy into protection and survival, not paying any mind to the others fighting around her. She spots a woman with bright red hair jumping between two buildings at some point, but before she can make out any more than that, she’s being targeted with another alien blast. Most surprisingly, she notices a man fly by her and take out some of the creatures with what looks like lightning . If she had any time to, she’d figure out if the lighting was technological or celestial, but she doesn’t. She kicks another alien ship to spin off into a crash.
The next time she sees Not-Steve, it’s because he’s saving her ass.
Having just been knocked down by a particularly hard blow of blue light from one of the extraterrestrial guns, she’s on the ground when another alien pounces upon her. She’s trying to avoid its strikes the best she can, but is still struggling to catch her breath from the blow and can’t find the strength to get it off of her.
Suddenly, miraculously , the creature is hit and falls to her side. She glances at the dead alien in surprise to find the shield from earlier stuck in its neck.
Diana gets up with a wince and turns to her savior. “Thanks.”
“We’re even now,” Not-Steve shrugs with a smile, and Diana thinks he looks almost boyish.
She turns to the fallen creature and pulls the shield out of its neck, blue, gooey blood pouring out of the wound as she does so.
With a grimace, she hands it back to Not-Steve. “Might wanna get that washed.”
He dignifies her bad joke with a snort.
A wretched sound rings out over the buildings as a whole new fleet of aliens streams in through the wormhole a couple blocks over. Another one of those giant, whale-like ships is among them.
“Is anyone working on closing the portal?”, she demands.
Not-Steve nods. Suddenly, he startles and holds a finger up to his left ear, an earpiece, Diana assumes, and lets out a frantic “ Do it! ”
Another person must disagree because he looks up with a frown a moment later. “Stark, these things are still coming.”
A pause.
“What do you mean a nuke ?”, he asks a little breathlessly. Then, “Fuck off , I know what a nuke is.”
At this, Diana speaks up. “Wait. What ?”
Not-Steve pays her no mind. “Stark. You know that’s a one way trip.” His voice is suddenly serious, subdued.
Diana thinks for a moment, tries to catch on to what’s happening. ‘Stark’, Tony Stark, presumably, is doing something with a nuclear bomb. A suicide mission. They have a way to close the portal.
Oh gods.
Is Stark planning to disappear into the wormhole with a bomb? It would work, probably, but he wouldn’t be likely to make it out.
Diana and Not-Steve both look up to see Iron Man whizz by, directing a missile on his back. She swallows and trails the figure with her eyes as it narrowly misses Stark Tower and disappears into the wormhole above it.
They stare at the tear in the sky, silent, waiting, anxious. Stark is no longer visible, and the creatures are still pouring out.
Diana doesn’t think she’s breathing.
Then, suddenly, the creatures around them make a mechanical whirring sound and fall to the ground. She looks over at Not-Steve, but he looks equally startled.
Back up in the sky, the glow of an explosion is visible through the wormhole. The harsh blue darkness gives way to a warm light, burning its way closer to the opening above Manhattan.
They wait. But they can’t wait much longer.
Not-Steve lets out a defeated sigh from where he is staring up at the tear and says, “Close it.”
The blue beam of light that was holding the portal open ceases a moment later, and Diana lets out a breath as the wormhole slowly collapses in on itself.
Then, through the last, tiny, hole in the sky, a figure is visible falling through it, down, down, into Manhattan. The tear seals itself behind him.
“Son of a gun.” Not-Steve’s voice takes on a whole lot of relief and just a bit of awe.
But the figure, Stark, isn’t catching itself. Diana notes with a pang of terror that he must be unconscious and is barrelling toward the ground at a fatal speed.
She prepares herself to leap across the building and catch him, but before she even has her footing right, the Hulk leaps from a roof and grasps Stark in his large, green arms. He skirts to a stop with only a couple thousand dollars of property damage.
