David, David, David...
Every time you try to tell me that you're not a great writer, you go and post something like this just to prove me right over and over again.
You have a real skill for making every single word count, and sometimes count several times over. Like this, one of several references to flashing lights:
More than anything, he needed to know. Clark closed his eyes, desperate to remember, and let the darkness swallow him. The bullets of light hung in the air around him, suspended in the vast nothingness. Like a country sky on a crisp winter night. If he reached out...
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was too... scared...
To Clark, it's all part of the confusion in his head, but the reader knows that he's partly remembering being in space chasing Nightfall. Yet it's such a subtle reference, tucked away amid the vivid image of a country sky in winter. So descriptive, so succinct and so effective. I'm in awe.
Then there's Clark's slow, painful acceptance of the truth: that what he thought were his memories weren't real at all.
The evidence had been staring him in the face all day. The way she’d flinch away from him when he’d touch her. The wedding photo that wasn’t on his mantle. The longing that wasn’t in her eyes...
Lois Lane wasn’t his wife.
Wasn’t his lover.
Wasn’t his.
I've told you before, but I just love the way you repeat the 'wasn't his' in ever-shortening phrases. Very effective, again, and a punch in the gut in the way it shows his pain.
And finally... the way he picks up on her loneliness, her fear of being alone, her need to be loved. This just made me sigh and dissolve in a puddle of angsty mush:
He *remembered* that.
There was... fire... mud... and... Lois’s sad voice. She was... she’d been hurt in the past. That was why he’d never... why he’d waited. She... the things she’d told him... that was why he’d never said... and why he had to now...
She deserved... she needed to know that someone loved her.
“But I do love you, Lois,” Clark said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
Great flash of memory, vividly shown, and of course with no inhibitions whatsoever, no memory of her telling him not to fall for him, he has to come straight out and tell her what his heart tells him she needs to know: she is loved.
He loves her.
And, of course, you have to leave us hanging not much beyond there...
ARGH!! I hope you're making decent progress on part 4 by now!
Wendy
