December third was a day drilled into his head by a professor waging a hell of an exam on his class, one that he was warned would be an automatic flunk if it was failed or miss. In the end it was just pointless stress when not only was the exam cancelled but the whole class itself for the rest of the semester, but that date being circled on the calendar let him remember the exact day that his whole perspective of Bentley changed. He even the very time of day it was when he returned home and made that discovery: 10:37 AM, he read from his watch walking to the front porch, trying to remember if Bentley had any classes that day, and understood when he tried to unlock the already unlocked door understood that no, he did not.
Bentley say at the other end of the living room facing a tv playing an unmatched program, and seeing his best friend with his eyes shut, not moving and with his already gigantic stomach horrendously bloated under a layer of shredded candy wrappers and chip bags gave Derek those five seconds of agonizing terror where he thought that it had finally happened; that Bentley had transcended this earthly plane and left his family to be the ones at the coffin store to ask where the giant ones were, but Bentley’s chest rising in his slumber let him deflate with relief.
That left his mind to be occupied by the fact that Bentley was buck naked.
Not that there was much to see, considering the night infinite amount of stored calories that drooped over and around his groin, and even when clothed it was not hard to imagine the contours of his body considering how much his clothes would conform and melt with his rolls and increasingly spherical form, but this was the most amount of Bentley that Derek had ever seen of him when there was already so much to go around.
Derek’s teeth went dry as his mouth hung agape, unable to step any further than the distance he’d cleared past the door but couldn’t step backwards so they both could have some privacy; he existed like the camera of a movie scene, unable to change or interact with what it was seeing and yet overpoweringly present in seeing every detail. The wasp pokemon slept whilst seated into the cushy paunch of his own stinger, its own weight gain ballooning it so it was useless to its a owner as a defensive weapon but no less essential to him as personal king-sized beanbag chair, legs thicker than truck tires dangling from its perch and splayed part by his boulder-like stomach hanging down past their knees, white hands nestled along the roof of the yellow and black colored orb.
…but on Bentley’s face, the last stop on Derek’s stupefied tour of his friend’s nude form was something he had never seen before, or to the degree that the soundly sleeping beedrill possessed. Derek knew how joy felt, but not total contentment with his life, where he had found all that he needed to be satisfied from then till his death. Bentley, however, sleeping on his own thorax in a food coma courtesy of his stuffed tummy looked like he had found true, absolute, and unpasteurized happiness. Lacking nostrils or a nose, Bentley couldn’t snore, the air serenely escaping his lungs through lips pulled up in the grin of a man who had achieved nirvana, eyelids gently shut and satisfied with a world without money, electronics or any other material goods.
Derek wanted to bottle up that childish glee of the snoozing landwhale and keep it safe and protected from the world. He wanted Bentley to never wake up again so no misery would ever again dampen his bloated features, but in a first for somebody who already adored the beedrill and though heaven and earth of him, Derek wanted to cuddle him. He wanted to leap right into that spherical waterbed bulging off his abdomen and enjoy his shameless gluttony in much the same way Bentley himself did, hold his face up to the curvature of his body and feel the warmth of his insulating bulk and hear the timely beating of his heart, anything with any chance of absorbing some of that happiness into his own heart.
But Derek skittered out of the room before anything could happen that would wake Bentley up and potentially capsize their relationship as he knew it. Bentley awoke alone in his house and politely greeted his friend fully clothed, clueless of what happened between them despite some major jitters when ever they were both together in the same room that day.
He could notice, however, Derek making himself more present in the weeks that followed, the human putting up more of an effort to be near the Beedrill and joining him at breakfast every morning, or more often joined him in watching a movie instead of lurk alone in his own bedroom. Rather than watch in trepidation whenever Bentley took a bite from his nigh-perpetual indulgence, he sought out and often re-discovered that smiling, sleeping beedrill that he had fallen in love with for those few minutes, and he himself felt a little closer to reaching that nirvana that his friend barely understood he’d found.
Then there were the days that Bentley had to leave, and without his mind’s tether around, Derek had nothing to do but think. In a home populated with computers, video games and TVs, he let them gather dust in thinking of the bare facts that surrounded what had happened when he caught Bentley alone. He thought of whenever he’d thought of anybody else that day, or more specifically, the devastating silence any other human he’d given him. Never from a single girl, even if he platonically loved them back, or from a single male, but realized the latter was because he’d never tried.
What Derek discovered was that it was not just those few minutes that he’d been in love.
It’s just one person, one half of his brain insisted. I wasn’t Mom or Dad, and eve if they found out, they were tolerant enough folk. It wasn’t his boss, or any of his professors, they didn’t have any reason what happened behind his closed doors. It was just Bentley, who gave a crap more about the people around him than Derek probably ever did for himself. Just the single greatest friend he ever had.
Just the most important person in his life, who he hadn’t a clue how he would react. Just somebody so perfect that the dominoes were stacked for this to be the one thing that was wrong with him, and that all that love, compassion of the past year were just a mask to some hateful bigot.
Choice 1: It has to happen tonight. If not now, it never would.
Choice 2: Maybe tomorrow. No, maybe the day after would be better. Yeah, it definitely would.
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