Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic The Roads They Walked Alone Part 57 - Comments

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Thanks,


Rac

You had me for a sec Rac...you had me.

Wonderful part. Nice to see a lighter tone to this story at least for now.

More soon!

~Lois Lane Wanna Be

Hi,

Great part!


He still don't get it. :rolleyes:


You scare me.


More ASAP, please.

MAF

Good chapter, Rac. But I'm with Maria. I want to see Rae Et laid out on a slab with embalming fluid pumped into her veins before I'll believe she's really dead.

Poor Talan. She gets to do the thing she most wants to do and the thing she least wants to do (put her arms around Clark) and she has to do it to preserve the ideals she's fought to uphold for so long. At least she gets to choke Nor a little.

I found it touching that she said she'd follow him back into hell if he led her there, and when is Clark going to pick up on her feelings for him? Gaah! You'd think he was insensitive or something.

We didn't see anything of Lois this time, and I don't know if that's a good thing (no news is good news) or a bad thing (you can't handle the truth!) so I'll just passively wait for the next glimpse into her tortured existence.

I'm glad you mentioned that you plan to spend the third story of this trilogy putting Clark and Lois back together. Considering all they've been through separately, it's going to take that long to reassemble them into a loving couple. Oh, they'll still love each other, of course, but now they each have so many issues to work out, both separately and together, and you've got so much material to work with here, I almost despair that you'll be able to finish it. Remember, the Star Wars saga was originally intended to be nine movies, not just six. We'll never see George Lucas' vision of the restored Republic, but I certainly hope we see your vision of the restored Lois/Ultra Woman and Clark/Superman team.

Oh, and I loved your misdirection with Clark and Talan. That was almost evil.

No. Forget that, it was most excellently evil. Now if you could put Lois and Jimmy in a similar situation...

Again and again, you make me marvel at how beautifully and perfectly you manage to say things, Rac.

Lok Sim, the wonderfully gentle man, feels a little disappointed that he wasn't given the chance to prove his death-defying courage to himself. Now he won't know if he really has that kind of courage. The fact that he was asked to risk his life and then didn't have to put himself in any real danger may keep eating at him, feeding a kind of self-doubt he didn't have before.

But Talan gives him the perfect answer. She believes in him, she believes that he would have shown that kind of courage if it had been necessary. But there are things you don't want to know, because the price of finding out is too high. And Lok Sim understands that she is right. Lok Sim is one of those who will be able to return from this war with minimal damage to himself.

Clark's confrontation with Nor was so tense and dramatic. I'm glad that he did punch Nor in the nose, at least, but I'm also glad that he didn't kill him. Talan's intervention was perfect. What she said to Nor was sufficiently intense to make the very air quiver:

Oh, but Talan is simply incredibly, incomparably better than Nor. She is as completely different from him as anyone could be, at least in many respects. Yet, I love how this paragraph again bears testament to how her faith in Clark's goodness has given her the strength to persevere.

Clark shows both his masculine fury and his petulantly childish vulnerability.

And when Talan tells him that he didn't need her to stop himself from killing Nor, he confesses his self-loathing to her.

She won't accept what he says about himself. But he is almost wallowing in misery.

He is listening to her, but he still hasn't told her all of what is eating at him. He hasn't said the worst.

Now he has said almost all of it. Talan is beginning to fully realize his pain.

I very much like that Talan points out to him how unbelievably hard it must have been to change from being invulnerable to becoming as physically destructible and susceptible to pain as anyone else, and at the same time, to have one's vulnerability unspeakably mocked by being tortured.

But now Clark finally reveals the deepest darkness in his soul to Talan:

Lois. So much of the man that he was, that he used to be, the man that he was proud of being, was the man who loved Lois so guilelessly, and who happily believed that he was worthy of being loved by her in return. How can he face her now? How can he show her the man he has become? How can he ask her to love what he is now? How can he find himself worthy of being loved by her?

Talan's reply, however, is absolutely, totally wonderful.

Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.

And Clark heard her. He understood.

And then Talan offers Clark another kind of comfort:

Talan, the ice maiden who meditated away her own pain, can now feel Clark's pain vicariously, as it washes over her when she holds him in her arms.

And again, she gives Clark such comfort:

And the last part of their conversation is so incredibly poignant, too.

Later, Clark keeps talking to Talan, further unburdening himself and drawing strength and comfort from her.

By seeing himself in Talan, he understands himself better. And he also understands Talan better, although he still has no idea that she is in love with him.

I think, perhaps, that Talan is silently thanking Clark for shaking her out of the stoical stupor that her meditation had settled on her.

And for the first time in months, Clark gets a good night's sleep.

This is an incredibly beautiful chapter, Rac. Thank you.

