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Lisa glared at her mother, trying to figure out when "normal" had become so screwed up. Oh, her family had always been a bit crazy, but lately, things had been more out of hand than ever. She pointed at the tub Dad had brought home, an accusatory look on her face.
"Mom, you realize we're eating kids, right?"
Marge sighed. "Lisa..."
"For the third night in a row! How does this not make you uncomfortable?"
"Honey, the plant sends them home with your father as a bonus. What are we supposed to do, toss them out?"
Lisa folded her arms and glared harder. "Mom, you can't give people away as a bonus! And even if Mr. Burns is a moral cesspool, it doesn't mean we have to sink to his level by eating them!"
Marge knelt down, putting her hands on her daughter's shoulders. "What else should we do with them, Lisa? If we send them back to the company, they'll be given to someone who will eat them. If we send them back to their families, they'll probably wind up on the dinner table anyway. I we keep them, we have to feed them and care for them just like pets. With as many as they send us, we'd be up to our ears in miniature teens by now! And money's tight enough as it is. Now your father works hard, but that doesn't mean wee can turn up our nose at a bonus, even if it is ... strange."
"But it's not right to just ... eat people!"
"Well, I understand if you feel that way, Lisa. You can have salad again if you want."
The young girl rolled her eyes, but nodded. The joy of being a vegetarian in a family of carnivores: sometime she wondered if she'd never eat anything
but
salad if she didn't prepare her own food. "That's fine, mom."
Marge smiled. "Ok. And I'll make sure and add the almonds you like this time."
Lisa returned her smile, though with more than a hint of bitterness. How her family had come to accept being cannibals, she just couldn't understand.
Marge smiled again, and went into the pantry to get the various ingredients for Lisa's salad. Lisa walked over and looked at the little clear plastic tub that contained the poor unfortunates Mr. Burns had screwed over twice: once by shrinking them, and then again by distributing them as food. For the most part, they seemed to have given up. Half of them were curled up in little balls, staring at nothing; the rest were sitting on top of them in the tiny space, talking quietly. Lisa blushed when she realized that a few of them had found other ways to occupy their time.
One boy, though, was neither catatonic, nor was he interacting with the others. Instead, he was sitting away from them as much as he could, watching the kitchen around him, studying his environment. He noticed Lisa looking at him, and returned her stare with frank curiosity. Starting, Lisa looked away, unable to meet the gaze of someone her family was going to eat. She turned to walk away, deciding that she'd be eating in her room again, but a soft tapping noise stopped her. Turning back, she saw the boy waving at her.
Lisa hesitated. No, she'd gotten to know one shrunken kid already, and look how that had ended up: Bart chowing down on poor Jeff, and nightmares for a week. She'd made it through one cannibal dinner, but after that she'd taken to eating her meals in her room when mini-teens were on the menu. Homer and Bart were just a little too enthusiastic about eating people for her liking.
As though thinking of him summoned him, Bart burst into the kitchen. "Heya Lis!"
"Hi, Bart."
Her brother noticed the tub of shrunken teens and ran over to the counter. He put his face down level with it and licked his lips, exaggerating the motion. "Mmmm...I'm gonna eat
so many
of you!"
The inhabitants of the tub scrambled back from him, panicking. Bart laughed delightedly, and turned to look at his sister. "Eating upstairs again tonight, Lis?"
She glared at him. "Yeah, Bart, I'm still not ok with eating
people
."
"More for me, I guess!" Bart crowed. Still laughing, her brother vanished, presumably to play video games until dinner time.
And just like that, she couldn't do it. Seeing Bart taunting the poor teens, knowing he was going to take such a mean pleasure in eating kids that were older than he was, stopped her from walking away. The other kids seemed to have accepted their fates, but she just couldn't leave a kid that was so obviously trying to talk to her to the tender mercies of her family. Lisa pinched the bridge of her nose and opened the container with her other hand. A chorus of terror rose up from the tub, stabbing through her. "I...look, I..."
Unable to manage anything decent through the wretched feelings coursing over her, she scooped up the boy, and slapped the lid back down.
"Lisa..."
The young girl spun guiltily. "Umm...I'm going to eat in my room again, Mom."
Marge looked from her daughter's face to her hand and back again. Understanding filled her face, and she smiled warmly. "Alright, hun. If that's what you need to be ok with it."
Lisa's face grew hot. Of course her mother thought she was taking a mini-teen to try eating one. Ugh. She nodded, trying to hide her revulsion, grabbed the ingredients for her salad off the table and out of the fridge, and all but ran to her room. She slammed the door behind her and leaned back against it for a moment, panting. A muffled yell came from her hand as the boy squirmed.
Jumping, Lisa walked over to her desk and opened her hand, gently depositing the boy onto it. She set the salad fixings on the desk next to him and rummage through her dresserr for a few minutes, before walking back and handing him a handkerchief.
