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Fingers of light caressed Vortex’s still-firm tattooed bicep, blanketed by both a comfortable layer of fat and luxuriantly soft sheets. He opened his eye with a subdued anticipation on seeing his beloved lying next to him. But there were only bundled bedsheets, like the fragments of a shed imago and a pillow indented but unoccupied. Vortex shot up like a kinetic round from a bolt gun. Since he’d migrated to her king-size bed, he’d never come around to a morning where Beelzebub hadn’t been next to him, fingers interlaced across the. The heavy-set hellhound scanned the light-dappled bedroom for any sign of her.
“Babe?” his voice lilted with panic, “Babe, where are you?”
Vortex’s finely honed chariness kicked into full throttle. He was used to vetting out dangers for his boss, but this was the person he loved. Beelzebub was one of the more beloved Sins, but that wasn’t universal. It was Hell, filled with scum who would have scrambled to plug up the vacuum of power left in her wake had she ever disappeared. Beelzebub’s cavalierly attitude towards life, the very thing that had drawn him to her, frustrated Vortex to no end. Like the rest of her sinful brethren, she’d been around for so long that she believed that nothing could hurt her. Vortex’s acute canine sense of hearing had picked up on rumors about a new type of bullets capable of killing overlords. There was no reason why Sins couldn’t fall again. Had someone carrying such contraband snuck into the party and erased the woman he loved with a single squeeze of the trigger? For a minute, all of Vortex’s nightmares were reality.
Pressure bubbled below his abdomen, not unlike the tingles of indigestion after a heavy meal, a sensation that Vortex had become intimately familiar with as the Sin of Gluttony’s partner. Pulling back the blankets, he found the queen kneeling before him. Unwrapping the blanket, he found her buried face-first in his belly, all four arms plastered around his sides. Beelzebub was out cold, rolled onto her side to avoid putting pressure on her chitinous wings, tail tucked between her legs. The gale of panic that had been brewing inside Vortex fanned down to a slack current. He gave a fond chuckle as he pushed a clawed hand through her scalp.
“You really are obsessed.” he muttered lovingly.
Beelzebub’s phosphorescent blue locks twisted around the joints of his fingers, as if trying to keep him there. Vortex was big and he knew it. He’d tipped the scales from the moment he’d been born, larger and heavier than the rest of his litter mates. Too shy to raise his fists, become a natural target for bullies. As he grew up, he lost that reticence and turned his size into an advantage, serving as professional muscle and roughing up whoever his clients wanted, if they paid him. His bosses regarded him as a staunch tool of intimidation, a walking artillery they deployed to get their way. But he’d never met anyone who lionized him like Beelzebub had.
Beelzebub entertained a certain degree of infamy for fattening up those around her. But it wasn’t entirely her fault. She was a bona fide bon vivant, who lived every day like it was her last, a lifestyle she’d dragged Vortex into. She adored every single part of him, even those he’d been driven to hide and coaxed his hidden happiness out into the open, like the sun pealing through the storm clouds. Whenever he was with her, Vortex felt like the most desirable being alive. On their first night together, he’d been forced to take a break or risk passing out. No other partner he’d ever been with had made him do that before. Vortex shuddered at the memory. She was his match in every sense.
The black floral-patterned bedding was hooded over her head, pointed ears flattened to the sides of her head. Vortex was mystified. Beelzebub was a humanoid typhoon, pulling the rest of the world into her joyous storm surge. Typically, she’d be up hours before him, having showered, dressed and polished off three breakfasts before his eyelids had even cracked open. Vortex had to megadose on caffeine just to remember his own name. With the exactitude of a surgeon delving his bladed instruments across a delicate network of viscera, he pushed Beelzebub back over onto her side of the bed without waking her. Beelzebub gave a melodic hum in her sleep. It was the longest that she’d ever slept in sober. Even the queen of corroborees needed a break occasionally. Beelzebub spent so much time indulging other people’s whims. Now, Vortex would return the favor.
As he crept out of bed, he kissed her just below her earlobe. A smile twitched onto her sleeping face, snuggling under the covers with a happy squeak that detonated Vortex’s heart like a hydrogen bomb. He maneuvered his bulk out onto the upstairs landing, vowing to return to her as soon as possible.
