Sundry and Assorted Fanfictions

When Toriel had first given him to Asgore, Tenna had been frantic…a state his poor crew had unfortunately borne the brunt of.  Sure, he knew she hadn’t watched him in a while, hadn’t even plugged him in, but what if she decided she was finally in the mood for a cooking show and he wasn’t there?  What if Asriel wanted to watch a movie when he came home for break?  And what about Kris - what would they do without him?

What Tenna didn’t admit to anyone, not even Mike, because the thought of it scared him so badly, was that maybe they wouldn’t be without a TV.  Maybe Toriel was getting rid of him so they could get a new, better one.  Maybe even one of those snobby flat screens…

But Asgore had taken him in, dusted him off, powered him up, and turned him on.  He’d even called him “old friend” while patting him fondly between the rabbit ears.  All of that had been even before the Fountain had begun to gush - before Asgore knew Tenna was a person.  Before he knew they were all people.

So it went almost without saying that when Asgore did get to the Dark World, in his armor, cape, and flower crown, things went absolutely swell.

“...and we’ll be right back!  Don’t touch that dial!”  Tenna beamed at the camera, holding it until the red ON AIR sign on the far wall turned off.  When it did, he set his microphone aside and stretched, fingers laced together over his head.  “Whew!  Now that was a great round!  And I didn’t think we could ever outdo the last one, but here we are, ratings off the charts!  Mike, show the chart around, will ya?”  Tenna turned to look at Asgore, smiling down at him where he stood at his podium.  “How you holding up there, Azzy - can I call you Azzy?”

“Oh, I’m not sure about that…I don’t mind, but that is what my son’s friends call him.”  Asgore chuckled.  “At least, I think they still do.”  He frowned slightly.  “Anyway, I’m doing great.  Just look at all my points!”

“You like it, then?” Tenna asked eagerly.  “You’re having a good time?  You’re having fun?”

“Oh, I’m having a wonderful time, Mr. Tenna!  I don’t think I’ve had this much fun since…”  Asgore’s smile faltered a little.  “Well.  Never mind that; I’m having a ball with you and everyone here.  Couldn’t ask for nicer folks.”

“Wonderful!  Amazing!  Marvelous!  Meraviglioso!  Incroyable!  Wunderbar!”  Tenna was up on the very tips of his toes, nose threatening to burst into bloom.  “Another round, then?  Two?  Ten?!”

“Sure!  Why not?”  Asgore laughed.  “I don’t have anywhere to be.  And I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.”  Before Tenna could tell him he was literally bursting with ideas, Asgore went on.  “But so long as we’re taking a break - or whatever you call it in showbiz - could I get something to eat?”

“Why, absolutely!”  Tenna flung his arms wide with enthusiasm, then flicked his antennae down into their headset configuration.  “Craft Services!  Get with the cooking show staff right now…we’re going to put together a buffet fit for a king!”

“Oh, well, now, there’s no need for all that, but I’m certainly not going to turn it down.”  Asgore chuckled.  “This really is an incredible place you’ve got here, Mr. Tenna.”  As Tenna smiled to himself, exiting stage left so he could help pull everything together, he didn’t quite miss Asgore adding to himself, “I can’t wait to bring the kids here.”

And, well.  If that wasn’t just peanut butter in Tenna’s ports.

Mike noticed something was wrong, of course.  He tended to, especially when he looked like he did right now: short, round, not a cat.  It took him until the buffet was completely set up and they were standing on the edge of the green room watching Asgore enthusiastically tuck in to coax it out of Tenna, but he finally did.

“That’s what’s got your nose outta joint?” Mike asked incredulously.  “Aw, boss - that’s a compliment.  He wants to bring Kris and…whatever the tall one’s name is, F-something?  Anyway, he wants to bring ‘em in here to meet you.  You’d love that, don’t tell me you wouldn’t, those kids’re your whole world.”

“He wants to leave, Mike,” Tenna fretted, chewing the retractable claws of one hand through his glove.  “What if he decides he doesn’t want to come back, once he’s back in the Light World?  What if he decides he doesn’t love TV?  What if - what if he throws me away?!  Dumped on the curb with all the other washed-up stars, just waiting to be hauled off - ?”

