Sundry and Assorted Fanfictions

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.

When Martin had first realized he’d fallen for his boss, he was aware of all manner of barriers to an actual relationship.  That was part of the appeal, really; made it safe.  There was the fact that Jon was, of course, his boss.  The undeniable reality he did not like Martin, which was understandable, Martin knew he wasn’t terribly good at his job.  The state of the archives, which left so little time for anything but work.

He would never in a million years have considered Jon’s appearance an obstacle.  How ironic, then, that it seemed to be the only one Jon was concerned with.

“Do you really?” Jon asked with a soft, tired chuckle, the first time Martin told him he loved him outside of the Lonely, when they had half a moment to breathe.  Jon gestured to himself.  “This?”

“Yes,” Martin replied, baffled.  “Of course, Jon.”  And the conversation moved on, because there were so many other things to deal with just then, and so Martin didn’t actually learn what the problem was until much later.

They were together, they were alone, but Jon flinched from Martin’s touch, would not undress in front of him.  They shared a bed, but Jon slept huddled up on the far side, out of Martin’s reach.  And Martin had never been with anyone like Jon before (not that many people otherwise, either), so he figured that was normal.  Or at least normal for Jon.  It may not have been exactly what Martin wanted, but he was so happy to be with him, so happy Jon was happy, that he was perfectly content.  At least until he made a casual mention of the behavior to Georgie, a sort of wry camaraderie between two people who loved the same man, and she looked at him with such bafflement Martin’s entire face pinkened.

Dinner that night was awkward.  Jon picked at what Martin had made, as he so often did; how had Martin never noticed that before?  Finally, Martin cleared his throat and broke the silence.  Before, he might not have, but…he wasn’t that person anymore, and hadn’t been in some time.

“So do you not like men, then?” Martin asked.  “Is that it?”

Jon looked up, startled.  “What?”

“Are you only with me because you feel you owe me?”  Martin swallowed.  “Or because you feel sorry for me?  Poor, lonely Martin?”

“Of course not!  Martin, I - I like men, I - ”

“So it’s just me.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Jon snapped, on the defensive.  Martin probably could have approached this better, but he was hurt.  “What have I done to make you feel as if I don’t want you here?”

“Oh - oh my god, what haven’t you done?!” Martin exclaimed.  “I spoke to Georgie today.  She said when you were with her, you two kissed, and cuddled, and…”  He trailed off.  “Jon, you won’t even let me hug you.  The last time we touched each other was in the bloody Lonely.”

Jon’s anger had drained completely away, and now he looked…embarrassed.  Ashamed.  Self-conscious and guilty, a combination Martin parsed almost instantly because of his own familiarity with it.  “I was a lot younger then, Martin.”

“So…what, you just don’t like that sort of thing anymore?”

“No, you won’t like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t look like I did when I was twenty-two.”  Jon stabbed aggressively at the potatoes on his plate, breaking them apart but not bringing them to his mouth.

“No one does,” Martin said, even more confused now.  “That’s how it works.”

“Martin, I’m not even entirely sure why you wanted to be with me in the first place.”  Jon was irritated.  “You’ll have to forgive me if I can’t quite get my head around your wanting to cuddle with me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Jon snorted.  ‘Of course not.  You look like that.”

Martin sat up straight, affronted.  He knew he didn’t turn heads.  He’d been self-conscious of his round face, his weak chin, his high voice for as long as he could remember.  He just hadn’t thought Jon cared about any of that.  His mistake, apparently.

“You’re insulting me now, then?”

“No, Martin, exactly the opposite, I’m - ”  Jon sat back in his chair, rubbing his hands down his face.  He let out a frustrated sigh as he dropped them.  “Look.  Can we at least agree I’m not exactly what anyone would call the most attractive man on earth?”

Martin was, of course, no stranger whatsoever to insecurity.  But it baffled him when it came to Jon - educated, accomplished, a man who’d saved multiple lives and the world besides.  And he supposed, until that moment, he had never fully understood just how much love could change someone’s appearance in your eyes.  Or maybe it wasn’t even that.  Maybe Jon was just wrong.

“No,” Martin said.  “I don’t think we can.”

Jon’s sigh was disgusted.  Martin hurried to continue before he could say anything.

