"....I'm so much in love with you superman. Tell me is there any hope for us."
He had often wondered what it would feel like when this finally happened. Oh, he had always been hopeful that she would return his feelings and now she was unknowingly confirming his worst nightmare that she would never be in love with clark kent.
He had imagined a torrent of pain flowing thorough his insides, feeling devastated, hurt beyond imagination. What he hadn't imagined was a feeling of slight bemusement, the urge to burst into laughter in lois's face and only knowledge that he would hurt her tempering his expressions.
It had started this afternoon with lois rejecting clark kent and asking him to contact superman for her in the same breath. The hurt he had expected had come then, torrents of pain so intense it felt as if something inside him was breaking. Apparently something was.
He had walked into his apartment, still reeling from the pain in his heart when he had passed out from the intensity of emotions coursing through him. That was the last time he remembered feeling any emotion.
When he woke up, suddenly the world seemed a lot more clear as if somebody had removed a pair of blinders from his eyes. The pain he had been feeling mere moments ago was missing and for the life of he couldn't understand why. Thinking about lois didn't bring the rush of emotions that she always invoked in him. The only thing in fact that he seemed to feel was a sense of contentment, a feeling he couldn't trace the source of. As usual for clark when he was troubled, his thoughts turned to his parents, and his thought processes stilled. Nothing. He could remember his parents, remember the fact that he loved them, and they him, yet he felt nothing.
He began cataloging events in his life, clark kent at the age of five bringing flowers to his mother. At the age of eight sitting in his fathers lap being told that he was adopted. At age ten, when his superhearing kicked in. His parents telling him about the details about how they found him. x-ray vision. heat vision. His strength. Discovering flight. Lana Lang. Meeting lois.
He remembered everything, he could describe in perfect detail how he had felt ant any of the particular instant in his life. Yet looking back now he couldn't feel anything he remembered feeling. It was as if a switch had been thrown, turning his emotions off. Even going through these remunerations, a part of him noted that he was neither scared nor panicked.
Turning his thoughts to his recent worries, clark realized that his emotions had been hindering his thought processes. now uninhabited, he could see quite a few ways to deal with Luthor, the simplest being flying him as high as he could fly a man without killing him and then letting go.
For the second time his thought processes had stilled. That last thought should have been followed by a wave of horror. That he could think about taking a life as casually as he just had should have scared him. He had rejected that thought as soon as it had occurred to him yet it hadn't been because it felt wrong.
No longer willing to ponder about himself anymore clark spun into the superman suit and left to patrol the city. three hours, two muggings, a rescued cat and a potential accident later, superman returned with a much better understanding of himself than when he had left.
Firstly, he postulated, while he had somehow been cutoff from his emotions, they were still there.
He had realized that given any situation he usually faced as superman, his majority of decisions would remain the same and that while thinking about cold blooded murder hadn't given rise to an iota of feeling, the knowledge that the person he had been would have been horrified had been enough to stall that line of thinking. going through a series of simulated events in his mind, he found that he almost instinctively rejected any of the unethical solutions to his problem. His memories of himself and that of his family along with the knowledge of what he used to feel for them seemed to make a good replacement for his missing conscience.
Thanks to the woman who had been hitting on him at the almost accident, he had also discovered that that he hadn't completely lost touchwith his emotions. he'd felt the same bemusement that always made itself known in such situations. A passing joke from a cop that he had actually found funny. And finally a whisper of 'awwwww' echoing though his mind when he had recued the cat from a tree for a five year old girl and been invited to a tea party by the said girl.
His second postulate had much more serious implications. He had decided that he was no longer clark kent. From his memories he remembered that clark kent was a man of his emotions. He was intelligent yet his actions were always guided by his heart. Whoever he was now, he knew that his actions would have to be guided by his intellect instead of his non existent feelings. Moreover, his thought processes were somehow different from the the original clark kent, more subtle and mischievous in his pondering. With this in mind he rechristened himself by his other birth name kal-el.
Satisfied with his re-invention of himself, he turned his attention to more pressing problems, such as lois lane and his upcoming meeting with her. It had taken ridiculously short time to come up with a plan of action and implementing it.
Now he stood before lois lane, who'd just poured her heart out for him and it was time of kal el to implement his plans.
A/N:- I get the feeling that I've taken a good idea and beaten it to death with this chapter....!!!!. I really would like too know other member's thoughts so please comment or PM me. Thanks...
