Chapter Text
Loki left and Thor watched him vanish through half-lidded eyes.
Despite the water he’d splashed into his face and guzzled from the faucet earlier, his vision was still blurry with sleep, his mind still slow and sluggish from the food and the booze he’d had the night before, his hangover playing the bongos behind his forehead. He was torn between dread and elevation because Loki had kissed him back and finally admitted his feelings, but then he’d also backpedaled on the whole immobility fantasy thing he’d vaguely consented to earlier (which was insane to begin with and Thor needed all the help he could get to finally come to grips with that unhinged desire? obsession? even though he really, really didn’t want to) just to feed him dessert moments after and then bribe him into getting up with a very generous breakfast—as if determined to remain the undisputed champion of sending mixed fucking signals.
Gods, he was so beautiful though. He moved with the grace of a dancer and looked like he was cut from marble, not an ounce of fat on his lean body, every muscle and every bone visible as he stretched, turned or shifted. There was no flab or even a fold of skin to grab, nothing to jiggle and squeeze, the polar opposite of everything Thor found attractive in himself, and yet he was the most gorgeous creature Thor had ever laid eyes on.
Those brilliant green eyes, those thin lips, those cheekbones.
And he’d tasted so, so good when he’d finally slid his clever tongue into Thor’s mouth.
Thor lay back and closed his eyes, caressing his bloated belly, holding on to the memory and the sensation of squishy softness with rising despair, that urgent voice (of addiction?) inside of him kicking and screaming at him to hold on to every single pound, to the pure bliss he’d been fortunate enough to share with Loki until his father just had to decide to throw a wrench in the works the minute their relationship was finally getting somewhere.
He was about to drift off again but then the door burst open and Odin strode into the room the instant the clock’s big hand clicked into place on the eight with a sharp, final tick. “Ready?” he asked, his icy glare sweeping across the room.
Thor had to clear his throat, his voice still thick. “Yeah.”
He moved to sit up but his muscle memory betrayed him again when he slumped right back down instead of rising to his feet in the singular swift motion he’d aimed for, weighed down by his heavy gut and his wobbly arms. Odin dragged in a long, annoyed breath as he watched him try again, hauling himself forward, pressing his palms into the sagging cushions and pushing upward, muscles straining and knees threatening to buckle, until he finally staggered upright.
“Pathetic,” was all his father had to say about it in a low hiss and a part of Thor itched to scream at him that the insult and the disgust were only making him hard. He held his tongue though (that was the one thing he probably wasn’t ever gonna be able to admit to his face) and shuffled back into the bedroom to grab his suitcase, his heart fluttering with gratitude that Loki had taken care of everything once again.
“That’s all?” Odin crossed his arms, raising one eyebrow. He looked threatening enough but he’d been shorter than Thor ever since he’d hit his last growth spurt and now he was practically dwarfed by Thor’s girth too, which kinda ruined the effect.
“There’s really not that much you can fit into a college dorm room,” Thor snapped, his fingers tightening around the telescoping handle.
Odin said nothing to that, just motioned him to go ahead.
To Thor’s great dismay, the elevator was out, which meant that he had to carry the entire suitcase down the stairs, and of course his father’s sharp, cold gaze assessed every step he took. Thor gritted his teeth, hoisting the top handle with both hands, his weak muscles screaming as the wheeled bag dug against his thighs, shifting its weight from side to side as he staggered down the first few steps, breath hitching, legs trembling. He had to pause on every landing, letting his shoulders tighten and forcing his arms to readjust, praying that Odin both was and wasn’t cataloguing every strained inch of him, every wobble that made the suitcase threaten to slip from his grip, every desperate, ungainly movement, every pound of bulk and fatigue that made this simple task feel like climbing a mountain, and yet he kept moving somehow, step by painstaking step, until finally he reached the bottom drenched in sweat and wheezing.
His father had pulled up in his SUV, which was relief and disappointment all at once. Thor’s first instinct was to sit in the back but he didn’t want to give the impression of a sulking kid, so he wedged his body into the front, sank on the passenger seat and swung the door shut behind him, pleasantly surprised by how much room there still was for him and fantasizing about filling out even that space at the same time.
