[fic][Check, Please!] Numina 1/?
Numina
by K. Stonham
first released 11/13/2020
(1 - Luminosity)
"No, I'll be all right," Jack insisted one more time. "I know you're worried, Ellie, but I really will be."
"Papa...." Her blonde hair was streaked with grey and her dark eyes were worried.
Jack sighed. "Look. I will miss your daddy for the rest of my life, but I do not need a babysitter. Go home. I am going to have something to eat, then take a nap, and when I wake up I will read a book. If it's too much for me, I promise I will call you."
His daughter still looked dubious and mulish, a Bittle through and through, but she eventually nodded and tiptoed to press a kiss to his cheek. "Take care, Papa. Call if you need me."
Jack hugged her. "I promise. Drive safe, chérie."
He waved as she got in her little blue car and drove away, then closed the door.
And Jack went to the kitchen, where his husband was waiting.
Eric turned and smiled, golden and blinding. "Finally got her to leave?"
"Yes." Jack sat down on one of the kitchen bar stools, content to watch from across the counter. Eric was hard to look at like this, on the verge of what Jack could actually stand to see without looking away, but he was so, so beautiful, and Jack still wasn't over that moment, a week ago, when he'd thought he'd lost his husband. A horse kicking him in the chest would have hurt less than Eric's stroke. "Any reason you're hiding from them?"
Eric shrugged and pulled a dish out of the oven bare-handed. "I don't want to deal with the explanations yet."
Jack blinked. "But I thought--"
"Oh, you can see me, Mister Zimmermann, because of certain promises we made some years ago--"
"I remember," Jack said with a smile.
"--but," Eric said, pulling plates from the cabinet and starting to dish up the ratatouille, "it's somewhere between possible and likely that our family will be able to, as well."
"Wait, really?"
Eric shrugged and slid Jack's plate to him, then took his own place next to his husband. "Genetic consanguinity, years of exposure to gods hiding in human skin... who knows why. But yeah, it's possible."
"I'm not a god."
"No, not yet, but you will be," Eric said, as implacable as the tide.
Jack blew on a forkful of their lunch, then put it in his mouth. The flavors melded together, perfection. "Delicious."
"Why, thank you, I do try." Eric smiled as Jack kissed him. His appearance flickered from moment to moment, now in his twenties, now in his forties, now older, but his mouth was real against Jack's, and kissing him had never gotten stale.
"So, what, you're going to hang around, cooking for me, until I kick it?"
Eric gasped. "Excuse you, Mister Zimmermann, I have work to be doing! Cooks to guide, kitchens to bless, disaster feasts to repair."
Jack waited.
"But, yes, that too," Eric agreed with a cheeky grin. "You surely do not think that I, of all deities, am going to leave my husband cooking for himself."
Eric's body was buried, Jack was legally a widower and had a shit ton of paperwork to deal with about that, but right now, sitting here next to his husband, having lunch, he was, he found, all right.
Author's Note: Edited by my Wonderful Husband, and the always superlative N-chan.