Author's Notes: Many thanks to all of you for the wonderful reviews and feedback! Please keep it coming!

Canon Note: I was intrigued and pleased by Eugene Brave Rock's reveal of who Chief Napi really is, and waffled on whether Diana had found that out by the time the Justice League formed. I decided she hasn't...but he's kept an eye on her.

Chapter Three

"Did Wanda say something?" Diana asked once she and Thor were outside and away from earshot.

"Oh no. Despite her power to know many secrets, she's very discreet. But I confess, it's more difficult for me to restrain myself when I see a friend in pain," said Thor with a sad smile. "So here I stand. My arms have the strength of Asgard, but so many of my friends here in Midgard carry burdens that I can't lift for them, though I gladly would try."

Diana smiled. "I'm glad you came to Earth. You haven't been here long, but I think you and I see the same beauty in this world."

"I believe we do. The mortal humans are a young people, but they have stout hearts and quick minds. They're easy to love." Thor shot her an all-too-knowing look. "But therein lies our sorrow."

To Diana's embarrassment, her throat tightened. All she could do was nod. To save herself from answering, she pulled a copy of the picture from her pocketbook and handed it to him, all while avoiding eye contact.

"This picture is some years past. One of Earth's great former wars?"

She forced air back into her lungs and nodded, still unable to look at him. "The first, near the end. Almost exactly one hundred years ago."

"So all these noble men must be gone now." He put a hand on her shoulder, and she seized it. "I'm sorry, my lady. It's a bitter truth I've yet to face, so soon after I arrived here, but already I rue the day all my dear friends and brothers in arms will leave me."

"The first..." Damn, why was it suddenly so hard? It'd been a full century since she'd seen the armistice and grieved for Steve along with millions of others in a hundred nations, whose sons and daughters and lovers had never come back from those trenches and beleaguered towns. Why did it feel as if the scars were all ripped wide open again? "The first was the hardest." She had to whisper it. She had no voice to speak without breaking into sobs.

"Show me?"

Thor held the picture before her, and she brushed a fingertip over his face. "His name was Steve," she whispered, and her breath seized entirely.

"Ah." Of course, now Thor knew, like Wanda, the reason she'd been so odd towards his beloved Captain.

His name was Steve, his name was Steve, my Steve, and he flew away in a plane to save the lives of millions, but instead of ice, he burned his life away in fire, and he never came back to me, except in a picture. I wish there'd been supersoldier serum back then. Maybe even that wouldn't have saved him. Maybe it would. It should have. He was a good man, a great man, and today there's another man who flew away to save the world, but he came back, and I almost hate him for it because my Steve didn't come back to me. A hundred years of human life have gone by, and I still miss him so much...

She abandoned the effort to restrain herself. There wasn't any point; she'd lost control, and this near-stranger beside her knew it. So she wept into her hands harder than she'd done in a very long time, probably not since she'd stood beside the graves of Etta or Napi, Sammy, or Charlie.

Charlie had died in 1926 of liver failure. Sammy had died of cancer in 1939. Napi had lived to see the end of the Second World War and died peacefully of heart failure in 1963, leaving behind a son who was so like him, sometimes Diana had called him "Chief". Etta had also lived to a ripe old age, even marrying despite being "past her prime" in the eyes of many men by 1918, but she'd been gone in 1969, leaving behind three adopted children, seven grandchildren, and nineteen great-grandchildren. Diana remained good friends with the grandchildren and their families. She was a family legend, and not a one of them had expressed any suspicion of the strange foreigner in their midst who never aged.

Diana had been able to talk about the Great War and Steve's death with Etta's family and shed only a few nostalgic tears. Napi's descendants were delighted by the stories, and Diana loved to tell them. Napi's grandson – also the spitting image of him – had inherited his well-coded diary that Diana hadn't even known he'd made, and she'd delighted him by taking only a few hours to decode it (where no man or woman who didn't know the cypher had ever succeeded). Talking of the past with them was easy, even the parts that made her sad.