“Here’s what will happen,” Odin grimly announced when he’d eased the car into the deserted streets of a city still asleep. “First of all, we will get you checked out medically, to assess the damage you have done to your body. And once we’re back home, you will meet with a personal trainer who will help you with your exercise and a meal plan. You will not eat a single meal outside of that, you hear me? The school will not serve you anything in the cafeteria, and I have frozen your credit card for the rest of the month, so don’t even get any ideas. No more junk food, no more booze. You will not see a single cent from me until you’ve lost some of that weight, is that clear?”
“I’m neither deaf nor stupid,” Thor muttered, trying very hard and failing miserably to ignore the panic flaring up hot and tight in his chest.
Odin shot him an icy glare. “A lot of people would call what you’ve been doing to yourself pretty damn stupid.”
“A lot of people are pretty damn simple-minded and prejudiced,” Thor retorted.
Odin actually barked a laugh at that. “Of course you’d stoop to questioning common sense to justify this”—he took one hand off the wheel to gesture at him—“this madness. I shouldn’t be surprised though, given with whom you’ve kept company recently. That Laufeyson brat is a bad influence.”
“That brat’s got a name,” Thor muttered. “His name is Loki.”
“His name is Loki,” his dad mocked him in an exaggerated, high-pitched voice. “Please, don’t tell me you’re sleeping with that little punk? Are you gay now too?”
“No,” Thor replied with deliberate pause, watching his father’s brows furrow as he elaborated. “I’m pretty sure I’m bi.”
Odin didn’t acknowledge that of course. “You don’t really think he wants anything with you, do you? There isn’t a single reason why he would concern himself with such an unsightly lump of lard like you unless he’s after our money. Did you know that he lived half his life in a shitty trailer park? That both his father and his oldest brother served time? Domestic violence, drunk-driving, breaking and entering, auto theft, assault. That little boyfriend of yours, he’s a bad seed and I want you to stay away from him.”
Thor had always suspected there was a past buried somewhere beneath Loki’s elusiveness; now he at least knew the origin of some of his trust issues. It made him feel strangely protective of the little snake and magnified his defiance. “I won’t. And you can’t possibly hope to control that aspect of my life unless you lock me up inside the house until we both graduate.”
Odin drew in a sharp breath through flaring nostrils and flicked another murderous glance at him. “Wait, is he the one who put you up to this? Is he one of those demented freaks with a fat fetish?”
Thor snorted. “I hate to break it to you, dad, but in case you haven’t noticed: I am one of those—and I’m pretty sure you aren’t supposed to say ‘demented’ anymore—freaks with a fat fetish. Nobody put me up to anything.”
His father gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles stood out white. “No, you’re not a freak. You’re just confused.”
By now, Thor should have become accustomed to how every single one of the people in his social orbit refused to believe him and instead wasted a lot of mental energy on explaining his desires away with grief and/or psychological stress but it still hurt that they were all so brainwashed by what society deemed attractive that nobody—except for Loki of course—had even tried to consider his point of view so far. Not that he’d expected his father to be the first one to acknowledge or understand anything but, every time someone just brushed his fantasies off as if they weren’t an integral part of how he’d always fucking felt about food and his body ever since he could remember, their incomprehension still rubbed another pinch of salt into the wound.
“If you say so,” sighed Thor. “You obviously know me better than I know myself even though you’ve given zero fucks about me since mom’s funeral.”
“Careful,” Odin warned him, his voice assuming that glacial tone that had always heralded punishment in the past. “You don’t want to test my patience.”
Little did his father know that testing his old man’s patience was exactly what Thor wanted to do and was planning to do as often as he could in the near future now that he’d miraculously shed the urge to live up to his unfulfillable expectations and gain his approval. He wasn’t in any position to contest the arrangements Odin had made with the school obviously and he didn’t have any leverage financially or otherwise until he’d completed his degree or found a job, whatever came first, but that didn’t mean that he was still a helpless, easily intimidated little boy. If Odin was determined to make his own flesh and blood’s life miserable just as he’d found true happiness after losing the only parent who’d never tried to beat him into shape, Thor was more than eager to return the favor.
