Some issues in the existence of fictional characters

'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?'

'I shall live them!'

— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

  Makishima saw L right away, even before he stepped onto the porch. L was sitting there, wrapped in a blanket. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t come,” he said, skipping any form of greeting, as if they had only parted five minutes ago. “Come inside. It’s warmer in the kitchen,” Makishima replied. Everything inside the house was so familiar, so intimate — the bookshelves stretching along the walls, the scent of dust and old paper… In one of the rooms they passed, black squares of "the hangman" games still marked the wallpaper, relics from their first week of knowing each other. Some of the gallows ended at the top beam, others with a noose. When the word was too difficult to guess, the hanged figures were completed, and they had taken great pleasure in outdoing each other in gruesomeness. L had been right: they were perfectly matched, two monsters of the same breed. Makishima caught himself smiling at the drawings, and saw his own grin reflected on L’s face. The whole thing looked like a scene from a horror film or a room in an asylum. They were home. In the kitchen, Makishima set the coffee pot on the stove, took two cups and sugar from the cupboard. His hands moved without thought, as if they had never forgotten. Their coffee-drinking was a ritual, carrying a meaning even he couldn’t fully comprehend. L perched on a chair, pulling his bare feet up under him in his usual pose. One day, Makishima thought without malice, that habit would leave him with a hunched back. “What have you been doing without me?” L asked. Makishima dropped a few cloves and peppercorns into the coffee. After a moment’s thought, he added cardamom. “Oh, nothing special… Taught art. Slept with Kogami Shinya. Started the World War III.” “And? How was it?” L asked, with genuine curiosity. “Not bad. But…” Makishima shrugged. How could he put into words everything he had experienced and understood? Could it even be explained so another person would grasp it? Finally, he settled on what felt like the closest possible answer: “I decided there are more interesting books in the world than this one. And you?” “Nothing special…” L echoed him, then added, “I missed you.” “The coffee, you mean?” Makishima deflected, hiding his discomfort behind sarcasm. “You.” If L knew the meaning of embarrassment, he gave no sign of it. After a pause, Makishima leaned forward and kissed him at the corner of his mouth. The familiar taste of sweets on his lips sent an unexpected wave of tenderness through him. “What was that for?” L asked, surprised. “Wanted to see if you’d blush,” Makishima admitted. Honesty, it turned out, was contagious. “And why should that make me blush? We even had sex once.” Makishima gave a quiet, humorless laugh. And worse, he thought. You’ve seen me cry. You’ve seen rot and worms spill from my mouth. For a moment, he studied L’s face — the slight upturn of his nose, the dusting of pale freckles, the messy fringe, the dark-rimmed eyes that always looked smudged with paint, the cracked lips. L met his gaze without a smile, without offense. “Listen,” Makishima muttered at last. “Don’t start imagining I’m going to stick around, for better and for worst, for the rest of our days.” “I wasn’t planning on it,” L laughed. “We’d get sick of each other if we were together all the time. Why does it even matter to you? Maybe we’ll love each other, maybe we’ll hate each other. Maybe we’ll part ways and never meet again. Knowing what comes next is boring. But you know where to find me if you ever need to.” He glanced at the stove. “By the way, the coffee is about to boil over.” Makishima hurriedly pulled the pot off the heat and thought, he had spoiled L — he takes being cared for as a given. Next time, he can make his own damn coffee… Then again, they had been down that road before. Whatever L brewed, no one but him could drink it. As he poured the coffee into cups, Makishima said, “We should find a book where you can pick up some culinary skills. At least learn the basics of taking care of yourself.” It was his way of hinting at gratitude. (Not as bitter as it could have been; the coffee hadn’t overboiled and was still good.) L either missed the hint or chose to ignore it. “Oh! That reminds me,” he said brightly. “I wanted to talk about books. Remember that guy, Moriarty? You pulled him out of a book ages ago — Sherlock Holmes?” Makishima