#zimmerparents

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Check Please! (Webcomic) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Alicia Zimmermann/Bob Zimmermann Characters: Bob Zimmermann, Alicia Zimmermann, Original Background Characters Additional Tags: Hockey, Unplanned Pregnancy, Falling In Love, Hook-Up, Non-Explicit Sex Summary:

“November of 1989, in which Alicia and Bob spend a rainy night together during Bob's Chicago roadie with the Pens.

Nine months later, Jack is born.” ( @parvuls ) - How Bob and Alicia's relationship develops, starting in November 1989

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Jack’s career was taking off and nothing could or should overshadow it; he didn’t need the stress or distraction of their divorce. So instead, they slept in seperate rooms, and lived seperate lives and came together only when the image of a loving family demanded it.

For a long time, they did not love each other.

But when the worst happened, between a call that no parent would ever want to receive, and a hospital bed they never wanted to stand over, they found themselves standing side by side and holding hands. They found themselves turning to one another and needing one another to make it through this. They found themselves asking where they went wrong, and how do they make this right?

And from those clasped hands, they built the relationship up again - and found that with it, came love.

The kind of night you sink into and the kind of dress you slip out of, and she’s laughing golden and bright and blushing in the passenger seat. She looks like she should be on a postcard that says What Happens in Vegas. Bobby tells her so, and she smiles. 

“I was!” Alicia says. They dropped the top three hours and a last name ago; she has to shout a bit to be heard over the wind. Gold flashes when she pushes her hair out of her face. He takes her hand and kisses it and her ring’s cool on his lips.

“You were?”

“When I was twenty-two,” she says, and he turns her hand over, lacing their fingers together. “It was a limited edition promo run for Kiss Me When You Land. I still have some.”

Of course she was, of course she has some saved somewhere. She’d showed him the opening night ticket stubs tucked next to her passport inside her bedside table after they’d fallen into each other sixteen hours ago, after she’d asked What’re you thinking about? and after he’d said I kinda wanna marry you. Do you wanna marry me? 

Red eye to Vegas in the clothes they’d gone out in. Twenty minutes in the airport bathroom to smooth hair and brush teeth. And then fifteen to the car rental, ten to the chapel, five to say I do, I really do, a lifetime to look forward to.

And maybe this is all it’ll be, a fast car and a wildly impulsive night, a postcard-perfect moment he wants slipped between the covers of his favorite book, a memory he can revisit when this implodes in the morning sunrise. Maybe that’s the real reason he’s driving to the ocean; you can’t outrace the sun, but he can steal moonlight with the best of them. Maybe they’ve fucked it before it started. 

But oh — what if they haven’t?

Bobby says, “Can I keep one?” and she runs her fingertips along his thigh.

“What’s mine is yours, darling,” she says. She raises an eyebrow. “Remember?”

He shakes his head, glances at her, smiles when he finds her looking back. “I don’t. Remind me?”

“Pull over.”

He does. She reminds him.

The sun catches them an hour from the beach, but he doesn’t mind. Here, in this car beside her? Here, rings reflecting the light? Here, his shirt too big for her, her flipping through radio channels to find something worth singing to, his hand on her knee? 

She settles on something smooth and full and sings to the wind as she watches the desert go by in this soft morning light and yeah, he thinks maybe she put the sun in place, maybe she invented postcards. He sees a sunrise every time he looks at her. He wants to hold onto everything.

I love them :)

As everyone is well aware, I love Jack Zimmermann, and I think he's a really interesting, well-written character who has such a satisfying character arc! But I also love Bob and Alicia! I think their family is compelling because all of them are essentially good people who want to do the right thing but have also made some significant mistakes.

Was sending your teenager with anxiety to live with a random family and play a dangerous sport in a high-stakes league, while he is also under an immense amount of pressure the right decision? No. We know how that ended. But how were they supposed to make a different decision when Jack said the NHL was his dream and everyone else, including Bob and Alicia saw it as the dream too? 

They both probably had a vision of their perfect little family where Jack goes on to be the next Bad Bob while they get to be the proud parents. But when that falls apart how were they not supposed to feel like it was their fault that Jack overdosed? Guilt is such a complicated emotion and there was so much of it between all of the Zimmermanns following Jack's OD and continuing well into Jack's first few years at Samwell. Something I really love is how Jack's recovery can also be seen in his improved relationship with his parents, especially his dad. 

