Chapter Text
Kai woke up first, the smell of something sweet making his nose twitch. He wriggled out of Ollie's hold and managed to land in his chair okay. It was different from the group home beds. Probably easier in theory, since they were lower to the ground, but disorienting since it wasn't the height he was used to.
The squeak of his wheelchair alerted Moxxie to his presence as soon as he even got close to the kitchen.
“Afternoon,” he greeted, before wondering if that was too formal.
“Hi. Whacha making?”
“Waffles. Oh crumbs, do either of you have food allergies?”
“I don't think so. Waffles sound good. Should I wake Oliver up?”
“In a few minutes.”
A slightly awkward silence settled over the kitchen.
“Have… have you ever been to Wrath before?”
Moxxie grimaced. “Yes. It’s very dusty there.”
Kai perked up. “Is it really true that you can be a cowboy as a job there?”
Moxxie found himself borderline interrogated as he kept an eye on the waffle maker, answering the questions to the best of his ability. “But I’m not from Wrath, most of what I know is through visiting with Millie’s family.”
“Where are you from, than?”
“I’m also from Greed.”
It was Kai’s turn to grimace. “I don’t know why anyone lives there.”
Moxxie shrugged. “It takes all kinds. Personally, I like to stay in Pride.” He carefully pulled a steaming, golden waffle from the waffle maker with a fork. “How about you wake up your friend? Millie should be back soon with-”
The door was kicked open. Millie strode in, holding up a shopping bag full of canisters and beaming. “Whipped cream!! Only the most important waffle topping in existence.”
-
Every time Fizz resolved not to be surprised again, it came back to bite him in the ass. He knew that everything was much easier for a Deadly Sin to accomplish. Of course it was. They were… well, Sins. With the power and resources and clout to pull off nearly anything. But he was still surprised when the phone call didn’t take Ozzie very long.
“They’re preparing the paperwork. It should be ready in a few days,” he said after he hung up.
If Fizz had called, he would probably still be on hold. Didn’t matter how popular he had been in the entertainment industry. “Really? Then what?”
“We sign. A social worker- one from this Ring- will be assigned to our case, which means a few visits in the beginning.”
It all sounded so… simple, yet the smaller tasks that he was beginning to list in his notes app were piling up into what felt like an insurmountable hurdle.
“Wow,” was all that escaped. Fizz sort of wanted to talk to his boyfriend about how he felt, but where to start? And besides that, did he really have time to waste? It was easier and more pressing to talk logistics. “Well, before all of that, we still need to figure this place out.” He gestured with an elongated arm. “Everything is super tall.”
“I suppose we’ll be needing a lot of little sets of stairs, then?” Asmodeus tried to imagine it. They already had one small set of stairs for the quieves to help them hop up onto the couch. Maybe soon the whole place would look something like that.
“Wheelchairs can’t go up stairs,” Fizz pointed out. “And for stuff like counters, will they be running around up there? Because that sounds dangerous, they could fall.”
“Okay, we need a different idea for kitchen counters… what if we just got a different couch?”
“You would be sitting with your knees up to your chest.”
“I could take a smaller form more often.”
“You get claustrophobic in those smaller forms. Don’t pretend it’s not true.”
Asmodeus sighed. It was true. “What if we set up two bedrooms, then we can work from there to the rest of the house?”
Fizz considered that. “Sounds good. But do you think they want to be separated into different rooms?”
“I hear that kids like their own space.”
“But they’ve also been all the other has for… the longest time. What if they get lonely? Or what if I’m overthinking this?”
Oz considered that. “We’ll set them up in a fairly big room. Two opposite sides. They still have their space, but the other is right there on the other side if they need them? Things can always change too, once we have their input.”
“Okay. Alright, yeah.”
-
“There ain’t enough room in this town for the both of us.”
The imps on the TV glowered at each other. Kai took a bite of his peanut butter covered waffle, rainbow sprinkles crunching between his teeth. Oliver, busy reading captions, was unaware of the whipped cream quickly melting and making the cereal soggy.
“I could get used to this,” Moxxie said softly, offering another strawberry to Millie.
“What? Late brunch?” she asked with a grin,
“Lazy Saturday mornings watching crappy Westerns with the kids.”
Millie’s left hand intertwined with Moxxie’s right as they both purred quietly.
-
“I don’t know where the fuck we are actually.” Fizz sighed and ran a hand down his face. This was supposed to be a quick, in and out type of shopping trip. And somehow they had gotten side tracked, then lost, in the winding aisles of Hell’s most frustrating but somehow most popular furniture store- Ikea.
“Well, we saw this showroom before, which way did we decide to turn?”
