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The rulers of the vampiric council live here, Izzy thought woefully to himself, counting out the 25% tip. Before I arrived, this house was kept clean for them, as it always ought to be. And now—
Now, the rotten floorboards creaked as Izzy traversed them; the grandfather clock’s shattered door sat open at the end of the hall, its glass sparkling in the fraying black carpet; a corpse lay draped over the staircase’s splintering banister.
The doorbell rang again as Izzy crossed the hall, and he winced, thinking of the six pairs of sensitive ears slumbering in their thin pinewood boxes.
“Jesus fucking Christ. I’m fucking coming.”
Embarrassed at the mess, as he opened the front door to accept the delivery, Izzy wedged himself into the small crack between the door and its frame. It was difficult. There was a bit more of him lately than there had been. He turned sideways to pass the cash to the frowning delivery man.
“What?” Izzy snapped at the man’s expression.
“What?” the man asked back.
“Just—give me that,” Izzy snarled, snatching the two boxes of pizza and slamming the door. He locked it behind him, looking again into the dirty, dimly lit hall. He supposed he could tidy up a bit later, after they’d…
No, his body would be too weak by that point. Again. That was the problem: the expectations of this job exceeded the limits of human abilities. It was fucking impossible to clean up after a whole houseful of vampires and to fulfill his other duties.
Well, his master could not have things both ways. Izzy did what he could do. The house could be clean, or Edward could stay fed.
Izzy carried the hot cardboard boxes down the hall, the meaty, cheesy, greasy smell overpowering any other less pleasant ones for the moment. He rounded the corner and paused in front of Edward’s door.
Shifting the weight of the pizzas awkwardly onto his thigh, he pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it twice through his hair, patting it until he was sure it was properly in place. He adjusted the shoulders of his vest. In a strange, nervous fit, he set the box down, unlatched his belt (oh Lord, Jesus fuck, it was getting a bit difficult with this gut now hanging in the way, wasn’t it?), and re-tucked his shirt.
“Miserable fucking idiot,” he muttered to himself. Absolutely pathetic. Gotta look pretty for the boss, huh? Got a bit of a crush? Bit of a crush on a fucking vampire who’d fucking kill you soon as looking at you?
Izzy picked up both boxes and his chin.
“Edward,” he said loudly as he opened the door. He shut it behind him. “Ed. Time to get up.”
He set the food down on the mirrored bureau as loudly as he could manage and went about lighting the candles. When he’d shown up at this place a year ago, Izzy, being a retired professional firefighter and a continued (waning) volunteer, had had an absolute fit about all the breaches of fire safety code. But vampires didn’t care about that sort of thing. They’d outlived everyone and everything they’d ever known, after all, and they’d already projected the same futures onto their current neighbors, familiars, and possessions. Guillermo—Nandor’s former familiar, the house’s former human servant, and now a newly-turned vampire—had explained this all with a shrug, and Izzy had accepted it with six months of arguments and protests and blown-out candles that may as well have been shrugs, too. You just didn’t win with this lot.
“Edward!” Izzy said again to the coffin in the center of the room. He circled back to the bureau and opened a pizza box unceremoniously. “I’m here! I’m eating! You better—”
The lid of the coffin, of course, swung open at those words. Edward remained lying down, his arms folded across his chest, one cheek pressed down sleepily onto the back of his hand. One eye looked blearily open.
“You’re early, Izzy,” he said, half-chastising and half-teasing. Hearing his name in Ed’s voice sent tremors down the fault lines in Izzy’s chest.
“It’s past ten,” Izzy replied, forcing some measure of irritability in his voice to mask whatever happened inside of him each day when he first saw his master. Joy. Possession. Fear and lust. Adoration.
Before he could think about it any further, he shoved the tip of a pepperoni pizza slice into his own mouth and chewed, glaring down at the lounging vampire.
“You must have been starving,” Ed purred. Teasing again.
Izzy felt himself blush. He’d gained, to put it frankly, a fuckton of weight since starting here.
He’d never been a thin man; he’d been quite a muscular one, in fact, having kept in shape enough to carry the heavy firetruck hoses, to run without much oxygen, to lift fallen debris—that sort of thing. But Izzy had never married, never had a wife, never really looked for one. He’d barely admit the thing to himself, but his tastes had always tended a bit more towards nervous, drunken trysts in filthy men’s bathrooms. So nobody, including Izzy, had really thought all that much about whether he’d been thin or fat or muscular or any of it. He’d used his body like a tool.