Adam lounged about on the edge of the balcony in a half-open robe, exposing a belly that billowed over the half-tucked waistband of his boxers, the only other garment he’d bothered to wear. He chewed on the blunt edge of a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, puffing out a gaseous smear into the atmosphere like an industrial smokestack. He stood with his back poised against the orange creamsicle dawn like a mosquito preserved in Jurassic ambergris. He yawned, scratching at the star-shaped soul patch on his chin, just above the ring of fat on his neck.
“Sup.”
With his head thorned with horns and a long scaly tail that he’d trip up the unaware with for his own amusement, it was hard to believe he’d ever been an angel.
“Morning to you too, my man,” Vortex squeezed in beside him, “what brings you out this early? Planning a little morning flight?”
Adam gripped his nasal bridge.
“I’m just coming round from that kegger I polished off at last night’s party,” he groaned, “so probably not. Unless you want puke in your pool.”
Vortex winced. Never again.
“Charming,” the hellhound looked around, “where’s Lute?”
“Still asleep. Her body’s still learning how to have fun. I had to carry her to bed.” Adam replied, “she’s such a fuckin’ lightweight that I’m surprised that she hasn’t floated away yet.”
Vortex chuckled.
“Same here. I’m giving my lady a little lie-in too. Believe it or not, even she gets tuckered out from time to time.”
Adam elbowed the inch of belly that spooled out from under Vortex’s black shirt.
“No wonder, trying to keep up with that beast!” he skreiched.
The smirk was smashed off Adam’s face when Vortex took a handful of his own belly and gave it a vigorous shake. Vortex bit his lip at the silken swell of Adam’s underbelly. He was amazed (and a little jealous) by how much Adam had fattened up in the short time he’d been in Gluttony. The bounteous pouch of flesh was striated with stretchmarks and the faded outline of Lute’s bruising hand. She was a tactile lover, who had never stepped out in public without an assertive hand perched on Adam’s belly or groping around his thick love handle. She wanted the world to know what she’d done to him, that the massive man was all hers. Not that Vortex could blame her. Adam was softer than any cloud in Heaven. Vortex found himself overloaded with the urge to jam his face in that blancmange-like gut. Beelzebub wasn’t the only one who liked them large, it seemed.
“You’re one to talk, 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘰𝘺,” he remanded, “I’m surprised you can still fit through the door. Though with the way things have been going, it’s only a matter of time.”
Vortex couldn’t believe that he as joshing with the man who’d commandeered the slaughter of half of Hell’s population. The thought hadn’t occurred to him when Adam had first stumbled out of the darkness. Vortex had mistaken him for another drunk and prepared to turf him out. That was until he heard the crackle of his skin, like fire-ravaged wood. Claws unmade the beds of Adam’s nails in a bloody procession, pushing out more human ones. His ornate white chasuble had been torn to rags, exposing a fresh scar across his sternum. Without a word, he’d collapsed comatose into Vortex’s arms.
He and Beelzebub had tended to his wounds as best as they could. Vortex was certain that the stranger would die without an identity. But Adam was too stubborn to leave this world too. His broken body had battled on to see the dawn and the subsequent other ones.
Even when they’d found out who he really was, Bee refused to kick Adam out even though she was more than justified.
“I created this place where people could eat and drink without guilt.” She protested, “We’re really going to sit here and judge him? I don't care what he's done, Vortex. Nobody deserves to be alone like that."
Vortex hadn’t been as lenient as his girlfriend. Even though being Hellborn exempted him from the yearly exterminations, he and others were still affected. He’d lost 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 to Adam and his forces, hapless sinners trying to navigate new bodies, who hadn’t been fortunate enough to find the light before they were snuffed out forever. He’d only given Adam a chance because Beelzebub had.
Weeks later, he discovered why Bee was so intent on housing him. As Vortex had knelt down to dab on a fresh coat on petroleum jelly onto the burns, he’d taken in the full extent of Adam’s injuries. Arborescent Lichtenberg figures were burnt into Adam’s scaled over skin, like a miniature ecosystem. Vortex had seen them before, on Beelzebub’s own body, stonewashed scars still apparent in the diminished glow of her sleep. There were still nights where she’d cry in her sleep to a creator who let her calls go to message for epochs. If this was what Heaven’s mercy was like, then he shivered at the thought of their true wrath. In the end, a golden cage was still a cage. Vortex had come to open his arms to this odd bird that had come pecking into their grounds.
A subtle blush glossed over Adam’s face as he jumped out of Vortex’s hold.
“Yeah, well you can blame Lute for that. That bitch does not let up. I think she’s more into this than I am. Your girl’s a bad influence on her.” he grumbled.