Not-Steve takes off running to the scene barely a second later, and Diana follows him in a haze. She doesn’t know Stark, of course, but suicide missions don’t bode well with her. She needs to know if Stark made it out.
Hulk is at the scene, turning over the unconscious Stark, as is an unfamiliar man. He has long blond hair and is wearing armor that looks almost like something Amazonian, grasping a hammer that Diana can feel is celestial even from where she is twenty feet away.
As soon as they arrive, Not-Steve is leaning down to check Stark’s body for breathing. The arc reactor is Stark’s suit, which is usually glowing blue, is gray and dead, and Stark’s face, no longer hidden by a mask, is unmoving.
Diana feels her blood freeze as Not-Steve hangs his head. Somehow, even the Hulk looks dejected.
He roars suddenly then, startling not only Diana, but also waking Stark into a startled inhale.
“What the hell?”, he heaves. “What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me.”
Not-Steve -- Diana should really find out his name -- and the celestial stranger both break out into relieved and exhausted smiles. The hulk roars again.
“We won.”
Diana breathes a little easier.
“What are you doing among us?”, the long haired man demands suddenly, turning to Diana.
She straightens. “I helped.”
Stark lifts his head with a grimace. “Oh god. Another one? We’re going to need a group chat or something.”
Not-Steve ignores him and looks up at Diana. “Where’d you learn how to fight like that?”
“My mother.”
Stark snorts. “We’re going to need more information than that, Athena.”
Diana frowns. “It’s Di-”
“You’re not human,” the long haired-one interrupts. He gives her a measured stare, but she refuses to be intimidated.
“Neither are you.”
He’s about to respond when two new figures come around a corner and walk up to the group. One of them is the redheaded woman Diana remembers seeing earlier, the other is a man in a black vest.
“Son of a bitch,” he says, spotting Stark who is now sat up on the asphalt. “He’s alive.”
“Not getting rid of me that easily, Barton,” Tony smirks.
Diana almost admires Stark’s ability to joke and charm in any situation, but she also thinks he’s kind of a tool.
“Who’s this?”, the redhead asks briskly. She nods toward Diana, but looks to Not-Steve for an answer.
He sighs as he gets up from the road and half-heartedly brushes dirt off of his suit. “We’re working on figuring that out.”
“My name is Diana,” Diana tries, but she’s immediately cut off by Stark.
“Oh, great. She has a name.”
“Are you working with Loki?”, the redhead demands. Her voice is icy, almost menacing.
“I don’t know who that is,” Diana explains. “I was in D.C., I saw aliens on the news, I came to help.”
“Wh-”, the woman starts again, but the celestial cuts her off.
“She’s part god, this one.”
Diana swallows. She’s not used to people knowing this, especially when she doesn’t even know their names.
Not-Steve takes a commanding step toward her. “Is that true?”
Diana squares her shoulders. “Yes. I’m Diana, Princess of Themyscira, Daughter of Zeus.”
“How on earth are you not on our radar?”, the redhead asks, but before Diana can answer, the man in the vest, Barton, opens his mouth.
“Wait. There are Norse and Greek gods?”
Diana frowns, but then turns to the celestial with a surge of clarity. “You’re Norse.”
“Thor,” he tells her, still in a fighting stance. “King of Asgard, Son of Odin, God of Thunder.”
“Pleasure.” She tries for a genuine smile, but she can feel its tightness.
Barton snorts. “Oh my god. Of course they have beef. We’re fucking watching god-beef. This is my life now.”
Stark snorts too. Not-Steve is helping him up.
And Diana doesn't have beef with the Norse, per say, but of course their histories allow for some distrust. It’s been thousands of years since the wars between them, but their truce is reluctant, if not cold. The gods don’t fight for the sake of the humans, but they sure as Hades aren’t friends.
Stark limps over toward her and gives her a measuring frown. “You’re a good guy?”
Feeling everyone’s eyes on her, Diana considers her best answer. “I fight for mankind.”
