Welcome back, Rac!
This is such a powerful portrait of what war, or rather fear and shocks, does to you. Think of dogs or cats that have been beaten and ill-treated. It is hard to give battered animals back their trust in life and people again. And I don't think battered and ill-treated people are all that different. When I was quite young, I read Dorothy Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon - it was so romantic! It made me blush! But anyway, the hero of the book, Lord Peter Wimsey, almost has a breakdown in that book because his horrible memories from World War I is catching up with him.
You describe so vividly how Clark's fears from his stay on Krypton are staying with him:
in his mind, it had been a feverish, dehydrated, hundred and forty five pound husk of a man throwing a pathetically weak punch at Nor before collapsing in a pitiful, boneless heap on the dirty basement floor of some anonymous prison. In reality, he'd hit his wife – the woman he loved more than anything in the universe, whose love had kept him alive when he was that weak and frightened prisoner.
Perversely, in spite of the horrors he suffered on Krypton, he might have been mentally stronger or at least far more assured there than he is here:
when he'd been there, he'd had a purpose, clear as day. He knew what he had to do and he knew what was at stake. Most of all, he knew what he wanted most—what he needed so desperately—depended on him doing his job.
When a man is at war, his rules are simple. Defeat the enemy. Save the people who are being oppressed or threatened by the enemy. Stay alive. Do all of that, and you will be allowed to return home to the people you love, and with them you will find solace. With them everything will be all right. Except it isn't so simple, because the man who returns from war isn't the same person as the man who set out for foreign shores to fight the war.
This is a beautiful portrait of a noble man who has been deeply wounded, and who is fighting to become, if not the same good man that he was before, then at least another kind of good man that he himself can trust and be proud of.
Ann
