The transport point on the Latverian side didn't have a welcome mat. Orion stepped through into a courtyard of pale stone that had clearly been swept an hour before he arrived, and stood there a second longer than he needed to, getting his bearings in a place that didn't invite anyone to feel settled.
No Latias this time. No Valeria. Just him, his cane, and the sound of his own footsteps against stone that seemed to amplify them on purpose.
A guard met him at the gate and said almost nothing, just tipped his head toward the entrance and walked ahead of him through a series of hallways that all looked carved from the same block of granite. Orion had been through these halls before, but going through them alone changed the geometry of the place. Every doorway felt like it was measuring him.
The guard left him in a small anteroom with a single high window and a chair that looked designed to discourage comfort rather than provide it. Orion sat anyway. He waited.
Nobody came for a while.
He'd told himself on the way over that he wasn't going to rehearse anything, that he'd said enough half-prepared things to Doom already and none of them had landed the way he wanted. But the silence of the room pulled the old habit back out of him anyway, and he caught himself running through a version of the conversation in his head before he noticed he was doing it and made himself stop. He looked at the window instead. The light coming through it moved slower than it should have, or maybe that was just how waiting worked in a place like this.
By the time the door opened, he'd lost track of how long it had been.
Doom didn't rush in. He never did. He crossed the threshold the way a man enters a room he already owns, cloak settling behind him a half second after the rest of him had stopped moving.
"You came alone," he said.
"Seemed right."
"It is a start."
Doom didn't sit. He stood near the window Orion had been watching, hands folded behind his back, and looked at him for a long moment before he said anything else.
"Doom has been waiting for this conversation since the throne room."
"I know."
"Do you."
It wasn't really a question, and Orion didn't answer it like one. He felt the shape of what Doom was actually asking underneath the words, the same way he had at the sanctuary a few days ago, and this time he didn't try to slide past it toward the easier subject.
"I should have come back sooner," he said. "I didn't. That wasn't about the sanctuary. That was about not wanting to sit in a room with you and admit I didn't have an answer yet."
Doom's head tilted, barely.
"That is closer to honest than anything you managed at the fence."
"I'm trying."
"Trying is a beginning. Doom prefers endings."
He said it without any weight behind it, almost pleasant, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd raised his voice. Orion let the quiet sit for a second before he pushed forward into the thing he'd actually come here to say.
"The sanctuary stays under Pokémon Home," he said. "Full oversight, no Latverian ownership, no co-sponsor line, nothing that leaves the door open for you to walk back in and give orders to my staff again."
"A clean request."
"It's not a request."
Something shifted in Doom's posture, small enough that Orion almost missed it, the way a man reacts to a move he hadn't expected from an opponent he'd underestimated.
"And what," Doom said, "does Doom receive in exchange for stepping back from something Doom built with his own resources."
There it was. Orion had walked in braced for an argument about control, about who got to make decisions on the ground, and instead Doom was asking him a different question entirely, one that didn't have an obvious answer sitting in his pocket.
"What do you want."
"An interesting question to ask a man who has already told you what he does not want."
"Which is."
"To vanish."
Doom turned from the window and looked at him directly for the first time since he'd entered the room.
"Doom built that wing. Doom funded it, designed it, filled it with creatures that would otherwise have had nowhere. And when the doors open on the fifteenth, Doom expects his name to exist somewhere in that story. Not buried in a filing cabinet. Not softened into a footnote your press office can quietly omit if it becomes inconvenient. Visible. On the record. Where the cameras can see it."
Orion sat with that longer than he meant to.
He'd expected leverage. He'd expected Doom to hold the sanctuary hostage for something political, some concession that would let Latveria's fingerprints stay on the operation whether Orion liked it or not. This wasn't that. This was smaller and somehow harder to argue with, a man who'd spent his whole life being right about things and rarely getting thanked for it, asking not to disappear the moment he'd stopped being useful.
He thought about every time someone had handed him credit for something he hadn't done alone, and every time someone hadn't. He thought about how it had felt walking into that festival knowing Luthor would try to make it look like Orion's success belonged to someone else's oversight the second it became convenient to say so. He'd spent this whole fight trying to prove that partnership didn't mean control, that being trusted with something mattered more than being managed through it.
He looked at Doom and understood, uncomfortably, that the man standing across from him wanted almost the exact same thing Orion did. To matter to something bigger than himself and be allowed to say so out loud.
He didn't like how much that complicated the ask.
"I can't just say yes to that right now," he said finally. "Not without talking to Dana. Not without knowing what it does to how people read the sanctuary once it's public that you built part of it."
"You mean Luthor."
"I mean everyone."
Doom studied him, unreadable behind the mask, though something in the set of his shoulders had eased, just slightly, the way a man settles once he's stopped bracing for a flat refusal.
"Doom will allow you the time to think," he said. "He is not without patience, contrary to what your associates likely believe of him."
"How much time."
"The fifteenth arrives regardless of what either of us decides here today. You will have your answer ready by then, or the question will answer itself."
He didn't offer a hand to shake, and Orion didn't ask for one. Doom turned toward the door, cloak sweeping into motion a beat behind him, already halfway through leaving before he spoke again, not quite over his shoulder, not quite to himself either.
"Doom hopes, for both our sakes, that you choose correctly."
The door closed behind him, and the room went back to being just stone and a window with slow light in it. Orion sat there a while longer, turning the offer over the way he'd have turned over a piece of evidence, looking for the trick in it and not quite finding one. Whatever answer he gave, it wasn't going to be the easy one. He'd known that walking in. He just hadn't expected to leave agreeing with the man he'd come here to push back against.
***
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