The town center was slowly disappearing in the rearview mirror, its narrow streets twisting between coffee shops, secondhand bookstores and crumbling Victorian façades that looked older than they were, all of it giving way to fancier neighborhoods that didn’t look as if they were desperately trying to look English. Funny, how it had never occurred to him that he’d been born and raised in a city that was also pretending very hard to be something it was not.
How fitting, Thor thought grimly just as Odin signaled and took a turn that wasn’t gonna lead them home.
He felt another stab of unease. “Wait, where are we going?”
“I thought you were neither deaf nor stupid,” Odin snickered.
It took a while for the implications to register and, when they finally did, his father had already pulled up at the curb in front of a swanky suburban residence where a small sign on the front yard by the driveway announced: ‘Dr. Helen Cho, MD – Private Practice.’
“I’m gonna have to see a doctor right now? On a Sunday?”
In a way, it did make sense of course. If you understood how Odin Borson’s mind worked and how eager he was to avert any kind of gossip about himself, it made perfect sense that he would want to avoid a public doctor’s office or the hospital and discreetly take Thor to a person who he either knew personally or who had been on his payroll or whatever on a Sunday fucking morning. Which of course still didn’t explain why he hadn’t tried to whistle him back at any point in the last six months before today, especially after Thor abandoned his outgrown Corvette in some random parking lot of (which Odin must have gotten wind of because he didn’t even suggest that Thor drive home in his own car), but that probably fell under the category of enigmas Thor wouldn’t be able to solve even with a brain upgrade.
Which is why he resigned himself to his fate, dragged himself out of the car and shuffled up the stairs.
The woman who opened the door was tiny. She wasn’t short exactly (not like Jane anyways, who’d only come up to his shoulder) and she moved with the brisk, no-bullshit confidence of someone who’d fought tooth and nail through med school, but next to Thor, everyone looked tiny these days.
She shook his hand, told him how nice it was to meet him (yeah, right), gestured towards a chair and handed him a tablet. “Fill out whatever applies. Skip what doesn’t. And take all the time you need.”
Thor tried to balance the thing on his thigh, but the angles were all wrong and his handwriting in the free-text sections sprawled into huge, cramped lines. He could feel her eyes flicking up every so often from her desk, sharp and assessing, like she was already piecing him together from the way he breathed and shifted in the chair. There were tons of questions about his eating patterns, his daily intake, binge triggers, exercise level, sleep quality, energy levels, mood swings, alcohol use, family history of diabetes and heart disease, was he feeling depressed or anxious sometimes, was he tired in the mornings, was he taking any medication, could he breathe normally, was he snoring and so on and so forth. It took him almost forty minutes to complete the whole questionnaire while his dad was just lurking in the corner with a copy of The Financial Times.
When he finally handed the tablet back, Thor was already feeling kinda hungry again and so exhausted that he wanted to crawl into bed to sleep away the rest of the day. The doctor smiled at him and guided him to stand against the wall, under the tall measuring rod, where she got up on her toes and lowered the headpiece with a practiced flick. “Six feet three,” she murmured, scribbling the number down, then pointed across the room. “Alright, moment of truth.”
His heart beating faster, Thor stepped on the sturdy, heavy-duty (hah!) professional scale with its wide steel base, rubberized platform and a bright display set atop a slender column, which barely even creaked under his weight.
“Three-seventy-seven,” the doctor read out loud, already typing, and Odin actually put his head in his hands, rubbing across his face. “That gives us a BMI of forty-seven point one, which is Class III obesity.”
Heat crawled up Thor’s neck at the confirmation of just how massive he’d gotten. The number felt like a spotlight that was too big and too bright trained on him and then, suddenly, even as he reveled in hearing the label spoken out loud, there it suddenly was: a foreign, sharp tug of alarm in his chest that he’d wrecked his body and burned all his bridges, that he could never go back even if he wanted to, that he was trapped in this body now, that he was gonna ruin himself and love every fucking second of it. Fear and embarrassment washed over him but threaded through the momentary sensation of horror was that sick and twisted thrill of yearning for more fat on him, always more, more, more, no matter what it was gonna cost.