chuckled. “Do I remember Moriarty? The real question is, how do you know who he is?” “Hey, I read Sherlock Holmes,” L said, sounding offended. “I grew up in England, remember? We read a lot in the orphanage — Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island… and, um…” He hesitated, apparently struggling to recall more titles. “Well, anyway, I know Sherlock Holmes. I like it a lot.” “It was the first book I ever read by choice,” Makishima said, nostalgic. “Guess we have something in common after all.” “So? What do you think? It’s the perfect book for us. For our next adventure.” “The last time we tried entering a detective novel, it was like stepping into a bad comic book,” Makishima said doubtfully. “For all my love of Conan Doyle, it’s pulp fiction — full of conventions and ridiculous contrivances…” “But now we can fix them!” L grinned. “We can rewrite everything — details, plot, whatever we want.” “I assume you see me as Moriarty. We might not agree on what needs changing.” “But that makes it even better! Imagine how much fun we can have making each other’s lives miserable.” Makishima admitted, silently, that the idea was tempting. But he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t object. “I don’t particularly want to plunge into the Reichenbach Falls.” “Well then,” L smirked, “let’s see how you get out of it.” Makishima raised an eyebrow. “You’ll have to save your own skin too. Or we could skip the whole waterfall business and write something more interesting.” “I like that,” L agreed easily. Time drifted around them, thick with the scent of coffee and spices. Outside, dawn had fully broken. The clouds had parted, and a pale autumn sun seeped through. “And after?” Makishima asked. “After what?” “After Sherlock Holmes. Even if we take breaks from each other in different stories, sooner or later, we’ll get tired of being Sherlock and Moriarty.” “Who could possibly get tired of being Sherlock?!” L protested. “Only a complete bore.” “But still — if we do turn into such bores…” “…then we’ll find other stories. Boring ones.” “Deal,” Makishima smirked. “They say there are plenty of good books in the world. It’s not like detective stories are the be-all and end-all,” L said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “There’s science fiction, for example… After all, Psycho-Pass is far from the only story about the future. Just think about it — space! Black holes, nebulas, worlds under entirely different suns…” Makishima, however — though he was reluctant to say it out loud — thought first of children’s adventure stories, the kind that were painfully formulaic and ridiculous. He could be the charismatic troublemaker, and L — the oddball classmate. They’d be friends — or rivals — or awkwardly, hesitantly kissing in the locker room before gym class. Of course, there would be shared secrets, dangerous obsessions disapproved of by adults, turf wars with kids from the other class — all those simple joys his real childhood had been deprived of. There was nothing he had ever wanted more than to be an ordinary teenager. He had never felt any fondness for his actual peers — but he longed for this idealized, golden-lit childhood that only existed in books. Maybe real childhood wasn’t like that for anyone, even if they were lucky enough to be born with the most ordinary-colored psycho-pass. And surely, it was too late to step into the shoes of a schoolboy now…? And yet, he wanted to try. What if you mixed childhood with space? That had to be good. But — only after Sherlock Holmes, of course. He couldn’t deny himself the pleasure of being Moriarty. “But none of it is real,” Makishima said doubtfully — more to his own thoughts than to L’s words about space. “The last thing I need is ridiculous rubber aliens…” “But it is real, too. Like that cat in the box — you said so yourself, remember? Silly aliens are the mark of bad stories. But if the book is good…” “Fine, you win. I suppose there are enough good books in the world to keep us entertained for the next eternity or so.” “And if we ever do run out — when there isn’t a single boring or ridiculous story left — we’ll just write our own,” L said with bright certainty. “‘We have art in order not to die of the truth,’ is that it?” Makishima smirked, and, remembering he wasn’t talking to Kogami, added, “That’s Nietzsche.” “Haven’t read him,” L admitted, a little sheepish. “I was just wondering — what’s the pastry situation in Victorian England? I really don’t want to develop a cocaine habit.” Makishima rolled his eyes in his usual fashion.   FIN