Well, I need to post a reply that is longer and more coherent than the little snippet I posted above, because this is my favorite story in a long time.
Rac, do you know that this may be the first story where I'm angry at Clark's failure to tell Lois his secret before things got out of hand, but I'm not angry at him? That's because you made his feelings and motivations shine through so true. I still think that, in his trembling happiness after having been allowed to make love to Lois Lane, the question of his Superman identity didn't occur to him. Or rather, he managed to push it so far back in his mind that he didn't see it, so it didn't bother him - not when his soul was trembling with happiness in the embrace of Lois Lane.
But trembling is the word I need, I think, because you made me see that Clark wouldn't tell Lois about himself because he was afraid of losing her. He would keep lying to her so that he wouldn't have to tell her so that he wouldn't lose her, thereby inviting certain disaster sooner or later. I've never believed the stupidity of that explanation before, but you made me buy it. Probably because of your way of showing us how Clark's love for Lois was so strong that it pushed out all other concerns from his mind. In this fic, Clark never discussed marriage with Lois, for example. I'm not in the slightest doubt that this Clark and this Lois will get married, and soon. But to this Clark marriage is secondary. You can call him irresponsible. But to him it is being with Lois that matters, not talking to her about worldly matters like marriage, protection, brownstone, meeting the folks and wearing a cape. The purity of this Clark's love for Lois moves me.
But like I said, Clark wouldn't tell Lois about Superman because he was afraid of losing her, and Lois wouldn't allow her relationship with Clark to grow into love because she was afraid of losing him. Both of them behaved so stupidly because the love they felt for the other one was so overwhelmingly strong, and they were afraid of losing even the friendship of the other one. How poignant.
Another thing I love about your story was that you allowed Lois to reaffirm her abilities as an investigative reporter, and you allowed her to, in the end, survive on her own. To me that is important. In the show we were told that Lois was a brilliant investigative reporter who had won three Kerths and was the youngest Kerth winner ever, but in the episodes she so rarely behaved like a good reporter. She was always tenacious and reckless, but she was rarely right and never brilliant. And she could rarely take care of herself, and she had to depend on Clark to save her. How could she have survived to win those Kerths before Clark was in Metropolis to save her?
But in your fic, Lois is able to deduce the identity of her would-be killer and she is able to take him down herself. She is showing herself that if she throws in her lot with Clark, their relationship doesn't have to be that unequal. It doesn't have to be all about her putting herself in danger and Clark bailing her out.
In the show, Lois and Clark's struggle was twofold: first it was about making Lois acknowledge that she loved Clark, and then it was about getting married. The struggle for marriage became absurd, in my opinion. In classical literature, star-crossed lovers are kept apart because they are forced to marry other people, or because their families hate each other. In real life people have also been unable to marry because of financial concerns. But Lois and Clark were never in a really tight spot economically, no one was trying to make them marry others, and we never saw evidence that the Kents and the Lanes hated each other. Lois and Clark's struggle for marriage became a struggle to find the right moment, and for some reason that right moment couldn't happen soon after Clark had returned from Krypton (without any post-traumatic stress syndrome in the show) or after Lois had been returned to Clark after he had been made to marry a clone of her. The waiting became absurd, because it became ever harder to understand what they were waiting for, and to me, that made their love in itself seem ever less plausible.
But this fic was a lovely tribute to Lois and Clark's love for each other, perhaps above all a tribute to Clark's love for Lois. You made that love shine as brightly and as purely as his love for humanity must be, considering he puts on that blue suit and faces the world's worst misery and tries, to the best of his ability, to alleviate that misery. Only the purest love could keep him going, week after week, year after year. But to keep him going, he probably also needs to express his love for Lois Lane, and to have her love him back.
Ann
