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Having been in possession of a real flesh and blood body for months now, Netzach had soaked it in beer and absinthe and cream sauces and buttered frostings until he spilled from his clothing like a wine-drenched pastry. It perturbed Yesod; he had only barely given up his high collars and covered hands and his skin itched against the bare air and beneath his clothing, as if there were thorns sewn in. He would greet guests whose fingernails stank like viscera and filth, he would spend time alone trying to purge himself of unmentionable thoughts, and he would go check on Netzach to make sure he was getting his work done and it would not matter how many times he had been re-measured and given new clothing, nor how many times he had been told to tuck in his shirt and to make sure his buttons were aligned in their particular places, and to actually tie his tie instead of leaving it hanging limply around his neck - he had found some way to make a mess of himself.
For four days now there had been an image glued across the windowpane of his mind - Netzach reaching to put away a book on a high shelf with his pale belly slipping out of his untucked shirt. It was only a few bare inches of flesh and yet it hung so low and sloppy and shameless that it seemed more obscene than if he had been standing there naked. His shirt at this point was more of a prayer towards modesty than anything that hoped to flatter or conform to him; it hung over each roll like a tarp and even that was not enough. There were two luxurious silk pillows worth of flesh that hung beneath his beleaguered waistband.
“Someone’s going to see you like this,” Yesod told him.
By ‘someone’, he primarily meant Roland. The Sephirot were already quite familiar with Netzach’s vices and Netzach’s body. Roland on the other hand was a new source of annoyance, kicking up dust with his feet, wearing a tie that hung like a noose, and smiling in situations that did not require it. Yesod knew the two of them had started drinking together, and it would only take one instance of him stumbling in carelessly to see Netzach with his belly out looking like an unkempt pile of custard.
Netzach only sighed - he had at this point been told many times that his waistband should be worn over his stomach instead of beneath it and he did not respond to conversations that he expected to be bothersome.
Yesod knelt down to tend to his clothing regardless - it had at this point become a comforting and familiar habit. He had done it since Netzach had weighed as much as a broomstick, and over time, frustration had softened into groaning tolerance. It was long past the point where his pants could disguise his surplus flesh - his arm fat sagged past his elbows, his thigh fat sagged past his knees, and even his gut was full of bulging rolls that seemed to grow more irregular and more numerous every time Yesod took his eyes off of him. He was a soft, clumsy, quivering mess and any attempt at clothing him could only be a distraction from the sloppy lines of his decadent and unmanaged body.
But the futility of it was in some way comforting - he knew that he would be here again and again, hands on flesh as bright and hot as the light it was woven from.
Yesod lifted Netzach’s stomach with one hand while he searched beneath it with the other and he felt the impossible sensation of eyes on the back of his neck, unpleasant as a crawling spider. He should not have been thinking about Roland - what on earth would this look like to him if he slipped through the door right then - him on the floor like this, elbow-deep in the crease formed by Netzach’s belly?
He was perhaps rougher than he should have been, hoping to get it over with quickly. Netzach, stuffed no doubt full of something sweet and fattening, had groaned at his stomach being jostled around with so little care. Yesod found the parted fabric amongst soft flesh and he jerked the two halves of Netzach’s pants upwards vigorously. They were getting small on him - he was tempted to say this, but the words felt sticky in his mouth.
Netzach’s rough breath became rougher as his stomach got caught in the zipper but Yesod did not relent. He brought the fabric together like stage curtains to conceal the warm, slippery flesh.
“There,” Yesod said. Netzach groaned.
The waistband did not sit straight on him, tugged down by his avalanche of flesh in the front, and on top of it, multiple inches of fat bulged outwards. But it was not terrible for Netzach to be stuffed into an overly tight waistband - it was extra encouragement for him to stop eating so much, and Yesod was inexplicably fond of the hot-cheeked, awkward-mouthed expressions he made when he tried to sit down or walk.
Yesod rose and placed a hand on his chest to steady him - and then jerked it back immediately once he realized it had been placed upon an enticingly plump breast.
