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Sachika was a genius. She’d come up with Shouma's food journal in the first place, and he’d been going crazy on that thing since the day she’d first met him. It had been a minute since then, and now that she understood the full breadth of his inexperience, it just made sense for her to build upon her original genius and help him fill in some of the gaps in his flavor knowledge. It made him smile, and making people smile was her thing.
That it was Umashou smiling was a bonus. The guy needed more smiles, she thought. If she could keep him smiling, she’d deserve a medal of honor.
He’d never tried any human food? No problem! All she had to do to correct that was continue to eat normally and always get a portion for him, buying or throwing together whatever in the kitchen. However, there was a limit to her culinary repertoire, and a limit to the places she could get full dinners on a budget in their area. But - and here’s where her genius really shone - convenience stores and supermarkets always sold sides in plastic dishes by the counter. For relatively cheap, she could buy a bunch of foods that Shouma had never tried before! And with a couple bagfuls of side dishes and sample sizes, you could set up basically any table into the pinnacle of the budget meal connoisseur, that fabled and glorious ideal that was: The Snack Party.
It wasn’t just Girl Dinner. It was charcuterie.
Naturally, Umashou was game. There didn’t exist a stick that could keep him off a carrot. They picked up a handful of waribashi and snagged a loose kangaroo-pocket-full of napkins from their various shops and destinations, and when they’d filled up the bags to her wallet’s ability, they scampered back to Hapipare tittering and giggling.
Umashou had obviously wanted everything, his greed only barely covered by his gracious and fawning nature. More jobs, she’d said. More jobs meant more snack parties. The twinkle in his eye had been like sugar on a cupcake; sweet on sweet, an indulgence she wanted to savor.
She parked him on the sofa, and pulled up a chair for herself. They stacked up the little plastic containers, sorting them into stacks and groups by a kind of unknown and alien logic that existed beyond such mortal concepts as ‘the alphabet’ or ‘price’. He wasn’t gonna eat all of it now, she said, in a wan attempt at reassurance. It wasn’t like he had to, she meant. She had a fridge. No need to be intimidated by the whole table of food.
She looked at him again, the greedy twinkle in his eye, and didn’t know why she felt like she had to reassure him in the first place.
What a table it was. There were stacks piled high of noodles, rice, pickles, potato salads, dango, taiyaki, and anything else they’d snagged, a skyline of a city of food. Next to him on the couch he had pens of varying colors, his snack journal, a couple highlighters, tape, and any other office supplies Sachika could think of and provide. She also had her phone, for the purposes of googling and defining and explaining any vocabulary he didn’t know, which was most things.
And then, the feast began.
There was him, wanting to try everything, and there was her, wanting him to try everything, sample sized dish after sample sized dish. Snack sized portions of spinach goma-ae, fresh and crispy daikon salad, creamy natto rice with avocado. A few bites of each and they disappeared, and so it became automatic, a factory line of foods licked and chewed and swallowed and reviewed. Pages of the book filled with colorful text, labels carefully unstuck from the plastic lids to paste into the journal. Stately stacks of plastic dishes turning into a pile of trash as they got tossed back into the bags they’d come out of. Paragraphs of Umashou's poetic waxing about the fluffiness, the brittleness, the bounciness. A note file on her phone of anything she’d have to remind herself to look up later, as their attention spans fluttered from dish to dish.
Salty, sweet, crunchy, all of them new and interesting and worth talking about, worth taking notes about. The variety, once daunting, kept them engaged. There was always something new, or some variation on a theme to consider. Crunchy miso turnips, soft and refreshing cold tofu, chewy sweet potato mochi with cheese. They laughed and talked, and he ate, and ate.
Neither of them really noticed the time pass, even when he started getting quieter.
He certainly didn't indicate he wanted to stop, just leaned back against the couch, letting his head loll, letting his eyelids grow heavy and his gaze to go glassy. He would pick up a little container and hold it near his chest, taking bites with dreamy, affectionate slowness. Salty, sweet, crunchy. Over and over.
He stopped reaching for dishes, but Sachika didn't slow down, unable to curtail her excitement. Without thinking, she snapped a clean pair of waribashi apart and started picking up the samples, deftly putting little bites into his mouth. Tart, creamy coleslaw, the meat picked from juicy chicken wings, seasoned hot spring eggs. Little bites that got licked, chewed, and swallowed, just like the ones before, disappearing into his eager mouth.
