Work Text:
Your first lucid thought is, This is not my bed.
The second is, Oh, fuck, my stomach.
Awareness spreads its tendrils along your limbs as you slowly return to consciousness. There’s an unnatural sluggishness clinging to your thoughts that makes you think you’ve been drugged. You impulsively swallow, finding your mouth parched and your throat disturbingly occupied. Panic stirs in your core, but you’ve trained for this, so you freeze. All you’ve got to do is get a lay of the land.
You’re upright. Not quite standing. There’s hard plastic cupping your ass, frigid steel banding your forearms and calves. Something cold and cylindrical is jammed between your teeth. You try to close your mouth, but the object doesn’t budge. You try to move your tongue, but it’s immediately met by some kind of tube. Your gag reflex immediately riots for attention; you suppress it, barely.
You count to five, then force your eyes open. The room is bright, the light sterile and blue-white, the ceiling covered in a gridwork of panels. There’s nothing before you but a featureless wall. It could be a two-way mirror, if your adversary was feeling particularly dramatic.
To the left, you spy equipment of some sort: a bank of monitors, some medical, some security. To the right stands a large, clear cylinder filled with a greenish liquid, thick and viscous. A tube snakes down from the base of it, running straight to the mouthpiece jacked into your face.
You try to spit it out, but you can’t. You try to scream instead. The result is more like a whale’s distress call, followed by a wet, glugging noise as the tube’s payload keeps pouring down your throat.
The tube runs deep enough that you can’t taste whatever-it-is that they’re pumping into you, though your mouth is filled with a creeping, chemical aftertaste that you can’t quite identify. There’s no way for you to deny the passage of the strange liquid that’s carving a path down into your shrieking, groaning gut.
Which, you note, is expanding.
You have a gut. You’ve always had a gut. It’s a side effect of a penchant for snacking during countless stakeouts. But you’ve never had a gut like this before. This is a Gut with a capital-G, and it’s blossoming under the onslaught of whatever they’re pouring into you.
It’s not just the size that’s disturbing you, but the pressure as well. You can feel your belly button straining, skin pulling drum-tight, each incremental pulse bulging you outward like a grotesque balloon. Your jumpsuit, fitted only last week in standard-issue black, is already losing the battle to contain you; the zipper has surrendered and fallen open halfway down your chest, forming a perfect V that frames your bulging, straining stomach in glorious relief, the mass of it stretching the fabric to near translucency. Every few seconds, the mass inside you shifts, burbles, audibly glurks. The feeding tube shudders with every pulse of the pump. Your midsection throbs, reshaping itself to accommodate ever more of the unholy mixture being funneled into you.
You close your eyes and try to remember the mission briefing. As instructed, you’d infiltrated the facility, retrieved the sample, and almost made it out again when everything went to shit. You recall some guards. A fight. You’d almost mopped the floor with them, in fact, when a strange scent filled your nostrils, then… blackness.
You don’t know what happened, but you do know you’ve got to get out of here. And soon.
You’ve just begun to scan the room for some sort of object you could use to free yourself when a wall-mounted speaker crackles to life. “Ah,” says a masculine voice. “You’re awake. How are you feeling?” There’s a brief pause. “Actually, don’t bother trying to answer that.”
You try anyway, but the sound comes out as nothing more than a gurgle. The humiliation is sharp, but not as sharp as the sudden heightened whine coming from the machine beside you.
“You know, we tried this procedure out on a few rats. None survived the initial tests. But you...” He trails off, the only sound remaining being the tapping of keys on a keyboard.
The tubing between you and the cylinder shudders, the flow rate of the goop instantly doubling. Your eyes widen, watering, as the pressure inside you spikes. You feel the jumpsuit’s zipper threaten to give up entirely. Your belly surges out another inch, straining your skin until it's an angry red.
Your unseen tormentor lets out a soft, considering noise from the other side of the intercom. “You know, none of my previous subjects managed to make it past the twenty-liter mark without experiencing... ah, well, let’s just call it 'structural failure'. Terribly inconvenient for the advancement of my research, that. But perhaps you'll prove to be the outlier. Best of luck, hm?”
The intercom clicks off, a parting chuckle still hanging in the sterile air. You’re left alone again save for the ever-present gurgle of your agonized insides and a mounting sense of nausea.
Through it all, the feeding tube continues to hum, relentless in its work.
You try to focus on anything else, but there’s no escaping the sight of your belly swelling, hot and insistent, each minute heavier than the last. The soft expanse of your gut has morphed into a shape more reminiscent of a beach ball. The only real stimulus you have is the steady crescendo of fullness, and a mounting certainty that you’ll soon discover the limits of your body’s ability to stretch.