Togami had to admit that Ogami had made a reasonable point when she'd insisted that he needed to clean up. Saying that he felt better after showering off the grime of the past two days might be an overstatement — that implied any kind of positive feeling could be possible — but it was preferable to leaving the filth on his skin. And while the tracksuit was the sort of garment he would normally disdain even for his employees to use as a cleaning rag, at least it was intact and unstained. It was far less complicated to put on than his usual clothes, too, which fortunately meant he could manage it even with the somewhat limited range of motion left to him with his bandaged hands.

And so by the time he stepped out into the hall and Ogami turned to lock her door behind them, he felt marginally more like himself than he had until that moment. That could only be a good thing — after all, he would need all his wits about him if he was going to figure out the extent to which the other two girls had been complicit in Naegi's murder.

Naegi…

Togami swallowed hard against the tightness in his throat, one hand going to his pocket to touch the dorm room key he'd so carefully stored there. There was something disorienting about beginning an investigation while knowing that he wouldn't be able to rely on the other boy to support his conclusions and confirm them in a way that the others could understand. He'd let himself rely on Naegi for so much of the investigations right from the start, before they'd even gotten personally involved. Now, even Ogami's presence at his side as they began walking down the hallway only served to underscore the fact that Naegi would never be there to support him again.

He'd intended to continue on out of the dorms without hesitation… but against his will, he found his feet slowing as he approached Naegi's door. He refused to look up at it, to stare lost and heartbroken at the nameplate… but he didn't have to, not when it blazed so painfully clearly across his mind's eye. The key in his pocket seemed to burn through the cloth, a fiery reminder that he could open that door and enter that room again…

But no. Togami forced himself to walk forward again, away from the only room in the school he truly wanted to enter. He wouldn't go in there with Ogami at his side, or even waiting for him outside the door. That room had been one of the places he and Naegi had spent most of the short time they'd had together. Those moments had been theirs, and he intended to guard every memory of them as jealously as a precious jewel. He would go in when he could be alone, without anyone else to steal away even a hint of what he'd find.

Either Ogami possessed the discretion necessary to ignore his pause, or she simply failed to notice it. Whichever was the case, she walked beside him in pensive silence — right up until Togami would have passed by the cafeteria to head towards the gate to the other half of the first floor.

"Wait… where are you going?" she asked, startled. "Don't you intend to eat anything?"

Togami glanced towards the closed cafeteria door, frowning as he considered her suggestion. It was true that he hadn't eaten in quite a while… but while a few hunger pains did gnaw at the edges of his awareness, the thought of actually eating made his stomach knot with nausea. Enduring the taste of food, feeling it heavy in his mouth, going through the process of chewing and swallowing… it was too much, too much to deal with now. He'd only make himself sick if he tried.

"Later," he told Ogami, intending the word to come out curter than it did. It must still be the lingering effects of shock and grief, blunting his usual speech patterns.

And sure enough, she didn't take it as the utter dismissal he'd intended. "But you would have more energy for your investigation if you took a few minutes to have a brief meal. You could even bring it along if you prefer not to delay."

He scowled at the implication that he couldn't judge his own physical capabilities. "I said I'd eat later, and that's what I plan to do. Stay if you're so determined, but I'm going to do something more useful with my time."

He'd only taken a few steps through the gate before he heard her following after him. He glanced up at her as she caught up to him, but she didn't seem inclined to bring up the point again. Good. If she had any sense, that would be the end of her attempts at directing his actions.

"Do you know where Kirigiri and Jill are?" he asked as they crossed the first floor.

Ogami shook her head. "I haven't seen them. I wanted to be on hand when you awoke, so I only left my dormitory to go to the storage room."

That was unfortunate… but the refusal to leave another student alone in her room did show an unexpected amount of sense on Ogami's part. He could hardly fault her for exercising appropriate precautions while sharing her room. He'd just have to work the girls' locations out for himself. After all, there were only five floors to the school — they couldn't hide forever.

"Then we'll start on the second floor and work our way up," he decided, as they reached the stairs. He could climb them without any physical difficulties now, after spending so much time resting — or at least, he could as long as he didn't allow himself to think about helping Naegi up the stairs, the smaller boy's body pressed warm and solid against his own. There was nothing to be gained from those recollections, nothing but grief that weighed down each footstep like his shoes were lined with lead.

As he stepped out of the confining walls of the stairwell, he felt as though he could breathe properly again… but the relief was only momentary. Approaching the library door, Togami couldn't help but recall the blind terror he'd felt two days ago, when he'd come racing down this same hallway to find Naegi bleeding on the library floor. He'd fought so hard to protect Naegi, but it had never been enough, not even before the trial. He'd failed, completely and utterly, he'd done everything in his power and it still hadn't been good enough —

"Perhaps we should start somewhere else."

Ogami's sudden words jolted him out of his dark thoughts, and Togami realized in shock that he'd come to a standstill in front of the library doors. Did she think that he was standing here because he was too frightened to enter? He shot her a furious glare before grabbing the handle and yanking the door open.

And he found himself staring at a room that looked exactly as he'd left it… with every shattered bookcase, torn book, and bloodstain intact.

"The mastermind hasn't cleaned the room," he murmured, scanning the wreckage in confusion. Yes, it was quite a mess… but even so, the other murders had been nearly as messy and the mastermind had still been able to clean the rooms where they'd occurred in the night after the trial. Some evidence of the murders could still be found — the knife Maizono had taken, for example, or the furnishings Owada had switched in the changing rooms — but there had never been an entirely destroyed scene left intact before.

Was it because this hadn't been the scene of the murder itself? Most of the destruction had been Jill's fault, the day before the murder had occurred. It might make sense for the mastermind to leave unrelated scenes alone… but as Togami crossed over to the area hidden by the bookcases, he found that even the pieces of the Monokuma robot he'd deconstructed were just where he'd left them. Well, all except for the bomb — but he knew all too well what had happened to that.

But that didn't make sense. Even if the rest of the library was arguably unrelated to the murder, this part wasn't — not when the tracking device in Monokuma's eye had been the trigger for his discovery of Ikusaba's corpse. The robot had been a key part of the trial, irrefutably a piece of evidence for the murder — and yet the mastermind hadn't touched it. Why would they have left it in place? Had they simply not had the time to deal with it yet… or was there some deeper, more sinister reason?

Well, whatever the mastermind's plan for this room might be, Togami wasn't about to let the chance to reexamine some of the murder evidence pass him by. He moved forward, heading for the place he'd been sitting when he'd first uncovered the blinking device.

"Oh no, are you back to look at all my hidden places again? How embarrassing!"

Togami stopped short, ice threading down his spine at the sound of that voice. Slowly he turned around… and there Monokuma stood, smiling innocently up at him.