Seeking Sherwood - Epilogue (Garth) (Patreon)

Now that Sherwood has been found, the cast drifts their separate ways. Garth has always ever been with Dawn, at least since he grew too big to have any say in the matter. But the question is, is one Garth enough? 

Written by the wonderful Rabidbadger writing, illustrated by me!  

Characters/Owners:

Garth - Nackvixen 

Veronicas - Veronacus 

Temperance - Paris  

- - -     

A cold rush in Garth's nostrils greeted him as the bunny woke. Oxygen, raw and pure, fed into him from one of a half dozen lengths of tubing running to just as many machines sprawled out over the dark chamber he occupied. It really didn't seem fair to call it a cargo bay or anything so mundane anymore, once the scrutiny of having passengers was out of the equation the situation with Dawn had changed a little.

Garth blinked slowly as he felt things shift around him. A heavy 'thump' that traveled to his muzzle, the presence of something soft and sweet on his tongue. He swallowed more on instinct than intention, which just led to more of what felt like heavy whipped cream rushing in to fill the void. Elsewhere, there were a couple more apparatuses of the same sort ferrying things out and away from him, but that was all he was able to tell from where he floated.

The floating itself was strange, Garth had experienced proper sensory deprivation before - it had been part of a VR experience he'd paid for once. This wasn't exactly the same, but the bunny could compare the two. It was selective deprivation - he couldn't see anything but what was right in front of him, couldn't hear anything but what came through the ear buds he couldn't reach to remove, only smelled what came through with the oxygen support he was getting, tasted what she wanted him to taste. The exception to the list was touch, Garth felt everything around him. There wasn't really any way not to.

A handful of points of light formed in the gloom. Not proper lights, but video feeds, all showing the same thing. The cargo bay had been gutted, along with the chambers next to it. Most of Dawn's ship was one huge internal chamber now, and about a third of that was occupied by a rough sphere of light brown marred with a few stains here and there. More than usual, actually. Garth wiggled a bit, or tried to. In response, there was gentle quivering from the gently floating shape in the cargo bay. That, after a handful of weeks of constantly debauchery and feeding with a total absence of gravity, was the best Garth could muster anymore.

Pitiful as the attempt was it had an effect. Garth almost startled as he saw the rush of russet fur moving in the edges of his vision, the edges of the video feed, but mostly as he felt her crawling over his body. A skittering of claws and then a grinning face hovering in the air near his. Dawn had her hands buried in his cheeks, lost in the loose flesh and fur. The vixen's red-ripped fangs told Garth she'd been nibbling again, though so did Dawn's much more comfortably plump frame. She ensured he was snacking every possible minute, because apparently it made snacking on him nicer.

“Good morning morsel. How are you feeling?”

A mumble was about all Garth could do around the hose fixed to his muzzle, the straps on it ran around the back of his head - around his neck. There was a collar on there somewhere, not his original one he knew, but the bunny felt it. It just wasn't large enough to see clearly on the video feeds buried under the rolls of blubber where his neck used to be. Still, this was part of their little ritual. Garth spared a moment to think about the question and form as honest an answer as he could. He started with his fingers.

Garth felt a rush run through him whenever he did this, there was something terrifying and intoxicating in equal measure about the state he'd eaten himself into. Not really blindly, it wasn't as if Garth hadn't seen this coming - he just didn't bother to get out of the way. His fingers moved still, clumsily, fighting against their thicker bulk and not quite closing properly. The act did fold his palm down to his wrist, to the thick dome of blubber surrounded by loose, dangling folds floating freely in the hold. All of it was too bulky to really do much more, his arms were held out at his sides by virtue of their own mass, too cumbersome to bother trying to move most of the time. Which described the majority of Garth's body.

Nothing much else really responded on the way down. Garth's eyes drifted to the side as he tried twisting himself, tried adjusting his hips and the catastrophic amount of flab exploding forth from them, but the next time he succeeded at moving any part of himself it was getting quite close to his toes, which were trapped as thoroughly as his fingers were. He did manage to tickle the underside of his gut with them though, setting off a shiver and a bit of drifting flab which caused the vixen clinging to him to grin wider.

Garth hadn't been caught entirely off guard by the fact that inertia persisted without gravity and left him quite difficult to move still, but it was another thing entirely to experience being weightless and still borderline immovable. Which was why the oxygen feed was necessary - Garth was sure it would be harder if he wasn't the thing in the room everything else was sticking to based on sheer mass, but that didn't make fighting against the bulk of his chest easy. All of which combined to provide the same answer he'd given for most of the recent past. Garth was riding a constant wave of indulgence with a little bit of fear, like the rush from a rollercoaster - apparently being the size of a small carnival ride had a similar effect to riding one.

“Mmmfn mrrrrw hrmphh.”

