Ambassador Of Peace

The United Nations building in New York is very large and very glass and very full of people in suits who have very important opinions about things.

Diana arrived on the first morning of her ambassadorship in a blue dress, her dark hair pinned neatly, her bracelets covered by her sleeves (mostly), and the Lasso of Truth wound slim and invisible beneath her jacket, because she suspected she might need it before lunch.

She was not entirely wrong.

Ambassador of Themyscira. The title was new — the role was ancient. For three thousand years, the Amazons had watched the world from behind their veil, choosing peace by choosing separation. Now Queen Hippolyta had decided that watching was no longer enough, and she had sent her daughter — the person she trusted most in the world — to engage.

Diana engaged.

She sat in chamber sessions and listened to disputes that had been running for decades, where both sides had so thoroughly convinced themselves of their complete righteousness that neither of them had heard the other's actual argument in years. She asked questions. Simple questions, direct questions, the kind that stripped the diplomatic language away and got to what was actually being said. People in those rooms were not used to that. They blinked at her a lot.

She spoke at the rostrum about things that were not usually said at the United Nations rostrum with that particular directness. She said that the rights of children were not negotiable, and she named specific situations where they were being negotiated anyway, and she named the people doing the negotiating. This caused a brief diplomatic incident. Diana considered this a productive morning.

She met world leaders. Some of them were wise. Some of them were frightened of her. Some of them were very interested in impressing her, which she understood was a different thing from respecting her. She was polite to all of them and she was not confused by any of them.

She visited conflict zones where the aid organizations needed someone who could, if necessary, walk into a situation that was too dangerous for anyone unprotected by divine grace. She stood between armed groups and said, in the voice she used when she meant something completely, "No. Not today." And it worked. Not always — but often enough that she kept doing it.

She championed clinics in places that didn't have them. She spoke at schools about what courage looked like and always, always stayed afterward to take questions, because the questions children asked were better than any she heard at formal briefings. A child in Manila asked her once: "Does it hurt to always be brave?"

Diana had thought about this very seriously.

"Sometimes," she said. "But being brave doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. It means you do it anyway."

The child had nodded. Diana could see her filing this away somewhere useful.

She also mediated between the human world and forces considerably older and stranger than any government. The Olympian gods had opinions about the state of the planet. The mystical creatures that lived in the margins of the modern world had concerns about the encroachment of cities and technology. Alien civilizations, passing through Earth's solar system, needed someone to explain humanity in a way that didn't start wars. Diana handled all of this with the same frank, patient competence.

There were people who thought she was too idealistic. That peace was not really achievable, that conflict was built into the human condition, that someone who grew up on a magical island had no real understanding of the pressures that ordinary people operated under.

Diana had heard this argument before. Ares had made it. He had been making it for three thousand years, and he had more evidence for it than any human skeptic could accumulate in a lifetime.

She disagreed with him. She disagreed with them.

Not because she was naive. Because she had seen the other thing — the thing on the other side of the argument that the cynics usually didn't cite. She had seen the woman in the conflict zone who had protected her neighbor's children for eight months at personal cost to herself and asked for no recognition. She had seen the UN volunteers working overnight on a water distribution problem in a country they had never lived in. She had seen ordinary people, in ordinary circumstances, choosing something extraordinary — so consistently, in so many places, that it couldn't be called an exception anymore.

Peace was not the absence of conflict. She had never said it was. Peace was the presence of justice: the daily, difficult, unglamorous work of making sure everyone's needs were heard and considered and addressed.

Diana had three thousand years of Amazon patience for unglamorous work.

She rolled up her sleeves — bracelets catching the fluorescent light of the committee room — and got back to it.