Those panels from the Cup Kiss where Jack tells his parents he kissed Bitty on tv are SO important to me. Both of them are clearly surprised, and it is absolutely the nail in the coffin of their perfect hockey family image, but they take no time at all to show that it doesn’t matter to them.

Another thing I like about the Zimmermanns is the complexity of the characters. I think Jack who is still kind of an asshole at the beginning of the comic is so interesting because it’s evidence that he is still in recovery. He is still trying to punish himself for his mistakes and he’s still angry, at himself and the world. Seeing him grow into a softer person in the way he treats his friends and they way he loves Bitty is, to me, the most important evidence of his recovery and it is so so great. The Bob we first meet in the comic is trying to give Jack what he needs but he still isn’t getting the fact that all Jack wants is for his dad to be there and be proud of him no matter what. By the time we get to the Cup Kiss though, Bob is not only very much present, but his immediate reaction to learning that Jack came out is to tell him that he’s “more proud.” We see Bob finally understanding how to support Jack the way Jack needs. As for Alicia we don’t actually know much about her, but it’s not hard to imagine how her being a model, where everything is about appearance, would impact how she thought about her family, so she probably also had some learning/unlearning/healing to do. 

Also as a fun note I like the symbolism of Jack looking exactly like his dad but having his mom’s eyes, as if to say he would be like his father but see the world like his mother :)

On another note I also enjoy how none of the Zimmermanns are what you would expect them to be. Bad Bob is a goon who is actually kind and effusive. Alicia is a model who is smart and has a college degree from a fancy university. Jack is a superstar hockey player who is half the things a hockey player "shouldn't" be. From a far they're this perfect, attractive, successful family but they've been marked by highly publicized dramas and tragedies. And yet the "imperfect" family that they actually are is so much better than the "perfect" family they were supposed to be, because the real Zimmermanns learned from their mistakes and healed and became better people.

ANYWAYS this was a lot lol

TL;DR they are one of my favorite fictional families 🥰

“Can I buy you a drink, beautiful?”

Alicia tensed as the familiar feeling of pissed off mixed with annoyance flared inside of her. She whirled around in her seat, ready to tell the owner of the voice where exactly he could stick his drink, but she stopped short when she saw who it was.

“It depends,” she sniffed. “What are you going to buy me?”

He grinned at her before slipping smoothly into the empty seat next to hers. “Anything you want, sweetheart.”

Alicia flipped her hair back and leveled him an impressed look. “Sweet talker, huh?”

“I’m more than that,” he said with a smirk.

“Let’s start with the drink first.”

“Sure. What will be?”

“The triple hot chocolate with the whipped cream,” she said. Then, after a second, she added, “And see if they have any olives too.”

He gave her a strange look. “Olives with hot chocolate?”

“It’s what the baby wants,” Alicia insisted, pressing a gentle hand to her stomach. Bob’s expression instantly softened.

“Okay,” he said agreeably before heading over to the counter to order.

Alicia watched him with a mixture of fondness and amusement as she stretched tiredly back into the cafe chair. They’d been shopping all morning, mostly for Christmas gifts, but Bob had spotted a baby store from across the mall and had dragged Alicia in even though she’d told him that she didn’t even want to think about baby things until her second trimester.

Bob had wanted to buy the whole store, and if he’d had his way, he would have. She’d managed to talk him out of buying a crib on the spot, only because they hadn’t decided which room in their house they wanted to convert into the baby room yet, and would still need to decide on a theme and measurements for furniture. By the time they’d gotten over the baby clothes, Alicia had been tired and vaguely exhausted, so she’d left Bob with the unisex onesies to find a place to sit instead.

The coffee shop wasn’t too busy for a weekday, and it didn’t take long for Bob to return. “They didn’t have olives, but they do have pickled eggs though.”

“Even better,” she said, taking a big bite out of the egg. Some rational part of her was disgusted by the cold, rubbery texture, but at the moment, it tasted like heaven. When she looked up, Bob was staring at her with a dazed expression

“What?” she asked with her mouth still full. Inwardly, she winced at how she’d just scarfed down an entire egg in three seconds. This baby was making her do things that she wasn’t proud of.

“I love you,” Bob said.

“I love you too,” Alicia said after she’d swallowed. She smiled at him momentarily, but was distracted when their drinks arrived. Her eyes widened at the mountain of whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top of her decadent hot chocolate. “I swear, this baby inherited your sweet tooth.”

“And your smile, hopefully.”

“You are a sweet talker,” she teased.

Baby’s Jack first word was Puck.