The Growlithe pen's new latch clicked twice under Dana's thumb before she was satisfied with it. She marked the change order on her clipboard, initialed it, and didn't look up until she'd finished the line.
The Absol paced a slow circuit along the fence, unbothered by the early cold, the notch in its ear catching the first real light of the morning.
Dana moved down the row, checking each gate the way she checked everything, without asking permission from anyone who wasn't there to give it. Two pens down, she stopped at a plaque bolted to the stone, blank where a name should have gone. She ran a thumb along the edge of it, found nothing, and kept walking. Further along, past the feeding stalls, a wing of the building sat closed off behind a door nobody had explained to her yet. She noted it the way she noted everything that didn't add up, filed it, and moved on to the next task on the list.
Orion found her there an hour later, Latias a step behind him, both of them dressed for a full day of checking boxes before the fifteenth.
"You're up early," Orion said.
"Somebody has to be."
She didn't stop walking. He fell into step beside her instead of asking her to.
They went through the grounds together after that, the three of them trading small updates back and forth, the kind of morning that could have belonged to any ordinary opening. Latias pointed out a supply order that hadn't come in yet. Orion made a joke about whether the Bidoof would behave itself in front of guests, and Latias told him not to promise anything he couldn't back up. It was easy, the way mornings at the sanctuary had mostly been easy since Dana took over, nothing underneath it yet.
They reached the guest list somewhere past the third pen, Latias reading names off her tablet while Orion nodded along.
"Press office confirmed the local outlets," she said. "Marcus wants a final headcount by tonight."
"Tell him tomorrow. He'll survive."
Latias kept scrolling, then paused.
"What about Doom," she said. "For the opening. Is he on the list, or are we handling the seating chart around a gap."
She said it like she was asking about catering. Orion answered like it was about catering too.
"We'll figure out seating once the numbers are final."
"That's not what I asked."
He didn't answer right away. Latias let the silence sit instead of filling it herself, watching him with the same patient stillness she used on anyone she was waiting out.
"Has anyone actually talked to him," she said finally, "since the palace."
"There wasn't anything left to talk about."
"That's not the same as talking to him."
Orion looked out at the half-finished visitor path instead of at her.
"He knows the sanctuary's operating," he said. "He hasn't said otherwise."
"That's not the same as him agreeing to it, either."
He didn't have an answer for that one. Latias didn't press it further. She let her attention drop back to the tablet, scrolling through the rest of the guest list like the question had already been answered, though nothing about the quiet that followed suggested it had.
Orion found Dana near the half-built visitor entrance sometime after that, going over signage proofs laid out on a folding table.
"These need a line for governing authority," she said, without looking up. "Whoever's putting together the opening packet wants it filled in before print."
"Put down Pokémon Home."
"That's what I had. Marketing wants to know if there's a co-sponsor line too. Somebody upstream flagged it as incomplete."
"Leave it as is for now."
She looked at him then, long enough that he felt it.
"For now," she repeated.
"It's fine, Dana."
"I didn't say it wasn't."
She went back to the proofs. He stayed a moment longer than the conversation needed, then found a reason to be somewhere else.
The first sign that something had shifted was the caretaker near the east wing straightening up too fast, tools half-forgotten in his hands. Doom crossed the yard without announcing himself, cloak settling behind him with each step, the kind of walk that assumed the ground underneath it without needing to check.
"The drainage grade here is inadequate," he said to the caretaker, who had no idea who he was and every idea that he shouldn't argue. "See that it is corrected before the opening."
The caretaker nodded and said nothing, because nothing seemed like the safer option.
Dana reached them before Orion did, drawn by the wrongness of a stranger giving orders on her own grounds.
"I'm sorry," she said, "who exactly are you."
"Doom does not require an introduction on Doom's own property."
"This is Pokémon Home property."
"Is it."
He said it without heat, almost pleasantly, the way a man might correct a student's arithmetic. Dana's jaw set.
"You gave orders to my staff."
"I made an observation. Your staff chose to act on it. That reflects rather well on their judgment."
"It reflects on the fact that nobody told them who you are."
"An oversight someone should remedy, then."
Orion arrived in the middle of it, already reaching for the version of this conversation that ended quietly.
"Victor," he said, "let's just—there's no need to—"
"There is a great deal of need, apparently."
Doom didn't look at him yet. He was still looking at Dana, the way a man studies something he hadn't expected to find interesting.
"Your manager wishes to know who holds authority here," he said. "A fair question, given that no one appears to have answered it."
"We answered it," Orion said. "The sanctuary's under Pokémon Home."
"By whose agreement."
Orion didn't say anything.
"By whose agreement," Doom said again, quieter, which somehow carried further than the first time.
Dana looked between them, arms loosely crossed, waiting for one of them to actually say something instead of talking past each other.
"There wasn't one," Orion said. "Not really. Not after Latveria."
"Ah," Doom said. "So we have arrived at honesty. Slower than Doom would have liked, but arrived nonetheless."
"I should have come back to you about it. I didn't. That's on me, not Dana, not anyone here."
Dana's expression didn't change, but something in how she was standing eased half a degree, the posture of someone filing away a fact rather than reacting to it.
Doom studied Orion a moment longer, head tilted slightly, the mask giving nothing away beyond the angle of it.
"That is the first fully honest sentence you've offered Doom since the throne room," he said. "It is a start."
"So what happens now."
"Now Doom expects a proper conversation. Not a correction shouted across a fence in front of staff who understand none of the history." He turned, cloak sweeping with him, already walking. "You will hear from Doom regarding the terms. Do try to arrive better prepared than you did today."
He didn't wait for a response, and none of them offered one. The yard settled back into its ordinary quiet once he'd gone, the caretaker returning to the drainage line like nothing had interrupted him, though everyone standing near enough to have heard knew better.
Dana uncrossed her arms and went back toward the folding table without asking the question out loud, the one she'd been circling for days. She didn't need to ask it anymore. She'd just watched enough of the answer to know there was more underneath it than anyone had told her, and that Orion had let her find out this way instead of just saying so.
Orion stayed where he was a while longer, watching the space where Doom had been standing. The fifteenth was closer than it had felt an hour ago, and there was a conversation waiting on the other side of it that he'd been avoiding since a throne room he still hadn't fully put behind him.
***
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