Wow. That was intense. And riveting.
As soon as she turned the doorknob, Clark snatched the door out of her hands and swept her up into a desperate hug. His grip was barely loose enough to allow her to breathe easily, and her feet dangled several inches above the floor. Fortunately, not unlike the night Superman had first danced with her in her apartment, he supported all of her weight.
She felt faint tremors run through his arms. When he finally put her down, his eyes shimmered with unshed moisture. “I was – I was afraid you weren’t coming back any time soon.”
How can I not be moved by your description of Clark's desperate love for Lois?
He was willing to do whatever he needed to do about the baby situation. He’d visit Dr. Klein again and get more details, maybe suggest a course of treatment, maybe come up with a solution. He wanted a baby, too – he simply didn’t want a baby more than he wanted to be married to Lois. And he was willing to bend any direction he needed to in order to make Lois happy on the baby front.
But he wasn’t willing to bend where Robin was concerned. He needed to reach her, needed to mold her the way his parents had molded him. He needed her to be a good person, someone who’d respect and obey the law and help people in some way, whether she ever used her powers publicly or not. He needed to know that his blood ancestors had been good people, that he wasn’t some aberration or mutation who couldn’t have coped with the society from which he’d been sent away.
And yet I can't help feeling that his intransigence when it comes to Robin hints at a coming disaster.
Lois’s tone matched his. “The girl threatened to kill me so you and she could be together. If that’s not an indication of her character, I don’t know what is.”
“You must have misunderstood her. Robin wouldn’t – “
Your description of Clark differs from the kind of Clark that most other people portray on these boards. Almost everyone else describes a lovable character who can be a lunkhead, but who ultimately has an unwavering moral compass and a rock-steady love for Lois. For most Clarks on these boards, loving Lois and doing the right thing is enough. They don't need more in order to be happy.
Your Clark is more complicated and more ambiguous. He is at once more human and less human than the man behind the glasses tends to be. He is more human because he is more flawed, more like the rest of us in that respect, even though he may still be a lot better than most of us. At the same time he is less human because he
isn't human.
Your Clark is, I think, awesomely powerful and devastatingly lonely. He is as existentially lonely as the orphan of an entire dead world has to be.
Who or what can cure your Clark's loneliness? Lois? The answer is not a definite yes. Your Clark is looking for warmth and female love where he can find it. I'm not saying he has a roving eye. So far he has never been unfaithful to Lois after he has committed himself to her. But he has been a lot more ambiguous about committing himself to her than most Clarks on these boards. You have shown us one Clark happily married to Lana, one Clark on the verge of marrying Mayson, and, in your latest fic, Clark-who-was-married-to-Lana falling in love with a sweet redhaired girl whose name I have forgotten. Being married to Lois also isn't necessarily enough to make your Clark happy. In one of your fics Tempus killed Lois and Clark's children. Clark blamed Lois and shut her out of his life forever, freezing himself into a state of eternal loneliness.
Your Clark is a deprived person, deprived by the loss of his home world. He isn't the happy basically untroubled person that we meet in so many fics on these boards. And he is looking for something to fill the hole in his soul. He is willing to look for women. Not so that he is a womanizer, but so that he hasn't got a steady compass unwaveringly pointing him towards Lois. Certainly not so that he has a compass that
only points towards Lois.
I can see that he would respond eagerly to Robin, a fellow survivor from Krypton. I can see that he feels the need to see himself in her. Most human beings feel the need to understand themselves by comparing themselves with others. But if you really have no one who is like you, because you are truly an alien in the world where you have grown up, then I can understand that you would grasp at the chance to get to know just one person who really is like you.
And if this person belongs to the opposite sex, it could just possibly become even more interesting.
Some of my students have just read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The monster demands that his creator, Doctor Frankenstein, cures the monster's existential loneliness by creating a girl for him. It is impossible not to think of the possible implication of an emerging and multiplying race of Frankenstein's monsters.
And I can't help thinking that you have created a situation where Clark will have to choose between Lois and Robin. One aspect of his choice is that Robin could probably give him children, whereas Lois probably can not. With Robin, Clark can give rise to a possibly uncontrollable race of Kryptonians here on Earth.
Frankenstein's monster killed Frankenstein's wife. It is going to be interesting to see what Robin may do to Lois.
Ann
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