Ann

Have to say, I did like Clark's attacking Nor. I know it was very, very, very wrong of me, but still I cheered.

Nevertheless, for me, this was such a sad chapter.

Clark's complete breakdown and then his collapse into Talan's arms. What is going on here? Would a commander collapse into the arms of his general? (I know I've got the ranks all wrong here. ) Anyway, my heart wept for "Lois and Clark". I think they are no more.

When Clark looked into the closet and thought "Her", it seemed so dramatic. Why not just a more casual acknowledgment that, as commander-in-chief, he'd been given his general's room? That use of the pronoun"her" didn't make sense to me. Up until that point I had thought maybe that the session with Talan was purely platonic on his part, given his confession about letting Lois down.

And sadness for Talan, too. Her ethics are so strong, (significantly, it's she, not Clark, who stops Clark's assault on Nor) yet she's being used emotionally by Kal.

So heartbreaking, whether from Talan's point of view or Lois's. This has been the most challenging experience of Clark's life, and it's not Lois who is helping him through it - it's someone else.

c.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments. Yes, I am kind of a jerk, but this section was just so darn...earnest that I needed to leaven it a bit with some misdirection.

LLWB, glad you enjoyed this part. It is nice to have the good guys winning for a change.

Hi Maria, thanks for commenting. Clark is a bit dense sometimes, especially when it comes to women. He always seemed surprised and even stunned on the numerous occasions when women came on to him on the show. Also, I imagine Talan is a bit more guarded than Toni Baines, Linda King, and Mayson Drake were.

Terry, thanks so much for your very thoughtful feedback. I also feel a bit sorry for Talan at this point. She gets what she wants - except she doesn't. She wins the war and gets the bad guy, but that means she loses her purpose. She falls in love - with someone who can't love her back but who still needs her friendship.

The Muse and I are working hard to keep up the enthusiasm for this monster. I'm busy planning the rest of this story and the outline for Part III.

Hi Ann. I'm so glad you enjoyed this part. Thanks for your very detailed and thoughtful comments. I'm also glad Clark got to punch Nor, even if it was a pretty shallow, visceral desire on my part. Nor had a heck of a lot more than just that coming to him. The confrontation between Nor and Clark and Clark's subsequent conversations with Talan are among my favorite scenes so far in this story. The emotions underlying these scenes are extremely powerful, but they're complicated and confused.

And I agree that Talan is so much better a person than Nor that comparison is pointless. But Nor doesn't know that and as much of a saint as Talan is, I'm not sure she's above scaring the bejeezus out of Nor.

Finally, Lois really is integral to Clark's identity and his sense of self. At the heart of who he is is his love of her. He's a strange visitor from another planet, he's an award winning reporter, he's a small town farmboy, he's a superhero, but more important than all of these things, he is the man who loves Lois Lane with all his heart and soul.

Hi Carol. Thanks for commenting. I guess we're reading that scene a bit differently. I think a lot of Clark's discomfort comes from the fact that he's arrived, basically flown off the handle, and then he kicks his victorious commander out of her quarters because of protocol.

As for whether his relationship with Talan is appropriate, I agree that this is uncomfortable and confusing ground. I don't believe he would be this dependent on anyone else if Lois was with him. But he has had his entire support network cut out and the nature of his responsibilities is extremely isolating. When you pile on top of that everything Clark has been through, I think his need to connect with a friend, to talk to someone about what's going on in his head, makes sense. He has a tendency to bottle up too much. Nonetheless, I think that the fact that it is someone else who is there for him when he's going through these dark days is going to have a major impact on his life with Lois.

Thanks for all of your comments everyone. More is coming up soon!

Regards,


Rac

Hi Rac. I can certainly understand his need ot connect with a friend, especially in these circumstances. But why not Zara instead of Talan? Zara's a part of his support network and she's also his friend. Or a combination of both people?

I'm so not sure that comes across in the scene. As well, what were you trying to convey with Clark's dramatic, "Her."?

At this point, I'm not seeing much in the way of Clark's actions or inner narrative that convinces me he still is totally committed to Lois.

c.

Hi Carol. I'm not sure what you mean by the "dramatic 'her.'"

I assume you mean the 'her quarters' line, which was there more for clarification than anything else.

As for why Talan and not Zara, I've tried to convey the fact that Clark feels a certain comradeship with Talan because she's seen dark, ugly, and brutal things he can't even imagine. For all her intelligence and thoughtfulness, Zara's experience with the actual realities of fighting a war on the ground, of the sheer barbarism of it, is limited. I imagine that he thinks she can't understand what he's thinking or what he's going through. Of course, she'd stand a better shot of understanding him if he'd talk to her, but even Clark acknowledges that his sometimes hostile, closed-off attitude toward Zara doesn't make any sense.

