Chapter Text
“You are making her fat.”
Isabela didn’t startle at the sudden low growl. She’d heard Fenris coming from a mile (okay, a few feet) away, and Fenris wouldn’t be Fenris if he didn’t have something to snipe at her. Though really, after being so long away, a hello, Isabela or how are you doing, Isabela or even a my you’re looking absolutely fuckable as ever, Isabela would have been nice.
Instead, as always, her ex-lover (ex-ex-ex-ex? What was the special word for scowly elf I’ve been riding on and off for the past handful of years, at least until he started making doe-eyes at the woman I’m currently screwing before breaking her heart and fucking off to Maker knows where, leaving me to sexily pick up the pieces; the Orlesians had to have a pithy word for it) came in and got straight to the point.
The point being Marian Hawke.
And how Isabela was apparently making her fat.
“That’s cruel, love,” Isabela said without looking up from the blade she was fastidiously cleaning. “At the very most I’ve made her pleasantly plump.” Then, looking up and over with an arched brow: “Though blah blah self-determination, so I suppose I should say she’s been making herself pleasantly plump. Hello, Fenris.” Isabela swung one thigh over the bench until she was straddling it, facing where the scowly elf stood, arms cross and…well, scowly. “You were gone from Kirkwall long enough we were starting to take bets on whether you’d actually bother to come back.”
She and Varric had been taking bets. Anders asked if he could put money on never, please Maker and Merrill had called it mean even as she snickered into her ale mug. Marian hadn’t been asked, considering the whole reason Fenris had fled the city for nearly a year was because he’d found true happiness at the well of her nethers or something else completely ridiculous.
Fenris waved away the almost-year he’d been gone as if it were nothing. As if he hadn’t broken any hearts on his way out. “That is not the point,” he insisted. “I saw her in the marketplace. She’s…bigger,” he finished weakly.
Isabela quirked a brow, putting away her knife with a flourish. “And?”
That seemed, somehow, to fluster him more. “And…you are a bad influence,” he snapped, crossing and recrossing his arms as he moved from foot to foot. It was early enough in the afternoon that The Hanged Man was nearly empty, so there wasn’t exactly anyone around to hear them arguing about Marian’s weight (or The Champion’s Darling Little Potbelly as Isabela had taken to thinking of it privately), but she lowered her voice anyway. Maker forbid word got back to Marian that her former lover and her enthusiastic current lover were debating the state of her figure. (For one, that might encourage her to start watching what she was eating, and Isabela was maybe just enough responsible for the current state of her waistline that she didn’t want to risk that. For two, Isabela had a vested interest in staying her lover, at least for the time being.)
“Explain,” Isabela drawled. She gestured for Fenris to take a seat. “Because to be honest, love, I can’t tell whether you’re suggesting I’m feeding her up on purpose or whether you’re saying my own diet is rubbing off on her. In which case I would counter that I look bloody fabulous and my deliciously pert rear isn’t the only thing rubbing on dear Marian these days.”
She actually heard his teeth grind at that, but he shoved back a chair and sat down with her, so she figured she’d take that as a win.
“And don’t you dare play the wounded, spurned lover at either of us,” Isabela added, lifting a warning finger before swirling it absently in the air in a call for ale. Even though she could have sworn nobody was behind the bar moments ago, she heard the tell-tale clinking and clatter of two ales being pulled. “You had your chance—multiple times, with me, if you’ll remember—and you are the one who left. I’m happy to see you back,” she said, because it was the truth and she did hate the way his eyes dropped at that in clear pain, “and if I weren’t giving the monogamish thing a try, I’d take you up to my room and show you, but Marian’s got every right to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
Isabela paused as the ales were shoved across the old wooden table, amber liquid sloshing over the slides. She took a deep pull, giving the bartender time to saunter away and leave them alone again, before she licked at the froth on her upper lip and added, “Especially if your opening gambit is Hello, Hawke, long time no see; my you’ve porked up over the past year.”