The boy looked from the handkerchief to her. "What's that for?"
"You're naked. Cover up."
The boy laughed. "With a salad that big, I don't think you need to add any fiber to your diet."
Lisa snatched the handkerchief back up and dropped it over him. "Just ... cover up!"
"Ok, ok," the boy said, pulling the cloth around him like a blanket. "So ... am I a salad topping then?"
Lisa gagged. "No! I ... I just ..."
She flopped down in her desk chair and covered her face. "... I'm just prolonging the inevitable. With my family, you're pretty much going to get eaten by someone at some point."
The boy squirmed uncomfortably. "Oh. Uh ... look, I know it's weird, but can we just talk for a bit? Before you ... or someone ... you know."
Lisa peeked at him suspiciously. "If you're trying to make me feel bad about this, you don't have to. I already feel awful, thanks."
The boy looked embarrassed. "No, no! I'm ... I just haven't had anyone to talk to for days."
"Why?" Lisa asked, curious in spite of herself. "I mean, I could see them talking in there."
The boy let out a wry laugh. "Would you believe that even shrunk down to five inches tall and in imminent danger of being eaten, jocks still don't like nerds?"
Lisa burst out laughing. She hadn't really had a plan when she grabbed him, but at this point she couldn't just abandon a fellow nerd. She extended her pointer finger to him. "Yeah, that sounds about right for jocks. I'm Lisa."
He reached out and grabbed her finger, giving it a little shake. "Kent. So I take it you don't like the whole 'eating little people' thing?"
Face darkening, Lisa launched into a tirade. Much of it ended up being incoherent babble for once, and it took a long side trip into her vegetarian stance, but it felt so good to vent about it. Finally, she trailed off, feeling embarrassed. "Sorry. I know you've probably got more right to be upset about it than I do."
Kent grinned. "Nah. I mean, yes, I'm the one that's probably going to get eaten, but it sounds like you're the one that has to stick around and deal with how nasty it is from your perspective."
Sighing, Lisa gave him a wan smile. "Yeah. But only for nine or ten more years. Then I can go to college and get away from this crazy, stupid, awful town."
"Oh? What do you want to do?"
Lisa shrugged. For the next hour, they talked, exchanging stories and ideas, their plans for the future. Admittedly, Lisa's plans mostly involved going to college without any idea of what she wanted to go to college for, but as it turned out Kent had intended to go for a degree in astrophysics before his accident. They talked pure physics as she made her salad, sharing the meal as they traded theories. Their shared interest in stellar phenomena carried the conversation late into the night, including a long argument over the origins of the cosmos, complete with a pad of paper, a pencil and magnifying glass for Lisa, and a number of mechanical pencil leads for Kent. They ended up sitting by Lisa's telescope, staring at the sky in companionable silence, taking turns looking through it and sipping hot cocoa (from one of her mother's ceramic thimbles, in Kent's case.)
Finally, Kent stretched and yawned, took the last sip of his cocoa, and stood up, letting the handkerchief fall away. Lisa stared at him, with a lump in her throat. "W-what are you doing?"
Kent sighed. "I...well, you said it yourself, Lisa. Someone in your family will end up eating me at some point. I really appreciate the chance to have a real conversation before...well, before. But if I'm going to be eaten by someone, I'd rather it be you."
Lisa licked her lips, and whispered, "You could stay. I've got some doll clothes, we can buy a terrarium for when I have to leave you home, you can come to school with me or we can get you online classes, you-"
"-can be a pet," Kent said, grinning sadly. "A pet that's terrified of being eaten by everyone and everything. A pet that's completely dependent on you for survival in every sense of the word. I don't think I can live that way."
"But I'm a vegetarian," she whispered, clinging to the stance like a lifeline.
Kent winced and ran his hand through his hair. "I know...look, if you can't do it I understand. Believe me, I'm not really happy about the idea either. Just...whoever eats me, don't let them hurt me, ok? I can just about handle it if the person is nice about it."
Lisa thought about her family for a moment, then shook her head, tears filling her eyes. "No...I'll...I'll do it."
She picked him up, feeling the weight of him in the palm of her hand, and shivered uncertainly. "Well...g-good-bye, I guess." She hesitantly sucked in his feet. The taste was not unlike sucking on her thumb, and the reality of what she was about to do drove home inside her. She pulled back, clapping her hand over her mouth as she gagged and heaved.
Kent winced as he watched the young girl struggle to keep her stomach in check. "Lisa, you don't have to do this, ok? Just give me to Bart, I'll be fine. I don't want... I don't want to hurt you."
Lisa managed a watery smile. "It'll hurt worse thinking of Bart-" she gagged again, "e-eating you. Just... stop talking, ok? I can't if I hear... just shush."
