Come Back To Us - 30. Chapter 30

A week passed, then two, three, four, but his heart and mind still couldn’t get a rest.

He needed to go back to see George again. He needed to make sure he was okay, he needed to apologise for leaving him the way he did. What if he tried to kill himself again? He could never know for sure, but there was that intense feeling ingrained deep into him that could foreshadow nothing good.

But it happened exactly like that last time when he had tried to sneak away during the night.

Kristian intercepted him as if he knew what he had in mind. He sighed as they were face to face.

“Here we are again.”

Karl’s stare was hard, unflinching.

“I need to go.”

“You know I can’t let you go.”

Karl sighed. He didn’t want things to happen like last time. The frustration was growing but he needed to let it go.

“They won’t let me have another leave until next Christmas. And I need to make up for how I acted.”

“I know they won’t and I know how you feel. But you made your choice and duty comes first. It’s too late to change your mind now. You’ve been here for a whole year, and the war is far from being won. So just put up with it.”

What was that sudden change in attitude? It reminded him of the very first time when he had met the man…

“If it’s just one night, they won’t be aware of it, I-”

“First of all, they will. They have eyes and ears everywhere. And given you almost crashed a plane and killed you and the Group Captain, they have been watching your every step. Second, if you left even just for one night, you’d never be able to come back, and everything you’ve been doing for the last year would be useless.”

Karl sighed as he looked down on his left side. Why couldn’t he try to balance the two? Sure, it would have been much simpler hadn’t he realized he had feelings for George, or rather if he hadn’t started anything with him. But now that he knew he cared, it was too late to go backwards as well.

“If something happened to him, I could never forgive myself for it.”

The man stared at him with no apparent expression in his eyes. It was his turn to sigh.

“Listen, I know that you feel responsible for him, and I know what it is to care for someone so much that you could die if something bad happened to them. But you should rather worry about your own life. Besides, he’s not alone. He’s got relatives surrounding him. If he has already tried once, they won’t let him do it again.”

Karl sighed again.

“I know, I do trust them for that. But I guess I can’t help fearing the worst… and I don’t want him to hate me…I didn’t even take the time to talk about my feelings for him now that I can speak much better English…”

Kristian sighed again.

“Let me tell you one thing that will be useful to you in this pathetic life. There are words you’d rather hear, and some you wish you could take back. But as Shakespeare said it so well: ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ Some things just can’t be forgiven, and memory can’t be erased.”

“No, I don’t believe so. Things can be made up and forgiven if you put all your heart in it.”

“This is your choice to believe so, but time will prove you wrong. If you live long enough to see it.”

He didn’t like the way he was being so dark and pessimistic. Even though he was aware reality wasn’t a world where everyone was happy and careless.

“And it’s my choice to go. I’ll take the full blame for it.”

“You will regret it.”

“I’ve already regretted leaving George the way I did.”

The man sighed again.

“This conversation is getting nowhere. We’ve been going round in circles for the last five minutes.”

“Then let me through.”

“No,” his tone was strict.

His jaw was clenched. He didn’t want to put up a fight with him.

“You’re behaving like a child. But you’re not anymore. Remember. You’re a man at war to save his country from the tyranny of its invaders. Don’t tell me you’ve just come here because that bloke let you down?”

He could only look down as he bit his lower lip. He couldn’t deny that a part of him had chosen to come here because of what had happened that last year. But he did care about his family and his hometown and couldn’t stand seeing all those people dying and being hurt with their houses being destroyed. So he hadn’t chosen to come there for bad reasons. But his heart told him he needed to go back. He sighed. He was conflicted.

All of a sudden, they both heard the building being shaken violently. Karl looked up with wide eyes as an intense aching feeling of dread overwhelmed his stomach.

“Is that the German planes bombing the city again?” He asked as his body was starting to shiver.

He glanced at the man who was looking at him. Kristian then walked away without a word but he didn’t know where so he just followed him silently. He soon realised that he was only making his way towards one of the windows. They stood side to side and stared but they couldn’t see anything out.

Karl could feel the cold freezing all of his bones simply through the glass.

“It is a blizzard. This is not a new bombing.”

A blizzard… His body relaxed a bit and his jaw unclenched as the shivers died down.

“And you seriously wanted to go out with that weather?” The man said after a while.

They exchanged a look. Winter definitely challenged the mens’ mentality. It made training much more difficult in those rough conditions…

“Come on, let’s go back to my quarters. We will be able to play chess for a bit, but then you will need some sleep somehow.”

He resigned as he followed the man’s lead. But he didn’t give up on the hope to see George again one day to make up for his lame behaviour. That was why he couldn’t die in this war.