“Boss,” Mike said again, sympathetically.  “That just ain’t gonna happen.  You know that ain’t gonna happen.”

“...yes, I do.  Because I won’t let it happen.”  Tenna took his glove-covered claws out of his mouth, clenched his hand into a determined fist.  “He can’t decide he doesn’t want to come back if he never leaves.”

“Hold on here a minute.”  Mike made a “time out” gesture.  “You can’t keep him here, boss.  How you even gonna do that?  Pop him in one of those little gumball things of yours?”

“No…no, of course not.  I’d never do something like that.”  Rubbing the bottom of his screen, Tenna stared broodingly out at the green room, where Asgore had just self-consciously loosened his armor a bit after his third plate.  A strip of white fur showed through.

While Toriel was the one who’d enjoyed cooking shows, Asgore had always been the half of the couple who’d liked food.  Tenna could probably count on one hand the number of times Asgore had sat down in front of him without something to munch on.  Popcorn, potato chips, cold cuts, ice cream, one of Toriel’s pies; he wasn’t picky, but that last one had been a special favorite.

Tenna had come home with the Dreemurrs when Asriel and Kris were both very young - and Asgore had been much slimmer.  He’d always been a large monster, broad-shouldered and tall even if you didn’t factor his horns in, but over the years, Tenna had watched him widen even further.  The weight had concentrated mostly in the heavy, roundly-firm belly that was currently bloated with three-and-a-half (and counting) loaded plates of the finest food the Dark World had to offer, but his arms, legs, chest, and behind had all thickened up, too.

Asgore had only gained more weight since moving out of the Dreemurr family household, but really not anywhere near as much as Tenna would have imagined, given how long it had been.  Without his wife’s cooking, he must not have been eating very well.  A hypothesis that was only further supported by the gusto with which he had dug into the buffet - and was still digging into it even after four plates now, muffling a belch automatically with one hand as he carried his fifth plate back to the sofa he’d claimed with the other.

Slowly, an idea began to spark to life in Tenna’s CRT.

First, he turned to a knot of Pippins standing nearby and scolded, “Just what are you all standing around for?!  Don’t make our guest get up, go get Asgore whatever he wants!  Go, go, go!”  As he punctuated the last bit with a series of brisk claps, the Pippins looked looked at Mike as if somehow expecting sympathy, but only found a, “C’mon, what the boss said!  You got dust bunnies for brains or what?”

As the Pippins trooped grudgingly off, Tenna turned to Mike and told him, “Call Craft Services again for me, will you?  Tell them to start making butterscotch pies…heavy on the butter.”

“Now, that’s a great idea,” Mike said encouragingly.  “Set out all his old favorites.  If this is the only place he can get ‘em, he’ll be sure to come back, huh?  If he even leaves at all.”

“Sure,” Tenna said distractedly, “exactly what I was thinking.”

“You’re sure this is safe for me to eat?” Grace could not keep the doubt out of his voice as he stared down at the package that Rocky had just passed through to him as it slowly off-gassed. It was pretty simple: a wrapper that was more like a box that unfolded, to minimize contamination, and inside, a small slab of matter. Engineered taumoeba and a few other ingredients. Basically an alien protein bar.

“Rocky sure. Smell funny because Rocky atmosphere. No way around.”

“Yeah, bud, I know that. Obviously.” Grace had long since gotten used to the smell of ammonia; he barely even noticed it anymore, unless the concentration in the air was high enough to burn his lungs. Which it probably would’ve been if he’d leaned in to take a big whiff of the thing, which he wasn’t going to do, because he wasn’t stupid...despite what he suspected Rocky thought about him sometimes. “It’s just. Y’know. We know I can’t eat your food…”

“This not Rocky food. Grace food. Rocky make.”

“I know, I was there, but - ”

“Grace not trust Rocky, question?”

“I did not say that. You know I didn’t say that.”

