The Eight Deaths Of Lex Luthor
i. breathe
This is how it goes: Lex is seven years old and he has an asthma attack. He spends four days in intensive care at Metropolis Hospital, and his mother reads him Morte Darthur, her knuckles white and her eyes red. His father never comes to visit him.
ii. fall
This is how it goes: Lex is nine years old and meteors are coming straight at him. He's trying so hard to be brave, but he can barely breathe. He cannot run, his legs won't move, so as the blaze comes he thinks, I want to be strong, I want to be brave, I want to please my father, I want my father to love me, and most of all: I want to live.
He remembers his father arms, holding him tight and calming voices and gentle touches and safety. The hospital is cold, he cannot stop shivering. It's so very cold.
iii. hide
This is how it goes: Lex is eleven years old and his baby brother was buried two days before. He overhears a conversation between his mother and his father that makes his eyes water. But Luthors do not cry, son, so he wipes fervently at his eyes with the sleeve of his white silk shirt.
He mixes cognac and his mother's pills for a nice little cocktail and writes a note to his mother. He lays down on his bed and waits and waits and--
--throws up, all over himself. He shakes his head, rips up the letter in four pieces and summons Tessa to come and take care of the mess. His mother never says a word of it.
iv. love
This is how it goes: Lex is thirteen years old and on suicide watch. His mother died four days before and his father is out of the country, not on business. Pamela sits next to his bed and says she'll listen if he wants to talk.
He doesn't.
Three weeks later, she's out of his life and Metropolis and he really doesn't know why. He's not on suicide watch anymore. He's not sure if it's because his father trusts him not to hurt himself or if he wants his only known heir dead, as well.
He is in his father's bathroom and sees the razor, its sharp blade beckoning him. But he won't give his father the satisfaction of giving in, so he leaves for his own quarters and buries himself in his comics. The good guys win there and there's no death, and Lex wants to be good, like Warrior Angel is.
v. fear
This is how it goes: Lex is fourteen years old and he's failing out of school. Nonsense, his father says, telling him to take care of it himself. He has the best grades in the school, but he just got his third strike [#1 found inebriated on school premises; #2 altercation with another student; #3 illegal substances found on his person] and Headmaster Reynolds means what he says. He's covered in his own sick when his classmate finds him, and the doctors find six different kinds of pills in his system.
He wakes up in a hospital room in Metropolis and his father's face above him. Is this what hell looks like? he asks, and his father smiles.
vi. forget
This is how it goes: Lex is seventeen years old and he is bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to the stomach.
The bullet missed all of his vital organs by a very small margin. The doctor in charge of his care called it a miracle, his classmate called it a near-miss, his father called it a failure on Lex's part, to get hit in the first place, and he calls it like he sees it: survival.
vii. remember
This is how it goes: Lex is twenty-one years old and he's calling his father from a payphone in the seedier part of town. There's blood all over his clothes. He doesn't know where it came from or even whose blood it is, and his hands won't stop shaking. He doesn't even know where he is, what he's taken or when he took it. When Phelan comes to collect him, he asks him what day he thinks it is. He says Tuesday, the 11th. No, it's Wednesday, the 22nd. Your father's been looking for you for a week.
Lex passes out after that and spends two days in a private care facility. Intensive care unit under 24-hour monitoring. It was touch and go there for the first 12 hours, Phelan tells him, and he almost seems relieved to see Lex awake and cognizant.
After two weeks of rehab, his father stops by to give him his real punishment.
viii. see
This is how it goes: Lex is twenty-one years old and his Porsche just hit a pedestrian on a bridge in a town called Smallville, and he is drowning.
This is really it, he's thinking as he feels himself leave his body, flying over the town. Flying, seeing his life for what it is. Nothing but survival.
He thinks he might see his mother if he flies high enough, but not too close to the sun. Even in death he knows that Icarus failed, and he cannot.
Lex will not fail.
A fifteen-year-old named Clark Kent revives him, saves him, and Lex owes everything to this boy. He can finally see clearly. This time, he doesn't merely survive.
He lives.