This is another wonderful chapter, Caroline, and I'm so late with my FDK again.
I aboslutely love how you show us how Lois and Clark misunderstand each other, even if this complete misunderstanding is heartwrenching, too:
She thought of the look on his face, though, when he’d stood up for her, and she realized that she’d liked it – liked having someone on her side, no matter what his reasons. She’d hardly needed rescuing from Jimmy, but the fact that Clark had bothered was still...
Well, she’d liked it, that was all.
He’d just made an absolute jacka** of himself, overreacting to Jimmy’s tease and barging in where he was neither needed nor wanted
Oh, I so wish that Clark could do what Lois was mutely asking Superman to do in "Superman the Movie": Read my mind. If he could only read her mind. And if she could read his.
So Clark decides, right then and there, to leave the Daily Planet after the two weeks that Perry had given him. And after that, he would... seek out his Kryptonian roots? Try to go back to Krypton?
He knew that in leaving the Daily Planet and a beautiful, infuriating, confusing woman named Lois Lane, he was walking away from the door marked ‘Normal Life’ and was choosing instead a path that would be decidedly not normal, not anything like the life for which his upbringing had prepared him. He would be answering the call of a distant planet he couldn’t even remember and embracing those parts of himself he’d always been compelled to keep hidden.
This gives me the chills, Caroline.
Once outside, he paused a moment to get his bearings, to breathe deeply of the fresh air and let the late afternoon sun warm his face. People rushing by took no notice of him standing there, just one more face in the crowd. He basked in his anonymity and took comfort in the fact that his ravaged spirit apparently didn’t show.
If he’d looked as bad on the outside as he felt on the inside, people would be forming a circle around his prostrate body and reaching for their mobiles to call for immediate medical assistance.
You achieve an amazing effect by putting these two parts together in a single paragraph: Clark's relief at having escaped Lois's presence in the Daily Planet newsroom, his sheer physical relief at being out on the street, breathing in the air (which could hardly be that fresh, but it felt that way to him), feeling the sun warm his face, and simply basking in the sense of being part of a crowd and being totally anonymous in it. And at the same time, the agonizing mental pain inside him which wanted to overwhelm him and make him fall unconscious to the ground, which would shatter his anonymity and turn him into a total freak of the sort that people brought into laboratories and cut up into little pieces like frogs.
Like everybody else, I was laughing out loud at the outrageously delicious costume-making session. You wrote it so wonderfully. I'll just quote one small part of it:
He might, given a decade or so, be able to work up the nerve to venture outside of the house wearing something like this...if it were very dark at the time. And absolutely no one else was around.
Others have quoted this already, but it's
totally irresistible.
And this, too, is so good that... that... well, so good that you have me smile and feel happy and thinking that I just
love Martha:
“So do you have a date?” his mother asked, far too casually.
“Mom, don't even go there, all right? It’s not happening.”
“I just asked a simple question!” she protested. “I didn’t mention anyone specific.”
“I don’t have a date. There’s your simple answer.”
“Will she be there?”
Clark glared at her. “I thought we weren’t talking about anyone specific.”
“That was a polite fiction. So will she?”
But Clark is not up for light-hearted banter:
“Clark!” his mother exclaimed, and he felt guilty when he saw both of his parents looking at him with concern. “Honey, this doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. It’s just...it’s been a bad week. And someday I might be ready to be teased about Lois, but I’m not there yet, OK?”
“I really didn’t mean to tease,” his mom said, sounding so remorseful that he couldn’t possibly stay angry with her. “It’s just...I know you’re not the type to fall in and out of love every other week, so it seems like this woman must have really meant something to you. I’m curious about her, I guess, and if you really care about her, I hate to see you give up because of a little rough patch.”
This, too, is just wonderful. Martha is telling Clark that she is sorry for him, she can see that he is hurting and that he's really in love, and she asks him to find it in himself to dare to fight for that love. For Lois.
