Go ahead and start shooting _ I made sure to give a Tank warning

Oops. I didn't follow the Tank warning protocol. Sorry. I've asked the moderator to delete the story. Mea culpa!

Chilling.

Well written, though!

Corrina.

Wow. Dark (thanks for the advance warning!), but very well thought out. I've been sitting looking at my monitor with my mouth open for almost a minute.

Hey, Randi :-)

No worries! There are no rules as such for deathfic. Authors can use the WHAM warning thread to give advance warnings, but it's not mandatory and there are perfectly valid reasons why some authors choose not to. It's entirely your choice.

A deathfic is different to a Tank ending, btw. A Tank Ending is a spectacularly downer/deathfic ending deliberately taken to ludicrous lengths as a fake/joke ending to a story you've been posting in parts. The real ending is then posted afterwards.

LabRat :-)

Thanks for the clarification.

Yes. Tragic and dark. I took as my inspiration Superman #149. The original death of Superman comic book story and by far the best and saddest -Superman doesn't come back in #149 as he did in Doomsday.

That classic story by Superman creator Siegel painted a dark future for Superman and the world. It was how the creator saw the never-ending battle ending. It was called an imaginary story as they needed to get the next week's Superman book out.

In those days the story was done as a single enlarged issue. Today it would have been an event spanning months of comic book stories a la Doomsday.

Ironically, speculation in recent years was that if, as seemed likely, WB/DC lost the rights to Superman they were going to kill him off and loosely base it on #149. In somewhat of a surprise, however, WB/DC have apparently won the full rights to Superman (pending a possible appeal to the SCOTUS by the heirs which many legal analysts say the SCOTUS won't even take up) and, in the past month, to Superboy. So that may be moot now.

Being short in length #149 left more than a few plot holes. In my story - which is ongoing yet, I fill in the kind of details I would liked to have seen addressed in #149.

- it's a stark story. Superman's belief in the goodness of everyone ultimately leads to his death as that belief is false. Luthor in indeed the devil incarnate and can't be redeemed as Superman thought he had been.

BTW, this is the John Shea L&C Luthor/Michael Rosenbaum Luthor of Smallville - not the buffoonish Luthor played by Spacey in SR or the comical Luthor played by Hackman in STM.

I wanted to bring home the point that Superman is an alien. How do you do that?

Well, in the lore, or some of it, he turns green if killed by kryptonite. But L&C, the Reeve films and SR did not show that. The Superboy TV series and Smallville did.

In the current new 52 lore, and in Smallville, kryptonite causes Superman's veins to engorge and become black/green.

The new 52 has him aging to his "true age" if killed by kryptonite. So while he always looks 25, if he were to die from K poisoning at 50 he would age to appear 50. Hence the hints of gray and wrinkles.

In death, unlike in life, Superman is clearly an alien and actually looks grotesque - this is what Luthor sees. What is underneath and not what is on the surface.

So shocking yes, but I wanted to bring that home to the reader.

This story includes Luthor's dissection of Superman, I know intense - it is not for the faint of heart, and Superman's alien nature is further brought out. Including that Superman could never have had a child with Lois or any Earth woman. Tying in with how L&C ended.