Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic The Roads They Walked Alone Part 61 - Comments

Thanks for reading, everyone. Comments go here.

Rac

Hi,

Great part!


Save by the bell!

Ann's inner romantic is finally responding, Rac!

I absolutely love this, how Enza is so miserable that she isn't even able to speak to Lok Sim, but he immediately knows what she needs right now - to be held by him.

Enza is confessing her utter misery and her deepest self-disgust to Lok Sim.

I love his answer.

I love this description.

And this is wonderful, too. I'm sure Enza doesn't want him to leave her.

How beautiful. Lok Sim is watching and listening to Enza as she is sleeping, and you made me feel how her presence is filling his entire being.

There is a wonderful sweetness here.

Yes, I think she does. She has just returned from the horrors of meeting and trying to represent people who have suffered so horrible because of Lord Nor and the atrocities he has visitd on them. Now she has come home to the warm embrace of Lok Sim, to his pure heart and true love. She wants, she needs to join with him, to confirm their love for one another.

Oh, this is so beautifully written.

I love how she is bringing up the future almost right away.

Oh, so lovely.

Wonderful. Ah, Rac, my inner romantic is so happy!

Was it Perry who married Clark and Lois?

I love how you use Enza and Lok Sim to symbolize what is good and right about New Krypton. (For the first time ever, I have spotted a typo in your text, a missing full stop after "people".)

And I love that Clark gave Enza and Lok Sim a honeymoon.

But Clark is assaulted by his self-doubts again:

No, Clark, this is most certainly not true. You are so extremely hard on yourself. You so need Lois by your side, to comfort you and help you put things in perspective.

But Talan can help Clark, too:

I'm glad that Clark wants to be a better friend to Talan, but I can see that this road could be a dangerous one, too.

I love how this hug that Jimmy gives Lois mirrors Lok Sim's embrace of Enza at the begining of this chapter. But Jimmy's hug is different, too, as it is purely friendly.

Jimmy's hug can never be more than friendly, because Clark is going to come back.

This is incredibly, wonderfully beautiful, like an ancient poem, the sort of poem you can hear the wind whisper as it blows across the open fields, or the trees whisper in the forest, or the cataract murmur and sigh as it throws itself down the gorge of the mountain. It's a tribute to love that is stronger than time, and as strong as life itself.

Ann

Thanks for recognizing (and for satisfying) the rustic romantic in me! It was so sweet to see Lok Sim and Enza get married, and so touching for Clark to stand so close to Thia, who was probably as excited as anyone else about this wedding (though for different reasons, I'm sure).

This troubles me ever so slightly:
I'm not troubled by the intimacy, but I am troubled by Enza's statement that she needed "this" and not "him." Sex has a powerful life-affirming quality to it, even when practised by those with little or no thought of the future or of committment. Lok Sim and Enza certainly do not fall in these categories, but I get the feeling that while Lok Sim's love is from the inside out, a part of Enza's love is wrapped up in what he can give her, namely, a buffer between herself and the big, bad world. If this is true, then her need for him will lessen if and when the stress of the trials and investigations is removed. Please convince me that I'm wrong, Rac!

Side note: Lok Sim is the same height as me! And I sympathize with his inability to be comfortable on any standard couch ever made. I'd bet his clothes cost more, too!

This passage troubles me also, but for a different reason.
Clark still thinks of himself as a twisted mockery of who he used to be. He still doesn't realize that courage is not the absence of fear, but the facing of danger in spite of the fear. He also doesn't realize that honor does not demand a pure soul, but that the honorable one does the right thing for the right reasons despite the temptation to do wrong.

And he has a somewhat skewed view of Talan (which, of course, mirrors her own view of him). I suspect they are headed for a dangerous encounter which has the potential of seriously damaging both of them, assuming it doesn't make them realize the truth about themselves and about each other. Each one has the other on a pedastal and themselves in a hog pen, and neither extreme is the true measure of either.

And Lois's mental declaration to wait for Clark to come back almost scares me. She's so very determined to be there when he returns that she's almost become obsessed with the idea. She is on the cusp of making Clark's return the focus of her life and forgetting about her writing, her own super activities, even her son. She's on the verge of something dangerous, too.

And I didn't believe for an instant that Jimmy would be a problem for her. They're so much like little brother and big sister that there's no way they'd ever be an item.

