When the morning announcement sounded, Togami had already been awake for quite some time. He'd spent more time staring at the ceiling last night than sleeping, trying to ignore the empty space in the bed beside him. He'd thought it was bad enough during the enforced separation, when the others had conspired to keep Naegi away from him.
It should have been easier now, since this time, Naegi's absence was through Togami's own choice, instead of being forced on him from the outside. But instead, it was unaccountably so much worse. The bedsheets lay cold against his skin without another person to warm them, no matter how many layers he used. No matter how he tossed and turned, no position was comfortable enough, not compared to the feeling of curling up around the other boy. The fact that he'd been the one to choose to remove those things from his own life did nothing to ease the ache of not having them.
And the worst part of it all was that he couldn't shake the lingering question that had occurred to him last night – what if his decision had been wrong?
A mere month ago, before he'd arrived at Hope's Peak, the idea would have been unthinkable. He wasn't wrong, ever – not about anything. If he made a decision, then that meant that what he'd chosen had to be the best choice, or why else would he have wanted to choose it in the first place? Being wrong was something that happened to other, lesser people – the sort who failed at things, who weren't able to achieve perfection. The sort of people who lost.
But ever since he'd been imprisoned in this nightmare of a school, the specter of wrong decisions had haunted him. He'd dismissed Naegi when they'd first met, lumping the boy in with the most pathetically average of commoners – only to realize the boy was sharp enough to outwit him where it counted, during those awful trials. He'd been annoyed in their later meetings, calling the boy ever insult he could muster – and then he'd seen past the boy's ordinary exterior to lose his heart to the extraordinary person hidden beneath.
And that miscalculation had cost him. Because of it, he'd had to eat his own words about committing a successful murder and winning the game, acknowledging a change in position that had shown personal failure. Maybe Celeste had been right when she'd said that his attachment to Naegi had weakened him.
It had certainly made him appear to be an easy target. During the last two trials. Celeste had tried to frame him, and Fukawa had tried to kill him – like they thought of him as nothing more than a tool to be used in their schemes. And that wasn't even taking into account the way that Kirigiri had manipulated him into that separation, using his affection for Naegi to play him like a violin. He'd been tricked before, when he was much younger – but never with so little difficulty. He'd never been forced to go along with a scheme knowing it was happening, and powerless to stop it.
Maybe asking whether he'd made any wrong decisions since coming to Hope's Peak was the wrong question. Maybe he should really be asking whether he'd made any right ones.
The thought made Togami grit his teeth in revulsion – but he'd always believed there was nothing to be gained by turning his back on reality. He refused to start burying his head in the sand now, just because he knew he wouldn't like the truth. He had to accept the idea that at least some of the decisions that he'd made here at Hope's Peak had been deeply flawed. He'd been wrong.
The only question was – how had it started? Where had he begun going wrong? If his judgement was failing him, how could he tell for sure what he ought to believe? Had he misinterpreted Naegi's feelings for him? Was Kirigiri really as devious as he'd thought? He didn't know. He didn't know, and it was driving him mad.
He'd never been forced to distrust his own thought processes before. He'd always had complete faith in his cold logic and dispassionate reasoning abilities. But now – well, he certainly couldn't call himself dispassionate any longer, not with his sheer need for Naegi clamped like a vise around his heart. He hadn't thought it was possible for his feelings to compromise his intellect – but it seemed as though that was exactly what had happened.
And maybe that was the start of it all. Maybe giving in to emotion in the first place was where he'd gone wrong. He'd seen the same pattern in other people often enough, even using against them when the opportunity had arisen – he'd just never expected to find himself on the other side of it. He'd lost his ability to think rationally at the same time that he'd lost his heart.
Oh, he hadn't turned entirely stupid – he wasn't that far gone. His conclusions about the traitor had been proven right, and he hadn't misstepped during the last two trials. But when it came to any issue that involved Naegi – no matter how logically he'd thought himself to be acting, the root of his behavior had been his emotions. The first flood of unexpected desire that had consumed him before he'd known what was happening, the corresponding affection that had so thoroughly turned his head, the gut-wrenching terror for Naegi's safety, the uncontrollable fury at the idiots who had dared to injure someone that he valued – those had been the reasons he'd acted as he had.
But on the other hand – did that make his decisions invalid? Acting solely on emotion was obviously a path to disaster, but would it really have been better if he'd ignored the emotions entirely? After all, his feelings had shown no indication that they were going to go away just because he didn't want them. If they were part of his reality, then he had to take them into account.
But he could do better than he'd done thus far. The Togami heir didn't lose to anything – not even to himself. So he'd been wrong. Well, a minor lapse could be forgivable, if the consequences were rectified. Results were what mattered, not processes. So now that he understood, the question that remained was – what was he going to do about it?
His judgement was the real problem, when he thought about it properly. He couldn't trust his own perceptions of the other students and their actions, not when his observations of them might have been compromised by his feelings. So logically, the correct response to that would be to try to rebuild his foundation for his judgements.
He had to talk to the other students, focusing on what they said. He had to find them, convince them to discuss the events of the past few weeks, and listen. And then – well, then he'd be able to decide what he needed to do.