When his gaze grew softer, and his eyes drifted closed, he still didn't stop her, and she saw no reason to stop herself. She touched his lip with a chopstick full of pickled cabbage and he opened dutifully, then again for a spoonful of cold miso soup with sesame, and then again for the hijiki salad, and then the next new thing, and the next, and then next. It was so easy for it to become automatic.
It was only when he hiccuped that she paused, a bite of zaru udon brushing sauce on his lips. It was a cute little sound, innocuous, but it was followed by a loud, unearthly, seemingly aggravated groan from somewhere in his middle.
"You good?" She asked, mostly on auto. She’d been right in the middle of a really good story about Ritsu and Hantii and the case of the nerd who carried a briefcase to school, and was just about to get to the second or third good part.
In response, Shouma opened his mouth and lazily slurped the noodles off of her chopsticks, lapping them into his mouth with his tongue. His lips were shiny with sauce and dotted with crumbs, she noticed, making him glitter a little bit. It was an awfully pretty color.
He shifted, and the shift turned into a squirm. He finished chewing and she watched his throat bob as he swallowed with obvious effort, seemingly having to choke the bite down.
Another hiccup. Shouma looked like he was really thinking hard.
"M'okay… just kinda… full?" He said, after a moment. He said it slow, syrup slow, like talking was incredibly difficult. It was strange, he’d never seemed to be at a loss for words before. On that note, she’d also never heard him say he was full before, and even then he had sounded unsure of that word.
His eyes opened slowly, blinking at the overhead lights like a man who had been at the bottom of a mine for days. His eyebrows seemed to try and knit together, two puzzle pieces bonking against one another as though his face itself was confused about what it was feeling.
She glanced across his body, taking him in, trying to diagnose the issue. His hands were lazily cradling his midsection, and his baggy hoodie looked suspiciously less baggy around the zipper. For a moment, her mind was blank.
Then things began to add up.
She looked back at her little table. The table was covered in a bunch of stacks of empty plastic containers and used napkins. They'd gone through almost all of the samples in what felt like the blink of an eye. In fact, the dish of cold udon in her hands was the very last container with food still in it.
The realization hit her like a truck, and she felt herself go hot and cold all at the same time. There had been bags. Bag-S! Plural! How much time had even passed? How long had he been eating? How long had she been feeding him? Wait, had the sun totally set while she was spaced out?
The volume of leftover samples turned over in Sachika’s brain like meat on a spit. Each container only held a few bites of a given food, but there had been kind of a lot of them when they started. More than enough for a breakfast party tomorrow, maybe even a light lunch. The volume of the person next to her slid into focus next. She imagined all that food, the bags of little sample dishes, and then she tried to imagine it all fitting inside the slight man on the couch, alien metabolism or no.
She slowly looked down at her little bowl of udon, amazement dawning across her mind. There was only one little bite left in the dish, and for a second she thought about giving it to him, but then Shouma's stomach gurgled again. He hiccuped, and slid his hands aimlessly over his hoodie; marking out the curve of a round shape underneath.
She felt her face break into a bewildered, delighted smile. She hadn't been trying to get him to finish all this, in fact she’d even said he wasn’t going to eat all this, but she'd been having so much fun gabbing that she hadn't noticed just how much he had put away. And damn, the boy could put it away, huh?
"Shouma~!” She said with a laugh, pushing him gently on the shoulder. The shadow of a grimace passed over his face as he swayed.
“Why didn’t ya tell me you were gettin’ done? You okay? You sick? Don’t barf on my couch."
Ignoring his stumbling, whispery apologies - and his shaky assurances that he somehow didn’t feel sick - her hand fell towards his middle, brushing the fleecy hoodie with her fingertips. She could feel his gavv through the fabric, hard carapace pushing up against it with every labored breath. (And yeah, oh, now that she wasn't yapping, she could hear his belly gurgling and moaning, and that he wasn't breathing too easily under the weight and pressure of all that food. Oops!)
She tried to remember what he had said about the last few sides, and came up empty. His little notebook hadn’t been touched in… oh forget the last few sides, it was at least a whole stack of those containers.
Dang. They hadn't even been reviewing them at all!
Her ears were hot. Her fingers itched. She just had to see the damage. Maybe they hadn’t meant to put a whole mini-fridge full of sides into him, but rules were rules, even if you just made them up. You just didn’t eat yourself into a stupor on her couch without paying the tax. She put the last bite of udon back in its container, and the container on the table, and hopped from her chair to the couch, hands held out eagerly. He watched her, sleepy and curious, but trusting, and not at all spooked.