As far as Lois might seem from his thoughts, I think it is still worth noting that the only good thing he recognizes in himself is his love for her and that his greatest disappointment in himself is his belief that he's let her down. I will try to make clear that she is still at the center of his thoughts and that hasn't changed.

Thanks again.

Rac

Thanks for the clarification, Rac. I saw 'her' as being significant because it was the pronoun, rather than just saying "Talan's." The use of the pronoun seemed more personal, adding emphasis, and so it seemed to convey a meaning beyond saying "Talan's quarter's" or even nothing at all. As though she'd been on his mind.

But then I'm one of those readers who sees words as symbolic. I'm still curious to know why, as a writer, you made the decision to use the pronoun in that situation. And thanks for the reassurance that Lois is still the centre of his thoughts.

Am looking forward to the next part:)

c.

Rac, you wrote:
Have you offered your muse any chocolate? Or perhaps a nice, relaxing dinner talking about stuff other than the story? I find that muses can be finicky, if not downright fickle, and sometimes need some tender loving care to unblock the creative flow. (This, of course, assumes that you are sharing the aforementioned chocolate and/or dinner.)

And I'm glad you're staying with it. I take this comment to mean that we're somewhere in the neighborhood of a heart-rending Lois and Clark reunion, one in which each will try to outdo the other in effusive expressions of love and tenderness.

Carol, even if there's no real probability of Clark having a romantic relationship with Talan, she's still an important person to Clark. She's one of the few who has seen him at his worst, and (I think) partly because she hasn't used that knowledge against him in any way, he trusts her more than he trusts others who don't have such knowledge. The "her quarters" line did have an emotional impact, and I think that Clark may be aware on some subconscious level that he and Talan might have had something special if he'd never met Lois. It wouldn't have been as wonderful, nor as intense, nor as deep and abiding, but it might have been. But, of course, because of Lois, it will not be, will never be, and they both know that.

Do you think that means Clark is now, in fact, emotionally cheating on Lois?

Terry, I do agree with everything you've said about Clark's friendship with Talan. I've never thought it was impossible for men and women to have important friendships, and throughout most of this story that's how I regarded Talan and Clark. That for Clark the friendship was not in any way sexual. Sort of like Lois and Jimmy. But now, in the last parts it seems that somehow things are different.

Rac, has assured us that Lois is still central to Clark so it will be interesting to see how he demonstrates that.

c.

I find this to be an absolutely fascinating question because unlike physical cheating, the line here is so much harder to draw. I mean, there's clear emotional cheating - you fall in love with someone other than your spouse, think about them more than your spouse, and emotionally rely on them instead of your spouse - but that's the easy example.

I'm a bit of an absolutist when it comes to the physical - if you kiss another woman the way you would kiss your wife, you're cheating. But while our physical relationships with our spouses are (or should be) completely exclusive, we don't emotionally cut out the other important people in our lives when we enter a relationship. I have friends I love like family, including friends of the opposite gender. And if Lois were with him, I have no doubt that she would be the absolute center of his support network. He would always seek out her counsel, advice, and support, and she would provide it.

While we can reasonably expect a decent and honorable person to be physically faithful, even through years of separation, It isn't reasonable or healthy to ask someone to have no emotional support network if they're separated from their spouse. So Clark's stuck relying on friends for the sort of emotional support that he should be getting from his wife. Even if he's still completely in love with his wife, even if her happiness means more to him than his own, and even if what he wants more than anything is to get back home to her, isn't his relationship with her going to be affected by the fact that for years, someone else was there to help him through the darkest of times?

Terry raises an interesting theory - if Kal El had never gone to Earth, if he'd grown up on New Krypton, what would his life have been like? Would he and Talan have had a relationship like Zara and Ching's? I agree completely with Terry that any relationship between Clark and Talan couldn't have been as deep, as abiding, as warm, and all-consuming as Clark's relationship with Lois. And while Lois and Clark's relationship has the power to make them both perfectly happy, I doubt the same would be true for Clark and Talan. Clark would still be married to Zara, a woman he regards as a sister. He'd never be able to think about having a family - something Talan doesn't seem to want, in any event. He'd also find himself involved with a woman who was constantly putting herself in danger and since he wouldn't be Superman, there'd be absolutely nothing he could do about it. Besides, unlike Lois, Talan has no sense of humor

Of course, the entire subject is beyond academic. Talan loves Clark, but he is completely and totally in love with his wife. And neither Clark nor Talan has any interest in destroying his relationship with Lois.

And as promised, I'll be posting more now.

Thanks,

Rac