Five.
For the third time in twenty-four hours, Hinata awoke without knowing how he had gotten to where he was, or even how or where he'd fallen asleep. In fact, he didn't even know if he had fallen asleep. One moment he'd been standing on the central island, and then he was sure he'd felt some kind of indistinct darkness, and then…
And then he'd ended up in this seat. No, not just a seat – a desk. Why was he at a desk?
He sat up straight, and felt the heavy weight of Enoshima's chain dragging at his wrist. This struck him as odd at first, given that he clearly remembered handing her off to Togami, but then he looked to his left and saw Enoshima asleep across one of the desks, drooling an exceptional amount. Togami was seated to his right, wide awake and staring straight ahead. The chain had been stretched out across the desks, right over Hinata's hands.
"Erm…" Hinata turned to face Togami. "We…"
"Weren't here before we woke up," Togami finished. "Astute observation." He didn't leave much room for Hinata to reply, so instead Hinata stood, looking left and right for Nanami.
As he looked, he couldn't help but notice just how odd the room was that he was in. It was some kind of a classroom, with desks arranged in neat rows and a podium up front for the teacher, an announcement board and a blackboard, and… metal plates on the windows, just like the ones burned into his memory from the old lodge. And bright, leopard-spotted wallpaper. And stopped clocks, and yellow security cameras hanging from the ceiling…
He finally saw Nanami asleep against one of the walls, curled in something close to a fetal position. She was only a few desk-lengths away from the door, which, compared to everything else in the room, looked fairly normal.
That was the last of Hinata's concerns, though. He stumbled up from his desk, nearly knocking Enoshima over, and ran for the front of the room. "Nanami –!"
"Keep your voice down," Togami said.
Hinata didn't acknowledge Togami, but he did make an effort to be a little quieter as he approached. He knelt by Nanami's side, and carefully tucked a few stray strands of hair away behind her ear. Even now, after so many days, her scars shocked him every time he saw them, and her shallow, labored breathing filled him with panic. "Nanami," he said, softly. "Nanami, wake up…"
"Hmmm…" Nanami's eyes fluttered open, and her brows furrowed. "Come on… five more… minutes…"
She paused, and then her eyes burst open. Hinata could practically hear her heart racing as she attempted to stand. "We're – what are we… oh no, oh no…"
"Nanami, it's alright," Hinata said, cradling her head. "We're safe. I don't know where we are, but… I think we're safe…"
"We're at Hope's Peak Academy," Togami interrupted. "This is one of the fifth floor classrooms."
Hope's…
Hope's Peak…?!
A shiver ran down Hinata's spine at the sound of those words – and much more at the idea that he was there. He placed a hand on Nanami's shoulder, as if to say 'I'll be back', and then sprinted to the door and pulled it open.
The classroom opened up into a cavernous hallway, dimly lit and painted in shades of grey and black. There were only a few indistinct doors in Hinata's field of view; mostly all he saw were several large, open atriums positioned in the middle of the floor, dividing the floor's pathways with an overflow of gnarled, half-dead vegetation.
"It looks horrible," he said.
"Of course it does," Togami replied.
Hinata stepped back from the door, and moved aside to escape its view, apparently forgetting that he could have just pulled it shut. "I don't understand," he said. "We were just on the island, and then… everything…"
"Either comprehend that we've been transported inside the ruins or stop talking." Togami stood from the desk he'd been seated at, and then gave the chain wrapped around his wrist a sharp tug. "We need to get to the bottom floor as soon as possible."
"The bottom floor –?"
"Make sure Nanami's ready to go."
Togami tugged again on the chain, and Enoshima jerked to the side before she mumbled, and then stretched with agonizing slowness. "Hmmmm?" she said, resting her elbow against the desk and fixing Togami with a half-asleep look.
Hinata had neither the time nor the patience for whatever Enoshima was about to be on about – or to try and argue Togami on what was really a reasonable plan of action. He turned back to Nanami, and placed his hand at her shoulder again. Even when she was half-awake, he could tell she looked distinctly distressed. "Nanami," he said. "You doing okay?"
