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Mort tried to hand the ring to Tristan.
“No! No! No! Not like that!” Loki got down next to Mort, on his knees, so now Tristan had a major deity and his reaper on their knees before him. “Like this….” He glanced over at Mort, to make sure Mort was paying attention. “Tristan, I love you, you’re super cool, and so hot. I would get my ass handed to me by the rivers of the water Lethe any day for you. Will you marry me?” He got back up to his feet. “Okay. Now you try.”
Tristan and Mort looked at Loki.
“What?”
“Get married. Live happily ever after,” Loki said, throwing his arms expansively wide, sloshing mai-tai onto the ground. Where the god’s drink landed, little green tendrils immediately began to grow. “I’m a fan of you boys,” he said. “My little murder guy and my bratty reaper.”
“Do you want to marry me?” Mort asked Tristan the question with curious inflection.
Tristan scratched the back of his head, looking perplexed and excited and a little worried, mostly about Loki. “I mean, yes.”
“Not exactly what I’d call poetry, but that counts!” Loki beamed. “I hereby declare you husband and husband.”
Mort was not overly familiar with human marital customs, but he did know a proposal and a wedding were not usually the same thing. He also knew that marriage was typically done in the eyes of god, which Loki technically counted as.
“We’re married?” Tristan seemed half-happy, half-confused.
“We’re married,” Mort confirmed. “Forever and ever.”
It was Tristan’s turn to burst into tears, happy tears of pure joy. Mort got up and hugged him, holding him close. Marriage, he had gathered, meant a great deal to mortals. Tristan had never brought the subject up, but perhaps that was only because he did not dare to do so.
As he was embracing what now seemed to be his husband, Mort realized he was no longer subject to the flaws and pleasures of mortality. His body no longer ached for no reason. His nose no longer ran. He wasn’t subject to an irritating high-pitched whine in his ears. He was immortal again. Powerful again. It was a bittersweet revelation.
“Thank you,” Tristan said, not just to Mort, but to Loki. “Thank you for everything.”
“Yes,” Mort agreed. “Thank you, Loki.”
“Aw, hell,” Loki said, a passing expression of something like shame, but not quite, passing over his features. “I’m going to be honest. Your dad came and told me if I didn’t return your immortality, he’d swallow everything I ever loved into the pit of nonentity. So I thought, hey, why not make a whole thing out of it for my two favorite little guys. Alright. I’m out. Do the happily ever after thing, okay? Peace.”
With that, Loki was gone.
Tristan clung to Mort, and felt the shift. It was intangible, but very, very powerful. “Are you… immortal again?”
“Yes,” Mort said.
“You don’t seem happy,” Tris said.
For his part, Tristan was happy, and scared, and confused. Everything gods did happened so easily, so quickly, and all at once. He understood why ancient people had worshipped them even while fearing their powerful and capricious natures.
“I liked being mortal with you,” Mort confessed. “Not at first. At first it was terrifying, and painful, and kind of gross. But it made us equal. It made us the same. It…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but Tristan had some idea it would be about the submission he had briefly experienced. Mort had melted into that so beautifully once he gave in. It did feel as though Loki’s appearance had robbed them both of something precious. Something they both wanted back.
“I’d like to meet your father,” he said.
“No. Absolutely not.”
When Tristan looked hurt, Mort explained. “My father is not some guy. He doesn’t present like Loki. He is the end of all things. He is the void itself. He is formless and eternal, even more than I am. I came into existence. He never did. He was here before anything, and he will be here after everything. Can you understand?”
“Not really, but yes.” Tris looked away.
“Tristan.” Mort slid two fingers under Tristan’s chin. “I love you, and I will spend an eternity with you, and I will give you everything you could ever ask for. But seeing my father would destroy you. A mortal cannot stand in his presence.”
“Then make me immortal.”
“Sure,” Mort said. “I’ll go to the immortality store and pick up a box of immortality for you.”
Tristan looked hurt by his sarcasm, and Mort immediately regretted it.
“It’s not that easy…” he began to explain.
“It seems that easy. I’ve seen you go from immortal to mortal and back again at the snap of a finger. Maybe we can just ask Loki to make me immortal too.”
Mort tried again to explain, but these things were not easy. They did not English well. They were slippery concepts hard to catch in words.
