"Easy for you to say," Makishima muttered, his gaze fixed on the slim, dark-bound volume under L’s hand. "From the inside, it all feels different. And you, genius, what would you have done in my place?"

"Nothing. Just enjoyed the fact that my spotless psycho-pass meant none of that nonsense concerned me. People can decide for themselves whether they like the world they live in or not."

"You’re not much of a humanist, are you?"

"And you, I’ve noticed, are such a humanist," L retorted, a faint smirk flickering over his lips. "Like I said, you reminded me of someone I once knew. That guy also decided one day that the world was rotten—"

"I see where you’re going with this, and—"

"—and that the best way to fix it was to start mass-murdering people."

"Just shut up, please," Makishima said, irritated.

His conviction that the world he came from was utterly unjust, that great causes sometimes required terrible means — those thoughts hadn’t gone anywhere. He had cultivated them for too long to abandon them so easily.

And yet, here, in this infuriatingly normal kitchen, filled with the scent of coffee and scattered with crumbs from too many sweets, under the gaze of this absurd stranger with a god’s name, those thoughts suddenly felt… distant. Not foreign, exactly. But certainly not as important as they once had been.

“Well,” L continued calmly, “I did like the part where you told Sibyl to go to hell with its offer. My friend wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation.”

“Yeah, no matter what I’ve done, I’m nowhere near the devil,” Makishima muttered.

L frowned in confusion, then chuckled.

“No, he wasn’t the devil, and I’m not God, like I said. Honestly. Sorry if this started sounding like a sermon. And this house full of books — it’s not heaven or hell. I mean, maybe it is heaven, I haven’t figured it out yet. Though personally, I think it’s a little dull. But I’m just like you, an ordinary person, and I don’t know much more than you do about what’s going on here. I just wanted to talk to you, so I pulled your page out of the book. Do you like pastries?”

“A page?” Makishima was getting tired of not understanding anything. “Do you even have any pastries?”

“No, but I thought you could bake some… A page from the end of the book, you know, where you die in that wheat field.”

“It wasn’t wheat,” Makishima corrected automatically, “it was hyper-oats.”

“Same difference. A very beautiful scene, by the way… You see, it gets lonely here, all the time. That forest — it’s endless. Literally. It doesn’t follow Euclidean geometry; no matter which way you walk, sooner or later, you end up back at this house. The food and supplies replenish themselves, but there’s really nothing to do. I’ve been here since spring. Out of boredom, I’ve even been trying to learn how to cook, but I’m not very good at it yet. Books are the only entertainment. But I was never much of a reader. When I realized I could tear out pages and bring characters here, things got a little more fun…”

L’s constant, rambling chatter had a hypnotic effect, dulling Makishima’s focus. Only now did he notice the page lying next to the book on the table — covered in dense printed text. If this madness was real, then was that his page? His death, his life, everything he had ever been? A brown ring stained the paper — tea or coffee. Beside it sat a shriveled, unappealing object that had once been a pastry, its sickly pink crumbs stuck to the edge of the page.

“How did you even come up with this? The page thing?”

“There were books in my story, too. Though they were only good for killing people in increasingly elaborate ways. I always thought all that blank space could be put to better use — and I was right. I’m actually very smart,” L added smugly.

“And you just figured this out instantly?” Makishima raised a skeptical eyebrow, his gaze still flickering toward the page — his page — on the other side of the table. “Sorry, but that’s hard to believe.”

“Well,” L conceded, “to be honest, I arrived in this house the same way. Someone pulled my page from a book. And when I got here, I found both the book and the page lying separately, so I caught on quickly. But I don’t know who did it. They never showed themselves to me.”

“So to summarize — you pull people out of books because you’re bored. And what do you do with their pages afterward? Tear them up? Burn them?”

L looked at Makishima with mild offense.

“I paste them back into their books, of course. Very carefully.”

“And what happens to those… people?” Makishima still wasn’t ready to say the word “characters.”

“I assume they return to their stories and keep flowing along with the plot. And what happens to them after that, well… that’s a complicated metaphysical question I’m not really prepared to answer.”

“Have you at least tried running some experiments?” Makishima still wasn’t convinced by this nonsense about books and characters, but the concept intrigued him. “You could pull out a page, then put it back, then pull it again and ask the person what happened…”

“I thought of that,” L admitted, “but in practice, I don’t really like talking to the same people twice.”

“But have you ever pulled someone out more than once?” A parade of fascinating figures flashed through Makishima’s mind — people he would have conversed with endlessly if given the chance.

“…Nana,” L finally admitted. “The St. Bernard nursemaid from Peter Pan. She helps me. You know, with cleaning, cooking… dressing… washing… But unfortunately, baking isn’t her strong suit.”

“You’re a goddamn infantilized autistic,” Makishima snapped.

“You think?” L tilted his head, unbothered. “For you, I’d guess paranoid psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder.” His tone made it clear he wasn’t trying to insult Makishima — just stating a fact.

Makishima realized this conversation was taking a bad turn. If he didn’t shift things soon, he’d be pasted back into his idiotic dystopia with its miserable ending, only to find himself right back in that field with his brains blown out.

“You know, it’s unfair that you know everything about me, but I know nothing about you,” he said smoothly, forcing himself not to look at the coffee-stained page. “I’d like to read your story, too. I’m sure it’s fascinating. Will you let me see your book? If there’s nothing too personal in it, of course.”

L nodded. He hopped down from his chair — Makishima noticed he was barefoot, moving with an odd, clumsy grace, like some hybrid of a spider and a cat — and disappeared into one of the rooms lined with bookshelves.

The moment he was gone, Makishima snatched the page. A quick glance at the opening lines confirmed what he already suspected — it was the description of his death, the scene written with unbearable, cliché-ridden melodrama. He folded the page into quarters and shoved it into his pocket.

L returned with a book — his book — and, noticing the missing page, didn’t seem angry. Instead, he smiled.

“To be honest, I was hoping you’d do that.”

“What?” Makishima frowned.

“Decide not to go back into the book. I’m glad the ending doesn’t suit you anymore. You wanted to die, remember? That bothered me the whole time I was reading. There’s a difference between risking your life and stretching out a suicide over time.”

“And what makes you think I wanted to die?”

“You told Kogami yourself. Here, I’ll find the page—” L started flipping through.

“No need, I remember,” Makishima interrupted, already unsettled from reading his own death scene. “Look, whoever you are — God, a ferryman for the dead, or just a weird guy — I’m not giving the page back. It’s mine, got it? I’ll paste it into the book myself if I decide to. You already ruined it with your pastries.” He shoved the page deeper into his pocket.

“So… you don’t want to die anymore?” L asked.

“…I don’t know,” Makishima muttered. “I’ll think about it.”