Metropolis.
Centennial Park.
Windy tonight. Cold front is moving in from the East. The weathermen were right for a change.
I was wrong.
Did you ever expect to hear me say such a thing?
It wasn't fair what they did to you. What everyone did.
The Alien wouldn't listen when you needed it most. Your…friends…those Titans couldn't save you.
Even I couldn't save you. With all my gifts, I'm still merely a man. And you…
You were my greatest creation. The great and powerful end product of generations of Luthors, some of them decidedly better than others. You were supposed to be a weapon. And then you escaped. Made your own destiny out of the clay that was the earth in front of you.
That was admirable.
He was foolish.
That doppelganger wearing that cape and that undeserved sense of accomplishment that they've all carried. He thought he had you, and for a moment perhaps he did. He overestimated all of us, and we underestimated his power. The lengths to which he would go, just to save his world. A world that would never have come back.
Foolish boy.
He was a child. A technological and metaphysical cretin playing in a sandbox far beyond his comprehension. Despite that, he almost killed you the first time around.
"A child with power." Luthor's voice is grave and mumbling.
And then you had to face him again, with Grayson and the junior Amazon in tow.
You could have won. You could have defeated him and sent him back to whatever level of hell he came from.
But sort of like the Grinch at the eleventh hour, you grew a heart and saved your little girlfriend. I wonder…what would the alien have done? Saved Lois, as he's oft to do? Saved himself, perhaps by flying into the constellations as the earth explodes behind him.
Then he truly would be the last son of two worlds.
The time for condolences and apologies is past, now, I think. I've cleared my name, and enacted measures for m return to the top of the ladder as they say. And I think it's eminently clear, despite the best wishes of the Boy Wonder, that you're not coming back.
But I'm so far beyond any of that now. Any false wishes for your life to return. It's no longer my right to grant life to things that don't ask it of me. I am no longer in the business of creating life.
Only…augmenting it. Changing it.
Luthor kneels in front of the statue and touches a hand flat against the granite. His index finger traces the diamond outline of the shield under the name 'Superboy.'
"You know," he says and bows his head. "Here's the real truth. Most people are shall we say unenlightened souls. There is a power in this universe—God, chance, call it what you like—that drives people. Makes them extraordinary or obnoxiously mediocre. Pathetic. Scientists call it the metagene. I myself call it luck. And you were destined to make your own, if that makes sense."
You deserved better things than this.
You began what life you had in a test-tube, and ended it in a bloody and icy mess.
Your destiny was to lie in greater things. You were supposed to be the hallmark of my lineage. The great savior of humanity.
And he killed you in cold blood because you were an impostor. Stupid boy.
At the risk of turning on my own very well-established ethos, my dear boy, you were Superboy. And the alien, curse his bones, is, from what I hear Jack Ryder babbling about, correct. A life is defined by what one does between breaths. Not between the feigned comfort of a casket.
Luthor's free hand moves forward and lays the roses at the base of the statue, a foot below the bronze diamond shield. He stands.
"When the pain of loss recedes, the only thing left is the suffering it brought, and the experience yet to be had. I fear I only realized this too late. Killing my own impostor left me surprisingly hollow."
A clandestine meeting with the Joker reversed our fortunes—and I, perhaps one of three people on the planet he won't kill on sight, made a deal. Beneath the rain gray skies of Gotham City, the man who had taken my place and humiliated me met his end at the end of the Joker's rifle.
Quid pro quo.
"Look at this." Luthor's lips curl into a scowl. "It almost reminds me…of my own engineered passing, before your time. The alien dies and they build him a state. I die and all they can do is babble about conspiracies."
There is no equity to life and death, my son. Death is the only constant and quite inescapable, even I'll admit.
Your doppelganger stole your life, uninterested in the charity of giving it back. And now I hear he's still around someplace, perhaps buried on the moon where all he can do is singe a few rocks.
It's not a due punishment. Not for everything he did. And so I'll make you a deal, Conner. And you know I can honor it as only a good businessman can.
"I am going to rectify inequity, Conner."
I will punish inaction, and take vengeance as you well know I can
Because everything I have done for the past five years has been for you, and they stole you from me. I wanted to utilize your talents for greater ends than to merely die among the icebergs.
"I have found a way to solve the equation, Conner." Luthor's jaw muscles tighten and he straightens his overcoat.
You were the most gifted metahuman I have ever known, Conner. And I'm a well-known xenophobe.
"The only thing I can give you now," Luthor says, clasping gloved hands together at his waist, "is my word."
You shall be avenged.
My son…
Not the End...