Lex coughs, turning aside to let the river water flow from his mouth onto the rocky bank beneath him.

Even as he works at sucking breath after breath of precious air into his stinging lungs, he’s considering how to spin this.  Nothing he can say or do can change the fate of the schoolboy whose life had been so abruptly ended on impact with his Porsche, and fortune has gifted him with an opportunity it would be churlish to ignore. 

Perhaps a better man would be regretting the cost of his momentary inattention to the road, but Lex has no pretensions to goodness: greatness has always been a far more worthy goal.  As long as he can manage to avoid a conviction for vehicular manslaughter this is practically the perfect opening to force his father’s hand and end his insulting exile from civilisation. 

But as he looks back up and meets the wide, scared eyes of the flannel-clad boy looking down at him, recognition flares in his brain.  Those eyes are the very same eyes that had widened in fear and pain as the boy’s chest was crushed between the hood and the bridge’s guard rail. 

Carefully calculated words to fix his blamelessness in the mind of the witness fly from Lex’s mind. 

“I could have sworn I hit you,” he breathes.

The boy’s eyes dart away before he answers.

“If you had,” he says, “we’d both be dead.”

For a moment, Lex can barely believe he’s actually heard the clumsy evasion.  Then he closes his eyes and lets himself fall back onto the ground, his mind automatically mapping out the possibilities from here.

After a moment’s deliberation he dismisses all those which will send him back to Metropolis immediately. 

Perhaps staying in Smallville won’t be so completely without diversions after all.