You expected to unleash anger. You’d braced for the sting of betrayal, the heat of humiliation, ready to unleash a torrent of venomous words. After all, she’d said it right there in front of Genocide: the courtship was real, but she did not love you. Not the way you loved her.

But then, after the battle, she came to you. Not as Wonder Woman, but as Diana. She stood before you, the scent of ozone and distant ocean still clinging to her, and she tried again.

“I do not love you the human way,” she repeated, her voice softer now, stripped of the battlefield’s urgency. “I have tried. I am not… good at it. The slow burn, the uncertainty, the games. They are a foreign country to me.”

You clenched your jaw, the old hurt rising like bile. But she wasn’t finished.

“I love you the Amazon way,” she said, and the words landed with a weight that stopped your breath. She took the Lasso of Truth from her hip, its golden coils glowing with a gentle, unwavering light. “And this will show you what that means.”

She didn’t wrap it around you. Instead, she held a loop of it in her own hand, the truth radiating from her. An image, a feeling, poured into your mind.

It wasn’t a flutter of a heart or a dizzying infatuation. It was a knowing. A clear, instant recognition, as certain as the sunrise. You saw yourself through her eyes—not as a project or a duty, but as a man she saw standing beside her on a sun-drenched Themysciran beach. In her truth, she saw a future: a union, a partnership, a child with your smile and her eyes. It was a vow already made in the silent chambers of her spirit.

“When an Amazon is attracted to a man,” she explained, the lasso’s glow reflecting in her earnest blue eyes, “she does not wait for a love that grows slowly. She knows. She chooses someone as a mate. They marry. And they have a child. And I am attracted to you. I chose you.”

The confession was staggering in its simplicity. Then came the other layer, the weight of her crown and her legacy. You felt her worry for her people, her culture. A princess’s duty. In her truth, she saw your strength, your character, and deemed you worthy. A fit guardian for Amazon traditions, a pillar should the unthinkable happen to her or Hippolyta. It was not a cold calculation, but the deepest form of respect her culture could offer.

All your prepared bitterness, your rehearsed rage, it dissolved. The emotional whiplash was total. The glass of water you’d been holding met your lips just as the full, monumental absurdity and honesty of it all hit you.

You spat the water out in an undignified spray. Your eyes widened, practically bulging from their sockets. You stared at her, utterly flabbergasted, your mind a blank, static-filled slate. All you could do was look at the Princess of Themyscira, the truth-teller, the woman who had just offered you a lifetime and a legacy in a single, staggering breath.

And there, in that silent, stunned moment, everything hung in the balance.