Now, he supposed, he was doing something similar, but the usage of that tool had become bit… less orthodox.
“Nice when you blush. Nice to look at,” Ed said, sitting up. His grin was wicked and very sharp. “Reckon that’s how you must feel looking at a nice juicy pizza.”
“Ever stopped to consider how the pizza feels?” Izzy growled with his mouth full.
“Don’t be ridiculous, man. C’mere. I wanna touch you.”
Ed’s familiar grouchily obliged. Not before, however, he’d crammed the crust of the first slice into his mouth and taken a second. He came over to the side of Ed’s coffin with grease running down the palm of his hand, racing for the cuff of his sleeve. He moved to lick it off before it could stain, but Ed grabbed hungrily for his waist, surprising him, and the oil darkened the fabric before he could do anything about it.
“Goddammit. Look what you’ve done.”
Ed snorted.
“Psh, your shirt? Who needs it? Keep telling you, Iz. Laszlo and Nadja are running around nude half the time; you certainly don’t need a vest.”
As he said this, Ed’s fingers traveled around Izzy’s waist to his stomach, where his thumbs slipped between the buttons. They pressed hard into the new pudge there, drew two wide circles.
Izzy, out of instinct, sucked in slightly, trying not to breathe. In an effort to avoid meeting his master’s eyes, he stuffed more pizza into his mouth and chewed frustratedly. He would take the vest off, eventually; both he and Ed knew it. Izzy’s nights had been somewhat hazy lately, somewhat difficult to remember the fine details of, but they’d all gone roughly the same way.
“Besides,” Ed said, “Must get expensive buying and re-buying this little uniform of yours. Can’t be the same one you had when you got here.”
That made Izzy blush again. From his peripherals could see Ed’s face, down at the height of Izzy’s chest, break back into that wide, impermanent, beautiful grin. Goddammit. God fucking damn it.
“No,” Izzy said. “It isn’t.”
“Yeahhhh,” Ed sighed. He undid the button he’d been poking around on the vest, and then the two buttons in the section of Izzy’s shirt directly beneath. A soft, doughy strip of belly spilled through. Izzy winced slightly as he felt a sharp fang slide up against it, but he did not give in to the sudden spike of instinctual fear. He kept his face even and took another big bite.
Ed laid his face against Izzy’s stomach as he ate and nipped at the hair above his navel, putting it between his lips and sucking it almost absentmindedly. He exhaled against the sensitive skin, and Izzy tried not to squirm. Vampires didn’t need to breathe, but Edward seemed to enjoy smelling him. Ed seemed to enjoy many things about him.
Which was strange, Izzy thought. Objectively speaking. Prior to whatever odd arrangement he had here with Ed, Izzy would not have listed any adjectives adjacent to “enjoyable” among his own qualities. It wasn’t like he hated himself; he might’ve said he was dependable, hard-working, and even occasionally courageous. But he had never been exactly… likable. In fact, he distinctly remembered his colleague’s wife calling him an “unpleasant little man” several years ago.
But Ed seemed to like him well enough.
Halfway through Izzy’s third slice of pizza, he paused, shutting his eyes for a moment against the pleasure of Ed’s big hand kneading one of his love handles. The muscle of Ed’s forearm pressed up against the center of Izzy’s stomach, and a burp rumbled up through his chest. He stifled it in his fist, but Ed gave a little growl of either hunger or lust and buried his mouth against Izzy’s navel, nipping with his dull front teeth at the skin.
Izzy moaned, pressing forward into the cold, wet mouth, and then felt himself blush an even deeper shade of red. Ed licked at him.
“Master,” he choked out. “M’thirsty. Let me—”
He tried pulling gently away from Ed, who whined but let him go. He drooped down over the edge of the coffin like an unwatered plant as Izzy stepped away, waiting for him to return.
“You bought beer, Izzy?” he mumbled into the wood. “Like it when we drink beer together.”
“Right. No,” Izzy corrected. “You like it when I drink beer for you and wind up sick as a dog on the amount it takes you to catch a buzz. No, I didn’t buy beer.”