Once they reached the room, they started a game of chess, but Karl was distracted, so he couldn’t take advantage of his opponent. And he knew that Kristian knew he wasn’t focused on what he was doing. But the man kept quiet about it. It was nothing new anyway.

“You know, about reincarnation… I asked an Indian man about its purpose, and he told me it was meant to enable the development of the soul. Basically, the soul needs to reincarnate into different bodies to learn all the lessons it has to learn and experience everything that needs to be experienced, all for the sake of the most utter wisdom. At least that’s what I understood…”

Karl looked up at the man with puzzlement lingering in his eyes.

“What lessons and what experiences?”

“If I remember well, there are eight main lessons to be learned, whether it is through positive or negative experiences: love, compassion, compersion, the opposite of envy, courage, humility, honesty, forgiveness, and patience.”

That was something he couldn’t have imagined on his own….he didn’t know what to think about it…so he just thought about it. They both stopped playing as he was deep in thought. He could feel the man’s gaze on him.

“Then, what about the soul once these eight lessons are learned? What does it become? Does it disappear?”

The man looked unsure of what to answer.

“I suppose so. If it has nothing to learn anymore, then there is no point for it to keep existing.”

“But then what is the point in all that development if it’s just to disappear in the end? It’s as if nothing had happened…?”

“Well…I didn’t really expand too much on the subject to speak the truth….”

Life and death…he guessed that was something he would never understand…

Even if he couldn’t deny it anymore, he had trouble imagining how such a thing could happen…so this meant that souls were like some kind of ghosts…? Who could see and hear anything…?

But if they were only souls, they couldn’t see or hear anything technically or even think, if they had no bodies to provide them ears, eyes, and brains…

“But…can’t two souls reincarnate together in the same timeline…? I mean if they love each other and want to be together again in another life…?”

He thought again about all his visions. Some pieces of the puzzle were still missing, but that was alright. He could make out most of their story with everything he had seen.

“Well, I didn’t ask him about that, but I guess I should have thought about doing so…” he paused. “But I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible if you choose to believe that reincarnation exists for real.”

“Or…since love is part of the eight lessons to learn, and if they didn’t have the chance to learn some of the other eight lessons; this could be a good reason for them to both reincarnate into another life.”

This was the only thing that made sense to him. When you die young, you don’t have the time to learn everything you could learn and gain experience, of course.

But then…if you worked on the assumption that Mímir and the King’s son had chosen to reincarnate in this life, then they could have technically reincarnated plenty of other times between their original life and this life….Because waiting for a thousand years or so seemed to be an eternity….But then they would have had all the necessary time to learn all the lessons they had to learn…This left him puzzled…

“Oh, by the way, I have forgotten something about that. He also told me that the most recent versions of the reincarnated souls were not supposed to remember anything about their past lives. Don’t ask me why though…”

Oh…well…this was making things more complicated than they already were….the little bit which he had just thought made sense didn’t anymore.

“Then how can he account for my visions? I didn’t make them up. And it can’t be a coincidence. They just seem all too real to be just a dream. I’ve got a name, faces, words that were spoken, places.”

The man was staring at him with sheer puzzlement in his eyes.

“I don’t know…I guess he can’t explain everything like he wished he could…”

Karl sighed as he glanced down. He wondered what his family would think of this if he told them...

"What do you think my parents would say about this? They wouldn't believe it for sure, I mean... they made me but wouldn't have they felt it if this was really true?"

“No parents want to think of their child as being the reincarnation of a thousand years old Viking warrior who had his own parents and siblings. I think there is nothing spookier than this.”

"Of course..."

This was indeed really spooky that this was him but not really him at the same time...

“If you wish, I can introduce him to you, so you can have a conversation with him. I don’t think he will be reluctant about that.”

That was nice of him. But he didn’t want to think about it too much.

“Thanks, but that will do. That’s enough information for me.”

The man offered him the ghost of a smile.

“Shall we finish that game then? Or are you too afraid to lose?”

Wow. The man was getting ahead of himself now. He couldn’t let him prove he was right.

“So you say. But the outcome will be different. Just you watch.”

The man smirked at him. That smirk was reminding him of his own attitude once. And he could only smirk back.

He wouldn’t let the past get the best of him this time.

***

“You’ll always be the only one true to my heart, and I’d choose you in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, until the end of times.”

Hello dear readers
So here you go with another chapter! I really wanted to talk about the reincarnation theme for I think this is quite an interesting subject, although not that easy to grasp, especially in Karl's case..
Have a nice weekend and take care ❤️