“In that case,” Stark holds out his hand, “welcome to the team. I’m Tony. Stark. But you probably knew that.”
Diana shakes his hand. “Not voluntarily.”
“I like her,” the redhead smirks. She gives Diana a nod. “Natasha.”
“I’m Clint.” Vest-man says from beside her. “Barton. Or Hawkeye if you want to make me sound cool.”
Hulk grunts.
“I know who you are,” Diana tells him with a smile.
He makes little to no indication that he heard her and wanders off into the rubble. Not-Steve makes a move to go after him, but Natasha calls him back.
“Let him go, Cap,” she says. “He needs a moment to cool off.”
Diana looks over at Not-Steve, Cap, with a curious stare. Now that she has a moment to think about it, isn’t fighting tooth and nail for her survival, she recognizes the suit.
“You’re Captain America.” It’s not a question really, but also she needs him to confirm. After all, he’s to have died in March 1945.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Diana blinks “You were dead.”
“No, just frozen. The serum made my body icebox-able.”
She smiles at his outdated vocabulary. “Nice to meet you, Captain.”
He comes to shake her hand and good-naturedly says, “Steve, please.”
Of course.
His name is Steve.
Of fucking course his name is Steve.
From the eyes to the hair to the damned airplane suicide mission, the name is a no-brainer.
It stings a bit, but it’s nothing she can’t handle.
Diana manages to shake herself out of the prolonged moment of a silence.
She smiles at the blond. “I’m gonna go with Rogers.”
He gives her a small, confused frown but doesn’t comment on it.
“Also,” she proclaims, turning to the others, “I’m not part of your superhero team. I won’t be. If aliens invade you can count on me, but I’m not great at teams and I’m even worse at having superiors.”
She never regrets her decision not to become an Avenger, but she almost changes her mind when she gets two-hundred pages of paperwork from S.H.I.E.L.D. in her mailbox a week later.
Diana sighs, signs it, and goes back to her office in the Louvre.
More than a month later, sixteen minutes into her lunch break, Diana’s phone pings with a text. She opens it curiously.
[Unknown Number]: Hey, Diana. This Steve Rogers from the New York alien invasion. I got your number from S.H.I.E.L.D., I hope that’s okay. You mentioned you live in Paris, and I’ll be there next week, so I was hoping that we could get a coffee? Or some lunch? Whatever you’re comfortable with. If you’d rather not, that’s okay too.
She stares at it for a moment, takes a sip of her smoothie.
The text is a bit formal, Rogers is clearly not sure what he’s doing, but it’s strangely adorable. She won’t respond though. She shouldn’t.
Diana doesn't do friends. Colleagues, sure, acquaintances, but not friends, not when she's sure to outlive them all. She'd had a whole bunch back in the twenties and thirties, one last one back in the seventies, but with every loss her walls became thicker and her resolve more impenetrable.
Tired of grieving, Diana just sighs and puts her phone down. Rogers reminds her too much of Steve anyhow.
But, as was perhaps to be expected, Rogers doesn't let up that easily.
He texts her again the next morning, clarifying when he’ll be in Paris, and when she gets out of work that afternoon, there’s another text asking her which of two hotels she thinks is better.
Either Rogers doesn't know the two blue ticks means she’s left him on read, or he doesn’t know how to take a hint. She turns her phone off for the night.
When she switches it back on the next morning, she’s almost forgotten about the text chains. She just wants to check if the next episode of her favorite baking show is up already.
It’s not.
Instead, she’s greeted by another notification from Rogers.
[Unknown Number]: Are you ghosting me?
Before she can think better of it, she’s opening the chat and typing out a response.
You know what ghosting means?
The three moving dots appear just a moment later, and Diana startles at Rogers’ quick response. Being from the forties, he doesn’t seem like the kind of man to constantly be online.
[Unknown Number]: Only since about five hours ago.
