#fat!jon

Ultimately, Peter had lost his bet with Elias, yes.  (Which wasn’t entirely fair, given you could very easily argue he had gotten one of Elias’s employees to pledge themselves to the Lonely or at least to Peter, but he did not think Elias was in the mood to be debated at the moment, nor would he be at any point in the next few decades.)  Peter did not have the Institute, he did not have the Panopticon, and most infuriatingly of all: Elias was still alive.

But all told, Peter was simply not that upset.  Elias’s precious Archivist was quite the fair consolation prize.

The overall details had been tedious and entirely alien to Peter.  There was something between Martin and Jon, which he had been aware of, part of the reason he’d chosen the Blackwood lad to begin with, that delicious one-sided yearning spinning slowly down into a comfortable numbness.  He never would have taken Martin if he had known it was at all reciprocated which, unhappily for them all, it turned out it was.  At least things had all worked out in the end.

There’d been some “Take me, not him.”  There’d been some “Jon, no, you - you can’t.”  Elias had broken out of prison apparently for the sole purpose of throwing what was, by his standards, a tremendous strop.  And Peter had left the Institute and then London in rapid order and with a new pet in tow.

“There’s no place in the city you could put me, then?” Jon asked quietly on the way.

“Well, much as I would like to…”  So close to the rest of Elias’s little band of gathered misfits, Martin Blackwood especially, and yet so far!  Truly delicious.  “I think Kent will do quite nicely for now, for us both.  And not just because Elias threatened to make a new desk blotter out of my skin.”

“When did he say that?”  Asked with faint surprise.

“Oh, he didn’t as such, but I could tell he was thinking it.  I know him quite well, you see.  Despite my best efforts.”

So Jonathan Sims, Archivist (because that title was lifelong), former head archivist of the Magnus Institute, new…something or other of the Lukas Estate, Peter would figure it out later, came to reside at Moorland House.  Twice-claimed now, all-marked, especial beloved of two gods who really worked quite well together when given half a chance.  Peter saw Jon settled (insomuch as one could ever “settle” at the old family homestead, which was to say he didn’t), then it was with great relief he left England entirely, returning finally to his beloved Tundra.  Where he remained for months, a beautifully-long and fantastically-healing voyage where he spoke on average to one person a week.

Peter preferred to have no contact with land while he was gone, feeding his god and his own soul, but it was unavoidable this time, the family themselves contacting him.  They were nervy: the House had never seen so many visitors as it had begun to get with Jon installed.

They came over the moors and down the roads, traveling for hours some of them, driven inexorably by the need to make a statement, to deliver the phobic cargo riding poisonously in the bellies of their lives.  These were people, as Peter understood it, who would ordinarily have found themselves drawn to the Institute to tell their story.  It gave him some pleasure to imagine Elias tearing his hair out over that.

The Archivist received the statement-givers, those phobic pilgrims, when they arrived.  Ordinarily he would have hunted, sought them out, but they came to him, the constraints of his new god and Peter demanding isolation.  Speaking of, Peter had his concerns about so much socialization, but when Conrad dropped in to observe and reported back, Peter’s fears were assuaged.  They recounted, they left, neither greeting nor goodbye passing between them and the Archivist, a distance maintained always between him and them.  Acceptable.

Peter sailed, the statement givers came to Moorland House, and the Archivist gorged himself on as much fear and loneliness as he could hold.

(Conrad had said Jon seemed fit to burst by the time he left, belt unbuckled and trousers undone, Corruption-scarred belly swelling free of his jumper in an overfed bloat.)

When Peter returned, as he sometimes-regretfully but always had to, he found Jon much changed.  The gray in his hair had spread and deepened, pale silver translucence rapidly overtaking the black, frost blooming out from his scalp.  Those striking eyes had also paled, nearly luminescent, hue reminding Peter of Elias…but where there were rays of iridescence in his irises, Jon’s were flat, marble instead of opal.

He’d also gotten quite fat during Peter’s absence.

There were tits, there was a second chin, the hawkish angles of his face had softened considerably.  A heavy, well-fed gut flowed back into creased love handles that sat atop much-widened hips, with an ass and thighs to match.  

Jon had kept up with his wardrobe as his clothing sizes changed…barely.  His trousers clung to him, and his top threatened to come untucked from his waistband and dump his soft underbelly out to jiggle and wobble.

