Luthor grew up in a house that knew every flavor of silence. The kind that pressed against your ears. The kind that slammed doors. The kind that hid in locked bedrooms for days and came out breathing like a storm.
Some mornings, the television would flicker in an empty living room while his father didn't move behind a closed door.
Other days, the man would pace the apartment like a restless animal, talking too loudly, working until his hands shook, chasing ideas that never stuck.
No matter the mood, the anger was always consistent. It lived in the walls. It slept in the belt looped over the chair.
Mistakes were loud in that house. A wrong look. A dropped glass. A grade that wasn't perfect. The words came first, which were sharp and quite endless. The kind that sinks in and never fully leaves. And when those ran out, the belt finished the sentence. Luthor learned early that pain didn't need an explanation. Kent learned by watching.
Their mother drifted through the edges of things. She cooked sometimes. She left often. She avoided the storms and pretended the wreckage wasn't there when she returned.
As a result, Luthor learned to tie his brother's shoes. Learned how to lie about bruises. Learned how to keep quiet at the wrong moments.
They waited for heroes once. From books. From church. From anywhere that promised someone good was watching. Sundays passed in wooden pews with folded hands and stiff backs. Nothing changed.
So they stopped waiting.
School was the only place that felt lighter, until it didn't. Middle school found them fast. The clothes. The way they walked. The way they never looked people in the eye. It was easy for others to decide what they were worth. The shoves started small. The jokes grew louder. Laughter, however, traveled in packs.
Luthor tried to do things the right way once. He tried talking with a teacher, which resulted in a visit from a tired social worker who took notes and left. Then the principal passed the problem back home like a bad grade. That night, the belt landed harder than usual.
The lesson was simple.
Don't ask for help.
He cried into his pillow until his chest hurt and the room blurred. When morning came, something inside him felt off. Not sad. Empty in a new way.
He asked to join a dojo that week. His father laughed at first, then agreed. One year. No quitting. Luthor nodded. That was all he needed.
The mornings started earlier after that. Pushups. Sit-ups. Squats. Running until his lungs burned. School. Training.
And then Repeat.
In the end, his body changed slowly. Not big or flashy. Just harder and steadier. Aikido taught him how balance worked, where bodies folded, and how momentum betrayed people who rushed in angry and blind.
By winter, he stopped lowering his eyes in the hallway. When the insults came, he answered. He made sure teachers were always near when he hit back. He watched how quickly frustration built in others. How it slipped out through clenched fists.
Behind the grocery store, the alley stayed quiet in the evenings. He set the trip wire low and waited.
They came louder than he expected. Confident. Probably too confident. The first two hit the ground hard.
After that, everything moved fast. Someone screamed. Someone fell wrong and didn't get back up right away. The rest panicked.
When it was over, they sat against the walls breathing in broken bursts while Luthor stood there shaking, not from fear but from the sudden drop of adrenaline. He recorded everything. The threats they spat, the insults they admitted to, and the way their courage cracked now that no crowd was watching.
"You leave me alone," he said quietly. "You leave my brother alone. If you don't, everyone hears this."
They nodded fast. Too fast. Why wouldn't they?
He walked home with blood on his knuckles and something fierce in his chest that felt almost like joy. He told himself it was over. That he was finally safe.
It didn't feel like victory. But it felt like he had finally stepped out of the shadows.
And for the first time in his life, the world had flinched first.
*
Friday nights used to mean nothing special. Just another shirt pulled from the closet, another shift clocked in, another evening traded for a paycheck that went straight into a savings account marked wedding.
Luthor stood in front of the mirror, tugging at the collar until it sat right. The fabric smelled faintly of detergent and chemical disinfectant from work. The phone buzzed on the dresser before he finished buttoning the cuffs.
The ringtone cut through the room like something out of a nightmare. He had set that one only for numbers he didn't recognize. It made his stomach dip every time.
"This is Luthor," he said, already walking toward the door.
The voice on the other end moved too carefully, too practiced. Hospital voices always sounded the same. Calm on the surface but panic underneath.
They said Kent's name. They asked if he was family. He didn't remember answering. He just remembered the word accident, hitting him like a hammer to the ribs.
There was no car to crash. They didn't even own one. He said that into the phone while pushing down the stairwell and out onto the street, waving at traffic like a man drowning in headlights.
The ride felt endless. Red lights stacked like barricades. Horns. Pedestrians are crossing too slowly. His knee bounced so hard the driver snapped at him to relax. When the hospital finally appeared, bright and sterile and unreal, the doors slid open as nothing terrible could ever happen inside.
It had already happened.
A doctor spoke. A police officer spoke. Their mouths moved in turns. Words like drunk, hit-and-run, and internal bleeding. Luthor nodded at the right places without hearing most of it. Kent had been on foot. Kent had been thrown. Someone had called for help. Traffic had trapped the ambulance like a bad joke.
By the time they cut him open, there was nothing left to save.
Luthor asked to see him.
The sheet only covered part of the damage. Kent looked smaller and too quiet. There was dried blood near his hairline that nobody had wiped away yet. Luthor stood there longer than anyone expected him to. He didn't touch the body. He didn't cry. His chest felt stuffed with insulation.
