He never lost his powers completely, but they’d flickered like a dying light bulb all afternoon and been far too unreliable for him to consider any Superman duties.

“When you invent a superhero, you don’t do it half-way,” Clark agreed. “It can be a lot to live up to.”

“Have I made you feel that way?” she asked, cocking her head at him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Many times. But you’ve also made me feel…” He shrugged, feeling a little foolish. “Super, I guess. Like if I tried hard enough, I could actually be the hero you thought I was. It sounds silly…”

“No,” she said softly. “Not silly at all. But I can hardly believe that anything I said meant so much to you – that I had that responsibility and didn’t even know it. It’s kind of scary, thinking about it now.”

“It shouldn’t be. More than once, you kept me going when I wanted to give up. You set the bar incredibly high, but you also made me want to reach it. I guess I never wanted to let you down.”

“You’ve never let me down,” she promised him. “Not as Superman, and not as Clark. And you won’t, no matter what happens.”

“That’s a lot of faith to put in a farmboy,” he said softly, feeling somewhat awed by the thought.

“You’ve never let me down,” she promised him. “Not as Superman, and not as Clark. And you won’t, no matter what happens.”

“I don’t let just anybody be top banana you know.”

With their conversation in the tree house, many of his reservations about Lois knowing his secret had fallen away, and now their friendship seemed rich with new possibilities. The knowledge that he could talk openly with her was positively exhilarating. He could talk about the questions he had about his origins, his abilities, and his mortality. He could talk about his duel identity - about all the problems inherent in his double life, but also all the blessings. He could talk about the rescues that plunged him into a sea of despair and about the ones that lifted him out again, restoring his faith in humanity.

He could look right into her eyes, without hiding behind a pair of glasses.

“Hi, honey,” his mom said, smiling brightly from her place in the middle of the floor. “Oh, dear. You need a new cape, don’t you?”

“Hi, Clark,” Lois said, barely looking up.

“Hi, Clark,” his father echoed. “Can you stay a while? …Oh, here, Lois, look at this one. See - he’s wearing the little T-rex shirt I was telling you about.”

When she’d pleaded with him that she wanted to understand, he suddenly realized that he wanted the same thing. For so long, the only two people in the world who really understood him had been his parents. His parents were wonderful, but they were still parents, and there would always be things he wasn’t quite comfortable sharing with them. The urge to be understood by a friend, a contemporary, was almost overwhelming, and Lois was the only one who knew enough to be a candidate.

The truth was that he couldn’t do anything but love her, no matter how hard he tried.

It was, quite literally, more than he had ever allowed himself to hope for. He had dreamed of a romantic relationship with Lois since practically the moment he’d met her, but it had always taken on a rosy glow of unreality in his mind. There had been ridiculously conventional dreams of a perfect, picket-fenced life, and there had been more blatantly sexual fantasies, which, though tame by many men’s standards, still made him blush when he thought of them in the light of day. Somehow, though, his mind had balked at imagining the inevitable moment when he would have to reveal himself to her completely. He had never allowed himself to indulge in dreams of total, unconditional acceptance.

Life with Lois – the real, live Lois who would drag a heavy ladder a half a mile just to stick her nose somewhere it didn’t belong – life with that Lois would be interesting.

It would be challenging. It would be crazy and fun and sometimes aggravating, and it would remind him every day of all the reasons he’d fallen in love with her in the first place.

Upon opening the farmhouse door, he concluded almost immediately that Lois was trying to drive him insane. He was sure of it.

“The grasshopper funeral was a little over-the-top, though. I mean, you can take that whole tender-hearted thing too far, even when you’re four. And don’t grasshoppers destroy wheat crops?”

“Dad refused to attend the funeral,” Clark admitted.

Originally posted by Vicki:

(As Terry said, we'll wait. But we'll nag. )

- Vicki