Chapter 237
The lobby smelled like it always did in the mornings, tea and old paper and whatever Pikachu had gotten into overnight. Orion sat with a mug he hadn't touched yet, watching the steam curl up and disappear. Latias sat across from him doing the thing she did where she didn't ask, she just waited, like she already knew something was coming and had decided to give it room.
"I never actually told you." Orion turned the mug a quarter turn without drinking from it. "What I decided. At LexCorp."
"I know."
"You know what I decided, or you know I didn't tell you?"
"Both." Latias didn't look up from whatever she was doing with her hands, folding and unfolding a napkin she didn't need. "You've been walking around for three days like a man who made a call and never said it out loud. It shows."
"I took the deal. The transparency thing. Told him yes, on our terms, not because I trust him all the way, just because the ask itself held up."
"I figured that part out somewhere around day two."
"Then why'd you let me sit here and say it like it was news."
"Because it wasn't news to me." Latias finally looked at him. "It was news to you. You needed to hear yourself say it as much as I needed to hear it."
He let that land without arguing it, because she wasn't wrong, and there wasn't much point pretending otherwise. He finally drank the tea. It had gone lukewarm, and he drank it anyway.
Dana came through a few minutes later with a tablet under one arm, not rushing, never rushing, but there was something in the set of her shoulders that said she had news worth interrupting for.
"It's live. The LexCorp thing."
"Already?" Orion straightened in his chair.
"Went out about ten minutes ago. Marcus is losing his mind over it in three different group chats."
She set the tablet down between them, angled so they could both see it, and stepped back with her arms crossed, the posture of someone who'd already watched the important part once and didn't need to watch it again.
The broadcast was mid-sentence when Orion looked, Luthor at a podium, composed the way he always was on camera, laying out the new verification standards like he was reading off a spec sheet, no theater to it. Then, without any real shift in his delivery, he said Orion's name.
"None of this happens without the rigor already being demonstrated at Pokémon Home." Luthor didn't glance at his notes for that line. "Orion's methods held up to more scrutiny than most people in this room would survive. That's not a small thing, and I don't say it lightly."
The clip ended there, cut for the news package. Dana let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Did Lex Luthor just compliment you on television."
"Sounds like it."
"Huh." She picked the tablet back up. "Didn't think I'd see that in my lifetime. I'm putting it in the log anyway."
She left the same way she'd come in, unbothered, like she'd just confirmed a fact rather than witnessed a headline. Orion sat there a second longer, turning the words over, trying to figure out if they felt as strange as they should.
"He meant it." Latias watched him do the math on his own face. "That's the part that's throwing you."
"Yeah."
"He's never had a reason to before."
"Maybe he found one."
The second message came that afternoon, not a summons this time, not cream stock or a formal invitation, just a plain text from Luthor's office asking if Orion had time for one more conversation, no press, no camera, whenever worked. Orion read it twice before he answered, and this time he told Latias where he was going before he left instead of leaving her to notice the shift in him after the fact.
LexCorp's smaller conference room was nothing like the office from before, no glass wall overlooking the city, just a table and two chairs and Luthor already seated, papers stacked neatly in front of him that he wasn't looking at.
"You didn't have to make this one so mysterious." Orion took the seat across from him. "The text just said conversation. Kind of vague, coming from you."
"I've found vague suits me better than people expect. It's harder to prepare a rebuttal for a conversation than for a demand."
"Fair enough."
Luthor slid one of the papers across the table, not far, just enough that Orion could see the letterhead without needing to pick it up.
"I'd like to offer you a seat. Formal oversight, on the new standards. Not as a figurehead, real input into how this gets enforced going forward. You'd have more say in this than half the people already on that board."
"Why."
"Because you earned it, and because I'd rather have someone in the room who actually knows what he's doing than another person who just knows how to nod at the right times."
Orion looked at the paper without touching it, weighing it the same way he'd weighed every offer Luthor had made since the first safety report landed on his desk, and found the same answer waiting underneath this one that had been waiting there the whole time.
"I'm gonna pass."
"You haven't even read the terms."
"I don't need to. It's not about the terms. I already told you back at the debate that wasn't the fight I was interested in winning, and this isn't the seat I'm interested in sitting in. Not because it's yours. Because it's a seat inside something I don't want to be inside of. I'd rather stay out here, doing this my own way, even if that means we keep butting heads sometimes."
Luthor didn't argue it. He picked the paper back up, folded it once, set it aside like a man closing a drawer he wasn't going to reopen.
"I expected that answer. I suppose I hoped I was wrong."
"You're not wrong about much. Just that."
"No." Luthor almost smiled at it. "Apparently not."
He didn't offer anything warmer than that, and Orion didn't ask him to. They sat there a moment, the fight finally out of both of them for now, two people who'd run out of moves to make against each other.
Back at the sanctuary that evening, Orion found Latias exactly where he'd left her, and Dana still going through her rounds like the day hadn't held anything unusual at all. He told her how it went, short version, no drama, and she nodded like she'd expected that too.
The Growlithe pen's latch clicked shut somewhere down the row, twice, the way it always did when Dana checked it. The plaque with Doom's name caught the last of the evening light. Nothing about the yard looked any different than it had a week ago, and for the first time in a long while, that felt like exactly the right amount of nothing.
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