“Ah, I see,” Peter said after he’d spent an appropriate amount of time examining and, yes, admiring - good to see a well-fed Avatar.  Good to be a well-fed Avatar too, apparently: he could swear Jon was preening as he was perceived.  Apparently there was more of Elias in him than just eye color.  “Elias was starving you.”  Peter paused, putting his head to one side.  Though I suppose I can’t blame him since, left to your own devices, you obviously overeat…”

“It wasn’t as if there was much else for me to do,” Jon said, sharply defensive.

“Clearly.”

A statement giver had come in all but on Peter’s heels.  Jon took their story sitting across from them, belly spread luxuriously in his lap and Peter’s hands on his shoulders where he stood behind him.  Once Jon was finished, gut having long spilled free of his clothing with the meal, Peter took him to bed.

They did not fuck.  Peter had no interest and suspected that neither did Jon, not that he cared.  But Peter kissed him, tasting fog and fear in his mouth, and lay in bed with Jon straddling him.  Peter was a big man, much taller than Jon and stout through the middle, but Jon was heavier than him and no doubt fatter.  He pressed Peter measurably into the mattress, plush thighs enveloping Peter’s pelvis, and made soft, high little noises as Peter kneaded at the generous spread of his stomach where it spilled down across him.

Jon was warm.  Hot, even, studded in sweat as he flushed.  Clearly they still had work to do.

Statement of Elias Bouchard, regarding the dreams of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, currently unresponsive.  Details pulled directly from subject.

Statement begins.

The Archivist does not know where he is, and in many ways that is correct, for to say that he was anywhere would be an error.  He has no conception of his body, lying on that grey hospital bed, perplexing the doctors: heart unbeating, lungs unmoving, but mind and nerves alive and firing wildly.  Everything but braindead…well.

Almost everything.

His abdomen is swollen, visibly bloated.  It gurgles, it churns, especially audible in the absence of breath.  There is no inflammation, no blood, no necrosis or trauma, all the theories put forth proven false by tests and imaging.  An endoscopic sample of his stomach contents defies identification: a thick and heavy fluid that seems to move and twist and branch on its own, iridescent as oil, infectious and vile in its brightness.  He is digesting normally (and quickly), growing fuller all the time, and so they leave him to it, as they have with everything else.  He is a medical mystery no one feels a need to solve.

Every calorie is put to use.  Nothing excreted, nothing burned, lying supine among the steady chirp of machines made useless by his condition.  Already, days after his initial admittance, the hawklike severities of his face have begun to soften, jawline gentling.  Sawblade hips and washboard chest steadily recede beneath a tide of excess, as snow falling over a corpse.  If one were to touch him, press a finger to his gut, they would find a thin layer of soft, downy fat already accumulated; most of the weight will go to his middle.  Predisposition.  Need.

The Archivist is where he exists so often when his eyes are closed.  He wanders the dreams he was given, and he feeds.

A cold and well-cleaned room, sterile metal tables that overflow with a gentle trickle of blood.  The familiar screen, the familiar woman beneath it, typing IT HURTS.  The long and desolate road, slick with the downpour, a police car’s lights flashing over the unmoving van, the coffin inside with the words carved deep into the splintered wood: I AM FOR YOU.  The train, twisted and pressed in on all sides, nothing but shrieking metal and cracked glass.  A yellow door, the dream behind it gone, the new one something the Archivist is deathly afraid of seeing.  The ants, a terrible rolling wave along the hard-packed ground.  The incinerator, with its burning silhouette inside, ingrained upon the Archivist’s racing mind as surely as the scars left by her worms are ingrained upon his flesh.  The dark building and its two occupants, creeping through it with an alert hunger on their faces.  A moonlit graveyard, peaceful, cool and damp as the rolling, foggy fields stretching out in all directions.  And finally, another dissection room, its single occupant standing calmly, and looking at the Archivist with pity, as opposed to all of the others, who have regarded him with fear and hatred and bitter acceptance.

His eye watches it all, and cannot close.  It pours into him, unstoppable, unending, thick and warm and sweet as honey, and even though he cannot feel his body, part of him knows what is happening.  The phantom stretch and groan and ache of his middle, ever-expanding, obscene and unreal.  He has no choice but to gorge himself at the font of horror.

