sakon76 | [fic][Check, Please!] Numina 5/?

(5 - Legacy)

"Great job, Robbie!" Jack tousled the boy's hair as the seven-year-old grinned up at him. "Just keep remembering that sharing the puck is half the fun."

"Yes, Coach Z! Oh, hey, my dad and grandpa are here! You want to meet them? My dad was in the NHL."

Jack smiled. "Sure." He skated leisurely after the thunderbolt and reached the gate as Robbie was gesturing expansively with his stick.

Manifesting, he'd found, wasn't actually that difficult, as long as he accepted it was an ephemeral thing. Kids would have a blurred memory of him as Coach Z. Adult players would only remember their coach or teammate Jack working with them on drills. And once off the ice, none of them would give him a second thought.

Jack Zimmermann was truly dead.

Or so he thought, until he looked up at Robbie's dad and grandpa, and saw familiar faces.

"Papa?" his son whispered, overlapping with his grandson's "Grandpapa?"

The shock on their expressions surely mirrored his own. "...Theo? Ricky?"

"Holy Christ, Uncle Shitty was right and you've come back to haunt us all for enrolling Robbie in hockey lessons--"

As Jack's eyes dropped to Robbie, whose own expression was morphing into confusion, he suddenly realized that he'd never asked the boy's name.

"You're a Zimmermann," he said.

Robbie's nose scrunched up. "Yeah?"

"Robert... Zimmermann," Jack said with a sinking feeling, staring at his great-grandson.

Robbie's father squirmed a little. "Robert Jack Zimmermann," Ricky admitted.

Jack deliberately drew a breath. And another. "That... is a lot of weight to put on a little boy's shoulders," he said finally, holding back the rage flooding through himself. It could have consequences, and he didn't want to visit them on his family, let alone a rink of innocent hockey-playing children. "And I'm not a ghost. Was your uncle high?"

Theo nodded, but was still wide-eyed and pale. "Papa, you died eight years ago. You need to move on. Daddy's probably waiting for you...."

"Crisse." Jack covered his face with one hand. Eric had warned him about this. Well, not about this in specific, but about their family in general. "I am fully aware that I'm dead, Theo. There are more possibilities out there than just ghosts. As Bits is also well aware."

Theo's eyes grew even wider. His expression would have been comical on anyone, but on a sixty-three-year-old engineer, it was hilarious.

Ricky wasn't so reticent. "What other possibilities?" Jack's grandson demanded.

Fuck. He couldn't do this without talking to Bits first. "Family dinner this Sunday," Jack said instead. "Bits and I will be there, and we'll talk about it then." And he pulled a bit of power, and disappeared.

"Well, of course ghosts are real, honey!" Eric's laugh was golden, but not mean. Never mean, to Jack. "Lord, have you forgotten everything Mandy and Jenny got up to, back in the Haus?"

"I... always thought that was Ransom being high-strung," Jack admitted. "They were real? I mean, they never did anything to me. That I noticed," he amended.

A floury hand patted his before Eric went back to kneading dough. "They wouldn't've, sweetheart. They knew you were having a hard time of it, didn't want to make things worse."

"But Ransom was fair game?"

"Ransom may've coral reefed every exam, but he had Holster and was a helluva lot less likely to fracture than you."

"Excuse me?"

Eric sighed and stopped working the dough for a minute. "Jack. People who've died, even just for a couple minutes, have a sort of a crack where the body and soul are joined. It can be dangerous. They were both smart enough to read between the lines of those rumors everyone kept talkin' about, and they didn't hate you, so mostly they left their teasing to Rans and Holtzy. And Shitty," Eric added, "but I'm guessing he probably wrote that off to being high or wasted."

"Are they still there?"

"Lord, no!" Eric laughed and went back to his work, shaping the dough and putting it in a bread pan to rise. "March--you remember her?--well, she was a bit of a natural medium, and as far as I know, was kind enough to let the girls in on one of her threesomes with the boys my junior year."

"Wait, you're saying sex with Ransom and Holster was so good it literally sent them on to heaven?"

"Le petite mort," Eric said in his usual horrible accent, grinning.

Eleanor was mostly sure that her brother and nephew were liars. Still, she hadn't objected to the idea of a big Sunday family dinner, so she'd offered to host. Theo and Candy had moved to a smaller house after becoming empty nesters, and John was so seldom home that she wouldn't have trusted him to have plates, let alone cutlery.

...All right, he probably did, but it was the principle of the thing. Besides, she had a big, lovely home and a dining table with enough leaves to fit everyone at the holidays. She'd definitely been the one to inherit their daddy's hosting gene.