Diana laughs and saves his number in her phone. She may have been a little rude, she begins to think. After all, he probably needs a friend, and she might be the only option that understands his forties references.
Sorry.
Yes, I’m in Paris, and I could do lunch next week.
Great!
Also do you possibly have any connections that could get me into the Louvre despite the fact that it’s sold out next week?
Aren’t you Captain America?
I want to be inconspicuous.
That’s understandable.
And yes, I can help you out. We can go together after lunch.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!
Diana locks her phone and heads for the shower. She’s not about to be late to work for the first time in twenty-eight years.
They text once more briefly, just to make concrete plans, before she’s walking toward him that next Thursday. He’s waiting outside her favorite café.
He looks better out of the uniform, she notes, not blind to the way his tight navy t-shirt is straining against his ridiculous chest. If it weren’t for his build, he could almost blend into a crowd with his white Chuck Taylor’s, Dodgers cap, and khakis.
“Rogers,” she greets.
“Diana.”
She motions to his cap. “Must’ve been quite the shock, waking up to find your baseball team in L.A.”
Rogers takes on an exaggeratedly pained expression. “I can’t even talk about it.”
Diana laughs, and they go inside.
They choose a table by the window, close to the door and in straight shot to the emergency exit, because old habits die hard. Rogers pulls out her chair for her, but it’s not condescending, just kind.
She thanks him.
Diana knows the waitress, Celeste, and greets her with a warm smile as they are handed the menus. Celeste makes a cheeky remark about how attractive her date is, and to Diana’s surprise, Rogers blushes and corrects her in not perfect, but decent French.
They chat briefly before Celeste is called back into the kitchen.
“I didn’t know you spoke French,” she tells Rogers.
He shrugs. “Spent quite a bit of time in France. And Dernier never shut up, so.”
She smiles. “He was one of the Howling Commandos, yes?”
“Yeah,” Rogers nods. “He died a few years back, apparently. Has a daughter in Marseilles.”
A gust of warmth wafts into the room as a couple comes in from the sun. Diana watches as the young man helps untangle the woman’s sunglasses from her hair and she laughs. He kisses her disheveled hair.
“It must have been hard,” Diana says, turning back to Rogers, “Waking up with everyone gone.”
He shrugs a little dejectedly. “Sure. But, you know. C’est la vie.”
Diana allows herself a chuckle. “Not usually.”
“No,” he agrees amusedly. “Not usually.”
She lets Rogers look at the menu while she gazes out onto the street. She’s been here more times than she can count, so she knows exactly what she wants.
It’s the warmest week yet, this year, and the streets are filled with families and couples and groups of friends that are out to enjoy the sun. Diana can already tell it will be a hot summer. The first wave of tourists has already begun to trickle into the city.
“I can’t believe the prices these days,” Rogers complains, eyes still on the menu. “I mean, really, three euros for a cup of coffee?”
Diana grins. “You won’t find it much cheaper anywhere else in Paris. Or New York, for that matter.”
“It used to cost 15 cents.”
“I know,” she tells him. “Inflation is a bitch. The prices have been shooting up nonstop since the seventies.”
At that, Rogers’ face takes on a curious frown. He leans forward in his seat.”Wait. How old are you?”
Diana looks back out the window and thinks for a moment. She hasn’t been asked that with anyone she can be honest with in a while. Mostly, she’s lying to bureaucrats and placing her birthday somewhere in the eighties, where it makes sense.
“A-hundred-and-forty,” she answers eventually. “Give or take a few years, I’m not sure. We didn’t have years in Themyscira the same way you do.”
Rogers’ eyes widen almost comically. “A-hundred-and-forty? Christ. And I thought I was old.”
Diana laughs. “We’re both a bit above average, I would say.”
“A bit.”
Celeste comes back to take their orders. Diana orders her usual, a croissant with raspberry jam and a latte, and Rogers asks for a black coffee and a chocolate éclair.
