A/N: Only because everyone begged so much!
Disclaimer: A multitude of episodes are referenced, none of which are mine. Thanks to everyone who created and made the show--I'm eternally grateful! No copyright infringement is intended.
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CLARK:
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Chinese had never tasted so good. I mean, I had frequented the same restaurant several times--I wouldn't have dared to feed it to the great Lois Lane if I hadn't known it was good--but never before had it tasted like this.
Silly, I knew, to think that way. I had already realized that I had a crush on the woman I was working with--the woman who didn't think much of me--and I knew, intellectually, that I was attributing my delight with Lois to the improved flavor of the food. It didn't actually taste better just because I took a bite at the same moment as Lois. It didn't actually satisfy me more just because Lois smiled and laughed during this impromptu dinner. It didn't actually melt in my mouth just because she responded politely, even charmingly, to my own words.
I knew that...but I couldn't quite believe it.
The flavors were richer, the textures more extreme, the combinations more appetizing, as if the entire meal had been made over into something even greater. Even the fortune cookies were filled with a hidden tang.
The only jarring moment was when Lois let me know that she was not feeling the same things. She might have said the food was delicious--and even meant it--but it was clear that the seasoning of her food had nothing whatsoever to do with me or my company.
It didn't matter. I knew without ever tasting another bite that this meal had changed something for me. It had made me realize just how much I was missing in all the other meals I ate. It had made it impossible for me to fully enjoy any meal where Lois wasn't there to season the dishes with her observations and questions and smiles.
Going abroad for a good meal wasn't something I had thought of just for Lois; I had brought foreign foods home to my parents before. They often enjoyed the foods I brought, particularly my mom, who claimed that it was the only way she could get a night off from cooking. I always loved eating with them--home-cooked meals or the take-out I brought home. Their conversation, their company, their easy acceptance and love of me...sometimes it was all I had to cling to, the only lifeline that existed for me.
But eating that first dinner with Lois...I realized that she could be my lifeline, too. She could be the person that *I* could take care of and help and comfort and understand. She was so beautiful, but locked away, hidden behind her mask, shielding her true self from rejection...just as I was.
And I knew--I knew that I wanted to flavor her meals just as she flavored mine.
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It wasn't an easy road, of course. Lois was locked tightly behind her disguise, reluctant to let anyone in. She had on a shell a mile thick, and I didn't want to push her. I didn't want to remake her; I just wanted her to trust me--to be *able* to trust me. She was a mass of contradictions that made perfect sense to me, maybe because I was hiding behind my own shell. Empathy, understanding, compassion, or just love--whatever the reason for it, I saw her for who she really was, and I loved her for it.
I loved her perfections and her flaws equally.
I loved the fact that she wasn't lying when she said she was capable of winning a Pulitzer before she was thirty.
I loved the fact that she couldn't cook to save her life.
The day she made oatmeal for her sister during a failed counseling session and made me eat a bowl of it, I learned that I *could* stomach just about anything. The bomb on the first day I was Superman had been easier to consume than the lumpy, somewhat tasteless gruel she watched me eat with that challenging quirk of her eyebrow, but I ate every bite of it. I ate it because she had made it, because she had given it to me, and because it was worth it.
I knew what the people in the newsroom said. I knew that the entire city of Metropolis knew Clark Kent was in love with Lois. I knew they all felt sorry for me, wondering how long I'd trail along after Lois Lane like a puppy dog, how long I'd take her constant put-downs and barbs and apathy. I knew they had running bets on when I'd walk away in defeat with my tail between my legs. I knew they made fun of me and condemned Lois simultaneously.
But they didn't understand. All they saw were the lumps in that oatmeal. They didn't see that there was so much more there. They didn't see the brilliance that allowed her to make that oatmeal for her sister even though she knew she wasn't good at it. They didn't understand the loyalty she was capable of that prompted her to make the effort. They were blind to the deep vulnerability she felt about her own shortcomings and flaws, and the beauty that shone through despite the walls she had built up around herself.
