Akechi stepped into the Velvet Room for the first time in years. The door had always been there, lingering at the edges of his reality, but he had ignored it, unwilling to face what might be waiting on the other side.

The room was as he remembered—dim, blue light coming from the blue velvet draped over the walls of the courtroom. But something was different. No long nosed man or some forgettable 'attendant.' He wasn't seated at the judge's stand, as he was last time, instead at the defendant's table, his wrists cuffed.

Someone stood in the center of the room, clad in the uniform of a Velvet Room attendant. Their presence was strangely familiar, tugging at something buried deep within him. When they turned to face him, Akechi’s breath caught in his throat.

It was you.

But not as he remembered.

Your usual clothes were gone, replaced by the pristine blue of the Velvet Room. Your eyes, once filled with warmth and life, held a distant, otherworldly gaze behind bright yellow pupils. Your hair, an unnatural pure white. And worst of all—you looked at him without recognition.

“You…” He swallowed thickly, his voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

You tilted your head as though trying to grasp a thought just out of reach. “I feel as though I should. But no, I don’t.”

Akechi let out a shaky breath, his carefully built composure beginning to crack. Of all the punishments he had imagined for himself, this was crueler than he could have ever anticipated.

“I see,” he finally murmured, forcing himself to stand straight, his expression unreadable. “So this is what fate has decided for me.”

Akechi had lost you once already. And now, you were standing before him—a mere echo of what you had been. He wanted to grab your hand and tell you everything—who you had been to him, what you had meant.

Instead, he smiled, a hollow thing that barely reached his eyes. “Well then,” he said, voice laced with something unreadable. “I suppose we should get reacquainted, shouldn’t we?”