“Damn,” Ed muttered, but his ears twitched under his curtain of hair when he heard the twisting of cheap metal on glass. “What’s that?”
“Rum,” Izzy said casually, then tilted his head back and poured two generous gulps down his throat. He gasped after swallowing, crinkling up his face at the taste.
Ed was sitting up now when he looked at him, hands gripping the sides of his coffin. It was difficult to ruffle the feathers of a vampire, Izzy had noticed. They’d seen everything, done everything, lived through everything. But Ed was looking a bit ruffled.
“Good familiar,” Ed praised, eyes sparkling. “Good fucking familiar.”
Izzy shrugged and took another huge bite of pizza.
“I’m sitting down,” he said with his mouth full, gesturing with the bottle towards the loveseat in the corner of the room. “Follow if you’d like.”
The soles of Ed’s boots tapped lightly on the pinewood as he hopped to his feet, and he was lying back with his hands behind his head in the loveseat faster than a blink. Izzy, pizza boxes and bottle in hand, dropped down heavily at his hip.
“Don’t mind me,” Ed said, gazing at him through his eyelashes.
Izzy said nothing. He continued to eat.
As embarrassed as his new, very visible weight sometimes made him during daytime, Izzy had to admit that he loved this. He loved stuffing himself with as much food as he ever could’ve wanted (and then some), he loved feeding himself up like an animal readying for either hibernation or slaughter, letting Ed get full off of him, get drunk off of him, letting his master use him until the two of them collapsed together into an exhausted, hot, sticky tangle of shared, separate pleasures on this loveseat.
Before he knew it, six slices of pizza had disappeared. He washed down the crust with several long chugs of rum, then leaned back against Ed with one hand on his stomach. A hiccup shook his body, and Izzy, embarrassed, tried to burp quietly into the collar of his shirt. Nothing came up. He breathed, hiccupped again, and winced.
Ed laughed, sitting up.
“Aw, poor little thing,” he purred, sounding at least half-sarcastic. A hand slid under Izzy’s shirt again, finding the swell of his warm, full stomach up by his ribs. Ed’s calloused fingers rubbed deeply, pressing slow circles into the stretching flesh until a pocket of air seemed to collect together and, suddenly, Izzy was able let out an enormous burp.
He panted, feeling the walls of his stomach relax and the pressure (which had been edging towards discomfort) diminish. Still, however, the metal buckle of his pants dug irritatingly in.
He himself breathe for a moment before pulling away slightly from Ed’s touch. Izzy lifted his gut up awkwardly with one hand, sucking in slightly, while the other hand worked fruitlessly at the belt buckle. He tried sucking in further and pulling the belt tighter so that the leather and metal could separate, but it slipped out of his grasp and his belly spilled out to press tight against his half-buttoned shirt again.
“Allow me,” said Edward with an exaggerated flourish, and within a moment had pinched the latch open. He slithered the belt out of its buckle and, with a tug, loosened its grip around Izzy’s waist.
Izzy, trying to seem nonchalant, took another long drink of rum as Ed undid the button of his pants. His stomach, still restrained up top by his tight-fitting vest, cascaded downwards, pushing the zipper far open before Ed could help out.
Izzy relaxed backwards, groaning with the sudden relief and the burn of alcohol down his throat.
“Incredible,” Ed sighed, palming it under the shirt. He lifted a soft handful of pudge and let it fall, as if testing for heft. “Swear you look yummier by the day.”
“Well,” Izzy replied, a little abashedly. “Cheers.”
He lay back for a moment, letting the feeling of Edward’s hands squeezing gently at his belly send shivers of burning heat down through his pelvis to his crotch. He didn’t dare think about what it must’ve looked like down there, in the span of pale blue boxer-briefs between the halves of his open zipper. He and Edward had done this hundreds of times now to varying degrees, and it must’ve been clear to his master exactly how much Izzy enjoyed this. And yet Ed kept asking him to continue.
“Slowin’ down, Iz? You gettin’ full?”
“Eh,” said Izzy noncommittally, although he was indeed getting a bit full. “Could still eat.”
“Well, good,” said Ed. “’Cause I’m going to feed you now.”