“Grace complain constant about taumoeba taste. Loud loud loud. Bitch like hatchling. Statement.” Wow, did Grace ever regret adding profanity to the translator. He was getting closer to fluency every single day, but...he was going to hear that word like that forever, because it was definitely different from “whine” and “complain” and “cry.” Which Rocky also used frequently in relation to him. “Grace not grateful, question?”

“I said thank you! I’m just – you can’t blame me for being a little nervous about it.”

“Rocky understand human biology statement. Mate biologist. Human not that hard.” Rocky had been sitting expectantly, limbs folded under his carapace, but now he rose to his feet, impatient and commanding. “Grace eat now. Rocky watch.”

“Pervert,” Grace muttered as he reached out to test whether or not the bar had cooled down enough for him to eat it.

“Not know word.”

“Tell you later. But just remember that if you kill me, your biologist mate is gonna be mad.”

“Study corpse. But never let Grace die, statement.”

The bar was cool enough, and most of the ammonia was gone, so Grace raised it to his mouth and took a bite. He might not have if he weren’t sort of desperate, but...he was already getting really, really sick of taumoeba, and he’d only started incorporating the stuff into his diet a couple weeks ago. They had years to go. If this could break up the flavor profile a little, not to mention stave off the worst of the malnutrition side effects he knew were coming down the line, he might marry Rocky.

Who was...already married. Crud. Grace kept forgetting that and then getting a little more disappointed every time he remembered. He’d decided he wasn’t going to think about why.

He chewed. The texture was fine. Firm, almost fudge-like, but not sticky. It tasted better than taumoeba, but that wasn’t a high bar. It didn’t taste better than pretty much anything else he could think of. It really was like a protein bar.

The weirdest part was that it tasted almost kind of...fruity? A little sweet, a little sour, a lot artificial. He wondered how Rocky had done that, or if he’d even done it on purpose, but wasn’t sure how to ask him. Eridians didn’t really have “taste” the same way that humans did.

Rocky listened intently. “Good?”

“Fine,” Grace replied, swallowing the last bite and wiping a hand across his mouth. “I can eat it.” Then, as it dawned on him that he was not going to spend the next three and a half years eating nothing but unadulterated taumoeba, he had to swallow back a sudden urge to weep. Space had made him tearier. “Th...thank you, Rocky.”

“Good. Grace welcome.” Rocky had been in a tense position; as Grace watched, he settled his carapace back into a more relaxed carriage between his legs. For something without a face, he sure was expressive. “Tell how digest, then make more.”

Most of the poisonous elements in Rocky’s food were things that would cause pretty immediate symptoms, so when twenty minutes passed without nausea, abdominal pain, or burns in his mouth, Grace relaxed. Still, as they both went back to work, he made a point to consciously check in periodically with his body. If he hadn’t been, he might not have noticed what was going on with his stomach until it ripped through his waistband.

As it was, he noted a faint pressure, and looked down at his abdomen, only to find it...inflated. Frowning, he lifted his shirt to look at it. Yeah, he was pretty sure that he was bloated. Not that he spent a lot of time looking at his stomach when it wasn’t bloated, so he wasn’t positive. He really should be more aware of his body. Maybe it’d be a good idea to look at all the parts he could see when he was sure nothing was wrong with them so he’d be able to better compare. But just as he was considering that particular project and how it could actually be a big medical help in his upcoming and non-optional experiment in starvation, he realized that he actually did know for a fact he was bloated. Because he could see it getting bigger as he watched.

“Uhhhh…” He glanced over his shoulder. “Rock?”

Rocky was there almost immediately, ball loudly clattering. “What wrong?” But he didn’t really have to ask, because the problem was pretty immediately obvious. Come to think of it, Grace should have called Rocky over immediately, he probably had his entire body map and all of his normal proportions perfectly memorized. He switched immediately to a better question. “Pain?”

“N – no? I-I mean, I don’t think so, but I - ” Grace had begun to hyperventilate, and his eyes stung: the tears were back. “Wow, this is not normal!”

“Grace stupid when scared. Obviously not normal.” Rocky’s tone was somehow businesslike as he rolled in a quick circle around Grace, nudging lab equipment out of the way, as was his wont. “Swelling not inflammation. Not sure what is, sound strange. Not limited to digestive system. Maybe not Rocky Grace-food, wonder?”