“I’m sorry,” he told him, even though he most definitely wasn’t.  “But you don’t get to tell me what I want or what I’m attracted to.”  Then, a bit petulantly: “You’re not my boss anymore.”

Jon sighed again.  “Martin - ”

“No.  You chose me.”  Martin squeezed his hands into fists, staring across the table.  “You went all the way into the Lonely - you killed someone to do it.  Didn’t you?”  And off of Jon’s grudging nod: “Right.  So let me choose you.  The way I want to.”

And that did not fix it, of course.  Because that wasn’t the way things worked.  Jon lay against Martin for a bit that night, even let him wrap an arm over the broad, warm heaviness of his gut, but it lasted only moments before he squirmed back over to the other side of the bed.  One nice speech couldn’t tear down the kind of walls Jon had built up any more than a single tidal wave could knock down a mountain.

But Martin was gentle and relentless as the rain, which certainly could wear away stone.

He kissed the top of Jon’s head when he was sitting down, peppering his spreading temples, nuzzling into the hair where it’d grown thin and soft on the crown.  He did not allow Jon’s reflexive waving him away each and every time to put him off.  When Martin finally convinced Jon to take a shower together, he fitted them against each other once they were both scrubbed clean, his chin atop Jon’s head even though they were quite close in height, his arms wrapped round him and hands on his belly.  Jon groaned, but bore it for nearly thirty full seconds.  In bed, Martin reached out across the gulf of mattress and sheets and took his hand, rubbing his thumb across rounded knuckles and long, thick fingers, and Jon did not pull away until he was ready to fall asleep.

“Why do you never eat much when I cook?” Martin asked one day.  “Or when you do, come to think of it…or when we get takeaway.”

“Well, I, ah.  Gained…quite a bit of weight, after I woke up from my coma.”  Jon put a hand gingerly on the round shape of his belly inside his jumper.  “Surely you noticed?”

“I did,” Martin said, hoping that even if his tone didn’t make the nature of his noticing clear, Jon would Know, even as weak as that particular skill was growing these days.  One or both of the two must’ve worked, because Jon blushed all the way up onto his scalp.

“R-right.  Well.”  He cleared his throat, trying to regain the composure Martin had rattled.  “Don’t have much time for exercise just now, but I figured the least I could do is try not to gain any more.”

“What, the least you can do is starve yourself?” Martin all but exclaimed.

“Well, it’s not healthy to be - ”

“And you think going hungry, after everything else your body’s been through, is?”  Martin folded his arms over his chest.  “Is that really your reasoning?  Or are you afraid of how you’ll look?  What I’ll think?”  He arched an eyebrow.  “Because I bet I can answer both.”

“Not everything’s about you, Martin,” Jon muttered irritatedly.

It’d be nice if something was for once.  Martin kept it unsaid.  And was glad he did, because that night, Jon not only cleaned his plate of Martin’s pasta: he came back for seconds.

Martin kissed.  He touched.  He complimented.  They lived their lives, ate, read, moved, both went back to work in different jobs, bought new clothes, went out on dates, went out with friends, had serious discussions regarding the future.  And one night, just as Martin was about to fall asleep, Jon reached out, and took his hand again, so long after he’d pulled it away.

Martin was instantly wide awake.  Jon tugged at him.  Martin rolled over, and met him in the middle of the bed, which felt so strangely firm and springy because they never slept there.  Jon blinked sleepily at him, beautiful in the dark as he was the light.

The thing about hybrids was that they were rare. Most people had seen at least a few, but usually only domesticated species. Cats, dogs. Occasionally a bird or some kind of livestock cross. So no one on the Hail Mary team knew quite what to do with Dr. Grace, who was of very obvious red fox extraction. Ears whose black and rusty-red fur faded down into the gold of his hair, a thick tail threaded through the back of his pants whose fur was only growing in thicker in the chill off the ocean. Occasional yips, growls, and other vocalizations. And that wasn’t even getting into his teeth, or the luxurious ruff that poked up above the collar of his shirts.

It wasn’t like he was actually a wild animal. Hybrids – especially those crossed with protected species – had all the same rights as full-blooded human beings, for the most part. And despite jokes to the effect, Eva Stratt did not have him on a (literal, at least) leash. But they were...underrepresented in certain fields, to say the least. Academia, hard science especially, was one of them, unless you were counting test subjects.

