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This time the Dísir’s silence lasted longer.
When Sigrun finally spoke, her sneer had lost some of its corrosiveness. “You’re so cute when you’re in denial. You can’t face it that you, the ultimate trickster, are trapped for eternity because you fell into her honeytrap. You cling to your belief in her like a five-year-old in Santa. But if she’s so true, why isn’t she saying anything? Why is she looking at you with such pity in her eyes?”
“You’re keeping her silent, but she doesn’t need words to communicate her emotions. You’re making me see indifference and pity, but I feel her turmoil and desperation, for what she considers my sacrifice, when giving up anything for her is a privilege.”
The gloating in the Dísir’s eyes wavered.
Then disappointment crashed in its place.
One of the other two exclaimed, “By Freyja’s pigtails! All this effort and all we get is this intractable mule.”
The other one huffed in exasperation. “We might have eternity, Sigrun, but with this one it means only that he’ll have that long to drive us insane. He’s a lost cause.”
Sigrun finally leveled fed-up eyes on him. “Congrats, you big lout. You’ve thwarted us. If you loved Kara any less, if you had the least distrust in her, we would have kept both your souls. But contrary to what you think, we didn’t write the manual of fate, we just abide by its letter. On the first page, it says it is people who damn themselves by their weaknesses and actions. And damn your blue eyes, you acted only with ridiculous resoluteness, while Kara, that silly girl, did everything with infuriating selflessness. By the Dísir’s own rules, we have to issue you a full refund of your souls.”
The brunette Dís nudged her. “Tell them the rest already.”
Sigrun exhaled in chagrin. “We have to issue you a reward along with those, too, dammit. Your hearts’ desire.”
The blonde Dís quirked an eyebrow at him. “What will that be? Or shall we guess?”
“I have one desire.” He looked back to the still Kara. “To be with Kara. If ‘in life’ doesn’t work, then I’ll take in death.”
Sigrun huffed. “So which part of ‘hearts’ desire’ didn’t you get? You want to go back to life with her, you got it.”
He stared at the Dísir. “That’s it? You’ll bring us back to life, and let us be?”
“Give the man an extra life.” Sigrun pulled a thick, fraying-at-the edges tome out of thin air, opened it. “But according to the Rewards Section, Resurrection Chapter, said life can only be as long as the shorter-lived among you was supposed to live. So you have only around a couple of centuries. And don’t complain. We did tell her her last life would be ridiculously short. But then, you might even have less—as long as your ‘love’ lasts. Or as long as your new choices let you live.”
The brunette Dís handed him a cheap plastic pen. “Before you sign, you do understand that you’d be throwing away certain eternity in the limitlessness of Fólkvangr, for the uncertainty love and life will bring you? That you’ll take your chances with both?”
He snatched the pen from her hand, stabbed his palm with it, signed his name in blood where Sigrun indicated.
“You can be Kara’s proxy. But if it turns out it wasn’t what she wanted, expect her to hate you till her dying breath.”
He looked at Kara, reached for her hand, kissed it before he nicked her finger for a drop of blood. Then he signed her name.
He added something in both their blood before he turned to the Dísir, hands on hips. “I put a little provision there that keeps your…agency at bay. I’m not letting you mess with Kara’s life ever again. Now let us out of this dump.”
The Dísir grunted something to one another, eyeing him with disappointment and something like admiration tinged in challenge. Then he felt himself fading.
Vidar phased back to awareness to the glorious feeling of Kara throwing herself at him.
Before he could get his arms to work, to wrap around her, she was climbing him, smothering him in hugs and kisses.
He sagged down where he stood, which turned out to be on her bed, relief like he’d never known inundating him.
When she’d expended the impetus of urgency, she looked down at him with eyes melting with love and flowing with tears. “Oh, God, Vidar…you believed in me when you had every reason not to.”
He caressed her precious cheek. “I had every reason to, since you are my every reason.”
She charged him with another bout of frenzied passion and gratitude before she pulled back, looking apologetic. “But, uh, don’t expect my aunts to leave us alone. I bet Sigrun is already looking for a loophole to circumvent your provision. Not to mention Loki. I don’t see him relishing having one of his Originals shacking up with a Valkyrie.”
He wrapped her wild locks around his hands, dragged her in for a wrenching kiss, before raising her face to smile assurance at her. “I already told your aunts what to do with themselves. As for Loki, he understands passion and values the rare, let alone the unprecedented. You should see him with his wife. He’s like a delirious puppy around her. He’ll understand what we have.”
Then he was tearing their clothes off, melding their flesh, groaning long and loud at the soul-deep pleasure and poignancy. “But if Loki doesn’t, he can also help himself to the same activity I recommended to your aunts. As long as I have you, I don’t care who thinks or does what. Your fateful aunts said we’ll take our chances with love and life, and I can’t wait to start taking every one with you.”
She pulled him into her depths as he thrust to merge them, cried out her exultation, her eagerness for anything with him.