“What the heck else could it possibly be from?” Grace snapped. He dropped his shirt; it stayed where it was, rolled up to his chest, because his abdomen had rounded too far out for it to cover him anymore. He put both hands on it, felt them move apart. It didn’t hurt. It felt weird, but there was no gas pain, no cramping, not even a straining of his skin. No, it hurt a little, there was pressure down around his – nope, that’d been his waistband, and the elastic had just snapped. Shoot. He should’ve thought and took it off, those were the only pair of track pants within twelve light years. He was definitely going to cry now. “Can’t you see – hear what it is? What’s inside me?!”

“Rocky said, not sure - ”

“I-is it juice?!” Stupid question, but this was a stupid situation. And terrifying. Rocky had been right, it wasn’t just limited to his stomach. He could feel his pants getting tighter around his thighs, his shirt around his chest and arms. He could see his fingers thickening. He opened and closed one hand several times, and on each successive fist, it grew more difficult.

“...why would Grace be filled with juice, question?”

“Well, Rocky, ‘cause apparently you turned me into a blueberry!”

“Grace not make sense. Stupid when scared.”

“Of course I’m freaking scared, I - ” Just in time, as he realized his glasses were getting tight, Grace whipped them off his face and dropped them onto the nearest lab bench with a clatter. Hard to be gentle, when he couldn’t get close to it because of the size of his belly and hips, and could hardly move his hands and arms. Not that he was probably going to need glasses in a minute. “I-I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I’m – I’m gonna explode!”

And for a long, horrible second, they waited, because there wasn’t anything else they could do. Well, there was one thing: Rocky pressed his ball, and himself inside of it, as close to Grace as he could get. Grace appreciated that, as he sobbed with fear.

But he didn’t explode. He just blew up. Literally.

Rocky’s xenonite ball scooted audibly backwards across the floor as Grace’s expansion pushed him. Grace squeezed his eyes shut, because of all the last sights to have, his own blood and guts splattered all over the inside of the Hail Mary ranked pretty low. He felt his arms lift as his sides pushed them up, his legs spread as his thighs pushed each other apart, his shoulders squeeze his head in place. He felt pressure all around him, increasing, digging into him.

And then it just...stopped.

After a few moments where the only noises were Grace’s own panicked breathing and soft, crooning chirps from Rocky, he cracked an eye. He was reminded of the first time that Rocky had tried to send him something from the Blip-A and he’d convinced himself it was a bomb, curling into a fetal position in zero-G only for nothing to happen. Except this time, something had definitely happened. Besides the obvious, his vision had gone wrong, something ruptured inside of his eye, a blurry pink blob eclipsing half of his lower -

Oh, wait. That was his cheek. His face had swollen up with the rest of him.

Grace blinked both eyes open, and took slow stock. He should have, he realized, left the lab and moved into the mental health module, the most open area on the ship, because he was pretty sure he was wedged in place. He could feel equipment digging into him, sides and belly. Experimentally, he tried to move, and nope: no good. Not that he probably could have anyway. It felt like not only were his limbs rigid with...whatever it was had bloated him out, his clothes were so tight were they hadn’t torn that it was practically like a straitjacket.

His cardigan hadn’t ripped. He felt an enormous burst – no, wait, use a different word, don’t think the “b” word right now, or any sharp thoughts. He felt an enormous rush of relief at that.

“Rocky?” His tongue hadn’t inflated, thankfully. He could speak.

“Grace not explode!” Rocky’s relief was evident in the high tone of his notes. “Grace hurt, question?”

The ship's system chimed. "Foreign object detected in laboratory."

"No...no, Mary, that's me. Dr. Grace." He cleared his throat, focused on Rocky's question. “Uh, no, buddy, I don’t think so, but...pretty sure I’m stuck.” As the fear began to wear off, other emotions crept in to replace it. “What was in that bar?”

“Normal things. Things Grace like. Said was good.”

“Okay, clearly not normal things, and I don’t like this, and - ” As they often did in moments of stress, Grace’s years of teaching kicked in, and he almost told Rocky he wouldn’t be mad if he were just honest with him. But that wasn’t true at all. “I can’t believe you did this to me!”