“So, uh-”, Rogers starts as soon as they’re alone. “Where, or I guess what, is Themyscura?”
Diana finds herself impressed that he pronounces it correctly after only hearing it once. “It’s an island in the Aegean Sea," she answers, "off the coast of Greece. I grew up there among Amazons -- a female warrior tribe sent by the gods to fight in the great war that never really came the way it was prophesied. My mother is their queen.”
Rogers nods, processes this. “Why does no one know about this island?”
“There’s an invisibility ward around it,” Diana explains. “And no one that seeks it is ever able to find it. Which includes me, now.”
“Wait. So you can’t go back?”
Diana shakes her head.
Rogers looks as though he’s about to say something apologetic when Celeste comes with their coffees, sets them down on the table, and whisks off to serve other customers.
Diana takes a sip of the beverage and feels its warmth travel down her throat and into her chest. Even if caffeine doesn't affect her, she loves the taste of coffee. She can’t imagine it affects Rogers either.
She asks.
“No, it doesn’t,” he tells her. “You?”
Diana shakes her head. “Can you get drunk?”
Rogers shakes his head then. “Nah. I drank two whole bottles of whisky in less than thirty minutes once trying, but no dice.”
“Must’ve been a rough night,” Diana jokes.
Steve briefly lifts his eyebrows in acknowledgement of her quip, but doesn’t seem to find it all that funny. "My best friend had died that day."
Fuck.
"I'm so sorry," she says quickly. "I-"
"No, it's no problem," he interrupts. "I'm fine, really."
Diana thinks for a moment, watches a waiter skirt around the tables. She remembers a name. "Barnes, was it? Your friend."
Rogers nods. "Yeah. Bucky. He was my only constant."
"I'm sorry for your loss."
Heels clacking on the wooden floorboards, Celeste comes back up to their table.
“Et voila,” she smiles setting down their pastries. “Bon appetit.”
They thank her and dig in, eating in silence for a minute or two. The couple from earlier is at the table behind Rogers and is speaking in low tones, voices wrapping softly around French vernacular. A car honks outside.
Rogers sets down his eclair and takes another sip of coffee. “When did you leave Themyscira?”
“1918,” she tells him.
His eyes widen as he smiles. “We’ve been around the same time then. I was born in ‘18.”
“Right,” she muses. “I remember reading that at some point. Forgive my not remembering.”
Rogers waves a placating hand. “Please. I welcome your not knowing everything about my life. Sometimes it seems like some people know me better than I do with the way they spew out facts they’ve read in some history book. It’s like they’re trying to impress me or something.”
“Fuck that,” Diana proclaims.
Rogers smiles, takes another bite of his eclair. “How have you managed to stay so hidden? I mean, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t even know you existed.”
“Well,” she teases, spreading some jam on her croissant, “first step: don’t sign up to do stage shows and badly written movies.”
Rogers barks out a sheepish laugh and takes a sip of his coffee. “Right.”
“And also I’m rarely in the field,” Diana confesses, composing herself. “I haven’t been on the front lines since the First World War, I just helped smuggle people out and such in the Second. There’s a few conspiracies about me of course, about ‘Wonder Woman’ I should say, but they’re no more than that.”
“Impressive,” He remarks. “And I like the name.”
“Wonder Woman?”
He nods. “It fits.”
“Thanks,” Diana grins. “I’ve always kind of liked it myself. It’s ridiculous, of course, but at least it has alliteration.”
“Thank god for that.” Rogers toasts the air with his nearly empty cup. “I can’t believe I got stuck with fucking ‘Captain America’. And, honestly, I don’t mind it that much, but it seems that people took it a bit too literally while I was frozen. The government put me in tights, I don’t love them that much.”
Diana snorts into her coffee and laughs until her sides hurt.