Why was she losing control so completely now?

Lois Lane hadn't been ashamed to sob her heart out for Kal-El when they laid him in his grave. Granted, she'd known him and loved him for far longer than Diana had known Steve...does that matter?

Thor said nothing, merely kept his big hand on her shoulder, and she clutched it with her own hand as if he might anchor her to this world, lest she be blown away by the maelstrom of grief. It tried to pull her off the ground as violently as it had that night, when she saw fire erupt in the sky and knew Steve was gone, and every time since when she sat at the bedside of every man and woman dear to her from those first chaotic days and watched them breathe their last.

Why are their lives so short?! Why, how can they do this to us? How can we be here among them and have to watch them die again and again and there's nothing we can do to keep them? Why are their lives so short even without all this violence? How dare they put me through this over and over?

"Have you really seen what it means to stay in this world?" she choked out. She shouldn't say this; it was unkind if Thor hadn't already come to understand. Why shouldn't he have a little peace among these people, the briefest chance to imagine that the ones he loved wouldn't leave him in the blink of an eye, leaving only memories and grief that rose and ebbed and never stopped?

Thor answered her after a long silence. "You mean, how easy it is to lose them?" So he did know. She hadn't wounded his heart cruelly...maybe. "I have, yes. I can't claim I have lost any man or woman as beloved to me as your Steve was to you, but I've seen my mortal friends perish far too easily and too young. Wanda's brother, for one. That he fell in battle as valiantly as your Steve is little consolation to her or those of us who knew him as shield brother."

The storm of grief and anger waned, and Diana stood swaying in the aftermath, trying to find her balance again.

Raised voices back at the house drew their attention out of the past. Thor made a little noise of dismay, and Diana saw the figures of Rogers and Bucky, gesticulating in argument. "What's happened?!"

Thor grimaced and explained, "That...happens, sometimes. Friend Bucky remains uneasy with what he was forced to under Hydra's control, or rather, with what he might be forced to do if he ever falls under the control of others again. Let Steve speak with him," he urged, putting out a hand to stop Diana from heading towards them. "Like you, I'd gladly intervene, but I've learned that Bucky doesn't regard such efforts with gratitude. He's been deeply wounded, and his trust is given to few, even among Steve's shield brothers."

"But what will he do?" Diana asked sadly, as Bucky stalked away, and Rogers watched him go with slumped shoulders. "Will he leave?"

"Sometimes he leaves for a time." Thor waited until she looked at him, then he smiled. "But he always returns. We've learned to be patient, and bid Steve have patience. I believe they'll endure."

"I knew a man like Bucky - well, since I've been in this world, I've known many men like that, but...I suppose it's the same. The first is the one we remember most." Diana showed Thor the picture. "Charlie. He was...nothing like Bucky in some ways," she mused, and was surprised to find herself grinning at the comparison. No, Charlie hadn't been good with fists or guns, though Steve and Sammy had insisted that once, Charlie'd been good with both until the front had taken its toll and left him ensnared by shell shock. "During the first war, it was called shell shock or battle fatigue. There're other names for it now: post-traumatic stress syndrome, combat stress."

"In Asgard, it's called the war fetters, though it may be felt by more than the victims of war. Only fools in any world may call in cowardice or weakness."

"I quite agree," Diana muttered, scowling. She'd gone on after the Great War to fight more than a few men whose side she'd been defending, just to prevent them from killing or beating their own soldiers for so-called cowardice. She'd even killed to protect such victims and spirited them away from the fronts of later wars, knowing they could endure no more.

There was little more for her to talk about with Thor, and this time, when she moved away, he didn't try to waylay her.

For the first time in the weeks she had spent among the Secret Avengers, Diana approached Steven Rogers alone.

To Be Continued...

Coming Soon: The conversation we've all been waiting for (I know, I'm mean)!