Fenris curled his hands around his tankard, brows drawing together in a dark scowl. “I would not say it like that,” he muttered, but Isabela recognized the gradual loosening of his body language. He had come in swinging in such an odd fashion partly because for some reason Marion’s weight actually bothered him (a point Isabela planned to dig deeply into, then crush beneath her boot if she sensed even a hint of body-shaming or misogyny lingering about) and partly because he hadn’t known how to say hello like a normal person.
Isabela had plenty of experience sailing in and out of the lives of people around her; someday, she’d remember to give him tips. But for now…
“And how would you say it, then?” she asked, taking another pull of her ale before resting her chin on her fist. She lowered her voice into a mock growl. “My, Hawke, you’re looking big-boned lately? Or maybe, Hawke; when’s the baby due? Is it mine?”
That, she decided when Fenris slammed his mug of ale on the table—sending an amber wave splashing across the worn grain—was probably going a teensy bit too far. Still, she couldn’t help digging the hole deeper. “Don’t worry, love: if she was carrying a grouchy little half-elf in there, she’d be muuuuch further along and noticeably bigger that the adorable little paunch she’s been carrying. Give me another couple of months and I’ll bad influence her up until she’s waddling about something proper.”
The endless desire to tease a response out of Fenris was the only excuse Isabela had for a little body-shaming of her own, puffing out her cheeks and using her hands to sketch out a proper nine-months-pregnant paunch—rocking side to side as if she were Marian waddling under its weight, hands smoothing over the invisible wide dome.
And that, ultimately, gave her the answer to the riddle of Fenris’s odd mood she actually needed, because Fenris flushed at her pantomime, eyes dropping down to where she was semi-obscenely pretending to stroke her (Marian’s) bloated middle as if the mage had managed to pack on a hundred pounds rather than a modest almost-thirty. He could be pretty difficult to read, but she knew him well enough to see the interest that flashed there…and wow, but some people never gave up on surprising you, did they?
She considered coming at him straight with the question (does Marian getting a bit chunky bother you because you find the idea of her getting proper fat kinky-hot too?) but decided to use the sneak attack instead.
“So, honest answer here? When you said I was making her fat, you weren’t exactly wrong.” Isabela could sense Fenris tensing up, though in adorably keen interest and focus rather than his usual prickly rage. People like Anders or even Merrill probably would never be able to tell the difference, but Isabela liked to think one of the many things she and Marian had in common was an empathetic streak that ran a mile wide, and anyone with a social IQ worth beans would be able to sense the soft river running beneath Fenris’s hard exterior. “I’ve always had a bit of a kinky streak, you know—”
“I know,” he countered, bone-dry.
Isabela hid a grin. “And one of my biggest kinks is bigger women. Especially women getting bigger. Especially,” she added, pushing her luck, “lanky dreamboats like Marian getting slowly bigger, and bigger, and bigger as she grows more and more comfortable with her life. Letting go a little—or a lot. Getting a little languid, a little lazy, a lot hedonistic and finally downright gluttonous. Oh,” she said, fanning herself, “but I love when they start getting truly gluttonous. It’s like a fire got lit inside of them and all they want is to be fed and to be touched, and to be rolled onto their back and have their squishy bellies massaged with one hand as the other slides between puffy wet nethers and—”
“Ahem.”
She snapped her fingers playfully. “Well, you get the idea. So when Marian came to me looking for a distraction to take her mind off things, I was only too happy to oblige. And so far, she’s been only too happy to spend nights in my bed and meals at my table, letting me show her the wonders of Rivaini cooking. After a diet of Ferelden blandness and Kirkwall poverty slop, it’s no wonder she’s starting to really balloon. And speaking of ballooning up,” Isabela added, leaning forward, “you should see her fall on an Orlesian dessert tray. Our Hawke’s got a sweet tooth that’s going to catch up with her sooner or later. Oh, what am I saying?” Isabela laughed. “As you already pointed out, she’s piled on almost thirty pounds easy just in the time I’ve had her, and I haven’t really been trying. It’s already catching up with her. Do you think I’ll be lucky enough to get her up to fifty before she catches on about what a fat pig she’s becoming? Seventy?”
