I wrote this story because I was so incredibly inspired by the story Tank wrote as a challenge for Wendy, The High Cost of Having A Life 1/2.
Tank's story reminded me so overwhelmingly of the comic book Superman I grew up with, the Superman who was so attracted to Lois, but who was ultimately just terrified of her. Because if he got close to her, she would... take away his ability to be Superman? As if she was some sort of Delilah to his Samson?
In the movie Superman II, Clark accidentally revealed his Superman identity to Lois, and within a day he had taken her to bed. But because he was informed that his superpowered body couldn't make love to Lois without killing her, Clark gave up his powers so that he could be intimate with her. For Lois's sake, Clark gave up Superman, and she robbed him of his powers like Delilah.
When Clark later found out that he had to have his powers back, he instead rejected Lois completely, to the point of robbing her of the memory of everything that had happened between them with an amnesia-inducing kiss.
The trauma of seeing Clark's fear of Lois win out over his love for her in the movie Superman II is something that has never quite left me. Tank's story offered me the possibility to explore Clark's conflicting emotions for Lois: his love for her, but also his overwhelming fear.
How far would a terrified Clark go to get away from Lois?
And how far would Lois go to get him back?
These are the two questions I explore in my story. Don't expect the Clark you meet here to behave like the Clark you all know and love in the ABC TV show. Hopefully, though, I will manage to make you like even my Clark in the end.
Just four more things. The Sandman you'll meet later in this story is closely modelled after Neal Gaiman's The Sandman, the main character of a comic book that was published by DC Comics and Vertigo in the 1990s.
Tank, this story is very close to my heart. I would like to upload it to the Archive, under its own name, but whether that can be done is up to you. Obviously you will be credited for inspiring the story if you'll let me upload it.
I'd like to extend a billion thanks to my beta readers, LabRat, Ursie, Terry Leatherwood and Nicole. Can't thank you enough, guys. But since I'm posting this without having had you look over my final version (and since I'm actually typing all this in word for word in the "post reply" box), there will undoubtedly be a number of mistakes here that my betas are not responsible for. So if anyone spots any mistakes, anything whatsoever, please tell me!
Oh, and.... Should I include a WHAM warning here? Well, yes, probably.... Although it's not as if I'm going to kill anybody, you know!
And finally.... As I said, Tank, this story couldn't have been written without you. So Lois's haircut and dye job is for you.
Home Is Where The Heart Is If Lois Lane hadn't been going stir crazy, she wouldn't be flying over Greenland in a hot-air balloon, fighting a blizzard.
The main cause of her unravelling nerves had not been that she had come within inches of having to put up with a new partner, a twenty-one-year-old boy from Oklahoma, whom Perry nevertheless insisted she show around and take along on a few cases. It hadn't been the fact that she'd had to run an obstacle course through the Daily Planet newsroom every day around all the guards who were permanently stationed there, or even that she'd had to put up with her own particularly obnoxious and spectacularly low-brow variety of a protector: Kowen Kieferland, ex-fighter, who had definitely taken a few too many punches to the head and who enveloped her in his pungent body odour wherever she went, to the point of smelling up her apartment because he was standing guard outside it every night. It hadn't been the fact that it had been impossible to go on stakeouts with that gorilla of a bodyguard tagging along, or even that, between her newly-acquired reputation and her bodyguard, it had become increasingly impossible to do even the most straightforward journalistic work. She'd been forced to face it: it was just a matter of time before Perry would have to let her go. But then, it was just a matter of time before the entire Daily Planet would have to close down, too.
It had all started on that fateful night a month ago, when Clark had asked her for a date. Aware of her irritation at his disappearances at the oddest of moments, and his lame excuses for them, he had decided to ignore all calls for help that night and stay at Lois's side for as long as their date lasted. Not until the small hours, after a delightful dinner, a movie they'd attended but hadn't seen and several hours of intoxicating making-out, had Clark left Lois's side and returned to his own apartment. In the morning, he and Lois had been informed that a young intern, Monica Pearson, had been killed that night outside the Daily Planet building, and Superman could easily have saved her if he had only paid attention to her cries for help.
To Clark, his failure to save the young woman was destiny's way of showing him that he couldn't have a private life any more. Certainly not one that included the romantic love of a woman who made him blind and deaf to the needs of the world. After being told about Monica Pearson's fate he had locked himself in a conference room, then stridden out of it, shirt open and S-shield showing, and mutely started clearing out his desk. Stonily silent, his face grim and impenetrable, Clark was retiring the mild-mannered reporter while holding up the remnants of him for his co-workers and the world to see.
Gathering up the belongings of the man who'd had the audacity to pretend he was a member of the human race, refusing to acknowledge the presence of his stunned co-workers, refusing to acknowledge Lois, Clark had walked slowly to the stairwell and out of the Daily Planet building, apparently forever. Standing silent and still on the sidewalk below, he had allowed the milling crowds to pay attention and to start gathering around him, until he had taken to the skies, flown north, and disappeared into the blue vastness above.
Since then, he had returned to the city he had called his own only to help out at disaster sites, then gone back to whatever hermitage he was hiding out at, without comments or interviews. After Superman had left, the crime rate in Metropolis had spiked. And all the friends and acquaintances of Clark Kent had been set upon by reporters and paparazzi, threatened by blackmailers, avengers and terrorists, taking refuge behind the broad backs of bodyguards, or taking flight and scurrying like rabbits.