And when she unlocks the back door of the Louvre and gives Rogers a personal tour, she watches his eyes light up and his hands gesticulate as he raves about Vermir’s brushwork and thinks that against her better judgement, she’s found a friend.
They stay in touch sporadically following that afternoon, text about art or inflation or TV shows. Occasionally, they’ll have a ranty phone call -- mostly from Rogers’ end -- about FOX news and the alt-right, or about Stark’s newest endeavours. Diana sends him Captain America memes whenever they show up on her feed.
They meet twice more, once in New York and once in D.C., but given their respective careers, they don’t make it across the Atlantic very often. It’s not a problem for either of them, the distance, but they do enjoy the time they get to meet.
It’s refreshing for Diana to have someone to talk to, she finds, someone that isn’t a colleague (or not really, anyway). She finds that she trusts Rogers, to a reasonable extent, and knows that he has her back.
So, when she wakes up to the news that S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury is dead, Captain America is a fugitive, and tens of thousands of confidential S.H.I.E.L.D. documents have been leaked, she decides to have his back too. There’s live news footage of multiple giant helicarriers crashing dramatically into the Potomac.
She calls Rogers immediately, but, perhaps predictably, it goes straight to voicemail.
Diana goes back online and finds grainy photos of Rogers, along with Natasha and a man she doesn’t recognize, fighting a stranger with a metal arm in the middle of a busy highway. The article lists at least twelve casualties. Diana swallows.
She tries Rogers’ phone again, then Natasha’s. Voicemail, both times.
With little to no hesitation, she books the next flight to D.C. on her phone and calls Yvonne to request some time off, apologizing for the short notice. Yvonne lets her have it easily, probably because Diana has used less than a week of her vacation days in nearly two decades.
She’s in D.C. with a messily packed suitcase and her armor under her coat just over twelve hours later, sitting in a taxi headed toward S.H.I.E.L.D.’s headquarters. Former headquarters, maybe.
Diana had read some of the leaked documents on the flight, at least that which she could download in time. She didn’t understand the majority of it, but she could recognize that it had effectively toppled the organization, exposing that HYDRA had been festering within it the entire time. It was a shock to her, but she imagines it’s an even bigger shock to Rogers and Natasha, who had not only worked for, but trusted the bureau.
She hopes they’re okay physically, but also psychologically -- to the extent that they can be, at least.
When the taxi rolls up to the main S.H.I.E.L.D. entrance, Diana can immediately tell that Rogers won’t be here. She gets out anyway, tipping the driver generously, in the hopes that someone will be able to tell her where she can find him.
As luck would have it, she spots a frazzled-looking Natasha leaving the main building just as the taxi drives off. The redhead is walking briskly toward a sleek black car to Diana’s left and doesn’t see her.
Diana calls out to her.
Natasha turns abruptly, searches for the source of the sound. When she finds it, she looks surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “Diana,” she calls, changing her course. “Shouldn’t you be in Paris?”
“I saw the news and you guys looked like you needed a friend. Or maybe a fighter. Or both, I don’t know.”
Natasha looks exhausted, but her lips quirk up at the ends. It’s a rare, genuine smile. “Both sounds good.”
Diana smiles, then remembers her friend. “Is Rogers okay?”
“Yeah.” Natasha’s smile tightens. “He’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean ‘will be’?”
Twenty minutes and one nearly silent car ride later, they’re opening the door to the hospital room Rogers is in. Soul music streams out through the open door, setting the room apart from the eerie silence of the hall. The unfamiliar man from the grainy photos, dark-skinned and handsome, is sitting beside the bed and talking animatedly to Rogers, who listens with a mildly amused expression.
They both turn to the door as it opens.
“Nat,” the stranger smiles, revealing an adorable gap between his two front teeth.
“Sam.” Her voice is warmer than Diana has heard it -- the man, Sam, must be a friend.
Rogers sits up a little, ignores Sam’s motion for him to refrain from doing so. “Diana?”
“Hi,” she smiles.
