When Togami had realized he had the key to Naegi's dorm room, he'd thought that it would help him find some peace if he could go back to a place that had belonged to the boy he loved. Naegi had lived in this room, however temporarily. They'd spent the night together here. It should have been a place that held what few good memories he'd made with Naegi.

Except that Monokuma had ruined any chance of peace before he could even try to find it. Togami couldn't even bring himself to open his eyes and look at the room again, not after the mastermind's robot had sullied it with his vicious mockery. The cruel suggestion that Naegi could have survived still lanced through his heart, an open wound that he didn't know how to heal.

Naegi would have known. Even in the worst situations they'd faced, he'd always found a way to make it all seem a little less daunting. When he insisted there had to be a way to resist the mastermind if they just worked together… when he called the other students his friends in spite of every reason to see them as enemies… yes, he'd sounded ridiculous and naive and infuriating… but the world had been softer and gentler for it. He would have known how to find a way out of this darkness.

But he was dead. He'd condemned himself to a gruesome, painful death so that he could protect the others, the kindest person in existence until his final breath. He'd died… and all the light he'd brought into Togami's world had disappeared with him.

How could it hurt so much to lose something that he'd barely had? He'd only just had time to fall in love before the boy who'd captured his heart had been torn away forever. Their time together had been so short… but shouldn't that mean that their lives hadn't yet been fully entangled? The wounds to his soul stretched through every piece of himself that Naegi had touched, so much that it was hard to believe it hadn't been the work of years. How could Naegi have become so necessary to him in a matter of days?

It didn't matter how. Whether it made sense or not, that was what had happened. He'd opened his heart to Naegi, left himself weakened and vulnerable… and he hadn't protected the person who'd held so much power over him. He hadn't been able to keep Naegi safe.

No… the darkness around him pulsed with a surge of violent guilt as he realized that it was so very much worse than that. It wasn't just that he hadn't kept Naegi safe… he'd contributed to the reason Naegi had put himself in harm's way. The fact that he hadn't intended to do so was meaningless next to the results of his actions. If he'd grasped the truth of what was happening in that trial… if he'd had full use of his faculties instead of allowing himself to be deafened and too tired to think straight… if he'd been just a little quicker, a little stronger, a little smarter… then maybe it all could have ended differently. Maybe Naegi wouldn't have had to try to protect him instead of the other way around.

Because that was what Naegi had done. Even injured and too weak to stand, even at the end of his strength, he'd made a decision to protect the others from the mastermind in the only way he could. It was the only explanation of everything that had happened that made sense. When Ogami had told him about Naegi's last words to the mastermind, his blatantly false admission of guilt, it had been impossible to believe that they could have come from the same boy who had the strength to push through the trials to uncover the most painful truths. But the words hadn't been a surrender… they'd been a purer act of defiance than Togami could have imagined.

There was almost a kind of beauty in that rebellion… a flash of light against the dark cruelty of the world. How many people would have had the strength to make that choice, knowing it would result in one of the mastermind's hideously painful executions? One in a million… or even less than that?

Whatever the numbers, there was one fact Togami knew for certain — and that was that he couldn't have done it. The thought didn't quite fit in his head, all strange angles and uncomfortable edges… but he couldn't deny the truth of it. He'd realized as much during the trial itself, when Kirigiri had accused him of lying to protect Naegi. He'd known at the time that he wouldn't have done any such thing — he wouldn't have condemned himself to die even if it had ensured that Naegi would win the game and live.

And at the same moment that he'd had that thought, Naegi had been facing the same decision… and he'd made the opposite choice.

The knowledge crawled beneath his skin, full of a filth more repulsive than any physical dirt. His fingers curled into claws, desperate to tear away at the feelings that encased him, to rip through the outer shell and rid himself of everything that hurt. Even though he knew doing it wouldn't help, he couldn't rid himself of the urge to tear until he bled.

It took long minutes of grappling with the unfamiliar feeling before he could recognize it for what it was… a depthless chasm of self-loathing, hatred piled on hatred for the person he'd discovered himself to be. His old self-confidence, his belief in his own perfection, everything he'd thought about himself had been revealed as nothing more than lies. When he'd been put under real pressure, he'd shown his true nature… showed that he was no better than the failures he'd despised.

He'd failed in his initial plan to win the game… and then he'd failed in his attempt to beat the mastermind. He'd failed to keep Naegi safe, and he'd failed to uncover the truth during that final trial. Nothing he'd done since entering this godforsaken school had gone as he'd intended… and he'd decided long ago what he thought of people who were incapable of succeeding.

He was pathetic.

The weight of it settled around his shoulders, too heavy for him to raise his head. He couldn't bear the thought of moving, of walking through the world without the mantle of undoubted success that he'd worn for so long. He didn't know how to face a world where he would have to live with the consequences of these horrible weeks.

He would have welcomed the blank oblivion of sleep, the mercy of a few hours in which he didn't have to be the person he knew he was… but even that much had become impossible for him. He drifted in and out of a fog, his awareness never fully fading to more than a fitful doze. Whenever he came close to the brink of losing consciousness… Naegi's face would appear before his eyes. He reached for the boy, tried to hold him close, tried to speak the words he'd never gotten to say… but the dreams crumbled to dust every time.

Stay with me… he wanted to plead, wanted to beg, wanted to do whatever it took… but there was no point. There was no one left to ask… nothing left to ask for… nothing he wanted.

No… wait. That wasn't quite true. There was still one thing left that he wanted… one way in which his failures hadn't yet been set in stone. There was still one more thing he could fight for.

Revenge.

The mastermind had killed Naegi for a crime he hadn't committed… killed him to spare the true culprit from the fate she'd deserved. The headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy, Jin Kirigiri, had wanted the backstabbing snake among the students to survive that trial, wanted it badly enough to cheat at his own game… and so Togami was going to kill Kyoko Kirigiri no matter what it cost him.