Things could have gone differently, if Dr. Grace had been more aggressive (as many of them knew he had been in the past – they’d had to muzzle him at the UNESCO conference that he’d torched his career at for a reason, after all) and less personable. If they hadn’t all been under so much pressure. If he hadn’t been so vital to the work, if not for his skills, then for his relationship with Stratt. If he’d been crossed with something less cute.

But Dr. Grace was extremely personable, and important, and very, very cute. And very, as the team quickly discovered, food-motivated.

“He’s got a sweet tooth,” one of the federal agents who’d helped him with the initial astrophage breeding experiments stated. “Loves sour stuff. Kinda like a big kid...no wonder he was such a popular teacher.” He shrugged. “I went and bought him a whole bunch of stuff from the candy aisle whenever it seemed like he was onto something. That might help out here, too.”

Grace easily caught Skittles tossed to him underhand from across the conference table when he asked a good question or offered up useful insight. He happily took the extra desserts passed to him in the canteen when they’d had a particularly good day. If he accompanied Stratt somewhere (and he almost always did, if it had anything to do with the scientific side of the project), it was inevitable she’d pick something up for him. Soda, ice cream, a candy bar, a local pastry in Paris, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro. A reward for being on his best behavior...a reward even when he wasn’t. The word “mascot” made the rounds.

He’d been plainly stressed, they all were, but that seemed to slowly melt away, the occasions when he bared his teeth or growled or pinned his ears back and then immediately looked mortified becoming fewer and further between as he immersed himself in the work...and the positive reinforcement. As for the rest of the team, just his presence seemed to help. He was, as previously mentioned, very personable, and very cute. Most of the team could touch him now, not just Stratt, and his hair was soft between and around his ears. And he wasn’t a catboy, foxes did not purr per se, but the noises he made when he was packed so full of sugar he had to reach down and undo his fly, panting softly, were, frankly, delightful. Almost as delightful as the way he’d started to automatically open his mouth for a reward whenever he answered a question, leaning expectantly forward.

Foxes were not domesticated, but Dr. Grace hadn’t been hard to condition. Even accidentally.

He actually seemed to do better work the better-fed he was. They were scientists. They took note of that, and acted accordingly.

Dr. Grace had mentioned, back home, biking to work. Mainly because he didn’t own a car and couldn’t afford one or its upkeep on his teacher’s salary, but nevertheless, that burned a lot calories. He was very obviously not exercising here. Most labwork and meetings were sedentary. He traveled frequently with Stratt, but tended to spend those flights either sleeping or eating (often with his head in her lap, for both activities). The pressure was immense, it was incredibly stressful still for them all, they were losing sleep and weight...because of course none of them were eating nearly as much as Dr. Grace, the most pampered, spoiled member of the team.

The weight he was quickly putting on wasn’t immediately apparent. He favored soft, comfortable, oversized clothing, T-shirts and cardigans and vests and sweaters and baggy pants, even when dressed in what he obviously thought was his best for special occasions. But eventually, people began to take notice. The way his shirt rode up when he stretched (as he did frequently and on all fours) to expose a burgeoning belly and love handles, jiggling with the motion. The way his thighs and hips thickened, and his face grew slightly rounder. But of course they didn’t stop feeding him, and he didn’t stop eating, until he had enough of a gut to spill over his waistband and make it hard for him to tug his shirts down over it.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Eva Stratt stated to most of the collected team. Grace stood next to her, fiercely blushing, ears held flat and low and tail lashing behind him, both hands on the hem of his shirt to keep his overfed belly covered. “Dr. Grace is a colleague, not a pet.” No one dared bring up the fact that Grace spent an awful lot of his downtime curled up in a bed in Stratt’s office, close enough to her desk to make reaching down to scratch behind his ears easy. “The overfeeding stops now.”

There was a general chorus of chastened disagreement. Dr. Grace’s wardrobe was updated (in size only, not style), and soon Stratt deemed him fit to accompany her again. He followed her up onto the waiting jet.

He hadn’t lost any weight. In fact, he was waddling, and huffed out a soft grunt of effort as he lowered himself down next to her. There may have been a sloshing noise from his stomach, as of something overfilled. Stratt said nothing, just reached into her bag, pulled out a candy bar, and meticulously peeled back the wrapper to snap off a square of chocolate.

“I thought you weren’t going to overfeed me anymore,” Grace said, even as he automatically opened his mouth.