"Don't forget the sugar, sugar," she could practically hear him tell her as she made a peach glaze for the angel's food cake.

"Yes, Daddy," she said, and accepted the canister he passed to her.

It fell from her hands as she stared at him.

"Careful, Ells."

Whirling, she stared at her other father, who had caught the sugar jar before it hit the ground. "Papa?" She looked back at the other man. "Daddy?"

"Didn't Theo tell you we'd be here?" her daddy asked.

"Well, yes," she spluttered, "but I figured he was trying to yank my chain or something." There had to be something not quite right with her eyes, she thought, because her parents were hard to look at, like gazing directly at the sun or something. There were weird afterimages surrounding them and they looked younger than she ever remembered them being, except the next moment they weren't....

Her papa put the sugar down on the counter and stepped behind her, wrapping his arms around her. "Close your eyes, Ellie-belly," he said, like he used to when she was really really little. "It helps not to look dead on."

"Really? You never told me that," her daddy said.

She felt Papa shrug as she swayed with him. "I was a new widower. You think I was going to stop looking my fill at you, Bits?"

"What's going on?" Eleanor asked.

Papa breathed a laugh. "Well, the long and short of it is, your daddy was always a god living in human skin. After he died, he reverted. And because he and I had made certain promises to each other, after I died, I got the choice to be a god too."

"A god." Oddly, as Eleanor considered it, the idea didn't seem that unlikely. After all, she'd never found anyone's food as good as her father's, and that was with a lifetime of culinary training and travel. "You're a god of pies, Daddy?"

"Well, cookery and plenty in general," her father allowed.

"And Papa, you're god of, what? Can't be hockey, it's over a century older than you."

"And yet I am," he replied simply.

"What, seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Just because it existed doesn't mean it had a patron for all that time," her daddy added on.

She considered it for a moment. "I guess that means Grand-père must be extra proud of you now."

"I... hope so. Probably." Papa sounded nervous.

She twisted to look up at him, blinking at the way he dazzled her eyes. "You don't know?"

"There's a place to hear the dead from, when we're doing the psychopomps end of things," he admitted. "But we can't go close enough to talk with them, or touch them."

"It's a one-way trip," Daddy added.

Eleanor considered that, then closed her eyes again, turned, and gave her father a tight hug. "I'm sorry. And I'm proud of you, Papa. Tell me what being a god's like?"

"Of course. Shall we bake together?"

Daddy laughed. "You just want maple-apple pie!"

Eleanor lit up. "Can you help me with that, Daddy? I can never get it to taste just right."

Daddy patted her hand, his face kind but just a little sad. "I'm sorry, sweetie. I'm not sure you can." He looked at his hands for a few seconds. "It's... 'cause I've always been divine, everything I made always had a little touch of magic in it, even when I was trying my hardest to hold back. And I'm not sure someone mortal can replicate that. Not even if it's you or your brothers, with gods' blood of your own."

"Oh." That was deflating, to know she'd never be able to make pie quite like her father's. But-- "Wait a minute. John's adopted. He hasn't got gods' blood."

Daddy's smile was hard to look at except from the corner of her eye. "Well, sugar, if your papa got to be a god because of the marriage vows he and I made, do you really think that promises to be a parent and child are going to be less vital? Because they're not."

"Theologically as well as legally speaking, John's just as much ours as you and Theo," Papa agreed.

"Oh. Okay. Have you told him yet?"

That won Eleanor matching grimaces from both her parents. "Not... exactly?" Papa said.

Daddy snorted. "It's harder to reach him. He doesn't cook if he can help it, so I haven't had a way to bump into him, and he hasn't set foot in a rink since Ricky retired, so Jack can't reach him either."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously," Papa replied. "Even gods have limitations. And we're neither of us gods of archaeology, so...."

"I still say he got the history bug from you," Daddy grumbled.

"I'm not disputing that, Bits."

"Mmm. Well, we can deal with the boys and the grands when they get here. Meantime!" Daddy clapped his hands. "What say we all bake something together, and you can help me chirp your papa's latticework, Ellie?"

"Being divine doesn't help with that?"

"Not if you're a god of hockey," Daddy teased.

"Say that at our next one-on-one," Papa retorted, smiling.

"Oh, is that what all the kids are calling it these days?" Eleanor chimed in.

Laughter brightened her kitchen, and the desserts they made were all the sweeter for it.

Author's Note: Edited by my Wonderful Husband, and the always superlative N-chan. This is all I've got for now, but there are at least three other chapters in various stages of written. So hopefully I can finish them up sooner or later.