His life wasn't supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be happy, fulfilled saving people, sacrificing. He wasn't supposed to be alone.
He was supposed to have it all. That was the purpose of the dual identity. He was supposed to do what he was built for and live the normal life he really couldn't have. He was supposed to get the job and the girl, or at least, not have a girl in heart at all.
He couldn't put Superman in the closet and Clark Kent was rapidly becoming someone he hated more than Lex Luthor. Clark Kent separated Kal-El from Lois Lane. Clark Kent bumbled and fumbled and stumbled his way through a day of nonexistence. Clark Kent wasn't even Lois' friend anymore. What relationship? Exactly, what relationship? Maybe Clark Kent should jump off a building. Or take another world tour, never to return. But what would that do to his mother? Besides, someone had to carry the family name. Goodness knew Jason wouldn't.
Those thoughts were supposed to be banned. He wasn't very good at living by the code. Rule 1: Play your parts. Rule 2: Don't think of the painful stuff, i.e. Lois, Jason, and Clark Kent. Rule 3: Never, under any circumstances, break rules 1 and 2.
He always broke all the rules.
He heard that he was the most powerful man on the planet. He figured it must be true. He was, after all, one of a kind. Damn it all to hell.
Superman was the only reason he kept living, the only reason he didn't kiss his mother on the cheek, tell Ben to take good care of her, and fly off to an ice palace in the sky. How sad was it that he was his own lifeline?
Lois had been, until she severed it.
He couldn't fault her for it; he would do the same thing, were he capable, but he'd never been that strong, as had been reiterated time and time again.
In all the ways that counted, he was the weakest man on the planet. And that fact was almost enough to make him hate Superman as well. He didn't have the energy for that.
He hated his life; he hated the pain; he hated the emptiness within him and the lack of light in his world; he hated that Lois loved another and the empty part of himself; he hated the fact that Clark Kent and Superman were forever doomed to remain two when he so desperately needed them to become one; he hated that he hated at all, how un-Superman, how un-Clark Kent. How unlike two-thirds of him. As for Kal-El…Kal-El was the longing, the hopeless dreaming, the incessant nightmares. Kal-El was the hating. Kal-El was what he imagined equilibrium to be. Kal-El was the impossibility because not only was ignorance bliss, in the case of those he loved, ignorance was also safety and for that he would hate, he would endure, he would hurt, and he would wish all sorts of things his mother could never know and Lois could see but not understand.
He was supposed to be one person. But he was three.