You walk the mortal world again, the taste of ambrosia now ash in your mouth. Your imprisonment by the Amazons is a fresh wound, a divine humiliation that demands a price. And you know the perfect instrument for your vengeance: Diana herself, their greatest champion. To break their icon would be to break their spirit.

The plan is elegant in its cruelty. You find Harold Campion, a mortal of decent bearing but fading light, drowning his irrelevance in a Metropolis bar. You slide into the seat beside him, the air around you shimmering subtly with restrained power.

“A man of potential, yet the world walks past you,” you say, your voice a low, compelling melody. “How would you like to walk where they cannot? To live where the air is nectar and every day is an eternity of bliss?”

Campion’s eyes, bleary with drink, sharpen with a desperate hunger. “Who are you?”

“A god offering a trade. Your identity, for a place in my father’s house. Mount Olympus.” You let the words hang, a golden apple dangled before a starving man. He agrees with a frantic, grasping nod.

The Mirror of Circe does its work in your hidden sanctum. Your divine form shifts, melts, and reforms into the exact likeness of Harold Campion. You send the true Campion skyward, a bemused mortal suddenly standing on the slopes of Olympus, and you take his place. You build a new legend from the ground up. You become the Champion.

You orchestrate your meeting with her with precision. A collapsing bridge in Gateway City. Civilians trapped. You are there, not with godly power, but with calculated, peak-human strength and daring. She is there in a streak of scarlet and gold.

Together, you stabilize the structure. As the last civilian is pulled to safety, she turns to you, a smile of genuine warmth on her face that, for a moment, disarms your fury.

“I haven’t seen you before,” Diana says, her voice like clear water. “Your courage is remarkable.”

You offer a practiced, humble smile—Campion’s smile. “Just trying to keep up with the best, Wonder Woman.”

It begins. You befriend her. As the Champion, you fight at the edges of her battles, a steadfast, mortal counterpart to her divine might. You share quiet moments after the chaos: on a rooftop overlooking the rebuilt bridge, on the steps of a museum after thwarting an art theft.

“Most men I meet see either a princess or a weapon,” she confesses one evening, the sunset painting the sky in hues of her armor. “You see me. You aren’t intimidated.”

“How could I be intimidated by compassion?” you reply, and the line feels less like a script and more like a truth you’ve stumbled upon. “Your strength isn’t in your arms, Diana. It’s in your heart. That’s what’s truly wondrous.”

You see her guard lower. You see the legendary Wonder Woman, the God of War, the ambassador, become simply Diana—a woman who laughs at your mortal-world jokes, who listens intently to your (fabricated) stories of a childhood in Smallville, who looks at the Champion with a growing, tender light in her blue eyes. You become the first man she ever loved.

And the problem, the glorious, catastrophic problem, is that you look back.

The vengeance cools, replaced by a terrifying warmth. The rehearsed compliments become sincere observations. You find yourself memorizing the way a stray lock of her black hair falls across her forehead when she’s thoughtful, the specific cadence of her laughter, the unwavering goodness in her gaze that now feels like a sun you want to orbit, not extinguish.