Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Single Petal of a Rose Part 4 - Comments

So...thoughts?

This was a really sweet story. I loved how it all worked itself out and how it ended. Good job. Laura

Wow! What a fabulous ending to a beautiful story. I've enjoyed every word. Thank you for sharing.

~Sheila

Oh! It's so good!

No time to comment more now, but this was stunningly beautiful!

Ann

Awesome, Rac. A really good story!

Artemis

Beautiful story, the end is cute !

That was a really great conclusion, Rac.

Michael

This was very enjoyable. I loved the way that even though Lois had a complete melt-down, she let herself work through it reasonably quickly and accepted Clark's apology.

I also loved the ending with the roses.

Bob

Well, I need to post a reply that is longer and more coherent than the little snippet I posted above, because this is my favorite story in a long time.

Rac, do you know that this may be the first story where I'm angry at Clark's failure to tell Lois his secret before things got out of hand, but I'm not angry at him? That's because you made his feelings and motivations shine through so true. I still think that, in his trembling happiness after having been allowed to make love to Lois Lane, the question of his Superman identity didn't occur to him. Or rather, he managed to push it so far back in his mind that he didn't see it, so it didn't bother him - not when his soul was trembling with happiness in the embrace of Lois Lane.

But trembling is the word I need, I think, because you made me see that Clark wouldn't tell Lois about himself because he was afraid of losing her. He would keep lying to her so that he wouldn't have to tell her so that he wouldn't lose her, thereby inviting certain disaster sooner or later. I've never believed the stupidity of that explanation before, but you made me buy it. Probably because of your way of showing us how Clark's love for Lois was so strong that it pushed out all other concerns from his mind. In this fic, Clark never discussed marriage with Lois, for example. I'm not in the slightest doubt that this Clark and this Lois will get married, and soon. But to this Clark marriage is secondary. You can call him irresponsible. But to him it is being with Lois that matters, not talking to her about worldly matters like marriage, protection, brownstone, meeting the folks and wearing a cape. The purity of this Clark's love for Lois moves me.

But like I said, Clark wouldn't tell Lois about Superman because he was afraid of losing her, and Lois wouldn't allow her relationship with Clark to grow into love because she was afraid of losing him. Both of them behaved so stupidly because the love they felt for the other one was so overwhelmingly strong, and they were afraid of losing even the friendship of the other one. How poignant.

Another thing I love about your story was that you allowed Lois to reaffirm her abilities as an investigative reporter, and you allowed her to, in the end, survive on her own. To me that is important. In the show we were told that Lois was a brilliant investigative reporter who had won three Kerths and was the youngest Kerth winner ever, but in the episodes she so rarely behaved like a good reporter. She was always tenacious and reckless, but she was rarely right and never brilliant. And she could rarely take care of herself, and she had to depend on Clark to save her. How could she have survived to win those Kerths before Clark was in Metropolis to save her?

But in your fic, Lois is able to deduce the identity of her would-be killer and she is able to take him down herself. She is showing herself that if she throws in her lot with Clark, their relationship doesn't have to be that unequal. It doesn't have to be all about her putting herself in danger and Clark bailing her out.

In the show, Lois and Clark's struggle was twofold: first it was about making Lois acknowledge that she loved Clark, and then it was about getting married. The struggle for marriage became absurd, in my opinion. In classical literature, star-crossed lovers are kept apart because they are forced to marry other people, or because their families hate each other. In real life people have also been unable to marry because of financial concerns. But Lois and Clark were never in a really tight spot economically, no one was trying to make them marry others, and we never saw evidence that the Kents and the Lanes hated each other. Lois and Clark's struggle for marriage became a struggle to find the right moment, and for some reason that right moment couldn't happen soon after Clark had returned from Krypton (without any post-traumatic stress syndrome in the show) or after Lois had been returned to Clark after he had been made to marry a clone of her. The waiting became absurd, because it became ever harder to understand what they were waiting for, and to me, that made their love in itself seem ever less plausible.

But this fic was a lovely tribute to Lois and Clark's love for each other, perhaps above all a tribute to Clark's love for Lois. You made that love shine as brightly and as purely as his love for humanity must be, considering he puts on that blue suit and faces the world's worst misery and tries, to the best of his ability, to alleviate that misery. Only the purest love could keep him going, week after week, year after year. But to keep him going, he probably also needs to express his love for Lois Lane, and to have her love him back.

Ann

I haven't read anything on these boards in ages, but dropping by on a whim, I saw this story on the front page and my curiosity was piqued.