“Apologies,” he spat, and Netzach laughed hoarsely.
His chest had grown large enough to pull the thin fabric of his top outwards and stretch it to near translucency. There was a large gap left by an unused button, and beneath it, warm sweat-damp skin.
Yesod’s hand returned compulsively; it was not proper to go around flashing that at people. Roland - again, Roland - he seemed like a man with a disposition towards breasts. Like he leered at them and made crass comments about them and like he might slip a hand under Netzach’s collar and grope a few times and ask what the hell had happened to him.
Yesod pulled the fabric shut with such violence that it tore off a few nearby buttons, leaving a huge, gaping display of Netzach’s flabby cleavage. The sweat on Yesod’s forehead slid like icicles down his face.
“Wow. Some help you are.” Netzach said.
So that was the incident. And despite Netzach’s soft breasts practically flopping free, it was really his stomach that stuck in Yesod’s mind, hanging breathtakingly low against his legs, precarious and absurd. It was disgusting - there was no reason for him to be thinking about this when it was not necessary, and yet he struggled to shake off disgust in the casual way that others did. His own brain was as much a mess as Netzach’s body.
Thoughts of it soothed him like a lozenge when he struggled to sleep, round, smooth, faintly damp with sweat and pleasant to touch. He could run his hand down the blanket that covered his pitiful body and pretend instead to be stroking handfuls of Netzach.
The receptions he attended did not help distract him at all. After dealing with the cannibals, he dreamed - Netzach, waddling around in the backstreets with all his clear fresh meat on display, captured, his low strip of bare belly fat kneaded and massaged and tested for tenderness, hand-fed fatter from a diet of grease and cheap fast food meals. He’d grow too large to need any kind of restraint that might marr or bruise his enticing flesh, and he’d be kept mostly bare to properly advertise him. Prospective buyers would visit to test his quality for themselves with their hands and teeth, and during one of these appointments, Yesod would steal him away to keep him safe and cared for.
He woke up with his stomach and blanket wet and completely filthy in the cold blue light that permeated his floor every hour of the day. It was repulsive. The sole saving grace he could find for himself was that he did not actually dream of eating him.
Netzach’s floor was teeming with potential and latent life. Nameless ephemeral sprites with glowing bodies like warm candle-wax crawled out of knots in the woodgrain and from under the corners of furniture to stare their hollow sockets towards human intruders. They made no sound at all, but their presence turned the floor’s low light into something more comfortable. There was a smell of fresh grass and burnt wood and cheap alcohol that hung in the air like syrup. At times it seemed fleshier and more human-like, perhaps in response to Netzach’s mental state - in the early days of the library, he was passed around between librarians like a toy. It was so new and strange to have a body again with all its follies, and he seemed to have no preferences to speak of when it came to sexual partners nor sexual acts so long as he could lay limply and sigh softly and soak up pleasure like a plant photosynthesizing. In the beginning, he’d been so thin and looked so awful that it seemed this new light might be snuffed out as easily as his first. Yesod had been too grotesque and terrified to fuck him like the others had. He looked like he’d break in half; like all his bones would splinter. He’d layed by his side, stroked his stomach, where all the fat of his meager body seemed to pool, and stuffed cheeseburgers into his mouth - the most normal and grounding object he could imagine and conjure. The grease stained the paper they were wrapped in, Netzach’s mouth, and Yesod’s bandaged hand. Netzach muffled moans in lazy approval and the entire room breathed with him.
Like a wary bud fertilized and watered and stroked and kissed to coax into bloom, lavished with so much attention he might burst, Netzach had grown spoiled. It was common to walk in on him being mounted, and there were at least a few times after the act where he could not be bothered to put his pants back on, and so he’d lay there satisfied in the smell of sex and sweat. He learned to reconstitute meals from books and the library’s latent light, and without someone around to harass him into working or to strip him bare and fold his increasingly cumbersome body into some new position, there was never much reason for him to stop eating.
