Listen, talk to me FOREVER about Steve’s guilt, about the way he dreams, that one night they spend together, that he wakes up and sees Diana’s perfect unmarred skin smudged with fresh wet blood, left there by his own stained hands. About the way that he sees her run toward the man who lost his leg to a mortar shell and he feels something crack in his chest, his heart breaking at her horror. About ‘what kind of weapon kills innocents’ and that ugly moment of silence where Steve wishes he could tell her something else, anything else, before he faces the truth and admits ‘in this war, every kind’. About how it feels like killing something, when he looks away from the crying woman and looks back to Diana and says ‘this is not what we came here to do’, and how it feels like being reborn–bright and painful and awful and new–when he watches her charge No Man’s Land, alone and powerful and pure and divine. About how Steve lost any belief he had in any god the world had to offer a long time ago, torn away in blood and mud and fire and the grey-green waves of gas, and having to acknowledge that he believes in her hurts, not because she doesn’t deserve it, but because she does, she is good and he is the one who will be remembered as bringing her down into this world from her paradise.
About the way his hands shake and he feels his throat close as he struggles to tell her that they’re all to blame, even him, everyone is at fault because people are nor always good and she is innocent of this terrible thing, she is the only innocent left in this war, and it is because of him that she is losing that innocence one day at a time, and forget the war, forget the people Steve has killed and the crimes that he has committed and the things he has allowed to happen, this is the thing that he will never wash from his soul. This is his greatest sin. This is the worst thing he has ever done, taking Diana’s pure and honest faith in humanity and breaking it with his bare hands.
It makes all of this much worse, somehow, to know that she doesn’t blame him at all.