Nanami was breathing heavily, and Hinata was patting her shoulder almost in tune with the heaving of her chest. "This is all wrong," she said. "Everything… all of this… it's…"
"It's okay," Hinata said. "We're getting out of here. It's going to be alright."
Nanami closed her eyes, and then opened them again, fixing Hinata with a determined sort of look. "It's where we were supposed to be," she said. "But not... no, in the end, it was…"
"Nanami?"
"They're trying to bring us to the end." Nanami pushed past Hinata and stood under her own power, if on unsteady legs. "We need to be careful. No matter what we do… or where we go."
"I wouldn't be so quick to say what they're trying to do," said Enoshima – or at least Hinata thought she was the one who was speaking. By the time he looked back, she was following a taciturn Togami out of the classroom, with her head pressed down against her neck as she very clearly pretended to sleep-walk.
Hinata followed the pair out of the classroom, and into the hallway beyond. He kept a firm grip on Nanami's hand, which she returned, though her hand trembled in his.
Togami was walking with purpose toward the far corner of the floor, and Hinata followed after him, a good distance behind. They passed by a couple of doors without so much as a look or any acknowledgement, and when Hinata pointed this out to Togami he reminded Hinata of some "commitment to not wasting my time" that he had at some point made. Hinata had to agree with him on that point, given the circumstances. But still… he would have liked to see some of the school that he'd never had the chance to attend.
As for the foliage he'd seen from inside the classroom… there was no way he could have been able to tell from a distance, but as he moved through the halls and sidestepped the various creeping vines that crossed their path, he realized that not all of them were real.
Most of them were, but some of them were paintings, so richly detailed that they looked as though they might just be very long, very thin living beings. The walls around the classroom they'd just left were still pitch black, with only some errant leaves here and there, but as the walls hit their corners the tips of life-like tendrils crisscrossed into deep cover, enough to turn the entire rest of the hallway a dark, leafy green.
Hinata felt a crawling sensation across his skin, as if the vines were entangling him. "Was... this always here?" he said out loud to nobody in particular.
"Yep!" Enoshima said.
"No," Nanami said.
"Stop talking," Togami said, lowering his head and pushing forward. He seemed to know where he was going without looking too hard at his surroundings, which impressed Hinata, given that the hallways were long and winding.
As they continued on, the subjects in the murals began to shift from one step to the next. On one wall a city skyscraper had burst its way out of the foliage, and on another several abandoned-looking torii gates stood close together, nearly choked in vines and thorns. These drawings did not look nearly as detailed as the plants around them; they were perhaps a step up from a child's scrawl, maybe more like an untrained middle schooler.
The school seemed to go on forever, longer than the length of any of the islands he'd walked in the past few weeks. On and on the murals went, twisting images of vines and buildings together; each of the structures was unique, even if one tower was just a bit taller from another. Hinata wished he could stop and examine them, or try find some rhyme and reason for their presence, but he knew what had to be done. He knew they had to find the stairs...
Except when they did find the stairs, Togami didn't turn to look at them, for all his talk. Instead, he bowed his head and sped past them, and Enoshima simply shrugged and obliged, following him at the same speed.
Hinata's eyes went wide, and he exchanged a look with Nanami. "Ah..."
"Togami-kun?" Nanami called more loudly, but he didn't answer her. Instead, he turned the next corner at an impossible speed... and then stopped short just before the point where he would have disappeared behind the wall, shaking slightly as he caught his breath.
He didn't look at Enoshima as he stumbled over herself, or at Hinata as he stepped forward more slowly, closely followed by Nanami. He trailed off as Togami came into view. He'd grown very still, and appeared to be staring at some fixed point at the end of the hall. This passage also extended an impossible distance away, and very likely turned a corner at the end, though Hinata couldn't see down that far.
Slowly, he slid Enoshima's chain off his wrist and let it fall to the floor. He didn't look back as Hinata ran to loop it around his hand, or even turn his head when Enoshima snickered.
