Chapter Text
“I want to go out today.”
Ozzie immediately stopped singing to himself at Fizz’s declaration, and Fizz grimaced. Not a good start. He stepped closer to Ozzie, stretching his legs so he could press against his lover’s back and wrap his arms around Ozzie’s broad chest. “Let me rephrase,” he said, borrowing a tactic Ozzie too often used against him. “I need to go out today.”
“Fizzy...” Ozzie tipped his head to the side to rub their cheeks together. That was a good sign. He was at least open to listening. “You know very well how booked my schedule is today. You booked half of it!”
“That wasn’t actually intentional,” Fizz said. “Not to keep you from going with me intentional, at least. But I really didn’t want to take that cardboard nut’s call, so... two birds?”
“What’s my schedule like tomorrow?” Ozzie asked. “I should have a few hours free after a day like today’s-”
“It can’t be tomorrow.” Fizz draped himself over Ozzie’s shoulder and pulled his legs up so he was hanging off his boyfriend’s impressive body. “It has to be today.”
“What could possibly be so important that it can’t wait-”
“It’s Blitzø’s birthday.”
Ozzie fell silent at that. Fizz picked at a loose thread on Ozzie’s collar as he felt him turn his head to look at him.
Birthdays were important to Fizz, and Ozzie knew that. His birthday was the anniversary of the fire and proof that he had survived another year despite all the devastation. It marked his triumphant, spiteful victory over the forces of death and fate that had tried to rip him from this world and his determination to keep moving forward.
It hadn’t always been that way. Fizz doubted his first few birthdays were celebrated at all. His very first birthday, the actual day of his birth, was also the day his mother died. “There were... complications,” his gran had always said, if he pressed her for details. Her eyes always drifted up to Fizz’s massive horns with that last word, and Fizz eventually understood the message. He had caused his mother’s death, and his gran simply couldn’t celebrate that.
The first time he’d ever celebrated his birthday was when he turned six, after joining the circus. Just a few weeks after he’d joined them, Blitzo and Barbie had been bouncing around excitedly, talking about their upcoming birthday and the delicious charcoal and raspberry meringue cake that their mama only ever made for family birthdays or the opening of the circus season and what sort of presents they might get when Fizz asked what he’d thought was a perfectly understandable question.
“Why are you getting presents?”
The twins stopped their excited gibberish and just stared at each other. Fizzarolli kinda hated when they did that. They were talking psychamagically, he knew they were, doing that twin thing that he wasn’t able to be part of cuz he wasn’t their twin too. Especially when they turned in unison, and their eyes were big and round and looking at him like he was some sort of freak.
“Because it’s our birthday,” Barbie said, real slow like Fizzarolli was a stoopid.
“Yeah, you said that!” Fizzarolli puffed out his cheeks and crossed his arms. He wasn’t a stoopid! He’d heard them talking about their birthday! “But why does that mean you get presents?”
“Don’t you get presents?” Blitzo asked.
“Presents are for if I’m really really quiet,” Fizzarolli said. “Not for birthdays.”
Blitzo narrowed his eyes. He hated being really really quiet, Fizzarolli knew, and he hated when Fizzarolli tried to be really really quiet. Not that Fizzarolli really needed to be really really quiet these days. Gran didn’t shush him anymore, and she didn’t make him stop talking to people or hide inside, or anything like that. But Fizzarolli still practiced being quiet, just in case they had to start moving again. “Presents are for birthdays,” he declared. “And holidays like Sinsmas!”
“Oh, yeah, Sinsmas gets presents too!” Fizzarolli at least knew that part about presents.
“Birthdays are like holidays,” Barbie said, “but for only one person. Or two, if you’re twins!” She elbowed Blitzo, and he tried to grab her in a headlock, and the two of them almost started wrestling until Fizzarolli interrupted with another question.
“Is presents on birthdays a circus thing?”
“It’s an everything thing!” Blitzo cried, throwing his hands up.
“Do you not get presents on your birthday?” Barbie asked. Fizzarolli hunched his shoulders at how she was looking at him, picking at his claws as he felt his face get all hot. He shook his head.
“What do you do for your birthday?” Blitzo asked.
“Nothing,” Fizzarolli whispered. “Gran doesn’t like my birthday. She tells me when I’m another year older and that’s it.”
Both twins gave huge, dramatic gasps. Blitzo clapped his hands against his cheeks. Barbie clutched at her heart and staggered around backwards, ‘dying’ elaborately against a hay bale.
“Fizzy,” Blitzo whispered, dragging his face down and long. “Fizzy, no.”
“When is your birthday!?” Barbie demanded, popping up enough to point one black claw at Fizzarolli. “Is it soon?”
“Um... it’s in a few months, I think?”
