"Do not let the roles you play in life make you forget that you are human."
― Roy T. Bennett
In the soft morning sunlight, tucked beneath sheets as white as Themyscira's sandy shores, Diana opened her eyes, sweeping the tips of her fingers across Steve's cheek. He sought the warmth of her skin almost instantly, fitting his hand into the curve of her spine. His breath was a whisper in her ear, the weight of her name as familiar to her as the pommel of her sword, brushing against her mouth like a promise, one that he intended to keep. If he was awake, he moved as little as possible. He kept her close, arm to arm and hip to hip, entangled in her warmth like a man on the cusp of freezing to death.
Diana's fingers continued to wander, tracing the bridge of his nose and the shape of his mouth in one fell swoop. Steve was warm beneath her hands, supple and pliant where she was firm and unyielding, muscle and sinew expanding and contracting in tandem with the rise and fall of his chest. Diana had grown fond of these contradictions. As a man, he embodied everything that she had been warned against, an accumulation of characteristics that served to sever whatever common sense she had left. Steve's constitution was as impenetrable as her shield and as strong as the sunlight spilling across their shared sheets. When she looked at him, allowing herself to drift aimlessly in the blue of his eyes, she saw a man who had shaped himself into a weapon, acting under the assumption that he'd never again be anything else. He had grown accustomed to austerity in the same way she had been taught to defy it all, tirelessly striving for the unachievable.
In sleep, everything that he had been forced to face suddenly slipped away. If he had known this, she knew that he'd be afraid, afraid that he had become less of a man in her eyes, an impression he hadn't wanted to cultivate. Diana considered these vulnerabilities a gift, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. His actions spoke louder than anything he had ever told her out loud, bursting from beneath his skin on more than one occasion, setting the world aflame in the span of a heartbeat. Steve was more than the sum of his parts, more than her mother had made men out to be, and more than she had ever thought possible.
Diana kissed him softly on the mouth, his name slipping through her lips like a prayer. He answered in kind, sinking his fingers into her hair, opening his eyes to simply look at her, committing the shape of her mouth and the sound of her voice into memory. He had been awake after all.
She had never seen anything quite so beautiful in all her life.
A/N: For Vanessa.