Author's Note: I...have no frame of reference of if this is good or not. I hate everything I ever write AND I wrote this in two hours when I was supposed to be in bed, but I needed to write it.
Also, I, always and forever, suck at endings. I'm sorry.
Title from Empires' "Lifers".
I'm searching for a heart
Searching everyone
They say love conquers all
You can't start it like a car, you can't stop it with a gun.
They tell me love requires a little standing in line
And I've been waiting for you, lover, a long long time
I've been pacing the floor, I've been watching the door
Meanwhile, I'll keep searching for a heart.
~Warren Zevon, "Searching for a Heart"
Here is the most important thing Diana has learned about grief: it never ever goes away.
Sometimes it recedes to the back of her mind, fades away a little. Sometimes it's days or weeks or months, but when it hits her again, it hits her as strongly as it did the first time she had time to sit and hold his watch in her hands and reflect after he was gone. As if it happened perhaps an hour ago, not nearly a hundred years ago.
One hundred years.
She thinks of that, sometimes. Reflects that by now he'd be gone even if he'd lived. No matter how this had played out, at some point it would have ended exactly like this. In every variation of their lives she would have wound up here, alone with her grief. But, she thinks, any variation would have been better than the variation where they had no future. Any future is better than nothing-there could've been a marriage, a home, coffee and a newspaper. Perhaps children (although, she thinks, the only thing that could be worse than outliving Steve would be outliving her children). There could've been at least 50 years of that sort of brilliant mundanity, but there wasn't. Instead there is this: the cavernous quiet of the museum, Steve's watch locked in a safe place, a hundred years of immense sadness, and her name. When she thinks she's forgotten him, somehow-when she can't quite recall the fine details of his face, when his voice is impossible to recall, she has these things.
Her name.
When she'd returned to London after the war, having realised that she couldn't return to Themyscira now, even if she'd wanted to, not with what she'd learned about the outside world, not with the burden of her responsibility heavy on her shoulders, Etta had everything already set up for her: the job, the flat, someone to look out for her. It was the first time that she realised that it was possible that Steve had known from the beginning that he would not be coming home with her.
Etta had asked about the name then: was there something else she'd like to change it to? But Diana had said no-she'd read that women took a name from their husbands, and she wanted to keep the one Steve had given her. It wasn't until later that she realised that meant they took their husband's name. Nonetheless, she liked her name. She liked that Steve had given it to her, and she liked that it was hers, so Diana Prince she became.
Her life as Diana Prince has largely been a quiet one. She works. She absorbs as much as she can about the world. It surprises her, sometimes, how easy it is to become someone else, how easy it is to start your life again. In the beginning she wonders a lot if this is what it was like for Steve-slipping into a life that isn't quite your own. She thinks a lot about Steve in those early days. About what his life must've been like. About how he grew up. About how he was right about being above average-no man could ever come close to him, so far as Diana was concerned. About how much she wished he was there.
She cried a lot in those early days because everything was so overwhelming and because she felt so lost, and because, more than anything, there was a huge gaping hole in the world that she couldn't seem to figure out how to fill.
There were other men, eventually. The first came two years after she settled in Paris. He was English, tall and thin, soft spoken. Nothing at all like Steve. The first time they had intercourse, she cried afterward, and when he tenderly asked what was the matter, all she could manage to say was "I just miss him, so much." She never saw him again, and it was a long while before she tried again-and after that, she always made sure to excuse herself, just in case.
But it wasn't just intimacy that could set her off-the smell right before it snowed, the taste of vanilla ice cream and the sound of a fiddle had all sent her into a flurry of tears at some point or another. A man had phoned the museum once, inquiring about a particular artifact, and through the phone lines, his voice was a dead ringer for Steve's. It had been so long-sixty years, then-that she'd realised she'd forgotten it until that moment. "Steve?" she'd asked, momentarily disoriented, and the man's puzzled response had barely registered. For a moment, he had brought him back to her. For a moment, she had him back-was able to indulge a daydream that somehow he had lived, had been frozen in time somewhere waiting, searching for her-a daydream that she had been entertaining for more than 30 years when the delivery from Wayne Enterprises arrived in her office.
Deliveries to her office are not uncommon, of course, but on that particular day she hadn't been expecting anything-and certainly hadn't been expecting anything from Mr Wayne-with whom her relationship had nothing at all to do with her work.
She leaves the box for three days before finally opening it and the accompanying email. When she does open it, she is surprised at herself, because when she reads the email and sees what's inside, it's not sadness that grips her, at least not at first-it's a kind of white hot rage at Mr Wayne's intrusion. This, she realises, is a new manifestation of grief. She has no interest in sharing this with him—how dare he insinuate that she should! She knows it isn't a rational feeling, knows that Mr Wayne could not possibly know what the photograph entailed, what it would make her feel, but she allows herself to feel it nonetheless. Allows herself, for the first time, to be angry-not sad-about what was taken from her.
She takes a moment, regroups, and studies the picture intently. How long it has been since she has seen his face! The fall of his hair, the shape of his jaw, the slightly bemused expression-it's a gift she was never anticipating receiving. She realises then that she's never actually seen the original, and she holds it gingerly in her hands as though it's a lost kitten or a tiny baby. She's spent every day for countless years surrounded by priceless artifacts, things that most people have never even dreamt of seeing, but this is by far the most precious thing she's ever been in possession of.
It's then, holding the photo, that she allows herself a moment to daydream, but it surprises her when instead of daydream of what could have been, she dreams of what was-of her childhood, of the day he all but landed in her lap...of sleeping together that first night on the boat, of how he unquestioningly took care of her without ever expecting a single thing in return-of how he let her take care of him. Of how handsome he looked in his stolen uniform the night of the gala-of how it was then that she realized that someone so perfect-so divine, even-was not meant to be part of the mortal world and how therefore he was doomed to die. Of No Man's Land, and of what came after. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there, cursor blinking on the computer, but when she wakes up out of the dream she feels somehow renewed. "Thank you for bringing him back to me," she types, and sends it because it's all she can think to say. She isn't sure that he'll know what she means, isn't sure that she cares.
When she gets home from work that night, she sets the picture up against the locked box that contains Steve's watch on her nightstand. "Now you're with me always," she whispers, touching his face-she should know better, does know better than to handle artifacts like that, but can't seem to help herself-after 100 years of waiting, she feels she's entitled to touch him again, if only in photographic form.
She touches him again when she climbs into bed that night, and as she falls into a deep, peaceful sleep, the only thought in her mind is the renewed hope that she will see him again, one day, somehow. Because if grief is forever, then so is love, and she believes in her heart that love is the thing that will prevail.