Thanks so much for the feedback. Sorry to have fallen off the face of the earth, my computer started acting weird, including smoking one evening, and I went out of town for a few days, so I didn't have a chance to fix it. I still haven't actually, but I'm hoping that since almost everything is working and it's not smoking anymore I can play with it until I have a chance to bring it in.
Sheila - I'm so glad you are enjoying this and no worries about being busy with RL. I can completely understand.
Ann – It makes me feel very proud that you liked the beginning of the chapter since I was worried that it was still too soon for Lois and Clark.
I think, though, that my views on Lois and Clark are quite different than yours. So while I do agree that it was Clark's choice not to tell Lois about his secret and this led to her crush on Superman, I don't think it's fair to say that Lois shouldn't feel a bit guilty for this.
Basically, I feel like Clark should not be expected to tell Lois he is Superman just because he is in love with her. I imagine that would make him want to share this piece of himself with her, but it's a big secret and the less people who know it, the better. As a result, it seems to me that Lois and Clark need some sort of commitment before it's fair to say that Clark owes her the truth. And by the time Clark “died” in this story, they had no commitment to each other. While they may have been in love with each other, Clark was unaware of that. Last he heard, Lois had told him that she loved him like a brother. So while she was being much kinder to Clark than she had before he told her he loved her, they weren't really at a stage where I would think it's fair to expect Clark to put his life and his parents' lives in danger to share his secret with her. (Of course, all of this changed when he found out how she reacted to his death, but right now they are talking about emotions prior to that.)
I don't hold Lois responsible for this, but I wasn't really trying to make it seem like Clark was either. It was more that Clark did want to have the type of relationship with her where he felt he should tell her, and so far her feelings for him hadn't made him feel comfortable with that, so he was hurt. This isn't Lois' fault, but when you want to be with someone and it seems that they don't want to be with you, it hurts, even though you can't blame them for how they are feeling (or not feeling).
That's what Clark was trying to get at – he had wanted to share this part of his life with her, but he couldn't except as Superman and he didn't want to share it with her that way.
Given that this is how I see it, I had Lois understand this. She wasn't really forgiving him – because in this instance he hadn't really done anything wrong. She was just understanding how he had felt and feeling a bit badly about it as she had actually been in love with him and things may have been different had he known.
I will say, as this keeps coming up, that none of this is ever intended to lead to Clark blaming Lois for the past mess. The situation here is nearly 100% Clark's fault. But they got there from their past before that, and in that past Lois was not 100% blameless. It was her actions there that led Clark to believe that Lois wouldn't care that he had died. His mistake was in not taking some time in the past 10 years to correct that, but I guess I don't see the initial “not telling” her as really a problem. It hurts to think that someone you love is dead, but if you shoot someone down enough times, it takes more than a few months of being really nice to them before they are willing to think you may care for fear of being hurt again.
For them to have a successful relationship, I think they need to work past their old issues – Lois needs to see past Clark's lying to her for 10 years and Clark needs to feel confident in Lois' emotions for him now. They need to put both things behind them in order to move on.
I don't really see any more apologies as necessary. Clark has already apologized countless times for lying, now he needs to show Lois that he means those apologies and is different now. And Lois never did anything to apologize for, but Clark needs to work past the hurt some of her very old actions caused.
Unfortunately, with the computer issues, I am still far away from having the next chapter up, but I'm working on it diligently.