"Togami," Hinata said, biting his lip. "Er..."
"I see them," Togami said. His mouth hung slightly open, and a thin line of drool trickled from the corner of his lips. "I see the people of this world, everyone one of them that passes me... People with thoughts, and people with selves... They think and they dream, they come and they go..."
He sounded exactly like himself, and the cold monotone was only mildly disconcerting. But... somehow, deep down, he knew it wasn't his voice. It was someone else's, someone Hinata knew so well. Someone Hinata couldn't differentiate from Togami by name.
"They are always the person they were born to be, and even when they pretend to be someone else, or change their name or renew their face, they are always the person they were, in heart and mind and soul..."
He tilted his head back and walked forward, looking up with glazed eyes as he advanced down the hall. Hinata only got a split second's look, but he could swear they were shining - no, glowing with some kind of red light.
He listed to the side and rubbed his fingers against the wall. The friction made an odd thudding sound and the paint smudged off on his fingers, leaving three distinct marks on the mural. "They're living, and moving. They are coming and going. They have places they are and places to go. Places with papers and places with others. Places with names. People with names..."
Hinata wanted to call out in his confusion, but in the act of forcing himself not to do so, he hesitated. Nanami took the opportunity to push ahead of him, moving slowly but carefully in an effort to keep Togami in sight. "Togami-kun," she called out, her voice barely a whisper. "Togami-"
"Shhh," Enoshima said, lifting a finger to her lips.
She was smiling, but her mirth wasn't something Hinata could parse or share. "What - no," he whispered. "We've gotta-"
"Follow me, Hinata-kun." Enoshima pushed herself to her full height and began to walk forward, her chains still dragging at her thin, bare legs. Hinata took one look at her as she turned the corner, moving down the same hallway that Togami had, and then looked back at Nanami, who was leaning against the wall, near the stairs.
"Follow her," Nanami mouthed. Hinata bit his lip, but did turn and follow Enoshima down the hall, about as far away as he could.
She stopped about halfway down the hall, and Hinata stopped beside her. At this distance, he could finally see the end of the hall, which Togami was rapidly approaching. Here, the images of buildings and roads and towns and vines had coalesced into a paroxysm of frenzied scribbles, which fell away entirely as they approached the final wall.
The far wall was a dead end, and empty except for one faint figure drawing. It looked more like a carbon afterimage than a complete human being; something only visible after an explosion had burned the rest of a body away. It was enormous - larger than life and twice as wide. But the silhouette was very familiar. Very, very familiar...
"They are real," Togami said, and then softly repeated the phrase as he drew closer to the painting. His voice trailed off into a shuddering breath as he pushed himself against the afterimage, and then slid himself down the wall, curling up into a ball at the mural's feet.
"They are real," he said, with renewed strength. "And I am not."
As quickly as it had come, the strange and terrifying light vanished from Togami's eyes. He blinked once or twice, staring wide-eyed into the wall – and while Hinata could only see him in profile, he could swear that he looked rattled, or terrified, or…
Or something that had almost entirely vanished, if not for the red-rimmed eyes and tearstained cheeks that Hinata could swear weren't there a second ago. He sat still for a moment, allowing himself a few breaths, and then he stood back up, turned on a dime, and ran back at them, his head lowered.
"Togami?" Hinata said as he passed, but Togami did not respond or even turn to look. As he passed, Hinata saw that the entire left half of his face and his suit was stained black with carbon, and that his features were twisted into an expression of pure anger.
"Togami-kun!" Nanami echoed, but he did not respond to her either. He turned and moved quickly down the stairs, without once looking back to see if the others had followed.
With a clenching feeling in his chest, Hinata turned and ran back to the corner of the hall, struggling against the urge to call out to him again. Enoshima followed after him, silent and apparently docile, and did not make any attempt to add her own spin to the situation as Hinata took Nanami over his shoulders and supported her down the short distance to the stairs.
