Togami watched the rise and fall of Naegi's chest, letting the repetition soothe away at least some measure of his fears. As long as every breath was the same, without slowing or failing, then that meant nothing had changed. Naegi wasn't fading away, his life draining out of him with his blood. He was still there somewhere.
But it also meant there had been no change for the better. By the time the doorbell buzzed to signal Ogami had returned from the nurse's office, Togami hadn't seen anything to indicate that Naegi might be close to waking.
Ogami didn't seem overly concerned to see Naegi still unconscious as Togami let her back into the room, an extra pillow in one hand and a small bag filled with a collection of bottles in the other. She set the bottles with the rest of the medical supplies, then headed directly over to the bed. She began positioning Naegi's arm on top of the pillow, bracing it in place so that it wouldn't move too much even if he began thrashing in his sleep.
"How much longer until he wakes up?" Togami asked her, once he was sure he could say the words without his voice breaking in the middle.
Ogami shook her head. "I don't know. Most of my knowledge comes from what I picked up during training, with the idea that a doctor would be available to take over by this point. It probably depends on why he's unconscious in the first place."
"He's been on the verge of collapse since that poisoned needle," Togami pointed out.
"And if that's the case, his system may just need time to recover," Ogami said. "The pain and the blood loss would have been a bad shock. But – well, it also looks like he hit his head when he fell, and I can't tell how badly. If the head wound is what knocked him out, and he's still unconscious from it –" She looked away. "I won't lie to you. That would be very bad."
Togami heard all the words she wasn't saying. Brain injury. Neural hemorrhaging. Coma. Naegi might still be alive, but if he'd survived only to spend the rest of his days as a vegetable, or a broken shell of himself – the entire world seemed to shudder to a halt at the thought, everything going white and far away.
The pressure of a hand settling firmly on his elbow brought him back to himself, and Togami rapidly blinked away the fuzziness from his vision to realize that Ogami had caught his arm and guided him back to the chair. He scowled, shaking away her grip. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Making sure you don't collapse," Ogami said, unruffled by his glare. "One unconscious boy is enough. Sit there and try to breathe."
"I'm fine," Togami snapped.
"People who are fine don't faint." She frowned at him. "If you have to get up, don't do it too fast."
Togami grimaced. He would have liked to say that he'd never do anything as ridiculous as faint during a crisis – but recent events proved otherwise. At this point, he was probably better off following Ogami's advice so that he didn't lose consciousness a second time – especially not now, when doing so would leave her to do as she pleased in his room, with Naegi out cold on the bed.
Instead of protesting again, he settled back in the chair, crossing his arms and scowling. Ogami nodded once, then turned back to Naegi to finishing cleaning as many injuries as she could reach. Togami watched from the chair, keeping track of her hands and exactly which supplies she'd used at any moment, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
Finally, Ogami leaned back and sighed. "I think that's the best that I can manage for now." She gripped Naegi's wrist for a moment, taking his pulse. "He isn't getting worse. He's fighting."
"Of course he is." To his absolute disgust, Togami heard his voice catch on the words. He cleared his throat, as though that were the only problem with his ability to speak clearly.
Ogami's expression shifted at the words, but she didn't acknowledge them, a reaction that made Togami's ears burn. She knew how Naegi's injury had left Togami twisted up and bleeding from his own internal wounds, and she pitied him for it. Words burned on his tongue, harsh and fierce and hurtful, words that would burn that condescending emotion into pain and fury.
But all that would accomplish would be to make the martial artist storm out of the room in a rage. Normally Togami would take anger over pity any day – but he couldn't afford to make that trade now, when Ogami seemed to be the only one left in the school with any medical skill at all. So he swallowed the sharp words back, doing his best to pretend he hadn't noticed that she'd looked at him as though he were something vulnerable and weak.
"So there's nothing else that can be done?" he asked, trying to redirect her thoughts to a different path.
It seemed to work, more or less. She looked back down at Naegi, eyebrows knitting together as she studied him. "Well – there is one other thing that might help. I checked the refrigerator while I was back in the clinic, and it seems that Yamada didn't use quite all of the bags of blood stored there when he faked his death."
"You're suggesting a transfusion?" Togami demanded, snapping to attention. "If you know how to do that, why the hell didn't you do it already?"
"Because I don't know how," Ogami said flatly. "And I doubt that jabbing him at random with a needle would be helpful." She shook her head. "Besides, I don't think the clinic is equipped to do a transfusion."
Togami frowned. He remembered seeing a whole pile of syringes in one of the drawers when he'd searched the clinic during the last investigation – but no, that wasn't quite right, was it? Those had been the sort of single-use needles used to inject a few drops at a time. A blood transfusion would require something different – some kind of tubing to connect the blood bag and the injection point. And Ogami was right, he didn't recall seeing anything of the sort.
"So the mastermind provided us with stored blood, but not a method to do a real transfusion?" Togami said, looking up to scowl directly into the nearest camera. "They only disguised that room as a clinic to mock us. It was never anything more than a place for potential killers to find the means to counterfeit a murder."
"I'm not certain that's true," Ogami said slowly. "When Monokuma spoke to me alone, he didn't always talk to me in my room. Sometimes he brought me up to the fourth floor, before it was open to the rest of you – and he said that he hadn't gotten the blocked off areas of the school 'ready' for you yet."
"And the nurse's office wasn't immediately accessible," Togami said, frowning as he tried to follow her train of thought. "So you're suggesting that the mastermind removed critical equipment from the clinic before they let us inside?"
It made all too much sense, now that he thought about it. If they really were in Hope's Peak Academy, as all the available evidence suggested that they were, then that clinic should have been fully stocked at one point. Granted, blood transfusions weren't generally considered part of a school nurse's role, but if the school had supplied blood bags for it, presumably they would have had the rest of the equipment available. If the equipment was missing, the mastermind had to be the one who had removed it. And since the clinic hadn't been opened at the same time as the rest of the first floor…
"If you're right, then that means the equipment to do a blood transfusion is still in the school somewhere," Togami said.
"In the mastermind's possession," Ogami pointed out. "I don't think they'll give it back just because you ask nicely."
"I wasn't going to be nice about it," Togami retorted. He turned back to the camera and raised his voice. "Monokuma! We want to talk to you!"