“We have to tell Mama,” Blitzo informed Barbie. She was nodding. “We have to make Fizzy’s first birthday party the best birthday evaaaaaaaa!”
At the circus, everyone’s birthday got celebrated, every year. Even the adults at least got a cake and a gathering for drinks or fireworks. The kids had the biggest birthday celebrations, though, and Fizz’s was always the biggest birthday party of the year for the whole circus. Blitzø and Barb taught Fizz the importance of celebrating himself, and even as they all grew up and the twins stopped being quite as sold on the importance of a party, Fizz had clung to the ritual. His first birthday party had been the first time he felt like he was somewhere he belonged, like he was accepted, and he was someone who was worthy and important.
Fizz’s first birthday after the fire was hard. It was his eighteenth birthday, marking his official transition to adulthood. It was the first anniversary of losing everything. There was no charcoal raspberry meringue cake. No twins sandwiching him in a hug. No fireworks. (Satan, if there were never fireworks again, he would be okay with it.) Money was tight, so his present from Cash was a tight hug and a noogie between his broken horns that knocked his beanie askew.
Barb snuck into his room late that night, while Cash was out drinking. She dropped a little paper-wrapped parcel on his bed and climbed in behind him, spooning him until he stopped crying beneath his pillow and uncurled so he could twist around and hug her back. She cuddled him for a bit before kissing his circus brand and telling him to open his present; he only turned eighteen once.
Her gift had been his very first jester hat, hand-made and a little wonky, because Barb wasn’t the best at needlework, but a million times better than the stretchy beanie the hospital had given him. Barb helped him pull it on over his horns and took him to the mirror, pressing their cheeks together, her sallow red one against his scarred white. “You’re still alive,” she whispered, her voice scratchy from smoke and thick with emotion. “You’re still here. Because fuck Blitzo. Fuck that fire. Fuck death itself! You are Fizzarolli, and I love you, and that is enough to celebrate today.”
I’m still here. It had become Fizz’s mantra for every birthday, every celebration of another year of his life, and he’d thrown himself into making sure it still meant something, no matter what the year had thrown at him.
Most other people didn’t have as dramatic an excuse to celebrate on their birthdays, so Fizz used it as an excuse for them. When someone he loved had a birthday, he had a valid, public reason to exalt them for all they had done to support him. He’d even made Ozzie pick a date to be his birthday (because none of the Sins could remember when they first existed), and he’d been ridiculously flattered when Ozzie picked the first day Fizz had surprised a genuine laugh out of him.
“I was born anew in that moment,” he had explained. “That’s practically the same thing, right?”
Fizz hadn’t celebrated Blitzø’s birthday in sixteen years. Oh, he made sure there was always a gift and a card headed Barbie’s way, wherever she was in the world, and she knew to avoid the Lust ring like the plague for the entire week around her birthday if she didn’t want to be showered in glitter and confetti, but celebrating Barbie was not the same as celebrating Blitzø. For fifteen years, Fizz had wanted nothing more than to throw a knife into Blitzø’s head on his birthday, to take a sledgehammer to his horns and his limbs, leave him broken and helpless and alone and see how he liked that birthday present... but he’d been mistaken. A box of fireworks to the face had never been Blitzø’s last present for him.
It had actually been a flower, Blitzø had admitted drunkenly to him one night. A flower he had found when the circus was passing through Envy, and it had reminded him of Fizz, so he’d picked it and pressed it and was going to give it to him for his birthday. But then he’d seen the gifts everyone else was showering Fizz with, and he’d felt too self-conscious to give him a stupid flower, so he’d run off and... and...
And he’d never regretted anything more in his life than not giving Fizz that flower.
Fizz regretted it too. He loved pretty things, and flowers given outside of a successful performance was high on his list of likes. Whenever he found a flower Ozzie had tucked into his mirror or beside his hat, he just melted. He would have loved a flower for his birthday.
But if Blitzø had given him that flower... he might not have ended up here, with Ozzie’s broad hand blanketing his back and fresh bacon sizzling in the pan, promising a delicious breakfast. Fizz looked up from the thread he was fiddling with to meet Ozzie’s eyes. “It’s been months since I quit Mammon,” he pointed out.
“If anything, that’s made you even more famous.” Ozzie sighed. “The first demon to tie down the king of Lust and spit in Greed’s face?”
“I didn’t spit! Tying you down, though...” Fizz twirled an arm around Ozzie’s wrist and grinned lasciviously at him. “Well, they should’ve known we were doing that long before you admitted you loved me.”
Ozzie laughed, a song Fizz knew his heart would always dance to, and swept him around to kiss him thoroughly, his arm braced against Fizz’s back to make sure he was never in any danger of being burned by the stove. “I don’t suppose inviting Blitzø here would satisfy your desire to celebrate?”
