Togami left the library and made for the stairs as quickly as he could. He would have preferred some other option than leaving Jill alone to keep watch on the strange scene – but he certainly wasn't about to send her down to his dorm room to fetch the toolkit for him, not with Naegi still recovering in his bed. He might have been forced into working with Jill again, but he had no intention of letting her near the boy she'd injured.
At least he was fairly confident that she'd stay put and watch the frozen Monokuma as he'd told her, provided he didn't take too long to return. Jill seemed as willing to listen to him as she'd ever been, even though she had to have realized by now that she had no chance with him romantically. Togami might not be able to follow the strange tangle of thoughts that twisted through genocider's head to make her want to follow his orders, but he was more than willing to take advantage of it.
Togami hurried across the first floor, slowing only once as he passed the clinic, just to make sure that no one had returned there. Finding it as empty as he'd left it, he didn't pause again until he reached his dorm room.
Entering the room, he found Ogami rising to her feet to face the door, placing herself at the ready between Naegi and whoever had entered. Togami had to admit, that did raise the girl a little in his estimation – she certainly seemed to be taking her promise to look after Naegi seriously. Only when Ogami realized who had entered the room did she let the tension coiled through the lines of her body relax.
"Have you discovered anything?" she asked. "Do you know why Monokuma is ignoring us?"
Togami turned towards her – and frowned, a thought striking him. Had she known about this already? Something had pried Ogami out of her room at just the right moment to offer Naegi medical treatment – could it have been some secret knowledge of the mastermind's absence that had spurred her to act?
But no – the timeline didn't work for that to be what had happened. Jill hadn't found the frozen Monokuma in the library until after the rest of them had left – and even if she couldn't be trusted to report accurately, Togami had been in that room himself. He might have been focused on Naegi's wounds, but he knew he couldn't possibly have missed the sight of Monokuma standing in the middle of that bloody scene. Whatever had happened to Monokuma must have been after Ogami had arrived to help Naegi – meaning that her reasons for deciding to help were still what she'd claimed them to be.
"Yes," Togami said, before the pause could drag on too long. "Monokuma is currently in the library, deactivated and unresponsive."
"He's – what?" Ogami stared at him blankly. "But – how? What happened?"
"I'm still finding out," Togami said, crossing the room towards his desk. "That's why I had to come back." He bent down to open the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out his toolkit.
Ogami's eyes widened. "You intend to use that – on Monokuma? Have you forgotten what happened to Hina and Enoshima?"
Junko Enoshima… Togami hadn't spared much thought for the loud, pink-haired girl and the idiocy that had gotten her impaled by Monokuma's spears, but he hadn't forgotten her. And he certainly hadn't forgotten the rule she'd broken – no violence is permitted against the school's headmaster Monokuma.
"I'm well aware of what Monokuma did to them," Togami said. "But the rule specifically prohibits violence – it doesn't mention any other type of contact."
"Using those tools to dismantle him sounds violent to me," Ogami said grimly.
Togami looked down at the toolkit in his hand, a frown crossing his face as he remembered the two girls who'd been killed as punishments for rule-breaking. Enoshima had known she was violating a rule, but she obviously hadn't known how far Monokuma was prepared to go in retaliation. But Asahina – while she'd known just how cruel Monokuma could be, she'd tried to use technicalities to avoid a punishment. Taking the door off its hinges would have been a fairly clever way to get around breaking the locked door rule – except that Monokuma had planned ahead for it. He'd used a technicality of his own to alter the door hinges, ensuring that any attempt to tamper with them would break the door as much as assaulting it outright.
But the fact that Monokuma had gone so far to make sure that the hinges couldn't be used to get around the locked door rule – didn't that mean that someone could avoid punishment on a technicality, provided they could find one the mastermind hadn't thought of? If not, they could easily have chosen to execute Asahina just for trying to break the locked door rule, instead of going through a dramatic reveal of just why her plan had failed. Togami wasn't sure why these rules seemed to matter so much to the mastermind – but apparently they did. And that meant that he might just be able to figure out a way around one of the mastermind's rules – if he was smart enough to do it.
"Possibly," Togami said at last. "But if there's a way to do it, then we can't ignore the opportunity. This could be the chance we've been waiting for."
"Or it could be a trap the mastermind is deliberately setting for us," Ogami countered. "Please – don't do anything reckless. Don't let Naegi wake up to discover you've been killed."
The unexpected sound of Naegi's name drew Togami's gaze down to the bed beside him, where he'd been trying not to look. Naegi lay there, too pale against the white sheets, his chest rising and falling in a slow but steady rhythm. Togami found his throat unexpectedly constricted, like it was holding back a sound too painful to bear.
He had to look away from the bed, swallowing several times before he could manage to answer Ogami's question. "I have no intention of acting carelessly."
She nodded. "Good."
"Then does that mean he'll wake up soon?" Togami hadn't known he was going to say the words until they were out of his mouth, sounding thin and unsteady in the quiet room.
Ogami hesitated, and an icy hand clutched at Togami's heart. Was it such a complicated answer that she couldn't say it immediately? What wasn't she telling him?
"He's no worse," Ogami said at last. "It's just that I was hoping to see some change for the better by now. The sooner he regains consciousness, the better it will be for him."
It made sense, of course. Naegi needed to wake up. And since there was nothing Togami could do to make that happen faster, the logical response should be to return to the library, where he could do something. There was nothing to be gained by staying here and counting the breaths until Naegi regained consciousness. He should leave.
Togami took a step towards Naegi, his fingers reaching out to hover just above the sleeping boy's hair, not quite daring to touch the injured boy. He heard Ogami asking something, but the words couldn't reach him as he traced the air above the curve of Naegi's cheek. He just barely registered that the sound of retreating footsteps and the tactful closing of the door meant that the room was empty now, leaving him alone with the unconscious boy.
With the pressure of any observers lifted from him, Togami sank to one knee at the side of the bed, his head bent close to Naegi's. "You have to wake up," he whispered, so softly that the words could only reach Naegi's ears. "You aren't allowed to go, do you hear me?"
He leaned forward just enough to brush his lips against Naegi's forehead, ghosting over pale skin so faintly that he could barely feel it. "You have to stay."
