The world tilted and spun around Togami at Jill's words, everything else receding in a nauseating whirl that knocked his perspective askew. Waves of ice washed over him, choking him with bitter cold instead of air. He couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't hear anything except those words, branded fire-bright across his soul.
I made him stop.
Those words from a serial killer who targeted attractive young men, who had admitted she found Naegi adorable – bile clawed its way up Togami's throat, acrid and burning.
"Where?" He could barely get the word out.
Jill's eyes flickered along Togami's face, then past him down the stairwell. "I don't –"
"Where is he?"
"The library, but –"
Togami was up halfway up the stairs before she'd finished speaking, paying no heed to whatever that sentence would have been. He'd gotten the only words that mattered from her, and he couldn't trust anything else she tried to say. Not until he'd seen the truth of the situation for himself.
He'd never run so fast in his life, tearing around the bend of the stairwell and down the hall towards the heavy library door. Maybe he'd open it to find he'd misunderstood what Jill had meant, that it wasn't what he feared, that Naegi was safe and everything was perfectly fine –
He seized the handle and wrenched it open – and knew immediately that nothing was fine. It might never be fine again.
The scene in the library might have been his worst nightmares brought to life. Some destructive force had torn the room apart, leaving books scattered and furniture destroyed – and in the center of it all, amidst the collapsed ruin of one of the largest bookshelves, Naegi lay crumpled and unmoving. The silver gleam of scissors flashed from his side, and on the ground around him, Togami could just make out a few red letters in a familiar bloody scrawl.
Togami cursed how slowly his legs seemed to move as he threw himself across the room. It took hours before he could move, at least a year for every step. Untold eternities seemed to pass before he could finally drop to his knees at Naegi's side and lay his fingers against the curve of the fallen boy's neck. He held himself frozen, couldn't take so much as a breath, not even daring to pray as he waited –
Until he felt the tremble of a pulse faint beneath his fingers. Soul-deep relief shuddered through him, escaping from his throat with a single voiceless sob. Naegi was still alive. Whatever else had happened, however badly he'd been hurt, he was alive. And Togami would do whatever it took to make sure he stayed that way.
Which meant he couldn't just sit here counting Naegi's heartbeats beneath his fingers. Naegi might not be dead, but he'd still been badly injured, if the blood trailing down the bookcase was any indication. Togami knew he had to figure out exactly what the boy's injuries had been. He gritted his teeth until they ached, trying to force himself back into some pretense of objectivity before turning his attention to the rest of the scene.
Togami had thought that after all the murders he'd witnessed here in Hope's Peak already, he'd developed an immunity to the sight of blood – but it seemed that in this case, just as with every other aspect of his life, Naegi was the exception. As he looked at the bright red stains on Naegi's left arm, soaking his sleeve and dripping down the edges of the bookcase, the world seemed to pitch precariously beneath him, everything going unsteady and off kilter. Shock, he realized distantly as he found himself gasping for breath – he was probably going into shock at the sight.
And he couldn't afford to do that. More to the point, Naegi couldn't afford it. Togami clenched his hands until he knew his fingernails had to be gouging deep into his palms, though he couldn't quite feel the pain it ought to be causing. He had to get a grip on himself.
Don't look at the big picture, that was the way to do it. Focus on the small details, without thinking about what they meant. Follow the trails of blood to track the shallower lacerations on the back of the head, the face, the hands. Check for active bleeding, anywhere that the blood hadn't stopped flowing yet. And finally, when the sight could be borne, look at the left arm.
Look at the scissors, driven through defenseless flesh and flimsy cloth to embed themselves in the wooden shelf beneath. Look at the blood, glistening damply on the dark shiny wood and dripping to the floor. Look at the letters, smeared on the ground nearby in the same bright red, spelling out BLOO before trailing away.
Fury bloomed hot and bright in his chest at the sight of those letters, burning away the fragile emotional distance Togami had tried to construct. No barrier he could create could possibly stand against the rage blazing through him at Genocide Jill's half-written signature. I didn't want to – that was what she'd said, as though she expected him to believe those letters had just materialized on the ground on their own.
Because whatever she tried to claim, however shaken she might have pretended to be – this hadn't been an accident. The scissors and the writing proclaimed it as loudly as if the words had blared from a megaphone. Naegi had said something to annoy Jill – and she'd tried to murder him for it.
Tried – and failed. Togami had to remember that. However much blood Jill had spilled across the library floor, Naegi wasn't dead. And as much as the alternative horrified him, Togami couldn't understand why it hadn't come to pass. Jill had clearly been halfway there, going so far as to draw her scissors and begin her signature crucifixion. Why had she stopped? If it was just because the shelf had collapsed, why not carry Naegi to another spot and finish the job? Had she not been able to move him? Maybe the scissors had been embedded too deeply into the shelf?
Togami shook himself. It didn't matter why Jill hadn't gone through with it. She was a mentally unstable serial killer driven even crazier by losing the other half of her personality – she probably wasn't even capable of acting rationally anymore. There was no point in trying to analyze her logic, not when she might not have used any in the first place. Naegi was the important thing now – the only thing left that mattered.
He braced himself to look again, knowing it wouldn't be enough but doing his best anyway. He had to assess the damage to Naegi's arm. It was unforgivable that he'd let himself be delayed this long already. If the injury was still bleeding – well, he might not know much about first aid, but he knew that wouldn't be a good sign.
Togami turned back to Naegi, looking over the boy's wounded arm and trying not to think too hard about the quantity of blood around it. Was the blood still pouring out, that was the question he had to answer. But he couldn't quite tell, not with the fabric of all Naegi's layered jackets blocking his view. Slowly, with a gentleness Togami hadn't even known he possessed, he reached out to nudge the topmost layer of fabric out of the way.
It wouldn't budge.
Togami frowned at it, puzzled. His normal instinct on finding something that didn't move when he wanted it out of his way would be to yank harder – but he didn't think that would be a good idea in these circumstances. Instead, he leaned forward, trying to get a better angle on what might be holding the jacket in place.
On closer examination, looking past the eye-catching red of too much blood, Togami realized that there was another color on Naegi's arm that shouldn't have been there. Circled firmly around his arm, wrapped flush around the base of the scissors, he could see long strips of navy blue cloth – the same color as Jill's skirt.
Togami stared at the cloth blankly, not quite able to comprehend its presence on Naegi's arm. It almost looked like the sort of bandage he might have decided to apply, putting pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. But – that couldn't be right. The only person who could have put it in place was Genocide Jill – and why would she go to the trouble of destroying her own clothes to bandage Naegi's wound when she'd been the one to inflict it in the first place?
No – it couldn't actually be a bandage, or anything else meant to help. It probably had some other terrible purpose, maybe something to do with the crucifixion process that she hadn't been able to complete. That had to be why it was holding the scissors in place in the middle of the wound.
Those scissors – Togami could hardly stand the sight of them. He'd looked through too many pictures of Jill's victims, pinned up and killed with identical weapons, to bear having them anywhere near Naegi, let alone leaving them stuck through his arm. They should come out. He reached out to grip the handles –
"No, don't touch them!"
Togami jerked his hand away at the shout, twisting around towards the door. Ogami stood there, bracing herself against the doorframe, with Jill just barely visible behind her.