“Do not call her that,” Fenris snapped, but he was flushed a dark red all the way up to his eartips, and Isabela could see the telltale way he was shifting in his seat. Isabela had ridden that cock enough times to know his tells: imagining once-svelte, almost willowy Marian Hawke a good seventy-plus pounds heavier was getting him very, very hard.
Isabela leaned in across the table, not missing the way his eyes dropped to the indecently low-cut front of her bodice. Good for the ego, and good to know Fenris still had other interests besides her own current lover. “How big do you think I can feed her?” she mock-whispered. “How big would you want to feed her in my place?”
“I am not,” he tried, but his voice was strangled. Oh, how he wanted it. “I am not interested. I walked away.”
“And now you’re walking back,” Isabela pushed, “only to find your dream girl has become even more of your dream in the interim. Come on, Fenris; it’s me. You know I won’t judge you. If you had your way, and you could pin Marian Hawke down…gently,” Isabela correct, sensing that while she rather enjoyed kinky embarrassment and forced-feeding play, Fenris was probably a lighter touch, “and rub her expanding belly and tell her what a good girl she was and how sweetly fat she was becoming for you and what a round ball of a goddess she had become…how big would that be? In your most feverish imagination?”
He shifted, then shifted again, practically squirming at the picture she was painting. Fuck. If she’d thought to have the may I have a pass to fuck our ex talk with Marian before, she’d climb over the table and straddle him now, no questions asked. Talking about the woman they both cared about blowing up into a gorgeous, pampered, gluttonous goddess? Well, that was hot, no two buts about it.
Still, she thought maybe Fenris wouldn’t answer her, leaving her fishing expedition unmet…before he cleared his throat into his fist, and admitted, low, “Five hundred.”
Isabela whistled, her mental image of Marian shifting at those words. That was bigger than she’d been anticipating—bigger than she thought she could possibly get away with—but Maker’s tits it was hot to picture. That willowy, pretty mage’s belly slowly bowing out, expanding, stretching into a tight little dome (like when Marian stopped paying attention and just absently ate whatever Isabela put in front of her until she was stuffed) into a soft little potbelly into a much bigger potbelly into a flowing apron of fat that bubbled out and spilled across her lap, down her thighs, toward her dimpling knees: growing bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder as all of Marian swelled up in massive succession: modest breasts spilling onto the fold of her belly with a solid thwap, her already-softening jawline doubling, then threatening to triple into her thick neck, her shoulders even gone pillowy soft as round arms were pushed away from her sides and Aveline-thick thighs were spread wide apart and Marian fell back with a strangled cry: bloating and spilling ever out and out in the magic spell of Isabela’s kinky imagination until she was overflowing the bed the three of them shared, happily eating sweets from Isabela’s fingers as Fenris hoisted her blubbery-soft overhang with all his warrior’s strength (grunting, even then, at the effort) and pushed inside her one throbbing inch at a time…
Isabela let out a stuttering sigh the same moment Fenris noisily cleared his throat again, and that…that was all the proof she needed that he was deeply and pervertedly into this, too, and he would come back into Marian’s life and bed if she so much as crooked a finger.
And considering Isabela knew first-hand just how much Marian still longed for Fenris despite him breaking her heart? She was pretty sure she could convince that finger to crook just as easily as she convinced her increasingly not-so-little mage to eat and eat and eat her feelings.
“Go back to your ruined mansion, love,” Isabela said, sitting back and squeezing her thighs together. Maker’s tits, but she was horny now. “And wait for our summons. If you’re willing to be a very good boy and share…I can’t think of any reason we can’t all get what we desire from each other.”
Though…five hundred pounds, all on Marian Hawke? That seemed to be stretching it. Still, it never hurt, she supposed, to dream very, very big indeed.