Togami narrowed his eyes and glared at Jill, waiting for her to explode with laughter and admit to making a tasteless and cruel joke. Two years? God, what wouldn't he give to have had two long years to spend with the boy he loved? Of course he would have found the words to tell Naegi the depth of his feelings if he'd had such swaths of time… and maybe, maybe it would even have been enough for Naegi to respond in kind.
And that thought hurt, more than blades sliding along his wrist, glass tearing through his hands, or explosions knocking him off his feet. He shied away from the thought of emotions Naegi would never get a chance to return. Anything was better than that, and so he forced himself to focus his attention back on Jill instead.
Jill… who against all expectations had not burst into wild laughter. Who was staring at him in confusion, as though he was the one who didn't make sense.
Togami's glare lost its icy edge as he realized that apparently, Jill was not trying to mock him. For some reason, she genuinely believed that he and Naegi had known one another for two entire years.
Well, he supposed that she had recently had her brain scrambled by whatever Monokuma had done during that execution. It was hardly surprising she'd gotten disoriented after that. "We haven't been in here for two years," he informed her wearily. "The killing game only started a few weeks ago, that's all."
But to his surprise, Jill nodded. "Sure, figured it had to be sometime around then," she agreed easily. "Not like Gloomy let me out to play all that often, but I know I would've noticed something like this going on any further back." She shrugged. "I was talking about the time before this whole game thing got up and running — all the time you had together at school and that."
School…? The reference to such a mundane feature of his former life slapped him harshly across the face, the sheer unexpectedness of it driving stabs of pain deep into his skull. Why was she talking about part of a world so far removed from what their lives had become here? No matter how badly her mind might have been skewed, it still should have been painfully obvious that he and Naegi had been robbed of any chance to attend school together like a normal couple would have had.
"If you can't be bothered to engage your brain before speaking, don't waste your breath." He'd meant for the words to bite — but somehow the edge never quite materialized, leaving his tone flat and empty. "Naegi and I didn't even know each other before we were invited to attend Hope's Peak, that should have been obvious."
"Yes, darling, I kno-ow," Jill said, rolling her eyes as she drew the words out in a childish sing-song. "That's what I'm talking about, the year you were all at Hope's Peak Academy together!"
Togami couldn't shake the unsettling feeling that he and Jill were having two different conversations, and the disorientation of trying to follow two contradictory trains of thought only made his headache worse. "That never happened," he said firmly, in the hopes that it would drag her back to reality.
But of course the genocider refused to go along with any attempt to make her act like a sane person. She put one hand on her hip as she stared at him, fingers tapping out a silent pattern against her side as if she were playing a piano. "You sure you're feeling all right there, darling?"
"I'm not the one who's hallucinating school attendance."
He'd meant the words to be scathing, but they didn't have their intended effect. Jill's eyebrows shot up, and with a silver flash her scissors reappeared in her free hand, twirling rapidly between her fingers. She barely even seemed aware of them, in spite of the razor-sharp edges spinning perilously close to her skin — all her attention was focused on him in a red glare so intense he could feel it burning into his skin. He hadn't the faintest idea what she was looking for… but her expression said loud and clear that she wasn't happy with what she was finding.
After a long moment, she snapped the scissors closed with a sharp clatter. "Are you saying you don't remember going to Hope's Peak?"
A wave of pain hammered against the back of his eyes until bursts of red clouded his vision. Could she really have caused such a terrible headache just by making a few bizarre claims? Maybe this was a sign that he was getting sick. After everything else that had happened, he wouldn't be surprised to learn his immune system had failed him, too.
Fresh pain shot through his jaw as he ground his teeth together, forcing the headache back long enough to glare at Jill. "How could I remember? I never got the chance to attend — the mastermind behind this game kidnapped us all the day we should have started!"
Her mouth twisted sharply, as though she'd started to grin but lost the will halfway through. "Talk about a waste of a good fantasy! I'm never gonna be able to dream about you going off the deep end again, you know — not with this kind of reality there to drag me down!"
So the serial killer with a split personality was going to act like he was the one who had lost his mind? Even after all the rest of what he'd endured in the last few days, that still sent indignation prickling along his nerves. How could she doubt his mind instead of her own, when she was the one who'd had her brain electrocuted when Monokuma had —
When Monokuma had erased her memories.
Togami froze, breath turning to lead in his heavy lungs. He hardly dared to think, not with that idea rising large and terrible out of the darkest reaches of his head. It couldn't be true, not really, not something so life-altering as this. There would have been hints, clues, something that would have given the whole game away. Someone would have noticed, someone would have said —
Would have said that they'd lost their memories.
Like Kirigiri had said to him, when she'd confessed her secrets in the bathhouse not so long ago.
The world seemed to quake under Togami's feet, leaving him too shaken to realize which way was up. He looked at Jill again — but this time he didn't see a twisted murderer sitting there beside him. Now when he looked at her, he felt as though he could finally catch a glimpse of a pathway back to solid ground.
"Tell me what you remember."
He'd never expected to be grateful for Genocide Jill's rapid-fire babbling — but that was precisely the reaction that washed through him when she launched immediately into an explanation without giving him more than a split second to regret asking the question.
"Sure, darling, you know I'll talk all day if you're the one listening! Not that I've got the whole picture — a lot of the pieces were on Gloomy's side of the dotted line — but I picked up enough to get the outlines." She shrugged. "You spent a year at Hope's Peak Academy before it closed during the Biggest Most Awful Most Tragic Event in Human History."