Lois did not let anybody see her fall apart. In reporter-mode, she told the world as dispassionately as she could about the effects of Superman's disappearance, while doing her best to protect those who had been closest to him. She quickly learnt that Jonathan and Martha Kent were on the run, but she had been asked by Sheriff Rachel Harris not to try to locate them, and she had honored that request. When she discovered that somebody had tried to torch the Kent farm, she did not report it. As she discreetly looked into the attempted arson, she learnt that Superman had indeed been sighted near his parents' farm, but after some members of the National Guard that were stationed at the farm had jeered at him, he had flown off and had not been seen again.
Things came to a head for Lois after Lana Lang was shot. Lana would survive, but would possibly not regain the full use of her right arm. As Lois tried to visit Lana, a mob of reporters had closed in on her, and it was all Kowen Kieferland could do to keep them at bay. Lois had felt a moment of panic, Lana had sobbed, and Lois had been asked by the hospital staff to leave.
For the first time since Clark had left them, Lois cried that night. Her world was disintegrating all around her, and people were blaming
her for the disaster. If they were not shying away from her, as if she was carrying the plague of bearing more frightful news about the catastrophe, they were trying to hunt her down and devour her.
More than anything else, she missed
Clark. She had never understood before just how much she had depended on him, or how much she had taken him for granted. She had just assumed that he would always be there for her, the way she had assumed that she could always get herself a drink of water. Water hadn't interested her, as she had always been a cream soda girl, but it is water, not cream soda, that is the drink of life.
Clark's warm brown eyes. His smile, which lit up the whole room around him. His touches; the way his hand would touch her arm, her shoulder, or rest for a moment on the small of her back. The lovely few times his hand had touched her hair, to tuck a strand of it behind her ear, or caressed her cheek, making her shiver.
And... his kisses. The way his lips had just brushed hers, so agonizingly sweetly, and then his mouth had claimed hers.... Or the way he'd feathered open-mouthed kisses all over her face, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts.... Oh, that night, before it happened. When she had been in his arms, so wonderfully... when she'd thought they would make love.
They would have made love that night, if it had been up to her. They had been kissing and caressing for hours. But suddenly, almost abruptly, Clark had stopped. As if he regretted what they had done... as if he was feeling guilty. And so he had left, leaving her bewildered.... And the next day, he had been told about Monica Pearson's death, and he had unbuttoned his shirt, displaying and retiring his Clark Kent identity, and left.
Leaving everybody.
Leaving
her. Why had he left her? She saw his face in her mind's eye again, the way he smiled. The way his brown eyes glittered, when he looked at her. As if they'd shared a secret.
But he hadn't shared his secret with her at all. He had carefully split himself in two men before her, displaying himself to her as two incongruous, unconnected personas: trusted colleague and farmboy from Kansas on the one hand, and spandex-clad superpowered demigod on the other.
And the demigod was never to have her. Only the farmboy was for her. Yet... when the farmboy had gotten close to her, he had backed off, frightened, as if burnt.
Why? Because the farmboy couldn't rid himself of the demigod after all? Because he couldn't be just plain old Clark Kent? Because he couldn't exorcise the... alien?
And seeing that he could never be fully human, he had rejected his humanity altogether. Turned his back on the human race. Turned his back on her. Because she'd tempted him?
Because she'd tempted him into believing that he could be with her? That he could share his life with her? That he belonged with her?
But he could. He did.
He had to.
What was he without her? Hiding out, wherever he was?
And what was she without him?
They had to be together. Couldn't go on without each other.
She had to make him see it.
And because he wasn't likely to come looking for her anytime soon, it was up to her to find him.
* * * *
It was Jimmy Olsen that she turned to, to locate Superman's whereabouts. She asked Jimmy for records of Superman sightings and possible means of getting closer to those places to take a look. Confirming that the clues pointed to Greenland, Lois put a sedative in Kowen Kieferland's coffee, then quietly slipped out of her apartment and disappeared into the nondescript dark car that had been left, unlocked, on the kerb outside. Finding the faked passport and a stash of cash in the glove department, Lois drove to a motel where she cut and dyed her hair, stayed the night, then returned to her car and drove nonstop to the Canadian border. Making her way to Quebec, Lois caught a flight to Godthåb in Greenland. In Godthåb, she met the young woman who had promised to provide her with transportation across Greenland: it turned out to be a hot-air balloon.
The majestic, red balloon vaulted like a giant's inverted teardrop above her. She was trying to judge when to open the valves of the burners to release roaring flames of heat into the silk-entrapped bubble of hot air above, to make her flying vessel stay afloat. She was standing up in the small, cramped wicker basket, gliding soundlessly over the hypnotically beautiful, white expanses below. As she closed the valves of the burners, the sudden silence seemed to drain all sounds from the world, and she was floating, suspended from the red canopy above, between the endless blue sky and the pristine, snowy vastness beneath her. She was being carried along by the wind, with no means of navigation, hoping against hope that the wind, and chance, would bring her to the man she was searching for.
After hours of flying over nothing but snowscapes, her eyelids began to droop. Fighting sleep, and running low on propane for her burners, she realized that the wind had picked up without her even noticing it, and the blue sky had turned grey. Snowflakes began to appear out of the air around her. Gently floating at first, they picked up speed, whirling and suddenly pelting her face and eyes. Blindly she fought for control as the basket jolted violently, cords got entangled and a burner hit her head. She heard her own desperate call for help drowning in the howling wind, "Superman, help!!! Clark... " as blackness descended on her.
tbc...
Ann