“And you’ve gained all that weight in just a year?” The doctor looked up from the tablet with Thor’s answers she’d been skimming, an incredulous glance raking over him before she composed herself again, which only fueled Thor’s fantasies and also ignited a spark of sick pride in him.
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever seen anyone pack on weight like that?” Odin wished to know.
“Not usually, no,” Dr. Cho admitted, which made Thor’s stomach flutter again. “Normally, we see a much more gradual increase.” She turned to Thor again, ignoring his fuming dad. “That must have been a significant diet change with, I’m guessing, a constant caloric surplus in the thousands and a very sedentary lifestyle?”
Thor bit back the remark that you didn’t need a medical degree to be able to deduce that. “Yeah.”
“Can you describe how it started? Was it a psychological need to eat or a physical hunger or can you even tell the difference?”
Thor’s thoughts carried him back to the reception after Hela’s funeral, of how insanely good it had felt to be able to let loose and not worry about having to control what he ate for the first time in his young adult life. “I guess the first time was kind of psychological or emotional in the sense that I ate out of frustration or boredom but then, uh, it quickly became something else.”
It quickly became sexual, and it turns me on like you can’t even fucking imagine, he wanted to say, spurred on by the fond memory of his first orgasm while stuffed to bursting, but looking at Odin the words got stuck in his throat.
“I, uh, put that in there, when you asked for the binge triggers?” Thor cleared his throat. “Bottom line is: I like the feeling of the weight on me, I like to touch the fat, and I like the feeling of being full. It feels good, okay? I can’t help that. And it really pisses me off that nobody makes an effort to understand that.”
Odin raised his eyebrows at the doc and gestured vaguely, as if he wanted to ask, ‘See what I have to deal with?’
She didn’t pay him any attention and motioned Thor to take off his shirt with a sympathetic smile. “Noted. Now, let’s do some tests, alright?”
Thor made as much of a show out of it as he could, ensuring his father saw every motion as he shrugged out of the shirt Loki had picked for him in the morning, his stomach rolls shifting and bouncing slightly with the movement. Odin’s eye tracked them, pinning the soft flesh with a mix of disbelief and disgust, the flicker of revulsion making Thor’s pulse quicken. He couldn’t resist the temptation: He hooked both hands under the overhang of his belly and shook it, sending the flesh bouncing and wobbling with deliberate force, feeling a rush of defiance at the way Odin’s jaw tightened.
Dr. Cho sat him down on a cot and came at him with a cuff, a stethoscope and that little white clip thing that she put on his index finger, poking and prodding, listening and scribbling. When she was done, she informed him that his heart rate was steady right now but his blood pressure was a little too high, his oxygen saturation was below the healthy range and his lungs were showing reduced airflow at the bases. “Do you know why that is?”
Thor didn’t even try to resist the urge to duh, flicking a challenging glare in Odin’s direction. “Obviously, it’s because I’m fat.”
The doctor flashed him another gratingly sympathetic smile and droned on about how his baseline was basically constantly overtaxed now because of how crazily he’d been stuffing himself. “If you’re constantly eating way over your calorie limit,” was how she put it, “your stomach is always distended, which means that your diaphragm is always a bit compressed, which shortens your breath even at rest. Such a rapid weight gain with no noteworthy exercise to speak of was an extreme metabolic and structural shock for your body. Your muscles, joints and cardiovascular system never had a chance to adapt gradually like it does with people whose gains are much slower, so you’re carrying the strain of a 377-pound body with the conditioning of your 200-pound body. Rapid gain unfortunately also means that much of it is soft, untrained fat rather than the supportive muscle your body was used to for years. And because you’re so tall, a lot of that mass settled in your abdomen and chest, crowding your lungs and limiting your flexibility. A shorter person might carry more of it on the hips and thighs and still breathe easier.”
“There’s nothing unfortunate about it,” Thor muttered under his breath but still loud enough to hear, which made Odin inhale a strangled breath.
“This isn’t a joke, Thor. You’re only twenty-one,” the doctor reprimanded him, looking sterner now as she rattled off a list of health consequences he was putting himself at risk for as if he was stupid and didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into (and didn’t really care to get himself out of). “Diabetes, cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory issues, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, liver failure, sexual dysfunction—”
Thor couldn’t help but snort at that because seriously? His libido had always been on fire but it had never been this fucking blazing before he’d packed on all the weight.