“Grace fine. Rocky fix.” Grace felt insistent nudging at one of his legs.

“Rocky fix how?!”

“Rocky fix!” With an enormous push, Rocky popped him free, and then – still in his xenonite ball – began to literally roll him. And there was nothing Grace could do about it.

“I am telling Adrian,” Grace declared, voice muffled by what was either his neck or his chest, he’d kind of lost track. “The second we land on Erid, there’s gonna be a call home - ”

It wasn't exactly a mystery, how Elias had gotten fat, though Martin doubted he'd planned on it.

The situation had dragged on much longer than Martin suspected he’d thought it would when he’d first found him.  He’d come up to get some receipts signed, was sent in by Rosie, opened the door, and then paused, not seeing Elias anywhere.

“Ah, Martin.  Down here.”

Martin looked at Elias’s desk, and there he was, standing on the edge.  Really no taller than one of the fountain pens in his set, expression on his face a mixture of irritation, embarrassment, and relief.  Martin stared at him a moment, the door creaking itself closed behind him, then for some reason asked, “D’you - want me to get Jon?”

“No, let’s not distract him with this.  I think you’re more than capable.”  Elias sighed.  “Truth be told, I’m rather glad it was you who found me.”

“Oh, well.  Thank you.”  Martin thought that was a compliment, at least.  “Um, what…what happened to you, exactly?”  Obviously, after the worms, he was fully aware that a lot of things he’d once thought were impossible were, in fact, all too likely to happen to him specifically, but finding his boss’s boss suddenly six inches tall was still something of a shock.

“You’re familiar with the Library of Jurgen Leitner?”

“Oh, yes, o-of course.  The cursed books.”

“As good a term for them as any, I suppose.”  Elias sighed again.  “We received a first-edition copy of Gulliver’s Travels in the post, and I failed to notice the frontispiece.”

Shouldn’t you know better than that?  Martin didn’t say it out loud.  No need to add insult to injury.  Instead, he asked, “How can I help?”

Apparently, Elias had just been waiting for him to ask.  “You’ll find the book on the floor behind my desk.  Don’t look at it or touch it barehanded, but if you could rewrap it, label it, and send it down to Artifact Storage?”

That task accomplished, Elias had Martin retrieve and unlock his phone for him (the PIN was “1818”), and then Martin sat and watched as Elias tapped clumsily away at the screen with one minuscule hand.  He sent out an Institute-wide email informing everyone he was taking a leave of absence for health reasons and apologizing for the abruptness, then made a series of phone calls.  The tersest and most important-seeming was to a Peter Lukas, whose last name Martin vaguely recognized from the donor placards in the lobby; apparently, he would be stepping in as interim director.

“Now what?” Martin asked once Elias had finished.  He was troubled; he’d assumed Elias would know how to remedy his physical situation, which didn’t actually seem to be the case.  Martin wasn’t really sure why he’d thought that, considering Elias hadn’t exactly met any of the other supernatural threats the Institute had faced with spectacular confidence.

“Now…”  Elias sat down with a grunt, leaning back against his nameplate as he allowed his legs to dangle over the edge of the desk.  “I wait for one of my contacts to get back to me with a solution, and try to find one myself in the meantime.”

“All right,” Martin said, then, “Do you want me to leave you here, then, or, um…give you to Peter when he - ?”

“Absolutely not.”  Elias interrupted him with startling vehemence then, a moment later, said, “I have an enormous favor to ask you, Martin.”

Elias’s keys, in his trousers when he opened the book, had shrunk with him, but - from Martin’s shirt pocket, where he’d ridden all the way to his flat - he directed him to the spare.  While this endured, Martin would be living at Elias’s place and tending to him, since he couldn’t very well take care of himself at his current size.  Upon seeing that Elias’s entryway was nearly bigger than his entire flat, Martin agreed much more readily than he’d been planning to.