If he had a choice.  Would he take it?

He wanders, his body here in the dreams lithe, mobile, unburdened.  He is searching, though for what he does not know.  He passes those places he can no longer watch, which no longer feed him: the silent wards of peeling skin; the empty warehouses of thick darkness and frightened children; the rusted train car that smells of eager, infectious hate.

All through it, above him, the shape that gazes down upon him, bloodshot and unblinking, as swollen with the fear as he is becoming.

At last, the Archivist looks up.  At last he looks into the eye that sees all and knows all and clutches at the secret terrors of your heart.  The ceaseless watcher of all that is and all that was.  The voracious infinite hunger that tears at his soul, invoking him to discover, to observe, to experience all and everything and forever and to glut himself endlessly.  It stares into him and it stares out of him and he is falling into the devouring eternity of its pupil even as he devours himself.  He wants to cry out in horror, but he cannot.  He is whole.

He is full.  And yet he wants more, as he always does, as he always will, as he always must.

He does not wake.  Wandering his slim collection of gifted nightmares, passing the grey and lifeless remains of severed dreams he can no longer eat.  He waits, but not for long, before they all begin again.

The only question is when he shall wake…and how large he shall be when he does.

Martin should have known what was coming early into their journey.  Right after the trenches, in fact.  When Jon staggered to a stop and gasped out, “I-I just need - just a moment - ” before a long, low belch rolled out of him, and he sank to his knees with a groan.

“Jon?!”  Martin immediately rushed to his side, dropping to one knee himself.  “What’s - ”  And then he saw Jon’s belly as he undid his belt and trousers with shaking hands, how bloated it was, how swollen, dark skin so taut he nearly looked pregnant.  “O-oh my god - ”

Given…well, everything, Martin thought he could be forgiven for the terrible places his mind immediately went, haunted by the Flesh, the Corruption, even the Stranger.  Jon must have Known, because he hastily put up a hand and said, “It’s none of those, I’m just - ”  He stifled another belch with a grimace.  “Far, far…far too full.”

“Oh,” Martin said, relief nearly blinding.  Then, a moment later: “Wait.  What?”

They were in a nice little forest now, on the border of a new domain.  No more churned earth or smell of blood and cordite in the air, although there was a faint hint of ash and rot.  Martin helped Jon out of his rucksack, then eased him back to sit up against one of the trees, hands folded almost protectively over the bulge of his stomach.  Jon heaved a sigh that turned into a groan, then answered.

“You know that I…eat fear,” he said, and every word in the sentence dripped with shame and self-loathing.

“Of course,” Martin said.  “I’ve seen you do it before, loads of times, I just…”  He gestured to Jon’s middle.  “This never happened.”

“No,” Jon agreed grimly.  “Because the fear’s…different now.  More solid, more real.  This is a world built on it, after all.  It holds more weight than any law of physics or biology does anymore.”  He chuckled bitterly, then winced.  “And there’s so very much of it.”

“Oh,” Martin realized.  “So - ”

“Yes,” Jon agreed.  “It’s like trying to drink from a firehose.”  He grimaced.  “Or…walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet where you actually have to eat it all…”

“I see.”  Martin was struck with a sudden and extremely arresting vision of Jon sitting in a restaurant with a steady stream of waiters lining up to pour platters of food directly down his throat as he slowly swelled with it.  A moment later, he had to wrestle down a blush as he wondered if Jon had Seen that, then wondered if he Knew he’d wondered, then -  He did his best to take his mind off it.  “A-are you…all right?”

“I will be,” Jon said grimly, breathing shallowly.

And he was, in short order.  Truth be told, Martin was quite glad for the enforced break…even if it was extremely difficult to keep his thoughts clean, especially sitting beside an overstuffed belly that had begun to gurgle with digestion.  It was even more difficult later, when Jon waddled hiccuping out the other side of the ghastly village.  After a brief moral crisis, Martin decided that if he was doing it to help Jon and not for his own enjoyment then that made it okay, and so he knelt in front of him and rubbed gently at his churning belly.  Slowly, the discomfort seemed to ease, and Jon relaxed.

“Where - did you learn how to do this?” he huffed.

