Poor Clark!
Over a month and still NO POWERS! He must really be suffering. It doesn't help that Lois wants to be friends again. Boy, he really can hold a grudge. I'm guessing his lousy new life without powers might have something to do with his grouchiness, though.
Lois is miserable and Clark wants her, but refuses to back down. The question I have is what does he want Lois to do? Admit that he was right and she was wrong? Um... okay. That's never going to happen.
I'm glad that Lois at least has Lucy, even if it's long-distance love, it's better than nothing.
“He’s—I don’t really know how he is. Not good, I guess. Oh Luce, I miss him so much,” she choked out.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, Luce. I mean, I know that it’s my fault for ignoring his warnings about Lex and for choosing Lex over him. Ever since my wedding, Clark’s been—well, he treats me like I’m a stranger. We still work together, but he’s polite now, almost to the point of coldness. I don’t know how to explain it, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Sounds like he's mad.
He just wasn’t sure he could take being in the same newsroom with Lois much longer. His feelings remained frozen in ambivalence, so he doubted he could leave her, but he wasn’t sure how to stay without losing his sanity.
Hmmm. Lois isn't feeling the ambivalence, only the anger.
He’d thought long and hard about his mother’s suggestion to write it all out, and had finally decided to write the events of the past couple months under the guise of fiction. Superman could become a celebrity author who masqueraded as an ordinary reporter. Maybe it was a little close to home, but he had the feeling the closer the better in this instance. He needed some emotional distance to make sense, but not so much that it stopped being him, being them. The character of Luthor had given him pause. Clark felt he had to figure things out from his perspective and from Lois’ perspective. He supposed that meant he should at least outline some version where Luthor was who he said he was—a wealthy philanthropist businessman, a good guy.
Oh, dear. Who is going to get their hands on this story?
Or should he try to see things from Lois’ perspective first?
That would be a good idea. So, of course, he discounts it. LOL.
The next couple of weeks, things continued on in much the same vein. Occasionally Lois would invite Clark over for pizza and a movie, but Clark always told her that he had plans for the night. Things were so tentative between them that Lois didn’t even ask what his plans were anymore.
It's going to get to the point where she's going to stop asking because she's moved on with her life while he's writing in his journal.
He didn’t like to remember the jealousy that had eaten him alive, the jealousy of Superman and the jealousy of Luthor. He also didn’t like to see how passive he’d been in his friendship with Lois: sure, he’d worked hard to establish a friendship with her—which was something of a miracle in itself since Lois didn’t let anyone close enough to be a friend, let alone a best friend—but he hadn’t even introduced the subject of romance before his declaration in the park. No wonder she’d been blindsided. She’d told him not to fall for her within days of meeting him, and that had been the last time they’d ever discussed the subject.
Is the light finally entering his skull? Does he realize that she may not be the only one to blame?
Clark was also realizing that Lois couldn’t allow herself to be wrong. Once she’d committed herself to a course of action, she rarely wavered and never apologized. Given what she’d told Clark about her father, he was fairly certain that was Sam’s influence. If she ever made a mistake, then all those years when Sam had been critiquing her, telling her what a failure she was, he’d been right. Lois couldn’t admit that she was wrong about Luthor without admitting that she’d made a mistake. That meant that she couldn’t allow herself see through Luthor’s façade once she’d told Clark that it didn’t exist.
I love this explanation for Lois's stubbornness. It makes perfect sense.
Regardless, he’d realized that, in a way, he’d made it impossible for Lois to love him because he’d never shown her the real him. The real him couldn’t always save the day for people, but Lois was convinced that Superman would, and the real him wasn’t always running away, but Lois thought that Clark did.
So, what is he going to do about it? Tell Lois?