Martin helped Elias replace everything that had been in his shrunken wallet so he could use his cards at his order, fashioned comfortable little robes for him out of his handkerchiefs, and squared his presence away with building management.  (He introduced himself as Elias’s nephew, caring for him during an extended illness, and felt quite pleased by the overall Victorian-novel-ness of that fabrication.  Not that it mattered, as the manager immediately formed his own humiliating ideas about the nature of their relationship.)  In the morning, before leaving for work, he ensured Elias’s phone was charged, then left him in the living room with it and plenty of food.

That, along with drawing hot baths for him in the sink, ought to have been where Martin’s duties to Elias ended.  But as it turned out, Elias (at work aloof and laissez-faire, at least when it came to the archives) wanted a higher degree of intimacy than Martin had been expecting.

“...hold you?”  Martin stared down at him.

“Well, not ‘hold,’ as such.  You can simply place me on your knee, if you like.  Or your shoulder.”

Martin’s first instinct was to say no.  They ought to maintain at least some professionalism, right?  But Elias looked up at him with big gray eyes, and Martin was suddenly very aware of the fact he was a man at the tail end of middle age, all alone, whose very favorite activity in the entire world was filling out spreadsheets and tables, and who had had something awful and inexplicable happen to his body.

And Martin knew what that was like.  Some parts of it, at least.

So he put Elias in his lap, and Elias leaned comfortably up against his belly, and Martin put the television on for him while he read.  And that became their nightly ritual.  Really, the hardest part was not launching him across the room when he stood up, because that was when Elias was still so light Martin could forget he was even there.

Elias did try to stay busy, at least to begin with; to remain firmly involved in the Institute’s day-to-day even from afar.  That lasted until Peter Lukas, a pale and oddly hollow man even larger than Martin, stopped in the hall and told him affably, “You might tell little insects that if they don’t want to be squashed, they’ll stop buzzing at me every five minutes.  And that if they wanted to run their own damn Institute, they shouldn’t have opened a bloody Leitner, should they?”

Martin passed the message on, which left Elias with nothing much (besides idle entertainment) but his search for a cure for his condition.  An activity which to Martin, on those few occasions where he observed it, looked an awful lot like sitting and staring blankly off into space for hours on end.

And eating.

Martin couldn’t blame him.  He was bored, the food was there.  And since he couldn’t leave him with too much of anything perishable, most of what Elias was left with during the day was junk food and baked goods.

(You might argue Martin didn’t need to leave him so much, or that he could have found healthier options.  Part of Martin certainly did.  But as the rest of Martin argued back, Elias was a grown…well, an adult.  He could have asked for something different.  He certainly could have avoided stuffing his face all day.)

So, yes: Elias was getting fat, and it was certainly no wonder.

Of course it was hard to tell too much in his loose-fitting handkerchief robes, but Martin couldn’t miss the dents picked out of cakes and loaves left on the coffee table for Elias’s browsing, nor the belching, nor the sleepy, satisfied expression on his face when he got home from work.  Martin could not remember the last time he’d come back to Elias’s flat and found him anything less than stuffed to the gills.  His face was unmistakably rounder, and he felt heavier when Martin picked him up.  And he could feel Elias’s little bottom growing when he sat on him, wider and rounder practically by the day.

The longer this whole thing dragged on, the lazier Elias got.  Where he’d at least once made an effort to reach things in his flat on his own, only asking for assistance when he absolutely had to, he began to just ask Martin to carry him.  Then he stopped stepping into his hand.  He simply reclined on the cushion Martin had set on the coffee table, one hand on the visible shape of his bloated gut, and waited to be picked up.

It went even further than that.  Elias still took dinner with Martin, and often dessert as well despite the fact he’d spent all day gorging himself and not doing much else, and one night as they ate takeaway, Elias asked Martin for another chip.  But when Martin held it out to him, he did not take it.  Just opened his mouth, and waited patiently.

There was a lot Martin could have said.  A lot he wanted to say.  But instead, he bit his lip, crossed his legs, and slowly fed Elias the chip, as if he were a baby bird.  He watched him steadily plow through the entire thing, crispy outside, fluffy white inside, all the way to the golden-brown tip.  And after that had disappeared into him, Elias’s tiny tongue came out and flicked against the pad of Martin’s index, greedily chasing salt and grease through the grooves of his fingerprint.