Hours later, he gave his number to the officer and walked home through streets that felt unfamiliar despite being the same ones he walked every day.
They caught the kid fast. Cameras everywhere. He was a seventeen-year-old who was drunk and drove a stolen car with Friends in the backseat, who ran when it happened.
The months crawled after that. The kid stayed at home. Rehab. Lawyers. Promises. Words stacked high enough to bury a person. Luthor waited for the trial like it might rearrange the universe back into something tolerable.
But it didn't.
The deal was already signed when he arrived. Community service. Treatment. Three quiet years and the record would vanish. The DA spoke gently. The defense smiled politely. The judge didn't look at Kent's picture for long.
Luthor didn't shout. He didn't break anything. He just asked one question afterward.
"Why."
They told him the kid had a future.
That was when the last of the heat left his body.
Life carried on without checking if he agreed. He kept going to work. Kept waking up. Kept eating because the body insisted. A headache settled behind his eyes and never left. The doctor said stress. He swallowed painkillers like they were vitamins and waited for the world to feel normal again.
It didn't. The pain worsened. The scan came back wrong.
Cancer-Stage two.
He laughed before he realized he was doing it.
Doctor Marlyn didn't laugh. She studied the images as they had personally offended her. She talked about chemicals and ventilation, and failure points. She talked about other patients from the same company. She talked about lawsuits.
Luthor said no to treatment.
After that, he stopped saving or planning. He bought the food he liked, the clothes he used to stare at through glass. He ate like tomorrow was his final day. He wandered through old streets like a ghost revisiting familiar walls.
Twenty-four days after the diagnosis, sitting alone with a half-finished drink and Kent's name still ringing behind his eyes, something finally clicked into place.
Not hope.
Not peace.
An idea.
And this one didn't hurt.
*
The nights all started to feel the same after Luthor stopped working. He would pick one of the suits he used to save for "someday," straighten the cuffs, and step into the city like a guest who no longer planned to stay long.
He walked until his legs ached or his thoughts went dull, measuring the silence between streetlights, wondering which would reach him first, the sickness in his lungs or some stranger's bad night.
When his steps finally slowed, he'd sink into the backseat of a cab and let someone else choose the road home.
That was how he saw him again.
A familiar laugh cut through the noise of traffic. Too light and careless. Jacob, the one who destroyed his brother's life and got out without getting punished much, stood on the curb with a bottle disguised in a paper bag, swaying with the easy balance of someone who had never learned fear the hard way.
A girl stood beside him, too young to look tired yet, smoke drifting lazily from her fingers as she laughed at something he said. They passed the bottle back and forth, traded keys, and slipped into a custom-painted muscle car that gleamed like an expensive toy.
The engine roared to life. Tires shrieked. Someone crossing too slowly jumped back just in time. The girl leaned out the window, laughing, shouting something mean into the dark as the car tore away.
Luthor stayed on the sidewalk long after the taillights vanished.
The nausea didn't rise to his throat. It settled deeper than that. He realized, with a kind of cold clarity, that he had never finished what the world had left undone.
From that night on, Jacob became a routine. A shadow Luthor learned by heart. Social posts. Late nights. Loud parties. Fast cars. Nothing hidden. Everything careless. Luthor followed at a distance, memorizing patterns, waiting without urgency. The clock inside his chest was already ticking fast enough.
And one, a chance came… And Luthor acted.
Jacob woke in a warehouse, bound to a chair bolted to the floor, confusion surfacing first, then fear when he recognized the face in front of him.
Luthor said his name once. Said his own. Said Kent's.
Everything else was waiting.
Time moved strangely after that. It stretched like it folded in on itself. The sounds inside the warehouse rose and fell like broken weather. Luthor watched a clock, not with impatience, but with focus, the way someone watches a finish line they never planned to cross alone.
When the final moment came, there was no speech left in him.
He raised the gun and clicked the trigger.
*Bang*
Only silence afterward.
When he was done, Luthor turned the gun's direction inward, to his own forehead. There was no hesitation left to summon. No argument left to make. Just the memory of a smaller pair of shoes waiting by the door that would never open again.
*Bang*
The gunshot felt less like pain and more like a door swinging open.
For a moment that tasted like eternity, he wasn't falling. He was lifting. The weight he had carried for years peeled away layer by layer. The anger. The grief. The constant ache in his chest. All of it thinned into nothing. There were no voices. No hands pulling. Just light and motion and a feeling that could almost be called rest.
Then breath slammed back into him like an insult.
Luthor woke, choking.
His head rang as if someone had struck a bell inside his skull. He blinked hard, expecting hospital lights.
Instead, a vast metallic corridor stretched in both directions. Bodies lay scattered along the floor. Not human. Their armor looked grown instead of built, dark and seamless like something poured over them rather than worn.
Luthor tried to sit up and slipped.
His hands struck the floor.
Hands.
Plural, in a way that made no sense.
Too many. Not shaped right. Three fingers where five should have been.
A breath tore out of him, sharp and cracked.
"What the hell…"
The words echoed strangely inside his helmet.
That was when he realized he was wearing one too.