(Of course, now that we've said all that, Ralph is going to start a rumor about them, isn't he? Please, if he does that, let Jimmy clean his clock!)

The next few chapters should be most interesting, Rac. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for commenting, everyone.

Maria, I'm glad you enjoyed this section. Thanks for always commenting on every part. It was definitely lighter than most of this story has been, even if Ralph was an unrepentant jerk. There will be more soon.

Hi Ann. It's great to hear from your inner romantic. It's also great to know that you enjoyed this, especially given the fact that you didn't initially seem too interested in the NKers. And it was indeed Perry who married Lois and Clark. The night before Clark left for New Krypton, Perry performed the wedding in his office, with Martha and Jonathan as the only guests. It was Lois's idea and I have to say I agreed with her decision to seize the moment.

Clark's decision to be a better friend makes sense given his thinking, but you're right that this way lies trouble. As far as Lois and Jimmy go, I'd have to agree with Terry that their relationship is way too big sister, little brother for me to imagine it as anything else. It's nice, however, to give Jimmy a chance to be something other than exposition boy, go-fer, or 'Superman's pal, who's always getting into wacky trouble.'

Hi Terry, thanks for your wonderful comments, as always. I definitely read Enza's line differently. Her response is merely a parallel to Lok Sim's question. He asks her if *this* is what she wants. And she corrects him that *this* isn't merely what she wants, *this* is what she needs. (Translated into geek, in both his question and her answer, Enza is the subject, and *this* is the object pronoun.) Nonetheless, it's a fair point. Lok Sim's love certainly does not seem to be conditional on what role Enza can play in his life. I hope you'll give Enza the chance to prove the same is true with her, even though at the moment, her life is completely overwhelmed by this trial.

And you're definitely right that Clark and Talan tend to see each other through rose colored glasses and they don't see their own incredible qualities. Who knows where these tendencies are going to lead them?

Thanks again for commenting, everyone.

Rac

Ah. That's what struck me as especially sad in this last part - the implications of Clark's inner vow to Talan.

You've often used contrasting parallels within installments to heighten the impact of what's going on. One of things I've admired about your writing of this story is how you do that.

So in this last part we get that wonderful, beautiful (your wrting style again!) love scene between Enza and Lok and we're reminded of what might have been between Lois and Clark. Here the parallel is unstated.

Then the stated parallels: between Lok and Enza's vows and Clark's vow to Talon, and then between Clark's vow and Lois's vow at the end of this part.

The stated parallel in this part is so sad. Clark dedicates himself to being "a good friend" to Talon. But given the intensity of his dedication combined with the context here in which his mind has been listing all the people he's let down (interesting that none of his Earth family are on his list, and yet arguably he's let them down as much, perhaps more), we infer a much greater meaning to his dedication to Talon.

And then at the end, Lois's rededication to Clark as her love. That seemed so sad given what we know of Clark. She's not in his thoughts, yet he's so powerfully in hers. Like Penelope, she waits. The good and faithful wife of tradition.

c. (who's just read Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad )

Hi Carol. Thanks for your comments. You're definitely right, there were a lot of vows in this part. But while the vows Clark made had everything to do with setting things right on New Krypton, I don't think Lois is absent from his thoughts. At Lok Sim and Enza's wedding, all he could think about was his and Lois's wedding and how much he missed his wife. And he gives the newlyweds a honeymoon because he knows how precious time is. He is giving these two people something he himself was cheated out of. Notwithstanding his comments to Rab Dun, the Chief Engineer, he didn't do so because he figures his lawyer will do her job better if she's... well... This is Clark being not just a man, but a mensch (to use that wonderful Yiddish term).

As to his thinking about all the wrongs he has to put right, I think he focuses on what he does because these are the things he can actually fix now. Despite all of his good intentions, Clark has sown a lot of confusion and pain in both of his houses. But in terms of what he can correct at the moment - he can try to be a better person generally and he can try to repair his friendships on New Krypton, but I don't think he can even begin to understand the depth and extent of the hurt caused by his absence on Earth.

So as usual, I'm going to claim the characters don't always get things right and they don't always think totally rationally. But in Clark's case here, I don't think he's forgotten Lois, or that he loves her any less.

More coming up. Thanks again for your very thoughtful and thought provoking comments.

Rac