Martin swallowed hard.

Elias sat back with a groan, both hands on his belly.  “Ahhh…maybe that was a bit too much.  You really ought to be more careful about…overfeeding me, Martin, it’s…gotten quite bad lately.”

And there was a lot more Martin could have said there, but he just reached out and picked Elias up.  Elias, sodden and heavy, settled immediately into his hand.  And when Martin began to rub his belly with his thumb, feeling the taut bloat beneath the half-inch or so of fat, Elias stretched luxuriously out, arms above his head, and groaned shamelessly.  His expression was so rapturous Martin almost felt uncomfortable looking at him.

Elias let Martin rub a few belches out of him, then murmured, “I’m thirsty.”  So Martin brought him to his own paper cup of soda and, with Elias still lazing in one hand, used the other to guide the jointed straw down into his mouth.

Elias nursed greedily, swallow after swallow.  Martin felt him grow heavier in his palm, watched his gut inflate bit by bit.  Until a length of paisley-patterned silk slipped free of it and Elias was exposed from navel to knee.

He was bottom-heavy, had gained an awful lot of weight in his hips and thighs.  Just not quite enough to fully obscure the dusky little nub of his erect cock, poking out of a thatch of salt and pepper hair and curved snugly against the underside of his belly, a little star of precome gleaming from beneath his foreskin.

When Elias unlatched with a soft groan, Martin told him, “I’m going to feed you dessert now.  You fat, greedy little thing,” and was shocked by the confidence in his own voice.

The whole thing about Project Hail Mary was that they were supposed to be doing whatever was necessary as fast as possible. That was kind of the point – of the authority Stratt had been given, of the seemingly-bottomless well of funding, of the lack of formal peer review and oversight for everything they were doing. There weren’t supposed to be speedbumps or red tape.

So why (and Grace still hadn’t quite been able to figure this out) were there so many goshdarn dinners and banquets and luncheons and meetings?

And why was he expected to go to most of them?

(Of course he had answers to both questions. “Everyone wants a say in saving the world, and letting the powerful feel like they’re contributing in the way they know best reduces the possibility of their challenging our work,” Stratt said calmly. “And you’re the man who first studied and bred Astrophage, Dr. Grace. You’re not quite the face of the project, but...you’re at least a feature.” He just didn’t like either of them.)

They went to Tokyo, to Nairobi, to Moscow, to Bogota. Mexico City and Chicago and Paris, Toronto and Melbourne and Lima and Rome and Johannesburg and Beijing and Cairo and Berlin. They took jets, of course. Sometimes private, sometimes military, and met with people with vaguely-familiar names and faces and important-sounding titles who had also jetted in from wherever they had actual power. Because of course they couldn’t just meet them on the boat, where everyone was doing their jobs.

“These meetings might actually be useful,” Grace muttered to Stratt through a full mouth, in between being asked – yet again – to answer questions he had not only answered fifteen times before for some of the same people, but that were also answered in pretty much everything the Project had published in the last year. “I mean, if we’re trying to speed up global warming…”

“Eat your foie gras, Dr. Grace,” Stratt replied.

And he did, feeling a little guilty as he did so, but not enough not to eat it. That was the one silver lining: the food was good. They’d had yet to go somewhere it wasn’t. But there was a flipside to that silver lining (and that didn’t make sense, but Grace had never met a metaphor he couldn’t torture). The food was a little too good, and there was a little too much of it. Or a lot.

“What’s wrong, Dr. Grace? Is the food not to your liking?”

The first time they had two lunch meetings, in one day, in the same city, within an hour of each other, Grace tried to decline. That clearly offended the interior secretary of the country they were in, who glared at him with barely-veiled hostility...and who, Grace remembered a little too late, already wasn’t a fan of the Project, and could single-handedly veto the sale of a whole bunch of rare earth minerals they needed. It’d go through eventually, of course, there was no stopping anything forever, but how much time would that take? How much would it slow everyone down? How many lives would it cost?