“Blitzø anywhere couldn’t satisfy my desires,” Fizz teased with a waggle of his brows, his tongue poking out of his mouth. “Not once I knew true Lust...”
“Froggie,” Ozzie warned with a grin. “If you wanted to actually eat breakfast...”
“If you burn the bacon, I’m sure I can always find some... sausage...” With Ozzie holding him like this, it was only too easy for Fizz to curl his tail into his lover’s robe and around the thick cock within.
The bacon did end up burnt, but Fizz liked it crispy anyway. He cuddled up in Ozzie’s arms, purring against his chest as Ozzie sagged back against the fridge, a deliciously rumpled mess of sin.
“If this was an attempt at a distraction,” Ozzie finally started.
Fizz laughed and wiggled his hips against Ozzie’s hand. The larger demon was still playing with his ass and tail, and he was trying to accuse Fizz of being distracting?
“I’d feel more comfortable if you brought Blitzø here.” He cupped Fizz’s ass fully and hugged him close. Fizz looped his arms around Ozzie’s shoulders and nuzzled into his neck. “Or I could arrange an escort...”
“If you arranged an escort, it would just be Blitzø anyway,” Fizz pointed out. Somehow, over the last sixteen years, Blitzø had converted from a decently talented clown to an incredibly talented assassin. While the first time Ozzie had hired him had been solely to try to rescue Fizz from Mammon and not because either of them actually had faith in Blitzø’s abilities, both Sin and jester had come to appreciate Blitzø’s unerring aim whenever Fizz was genuinely in danger, and, less vocally, his somehow still sharp sixth sense for Fizz’s mental state. If Blitzø caught him early enough, he could usually annoy off a panic attack or coax Fizz off the ledge when his insecurities started to spiral. He could even identify when a crisis was beyond his abilities and could call Ozzie early enough so he’d arrive just in time to catch Fizz as he came crashing down.
Fizz doubted he’d be able to ever admit it out loud, to acknowledge his own frailty, but he was silently grateful for Blitzø’s familiar presence in those moments. Blitzø was one of very few demons who knew him before the fame and didn’t look up to him with stars in his eyes (or down on him with derision and scorn). Any other security was too careful around Fizz, treating him with kid gloves and not cutting through his cloud of bullshit out of some sort of respect for either his status or Ozzie’s money. Blitzø didn’t give a shit and was always ready to call him on his crap.
The panic attacks were so much fewer and further between these days, fading into the past as time leached Mammon’s poison from Fizz’s soul. That didn’t stop Blitzø from being promoted to the top of Ozzie’s most trusted list when it came to Fizz’s personal safety.
“And really, I wanted to surprise him. At his office. He always wanted an office, did you know that? When we were kids, I dreamed of working with Mammon, and he dreamed of running a circus out of a big office.” Fizz chuckled, remembering young Blitzo’s wild gesticulations as he talked about his future circus with more horses than clowns (but of course, Fizz would be his star performer). “And besides, I’ll bet you ten souls and a blow job that his employees have no idea it’s his birthday today. If Blitzø knew I was coming, he’d figure it out. He’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid.”
“Does the hellhound count as an employee?” Ozzie asked.
“She’s family.” Fizz shook his head. “Not for the bet.”
“No bet. You’re right. He’s not the sort to celebrate himself.”
“And that’s why I need to.” Fizz lifted his head to wibble his lip up at Ozzie, not going for the full on puppy eyes, not quite yet. “It’s the first birthday since we reconnected. I need him to know... to know it’s okay to celebrate that he’s still here.”
There was a soft gooeyness in Ozzie’s expression that Fizz knew was for his eyes only. The Sin caressed his cheek gently, and Fizz turned into the touch. “Every time I think I can’t possibly love you any more, you find some new way to surprise me,” he murmured.
“Ozzie?”
Ozzie leaned in, pressing their foreheads together. Fizz closed his eyes in delight. His cybernetic prosthetics were incredible, the bleeding edge of technology, allowing him to feel his world almost as clearly as if they were his original body, but he loved the sheer intimacy of actual skin to skin contact with his lover. This press of foreheads was as meaningful to him as he imagined clasping hands could be for someone else.
“You’ll go straight from here to Blitzø's office?” Ozzie confirmed. “And then you’ll stay by his side until you’re ready to come back? And then you’ll come straight back home?”
“From your side to Blitzø's and back,” Fizz promised. “Hardly even counts as going outside, really.”
“I love you, Fizzarolli.” Ozzie cupped his face and kissed him, slow and sinful. “Do not put me through another day of ransom negotiations with Stolas.” He nudged Fizz’s cheek with his nose, waiting for him to meet his eyes before continuing. “I mean it. You stay safe out there.”