First of all, this is really, really well written. It's great that you give us so much story in the first part. There is a lot of excellent A-plot, but also a lot of interesting B-plot.
I love the way you set up the A-plot:
“So it's settled, then,” he says. “You and Dead Girl – “
What?
...
The pie smells great. But I'm not interested in that as much as I am in "Kitty's' arm and its odor. What's really fascinating is "Kitty's' smell. It's different.
...
She's got a subtle odor (almost drowned out by the glorious apple pie scent) that I've never detected on any human before. But the strange thing is, her smell is still human, still Earthling. There's just a different edge to it. Not the way I'm different, but different in her own Earth way.
Of course Kitty's smell is different! Because she is Dead Girl! Those two shady character who were with her have obviously revived her somehow and turned her into their slave or something! Wowzers! Yeeech!!! (But what an excellent A-plot!)
The best part of the B-pot was this, I think:
My eyes stray down to her legs – she's wearing a short skirt today. She's trying to kill me and it's working. I determinedly haul my gaze up to her face. She has a half-smile on her face that tells me she knows exactly what she's doing to me. It's part of the game we play. But nothing is ever said. There's plausible deniability, in everything we say and do. That's the whole point of flirting, isn't it?
Some days that's fun, and other days it's torture. I'm not sure what today is. It keeps on changing.
Flirting. That's what it is. There is so much flirting here, it's a wonder that they get anything done. Ah, but your Lois and Clark are reporters, too, so they don't forget to work just because they want to play, too.
All this is excellent. And it is a great story, so far. But now for my complaint! And it has nothing to do with your story, as such. Rather, it has to do with how your story and I just may not be entirely compatible.
You are new here, so you may have missed the story about my Superman addiction, which I have repeated so often on these boards. The long and short of it is that I got hooked on Superman back in 1968, when I was barely thirteen, and if you wonder why I didn't like him when I was even younger it was because I had never heard of the flyguy in blue spandex before that year, 1968. Anyway, in 1968 I loved him because he was so super, because he could fly, because he pulled off all those amazing feats. But in 1969, he took Lois Lane in his arms, got all soft in his stern Superman face, and said to her, 'I love you'. Well, that happened in one comic book I read that year. I had just begun to get ever so slightly tired of Superman - after all, there are only so many times you yourself can go, 'It's a bird, it's a plane, it's
Supermaaaan!!!. But when I was reading this particular comic, I could almost hear Lois and myself gasp in tandem in reply to Superman's words,
Really??? He
loves me/her???
Suddenly I was obsessed with Superman. Suddenly I had to understand him. What did he mean when he said that he loved Lois? He was constantly playing this rather cruel game with her. The two of them were often off chasing down a story together, but invariably his Clark Kent persona started acting all whiny and cowardly. He had to go home! He had a tummyache! He couldn't bear to stay and watch! His shoes were wet, he had to go home and change his socks! And then he'd take off, and the next moment Superman would appear and take care of the bad guys. And almost instantly Clark would be back - well, he'd be back as soon as Superman had left - and he always had some groan-inducing explanation for his speedy return.
Now comic book Lois wasn't stupid. She realized that there was no way that Clark could be as scared and whiny as he pretended to be. How on earth could he bring home all those journalistic scoops if he was all that spineless and pathetic? Lois realized that something was wrong. Clark was playing a game with her. Not only that, but she figured out what his game was, too: obviously Clark was Superman, and he ran away from her so he could change into Superman and take the bad guys into custody.
So Lois valiantly tried to prove that Clark was Superman. But he constantly used his superpowers to cheat her out of her biggest discovery. She never got the proof she needed, because he used his powers to trick her and frustrate her.
And yet he had said to her, as Superman, 'I love you'. What did he mean? What did he want? What was his game?