I wonder. Does Martha realize that if Clark can't make things work out with Lois, he might turn his back on humanity and eveything she and Jonathan have taught him and seek out his Kryptonian roots instead?
“What’s she like?” his mother asked gently.
Clark wished he knew. “Lois is...she’s complicated. At the Planet, she’s domineering, uncompromising, pig-headed...brilliant. But the night I met her, she was different. Funny...sweet...flirtatious.”
Martha smiled at Clark’s description. “Pretty?”
He shook his head. “Pretty doesn’t even come close, Mom.”
“Sounds like the kind of woman who would keep you on your toes,” his mother observed. “Make life interesting.”
“Drive you crazy,” his dad added, shooting his wife a disapproving glare.
“I’m just saying....”
Sorry to quote all of this, but you show us so wonderfully how Martha approves of Lois, from the way Clark describes her. Maybe that is because, as you pointed out in your previous story, Martha and Lois are really very much alike in many respects. That makes it so much funnier that Jonathan says that a woman like Lois (who is like Martha) would drive a man like Clark (who is a bit like Jonathan?) crazy. He doesn't mean it.
As for the ball, I love this:
“I saw Cat a few minutes ago. She pretended she didn’t know me.” Jimmy shrugged and then nodded towards a staircase. “Hey, look. There he is: Lex Luthor!”
As Clark looked in the direction Jimmy had indicated, a flash of lightning lit the figure on the staircase, the subsequent thunder announcing his arrival like a drum roll. Even nature, it seemed, stood in awe of Lex Luthor.
That packed a punch, Caroline.
This, too, is so great:
He noted how the crowd parted before Luthor, how no one dared to approach him.
With one notable exception.
“Lex Luthor!” Lois’s voice rang out, confident and clear, arresting Luthor’s progress and drawing the attention of everyone nearby.
And the way it continues is so good, too:
She stepped out of the crowd, and at the sight of her standing there, looking as magnificent as a queen in her deep blue ball gown, Clark lost touch with gravity and floated six inches off the floor.
Then Lois danced with Lex. I feel like Clark, this worries me:
He watched as Luthor led Lois to the dance floor and pulled her into a waltz. They were dancing much too closely, he thought, and Lois was smiling up at him as they talked.
What if Lois is going to decide that this charming, debonair billionaire is exactly the man she needs in order to get over Clark Kent? I would so hate to see her go down that path again. It was bad enough that she did it in the TV show.
And when Clark is looking at the way Lois is smiling at Lex Luthor, it is so, so, so painful:
with that smile lighting up her face, she reminded him painfully of the night they’d met, the night her smiles had been for him and her body had been his to hold.
And Clark realizes that Luthor is not honestly and romantically interested in Lois Lane. She is in danger from him:
Clark had experienced an almost visceral distrust of the billionaire at first sight, and now he recognized the predatory gleam in Luthor’s eye as he looked down at the woman in his arms.
So he decides to follow his mother's advice after all, and ask Lois for a dance:
Clark had not intended to take his mother’s advice. He had not intended to approach Lois at all, in fact. But somehow, he found himself next to her on the dance floor, looking into the eyes of one of the richest men in the world and asking a question no other man in the room would have dared to ask.
“May I cut in?”
Oh, yes, yes, yes! I love that he asked. And please, Caroline, make Lois dance with him. I want to see what dancing with him again will do to her. Of course, circumstances this time will be so incredibly different, but nevertheless - the last time they danced together they fell sufficiently in love to spend a night together that had been
too wonderful, too life-altering an event, for him ever to treat her as an indifferent acquaintance.
And I'd say it had been as wonderful and life-altering for her as it had been for him, if we can only get her to admit it.
I'm so looking forward to the rest of this story, except that I can take only so much when it comes to Lois dating Lex Luthor. And agreeing to marry him? Will her night with Clark not make her be more wary of sharing herself
that way with Lex Luthor?
I love your story, but I'm sure you already know that.
Ann
