In her darkest moments, Diana knew fear. She knew rage, as well, but that did not have context here. Steve Trevor had died in 1918, and Diana did not count the brief respite from death in 1984. Therefore, he had been gone nearly 100 years, leaving Diana to parse apart every bit of their relationship. And in doing so, she had kept tabs on the soldiers she had known, on the humans she had met during her first foray out into the human world. And Diana had learned a very, very hard lesson over time: they all died. Every single one of them was now dead today, and there was no one left who remembered the Wonder Woman that had made her appearance during World War I.
That had been an incredibly painful lesson, and an incredibly painful realization, but Diana could do one better. She had wondered what it might feel like for the humans on the other side of that, and thought again of Steve’s absolute shock when he’d told her she hadn’t aged a day. Steve would have grown old and slow and crippled while Diana remained as she was, and Diana wondered often if he could’ve taken that. She thought he could’ve, but then… Diana had been wrong before.
“I would believe that, actually,” she said softly, and she giggled a little as well. It wasn’t so hard to imagine, considering that she’d already seen Thor fall down all on his own. Or so she thought. She sobered as Thor continued, however, because he was giving voice to what would have been her worst nightmare. The sheer fact of their difference had been as death, and Diana wondered regularly if the same would’ve happened to her and Steve, outside of wartime when Wonder Woman was useful. He had not truly known Diana of Themyscira, and what he had known, he had encouraged her to hide. It had not boded well, as she’d thought about it since.
Their hands were still linked, and so she raised his to her mouth and brushed a kiss over the back of his knuckles. “It is not fair that you lost her, and I am sorry for it.”