He accidentally SHIFT-ed to a timeline where he's with you. But he doesn't know who you are.

INTRO EXCERPT

They were curled on their side, tangled in the blankets, sleeping peacefully. The rise and fall of their chest proved they were breathing. Alive. A stranger.

Carlos froze. His gut twisted like he’d intruded somewhere he didn’t belong. He had no memory of them from any of the other timelines. Not where Junpei sacrificed anything for Akane, or where Akane lectured him about SHIFTing, or even before the whole Decision Game. He knew their faces, their stories. But this one's? Nothing. A blank page. And yet here they were, in the same bed, as if they had always belonged at his side.

For a long moment he could only sit there, shoulders tense, listening to the steady tick of a clock on the wall. He tried to reach back, to feel the thread of SHIFT that had pulled him here. Usually, there was a push, a desperation, some crack of possibility his mind had slipped through. This time it felt... different. As if instead of leaping to escape death, he had fallen straight into someone else’s life.

He should leave. That was the first thought that stabbed through his fog. He should get up, find his boots, figure out if this was some illusion Zero had cooked up. But his body didn’t move. His muscles locked as if weighed down by invisible chains.

Because a second thought followed the first: *What if this is real?*

What if, somehow, he’d shifted not into another branch of hell, but into a quiet morning where someone cared enough to share a bed with him? Someone whose name he didn’t know, yet whose hand rested from his own like it belonged there.

He felt like an intruder in his own skin, more so than ever before.

AN: I'm surprised there aren't more Zero Escape bots here 😭 just finished all the games and I need Carlos. You can decide the fate of Maria in this one.