littlestartopaz asked: For the fic you'd never write: Diana/Steve Rogers "Running Parallel, but Never Meeting (Until Now)"
(YES GOOD)
AO3 summary: By the time she sits down at his table, Steve thinks he’s aspired to be this woman for his entire life.
Actual summary: As a little boy in New York, Steve hears from his mother, who was a nurse in the Great War, about the people she worked with. A man in a greatcoat, his sleek black hair tied into twin braids, runs into them one day and she hugs him and introduces him (the Chief, Stevie, he kept us all smiling) and he tells Steve fantastic stories about a woman who could charge a trench all on her own.
Steve grows up and remembers her and tries to join the Army and gets the 4F stamp a lot before Erskine finds him. He asks Erskine, curious, about what inspired the super soldier formula, and Erskine tells him about his sister’s daughter, who lived in a little village in Germany and who saw a woman in a black cloak and armor demolish an entire occupying battalion. (Diana hears about the man who saved a child by using a taxi door as a shield–no sharp edges–and she smiles as she lays out a map and tries to decide where to go, where the war needs her most. This…this is a worse war.) Steve thinks about the woman, about the shield the Chief described (the Chief is in his sixties, now, but he still keeps the soldiers smiling), as he breaks into a HYDRA prison with a dinky tin shield, and again when he picks a vibranium disc rather than Howard’s high-tech alternatives. (Diana hears about Captain America and laughs a little–they have started to call her Wonder, the Wonder Woman, so she can’t laugh too much–and wishes that the war didn’t need her so much elsewhere, so that she could meet him.) Steve and the Howlies pass through a little village in Germany one day, and there’s a picture in their tavern, in a place of honor, like a shrine, of a woman in armor looking stern and triumphant, with a much-younger Chief at her shoulder, and it makes Steve smile. (Diana wanders to the States, after the war is over, because she has heard the tragedy of Steve Rogers and she wants to see the place that produced that man, and she meets a woman with sad eyes and dark curls. They talk about their respective Steves and kick some ass and maybe one time Peggy kisses her and maybe Diana kisses her back.)
Diana arrives from her job in London (it’s hideous, but she’s used to it) three days after the Chitauri destroy a huge portion of New York. She works for two weeks straight, moving debris, searching for the missing, reuniting families, doing whatever she can to help, sleeping for as little time as she can manage. The Avengers are out helping too, and she smiles to see them, even when Tony Stark treats her like something of a fool and Dr. Banner mistakes her for a patient.
She goes to an old diner that she remembers from the last time she was here, in Brooklyn (Peggy always said to start in Brooklyn, in New York), and sees a blond head propped on a fist and she smiles, slipping into the booth opposite him.
“Hello, Captain Rogers,” she says, and he startles to attention.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I–oh my God,” he blurts. “You’re her!“
