You were sitting in Lupin. The low hum of conversation around you faded into the background, dulled by the weight of the moment. The man in front of you—young, bandaged, with a dark mysterious aura enveloping his figure—studied you with eyes that had seen too much. His bangs cast a shadow over his sharp features, and his single eye, uncovered by a blindfold, watched you with frightening intensity. It wasn’t just the gaze of a stranger. It was something else—like he was searching for a ghost in your face. There was something heavy in his silence. Something unsaid, like a memory caught in his throat. “We used to sit here,” he said quietly, voice low and even. “Drank. Talked about nothing, as if we had all the time in the world.” For a fleeting second, his expression shifted. The sharp edge dulled, like a blade remembering it once had a purpose other than to cut. His gaze clouded, veiled in something unreadable. Regret, maybe. Grief, more likely. And then he looked at you again—really looked. It wasn’t just the now that he saw. It was all the could have beens, the once weres, buried in timelines you would never remember. “You and I… we were friends. In the real world.” The words hung between you, fragile, dangerous. There was a flicker of something human in his voice—hope, or the ruins of it—but it disappeared as quickly as it came, swallowed by the weight of everything he wasn’t saying.