Hmmm, Hasini. I've just made a spectacle of myself again elsewhere on these boards, going on about Lois deathfics, and here you are posting something that's looking remarkably like something that could become.... Okay, I honestly think that
if you are going to kill Lois here, it won't happen now, or soon. I can imagine Lois being an angst-inducing comatose presence in that hospital for many more chapters to come. Well, if you do decide to kill her off eventually, will you please, please slip me a private mail and warn me first? I don't expect to hear anything from you right away, because I don't foresee the imminent demise of Lois anyway. (And to tell you the truth, your story doesn't really, really, really feel like a Lois deathfic to me.) In any case, if you do tell me something in private about your story, I promise not to tell the others!
Well, now for some comments on the story....
“Hey.” She smiled languorously down at him through half-drooped eyelids, her lips swollen and her cheeks flushed. She looked so scrumptious that he felt a decisive inclination to ravish her. He unceremoniously flipped her onto her back, eliciting a squeal from her.
Under the sheets, a few minutes of playful wrestling ensued, punctuated by feminine giggles and lustful growling. Finally, he pinned her arms firmly above her head and watched her squirm futilely beneath him. He leaned over her victoriously as she grudgingly accepted defeat, and rewarded her with a very thorough kiss. He pulled away for a moment, letting himself drown in the large pools of liquid laughter that were her eyes.
Oh, so deliciously sweet and erotic. And this is in the gfic folder, too!
“Okay what?” Lois sounded nonplussed.
And Lois just
knew that he wouldn't say
that.... so she doesn't understand what he's saying.
“Okay, I’ll find someone else then.”
“You would?” Her words were laced with skepticism. “Really?” Now uncertain and tentative, like a child prodding a loose tooth to see whether it would actually fall off.
“Sure.” The little devil on Clark’s shoulder was having fun this morning. “Somebody as smart as you are, only a little different so she won’t remind me of you too much. Preferably blonde this time.”
“What!” Lois’ indignant screech startled a sparrow off the front porch.
Yes, after Clark made that "blonde" comment, I can just hear Lois's sparrow-repelling screech!
He was as caught off guard as everybody else in the newsroom when on his way out from the morning meeting, he found himself unceremoniously yanked around by the knot of his tie and pushed up against the wall. Lois trapped him there with her small body, glaring up at him with a fierce expression on her face that reminded him of a vicious Jack Russell terrier.
“Now you listen to me, Kent,” she hissed at him. “You ever even think of looking at another woman ever again, and I swear to you I will rise up from my grave if need be and make you rue the day you were born! Understood?”
Hmmmm... so... maybe some flirting will be what the doctor should have ordered when Lois won't wake up from her coma? Maybe there's going to be nothing like some good old-fashioned jealousy to shake Lois out of her unconsciousness? Of course, I don't feel altogether happy about such a solution myself. What if Clark sits by Lois's bedside and starts kissing another woman, thereby waking Lois up? Can he and Lois be happy after Lois has found him red-handed and kiss-lipped like that?
“You think any woman besides me in her right mind is going to put up with having an alarm go off in her ear at six o’clock in the morning ever single Saturday? Dream on, farmboy! And if you have even an itty-bitty, microcosmic vestige of a notion of so much as looking at another woman again in this lifetime, you’d better snap out of it, lunkhead! Because I’m not going anywhere, so you’re stuck with me for life! And that’s a promise! Got that, Kent?” Lois’ eyes glinted dangerously, daring him to disagree.
Oh, so Lois. I love it! And Lois, whether you are comatose or not, remember that a promise is a promise.
“Okay,” he said as nonchalantly as was possible while his wife had him mashed up against the conference room wall by his tie.
“Good!”
Yanking his head down to hers, she proceeded to devour his mouth in a furious, earth-shattering kiss in front of all their gaping colleagues.
“I’m not going anywhere, so you’re stuck with me for life!”
Clark traced the outline of his wife’s motionless figure against the glass window of the hospital room.
For your life or for mine? He wondered. He wished he’d thought to ask her.
“You’re stuck with me for life, and that’s a promise!”
You promised me, Lois.
Oh, so sad.
“How much chance do you mean by ‘not much chance’, doctor?” asked Clark, fixing his eyes upon Lois’ bruised, blue-veined eyelids. Her lashes were so long, kissing the baby-soft skin of her cheek, the way he had always loved to do. The mantra that had been running through his head for the last three weeks began chanting anew, in his head.
Wake up, Lois! Open your eyes! Come back to me! Wake up, Lois! Wake up!
How beautiful...
“I mean….virtually none, Clark,” said Dr. Sanders, slipping back into the familiar address. In truth, they had dispensed with the formalities by the second week. “We’ve been keeping her on artificial respiration for too long. Her vital organs have already begun shutting down. It’s virtually unheard of for a patient to come out of coma at this stage.”
Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh... but... this is
Lois Lane we're talking about. So what if it is
virtually unheard of for a patient to come out of a coma at this stage, if the patient in this case is Lois Lane?
At best, given the extensive brain damage she’s suffered, I’d predict some very severe psychological complications.”
Gaaaah!!! Groan! Okay, so no kissing another woman by Lois's bedside then, Clark. Remember your bedside manners.
The picture of Lois’ fragile figure swathed in white sheets and hooked up on tubes and wires that snaked around her, like a firefly trapped in a spider’s web, seemed imprinted behind his eyelids. He fancied her opening her eyes and breaking free of them, a living ball of energy once again.
What lovely imagery.
He missed her eyes, so much. He loved her eyes, full of love and tenderness and warmth and fire, just for him. He wanted to drown in them, whenever he saw them. They were soft and doe-brown with an elusive sparkle within them. When she was pensive, it was like sunlight upon ripples of water. When she was angry or excited, it was fire kindling from the depths of the earth. He missed that spark in her eyes like a physical pain.
