It was impossible to know whether the vast majority of people were just being polite, weren’t terribly observant, or were willfully ignorant to what was going on. Or maybe the waistcoat was just that effective, and because he knew what lay beneath, Ingo couldn’t be fooled any longer.

If he didn’t put the effort into hiding behind multiple layers or a clever use of color, it was plain to see how swollen his abdomen had become.

Apart from the effort it had taken to adjust his wardrobe, he’d gotten this far refusing to acknowledge the changes, but that approach couldn’t work forever. After having felt the first few ghosts of movement previously-- after they’d become so much more frequent as time went on-- he somewhat doubted it could for even a few days more.

This was only week seventeen. If he didn’t get over this… revulsion one way or another, it was going to be a miserable twenty plus from here on out. He tried to think of it as something akin to exposure therapy; in confronting the growing obstacle-- willingly or not-- when he got dressed, he was becoming slightly more desensitized to it. If he could make that adjustment, it was time to try something a bit more intimidating.

Embarrassed without quite knowing why, he’d excused himself from the living room and sneaked away before any Pokemon could follow, then locked the door to his bedroom behind him. His light was off, both to fool them into thinking he wasn’t there and to help him go through with this.

He sat down on the foot of his bed, back to the door so he wouldn’t spend this entire time distracted by the fear of being floated in on, and forced himself to lay down. It wasn’t like settling in for a nap or to cuddle with a Pokemon. It felt far more like laying down on an examination table, waiting for a doctor to poke and prod or a technician to start their equipment.

He closed his eyes and took a breath, forcing himself to focus on where he was and the proof that he was safe. This was home. There wasn’t a paper lining or plastic cushion beneath him, just his weighted blanket. Without any visual cues, he could even smell the lingering perfumed smoke that spoke of Chandelure’s regular presence. Chandelure had no business being in his doctor’s office. In fact, that was one of the last places she belonged.

Trying to settle his heart with the familiar sensory information, he simultaneously inched the hem of his shirt up bit by bit and laid both hands on the gentle curve of his belly. He stayed there for several minutes, frozen and unsure where to go from here. That-- that was still part of him. He could feel the moisture where his palms made contact with the extra-warm skin, betraying his nervousness. On a reasonable level, he’d known, but there were days that he felt so disconnected from himself and his body that he couldn’t say with absolute certainty.

Was that good enough for now? Could he stop?

...did he really want to do all of this over again, if he pulled the brake now?

No, he decided. It was humiliating. He was afraid that he’d be seen with his hands resting on his own stomach. He’d gone to the extreme of sneaking around and hiding in the dark to avoid being noticed-- he wasn’t doing it again. It would take more than just tonight to get over this, but he wasn’t going to Wimpod out when he’d barely accomplished anything.

Letting one hand drop to the bed, he set the other just below his breasts and traced his abdomen’s contour all the way to its end. The synchronization of it helped, marginally-- that he could track where in space his hand was through the contact. It… wasn’t actually so bad, from a sensory standpoint. It was just skin. The layer beneath was firm, like a tensed muscle, which made sense considering what the uterus was.

Maybe this hadn’t been such a terrible idea, after all.

While it hadn’t always showed from the outside, he’d been well aware of the changes going on inside of him. He’d said as much to Emmet, months prior. His body felt wrong. On bad days, it didn’t even feel like it was his anymore. That was what he’d been afraid of all this time, however nonsensical: that he’d reach down to find the roles had been reversed and now he belonged to his body, to the twins he was harboring, to the uncaring Arceus.

Emboldened, he moved to try something else, gently resting a hand on either side of the shallow bulge, fingers pointed down toward the edge of the bed. As slight as the both of them were, he’d never been able to do anything quite like this before; if they’d been predispositioned toward their maternal family’s muscle mass, then maybe, but they’d taken after their father in terms of physique, the structure of their chests narrow and builds lean. That meant that he had a very clear baseline to work from. He slowly moved his palms up, until his thumbs met over top.

His heart rate picked up again as he wondered for what might have been the hundredth time how nobody had actively called him out. Did the polite ones think he was deluding himself? Did they ask themselves who he thought he was kidding? How pathetic it was to even pretend?

Forcing a breath to stay slow even as it trembled, his thoughts got caught on a different question:

How much worse was it going to get?

He wasn’t aware that his hands had moved until well after the fact, one tangled in his hair as he pushed it back from his face, the other cupping his mouth-- both exerting an amount of force that neither action required.

It wasn’t the tugging at his scalp or the nails biting into his cheek that alerted him to the problem. Ironically, the thing that brought him back to reality was a flicker of movement just below his ribs.

He let go in stages, gradually prying one finger up at a time and then forcibly relaxing the grip on his hair. Seeking reassurance, he moved both hands to the blanket beneath him, feeling for the stitches delineating each quilted segment from the next, counting the bumps of the thread weaving back and forth through the layers.

While he didn’t think he could have mustered the courage to try this with Chandelure in the room, he wished she was here now, something to hold onto and ground himself against. If he was so desperate for her, he could find her, he reminded himself. She was no more than two rooms away.

Because, again, he was safe at home. There was no reason to panic. If he needed help, there were plenty of beings willing to lend an appendage.

...including, he supposed…

The contact hadn’t been the problem, he reminded himself, it was where his thoughts went when he didn’t keep a proper hold on them. He shivered as he did it, but he rested one of his traitorous hands over his equally disloyal uterus, steering his thumb in a tiny circle over where he’d felt motion.

“I’m sorry. It’s… not your fault.” He told it, staring resolutely into the darkness above him. Taking a breath, he held it until he could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears, and at the very end of the long exhale:

“Thank you.”