trajectory CHAPTER ONE: CRY HAVOC

The steel-blue Porsche with Metropolis plates hurtled down the open country road at a pace that could only be bred by a life that moved faster than anything that had been reared in Smallville, with its open and languorous landscape. The vehicle's occupant contemptuously noted its vastness - not for its beauty, peace, or natural grandeur, but for its emptiness. Sparse. A wide expanse, amber waves of grain that in dawn's early light undoubtedly inspired men with less impatience, but no force had yet come in to Lex Luthor's life that could awaken such perspective.

And none would.

The song on the radio irritated him, but so did his new life, so he let the music wash over his discontent as he rounded a curve at break-neck speed. He hated Smallville already, though he'd always felt bound to it. He knew one day that he'd be drawn back, but he resented that it happened by his father's will. He resented anything that happened by his father's will.

Perhaps it was his resentment that induced Lex Luthor to do a most uncharacteristic thing that day.

He wished.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Wishes were futile, made only by those without foresight, resources, power and drive to make things happen. To exact change without need of idle dreaming. Lex did not make wishes - not since he'd learned what bitter residue was left by wishes unfulfilled. But there were times when those dreams left unlived - combined with his remaining youth - found Lex in a tiny span of need, in which his most fervent desire was one that he had no means to grasp on his own.

In that moment, as the young, promising future mogul neared the empty bridge, he uttered a silent plea for intervention. Some cosmic event that would displace his current course and send him reeling, if only for a moment, so that his father's notice could not be above him, nor his concern. Nor his love, had Lex dared to wish that fully.

It almost broke his heart to dare.

Wishes, prayers, desires, hopes - none are ever answered in the ways that one expects, so one seldom notices when the manifestation is visited. Lex's life was intervened upon with the simplest, most mundane of distractions, one that he could not have known would be the last he would receive. The ringing phone took his attention, the bale of wire rolled off of that oncoming truck, and in one terrible instant, Lex Luthor learned that wishes do indeed come true.

His course was altered.

The bridge was empty.

The guardrail was weak, and the water below was almost as cold as the realization that flooded him as it rushed through the gaping windshield to give him all that he'd ever uselessly wished for - his mother's face, his brother's smile, his father's love. Things that no power on Earth could give him, but by his prayer he was no longer denied them.

Because there was nothing in Smallville to save him.