Steve Trevor And Man World

Steve Trevor had not expected to be rescued by an Amazon princess. But then, Steve Trevor had not expected most of the things that had happened to him in the past several years, and he had found it was better to simply roll with them.

He was a pilot — steady hands, clear eyes, the kind of calm that descends on certain people when situations become genuinely frightening. He had crashed into the waters off Themyscira during a mission he probably shouldn't have been on in the first place, and the next thing he remembered clearly was the shore of an island that didn't appear on any of his charts, and a young woman looking at him with the focused expression of someone examining something they had never seen before.

"You're a man," Diana said.

"I am," Steve confirmed, wringing water from his jacket.

She tilted her head. "I have read about men."

He looked at her very carefully for a moment. "All good things, I hope."

That had been the beginning of a friendship — and then a partnership — unlike anything either of them had expected. Steve had shown Diana the world beyond the veil: its cities and its trains and its extraordinary, overwhelming variety of human noise. He had shown her inequality and treated it as something to fight, not accept. He had shown her that people could simultaneously be capable of great cruelty and great kindness, sometimes in the same afternoon.

Diana had found the world beyond Themyscira astonishing. Not in a simple way — not in the wide-eyed way of someone who has never left home — but in a deep, complicated way that took time to fully feel. She noticed everything. She noticed the way some people were listened to and others weren't, based on things that had nothing to do with the quality of their thinking. She noticed the senseless violence — not the battle kind, which she understood, but the small, grinding, everyday kind that wore people down over years. She noticed that people were capable of extraordinary courage in ordinary circumstances and then walked home and had dinner and didn't think of themselves as brave at all.

Steve was her guide and her anchor. He explained things she found confusing. He admitted, honestly, when he didn't have an explanation. He never pretended the world was better than it was, and he never stopped believing it could be. This combination of honesty and optimism was, Diana thought, the best thing about humans — the way they could see something clearly, including its flaws, and still choose to care about it.

They worked in military intelligence together, Diana as Diana Prince, moving through the world in civilian clothes with the careful disguise of someone who was paying attention to everything. She filed reports. She sat in meetings. She learned to operate in systems that were not the clean, clear hierarchy of Themyscira, systems full of politics and personalities and self-interest. It drove her to distraction sometimes.

Steve brought coffee on those mornings and said, "Pick the battle."

"They're all battles," Diana said.

"That's true," he said. "So pick the most important one."

She always did. She was very good at it.

His mortality was something she thought about. Steve Trevor was brave and steady and exactly the kind of person she most admired — and he was also, simply and unavoidably, human. He would not be here forever. This was a fact that arrived in her chest sometimes in the middle of ordinary moments: a meal, a debrief, a quiet car ride through a city at night.

She did not try to change it. She did not pretend it was otherwise. She simply made sure she was present — fully present, not with one eye on the horizon and one on today, but both eyes on the person sitting across from her with his coffee cooling and his honest face and his complete inability to be anywhere other than exactly where he was.

That, too, he had taught her. The human gift: the full weight of a moment, knowing it will pass.

Steve Trevor was the first man Diana ever knew. He was the person who opened the door between her world and this one. And even on the days when the world beyond that door disappointed her — when the politics were small and the kindness was far away — she walked through it anyway, because he had shown her that it was worth walking through.

She still thinks so.

She walks through it every day.