I plowed through it all at once and I am gratified that I did. What a gorgeous story, so beautifully characterized. This was such a pleasure to read, and it brings me back to my Lois & Clark love at a time when other takes on Superverse have been dominating my fannish inclinations.

Thank you very much.

Incognito! It is so good to see you back here!

Rac, as for the Duke Ellingotn piece of music, I couldn't find more than 22 seconds of his original version on the internet, but I found a cover of it played by a young guy.

Hmmm. I'm not a highly musical person, even though I did sing in a couple of choirs when I was young. Music rarely speaks very strongly to me.

I remember a Lord Peter Wimsey book by Dorothy Sayers. Lord Peter has finally fallen in love, and the woman he has fallen in love with is mature and intellectual, almost certainly a sort of portrait of Dorothy Sayers herself - ah, but I must say that her heroine, Harriet Vane, is a great version of the Mary Sue character. Anyway, Harriet and Lord Peter have gone to a concert together to listen to someone playing Bach. As soon as the music starts, Lord Peter gets drawn into into another world. Harriet keeps watching him, but he is oblivious to her, since he is totally concentrated on the music. Although he is an English gentleman who would never make a fool of himself in public, Harriet can see little signs in his face testifying to how intensely he keeps responding to the music. She can see how he savors how various themes are repeated but subtly changed in Bach's music. To her, however, the music is beautiful but not in any way hypnotizing, and she concentrates on her fiance much more than on the music.

I feel like Harriet Vane watching Lord Peter as I listened to the cover of Single Petal of a Rose. So this is the piece of music that so fascinated Clark and made him understand Lois better?

Well, whatever worked for him! For the two of them! And I like the fact that Ellington's music was so important to both Lois and Clark, though I doubt that it could ever open any doors for me.

Ann

Hi Rac,

I finally found time to finish your story, and what a worthwhile read it was.

You gave us a beautiful, heartwarming ending to a very interesting and believable story.

Great work, as always, Rac.

Yours Jenni

I loved this story! So sweet... seemed like a realistic struggle where neither is to blame, and both worked through it maturely so their relationship is strengthened at the end. Great job!

I've been wanting to find the time to read this since it first appeared.

I finally got to it - and it didn't disappoint.

I loved how you portrayed the relationship between Lois and Clark - great story, and a wonderful ending.

Coming late to the comments on the last part, but this was so rich I needed to digest it properly.

This was wonderful. You portrayed Lois' heartbreak at Clark's deception so realistically that I almost wanted her to tell him to go find someone else to lie to. I'm usually on Clark's side on this question, but he really blew it big time in this story. Even if his motives were not impure, he took advantage of a terrified and shaken young woman and very nearly killed her love for him.

And Lois' reactions were dead on target. The most important thing to her was not that she'd had sex with Superman, but that Clark had not been honest with her. And she was right. The way she slowly allowed herself to understand his reasoning and the way she cautiously allowed him close again was very true to life. You've captured something of Lois Lane here that we don't often get to see, and it was both heartrending and uplifting.

Great story, Rac. This one deserves a Kerth nom, if not the award itself. Keep up the great work!

Beautiful story. Loved it.

Thanks for all of your wonderful comments, everyone. I'm so happy to see that people enjoyed this story. Before I get to thanking each of you individually, I hope you'll indulge a brief author's note (If not, just skip the next two paragraphs or so ).

This had been sitting on my hard drive half finished for about a year and a half. The whole story came from the image of Lois playing the piano in an empty bar with Clark watching on as an unwanted audience. I confess to writing what I know, and this story is definitely no exception. I heard the piece, 'Single Petal of a Rose,' for the first time five years ago this month in the jazz club on 44th Street (in New York's Hell's Kitchen, not Metropolis's Devil's Den). Unlike Lois, I was old enough to get in without a fake ID. I was so taken by the piece that I paid to stay for both music sets that night just so I could hear it again. (Ann, I'm pretty sure I know the version you found on-line. I admire the young man's talent, but I'm not a fan of the license he takes with the tempo and the theme and I feel that the original is completely in a league of its own).

Having worked on white collar criminal investigations for years, I thought I'd try to transplant just a little bit of what I learned there into the storyline here - how do you make sure you've exhausted sources of information, how do you develop new investigative strategies when others don't work, etc. I feel like the show had to take a lot of short cuts with the actual work of investigating as it was not a police procedural and there was probably plenty enough other stuff to work into the 44 minutes per episode. As a result, I think it missed out on a lot of what could have been interesting character and storyline development, out of sheer necessity. That's the nice thing about writing without the same sort of limitations an actual TV program would have - more freedom to explore different approaches to pacing and development without being a slave to a schedule or an entire season's storyline.