Vortex remembered her leading the other partygoers in chanting Adam’s name as he chugged down the heavy keg. Adam wasn’t the only one who’d abandoned all compunctions. When Lute had first come here, she’d been more wound up than a gordian knot, a shy wallflower wilting into the corner that she’d tried to remain unseen from. Now, she’d positioned herself as the devil on Adam’s shoulder, goading him into further acts of gluttony. Vortex wondered if they’d held the same dynamic in Heaven. The hellhound folded his arms in disbelief.
“Bee? She’s the one who’s been begging for tips from 𝘩𝘦𝘳!” he exclaimed, “We’ve created a kinky monster.”
“Yeah, that’s Lute.” Adam sighed.
His soft voice was loud enough to give Vortex pause. It was a tone that he reserved for Lute alone, inflated with hydrogen-light love that he’d ridicule anyone else for using. Once Adam had healed enough to speak, Lute had been all he could talk about. Even under the guise of a demon, Vortex was able to pick her out from the crowd, this aloof, white-haired woman who had yet to come across a conflict she wouldn’t throw herself into.
Adam composed dreamy ballads about her bloodshed on his guitar. Her absence, as well as making the first man’s heart far fonder, had escalated her to near-godlike status. He and Beelzebub had made a bet about whether Lute was a seraph or not. Bee hadn’t stopped rubbing her victory in his face since the other angel had fallen into their domain. Vortex had always wondered what Lute had to have had such an influence on the first human being. She seemed as ethereal as Lilith or Eve, whose existences had been limited to rare mentions. Vortex found himself on equal footing with the unreachable angel. When Beelzebub had sashayed into his life, all other women had faded into the background. No-one could surpass her.
After meeting Lute in the flesh, Vortex saw why Adam had so fallen for her. Though different in appearance, their souls were woven from the same cloth, meshed in a burning tenacity. They belonged together.
“I hate the way I left her,” Adam had sighed one night, “after I was stabbed by that freaky little sinner bitch. She was screaming and sobbing, begging me to to stay with her.”
Vortex raised his head from his drink, the smile plummeting from his face, unprepared for a somber swerve to a night that had been, up to this point, jovial. Adam had been tight-lipped about the circumstances that had led him there, resisting all their gentle prods. Prompted by a queasy fascination, Vortex listened.
“I’d never seen her cry like that before and I hated it. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just smiled. To let her know that it wasn’t her fault, how happy she’d made me.”
Adam folded his hands across his stomach, leaning back into the pillow as if it was his lost love’s lap.
“If there was one thing I couldn’t stand,” he went on, “it was Lute being upset. I lived for whenever she smiled. If only you could have seen it, Tex. Hers outshone the sun. When she smiled, everything came alive.”
Vortex was stunned. It was a side to Exorcists with their flickering grins and demon-blood discolored weapons, that he had never believed they were capable of. Beneath the many layers of hedonistic loutishness that composed Adam’s being, there was a heart of gold, tarnished but still beating. And Lute’s name was engraved on it, Eve and Lilith’s scratched out.
Over the last few months, he’d seen more intimate glimpses of Adam as they were pushed closer by their girlfriends’ mutual obsession with fattening them up. And Vortex liked what he saw. Sure, Adam may have been rude, arrogant, loud-mouthed, entitled, lazy, sadistic and borderline insufferable at times. But he was also lively, a born performer and impossible as it seemed to the rest of Hell, cared about those close to him. He’d lost paradise twice, but still soldiered on. His wings were clipped yet he soared. Vortex didn’t know many others who’d be able to do that. He wasn’t the brutish buffoon everyone thought him to be.
Demon or angel, Adam was a handsome guy. He had an unkempt beauty like the untrimmed drop of a mossy crag, something that could crush those unprepared. His weight gain had spruced him further. Adam’s belly fell to his mid-thighs like a sarcoid apron, with a wide, grabbable rump and a pronounced degree of muscle that added to his expanding physique. Together, with ivory-haired Lute and her violet-tinted skin, they painted a picture too attractive to look away from. It didn’t escape Vortex how Beelzebub’s gaze lingered on them both, longer than anyone else they’d ever shared their private quarters with. Adam and Lute were the only other couple that could keep up with their feedist fun. It was a subject they’d discussed at length between each other in their own bed, that Beelzebub was ready to drag out into the open. Vortex had been forced to apply the brakes for fear of scaring the other pair off, something that had happened several times in the past. Inside, he was just as eager. The more the merrier, as Beelzebub always said.