Unlike Clark/Superman, Lois wasn't hard to understand at all. She was a bright, curious, adventurous girl who had become a reporter because she loved to poke her nose where it didn't belong. But when Superman had told her that he loved her her world was turned upside down, and she, like me, was forever stuck trying to figure out what he meant, what he wanted, if he really wanted a life with her.
Well, then LnC came along. It reinterpreted Clark and made him so much more lovable. Whiny pathetic Clark was gone, and the guy who had to run home because he had a tummyache turned into the guy who had to run off to return a video or pick up his Cheese of the Month shipment.
While Clark changed for the better, Lois, unfortunately, changed for the worse, at least during the first season. The curious adventurous girl turned all bitchy and self-aggrandizing. Suddenly, she was as improbable as a successful reporter as comic book Clark had been. There was no way that spineless Clark could have gotten all the scoops he kept getting. But similarly, there was no way that galactically stupid Lois could have won all those Kerths.
When I read the comic books, I was forever looking at Superman/Clark through Lois's eyes, trying to help her figure out this very complicated man. But in LnC, I was asked to look at bitchy self-aggrandizing stupid Lois through Clark's eyes. I was asked to think of this superpowered Kryptonian with a double life an an über-normal wholesome farmboy and help him figure out why this city bitch of a girl had taken such a stranglehold on his heart.
I don't know. I didn't really like this change of perspective, this changed point of view. All my questions about Clark went out the window, because suddenly there was nothing to wonder about. Clark was just this sweet normal boy who for some reason - and don't ask about the reason! - had to court a girl and deceive her at the same time. Similarly my identification with Lois became impossible. Lois was a bitch, and a stupid bitch at that. What kind of attraction did Clark feel for her? Surely he couldn't exactly respect her. How can you respect a woman who gets away with being intolerable just because she is a woman and has the right to ask the men around her to be courteous to her? How can you respect this kind of behaviour?
Lois chivies us into her Jeep and takes Jimmy just far enough to where he can pick up a taxi.
“You get those photos printed,” she says. “And I want to know everything about Jordan. Who he was, who his friends were, who his enemies were, what he lived on, what he ate for breakfast!” She stops to take a breath. “Clark and I will be in this afternoon and I expect it by then.”
“Lois!” Jimmy protests.
She just smiles as the cab pulls away.
Lois doesn't deign to drive Jimmy home even though she easily could, but she does expect him to do all sorts of research work for her? :rolleyes:
When Lois is being such a bitch the story easily turns into something that isn't so much about Clark and
Lois, but rather a story about
Clark and his tender heart. What will Lois do to his heart? For example, what will it do to Clark to have to reveal his secret to Lois? That will hurt him, won't it? Better protect his secret, right? And so the story easily turns into another of those almost-but-not-quite-revelation fics, another of those phew-your-secret-is-safe-Clark stories. Those stories were a dime a dozen when I was a kid, and I learned to hate them.
Another interesting thing we can do in a Clark fic is to kill Lois. It is very interesting to see Clark's tender heart bruise because of Lois's death. It is fun to watch him grieve for her forever, but it is also satisfactory to see him learn to smile through his tears and watch him soldier on for Lois's sake, to honor her memory. Alternatively, it can be fun to watch Clark move on and find another woman to love and be happy again.
So what does it mean for Lois to be dead? Ummm... who cares? Because the story isn't about Lois, right?
Well, I know that the typical Clark stories, the stories where Lois is just a tool to manipulate Clark's tender heart, are no longer compatible to me, if they ever were. I need Lois and Clark to be equal partners, or better yet, I like to watch the world through Lois's eyes. I like to watch Clark through Lois's eyes, the way I did when I was a kid and read the comics.
Well, we have yet to see how much Lois is going to reduced to a tool to manipulate Clark's feelings in this fic. And two things are certain. Your story is very well written indeed, and there are so many FoLCs who are happy to read Clark stories, stories where we watch the world through Clark's eyes and try to figure out the (bitchy) mystery that is LnC's Lois Lane.
Ann
Working on my Ficathon piece right now.