They didn't see her like I did. Sure, there were days when the put-downs and barbs and seeming apathy hurt--a lot--but there were other days when I received so much more than I deserved, so much more than they would ever think she had to give.
And Lois was never indifferent to me. No matter what she had said at the end of that first meal, there had been a moment even then when she looked at me as if there were something more there than she had originally thought. And almost every day, there was always at least one moment when I knew that she *did* see me, that I *did* mean something to her...that I was, in some small way, flavoring her life, too.
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And then it wasn't her sister she was cooking for--it was me. I'll never forget the surprise I felt when she fed me a piece of rumaki and asked if she was yesterday's news. I think I choked more on the realization that she had dared to cook for me than on the extreme amount of curry.
You see, Lois doesn't cook for anyone. It's almost a point of pride with her that she doesn't spend time in the kitchen. If she doesn't like you...well, you get zilch. If she likes you, she'll order some take-out. It's only the people she *really* cares about--the people she considers the closest to her--that she'll cook for.
And she had cooked for me.
Since Mayson's death, I had been living in a daze, scarcely able to see anything besides the investigation, fighting in some small way to make up for the fact that I had, in the end, been someone Mayson absolutely hated and feared. Fighting to atone for the fact that my fierce desire for a personal life had made me too late to save her.
The eye-watering amount of spice in the hors d'oeuvre was startling. Lois's question was astonishing. The realization that she had gone to so much trouble for me was...incomprehensible.
She was trying.
She was worried.
She...cared. She cared whether what was between us succeeded or failed. She wanted it to work. At some unknown time--I couldn't begin to say when--her reluctance to date me had transformed into *wanting* to date me.
But Mayson had died with the knowledge that the man she had thought she could have a relationship with was actually an alien she had despised and distrusted. I couldn't stand for Lois to look at me with the same expression of disillusionment, disappointment, and horror that Mayson had worn in the moment before her death. If I ever saw that look on Lois's face, I would shrivel up inside. I would fade away. Clark wouldn't be able to face life anymore and Superman would be all that remained, all that was left when the pretense of humanity was ripped away.
But how could I *not* tell her and not hurt her? How could I *tell* her and not hurt her? How could I know just how far she cared for me?
'Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive,' I remember thinking abstractedly. What had started as a crush and moved immediately to full-blown love on my part had kept me imagining ways to tell her; what had started out as disinterest, then moved to friendship before finally becoming...what? Affection? Fondness?
Love?
Whichever, the very fact that Lois now felt these things for me meant that telling her was no longer just an idle fantasy. It had to become a reality--and fast. The fire on my tongue proved that I didn't have a lot of leeway here; Lois wasn't the most patient of women.
But the tears that would have sprung to my eyes--had I been human--due to the intense heat of the rumaki also made it very clear that this could hurt worse than anything else in my life. I could be left with nothing, or even worse, with wounds that would never heal.
And yet no matter how worried I suddenly was, fear of the future wasn't the primary thought circling through my mind and reawakening patience and hope even as I gulped a glassful of water to wash away the potential harm I could inflict.
Lois cared.
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Lois wasn't the only one who changed in our relationship, though.
Opening up to anyone has always seemed, to me, to be the most terrifying of prospects. Once a secret is told, it can never be untold. Once a mask is taken off, it can never be put back on. Once I was revealed, I could never go back to being just Clark Kent.
Once she saw me for who I really was...I could never go back to before. And what if the 'before' was better than the 'after?'
Secrets--*one* secret--has molded my entire life, and secrecy was the way I lived that life. That's not an easy habit to break...but I did. I broke it because Lois is more important to me than safety through secrecy. And because a love that risks nothing is worth nothing. So I risked it all...and I gained it all.
Lois has seen me without the mask, knows me past the lies, and she still calls me Clark. She still loves me. Her knowing my secret had not destroyed my world; rather, it had made it a place worth living.
And once I began sharing secrets, it was hard to stop, hard to imagine ever going back to a place where Lois wasn't my confidant, the one person I could trust with *all* my secrets. I would risk anything for her, dare anything, try anything.
