I'm going to be a little more coherent now, but before I discuss your fic I will talk somewhat extensively about another fic which deals with the same general premise as yours. This general premise is that Lois endangers her child(ren) in order to save Clark. And in that other fic, which I'll be talking about entirely from memory, Lois and Clark's children die because Lois saved Clark first and tried to save their children later.
In that other fic both Clark and the children were powerless, perhaps because the person attacking them had just taken away their powers by using kryptonite on them to kill them. (The person who attacked Clark and the children was Tempus, who was trying to make sure that Utopia never happened.)
As soon as Lois realized what was going on, she used her Ultrawoman powers to try to save her family. Surveying the scene, she concluded that Clark was the one who was in the most immediate danger. If she didn't save him right away, he would never make it. Making a split-second decision, she decided that the children could hold out a few seconds longer while she saved Clark. But it turned out that the children were dead when she had saved her husband.
In this fic Clark never - and I mean never - forgave Lois. It wasn't just that his smile never again reached his eyes when he looked at her. No, he never gave her a smile again. What's more, he could hardly bear to look at her again. I don't know if they were officially divorced, but Clark moved away from her and avoided her. Indeed, he didn't just avoid her, he avoided society as a whole. I think he became a hermit of some kind, never really again being a real member of humanity, but still helping out at catastrophes as Superman.
That fic left me with three indelible memories. One memory of Clark's bottomless grief. Another memory of Clark's bitterness and anger directed at Lois for failing to save his children - for choosing him over his children. Clark could never forgive Lois for that. It didn't seem to matter to him that it was Tempus who had killed his children, and that Lois had done almost her utmost to save them. Clark could never forgive her for not doing her absolute utmost to save them by choosing them over him. Lois had done her very, very best to save all of her family, but it hadn't been enough, and Clark could never forgive her. He really seemed to direct most of his anger and hatred at Lois, who had tried to save his children, and not at Tempus, who was the one who had actually killed them.
My third memory of that fic is of Lois's incredible grief. Interestingly, while Clark seemed to hate Lois for failing to save his children, Lois didn't hate Clark for being so unspeakably hard on her. Lois didn't hate anyone in this fic, she just grieved.
I can't accept Clark's terrible anger and inability to ever forgive Lois in this fic, but I
can understand his heart-shattering, debilitating grief. Clark is one of the few survivors of a dead people. In some respects he is worse off than a holocaust survivor, because there are far fewer individuals left of his people. Clark, then, can be seen as one of the last hopes of his dead people. Almost an entire people from another solar system have placed their hopes on Clark's shoulders, and it is up to him to see to the continuation of their race. When Clark's children died in that fic I have been talking about, all his people died a second time. He failed them. He failed them by failing to keep his offspring - his people's offspring - safe. And it was all Lois's fault, which is why he could never bear to look at her again.
This fic was so negative, at least to me. It was a fic that created a situation that could never be rectified, so that the only way to make things better was to undo the original Tempus attack altogether.
Let me repeat that I have been retelling this fic from memory. It could be that Clark was not as starkly unforgiving of Lois in the fic as I remember him to have been.
I think, Rac, that you are going to show us a way for Lois and Clark - perhaps not least for Clark - to deal with a similar situation. I think you are going to show him that even if the most horrible thing happens, if he loses his child, he can stop blaming Lois for it. He can love her again for real. He can acknowledge that she was doing her very best to save her family, all of her family, but because she is only human she doesn't have any divine knowledge of what would be best to do. And sometimes there is no way to save everybody. There just isn't, and blaming a person for failing to do the impossible isn't going to make things better for anyone.
I think, Rac, that you are going to make Clark understand and accept many things about the frailty of life and the impossibility of perfection. I think you will make Clark love Lois again. And I'm not at all sure that you are going to kill or disable the baby they are expecting.
Ann