Laura, I'm glad you enjoyed the ending. Over the last week and a half or so, Avia and I have been working through it to get it right. It was definitely the most troublesome part to write, so I'm glad it worked for you.

Sheila, it was my pleasure to share the story. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.

IolantheAlias, glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for reading and commenting, Artemis!

Annalina, thank you for taking the time to read this and give feedback. I'm glad you liked the ending.

Thank you, Michael. Great to hear that the conclusion worked for you.

Bob, thanks for your comments. I agree that Lois needed to have a meltdown. I didn't really give her a choice thanks to the Worst.Revelation.Ever (TM Michael). I also felt it was still early enough in their partnership/friendship that Clark's behavior looks like temporary insanity/weakness, not a long-term calculated plot to deceive, so I hoped it would be believable that she'd get over it sooner rather than later.

I'm also glad to hear you liked the roses. I thought the show's use of them in the Prankster episode was poignant and kind of wanted Clark to be able to give Lois roses without her pouring stale coffee over them. Also, while the source of the study is clearly biased (American Society of Florists), 60% of men surveyed would like to receive roses. Lois is a forward thinking woman, I figured having her send Clark roses would be a good bookend to the story.

Ann, thank you, as always, for your extremely thoughtful comments. I'm very pleased to see you enjoyed the story and that the ending rang true to you. I realized as I was working on this that I didn't want it to turn into some long, protracted battle between the characters. Usually, though, I let them take me where they want to go. If they want a long, protracted battle, they get it (as you are, no doubt, aware). In this case, it was tough to have a conclusion in mind and then try to work toward it. I was worried that I would start forcing the characters to behave in a way that served the story and my goals, instead of serving their own motivations.

As you said, more eloquently than I, love makes people do stupid things. Out of fear of losing that love, they rationalize bad decisions or they hide, lie, deny the obvious, whatever. And I think you're right about the point of the story. While the A plot is entirely about Lois and her realization of her feelings for Clark is important, this story is largely about Clark's love for Lois. Something I've tried to I touch upon in "The Longest Road" is the idea of what's left of a person when you strip away status, profession, relationships, and everything else that people use to identify that person and their place in the world. What are we at our molecular level? What is the smallest measure of Lois Lane or Clark Kent that is recognizable as Lois or Clark?

In my opinion, for Lois, it's the need to fight back. It doesn't even matter against what. Lois Lane fights back. At a molecular level, that's who she is. That's the part of her that doesn't change, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what her experiences.

For Clark, I'd be tempted to say that Clark Kent helps others. However, I think Clark helps in large part because it connects him to humanity. It makes him part of this world and allows him to take part in life on Earth as a fully participating member. He helps because he's a good and decent person raised to be that way by Martha and Jonathan Kent. He helps because he can't imagine what other reason there would be for him to have such remarkable powers. But these are precisely the connections and the desires and hopes that make up our relationships with the world and other people. At his core, I would say that Clark Kent is the man who loves Lois Lane. That is who he is. That is the thing about him that cannot change, no matter what.

This isn't meant to diminish Lois's love for Clark or to try to compare the two. I don't think it's really possible to compare the two characters and say he loves her more than she loves him, or anything like that. I don't think you could say he wouldn't hesitate to die for her, but she might think twice. But I do think Lois would survive losing Clark better than he would survive losing her. She would revert back to fighter mode. I have a tougher time seeing Clark do the same. Now you know why I've been so much crueler to Clark than Lois in 'The Longest Road.' I'm a really big jerk.

And as a post script, for any impressionable young, or not so young folks out there: While I agree with Ann that Clark's thoughts at this point are singularly about being with Lois, not about white picket fences, or church weddings or whatnot, the conversation about protection did in fact happen. It just happened during one of those times when the characters turned at me and said "Rac, do you mind? A little privacy, please?" so the scene faded to black.

Thanks for your wonderful comments, Chris. I'm glad you enjoyed the story and am very pleased if it brought back a sense of nostalgia for LnC.

Jenni, thanks so much for reading and commenting. Glad to hear you enjoyed the story and the ending.

Flowerpot, I'm glad to hear that I managed to tell this story without you wanting to blame the characters. They did some less than brilliant things (Clark especially), but I wanted to make sure it was believable.

Female Hawk, thanks for taking the time to read the story. I'm very glad to hear that you enjoyed it.

Thanks for the very kind words, Terry. I'm glad you enjoyed the story, even if Clark was a dolt the whole way through.

Thanks, Gamesaway! Glad you liked the story!

Regards,

Rac