His stomach showed the damage first, gathering up in meaty rolls that spilled past his carved, delicate hips and when he sat, it would blanket his thighs. Netzach treated it with the same casual disdain that he held for the rest of his body and he would heft handfuls of it out of the way during sex or slap it in sardonic self-deprecation. It was completely disproportionate with the rest of him. The sexual attention eased up, and this suited Netzach just as well, because it gave more time to laze around and gorge himself. The extra weight adorned his chin and plumped out his limbs to soft uselessness and gave him a chest as large as a woman’s. He still did have visitors - Yesod had seen Chesed fuck him against a desk and though it supported the entire weight of his sagging stomach, he still mouthed wordless complaints at having to stand. Chesed’s arms wrapped around his wide body and his fingers pressed into his blubbery hips so deeply that they were nearly engulfed by them. He whispered pet names that were practically insults, either too ridiculous or too disgusting to repeat. And Yesod had seen his sprawling bulk laid out on top of Hod as he grunted in pain at the pressure his immense weight placed upon his overstuffed stomach. She pressed slices of tea-cake through his lips to silence him when he made too much noise.
“Shhh,” she said as she stroked the back of his head with one hand and a roll of hip fat in the other. Her manicured hand disappeared between two of his rolls, and she spoke softly as she assured him that he was almost there, he was almost inside her, and that he was doing well. He’d come like a quivering, sleepy mass of lard, and Hod struggled audibly with the effort of rolling him off of her. She had seed smeared across her left leg, somehow making it up to her belly - he had not been anywhere close to penetrating her, and how could he be, with multiple feet of flab blocking any hope of a proper view. But she’d kissed him regardless and cradled his neck, and settled down to rest naked across his rolling hillscape of a body.
Perhaps it was Yesod’s own imagination that conjured smells of sex and naked flesh here.
He found Netzach draped across the wooden floor like a puddle of spilled wine, surrounded by platters of cakes with liquid chocolate centers and cans of cheap alcohol. His loose hair tumbled across his face and fanned out across the floor. He looked like corpulent siren stolen from a bed of kelp to lay uselessly upon the shoreline sand. Now providing plenty of hidden creases for them to worm themselves into, the absinthe-sprites flocked around him like a mother bird. A few slept atop his belly and another crawled out of the crook of his armpit to get a better view of Yesod as he stepped closer. One hid under the lowest fleshy part of his stomach which was once again lifted out of his pants. Yesod jerked his head away.
“Not today,” Netzach said. There was sweat on his brow and he rubbed his stomach tenderly. “I’ve been eating like a hog.”
“I’m just here to organize things,” Yesod said.
He always finished his own floor’s work early and allowed himself a strictly scheduled amount of time spent helping out here on the Floor of Art - it would not be right to completely wallpaper over Netzach’s incompetence but he was obviously physically impaired and he had been mentally ill-suited for this kind of work since his dead brain had first been stuffed into a box.
He was so behind in dealing with new books that they’d formed a sort of architecture scattered around the room and stacked to form makeshift stools and tables. A high wall of them surrounded him in a U shape. Yesod avoided anything that seemed too functional and instead focused on clearing better pathways.
As he moved to organize titles upon the shelves, he saw a stretched canvas upon a wooden frame painted in scrubby, thin, translucent colors.
“Is this yours?” he asked.
“That miserable thing?” said Netzach. “Take it, if you want to. I don’t want to look at it any more.”
Yesod took the painting even though he could not find a single identifiable form within it. It would be a stretch to claim he liked or understood it, but it could be a new color in his cold blue room.
“You’ve been feeling well enough to make this?”
Sober enough too. The brushtrokes were drawn in firmhanded lines.
“Sure. Someone’s been kind enough to lighten my workload,” he said.
His chest flushed with heat. He liked taking care of Netzach - more than that, he liked Netzach being taken care of to excess, pink-cheeked with a full stomach, drifting off to sleep.