He’d somehow picked up the remaining two slices of pepperoni without Izzy noticing. There was dangerous look in his eyes even though they were smiling. They glinted like an animal’s against the candlelight, flashed it back in flat green circles for a moment as Ed sat up around him, legs on one side of Izzy and his arms on the other. His body was not warm, but it was solid and protective.
Izzy put his chin stiffly up and bit the folded-together slices held before him. He tore off too much and chewed it roughly.
Ed smiled.
There was barely time to swallow before the next bite was forced into his mouth. He breathed through his nose, swallowed, accepted more and more and more, and licked Ed’s fingers clean when the last bite had gone.
He’d eaten a great deal very quickly, and he felt it. He’d become so accustomed enough to doing this, however, that a whole pizza was not quite enough to make him feel really full. Not stretched to his limits, not completely rounded out. He could still eat.
Izzy let out a long sigh that turned into a deep, rumbling burp. In the fuzzier, more gently-edged frame of mind the rum was settling him into, he hardly blushed at all. He knew Ed didn’t mind. And they were all alone.
He leaned backwards against Ed, whose lips grazed his ear then the jugular vein down the side of his neck. Ed hardly ever bit Izzy’s throat anymore despite his clear temptation.
Wears the veins out if you do it too much, he’d explained. Makes ’em weak. Then I’m out a good familiar.
Izzy picked up the bottle and took another long drink, wincing. He’d never cared much for rum, but Ed—having had very few options for physical escapism in the past three-hundred odd years—seemed to relish opportunities to get a bit fucked-up.
“Take it easy, mate,” the low voice warned.
“Can handle myself, thanks,” Izzy panted, although he could feel himself starting to sweat and the moments starting to blur together.
“Right,” said Ed, a bit paternalistically, and patted Izzy’s stomach right where it puffed through the vest’s single undone button. The others looked strained. “Right. Maybe oughtta get this off, though. Before it rips.”
Izzy obediently stripped off his vest, folding it and placing it gently to the side of the couch. His collared shirt, however, stayed on. It was stretched to its capacity over his belly, a peak of suntanned, hairy flesh between the two open buttons above his navel, where the clinging fabric dipped generously.
“Seeing as how this shirt’s already ruined…” Izzy started.
He had a feeling that Edward were to be drawn as a cartoon in that moment, his tongue would’ve been lolling out of his mouth at the sight of Izzy having gotten too big for his shirt. As it was, Ed’s lips twitched and his eyes lit up with wildfire.
“Y’know I’ve never had a pizza,” he said, staring directly into Izzy’s belly as though hypnotized. “But I’ve heard you’re a maniac for the pineapple thing, and I believe it. Just sounds weird.”
“Your sense of smell is alarming,” Izzy muttered, thinking of the still-unopened box of ham-and-pineapple pizza they had yet to go through.
Ed said nothing. He merely reached down to the box, knocked it open, and grabbed two more slices. He sat up and came nearly cheek-to-cheek with Izzy, master’s breath tickling familiar’s facial hair. Ed presented the food, and Izzy again bit off as much as he could chew.
“That’s it,” Edward whispered, and Izzy’s cock throbbed.
He felt the cold, raspy tongue lick the back of his ear as another bite was presented to him. He ate dutifully, feeling the restrictions of buttons and hems unevenly restricting the growth of his stomach. Halfway through these slices, he paused, turning his face, and started to rub it gently, pushing the flats of his hands down against the tightness there.
Edward cooed and followed suit, his strong left hand easily working another long, soothing burp.
Izzy moaned and took another bite.
“Fuck,” Ed murmured, as he was chewing. Izzy knew that tone of voice: it was hardly even a voice, verging so strongly on a growl. Ed would draw blood soon.
Izzy put down the ninth and tenth slices together as fast as possible. He leaned hard into Ed’s rubbing, comforting hand as the pressure caught up with him, but the touch was not enough. He found he could barely breathe. His warm stomach sat bloated out under the riding-up shirt to his thighs.
He panted into Ed’s shoulder, and Ed, shaking slightly from the effort not to bite, held him.
“Izzy,” Ed sighed lowly, gripping the last bit of soft, unswollen flesh at the very bottom of his stomach. “Izzy.”
Izzy, in response, took another big swig of rum. As he set it down, he grabbed another slice of pizza and crammed as much as he could into his mouth. A stray cut of pineapple dropped and rolled down onto his lap. Ed brushed it off impatiently and put his face to Izzy’s thigh. His strange mouth dampened the crease between Izzy’s stomach and hipbone.
