Lex had been exiled from Metropolis to work in a place that had once been the stage for all of his early adolescent nightmares. This was the town that had changed his life in ways that could never be predicted or changed and it had done it more than once. 

When he was a child it had been in these very cornfields where he had become the person that would shape his life for years to come. He lost his hair and some would argue his sanity here when the meteors came and while he had resented the results of that day during the entirety of his formative years he wouldn’t change it now for all the normality in the world. Surviving the meteor shower had changed him on a base level that had led him to where he was in the present and he would never give this up. Never.

The second time this small town changed him had been far more recent, just the year before his banishment in fact and it was something he could have never predicted. Over the years since he’d gained the limited independence that came with gaining both a car and the legal right to drive it as far and as fast as he pleased he’d begun a pilgrimage of sorts. Every year near the anniversary of the fall of the meteors, but never on it since he didn’t want to be predictable, he would get into whichever car he’d bought that year for the trip and he would drive out to Smallville almost like he was daring it to do something else to him. When he was a child the very thought of the place had nearly moved him to tears so as a defiant young adult he’d stood in that very cornfield every year with his arms held out like the poor bastard on that scarecrow stand he’d seen that day and waited. 

Nothing ever happened, the people of small town Kansas never even acknowledged that he was there or they genuinely didn’t notice. Either way he would spend his self imposed hour of purgatory in the field smirking at God before he would drive back out of town at a breakneck speed that dared one of the so called police there to try and chase him down.

That year he was leaving the town again, thinking that maybe that year would be the last he would indulge in this new tradition of his when finally that nothing he’d become used to had become a new something to contend with. He was crossing the bridge behind an old pick up truck that had decided to hit its brakes. Only Lex didn’t want to stop that would mess up his tradition of speeding across the town line so he decided not to. Only when he swerved around it he hit a spool of chicken wire that had been laying in the road causing his car to spin out and at full speed careen over the side of the bridge into the lake below. 

He had been sure that his life was going to end and in Smallville of all places. He had smirked at God and demanded action from him one too many times and this was his answer. A definitive end to an unlamented life that had been going nowhere faster than most. Only it didn’t end, instead he was pulled from the waters and delivered from hell to absolute heaven by an angel. An angel named Clark Kent. He and his mother had been the ones in the truck that had tried to make him stop and they had been the ones to save him in the end. 

After surviving the accident he’d devoted nearly six months of his life commuting from Metropolis to Smallville to connect with his rescuer and try to balance the scales but nothing worked. Every gift he tried to bestow was politely but firmly rejected. Every overture he made about helping the family financially was met with the same resistance and pride. He went through his entire bag of tricks that had always worked for him in the past and nothing seemed to sway either Clark or Martha to accept any of his help. The both of them were strongly independent and from what he could find they were both pillars of their little community having risen to near sainthood status after the untimely passing of the family patriarch the year before of an unexpected heart attack. 

The more he was around them the more he wanted to be around them but he knew that Lionel would never allow it if it was something he genuinely wanted. His father saw things like craving acceptance and friendship as beneath the notice of a true Luthor. No, if he wanted to be in the lives of the Kent’s on a more permanent basis he was going to have to make a plan to make what he wanted look like a punishment. 

So he went back to Metropolis and spent nearly two months getting into non-stop mischief and scandal. He made his father more angry in that short amount of time than he had in the entirety of his life to date and it was a sight to behold. When word came down from on high that his father was thinking about sending him away from the city and the temptations of it for a while he made sure to amp things up another notch to solidify the destination. In his father’s mind Smallville was still the place of his most fervent nightmares since he’d kept his yearly anniversary trips to himself. In the end it had worked, he finally got what he wanted and his father had been so mad at him for his stunts that he knew it would be at least another six months before he even deigned to speak to him again let alone visit.

He was quietly shipped off to the castle his father had built as a family legacy of some kind and into a life he far preferred to the one he was leaving behind. Clark came over every day for the first week to help him unpack and settle in and he always brought a treat with him still piping hot from his mothers oven. It was as close to heaven he was likely ever to get and he never wanted it to change.