Summary:

In the Fortress of Solitude, things still grow.

After decades of uncertainty, Diana's life has finally developed a routine. She's not sure how or why, just that it has. She sleeps at night, wakes with the dawn and listens to the muted howls of freezing wind outside the ten-foot thick steel doors of her new home - Kal-El's Fortress of Solitude.

Her move there wasn't planned. It just happened, like so many things in her life outside of duty. Time changes everything, even things once taken for granted as permanent. The Watchtower, once their greatest ally in the battle against danger, is now a quaint reminder of the headier days of their League, a broken but beloved antique with too many good memories attached to simply throw away.

The Tower is like most of their fellows in The League who are departed, either in body or in spirit, mourned with love and hopes that one day they will meet again, somewhere.

Batman exists but in a new form, as a young man named Terry McGuiness has taken on The Dark Knight's heavy mantel. Bruce Wayne sits in Wayne Manor, staring into the fire with a dog at his feet, the very picture of a happily retired hero.

Or so claims Kal-El, but Diana knows there's more to the story since the Bruce she knew was incapable of stillness.

But Kal-El insists it's true and Diana doesn't argue. She knows he likes the thought of retirement. He likes the thought of old age and of waking up with creaking knees and sighing into a cup of hot tea before nodding off to a nap. He likes the thought of dying in his bed, surrounded by loving faces and being buried properly, next to his parents.

Diana knows Kal-El likes those things because all creatures want what they can never have.

He craves mortality in the same way she desires a home. Sometimes, when she flies down to the warmer climes, Diana gets a sensory reminder of Themyscira - the way the tides smell in spring, the precise way the sun reflects off the white shores in summer, an angle of light so right it makes the blood swirl giddily through her veins.

The feeling never lasts, but for that lone second she thinks she might be able to hang onto this banished existence for another few hundred years or so.

Or die trying.

Until then, the Fortress does just fine. One bedroom is her own, carved out of ice by Kal-El's bare hands and made to resemble an ancient Grecian home, coated with shatter-proof glass and heated. He got such pleasure out of designing it, she didn't mention he'd mixed up at least four architectural periods as well as some Roman knock-offs in the process.

Still, it's lovely, its walls whiter than the finest marble. He built her a bed as well, the one they share more often than not with a frame made out of titanium and covered with a goosedown mattress.

He claims it's a perfect representation of her - soft and beautiful on the outside, harder than steel beneath. Atop it lies Diana's most treasured possession - one of Martha Kent's handmade quilts given to her on the day she decided to stay.

The message it sends is so much greater than any words of love he could ever speak.

Not that they talk about love very often. They're both too old, been through too much together to waste words on giddy declarations that only sound hollow in the hindsight of greater, silent displays. For the past year, he's taken to leaving an orchid by her bedside to find each morning as she wakes up, perhaps as an apology for not sleeping next to her, his alien body having no longer having the need for it.

Or perhaps it's something more, as lately he brings the flowers back in a pot full of their native soil. It's been that way since the day she gently chided him for killing such magnificent life forms simply because they were beautiful.

"The weeds must breathe a terrible sigh of relief when they see you taking off with their prettier cousins," she'd joked and he blinked, before nodding in agreement.

"I didn't even think of that," he'd admitted. He brightened. "But we can do something else."

The next day a garden room was carved out of the ice and the orchids continued to arrive, but alive and waiting for her to plant them. It wasn't long before the garden was her pride and joy, and happy hours are spent kneeling in the soil, tending and watering her growing collection of flowers.

Diana feels like she's a mother at last, taking care of her ever-growing brood, clucking over them as she tends to their every need.

It's only fitting as this garden is exactly what she needed and didn't even know it.

But he did and it's bewildering how much he understands.

Kal-El watches as Diana works but keeps a respectful distance, preferring to comment on the garden's beauty from the doorway. He jokes about soil being an aphrodisiac since he can't think of any time she's more beautiful than when her face and hands are smudged with streaks.

Once, feeling brave, he snuck up and pushed her down onto an unplanted patch of dark earth before making love to her, all the while ignoring her loud protests.

"Not in the dirt!" she'd cried, laughing and trying to push him away.

"This is good for the plants," he insisted, entering her with a single smooth stroke. "Trust me, I used to be a farmer."

"That's a new one," she groaned, but it felt wonderful: the cool, soft earth beneath them, him inside of her making her writhe with pleasure as the flowers looked on from their surrounding perches, smiling at them from beneath their rainbow-colored petals.

"No, it's a very old one," he'd replied, cradling her face between strong hands, holding her gaze until they both came. "This is how we encourage life here on this world, Diana. How we make life worth living."

Strange words for a man who'd probably never know death, but the human in him is still strong, still holding onto dreams of old age and distinguished passing. Diana is grateful for that as she dreads the day the detached alien in him takes over completely, leaving Clark Kent dead, but not buried.

She wishes she could call him by that name if only to keep him tethered to his softer side for as long as possible but she knows that somewhere spirits are watching and according to Kal-El, jealously guarding the lone link to their lifelong companion ... the mortal being named Clark Kent.

Or maybe Clark is the one who won't let the past go.

Either way, Diana is content with their arrangement. The warmth of their friendship is paramount, the heat of their passion merely a plus, even if he's more beautiful than a sunrise over Themyscira. Even if he's strong and kind and like no other man she's ever known, a man for whom all her sisters would fall for in a heartbeat, for whom the tenets of her race might never have been created if he weren't the only one of his kind and ...

Yes. The passion is merely a plus.

So Diana spends her days working … and loving. It's not a bad life, considering. True, she misses her sisters, misses their songs of joy and hope, misses the way her mother would smile at her when she grew sleepy beneath the olive trees. Misses how her sweet Antigone would smooth the hair away from her forehead and kiss Diana between verses of poetry, laughing softly at a novice lyre player's mistakes, tinkling somewhere in the distance.

The world outside the Fortress is cold, so cold even she might not live more than a day if she were ever lost in its brutal grip. Inside, she knows she is safe and loved and there are times when she and Kal-El fly side by side over the ocean and under the moon, when the starlight hits the waves just so, and all the liquid inside of her melts, swirling through her body, making her glad to be alive.

Making her grateful that they both will live, for a long time to come.