Global Heartwarming
Author’s Notes
The familiar characters of this story are not my own but are the property of corporate entities (DC Comics, December 3rd Productions, ABC, etc.) other than myself. This work is a labor of love and is presented with no expectation of remuneration.
**********
From the author’s
She’s:
He couldn’t cry, either. His heart was locked in deep glacial ice. He’d not only frozen Lois that day, but he’d placed himself in a life-long deep freeze.
He’d never see Lois again.
“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa,” © 1952
This is a story about recovering from the sudden death of a loved one. Some of the descriptions of grief and recovery are from my clinical research and some are from my own personal experience. No one dies in this story, but you will read about people who are dealing with sudden and abrupt death and moving on – or maybe not moving on – in life after that terrible loss. It’s also about other people meddling in the lives of those riven from their loved ones with the finest of motives.
To get the full background, I strongly suggest reading my one-chapter story
She’s – the prequel, I suppose, although it wasn’t intended to be that – either on the
message boards or the
archive. It would also be a good idea to read the feedback it generated. Some of it was quite opinionated and strongly-worded.
She’s was a pushback of sorts on the ending of the season 2 finale “And The Answer Is…” (often abbreviated ATAI). I have always understood from a dramatic POV why the show went in that direction, plus the weight of the legacy of the comics where Superman regularly rescued Lois from certain death situations (and occasionally from actual death) pushing the concept, but I really didn’t like how they handled it so carelessly. I’m hardly the only one who believes it was both reckless and irresponsible for Superman to freeze Lois into a state of suspended animation.
There were, and still are, any number of different possible narrative courses to follow – some of which have been explained quite well by other authors – and the freezing idea was an exceptionally dangerous option, so the final resolution seemed to come too easily. To me, the ending lacked dramatic tension, although I know it was meant to be a romantic adventure show that happened to include a superhero. Still, I didn’t think then (and don’t think now) that it was the best path to take. So in my tale
She’s, I let Lois bite the dust.
If you’re willing to do some archive or message board research, there were at least two follow-up stories by other authors which built on the ending to mine. If you find them, you may judge whether or not the direction of either tale was a logical continuation.
You might notice that She’s was posted in 2006. Yes, that’s a pretty long time to wait for a sequel, but I actually started making notes about this tale in early 2007, did some preliminary chapter drafts in 2014, and it’s taken me this long to put it all together in a semi-coherent narrative. Because of the intensity of some of the feedback on She’s and the general drift toward highly romanticized stories being posted on the boards, I was hesitant to continue Heartwarming until mid-2019. Recent reminders of my own pending mortality (pushed back a good bit, I believe, by a very successful liver transplant in April of 2019 – yay for my outstanding surgeons and after-care team!) provided some of the impetus.
This may be the most emotion-centered L&C story I’ve written to date. The convention among publishers of books written and printed to generate profit is that the A-plot is the central dramatic sequence of the narrative, while the B-plot is the sub-plot. In a romance novel, for example, that means that the love story is always –
always – the A-plot: the hero (or heroine) gets together with his/her main love interest, and any action that takes place along the way is the B-plot. Among this fandom, though, the A-plot is the action plot (for alliteration, I guess) and the B-plot is the romantic story. Going by our site’s conventions, this tale is just about all B-plot. Any A-plot the reader may find snuck in while I was looking the other way.
If you can stomach a tender story about Clark grieving for Lois, learning to live without her without forgetting her, and slowly building a relationship with another woman who has suffered her own devastating loss, please dive in. And bring tissues.