Adam’s fat face unzipped into a grin, his studded tongue forking out.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit Lute’s got planned tonight.” he boasted, “she wants me to eat a cake right off her body, baked it all herself. A whole fucking cake, can you believe that?”
Vortex enacted the scenario in his own mind, with Beelzebub displacing Lute as the leading lady, straddling his lap naked as she pushed another moist slice past his eager muzzle, playing with his softening body. Adam and Lute remained, relegated to the background where they watched on, with the fallen angelic commander wearing that insufferably sexy smirk. Vortex snuck a look at Adam’s gibbous belly. The man wore the weight as well as his new horns. He could see why Lute was so intent on expanding her territory. He wouldn’t mind seeing a lot more of Adam either.
“Hope you survive it, buddy.” He patted him on the back.
Adam flicked up an affectionate bird as the hellhound departed.
“Hey, fuck you, man!” he exclaimed, "I punched a mountain into dust once!”
“Says the same guy who got winded trying to open a bag of chips.”
Instead of clobbering Vortex’s ears with a barrage of insults, Adam snorted, trying to appear irritated. He threw back his arms like wings, in an imitation of a flight, before strolling back in the direction of his own room, to Lute.
Even after living the high life for so long with Bee, Vortex hadn’t grown complacent enough to forget how to cook. Being the eldest, he'd learned independency far younger than most. There was something as satisfying in taking care of others as there was in being taken of yourself. Unpacking the ingredients from the monstrous fridge out onto the kitchen counter, the hellhound worked his own magic. He shifted the sizzling product off the pan and into a neat arrangement of plates and cutlery spread across a wide tray. As finishing touch, he garnished the elaborate breakfast spread with a tasteful yellow rose in a narrow vase, Beelzebub’s favorite flower. Vortex gave a toothy beam at his own handiwork, wiping his honey-smeared hands on his apron. Oh, she was going to love this.
Juggling the steaming platter in his hands, Vortex pushed open the door with a hip. Much to his relief, Beelzebub was still asleep. Her foot pirouetted in her sleep, lost in a sleeping stage show. The mouth-watering aroma of thick, battery honey French vanilla toast, drowned in maple syrup and fresh fruit, pulled her from her deep sleep.
“Tex?” she called out, eyelids still drooping.
“It’s just me, babe,” he nodded, “I brought you a little something.”
The sleep fell from her eyes like scales at the shining array of breakfast treats that Vortex had laid out for her. Along with waffles, which were her go-to breakfast, there were golden brown, buttery blueberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, crispy brown strips of fat-soaked bacon and a creamy granola parfait in a small mason jar. A tall glass of orange juice sluiced on the far edge of the tray. It was more than a single person’s recommended calories for the day. But for Beelzebub, it was a light snack. Beelzebub sparked up like a firecracker. She bounced up and down in bed, their put-upon mattress moaning underneath her.
“No way!” she cupped her face in delight, “Vortex, you’re the 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵!”
She didn’t even wait for Vortex to lay it down before she started tucking in. She attacked it with a fork, wielding the pronged instrument with the intensity of Satan with his trident. Rather than fearsome, she looked impossibly cute, cheeks inflated with half-chewed food like a chipmunk and the coal-black tip of her nose dotted with the sweet liquid. Vortex sat and watched her eat with meditational adulation; his supine head tilted into his callused palm. Adam had been right for once. There was nothing more beautiful than the one you loved smiling. He swiped it off her cartilaginous bump with an index finger, where it fizzled on the tip of own tongue.
“Jerk!” she gasped, swiping at the air next to him, “Go get your own! Don’t I stuff you like carry-on luggage daily?”
“Just getting my daily dose of sweetness.” he explained in a matter-of-fact tone, “All part of a balanced breakfast, babe.”
Vortex dotted her lower lip with a fingertip. Beelzebub maneuvered her face around his digit, rubbing her cheekbone against his hand. The warmth of her skin spread upwards through his phalanges like sunlight.
“You really did all this for me?” she quietened, staring down at the clattering tower of sticky plates.
Vortex thought of Adam and Lute, sprawled out in bed like they were, legs locked around each other, their clawed hands palliating the featherless membrane of their new wings. Vortex knew that Adam would venture out to the uncharted outer reaches of Hell for her, just as he would for Beelzebub. Throughout all life’s changes, their love remained the one true constant.
“Well, I had a little inspiration.” he blushed.
fish_frick Fri 14 Jun 2024 12:28AM UTC
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