Sweet boy. Sugar sweet. He was so cute.
She went to pull up his shirt, and he took a deep, trembling breath, apparently trying his best to suck in his belly to keep his gavv from catching on his hoodie. It still caught as she lifted it up, and his stomach gurgled as he let his breath back out, his hands ducking in to cushion and soothe his full stomach and second mouth.
Her eyes raked over him. It took a second for it all to sink in.
Shouma was a skinny little guy, she thought. Only about as wide as she was. His belly always stuck out a little, but that was usually because of the big red second mouth making a bump under his clothes. She’d actually thought he was a little plump - and that it suited him, like he should be a little plump - before she’d known about the whole granute thing.
But now - and maybe it was all the more noticeable because he was so thin - he was round. His stomach bowed out in a prominent curve, unbalanced and top heavy. His skin looked stretched and taut, shiny and flush with color. His back was arched to give himself as much room as possible, and she could nearly see the strain where the skin stretched in around his sides. The new mass sat heavy around his middle, his stomach pushed out as far as it seemed it could go. His gavv was even sitting at a different angle than usual, tilted downwards by the pressure behind it, tipping towards the hem of his pants.
She also noticed that right now the gavv looked… sweaty. She hadn't thought it was expressive, but here it sat, teeth gritted, brows a little knit. It could have been the light, but the longer she looked, the more she was convinced that the rigid shell really was grimacing in pain. She reached out and gave it a gentle stroke. It was warm, warmer than the hard shell looked like it would be.
It seemed like the discomfort was catching up to Shouma just as much as it was occurring to her. He shifted and arranged himself, spreading his knees and inching his hips forward. His hoodie stayed up at his chest without him holding it, held there by the shelf of belly beneath it. The hem of his pants curved down under his gavv, having slid into a deeper U shape as his stomach expanded over the top. Shouma rubbed his hands around on his stomach, aimlessly - and judging by the sounds, uselessly - trying to soothe the growling beast as his lips trembled.
"You're a really big eater, huh?" She laughed, understating the obvious. Really big. Bigger than even she knew, and boy did she already know the boy could eat. She slapped him on the knee, barely stopping herself before she gave his tummy a good whack. He looked a little delicate for that.
"Mhm, I guess. Is that good?" He patted his swollen stomach with what seemed like a hint of pride, only to frown as the pat dislodged a hiccup.
“Not if you don’t know when to stop.” She scolded him lightly, still laughing. She poked his stomach for emphasis. Her finger barely dented the surface, and left a pale oval on his blushing skin. The boy was tight.
He squirmed again, his lips twisting and trembling. He didn't seem like he could get comfortable, no matter how far he rucked his hips forward.
“Sorry. I've never done this before,” he added, over the sound of his belly once again protesting all the ‘this’ that had been ‘done’ to it. He put his knuckles to his lips and whimpered around another weak, squeaky hiccup. Sachika let her finger linger on his skin. She didn’t think he had room even for air in there.
He was so cute, so delicate, so tightly packed, she almost regretted scolding him for overdoing it. If anything, she was impressed it all fit in there, impressed he could keep going as full as he was, impressed he had been so easy and eager the whole time. She wanted to pat his head and tell him he was a good boy, but she settled for:
“It's good stuff, right? Couldn’t resist, right?” She laughed again, and so did he, chuckling sleepily and nodding. He smiled and closed his eyes, rubbing at his sore spots with mindless, slow hands. She listened to the soft, raspy sound of her palms on his skin for a moment, still giggling.
A thought occurred to her.
“No gochis, though?” She asked. Shouma's eyes opened by a tiny sliver. He looked down at his exposed, struggling gavv.
“Mm, no. Guess not.”
“Not like, stuck though?”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
In a helpful spirit, she reached out and put both hands on his belly. Before, she had noticed how warm the gavv was, but all of him felt especially warm, radiating heat as his insides went all hands on deck to handle the full brunt of The Snack Party. He felt like he had swallowed the sun, a bright orb of heat centered in his middle, growing ever so slightly cooler the further out she touched.
She rubbed gentle circles in the tight, hot flesh, and thought she heard Shouma purr, either from his mouth or his gavv… though it could have just been his stomach churning. Either way, Shouma pushed his belly into her touch, murmuring vague gratitude for the assistance. His own hands stayed glued just under his gavv, holding it as though he could take the weight off his back.
