Thanks Annie, I tried placing this fic as right after the proposal. Lex proposes on the plane ride home and Lois immediately goes to Clark's place to try and talk it out. Unlike my MoSB fic, I didn't actually rewatch the episode before writing this but if I remember the timing right, we have Lex propose, commercial break, then daylight at the Planet with Lex seen coming in to claim ownership. Then Clark doesn't find out about the proposal until Lex shows up. And with Lex preening about it, Clark's even more bitter and judgmental in his reaction. This fic would take place in that commercial break, before the wedge in LnC's relationship starts to be driven in.
Thanks L, =)
Thanks Morgana, you know, before my muse died before I'd played with the idea of more fics like Coin Toss or One Way Down/Finding the Way Up... fics that played with Clark's childhood or travels... although a secret of One Way Down is, if you put it in the universe of my long unfinished fic, that's not *Clark* falling... and I think I still never actually used his name in that one outside the summary (yay for first person perspective).
Giulia... was a total surprise to me. I meant to kind of parallel her with Lex. Someone who would be higher profile (a politician maybe, I even considered her being a contact for him in the LnC UN or something) than someone with as much to hide as Clark could really be comfortable in a relationship with. Then, as I was having him describe their relationship, I kind of thought: how might someone devoutly Catholic respond to Clark's powers? Especially if he wasn't *saving* them at the time they discovered them? And the rupture of their friendship came out. And then, because of her terrified reaction, Clark just vanishes. He never tries to see if she just flipped out because it was the middle of the night and could have been calmer or more rational in the morning or if she would have still been terrified of him... which I get the feeling happened a lot with Clark in his years abroad. I tried to give the feeling in the letter that there was a strong possibility that she looked for Clark the next day and wondered or even worried about what happened to him. But, the letter was also written to Superman. So she couldn't actually say that much.