But that still wasn’t something he was willing to share with his dad in earshot, so he just shrugged when the doctor asked him why that was funny.
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” she said then.
Maybe he wasn’t. He hadn’t really wasted much thought on the long-term medical complications of this lifestyle, that much was true, but it was also entirely beside the point right now.
“You wanna know what I think?” Thor asked back, crossing his arms over his gurgling belly. “I think that you think I’m in denial or something or that I’m under the illusion that obesity is healthy. I am not a total idiot, okay? Not to mention that you’re both standing there assuming that I gained the weight by accident or wanna lose any of it, neither of which is true. I have never fucking felt better in my own skin and I don’t need an intervention! What I really need is for y’all to fucking start listening to me!”
Odin shot him one of his infamous ‘We’ll talk about this later’ glares and the doctor snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.
“I’m ordering a full metabolic panel,” she promised as she tightened a tourniquet around his arm. “Glucose, insulin, thyroid, liver function, vitamins. Your blood will tell us what’s going on under the hood, and perhaps it will give you the opportunity to reconsider if you truly want to keep the weight on?”
Of course she’d say that.
Screw her.
Thor swallowed and tried not to watch the vial fill.
He tried very hard not to think about what the results may yield, or the next few hours, days, weeks; how bleak and hollow they were gonna be without that warm, dragging weight in his stomach, without the routine of pigging out until he was pinned down by his own body, without the constant promise of the next bite, the next rush of flavors on his tongue, without the soft pressure and the bliss and the foggy, floating satisfaction of drifting off into a stuffed, drunken haze.
He tried even harder to ignore how scary it was that overindulgence wasn’t just something he did anymore—it was the rhythm his whole existence beat to now, and the thought of being cut off cold like this without a say as if he was a fucking kid again made him feel like he was about to lose the only part of himself that still made sense; the only part that had ever made sense.
Hell, it felt like he was about to get locked out of his own skin.
He needed to get out, needed to find a job.
((He needed to heed that wake-up call before it was too late.))
He couldn’t possibly go live with Odin.
He needed an escape route now.
When Dr. Cho was finally done with him after prodding and poking him some more, she promised to call with the results in a couple of days as Thor struggled back into his shirt. She scheduled a follow-up appointment, gave him a referral to a sleep specialist who was gonna evaluate him for sleep apnea, told them to call if there was a problem in the meantime, and then she dismissed them because it was still a fucking Sunday and the poor woman probably had a million better things to do than dealing with an entitled politician’s demands to treat his son who didn’t even want to be treated in the first place.
His father inhaled another sharp breath as soon as the front door clicked shut behind them and Thor knew exactly what was coming, so he beat him to it. “Let me guess? I’m such an embarrassment blah blah, such a disgrace blah blah, I’m only gonna tarnish your reputa—”
Odin’s hand snapped out before Thor could even finish, slapping him across the back of the head, startling him with the force of the blow. “I told you not to test my patience, didn’t I?”
Thor’s reaction was pure instinct (panic): He shoved his father away from him, shoved him way harder than he’d meant to, actually making him stumble. It was just a half-step but it was enough to send Odin lurching towards the top of the stairs and for one terrible, stretched-out second, time slowed and Thor could only watch, frozen, stomach twisting, because some awful part of him wanted his dad to fall and hurt himself, and the instant that thought flickered through him, he hated himself for it even though another part insisted that Odin was about to shit on his happiness and take everything away from him and that Thor’s life would be infinitely better right now if his parents’ places were exchanged.
Eventually, his father’s hand caught the banister, fingers clamping down hard, wrenching himself upright before he could go tumbling down. When he turned around and looked up, his gaze was unreadable in that terrifying, stomach-twisting way that had never failed to make Thor cower before him when he’d still been a kid.
“I’m sorry,” Thor bit out, his heart beating in his tight throat, feeling utterly wretched and horrible for even thinking something so awful.
“You will be,” was all Odin said in response.
The rest of the drive home, he punished Thor with unnerving silence.