“I can’t remember, Oz! Left, probably?”
“Let’s try going right then. Kids’ beds can’t be that hard to-”
“Don’t. Don’t even. We’ve been here for a half hour already. We should just ask the next person we see, or we’ll be here all day.” They’d gotten as far as picking out some cute sets of twin-sized bedding before somehow getting turned around. There seemed to be no end in sight to kitchen showrooms and various appliances. Those they didn’t need to worry about. Probably.
“I don’t mind spending all day with you, Froggie.”
Fizz grumbled, trying not to let the corners of his mouth turn up in a grin. “I’d rather spend all day with you not in Ikea. I don’t want to take too long and let the kids think we forgot about them.”
“I understand. We’re going to figure this out. Here, I’ll push the cart for a while.”
Fizz relinquished control of the cart and was secretly very glad that Ozzie didn’t bring up the fact that he was the one who thought it might be fun to go shopping in person. Yeah, maybe this would have been easier online, but he wasn’t going to admit that now. And really, would it kill these people to put up some directional signs? He said that part out loud.
“They have those in human Ikea, but I don’t think they help very much.”
“You’re telling me Earth has these too?!”
“Sometimes I forget you’ve never been there.”
-
By the end of their trip, Fizzarolli and Oz went home with two matching bed frames, two kid-sized mattresses with sheets, pillows, and blankets. Two sets of drawers, some shelves, supplies to anchor those to the walls (“In case they’re climbers like Barbie was.”), and two desks. Fizz deliberated over buying toys for a minute before realizing that he didn’t have the best idea of what the two would like. Probably better to let them choose.
“What age do kids start school again?” It had been a long time since Oz had interacted with kids. He remembered Lucifer unable to stop crying on Charlie’s first day of preschool, but that was about… two hundred years ago? Give or take a decade.
“Um… well, eleven is definitely school aged. We’ll have to figure out where we’re enrolling them before summer ends,” Fizz added that to the list in his notes app. If his hands weren’t metal, they might have been sweating. Did the schools in Lust have a positive attitude toward imp students? Were there bullying problems? What if the kids found it hard to make friends? What if they hated it, and then they hated Fizz for making them go there?
“I can see you worrying again. We’ll figure it out, one thing at a time,” Asmodeus reminded him. “First, quite a few of these boxes say ‘some assembly required’.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, you’re an engineer.”
It was that hard. The instructions were very small for Asmodeus, and mostly in pictures which seemed like it could be helpful but wasn’t really, and Fizz kept messing up the sizes of the different dowels. Thirty minutes in and Fizz felt like he might cry. He took a deep breath. He would not be bested by a set of shelves, goddammit.
“Do you want to take a break, Froggie?” Asmodeus asked, clocking the calming breaths which were only sort of helping.
“Kinda.” His stomach turned with guilt. “Are we doing the right thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Combined we know, like, nothing about kids.”
“You don’t know nothing, Fizzy Frog. Shit, at least you were a kid once. I popped into existence fully formed one day, so I’m kinda banking on your knowledge, babe.”
“And that’s a terrible idea!” Fizz slouched over onto the floor, wrapping his cybernetic arms around his aching middle. “My parental figures were Blitzø’s parents. Tilla… passed when we were still pretty young and I didn’t see hide or fucking hair of Cash after that. I don’t know the first thing about being a good father, what if I’m awful?”
“You are not going to be awful, c’mon! Just… what would you have wanted when you were a kid? An- an impling? Is that what…?”
“Technically. Though, the way it’s being used by some other demons, it’s starting to sound like another fuckin’ slur.” Fizz sighed. “I’m not really like them. I mean, I lost my parents too, but I was in the spotlight from the moment I could crawl. On a tightrope. I wasn’t a normal kid, I wasn’t treated like a kid most of the time. I was an employee first.”
Asmodeus sighed and scooped Fizz up off the floor. The dramatic imp remained limp in his grasp, limbs dangling. “So you wanted to be a kid? Well, we can do that for them. It’s not like I had it in mind to hire either of them, and you’ll be careful about putting them in the public eye. They can be themselves. And we’ll figure it out from there.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“How hard could it be?”
“Knock on wood right fucking now.”
“Okay, okay,” Oz laughed, knocking on one of the shelf pieces. “There. We’re not going into this jinxed or cursed. We’re just… first time parents.”
Fizz sat up. “Oh. Right- they make books for first time parents, don’t they? Oh my god, we’re first time parents. I should read.”
“Hold your horses, furniture then books."
“Okay. Well, dinner then furniture and then books. I’m hungry.”
“Burgers?” Oz suggested.
“You read my fucking mind. I love you.”
“Love you too, Froggie.”