It wasn’t that Derek couldn’t form the words to release his inner demons. Quite the contrary, when you had them bottled up and wracked your brain over all the best and worst case scenarios, you learn to write through them like Shakespeare, and Derek had a slew of ways to leap into that dreaded confession. Some as blunt as five words or soliloquies that went on and on and were jump-packed with purple prose, melodrama and all those pretty comparisons to the stars and moon and such, but were no more difficult to recite by hoping and fearing with them for six months.
Six months. Half a year, better to say, the latter one to his first of being thrown alone into the wilderness of adulthood, into the equally stressful as coddled life of a college student. Also the very last of his teens before he’d been alive for two whole decades, the third what would be filled with the moments that would define who he would be as an adult.
Moments like this.
A year in memory felt so short, but comparing who he was now with what he remembered of himself a year ago, that shy, scrawny eighteen year old who was so afraid of the world beyond his comfort zone felt like a span of history lasting centuries. Well…okay, he was still scrawny, and still shy, and maybe even MORE terrified of leaving his current comfort zone more than his last, but to think that there was a point in history where Derek Larrety was scared of being a roommate. Being one with a human was intimidating enough, a total stranger with his own life, morals, and potential violent neuroses to deal with, but humans didn’t breath fire, or conjure electricity, or exhale toxic gas, or anything else that wasn’t outside the more Pokémon-centric community on campus.
He read straight through all the docile dragonites or the loyal espeons for every nightmare scenario, images of getting brain-wiped by a Gengar or having his spine cracked over a Tyranitar’s knee that made him go through a sort of reversed crisis of faith where he implored there to be a higher power and implored them to please let him survive a whole year without any third-degree burns. His crisis of faith became a proper one when he realized he was bunked with Bentley Delanges, a beedrill.
Great. Wasps were already satan’s dust bunnies, and here was one bigger than a human. Here was one that towered over the mortified Derek last autumn when he saw not only how much he towered over him at…good god, only seven-foot-eight but had the arms, chest and legs of a varsity athlete, all compounded by a stinger large enough to puncture a coconut, glassy wings and a face split yellow on the top and black along the bottom with rings grown around his eyes like he were wearing goggles, those eyes a perfect match for a killer robot with solid red featuring blank white pupils.
…and Derek had not a second of time to himself in his campus house, not even an opportunity to open the door himself. The door swung open by the beedrill’s own hand, his ruby peepers eyeing him from above as the trailer to his greatest fear began playing in his head…
“You’re Derek, right? I’m Bentley!”
Then Bentley shook his hand.
And he smiled.
Derek thought of Bentley’s white-colored hands at the end of his black arms. His jeans and red hoody, how his dark brown hair was grown and messy, but styled so not to look like he never combed, black antennae twitching through his bangs. He thought he was tall back then, how he was thin back then…then Derek thought of what Bentley was now, and the whiplash between that friendly, strapping beedrill of old to what currently existed downstairs came as a hormonal sledgehammer to the organ pumping blood in his chest. Earbuds sat mute in his ears for ten minutes of music-dry silence, its previous purpose to negate a familiar chomping from detracting his virginal brain, but it and all other sound became white noise in his ears in his reflecting on how he in his still short, twiggy self had gone through a total mental transplant since enrollment, and how Bentley stayed his beloved self in spite of his completely transformed body.
If a LOT less mobile nowadays, the way he talked now came off no different from that volcanic eruption of confidence who had the equal love and absolute HATE of all his friends, who loathed how that funny, handsome and charismatic beedrill had the nerve to show up in their lives and make them feel like the biggest nerd in the room for not knowing all the coolest hangouts in town, or throwing the best parties, or having loaded parents whose wallets were there personal portal to every item he wanted. The kind of guy who could never see Derek again and would experience absolutely no negative impact on his life as a result, not that Derek cared about being in the inner circle.
…but what mattered to Derek was that Bentley, somebody who was five years his senior and could have any girl he wanted, did more than acknowledge his existence. Any time his friends would show up so they could have him join them at the club, or rave, or something else Derek would never be invited to, Bentley would always run back into the house to see if his human roommate wanted to come. Derek didn’t always go, but whenever he did, Bentley would show him around his friends, telling him their names and letting him introduce himself like the runty human was just as impressive as the barrel-chested aggron, or the fire-tailed charizard.
If there was somebody he was trying to impress, Derek had no idea who they were, and Bentley was taking his sweet-ass time mooching from them. Assuming Bentley was just an amazing actor, there was never any reluctance to his voice whenever he offered any help to Derek when he was struggling with his homework, or frustration if he went out to fetch some coffee when Derek pulled an all-nighter, or anything that wasn’t remote compassion when Derek came home in tears after failing a test he’d studied weeks for and left him alone to grieve, only returning an hour or so later with some doughnuts, friends, and a brand new gaming console as a gift, never asking a dime back for it.
The guy who could sing, dance, drink, did magic tricks, did juggling, and even had the label as the town hero when he broke the arm attached to a man trying to spike a girl’s drink, treated Derek like he wasn’t some worldly commoner. Derek would’ve been happy with Bentley treating him as a person, but he did so, so much more than that. From the moment before they’d gotten so close, he was his friend.
Then Bentley started eating.
That day with the doughnuts, Derek could remember, whether it was the catalyst or an insight to something Derek or Bentley’s other pals had never known of him before. The beedrill shoveled in heaving mouthfuls of raised yeast filled with Bavarian cream and glazed in sugary icing in such a volume that his toned belly gave no indication of containing. His friends laughed it off to a high metabolism, something that evolved into a running gag when Bentley took a sudden liking to fast food and vast quantities to it, less green vegetable or grains present in his diet that weren’t lettuce and a bun sandwiching fatty, glistening meat patties drowned in cheese, chili and sauce.
Even Bentley’s ‘perfect’ bod couldn’t survive. The hammer space of his stomach yielded to reality, a rotund bulge pushing from his abdomen that he would pat merrily after feasting on thrice however many burgers any person ate in a week per meal, one of a fourth or fifth, eventually sixth that he’d squeeze in a day. He’d go to sleep that night under covers shrouding a somewhat rounder figure than normal, and come day that bulge would shrink, but still retain a little bit of that roundness than when it was empty before.
Thus earning him the snicker and poke in the stomach from all of his times his friends would come over, but they was nought to the endless wealth of fat jokes Bentley would direct at himself. Ones much more damning than anybody would’ve asked when he was just becoming visibly plump through his clothes, but became harder to argue with when Bentley had blimped up twice as heavy as that.
For all his self-assurance, anybody would’ve expected Bentley to come to some realization of what was happening to him when he steadily ballooned to what would’ve been a man of Derek’s size three-hundred pounds. If not that, then when Bentley had run out of stores to shop at where he could find shirts that reached past his naval, let alone wasn’t totally skintight, and maybe when he had to have the front door totally remodeled because squeezing through became impossible, then when he started to leave through the sliding doors to the backyard when he outgrew that.
Bentley’s stares turned from amusement to gobsmacked horror at just the notion that there was this…thing that’d gotten this big, and never treated it as a hindrance even when he got two big for any of their cars to drive him anywhere, Bentley just responding with affectionate noogies and yanking friends that he came to loom over into his stomach paunch. For Derek, it was not a stupefied horror and one for his best friend, horrified that one day he would come home to find the best friend he ever had dead of a heart attack. Flattered as he was of Derek’s concern, even he was useless to swaying him, at the front lines to every time he laid eyes on Bentley and saw that he was not magically, or supposedly, or any other adverb that implied anything but objective fact that Bentley was more massive than the last.
Then December third happened.
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