(A Few Days Later)
The Growlithe pen's latch held fine this time. Dana checked it anyway, out of habit more than doubt, and moved down the row the way she always did, gate by gate, nothing skipped. She reached the blank plaque first, except it wasn't blank anymore. Doom's name sat there now in clean lettering, and she still hadn't decided how she felt about that, so she didn't decide. She kept walking.
The sealed door was next. Same as always, same as every morning for weeks, except this time somebody was already standing in front of it.
Dana didn't step aside to give him the walkway. "You're blocking it."
Doom didn't move. His cloak brushed the frame of the door like it belonged there, which, as far as he was concerned, it did. "Doom does not require an escort to visit Doom's own construction."
"Funny. I've got a sign-in sheet that says otherwise."
He turned his head just enough to look at her, unbothered, almost pleased. "You are the manager who does not know what she manages. An interesting position to hold."
"I know exactly what I manage. This door's the one thing I don't."
"Then perhaps it is time someone remedied that."
He said it like an invitation, but Dana wasn't going to let him hand her one on his own terms. She planted herself between him and the frame, arms loose at her sides, the kind of stance that didn't need to look threatening to mean business.
"What's actually behind this door."
"A fair question. Doom is not obligated to answer every fair question."
"I've been running this place for months. I've had a supposed king show up twice, order my staff around, and disappear again, and every time I ask what's going on, somebody finds a reason to talk about something else. So I'm asking you straight. What's behind the door."
Doom studied her a moment before he answered. "You assume Doom keeps secrets for their own sake. A common but tiresome assumption."
"Then it should be easy to just tell me."
"It would be easy. It would also be pointless without the man who should have told you already."
Orion came around the corner right on that line, Latias half a step behind him, both of them dressed for a normal morning that had clearly stopped being one. He read the standoff fast, Dana's stance, Doom's stillness, the door between them, and for once he didn't reach for the version of this that ended quietly.
"Alright. Dana, you deserve the whole thing. Not pieces of it. All of it."
Dana didn't say anything. She just waited.
"The sanctuary wing wasn't a gift. Doom paid for the branch, but he never gave it to us outright, he built himself a claim into it. I found that out in Latveria, after the fact, not before. I should've come back and told you the second I knew. I didn't, because it was easier to let you find pieces of it instead of just saying it myself."
"You mean the plaque."
"That's the part he asked for out loud. The door's the part he didn't."
Doom watched this without interrupting, arms folded, something in his posture closer to satisfaction than impatience. "You told her more in that sentence than you told Doom in the entirety of the throne room."
"I wasn't trying to hide it from her forever. I just kept telling myself later was fine."
"Later rarely is."
Dana took it the way she took everything, filed without a flinch, without a thank you either. She looked at the door, then at Orion, then back at the door. "Open it."
Doom's hand found the panel beside the frame. It gave way with a low mechanical sound, no flourish added on top of it. The door slid back, and the space on the other side was neither a throne room in miniature nor a monument to Doom himself. Containment stations lined one wall. Monitoring equipment hummed low and steady, built to a standard Orion could tell mattered even without knowing the specifics behind it, the kind of precision that said someone had intended to actually run something here, not just plant a flag and walk away.
"This isn't what I thought it'd be."
"Very little about Doom is what people think it will be. That has always been the trouble with being underestimated by the right people and overestimated by the wrong ones."
Latias stepped further in, quiet, taking the room in the way she took in everything, without needing to touch it to understand it. "You built this to run it yourself."
"Doom built this to see who would ask why."
He let that sit a beat before he kept going, hands folded behind his back now, the posture of a man delivering something he'd rehearsed a long time ago and never gotten to use. "A gift given freely teaches nothing. A gift given with a hidden price teaches everything, provided the recipient is honest enough to notice the price exists and brave enough to challenge it instead of simply accepting the debt. Doom has watched you accept debt after debt, the berry, the plaque, this branch itself, without ever once asking what it cost. Doom began to wonder if you had a spine underneath the diplomacy, or only the diplomacy."
"And now?"
"Now you have finally asked the correct question, several months later than Doom would have preferred, but asked nonetheless."
Orion looked at the equipment, at the door, at Doom's own words still hanging between them, and felt the ground under this whole conversation finally hold instead of shift. "You've said it yourself. Control's a redundant term for order. And you don't build something that lasts alone, you build it through people you actually trust. If that's true, then this can't stay yours alone. Not if you mean any of it."
Doom didn't answer right away, which was itself an answer. He'd built an argument nobody could use against him without agreeing to it first, and Orion had just done exactly that, using Doom's own doctrine as the blade instead of inventing a new one.
"You quote Doom's own philosophy back at Doom, as though Doom had not anticipated the possibility."
"Did you?"
"Doom anticipates most possibilities. It is considerably less common for one of them to actually arrive fully formed."
He turned toward the room itself, considering it the way a man considers something he's already decided to give up but hasn't said so yet. "Very well. Shared custody. Pokémon Home's welfare standards apply within these walls the same as any other. Doom retains oversight of the technical systems, since no one else here is remotely qualified to maintain them, and that is not a concession, that is simply fact."
"Then it's settled."
"It's settled," Dana said, half a beat behind him, neither of them softening it into something warmer than it was.
Doom studied the room a moment longer, then Dana, longer still, something unreadable behind the mask. "You will find that she asks better questions than you do."
"I've heard that a few times now."
Doom didn't answer that either. He turned and left the way he'd arrived, without theater this time, cloak settling behind him at an ordinary pace instead of a practiced one, a man who'd decided the matter was handled correctly and saw no further reason to perform about it.
Dana stayed by the open door after he'd gone, one hand resting on the frame, looking into a room that had been a mystery to her an hour ago. She didn't say anything for a while. Then she pulled the clipboard back out from under her arm and started a new line on it, containment stations, first item, exactly the way she started every list that mattered.
***
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