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It’s really not about the pain anymore.
Saiki knows it and Toritsuka knows that he knows. Carefree days in school with the typical drama, Toritsuka running after Saiki’s reluctant shadow with the same goofy smile and the same depraved requests. It’s almost deterministic. The lack of variation is what makes it desirable. He knows he can never have what Saiki can’t give, and that’s a non-issue for someone like him. Nothing’s ever a real issue. Not really.
It’s not cat-and-mouse, and it’s not a game. It’s really not any of those cliches. They both have their duties and vices. It’s been like this from that first fateful meeting: a spontaneous event for Saiki (a nuisance, at best); a climactic moment of a lifetime for Toritsuka. Fanfare, parade, strippers. It had felt like his entire life—the ghosts, the rumors, his transfer to PK—had been leading up to that day since he was a child. Really, he moved schools to be with Saiki. He tells himself that it’s this imbalance which makes their interactions satisfying.
But Toritsuka knows that when he needs to copy homework before class, Saiki’s not the person who he'll rely on. That when he’s lost and deserted in the city with only a quarter and some hope, Saiki won't be the one to answer his payphone. That Toritsuka revels in Saiki's dependably predictable bad will, even when he doesn’t forget that there are other people in his life—Aiura, Akechi, Yumehara—who would give him a shoulder to cry on if need be. Reluctant or not. But he doesn’t care about them. Not at all, never, never, never.
The worst thing is that he enjoys it. Toritsuka would be the first to admit that he gets off on it, the pain of rejection. It’s something deeper, more twisted than the mangled white scars that crawl up his forearms or the iron weights he has stuffed in his closet, all of which are simply surface level. What he hides is stuffed behind clothes and porno mags and past hurts from years ago. There’s something sickeningly sweet about knowing it all. The constantly fulfilled expectation of heartbreak solidifies everything he’s always known about himself and the world. Don’t call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, because there’s nothing to do with prophecies or Aiura in these depths of his despairs. Toritsuka likes to think it’s the absurdity of the humor with which Saiki treats Toritsuka's passions that makes him alluring. Saiki has never cared, and this has never been of any importance. Toritsuka could dedicate his life to this boy, this god, worship the ground he walks on and his shadow and his footprints in the dust and Saiki would call him a fat rhinoceros beetle, then punch him in the stomach.
Toritsuka has these needs. These are things he knows he could only fulfill with a blade or a rope if Saiki was not so generous with his retribution. Saiki needs to feel justified. Toritsuka is there for him in the same way, their relationship born of warped necessity. Saiki needs to know that he can push and push something and that it still won’t break, and he needs to feel morally justified. If it breaks, it’s still for the greater good. He wants to fight against something and not feel the responsibility of morality weighing on his shoulders.
Toritsuka does the worst things and honestly enjoys it, he can’t deny this. He won’t let Saiki take away his perversions if Saiki himself benefits from them—both of them, really, they’re disgusting to the core, and Toritsuka loves that he can get away with his darker deeper twisted terrible desires under the guise of teenage horniness. It makes it easier to tell Saiki things like I need you and I love you when Toritsuka knows he can write it off, and when he knows Saiki won’t say it back.
(But in Toritsuka’s worst moments, the ones that repulse him beyond just the hurts, he thinks of Saiki’s face. His soft, lilac eyes and the way his expression goes rotten just for him. The understated beauty of his lithe body underneath the school uniform. His uncharacteristically flamboyant pink hair. His face when he eats something sugary, his monotone voice when he’s in conversation with one of his real friends, the quirk of his lips when Toritsuka says something he finds mildly humorous. And Toritsuka feels something like sweetness bubble up inside of him, and he hates it. He buries this deep in the back of his mind and tries not to think about it at all.)
He does this today, because it's the day of all days. His excuses; it all makes it easier to smile at Saiki naturally in the school hallway, it makes it easier to turn off his violent thoughts and remain undetectable, it makes it easier to lust after some random girl just to get Saiki’s attention during lunch period, just for five minutes, it makes it easier to sit on the courtyard bench rubbing at his freshly bruised arm after Saiki’s taken it all out on him, as he deserves, it makes it easier to walk back to the temple after class with the constant assurance, a goofy smile on his face, to go back to the temple and pull out those things he keeps in the closet, his iron weights and sentiments, to write his goodbyes once and for all with that easy finality of knowing.
It makes it easier to leave the letters on his desk and walk over to the low bridge that hangs over the mouth of the river, where no cars pass.
It makes it easier to think of Saiki’s face and the slope of his nose and the ways he could be imperceptibly kind in Toritsuka’s worst moments, when he would get caught and Saiki would learn just how bad it would get. Saiki would find Toritsuka with blood on his hands and on the floor and all over his legs, he’d scowl with a sarcastic joke on his lips and clean Toritsuka up before calling Aiura to make sure he would be alright, then disappear. Saiki knew his own emotional detachment, and tried his best to make up for it. That primal desire for comfort would burst out of Toritsuka and he’d be hurting for days, thinking about Saiki’s kindness contrasted with his predictable cruelty.
It’s really not about the pain anymore, and Toritsuka is thinking this as he waits on the bridge to do something he knows he must do. It was never about the pain. Seventeen winters of desire, compounding the significance of existence and life and the world into one boy years before he even met him. It's something fleeting and something that contrasts violently with the real world—that is to say meaning. You can work up an idea, a fixation, in your head so much that it becomes impossible to imagine life without that thing; and it's not love, not at all. Toritsuka knows and he knows and he knows that these things are final, predictable, unchanging, and balanced. Saiki belongs to him only in this obsession, and he is not his to have without this pain. And Toritsuka will know this until the last second, until this last moment when he is tugged below the current by two iron weights in his pockets and he breathes his last breath of life beneath the river, the temporary significance of his desires solidified and set in stone for eternity, or for these final minutes, or for however long it will take for Saiki to turn around time again and escape this act of justice.