“Oh, you know,” Martin said evasively, and left it at that, even though Jon probably did Know.  If he did, he didn’t say anything, and eventually, they got up and kept going.  Only to be sidelined after every domain as Jon digested the feast its inhabitants had unwillingly crammed into him.

“Couldn’t you just…try to eat less?” Martin asked once as he tended to his gut, once again bloated out nice and round.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Jon snapped, with enough venom to make Martin suspect that maybe it did, actually.  But he dropped the subject…much as some small, disgusting part of him wanted to hear Jon admit he liked gorging himself stupid, even if he regretted the suffering.

The possibility of what might happen to Jon had occurred to Martin’s guilty mind by then.  Biological rules thrown to the wind or not, you couldn’t eat this much this continuously without certain physical changes; surely you couldn’t waddle (he’d always loved the ponderous roundness of that word) through the apocalypse stuffed to the absolute gills without putting on weight.  He just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly, or as quickly as anything could in a world without linear time.

Apparently, you fattened up fast on fear, even walking from Scotland to London.

It was directly after their first Buried domain, the long empty field with things that had used to be people churning the earth below, that it first became apparent.  Jon was flat on his back on the ground, arms above his head, popped-out belly button pointed at the gray sky as Martin administered the usual post-statement massage, when there was a sudden ripping, popping noise.  Martin looked up, startled, but didn’t even have to ask the question out loud before Jon answered it.

“My trousers split,” he said stiffly, before hiccuping.

And so they had, in several places along his thighs and hips, Jon swelling out of the popped seams where he had softened.  Martin briefly contemplated biting one of the doughy diamonds of flesh - not hard, mind - before trying to shove that thought firmly into the dustbin of his mind.  But it kept jumping back out.

“Oh, well, that’s all right,” Martin said, perhaps a bit too quickly.  “Let’s - get you out of these and into a pair of mine, shall we?”

Unspoken was the shared knowledge, no need for Eye powers, that Jon would probably outgrow those quite quickly, too.  And he did.

When they had set out, Martin probably could have picked Jon up, although he’d never tested that.  He had a naturally slight build, exacerbated by the unnatural, wasted thinness that the hospital had left him with, still stubbornly sticking around even though it had been months because muscle was easier to lose than build.  As they moved through the new world, Jon eating all the while, he filled out, plumping up very nicely indeed.

Surely it was okay for Martin to think that in the privacy of his own head, no matter how guilty he may feel about it?  If Jon Saw it in his thoughts, that was his fault.  Surely.

Martin just couldn’t help it.  How much he loved the rolling gait Jon developed as his thighs thickened quickly; he was a natural pear, as it turned out, deliciously bottom-heavy.  How he could not keep his eyes off of Jon’s well-fed belly, which stuck stubbornly out of whatever clothing they managed to scavenge for him, just too round and heavy to be covered, especially as it grew to be a proper, chubby gut, jiggling even as it sloshed and groaned with fullness.  Martin especially liked the way that Jon had taken to keeping a hand on it as they walked, rubbing absentmindedly.

Martin could not help how he felt about the look that had begun to settle on Jon’s face when a statement took him: utter bliss.  Or how much he liked the stupor he’d begun to slip into after feeding.  At the Spider theater, he had found him kneeling as he ate and ate and ate, legs forced wide by a belly so marvelously bloated with fear it rested on the red carpeting of the floor and wobbled fluidly with every breath, face dreamy and absent with rapture as he started yet another cycle of the horrible play…

(Part of Martin regretted waking him.  Perhaps he could have left him there just a bit longer.)

Jon had grown quite round indeed by the time that they reached Salesa’s little island of safety.  Martin couldn’t even get his arms all the way around him anymore.  Of course, Salesa and Annabelle both had plenty to say about Jon’s size, even more than Jared had, or Helen.  Martin was only too happy to leave when the time came.  Jon had grown increasingly short-tempered during their stay, which Martin couldn’t blame him for with all the jabs about swollen eyes and such (it wasn’t even clever), but as it turned out, that wasn’t even the main issue, as Jon revealed while they kitted back up.

“I’m sorry, I’m just…”  And there was shame in Jon’s eyes, but also a deep and unrepentant yearning as his hand fell to the ample expanse of his belly.  “Hungry.”

“Well, then,” Martin said, hoping that it came out sounding like the joke that it absolutely wasn’t.  “Let’s go get you fed then, shall we?”