He half-expected Stratt to elbow him, but she didn’t. She seemed to have a greater degree of faith in his ability to make the right choice than he did. So he cleared his throat, smiled, apologized, and ate. And ate, and ate, and ate, because it was a multi-course meal, and before the end of it, he’d had to loosen his belt, and unbutton his slacks.

“We have a UN banquet tonight,” Stratt stated as they boarded the jet again, Grace trying not to waddle and wondering where she put it all. They’d been in exactly the same meetings today, after all. “In Stockholm.”

“Wake me up when we get there,” Grace mumbled, extremely grateful to be on a Learjet rather than an F-35 as he took his glasses off and stretched out on the sofa.

“You’re not going to try to do any work on the flight? We have a few hours.”

“Nng.”

“Ryland?” She used his first name so rarely – everyone did – that even though he could barely keep his eyes open, he lifted his head and squinted at her as she sat down nearby, taking out her laptop. “In the future, please keep in mind that you are expected to eat at these meetings. All of them. Act accordingly.”

He dropped his head back down with a defeated sigh. Well, that wasn’t so bad. Certainly an easier ask than being the first person to work with Astrophage when they’d thought there was a good chance it could kill human beings, and he’d done that without complaining. Much.

Grace knew how to gorge himself. He worked as a teacher and lived alone in a city with one of the highest costs of living in the entire country...and all that was before you considered the student loans he was definitely going to die before repaying. You didn’t keep your head above water doing that unless you were creative. Schools loved parties and potlucks, and he’d quickly learned how to use those to stretch his meager grocery budget. By stuffing himself to the point he could barely walk, of course. You didn’t want to be the guy who took home leftovers without asking.

He was just basically doing that every day, now. For weeks at a time. There were breaks, during which he and Stratt were able to get actual work done, and then all of a sudden a tribunal would be called, or a review board, or a panel, and then that would trigger three dozen people all over the world realizing they also needed to talk to the head of Project Hail Mary and the man who’d increasingly begun to suspect he was her emotional support animal right now, and it would start all over again.

He should’ve seen it coming. Calories in, calories out, a deceptively simple equation when uncomplicated by genetic disorders and hormone imbalances, which it was for him; outside of the myopia, his was about as standard as the human body came. And he wasn’t biking to and from work anymore, uphill both ways. All-nighters and stress and travel didn’t burn nearly as many calories as they would have in a fair universe. It wasn’t as if he were eating great even outside the banquets.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him when Stratt paused after one of the more formal events, looked the tuxedo she’d had tailored for him up and down with a critical eye, and said, “When you take it off, give it to me.” But it did.

Grace muffled a belch with one fist. “Why?”

“It needs to be let out. Significantly. If not replaced, but I’m no tailor; we should get you measured again.”

“You think my measurements have changed?”

“You’ve burst a button.”

He’d been really hoping his cummerbund would hide that. Hopefully no one else had noticed. “It’s just because I’m full. This is, like, the fifth meal I’ve had - ”

“It’s not,” Stratt said implacably, tone entirely neutral.

Grace could not really muster up a glare; he didn’t have the energy. He tried for what he hoped was an appropriately offended look, although he wasn’t even sure what the appropriate level of offense for this kind of thing was. “Wh – are you calling me fat?”

“No,” Stratt replied, striding ahead of him, low, sensible heels clicking, “but you have a gut. Have had for some time.”

And she was right: he did. Rounded against his buttons, near-liquid in its softness, threatening to spill over his belt. When he took his pants off at the end of the day, there was an angry red line all the way around his middle, because he had love handles, too. And it wasn’t just his middle. He was lucky he hadn’t split a seam over his thigh or hip. Or behind, because that seemed to be keeping pace with the front of him.

He still didn’t feel offended, per se, but there was definitely embarrassment. He could feel himself blushing, nearly hot enough to fog his glasses. Stratt didn’t see, but he knew she wouldn’t have commented on it if she had. Besides maybe telling him not to cry, which would have been useless, because he wasn’t going to. Not over getting fat off of the best food the world had to offer. Not over the fact he was probably going to get fatter before this was all over.

“There is a gym on the ship,” she offered over her shoulder.

“Like any of us have time for that,” Grace muttered.