Setting: Canon, The Pillar
PoV: Traitor!Toya
Notes: I tried very hard to keep this spoiler-free from the true end, but let me know if you think I need to slap on a warning after all. Also, I wrote this in a haze after studying, so it may be incoherent. Sorry.
Love, he thought, was rather inconvenient.
In some ways, he preferred that it hadn't happened to him at all. Love made things a little more complicated than he would have liked. It made him distracted half the time, made him absent-minded in his responses, made him blurt out truths he would have preferred not to say in hindsight. Love made him want Sho to know him better, made him want to know Sho better, even if that was the last thing he should be doing.
The worst part, however, was that it made his own actions unpredictable even to himself. He couldn't be impartial anymore, couldn't calculate his next move without hesitating. In situations like this, feelings was the last thing he needed to interfere with his plans—Nagi herself warned him under her breath on the fourth floor, when they had both regained their complete memories. By then it was far too late for him to pull away from Sho. Discarding his feelings at the drop of a hat shouldn't have been so difficult, so impossible.
How foolish he had been to think that he was too unclean to experience something so pure. Love, it turned out, didn't really care much for logic or reason. It was inconvenient, distracting, unreasonable, inescapable. Painful.
It hurt to be in love—a fact he learned when he found lying almost unbearable, not because of the action itself but because the thought of hurting Sho like this made his chest ache. Lying was not something new to him, after all; his livelihood often depended on his ability to bluff, usually with too many things at stake. There were many things at stake now too, and yet he felt his well-worn poker face faltering.
And so he ended up doing nothing. Despite everything he had sacrificed to come this far, he did nothing. When the time came for judgment, it came as no surprise to him to see his face flashing across the screens hanging above. Sho was intelligent. It was near impossible to hide anything from Sho's eyes.
He had never lost at anything before, especially at bluffing, and so this was the first time he'd experienced anything like this. He should be feeling disappointed, but instead all he felt was a sense of relief. It was over. He no longer held the burden to keep playing traitor.
The indescribable hurt in Sho's eyes made him falter for a moment. For someone who supposedly did the right thing, Sho looked like he was hurting much more than Toya, the one in the wrong. Ah, he realized, love had dug its claws into someone else's heart too. It suddenly occurred to him that leaving wasn't the hardest part to play; being left behind was much harder, from what he could tell from the look on Sho's face.
He now understood that this was The End's plan all along: The End had not expected any of them to succeed, to do anything; the whole point was to make Sho suffer like this, over and over. Hate, the other side of love. Love, the other side of hate. Two sides of the same coin, and in that sense The End was no different than he was.
Love, he thought, was rather inconvenient.