Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic FDK: Choices And Consequences (all)

Terry, this is an incredibly moving story (trilogy?) and I'm sorry I haven't posted feedback until now.

I'm going to start by making a few comparisons between this three-parter and the fic you posted just before this one, She's. I won't blame you if you dismiss what I say about She's, since I haven't read it and likely won't. But I learned enough about that story from the feedback thread to be able to discuss its premise. In She's, Clark freezes Lois to be able to save his parents. He does it because she asks him to do it, and also, obviously, because he hopes he will be able to save his parents that way. He freezes her even though he must understand that this is incredibly dangeorus. He hopes that he will be able to save her, just like he did in that episode on which your story is based.

I have a couple of objections to this premise, but only one is relevant on this FDK thread. This objection is that the whole situation - Clark deliberately exposing Lois to life-threatening danger in order to save his parents - is improbable. How often does this sort of thing happen in real life? Not even terrorists usually demand that somebody else should be killed in exchange for the lives of their hostages.

By contrast, the premise in Choices And Consequences, that sometimes you can't save everybody and that you are going to have to choose who you should save and who you should abandon, is horribly, devastatingly probable and real. I'm sure it happens all the time at disaster sites. And one of the most harrowing movies I've ever seen, Sophie's Choice, deals with exactly this situation. Sophie, a Jew, is sent to a Nazi concentration camp with her son and her daughter. When she gets there, she is told that she will have the chance to save one of her children - the other one will meet with certain death. Sophie chooses to give her son a chance to live. In so doing, she sentences her daughter to death.

What Sophie goes through, and the grief and guilt that wracks her for the rest of her life, is so much worse than what happens to Lois in your story, Terry. For all of that, your story is one of the most moving I've read. One thing that makes it so incredibly poignant is that it is so full of goodness and love. Lois, as Ultra Woman, is a most admirably good person, an altruistic superhero and a loving wife. And both KJ and Dan are incredibly good and caring husbands. In spite of the horrible grief of your story, the scenes with Lois and Dan and Lois and KJ overwhelmed me with the sheer love that the men, in particular, feel for and give to Lois, but also the love that Lois is giving back to them.

Your story had me thinking about what Lois ought to have chosen, if she had known that she would have to make a choice about whom to save. Should she save her husband or her children? To me, it's obvious that Lois would, and should, have chosen her children. Wouldn't most mothers have done that? Wouldn't many fathers have done it, too? Sacrificing everything for your children is the ultimate act of altruism as well as the ultimate selfishness in the world. What could be more important than your children? They are your escape hatch to the future, to a time when your own physical existence has ceased. They represent the hope that something of you will live on for centuries or millennia. I'll never forget an old woman I was briefly hired to help with household chores and the like; she had no family left at all, and her daughter had died many years ago. I'll never forget the bottomless sorrow in this woman's eyes, when she looked at the old framed photograph of her daughter and said to me: "Children are not supposed to die before their parents."

So how about Jon and Laura's reaction to Lois when she had saved them but had failed to save their father? How could they blame her for Clark's death? They were only nine years old, and I can understand their horror. I find it harder to accept Jon's hatred of his mother now that he has grown up; he should know from his own experience that sometimes you just can't save everybody. Failing to save somebody while you are desperately working to save somebody else is not the same thing as killing the one you were forced to (temporarily) abandon. For all of that, I still feel some sympathy for Jon's reaction. You make me feel his grief, Terry. As for his hatred of Lois, well - ultimately we can't demand that children must love their parents. Children don't choose their parents. They don't even ask to be born. Sometimes parents and children simply aren't compatible. I don't hate Jon for hating Lois, but my heart aches for Lois.

The next version, however, is almost unbearable to me. I do think that Lois must grieve the loss of her children more than she grieved the loss of Clark in the other version. Also, Clark's hatred of Lois is harder to accept for me than Jon's hatred of his mother. Clark must know that Lois didn't deliberately endanger their children. She did what she could, even though I think she made the wrong choice when she made Clark her priority rather than her children. Clark can't possibly doubt the heartache Lois must feel over her dead children.

But even though I strongly disapprove of Clark's behaviour towards Lois, I also feel so much compassion for him. You make me feel that his heartache is as bad as Lois's, Terry. Clark is a bereaved father as much as Lois is a bereaved mother. In his utter desolation and loss, Clark is able to feel only dark and troubled emotions. What a lonely, lonely figure he is in the end. Lois, who I will insist comes through as the more generous of the two of them, has at least found another man who truly, truly loves her. Clark appears to be as starkly lonely as a weathered piece of rock in the desert.

These two first chapters are extremely moving, tender, harrowing and devastatingly sad. They are marvellously well written.

The concluding chapter pays an absolutely wonderful tribute to the altruistic love that Lois's two alternative husbands, KJ and Dan, feel for her. Dan and KJ are, literally, prepared to give up absolutely everything for her. Dan is removing himself from the woman he loves with all his heart, so that she can be happy with another man, and so that she can keep her children. KJ is prepared to sacrifice all that and more, his own physical existence. This chapter is a wonderful mix of humour and comedy and incredibly beautiful altruistic love.

I loved the ending, too - well, actually not the very ending about the man in Minnesota and Paladin and Abrams, because I didn't understand that. But I absolutely, totally loved KJ's words to Dan near the end:
Haha! It's been a long time since I saw Casablanca, and I don't remember it that well, but I do remember that Humphrey Bogart's character has just given up Ingrid Bergman's character - she's going back to her husband - and Humphrey Bogart says exactly those words about a beautiful friendship to a newfound friend of his. How wonderfully appropriate!

I absolutely loved this story, Terry. It's not only so well-written, but it also gives the reader so much food for thought. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing it with us.

Ann