“What are you doing here?” He frowns, and Diana suddenly feels like she was overstepping, coming here.
“I saw the news reels,” she explains, “and I thought you could use a friend.” She peers around the room. “Or, a third one, I guess.”
Rogers’ face breaks out into a grateful smile, and Diana relaxes.
Sam introduces himself as Sam Wilson, a new friend, and soon leaves with Natasha. They promise to bring Rogers some food when they return, and he thanks them with palpable relief, quipping a joke about the bad hospital food. Diana is glad to see him banter, but can tell that beneath that surface, he is exhausted and hurt.
Taking the seat Sam had left empty, she asks him what happened. She knows it's not an easy question even as she asks it.
Rogers is silent for a moment or three, then lets out such a deep, shuddering sigh that she can feel it in her bones.
He tells her about Fury’s visit to his apartment, about the USB-stick, about his death. He tells her about Natasha’s involvement, their discovery of a corrupt and HYDRA infested S.H.I.E.L.D., and the bunker in Jersey. It turns out Nick Fury wasn't dead, and HYDRA had set a highly trained assassin on their trail: the stranger with the metal arm from the highway.
"So we were fighting, this man and I," Rogers says almost monotonously. "and I remember being confused about the fact that we were effectively matched. I mean, I'm not used to other people being as strong as me, but he was. Nearly enough, at least.”
He pauses. The music behind him, quieter than it was when Natasha and Diana entered, plays on.
“He was wearing a mask -- you probably saw.” Diana nods. “But at some point I managed to knock it off and he turned to me and I-”
Rogers falters for a moment, then looks up at Diana with the most pained expression she thinks she’s ever seen. “It was Bucky.”
Diana tenses. “What?”
“And I called out his name,” Rogers continues, “But he just looked at me like he didn’t know who, or what , that was. He hesitated though, for a solid five seconds, so that has to count for something, right?”
She nods. “Definitely. But how is he Bucky? He should be nearly a hundred now, if he survived.”
“Fuck if I know,” he says helplessly. “But it’s him. I know it is. It was his face and his voice and the exact color of his eyes. HYDRA did something to him, something horrible, and I need to find him, get him out.”
“I can help.”
Rogers shakes his head. “No, Diana. It’s not your fight, and I can handle it. I’m fine. I’m okay.”
Diana can do little more but stare at her lap as she processes all he said. “You're not okay.”
“I just said-”
“It's okay to not be okay. And I know you aren't. You can’t be, given the circumstances.”
Rogers takes a deep, shuddering breath.
Not entirely certain of what to say, Diana just waits and lets him gather his thoughts.
"I just-" He falters, pauses. " I don't have time not to be okay. I have to save him. I have to."
Diana nods. She wishes she had a chance to save Steve. "You will."
"But you don't know that." Rogers' voice suddenly takes on an angry note. "What if he's too far gone? What if HYDRA already killed him years ago?"
He's clearly prepared to continue, but Diana cuts him off.
"You said he hesitated," she reminds him insistently. "When you said his name. You said there was a five second window where he could have taken a shot and didn't."
Rogers stays silent. His eyes drop to his lap.
Diana folds a leg under herself to face him fully. "If anyone can save him it's you, Rogers. And you don't seem the type to back down from a fight."
He huffs out a little laugh, and his somber gaze turns sentimental, warm. "I'm not, usually, even when I'm set up to lose. Bucky used to bitch at me about it. He pulled me out of so many back alley fights back before I could win them. I insisted that I didn't need protecting, and he agreed, just told me he had my back. He was the only one who didn't make me feel weak back then."
“With your connection, your history,” Diana assures him. “Bucky will remember you. I know he will.”
“No, you don’t.”
Diana opens her mouth to argue, but then just closes it, sighs. “No, I don’t.”
Rogers holds out his hand for her to take and she does. They listen to Marvin Gaye sing on about poor Abbey Walsh.