Sara, I just so love this. To me, this part of your story summarizes, on a very fundamental level, the bottom line of what Lois and Clark fiction should be about. These two people are full of fears and doubts, and they suffer from a great deal of sorrow and loneliness (well, alt-Clark certainly does). But they are also incredibly full of love and need and longing for one another. To me, the most sublime moments of this genre, the LC fanfiction, is seeing when Lois and Clark's love and longing overcomes their fears and doubts. Every time they get overwhelmed by these truly good and beautiful feelings for one another - when they are simply compelled to confess their love, to embrace and kiss, to burst into tears, to give in to their need to make love - I feel, in the words of Plato and Paul, that their love is expressing something more beautiful than you would normally find in this world - something divine, if you can stand that word. And I guess it's because I see this extreme beauty in Lois and Clark's love for one another that I've been a Lois and Clark/Superman fan for almost 37 years.
When I commented on part 23 of your story I said that I loved seeing Lois taking care of the unconscious Clark. In part 24, things get even more touching. Clark is more or less unconscious, and he is most certainly not awake, and yet he is sufficiently attuned to Lois to know that his head is resting in her lap, and that she touching and caressing him lovingly, and speaking softly to him. Clark transforms his knowledge of this tender scene between him and Lois into a dream, and then, when he starts waking up and Lois is still with him, he considers his dream a hallucination, because it is too beautiful too be true. Do I have to tell you I loved it?
And then Lois reacts to seeing Clark's love for her. It warms her heart so wonderfully and yet terrifies her to the core of her being. It shakes her so deply that she can't stand it if he doesn't explain how he can love her, and she demands an explanation from him. And he complies, even though he, too, is almost scared to death, and full of inner pain. And he finally puts it in words: How Lois sees him. Not Clark, not Superman, but him. And how she not only sees him, the true man that he is, but how she loves that man, too. And how her love makes it possible for him, for the first time since his parents died, to like himself, and accept himself, and take pleasure in being himself. And as he tells her and shows her that she has given him himself, he gives her the gift of showing her that her acceptance, her blessing, her love for him is divine. And finally, she knows, too, and embraces that love for him. The love between two people from different planets, the kind of love that encompasses the cosmos. The love that is, if you can stand the word, divine.
Ann
