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He supposes it was inevitable. He had been worshipped for so, so long by so, so many – pro sports were the most obvious way to get that adulation back.
He played hockey at first – had loved the speed of the game, the chill of the air against his skin, the way he could drop his gloves to solve any slight against himself or a teammate with his fist. He changes faces often, playing for decades and decades.
Then he travels across the ocean and looks for something new.
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He falls in love with American football and the violence of it; relishes in the feeling of protecting a lead and making sure his opposition doesn’t gain a yard.
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When he starts playing for the Packers – he falls in love with the little town and the little team and everyone he plays with. And as soon as he shakes hands with Aaron Rodgers he knows that he’ll protect the boy with everything he is.
Then he meets Mason Crosby – and then he meets the boy’s “parents” – a pair of Immortals who give him a wary side-eye that he acknowledges simply with a lifted glass and a wink.
“Don’t worry about me,” he tells them later. “I’ve no stake in your kind and your child is safe around me.” One of them is old, not nearly as old as Clay (the name he’s decided to go by these days), but old nonetheless.
“And what reassurance do I have of this?” the old one, named Billy, asks.
Clay answers with a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder that shakes the house and makes the mortals around them jump. “Because I say so,” Clay says as he lets the lightning flash in his eyes, lets it spark and scramble across his skin. “Because none of your kind can stand up to my power.”
Billy recognizes Clay then for what he is – and he grins. He lifts his wine glass in a salute and smirks before he drains it. “As you say,” he says, setting the glass before Clay as if he were placing it on an altar, “so then it shall be.”
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He gets his sponsors and indulges in all that capitalism has to offer him (he ignores the phone calls from Freya, deletes her voicemails that are nothing but her cackling into her phone about diapers and shampoo – it didn’t matter to him, not when she's one who's aging).
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Snow falls on Lambeau Field and Clay looks to the sky and with a wink to Aaron – thunder rumbles in the distance – the Packers win it all.
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End.