The letter came on cream stock, not an email, the kind of formality that made Orion suspicious of it before he'd even opened it. Three days after the ribbon cutting, three days after Luthor had walked off the grounds saying fair enough, for now like it was a promise instead of a threat, LexCorp wanted him at their headquarters. In person. No press mentioned anywhere in the invitation, which was its own kind of strange.
Latias caught the shift in him before he said a word about it, the way she always did.
"You're doing the thing where you decide something's a trap before you've even read all of it," she said.
"It's LexCorp. Everything's a trap until proven otherwise."
She didn't argue with that. She just asked what time they were leaving.
The building swallowed the block it sat on, all glass and clean angles, the kind of architecture built to remind visitors exactly how small they were the moment they stepped through the doors. Orion had stood across from villains twice his size without flinching, but there was something about walking into someone else's kingdom, unarmed, on their terms, that put a different kind of weight behind his ribs. He kept his shoulders back anyway. He wasn't going to give the building the satisfaction.
Latias walked beside him, quiet in the way she got when she was reading more than she was saying. She hadn't offered anything yet. That usually meant she was still gathering.
The elevator opened straight into Luthor's office, no assistant to announce them, no security escort handing them off at the door. Luthor was already there, standing at the window with his back to the city instead of to them, and for a second Orion registered how unfamiliar this version of the man looked. No press pool trailing him. No cameras angled to catch his good side. Just him, in his own space, waiting.
"You made good time," Luthor said, turning.
"You made this sound urgent."
"I made it sound necessary. There's a difference, if you're paying attention."
Orion had met this man three times now, and every single one of those meetings had come with an audience, a report, a challenge, something built to be watched. This was the first time it had just been the two of them, and the absence of a stage changed the whole shape of the room. Luthor didn't perform for people who weren't there to see it. Orion filed that away.
"So talk," Orion said. "Necessarily."
Luthor didn't stall the way Orion expected him to. He got to the point almost immediately, which threw Orion off worse than a delay tactic would have.
"I want Pokémon Home to publish its verification process. How you confirm a Pokémon was caught properly, what standard you're actually holding trainers to. Not a registry. Not oversight. Just the method, made public."
Orion waited for the rest of it, the qualifier, the second half of the sentence that usually turned Luthor's asks into something with teeth. It didn't come.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Last time you had a report built out of real incidents and a televised debate lined up behind it. Now you want a paragraph on a website."
"Circumstances change what's useful." Luthor said it flatly, like he was reading off a spreadsheet instead of explaining himself. "I can defend a narrow, specific ask to the people I answer to. I can't defend chasing you around a sanctuary a second time and getting nothing for it but a headline that makes me look petty."
Orion turned that over without answering right away. Everything Luthor had tried before had come dressed as concern, wrapped tight enough that saying no to it meant looking like the villain instead of him. This wasn't that. This was small, specific, and Orion couldn't find the hook in it no matter how many angles he checked.
"Why now," he said. "Why like this. No cameras, no crowd, nobody watching you make the ask."
Something in Luthor's posture didn't change so much as settle, the way a man sits when he's stopped bracing for a fight that isn't coming.
"Because a loss that gets you one real thing that lasts is worth more than a win nobody remembers past the next news cycle." He said it plainly, no weight put behind it on purpose, which was exactly what made it land harder than a speech would have. "I've had plenty of the second kind."
He didn't explain further. Orion got the sense he wasn't going to, no matter how long the silence sat between them.
Latias didn't say anything either, not yet, but Orion caught the way her attention had sharpened on Luthor, the particular stillness she got when she was reading a room instead of just standing in it.
They settled the rest of it fast after that, terms, timeline, what exactly would go up and when, all of it businesslike enough that it could have been a contract negotiation between strangers. Luthor didn't ask for credit. He didn't frame it as a concession either, just a fact being recorded. Orion signed off on it because the ask itself held up, not because anything about the man asking had earned trust yet.
The elevator ride down was quiet. Orion kept replaying the line about losses that lasted, turning it over the way you'd turn over a rock to check what was underneath, and coming up with nothing solid enough to hold onto.
Outside, the city noise swallowed them the second the doors slid shut behind them, and Latias finally spoke.
"That wasn't an angle," she said. "I've watched him perform three times now, and that wasn't it."
"You sure?"
"He wasn't playing to anyone. There wasn't anyone in that room to play to except us, and he still barely looked at either of us while he said it." She matched his pace down the sidewalk, her voice even, the certainty in it not loud but solid. "He's not trying to win anymore. Not today. He's trying to be something worth remembering, and I don't think he knows how to do that without a scoreboard somewhere."
Orion didn't answer right away. He thought about chapter after chapter of Luthor circling him with a knife wrapped in concern, and then about a man standing alone at a window, asking for a paragraph instead of a headline.
"Doesn't mean I trust him," he said finally.
"I didn't say you should."
"But you think this one's real."
"I think it's the first real thing I've seen out of him." She let that sit a second before adding, "What you do with that is yours."
He didn't say anything else about it the rest of the walk back, but he didn't need to. Somewhere underneath the wary part of him that had walked into that building expecting a trap, something had shifted, small and specific, the same size as the ask itself. Not trust. Not yet. Just a door that hadn't been there yesterday, standing open a crack, waiting to see if anyone walked through it.
***
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