Naegi lay on the floor of his dorm room, gasping for breath as the back of his head throbbed where it had hit the floor. Had that been a dream? But it had been so clear, so vivid – like he really had been walking through the Hope's Peak halls, sandwiched between a warm, affectionate Togami and a happy, laughing Kirigiri. Even now that he was awake, he could still feel the comforting weight of Togami's arm lingering on his shoulders.
Normally his dreams were fragmented and nonsensical, a mix of bizarre unreality that stopped making sense once he woke up – but this had felt like a regular morning from his life. His every movement had fallen into an easy rhythm, repeating a pattern that he'd known without having to think about it. He'd walked through those halls like he'd done it every day. The commonplace events would have been boring – if it hadn't been for the gentle shades of contentment coloring them.
They'd been happy in that dream, all three of them – Togami, Kirigiri, and himself. They'd been friends, enjoying each other's company even during an unremarkable morning. They'd walked through the halls of Hope's Peak Academy the way he'd imagined it would be when he'd first gotten the invitation to attend, all bright and welcoming and full of opportunities – the way he'd never seen it in real life.
No, wait – that wasn't quite true. Naegi frowned, remembering the pictures of the dead students that he'd seen for a few seconds, before Monokuma had snatched them away. The Hope's Peak Academy in those pictures had been just like the one in his dream, full of light and air with no iron plates blocking the windows. The students in the pictures had smiled with the same carefree joy that had been present in the dream, the sort of smile that he couldn't imagine crossing anyone's face in Hope's Peak Academy as they knew it now.
Maybe his sleeping mind had seized on the glimpses of a false Hope's Peak from Monokuma's photos and used them to craft an alternative to reality he found himself caught in now. Thinking it over, Naegi supposed that if he'd had to imagine his ideal school life – well, it would have looked pretty similar to the one in the dream. He and Togami could be together, dating like a normal couple without interference from psychotic bears or arguments about gut-wrenching moral dilemmas. Togami and Kirigiri could get along, their sniping reduced to mere friendly bickering. The biggest problem any of them would have to face would be whether they could get to the cafeteria in time for breakfast.
Naegi's vision blurred as he stared blankly up at the ceiling, and he realized that for once, it wasn't a leftover effect from hitting his head – it was because were welling up at the corners of his eyes. The thought of living in a Hope's Peak like that, where everyone was happy and no one was dead – it sounded like everything he could imagine wanting. He could have spent more time with all the wonderful, brilliant students that should have been in his class, all of them able to bond in a way that had been impossible with the threat of death hanging over them the way it did here.
He'd seen them all in that classroom, just for the briefest of moments before he'd been jolted awake – every student he'd met here, dead or alive, smiling like there was nowhere else they'd rather be. A tear ran sideways from the corner of his eye, followed by more and more, dripping down until the edges of his hair grew damp. But he couldn't stop it, not when he could see Maizono waving brightly at him as he entered the room, or Owada startling a laugh from Fujisaki, or Asahina leaning against Ogami's shoulder. It might have been only a split second in the dream, but he felt like he could see all of them, so much more clearly than he could see the room around him now.
All of them except one person, the one who'd spoken to him in the moment before he'd woken up. Who had that been? He hadn't been able to get a good look in the dream, although really there hadn't been any barriers preventing him from seeing. But maybe that was just a little dream logic, where sometimes he found himself unable to do perfectly simple things.
Or then again, maybe he hadn't wanted to see that person. Everything else in the dream had been happy, peaceful, as close to an idyll as could be – except for when he'd heard that person speak. In that moment, a rush of fear had flooded through him, all heat and anger and terror. He was fairly sure those emotions had been what had caused him to fall off the bed and wake up.
But no – that seemed silly. If that dream had been his mind creating the ideal Hope's Peak that he wished he could have attended, why would he have included someone that he feared? That would have fit better here in this twisted alternate version of a school, not in his happy fantasy. Maybe that hadn't really been a person, after all – maybe it had just been his awareness of the real Hope's Peak intruding on the dream as he started to wake up. Even in a dream, nothing good could last in a place like this.