She closed her eyes and popped him into her mouth all in one go, leaving only his head peeking out between her lips. The feeling of wrongness magnified a hundredfold instantly as she was able to make out the shape of a person filling her mouth. She fought down another wave of gagging and began to meditate, focusing on getting her breathing under control. Lisa forced herself to start sucking and licking Ke...the food in her mouth, so she could swallow it more easily.
From Kent's perspective, things were going...not badly, but not well, per se. After all, this ended with him being digested. At any rate, whether Lisa was intentionally trying to make his last moments heavenly, or it was simply a happy accident, there was no denying that the feeling of her mouth around him was intense. The way she sucked on him, the sensations created by her tongue rubbing and stroking him, made his eyes cross. He would have been babbling with pleasure already, except for the facts that a), the pleasure was a precursor to him being eaten, and b) the person giving him this extraordinary feeling was
eight
. A mature, intelligent, gifted eight year old to be sure, but still...
And of course, he thought as he looked up through his haze of pleasure to see tears streaming down her face, there's the fact that it's obviously hurting her.
"Lisa..." she twitched violently at the sound of his voice. "Lisa stop, please. I... can't do this to you. We'll try it your way, terrarium and everything. Just please stop hurting yourse-"
She spat him out so fast the air got knocked out of him when he hit her hand. He looked up at her, concerned, as he fought to get his breath back. Her eyes were unfocused, and he realized she was still regulating her breathing, still meditating. She set him gently on the desk, dropping his handkerchief next to him. He watched as she walked across the room sedately, quietly opened the door, stepped out, and closed the door just as quietly behind her. The moment the door closed, he heard the thudding of running feet, two quick slams, and the distant sound of someone being violently sick.
He dried himself off, wincing at every gag he heard, closing his eyes as the sound of Lisa throwing up went on and on. Finally, it tapered off, replaced with the sound of running water. Slow footsteps came back, pausing outside the door. When she opened the door, she was collected and calm. She walked over to the desk, picked him up, and hugged him gently to her chest. "Thank you for not making me do that."
Kent spread his arms, doing his best to hug her back. "I'm sorry for asking."
Lisa looked down at him, shaking slightly. "I don't want you as a pet, ok? I want to be friends. Yeah, you'll have to have a little cage or something, but it's to protect you. If you ever feel like a pet, just say so, and-"
Kent held up a hand, cutting off what sounded like the start of Lisa descending into into incoherent babbling again. "I know, Lis. I just... I got carried away feeling sorry for myself. I know you won't treat me that way."
Lisa blew out a breath, and held him for a while longer. She started when she realized how long she'd been standing there cradling the teen in her arms. She set him back back on the desk with a tremulous grin. "Let me get you some clothes."
~~~~~
The doll clothes had fit ok, but Lisa had ended up having to tap into her savings to get some higher quality ones. After a bit of discussion, she'd also bought a small decorative birdcage, so that Kent could feel less enclosed when he was sleeping. She'd set up one of her old phones to share a screen with her computer, so he could take his classes online while still having a keyboard he could type on.
Marge and Homer had been less than pleased at discovering they suddenly had a 14 year old living in their daughter's bedroom, but Lisa had flatly refused to discuss it beyond pointing out that if they were going to keep eating people they couldn't very well complain if she chose to keep a person as a pet.
After almost two months, with Kent settled in nicely, Lisa found herself once again poring over her notes. Between her and Kent, they'd begun to work out a theory of how he'd been shrunk. While they were both pretty sure that any eventual publication would be preempted by Mr. Burns, their main goal was to find a way to reverse the effects.
Kent stared at the math on the page, blowing out a breath of frustration. They could mostly understand the sorts of physics involved, but the main conclusion he and Lisa had come to was so far that they'd probably both need advanced degrees before they could really nail down anything.
He sat back, twisting to work out the kinks in his back. Looking up at Lisa, he felt a now familiar flutter, one he stomped down as quickly as it arose. Lately, he'd begun to have trouble making the distinction between their ages. The size difference, coupled with Lisa's unusual intelligence, often made him forget he wasn't talking to a girl his own age. Several times in the last couple of weeks he'd had to stop and remind himself that Lisa was a child, and certainly not someone he could develop feelings for.
"Lisa," Kent said, hesitating.
"Hmm?" she responded, chewing on her pencil as she went back and forth between the ridiculous math on the paper and the reference book she'd picked up to help them figure out how to express the situation with variables.
"What if we can't solve this? I mean, what if it's irreversible?"
Lisa blushed and gave him a shy smile. "I guess...we'd be stuck with each other."
Kent laughed. While Lisa was far too young for him now, he had to admit that he'd never met anyone like her. Besides, someday, she'd be old enough that...that they could consider being something more than friends.
He smiled at her and reached out to pat her hand. "Lis, I think you might be stuck with me no matter what."