As example of that, I even changed my mom's award-winning tomato sauce for her. Lois doesn't like onions, so I took them out of the sauce even though the recipe calls for it.
Not a big change, perhaps, but it seemed symbolic at the time. Lois and I were engaged, we were about to start our new life together as a married couple, and so I changed the recipe for her. A symbol that whereas I wouldn't change for others, I would change for her. Just as she had cooked for me and no one else.
Unfortunately, the timing must have been wrong because the taste of onion-less tomato sauce could not overpower the betrayal I felt when the world believed the worst of Superman.
When *Lois* believed lies about me.
Understandable, I told myself as I cleared the dishes from the dinner I had made so carefully and of which neither one of us had eaten too much. It was understandable that Lois would doubt me. After all, I had lied to her before; why shouldn't she believe that I would lie again?
But I had never betrayed her with a woman. I had never fathered a child and then abandoned him. I had never left a super-powered infant to face the cruel world alone.
Yet both Lois and the world believed I had. And once again, it was only my parents who believed in me. Who stood there with me and trusted me. Who never doubted me.
The tomato sauce had gone to waste, but the changes I had made for Lois hadn't disappeared. So I systematically tamped down on and destroyed any betrayal and hurt I felt. I laid out my defense before Lois in an effort to win her back. I promised her that I had not lied to her--would not lie to her.
And she believed me. Despite the fact that I had lied to her in the past about my identity, she listened to me...and she believed in me.
And I have to say...I prefer tomato sauce without onions.
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I've traveled all over this world and even to a palace in space. In those places, I've tasted a hundred different flavors, a thousand combinations of spices and seasonings, a mélange of sweet and sour and bland and hot and everything in between. But none of them can compare to the taste of Lois.
There was always a touch of guilt to the kisses between us before she knew my secret, always the whisper at the back of my mind that told me she didn't know she was kissing an alien. She didn't know she was kissing her partner, Clark Kent. Usually the whisper was submerged beneath the sensation of the mixture of strange and amazing tastes that was Lois Lane, and at times, like the kiss the day after our first date, I almost thought it didn't matter.
But it did.
I know it mattered because the taste of her kiss after she knew me as Superman and Clark was a thousand times sweeter and more intoxicating than any that had come before.
From the moment of our first kiss, I've always been blown away by the explosion of tastes that she offers me. Each day is a different concoction, each moment a separate flavor, each kiss its own brand of delight. From hesitance to bravado to tears to passion to fear to tenderness and everything in between--Lois kisses just as she feels.
I remember that first kiss on Trask's plane, a diversion that I accepted as truth for a long, dreamlike moment. She held her hands up to my face as if to control how far I went, her movements slow and cautious.
I remember the time I kissed her to distract the maid and the moment I kissed her goodbye. I remember how she kept her hands away from me, neither resisting nor controlling those kisses.
I remember how she kissed Superman when that was all he was to her--the total abandonment in her posture, the overt enthusiasm as if to make up for the stiffness on my part.
I remember the tenderness of the first kiss she willingly and freely gave Clark Kent, the way I could taste that I had affected her as much as she had been affecting me from the moment I met her.
And I remember the way she kissed me in my apartment after risking her heart by telling me she chose me above everyone else--the way she wrapped her arms around my neck and refused to let go, surrendering herself to me completely.
I would have sworn beforehand that no taste could rival those, but I would have been wrong. Because even after finding out that I had lied to her--that I was two men to her--she kissed me and tasted of happiness and acceptance. She gave herself over into my arms, then pulled back and kissed me once, twice with her eyes wide open, knowing me--the whole me--as she never had before...and still choosing to kiss me, still trusting herself to me.
Since then, I never know what taste she will offer me when I bend to touch my lips to hers, but I know that it will be more exotic, more delicious, more surprising than any other taste could ever be.
I know that whatever the taste is--whatever part of her heart she offers me at that moment--I will love it because I love her.
That taste...what can I say? It's what makes life worth living.
The End
