The fifteenth arrived warm, the kind of morning that made the whole thing feel less like a political minefield and more like what it actually was, a place built for animals who needed somewhere safe to land.
Guests filtered in through the new gate a little before nine, families mostly, a few reporters trailing cameras that stayed low and easy instead of hunting for anything. Dana moved through the crowd with a clipboard she didn't actually need anymore, checking things out of habit rather than necessity, the Absol keeping pace beside her without being told. Orion stood near the entrance shaking hands, repeating the same three sentences about the mission to person after person, and meaning every one of them a little more each time he said it out loud.
Latias drifted near him in her human shape, watching the crowd the way she always did, less interested in what people said than in how they stood when they said it.
"Nobody's looking for a fight yet."
"Yet is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
"It usually does."
The morning held for almost an hour before the air shifted. Orion felt it before he saw it, the small ripple that ran through a crowd whenever something in it stopped being ordinary. He turned toward the gate and found Doom already walking through it, cloak settling behind him with each step, like the ground had been waiting for him specifically.
Orion crossed the distance to meet him. "You came."
"Doom does not make arrangements he intends to break."
"I wasn't sure how this would look."
"Neither was I, until I arrived." Doom's gaze swept the grounds once, assessing rather than admiring. "It is smaller than the palace. It will do."
Orion let that pass. Getting into it with Doom about scale on opening day wasn't a fight worth picking.
It didn't take long for the next disruption to arrive. This one came with cameras already rolling, a small cluster of press moving in formation around a man in a gray suit who didn't so much walk into the crowd as absorb it, people turning toward him the way they'd turned toward Doom, but slower, warier. It was Luthor.
Luthor already had the reporters arranged before he spoke. "I heard there'd been questions about who's actually behind this place. Seemed worth asking in person instead of through a folder nobody wants to answer."
"You could've called."
"I did, in a manner of speaking. Nobody picked up."
He said it without any heat in it, the same reasonable, unhurried tone he always used, the kind that made a question sound like a favor, and turned to scan the grounds with the practiced ease of a man who already knew exactly where he was headed, toward the visitor path, toward the plaque.
Orion's stomach dropped half a step before his feet caught up to the reason why. The plaque was blank in his memory, and he'd spent weeks avoiding exactly this moment.
Luthor reached it first, the press trailing him close enough to frame the shot.
He stopped.
The plaque wasn't blank. Someone had filled it in already, plain block lettering, no flourish, no ceremony, skipping Latveria's name entirely, skipping anyone's ego too, and laying out the plain truth instead, written the way you'd label a supply closet.
Luthor read it twice before his expression leveled out, flat and unreadable.
Dana walked past behind him at that exact moment, clipboard under one arm, already three tasks ahead of this one in her head. She didn't slow down. "Somebody needed to fix the wording. It bothered me."
She kept walking. The Absol trotted after her, entirely unbothered by the two of the most powerful men in the hemisphere standing a few feet from where she'd just walked an argument off the table without being asked to referee it.
Doom, who had drifted close enough to watch the whole thing unfold, made a small sound that might have been amusement if he'd let it go any further.
"It appears your opening line has already been claimed by someone with considerably less patience for theater than you, Luthor."
"I noticed."
"She did not even pause to enjoy it."
"I noticed that too."
Luthor recovered fast, the way he always did, folding the small defeat into professional ease before it had time to cost him anything real. He turned back to Orion, and his tone shifted, still calm, still reasonable, but heavier now, aimed somewhere bigger than a plaque.
"Since we're all here, I'd like to propose something, not to you personally, but to the sanctuary itself: an independent oversight seat, LexCorp funded, obviously, but structurally separate, so nobody has to keep wondering who's really steering this from behind the curtain."
It landed differently than the plaque had, an offer he couldn't laugh off, one with his name already halfway signed onto the building.
Latias appeared at Orion's side before he'd fully processed the shape of it.
"He's not asking whether you'll say no, he already assumes you will. What he's really asking is whether it costs you something permanent to say it here, in front of everyone, instead of somewhere private where you could still take it back."
Orion held that for a second, feeling the weight land where it belonged.
"This isn't mine to give away. The sanctuary isn't a personal project I'm deciding the future of on a Tuesday morning. It belongs to the people who show up and do the work every day, whether their name's on a plaque or not." He glanced, just once, toward Dana, who was already three enclosures down, checking a latch that didn't need checking. "It doesn't answer to LexCorp, and it doesn't answer to Latveria either, no offense, Victor."
"None taken. It was an accurate assessment before you finished the sentence."
Luthor's expression didn't crack, though a flicker crossed it, more calculation than disappointment.
"Fair enough. For now."
He didn't linger, leaving the way he'd arrived, unhurried, the press trailing him back toward the gate, already composing whatever headline this would become by tonight.
The grounds settled once he'd gone, the ordinary noise of the day filtering back in, a child laughing somewhere near the Growlithe pen, a Bidoof making a break for an unattended snack table. Dana reappeared near the entrance a while later, clipboard tucked under one arm, entirely uninterested in whatever had just happened behind her.
"Latch on pen four's loose again. I'll get to it after lunch."
Orion watched her go, the whole enormous morning folding itself back down into a loose latch and a clipboard, the way it always seemed to.
"She has no idea what she just did."
"I don't think she'd care if she did."
Somewhere past the fence line, a Growlithe barked at nothing in particular, and the sanctuary kept running, the way it had every ordinary day since Dana took it over, whatever storm had just passed through it already forgotten by everyone except the people it was actually aimed at.
***
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