Naegi sighed, swiping a hand across his face to wipe away the last traces of tears. There was no point in dwelling on the life he wished he could have had, not when it was impossible. If he didn't stop thinking about it now, he knew he could spend the rest of the day lying on the floor, envisioning what could have been – and if he fell into that trap, he wouldn't be able to salvage any good things that were still in reach.
He tried to sit up – and gasped as the room wavered around him like a blurry ocean of colors and flickering lights. Pain stabbed through the back of his head, pulsing out from the place where it had cracked against the floor – the same place that he'd been clobbered in the hidden room the night after the third class trial. Naegi didn't know much about head injuries, but it definitely didn't seem to have been a good thing.
But it wasn't like he could stay in his room for the rest of the day. He had to check on Kirigiri and make sure she was all right after her foray into the locked areas of the school last night – after all, he was the only one who knew what she was doing. That meant that if anything had gone wrong, it was up to him to find out about it.
So Naegi slowly levered himself up off the ground, taking care to move his head as slowly as possible to minimize the amount that the room spun around him. He managed to get himself upright, and used the corner of the bed to haul himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, where he'd fallen asleep over his e-handbook.
The handbook was still where he'd left it, propped open against a fold of his blankets. It showed the first floor dorm area, and apparently Monokuma's upgrade was still in place, because he could see his own icon sitting alone in his room. But when he immediately looked down the rest of the hall, Kirigiri's dorm was still alarmingly empty. In fact, he didn't see her anywhere on this part of the floor, not even in the cafeteria. That wasn't good at all – Kirigiri rarely skipped the breakfast meeting. Maybe it hadn't started yet?
Naegi's eyes automatically went to his clock at the thought of the meeting – and he nearly fell over again at the sight of the time. It wasn't seven, like he'd been assuming – it was past nine, nearly mid-morning. Had he just slept through the morning announcement? It seemed unbelievable that he could have missed something so loud – but on the other hand, he'd been pretty exhausted. He still was, truth be told, but not quite to the same extent as yesterday, when he'd been practically asleep on his feet.
If it was past nine, then that would explain why the cafeteria was empty – the breakfast meeting time had come and gone without him. Naegi frowned. Did that mean that no one had noticed that he wasn't there? Or maybe there just hadn't been anyone else at the meeting to notice his absence. After all, only he and Kirigiri had attended the meeting yesterday.
Which would mean Kirigiri really hadn't made it back in time, either. Naegi really hoped that wasn't the case – the mastermind might not notice what she was doing if she was gone all night, but he didn't think they could miss it if she was missing during the day, as well.
Was she really missing? Naegi flipped through the maps of the school again, just as he'd been doing last night – but Kirigiri's icon was just as absent now as it had been then. That seemed to mean that wherever she'd gone that the mastermind couldn't track her, she still had to be there. That, or there was some other reason that the handbook couldn't show her location…
But no, he wasn't going to think about that, not unless he found some real evidence that something had happened to Kirigiri. Her absence from the map didn't prove anything. Even if she didn't show up in any of the common areas, she had to be somewhere. Maybe if he tried looking around in person, instead of on the map, he'd find some hints. It had to be worth a try, anyway.
Naegi flipped the map back to the dorm area again, just in case she'd returned – and he paused, his eye falling on something strange. He'd noticed before that Togami's dorm room was empty – but he hadn't realized that the other boy was elsewhere in the dorms. Now that he looked, though, he could see that Togami was actually in Ogami's dorm, standing close to her icon near the far wall. But Togami had been very cautious around Ogami ever since finding out that she'd been forced to work for the mastermind – so what would he be doing in her room?
Naegi's hand slid out towards the map, almost of its own volition, resting his fingertips against Togami's name. He hadn't really had a chance to process how much he missed the other boy yesterday, when he'd been caught up with investigating the fifth floor with Kirigiri – but this morning, it was different. Now, he'd woken up alone and miserable, shaken out of a dream when he'd been happy and cared for.
In that dream, he'd started the day by seeing the person that he cared about most in the world, the person he wanted to see first thing every morning – and even though the dream hadn't been real, the feelings were. Naegi knew that he didn't want to wake up alone again. He missed Togami desperately – and he wanted the other boy back.