“Take this fucking thing off,” Ed demanded, pulling at the shirt—but his movement, enhanced by bloodlust and frustration, tore it straight open, buttons springing free from their holds.
He didn’t stop to apologize, burrowing his face straight into the bulge of Izzy’s full gut, his hands caressing it, his hair tangling in the buckle of Izzy’s open belt. He was gentle but firm, and Izzy felt comfortable surrounded—almost trapped—in his touch.
Izzy smirked and worked his way through more pizza and rum. He was comfortably drunk now, which took the edge off the distress signals coming from his stomach. He leaned back into the loveseat, spreading one arm over its back and belching in response to Edward’s hands.
As Izzy leaned down to grab the thirteenth slice, he felt the telltale sting of the vampire’s teeth against his gut, which had admittedly smooshed Edward down into the couch as he’d bent forward.
Having blood sucked was always a strange sensation. It felt like nothing for a moment, and then it felt very cold and very empty. Izzy reached down to Edward’s head and gripped it, tangling his fingers through hiss long, greying hair. Ed made a soft, keening sound that nearly put tears into Izzy’s eyes, but Izzy blinked them away and bit gingerly into a piece of pineapple. Ed’s powers of hypnotism were very strong, Izzy knew, and Ed seemed almost unaware of how aggressively he used them when he was feeding. While feeding, Ed became something pitiful, sweet, and terribly injured. When Ed was feeding, the only thing in the world that Izzy wanted was to protect him. With the right word, he could’ve been talked into giving his life, in this moment, to let his master drain him.
That was dangerous, and the only weapon was distraction. Izzy kept eating, feeling the rasping lick of Ed’s tongue on the pudge of his skin and the barbs of his latching fangs in his flesh.
After a while, Izzy began to feel weak. Lifting the bottle to his mouth after he’d finished the slice was a chore. He breathed as heavily as he could with his stomach so full and clenched his fingers tighter into the vampire’s hair, warning him.
“Ed,” he sighed.
The edges of Izzy’s vision began to sparkle. The flames of the candles crumpled and bent. Izzy felt his heart beating hard in his ears.
“Ed,” he said, louder, pulling at his master’s hair. There was no response.
In a frantic bid for freedom, Izzy wriggled upright, yanked the hair from Ed’s face, and stuck a spit-moistened deep into the vampire’s ear.
Ed unlatched with a horrible, broken sound like a sob.
Izzy slumped sideway into his master’s chest in relief, letting his eyes loll shut. Exhaustion overwhelmed him again. He was so tired. So fucking tired.
Ed’s arms latched so tightly and insistently around Izzy that Izzy felt like a child’s favorite stuffed animal as he was pulled down to lie against Ed on the loveseat. He cried out quietly in discomfort, but then relaxed gradually, sinking in, the arms around him loosening slightly. Ed was solid and strong and smelled like pine and salt and lime. Izzy's body was spent. His wound tingled from the anticoagulant in Ed's saliva.
Beneath him, shudders wracked Ed’s muscles as the vampire strained against the urge to bite the overfed, rather tipsy, half-naked man lying on top of him. Izzy just held tighter to him, perhaps making a soft shush-ing sound or two. No one would ever tell if he did. He could feel Ed’s own quite distended and unusually warm stomach resting right against his crotch, but he tried not to think too hard about it. No need to intensify that particular situation.
“Ss’hard,” Edward stammered, sucking a hiss of breath through his teeth, “Not to kill you.”
“Effort appreciated, boss,” Izzy said, hoarsely.
“Got so much,” Ed continued. “So much blood. Jesus, Iz.”
“Well,” said Izzy, and didn’t continue.
He shifted slightly, trying to breathe against the weight of gravity. It seemed impossible.
Christ, who cared about air anyway. He was exhausted. He let his head hang down and his cheek nestle against Ed’s collarbone, groaning quietly. He could hear his stomach digesting the huge meal it’d had.
After a moment’s hesitation, his master snuggled closer to him, too.
“You smell good, Izzy.”
“You said that earlier.”
“I can say things twice.”
“Mm. Just don’t bite me again.”
“Nah, I won’t,” Ed assured him. “Think I’m satisfied.”