And they wanted him to put it out, like snuffing the flame from a tallow candle.
They wanted him to kill his wife.
“I’m saying it may soon be taken out of your hands,” said Dr. Sanders, before resignedly walking away.
No. Lois could not die. The idea was ridiculous.
She would not leave him.
She had promised.
Yes, Lois, remember your promise!
Clark stared fiercely at her face, white and cool as the sheets upon which she lay. Lois, I never told you that day because I thought you already knew. I’d lose myself forever if you left me. There will never be another woman. There’s never been anyone else. It’ll only ever be you, just like I promised. Now it’s time for you to keep your end of the bargain.
But you should have told her, Clark.
“The fire which has been raging for at least four hours now, is reported to be contained at last with the combined efforts of Superman and the fire department,” said the newscaster. “At least 30 casualties have been reported so far and many more are anticipated. The fire chief has declined to comment on whether it could have been arson or not as yet…”
So horrible for Martha and the kids. Lois is comatose in the hospital, and Clark is rescuing people from a terrible fire - however, he was unable to save at least thirty victims, and now he will have to deal with the guilt and the horror of that.
The rain splattered against the glass of the apartment windows, the icy sleet washing away the intricate lace of the frost coating the panes. It seemed to beat in time to the pounding at his temples, foreboding the beginnings of a painful headache.
Are you sure this hasn't been taken out of Rachel's fic, Hasini?
No. Whatever the police had to say on the subject, Sam knew someone must have abducted Lucy. It was the instinct of a father from deep inside his gut. Quite separate from the fact that she had been reported missing mere hours after Lois had nearly been murdered was far too monstrous a co-incidence to contemplate.
This is almost unbearable.
And if their daughter had been anyone other than Lois they would by now had accepted the inevitable – that she may as well have been lying in a coffin. But no one who really knew Lois Lane would ever imagine that she would give in to mere trifles like medical impossibilities and not seize every last atom of a chance she had to keep alive. Lois was nothing if not a survivor.
I love the way he's clinging to hope, and to his faith in his daughter.
The filthy smog clung to Superman’s body as he flew away from the smoking remains of what had once been a slum shelter. He was exhausted, more emotionally than physically, as he tried to banish the memory of a man and a small child keening over the blackened body of the woman he had carried out of the burning rubble. He had been too late. Just as he had been too late for Lois three weeks ago. Fate had been kinder to him, though. Bloodied and battered as he had found her in the hospital, Lois had at least been alive. He had to count his mercies, as small as they were. Unlike that unfortunate man whose screams he could still hear inside his head, Clark was not a widower.
Not yet.
Sorry for returning to my musings on deathfic, Hasini. In your story, Clark had been too late to save Lois from her attackers. He has been too late to save her in quite a few other Lois deathfics, too. However, in the stories where Clark has been in mortal danger - with the exception of TOGOM rewrites, which aren't true deathfics - Lois the non-superpowered human has rarely been too late to save Clark. Is that strange or what? She saves him better than he saves her! Does she just care for him more than he cares for her?
Superman’s mind felt heavier and wearier than ever as he flew as though the clamor and squalor of the uncaring city were lacing putrid fingers through his senses and dragging his very soul down to earth. For one of the few times of his life, he couldn’t comprehend living in a place like this where so many people called out to him, picking apart pieces of his heart, his strength and his mind even while he clung to every atom of them himself to help him cope with the tumult in his own life. He felt a great pull to the west, one that was almost physical. He wanted to fly and fly inland away from the tall spires of corporate empires and tall city lights that blocked out the winking stars. He wanted to see the rocky hills and timberlands meld into one vast expanse of tranquil fields, where the fertile earth slept under the pristine mantle of snow, awaiting the touch of spring. The memories of his childhood were scattered there, eager and innocent as the young stalks of wheat and corn that danced in the spring, away from the confusion of his adult life.
All of this is so beautifully written.
He wanted to seek out the solitary gravestone that nestled unobtrusively beneath the poplars of his parents’ farmhouse. It had been standing there for the past two years, but it was still where he felt his father’s presence most strongly, surrounded by the fields he had lovingly tilled for forty years. He wanted to kneel on the wet soil there and seek comfort in the company of the man who had never failed to be the anchor to his drifting soul.
So Jonathan is dead. Well, seeing that this story is set ten years into Clark and Lois's marriage, that isn't very surprising.
It's a beautiful paragraph, by the way.
He was glad, though. If he couldn’t seek healing in his wife’s warm embrace, Asha’s faux acerbic conversation was a good alternative. She’d probably annoy him out of his gloom in five minutes.
Hmmm. Asha reminds him of Lois. Maybe he could fall in mock-love with her and shake Lois out of her coma by making her jealous? Just don't overdo it, Clark.
For a moment, he was six years old again, without the responsibilities of a hero, husband and father. The world was full of frightening possibilities and unanswered riddles, and he cowered from them in the shelter of his mother’s arms. His fears seemed to melt away in that warm embrace. It transported him to a time when unconditional love smelt like lavender and honey. Like his Mom. And he was her special boy.
Oh, so beautiful.
“Clark?” Martha touched his arm and turned him back toward her. Her eyes were moist. “You know what your Dad would say if he were here, don’t you?”
His breath hitched in his throat and he swallowed.
“Yeah.” He nodded.
When mother and son embraced this time, he wasn’t sure who was giving comfort and who was receiving it. He held his mother against him tightly.
I have faith, Dad.
So beautiful.
Well, great chapter, Hasini! (And I'll be checking my mailbox for bad news about Lois's health....
)
Ann