When Yesod finished, he saw that Netzach was still eating, having propped himself up on his rolled up jacket for better digestion and moved to an entirely different color palette of equally sweet deserts. Chocolate tarts and cream pies. He’d drunk enough that he was flushed down to his bare belly and his lips had pulled back into a smile.
“I don’t know how you keep all that down, drinking the way you do,” Yesod murmured.
“I get enough practice,” Netzach said. He patted his stomach clumsily. “But it’s not exactly comfortable. I don’t suppose you felt like helping me out a bit more.”
Yesod’s knees felt weak, and so he sat. He lowered down a few inches from Netzach’s side, but Netzach tugged him in till they were pressing together. He brought his thumb to Yesod’s forehead to smooth down the wrinkle between his eyebrows. Yesod pulled away, blinking, and while disoriented, Netzach brought up a shot glass of some dark unidentifiable liquor.
“No.” Yesod said. “Thank you.”
Netzach shrugged and drank it himself. He used to practically shake like a leaf with anticipation of the stuff, letting out a high sharp breath like laughter. Now he took things smoother, letting alcohol seep throughout his slow and cumbersome body.
“What about this?” Netzach asked. He held a slice of chocolate tart.
Yesod stared, considering, and without even waiting for a response, Netzach had pressed it to his lips. The cream at the center was dark and rich. Netzach’s face was close and his eyes were dark and tired, as if a dull rot had seeped under his skin. His breath smelled thick like honey and absinthe, far sweeter and more complex than the awful liquids he drunk himself numb with.
Yesod swallowed dumbly. It was good - it was very good. Alive, he would have eaten things of this quality very rarely. Netzach’s plush arm was draped over his shoulder to pin him into place while he fed him. His breasts pressed against Yesod’s abdomen; the rolls beneath them, too. The low and exposed part of Netzach’s stomach that he was trying hard not to think about had overflowed Netzach’s lap and spilled out onto Yesod’s.
There was another bite, then another. Netzach’s deep and magnificent gash of a belly button pressed against Yesod’s pitiful one. The width of him was magnified by closeness, and Yesod thought again of him with Chesed - encircled by those long, wiry arms and treated like a spectacularly fat beast shot down by a proud hunter. Each roll groped with glee and awe. He had never even seen something so fat before.
Yesod surfaced from the spell when he realized Netzach was trying to force more food into him and then pushed him away panting.
Netzach, for all his added size, has not gained a single ounce of strength, and so he fell away very easily, sighed, and rubbed his stomach.
“No - you eat enough for the rest of us combined. None of us can eat like you if we want any amount of work to get done at all.”
“You look like you need something - you always look like you need something,” Netzach said.
He rolled his thin shirt up to reveal even more of his bare stomach, then ran his hand along it. He lifted it, shook it, and then made eye contact.
“You could sink those viper fangs into this instead, mm?”
“I’m not going to mark you up in a place you insist on flashing at the entire library.”
“Calm down,” Netzach said. “It’s stressful listening to you. Here - I have these now, if you like them.”
The top few buttons of Netzach’s shirt were already undone, and so he could easily lift one of his breasts out the top of it. He massaged it, bringing it up to look rounder and perkier than the other one, massaging supple flesh inwards to crease around the bud of a nipple.
“They’re a bit droopy - I know they’re not much to look at. But they’ll bounce if you shake them around a bit.”
Netzach made an obscene gesture with his right hand, and then picked up another tart and popped it into his mouth.
Filthy, disgusting man.
“Every part of you bounces,” Yesod said. “All the time. It doesn’t even have to be something intimate. You could walk briskly down the stairs and you’d have half of the library agog. Look - shouldn’t you finish eating before you try to seduce me?”
Yesod physically removed Netzach’s hand from his own breast.
“That’s a pain,” Netzach said. “It’s so hard to stay awake with a full stomach.” He shifted his hips one way and then the other, and his stomach fat lolled atop them. “I’ve been struggling to take care of myself lately. If you could help out…”
He was being invited to touch Netzach while he was stuffing food down his throat like the pleasure slave to an obese and overindulged king.