Dawn bubbled into a giggle that started to alarmingly resemble a cackle as she released Garth's cheeks and pushed off his chest. It set a ripple moving through his body and got her away from the cling of being too close to his bulky mass. The vixen was nothing like the svelte thing she'd been when Garth got roped into all this, and that was apparently his doing. Kind of. It didn't entirely make sense to Garth how anyone's blood, no matter how much of a giant heap they were, would get someone fat. Let alone leave Dawn having grown out of four flight suits and looking like a short three hundred pounds over such a short period of time. The fox appeared to love every bit of it, though.

“Heh! I thought so. You are so ripe.”

No flight suit this time, Garth noticed. Just the layer of bandages that was always covering most of the vixen underneath it - he'd spotted it a few times during the trip but it had taken time to work out just how far those wrappings went. Apparently even a glimpse of them called for a special occasion, and now here she was floating by Garth and fiddling with something in her hands. It looked like fruit, something brilliant and red. Dawn stabbed to fingers into it, then eased herself up to Garth's belly and started tracing them over it. It tickled, probably more than it ought to.

“I've been thinking of late, about this little arrangement of ours. This unique understanding you seem to have with riding the current and finding things to savor.”

Squinting, Garth followed Dawn for as much as he could while she crept around his belly. Starting from the top she was drawing something on the huge dome of his body. Dragging her fingers around the gently drifting trash bag-sized moobs and creating a circle. Garth let out another grunt and a wiggle which were utterly inadequate to even get in the way of whatever Dawn was doing, not that he really intended to. Avoiding these things wasn't his intent, but he was curious.

“It's not a thing you find under Chrome all that often. Maybe a little more often in the other corners of the world. This world, anyway.”

Eventually Garth had to give up on the squinting and try something else. Dawn had never entirely disconnected the system that let him sink into the ship's visual feeds - possibly intentionally, Garth hadn't asked. There was enough control left for him to zoom in on what was going on with the monitors and get a proper look at...

Nope, none of that made even a bit of sense. Garth went right back to squinting as he watched the vixen trace out whatever arcane shenanigans she was up to with that fruit she held.

“Heh, you rubbed off on me.”

That part seemed obvious. Garth had watched Dawn pack on pounds religiously just like he'd done, but the brown sphere of bunny suspected she meant more than the obvious. Something Dawn seemed to pick up on - like she could somehow read body language in the gentle undulations of flesh flowing about itself in zero gravity.

“That dedication to gratifying yourself. I wonder if I picked bits of that up too? Either way, it all adds up to the same result.”

Garth swallowed, not out of worry but because at no point during this had he stopped eating. There was, perhaps, a little bit of concern building in the back of his mind though. It was hard not to let a trickle of it in when there was some kind of strange ritualistic circle being traced to finish on him, but that wasn't going to get in the way of figuring out where this was going. Something exciting was worth a little worry - also he was still rather helpless about the matter.

Dawn crawled her way back up the front of Garth, grabbing handfuls of blubbery fur until she was face to face with him again. Garth met those red eyes and waited, listening past the background noise of a steady hiss of oxygen being fed into his nose and the rampant gurgling of his overworked stomach.

“Even after you're as ripe as you can get... after I have my fill, finally?”

The vixen leaned in, burying her face in Garth's cheek. For that moment he felt a familiar pinprick of pain followed by a rush of euphoria. Light-headed, drifting, still wrapped in sweet delights and free to ignore all the annoying demands he used to have to satisfy for his body between tending to the one he really cared about. His appetite.

Beyond that, Garth had started to feel another layer to these moments. Something a bit more personal with the vixen. Dawn's eyes weren't just gleaming predatory when she came up from that nuzzling with a bit of red around her lips, they looked quite smitten as well. Something he hadn't entirely been ready for, and still wasn't sure what to do about. If anything. If there was even time.

After wiping her lips, Dawn reached down with the same hand and touched the edge of the ring she'd drawn on Garth. It wasn't just euphoria or weightlessness that he felt this time, but proper vertigo. Or something like it. Garth couldn't tell where 'up' was, which was a thing he thought he'd gotten over already, then there was the falling sensation which shouldn't have been possible. He thought, for a moment, that he smelled something else - dirty city air and a cornucopia of unhealthy food nearby - but it was just a brief thing. A moment later he was back in the cargo hold, floating, looking at a hungry vixen licking her lips and watching the circle rapidly evaporate off his fur.

“There's no way I can be satisfied with just one anymore.”

***

Garth let out a belch that kicked a bit of ketchup loose from his lunch, sending it tumbling down onto his shirt. The bunny had been collecting stains all day on it as he meandered the dockside festival, sampling every unhealthy delicacy he could get his paws on. There were little trails of grease and condiments all over where the fabric stretched across his four hundred pound 'physique', which had started to resemble a loose circle with scattered other marks in the middle of it. Everything he ate he seemed to find a way to add a fresh mark or two to the thing, but a lost cause of a shirt was a small price to pay for really indulging himself on such a rare opportunity.