Smiling in saintly sympathy, she made herself comfortable next to him. She ran her hands up and down his sides, giving special attention to where the structure of his ribs gave way suddenly to the overstuffed landscape of his stomach.
She pressed her fingertips a little too hard into the top of the curve, pulling a soft groan out of his throat. He felt so tight under her hands, really and truly stuffed to the gills. There was barely any give to it at all. Ready to pop, she thought, and then she had to brush that thought away with a tinge of alarm. She kept moving, carefully rubbing at the spots that made him sigh, or whimper. It wasn’t difficult to pull the sounds out of him, it seemed like everywhere she touched got some kind of reaction.
“Mm,” he breathed, voice growing quieter and quieter as he drifted further and further away from full consciousness. “Feels good. Hands’re cool.”
Poor baby, was all she could think. Poor dumb goofy baby who didn’t know when to say ‘no’. This idiot, but with all affection. Affection and more than a little urge to tease - though she was managing to keep that urge down, for now.
She pushed her hands in a little harder than she needed to, and he whined a little ‘don’t’ that rose into a high, squeaky hiccup. His stomach lurched under her palm.
Mostly. She was mostly able to keep that urge down for now.
Her hands dipped under the gavv, taking a moment to skritch it under its ‘chin’. Below the chitin, she made a discovery. She could feel a sharp dip where his pants dug painfully into his stomach, the swell straining against them with every uneasy inhale. If the gavv was a mouth, she thought, this must be like being choked.
That explained his breathing, she thought. And probably at least a little of his discomfort. She could sympathize in the spirit of everyone who had ever felt bloated in their cutest jeans.
“Lemme help,” she muttered. Without pausing to ask permission - which she suspected he wouldn’t have really known how to give right now - she shoehorned her thumbs into the waistband, having to wiggle them side to side just to get them in. His sweet face faltered as the pressure intensified, but he spent no effort stopping her. If he even could anymore. He seemed beached, and more than a little helpless. By her logic he had been more than halfway into a food coma when she had stopped feeding him. It just made sense that he needed someone to handle the finer details, like drawstrings.
Sheesh, he was gonna sleep for a week.
Using her thumbs as an anchor, she tried to pull his pants down under his swollen stomach, but found they were stuck low and tight against him, with no more room to slide down. Next, she tried untying the drawstring, but the pressure in his middle had pulled the laces tight from the inside, leaving the knot hard as a pebble. Pulling on the trailing ends of the bow did nothing to dislodge it. Furrowing her brow and nibbling her lip, she tackled the Gordian (Granutian?) knot the best way she, or any girl who had ever had her necklaces tangle up, knew how, and started picking at the knot with her fingernails.
The gavv ground its teeth, his stomach gurgled at the extra pressure, and she heard a soft but distinct puppy-whine from the man himself, but after an agonizingly long moment, she succeeded.
Instantly, and with a soft, food-drunk ‘whuff’ from Shouma, his belly surged forward over her hands, joyfully free from its imprisonment. Her fingers barely had time to note that once the knot had loosened, the remaining friction had done nothing to hold the laces in place, and they had shot back into the pants with a shiver she could feel up her arms.
Her eyebrows shot up, startled that what she had seen before was his stomach being held back. For a second, his belly wobbled, bouncing as it settled onto the much gentler cradle of his underwear. His body seemed to equalize as it relaxed, smoothing the swell from his ribs to his hips into one plump, overfed curve. Around his whole waist, there was a dark red mark where his pants had been cutting into him. Pants that she noted would likely be impossible to close back up.
Most dramatically, the gavv itself sagged forwards, its worried brow and gritted teeth relaxing all at once. The teeth parted with an audible hiss of relief, and the tongue - huge and pink and wet - flopped out between her arms and onto his lap. The whole thing sighed like an old dog, a moan trailing off into the quiet of the room, and then it went still, gurgling softly.
She turned her hands over, letting the weight of his firm, overfull tummy fill her palms. She gently rubbed her thumbs over the red line, hoping to soothe any lingering aches. She could hear his stomach beginning the honest work of digesting, his body insistently settling him into a long nap in the soft embrace of the couch. His breathing steadied, shallower than normal, but better than before.
After a minute his whole person seemed to take a breath. She looked up at him, this personal pot-bellied Buddha having descended onto her couch, and waited for his wisdom.
"Pants," Shouma said eventually, sighing like it was the end of the world.
She looked at him with sympathetic eyes full of understanding. She nodded. She tried not to laugh.
“Pants,” she agreed.
She ate the last bite of udon herself.