(Baxter Building, Valeria's Room)
Valeria closed the door behind her before she let her shoulders drop.
She sat on the edge of her desk instead of the chair, because the chair felt like something you sat in when you were ready, and she wasn't sure yet that she was. Metang drifted through the gap before the door finished sliding shut, settling low near her knee, his hum quieter than usual, watching her the way he watched a storm cloud before deciding whether it meant anything.
I make the contact. Not you.
She'd said it to Orion like it was easy. It wasn't easy. It was one thing to decide she could ask Doom for a favor. It was another thing entirely to sit here rehearsing the words, crossing out the ones that sounded too much like begging, crossing out the ones that sounded too much like a twelve year old pretending she wasn't asking a favor at all.
Metang's casing gave a faint tick against the floor.
"I'm fine," she said. "Thinking."
The hum didn't buy it. She reached down and rested her palm flat against him anyway, and some of the noise in her chest quieted the way it always did when he was close.
She pulled up the contact. It wasn't listed under a name most people would recognize. It never had been.
Her thumb hovered over it.
He let me name the stuffed dragon he gave me when I was six. The memory came uninvited, small and warm and completely useless to the argument she was about to make. He told me dragons only answer to names their owner chose herself. I believed him for years.
She pressed the contact before the memory could talk her out of anything.
A pause on the line, longer than a normal call, and then a voice that wasn't Doom's at all, formal and clipped, announcing itself as a channel of the Latverian royal household and requesting the caller's identification.
"Valeria Richards," she said. "For Doom."
Something in the aide's tone shifted, subtle but real, the sound of a door being treated differently than it had been a second ago.
"One moment, Miss Richards."
The line clicked over.
"Valeria."
Her name in his voice did something the aide's formality hadn't. Warmer. Immediate. Like he'd been waiting for a call and this was the one he wanted.
"Doom trusts you did not call at this hour merely to discuss the weather."
"Hi, Uncle Doom."
"Doom is listening."
She heard the shift happen, quick and deliberate, warmth folding itself back into command the way it always did once he remembered he was supposed to be terrifying. She'd learned a long time ago not to take that personally. It was armor. It just happened to have a door in it that only opened for her.
"I need a favor," she said. "A real one."
"Doom does not do favors."
"You're going to want this one."
A pause, considering, and she could almost see him behind it, hands folded the way he did when something had caught his interest despite himself.
"Explain."
She laid it out the way she'd rehearsed, though half the rehearsed version fell apart the second she started talking and she found the real one instead. LexCorp's report. Every incident true, every number accurate, and somewhere inside that truth a structure built to look worse than it was.
"Luthor didn't lie," she said. "That's the whole problem. Nobody can argue with facts. Somebody has to argue with the math."
"Ah." Something in his voice sharpened with actual pleasure. "Luthor's papers are always beautifully formatted. It is a shame formatting is not a substitute for rigor."
"So you'll look at it?"
"Doom does not simply look at things, Valeria." A beat, less theatrical than the sentence around it. "Tell Doom what you understand of the flaw yourself, before Doom agrees to hunt for one."
She hadn't expected that. Not doubt in her, never that, but a demand that she show her own work before he did his. It was almost fond, the way a teacher pushed a student who'd already proven she didn't need pushing, just to watch her do it anyway.
"The incidents were real," she said. "But every one of them traces back to something human. A banner that wasn't secured right. Crowd control that wasn't tight enough. He's counting Pokémon as the cause when the actual cause is people cutting corners around them."
Silence on the line, brief and considering.
"That," Doom said, "is very nearly the correct instinct."
"Nearly?"
"You will find the rest is more interesting than you expect. Doom does not spoil surprises, even for family."
Something in her chest loosened at that last word, quiet, unshowy, the kind of thing he'd never repeat if she pointed it out.
"So that's a yes."
"That is a yes." A pause, and then, quieter, stripped of nearly all its usual grandeur. "You do not often ask Doom for anything, Valeria. Doom noticed that, before he noticed the report."
She didn't have an answer ready for that. It sat there a moment, honest in a way his voice almost never let itself be, and she understood without being told that this was the only version of it she was going to get before the mask came back up.
It came back up.
"You will come to Latveria," he said, brisk again, already three steps past the sentiment. "Doom does not travel to review another man's failures. He reviews them on his own ground, where the light is better and the tea is superior."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. Doom does not enjoy waiting on incompetence longer than necessary, and Luthor's incompetence has already waited long enough to be corrected."
The line went dead before she could say goodbye, which was, she'd learned a long time ago, just how he ended calls he considered finished.
Valeria set the phone down and sat with it a moment. Relief came first, sharp and real. Under it, something quieter and harder to name, gratitude tangled up with something close to guilt, because it had been that easy for him and she knew exactly what it had cost him to let it be easy. Not the favor. The warmth underneath it. He didn't hand that out for free to anyone else on Earth.
Metang drifted up beside her, his hum settling into something low and steady, the sound he made when whatever had been sitting wrong in her had finally sat right.
"We're going to Latveria," she told him. "Tomorrow."
He tilted in the air, and she let herself smile at that before the next thought caught up with her.
Orion didn't know yet.
She looked at the time, did the math on how early first thing had meant to him yesterday, and decided the call could wait until morning. Tonight, she had a bag to pack and a story to figure out how to tell her parents, or, more likely, a story to figure out how to delay telling them at all.
She picked up the phone again anyway, thumb hovering over Orion's contact, and didn't press it yet.
***
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