Netzach struggled against the weight of his sprawling belly to scoot his legs wider, and then he slapped the flesh between them, and spent some time arranging it - even though he looked as if he were the most coddled and comfortable man in the entire city, he was always doing things to make himself even moreso. Slight shifts to the position of his belly, slouching ever-more slightly, another few or fourty mouthfuls.
“You’re too fat to touch yourself, and your solution to that is to keep eating?”
Yesod pinched Netzach’s lowest roll, able to resist no further.
“It gets you here, doesn’t it?” Netzach said.
Yesod had no answer to that. He was thinking again about his dream: all those arms touching, kneading, squeezing. He rubbed over that sensitive flesh again, smooth and light in shameful apology.
Netzach placed a heavy palm onto Yesod’s back to massage him and entice him in closer. Yesod’s cock was hot, tender, and when it pressed against Netzach’s fat hips he made a disgusting noise of embarrassment. Netzach sampled Yesod’s lips between phenomenally large mouthfuls of cake, licking lazily at his lips, and giving sweet, clumsy kisses. His hips canted upwards rather pathetically.
“Alright - alright,” Yesod said, and snaked his hand lower, beneath Netzach’s low-hanging belly to the sweaty crease and puff of flesh beneath it.
Netzach’s hand snaked under the collar of Yesod’s shirt and the touch was like a hot knife against his chest. God, he was not used to being touched.
He clamped his hand harder into Netzach’s underbelly, and Netzach again offered him a few bites of chocolate cake, rich, hot as blood, dripping obscenely with fattening icing that was as smooth and filling as butter. Yesod was like gelatin. All the rigid bars and wires that composed him softened to a puddle - everything except his hand, which somehow felt firm and strong surrounded by all that soft flab.
He was not a particularly strong man, and yet positioned against this - the fat thighs and fat belly and the mound of crotch-fat already hot and slick and leaking. The way it swallowed his arm whole, he might as well have been penetrating him - fucking him right here.
Yesod’s fingers were usually so quick and attentive. He got himself off cleanly and quick without any kind of prolonged spectacle. But to do that to a man so bloated full with pleasure - it seemed insufficient. He should be slow, gentle and indulgent, but he was not slow or gentle as he took Netzach’s cock into his hand and slid right down to the base, the rich flesh yielding all around him. He felt like a machine malfunctioning under too much heat and too much moisture.
Netzach sighed so quietly that it was nearly imperceptible, like a delicate spider-lace tablecloth floating down to engulf the room.
“Don’t be so shy,” he murmured.
Yesod worked him harder. Netzach’s eyelids seemed to hang lower and lower with each sharp jerk of Yesod’s hand.
There was a tiny drop of icing smeared across one side of his lips. Yesod kissed it away, only for Netzach to pull away early so that he could stuff a slice of cake that seemed to be nearly the size of his head into his mouth between two thrusts. His hand stayed over his mouth to help keep it down, and he moaned through his fingers.
“Good… Good,” he murmured quietly when he’d finally managed to swallow it fully.
With minimal warning, as was usual for him, he spilled upon Yesod’s fingers.
Yesod removed his hand from the smothering heat of Netzach’s thighs and flexed his fingers, staring at the filth there.
Netzach seemed satiated in every possible sense, and lied down, as if preparing to sleep right there on the floor. He rolled onto his side so he could breath better and took large, ocean-wind breaths into his body while resting his head upon his pillow-sized arm.
His shirt was mostly unbuttoned, and his tie had been abandoned somewhere unknown. Stacks of crumb-filled plates and empty cans surrounded him, and his hair hung wild and half tangled.
What an ordeal it would be to clean the filth from his belly and crotch and thighs - what a mess! His heart and his still swollen cock twitched at the thought.
“Rotten,” Yesod murmured. “You’re completely rotten.”
But he was already far too tired to respond.