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There was probably no controlling Tris. But there might be some way of making a bargain with a different devil.
Tristan woke up in pain, pain he was happy to bear because it meant he was alive. Mort’s words had cut deep the previous day, and they were still on his mind. Death was an end. Not an end of soul, but an end of memory. The implications of that were intense. If the dead did not remember, then…
He suddenly found himself very keen to cling to his memories. To his self. To the very parts of his being that he had been so keen to discard like trash. To the here and the now.
He found himself wanting life.
The kitten was tucked beneath his nose. It never seemed to grow. It was still small and fuzzy and adorable, and it meant that Mort was not far away.
“Mort?”
He called for his… lover? Not really. One sorry I got you beaten blowjob didn’t really qualify them as lovers.
Mort came into the room obligingly. He was tall and dark and strong. He also looked solemn, but that was his expression in general. For once, Tristan was fairly certain he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had been asleep, and even he couldn’t fuck that up.
“I was worried you were gone,” Tristan said, hearing how small he sounded.
“I am not gone, but I do need to take a little trip. I won’t be long. I will be back before dinner, certainly.”
“Where are you going?”
“I cannot risk your life again,” Mort said. “I am going to see my father.”
“Oh,” Tristan said. “Say hi to your dad for me.”
Mort was absolutely not going to say hi to his dad for Tristan. Mort’s father was great and deep and dark, formless. He was the void itself, the space between things.
Mort stood at the last bit of thingness and made his sacrifice.
“I will make a deal,” he said. “I will give you the rest of eternity, if you will give me the lifetime of this mortal.”
His father took form in the guise of a human skeleton many miles tall. It was in this form he conversed with his wayward son. He spoke with knowledge of all things, for he saw all.
“When you met this human, he had minutes left. You would trade all eternity for one unstable human male who courts death so eagerly? You might have days, hours, perhaps minutes — not years.”
“I would exchange all eternity for one day with him.”
His father laughed, not cruelly, and not indulgently, but somewhere in between. And then he did something he probably considered merciful.
“I will not accept this deal, because you are not thinking clearly. You have allowed yourself to be drawn into mortal psychodrama, and it will destroy you. Your pledge of eternity will mean nothing if you become as they are.”
Mort’s father loved him. Wanted him to exist. That was the most basic and primal functions of love, to create and preserve existence. It was the love of a parent for a child, and the love Mort was beginning to understand he had for his boy.
Mort’s father continued speaking. “He loves you because you are an end, and he desperately seeks an end. He yearns for me, for unbecoming. These are all releases from his prison of flesh. He does not appreciate his life, and he can never appreciate you, my son. Not as anything more than a whisper of what he most craves.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I have known many like him. I contain many like him.”
For a moment, the illusion of the great skeleton parted, and in its place swarmed a myriad of what some would call lost souls. They were lost no longer. They were at home.
Mort felt what might be the weight and truth of his father’s words. He wanted to reject them. Needed to push them away. But they had already infected him. They had found the little seeds of doubt deep inside him, and they had made him wonder if Tristan’s love was not love at all, but merely part of his compulsion for an end.
“I know I cannot tell you what to do. I did not make you to obey. I made you because souls need guides. You are one of the very few creatures in existence to truly have a purpose. You were made for something. The mortals you encounter, they were not made for anything.”
Mort’s gut rebelled against that statement, but he could make no good argument against it, and it was not why he was there.
“I will let that purpose dictate events,” his father said. “I will not attempt to force you back to your work. Your work will lure you, however, because it is what you were made for.”
“If that’s true, why did you send the Punisher and the Enforcer? Why send anyone at all?”