The overall state of Garth got him a few looks here and there, but the bunny didn't much care. Spending a lot of time fussing about other peoples' opinions of him never struck Garth as worth it to begin with, and lately he'd been feeling that conviction more strongly. Enough so to walk around with a large basket of nachos in one arm and two hotdogs in the other - though that rapidly became one. The first one doused in 'the works' was gone already, which left chili-cheese in the other little cardboard boat contraption. That, Garth reasoned, ought to put his increasingly demanding gut in its place for a while.

While successful, this also taught Garth that silencing his roaring gullet didn't quiet his thoughts about the matter. It had gotten rather hard to sate of late, and he'd packed on a lot of weight trying to keep up with the matter. Garth wasn't sure he really minded that per se, but it was notable just the same. Lots of hunger, lots of torn shorts and ill-fitting shirts - he'd picked today's because it had the least risk of letting his gut hang out from underneath it and now he definitely felt the sea breeze on his exposed belly. Unsettled, Garth paused as he stopped to discard the empty caskets of his hotdogs and start on the nachos.

These small bouts of what seemed like paranoia anymore had become common as well. Garth felt something nearby, but nothing seemed wrong. There was just the usual crowd of people enjoying the same opportunity to get out and indulge he was, a few of whom he'd seen around already. The over-dressed vixen, for one. Garth seemed to see her every time he paused for more food, mostly because she was doing the same, and because she had too much clothing on.

Not wanting to imagine how hot it was in a full outfit and turtleneck in this weather and needing an out from a moment of awkward eye-contact with the vixen, Garth looked away and began nibbling as he looked for something to do. Why a hall of mirrors seemed like a good idea at first glance he didn't know, but it was there. The bunny ducked inside the building, which looked more like a hastily converted office than a proper attraction, but once inside it didn't matter much. A mirror was a mirror - and whoever was supposed to be manning the admissions was apparently out to lunch. Garth waddled in, sidling past the desk and savoring the moment of peace the room offered.

Trying to shake the odd feeling, Garth kept nibbling as he walked through. On the off chance someone was following him this would leave him an easy way to spot it, he just had to keep an eye on the mirrors and he'd see them behind him. Granted, they might look a bit distorted - thin - short - oblong - something. They might look slender and seem to have bandage ends dangling out of some snazzy futuristic flight suit, or might look like he did in the convex mirror - like a big blimp of lard that could occupy most of an entire room if he tried.

Garth stopped at that one, blinking at the mirror and moving a little. Watching the way the distorted reflection of his belly shook and quivered, the way it seemed to dwarf all the rest of him and swallow it up. The bunny couldn't quite help, as he kept feeding himself chips drenched in cheese sauce and questionable ground beef with other toppings thrown on haphazardly, imagining what being that big would feel like. After another experimental wiggle the mental image became disarmingly clear for an instant. Helpless, floating, limbs pinned by the sheer size of himself if not the weight, at the mercy of...

Blinking sharply, Garth shook his head and tried to clear it. Of whom? Probably whoever was feeding him, he figured - not like someone gets that big on their own. Glancing at the mirrors to check behind him, Garth saw nothing and hurried himself out of the other end of the hallway. He'd satisfied his paranoia, and now it was time to try to please his gut again. But maybe from the snug safety of his hotel room this time.

That sense of security lasted right until Garth opened the door to his room and found a large basket of chocolates, fried carnival food, bottles of soda and wine right next to each other, and a small pile of restaurant gift cards sitting on his bed that hadn't been there before. Atop the basket was an unsigned note in florid, scarlet handwriting. 

Sweets for the Sweet. Indulge, morsel.

Garth gasped as a brief flash of something other than what he was seeing blitzed through his mind. The hotel room, but darkened, and a pair of red eyes looking at him from the other side of it. A sultry voice saying the words he'd read on the card, crawling into his head and burrowing into his thoughts. The moment was brief, but when it passed Garth couldn't seem to get the voice out of his ears. At least, until his gut began rumbling like an oncoming summer storm.

Once that had begun, the bunny found himself glancing between the door and the bounty resting atop his bed. They had the feeling of a crossroads, complete with a devil waiting at them, though as far as he could tell he was alone in the room. The delay was, for Garth, fairly long. About eight seconds or so before he said, to no-one in particualr.

“...Well, it'd be a shame to let all that go to waste.”

Easing his lumbering bulk onto the bed, Garth reached for the first of many snacks with one hand and began fiddling with gift cards and his phone in the other. Garth paid no mind to the corpulent vixen licking her lips and staring in the corner of his window - it hardly seemed like something to worry about, or remember - until she wanted him to.

Until the time was ripe.