# One Big Family 7: Comfy

By: TheDragonBoy

## Content

*boing*

*boing*

“Weeeeee!”

*boing*

In the waning hours of the day, with the sun setting behind the mountains and his family returning home for the night one by one, Toby was happily passing his time. Beneath him lie his big brother Torh, sprawled out on his side- as close to being on his back as he could get. A dragon’s spines naturally made it difficult, if not impossible, to fully recline- which was normally a good thing; a dragon rarely wanted to be belly-up on the ground. But this was one of those rare occasions. The thing was, Torh’s belly made an excellent trampoline for his little human sibling.

*boing*

*boing*

The golden scales of his brother’s broad belly were hard against the boy’s feet, but the overlapping surface was flexible, and just underneath the scales the dragon’s body was plump and yielding and- in a word- bouncy. And Torh in particular was the bounciest.

He was one of Toby’s older siblings- from their parents’ first clutch- but he had always trailed behind his clutchmates in size. While he was noticeably larger than any of their younger brothers and sisters, he could never quite catch up to those his own age. As a silver lining, this just happened to make his belly the perfect size and tension for his littlest sibling to bounce on. Larger bellies were just too sturdy for Toby’s little body to make an impact, and with smaller ones he would sink too deep and start to knock against bones or other innards. But Torh’s belly was just perfect.

So Toby bounced and bounced and bounced. He bounced until he began to grow tired, and then he bounced once more, put his arms out to his sides, and let himself tilt backwards. He landed one last time- on his back rather than his feet, letting himself sink into the small indent he made before his momentum gave out and the belly jiggled back into place beneath him.

As his heart started to slow, he closed his eyes and basked in the warmth that soaked into his skin from below.

“Comfy?” came the voice vibrating against his back.

Toby turned his head to the side and cracked an eye. Torh’s golden face hovered a few feet off the ground at the end of his long neck, curved at a sharp angle so the dragon could gaze back at his own belly and the little boy atop it.

“Super comfy,” the little boy replied, wriggling happily as if trying to sink in even deeper. Torh watched for a moment with a pleased expression, always happy to see his tiny sibling enjoying himself.

“You know, as comfy as it might be lying on top of my belly, I bet you it’s even comfier on the inside,” the dragon teased.

“Oh yeah? You think you still have room for me?”

“Oh, I always have room for you.”

Toby sat up eagerly.

Torh, seeing his sibling’s eagerness, moved in. He craned his neck even further and arched his back a bit, making little wrinkles around where his sibling sat as his body bent. When he got his head all the way around to his gut, he stuck out his long, broad tongue, and gave his scales a nice, slow lick.

One moment a little boy had been lounging happily on those scales, and the next he was gone, with only a smear of saliva in his place.

Torh unwound to a more comfortable position, rolled onto his belly and took a moment to stretch, extending his limbs, neck, tail and wings to their limits and then slowly relaxing. He felt the tiny movements against his tongue as the little boy too assumed his preferred position, preparing himself for the trip into his big brother’s depths.

The trip began as expected, with that familiar, iconic sound:

*gulp*

A small bulge, vaguely noticeable, traveled steadily down the golden neck. Torh followed it down with his attention, more out of diligence for his brother’s safety than any sense of satisfaction- as he might have felt from a real meal. He followed it all the way into his chest, and then deeper, until it just about disappeared when it merged into his busy stomach.

*sploosh*!

Toby’s entrance to the chamber was a loud, wet spattering and a thick *glorp*. His big brother had eaten dinner quite recently, and he had just been thrown straight into the middle of it. And inside the well-packed stomach, digestion was already well underway.

What not long ago had been a haphazard pile of hunks of masticated meat, was now much more like a stew. Large quantities of digestive juices had risen around the meal, quite loose and watery at first, but presently thick and viscous with many noticeable- but now much smaller- chunks of meat hidden below the surface. And all around the stomach was working; squeezing and squishing and mashing and churning; making a symphony of splashes and slurps and plops and all manner of bodily noises.

To practically anyone, being pitched into the middle of such a scene, with the only exits tightly sealed, and nothing for company but a dragon’s last meal- which in all practicality you had now become a part of- would have been the stuff of nightmares. But not for Toby.

Sure, even after he’d taken a few trips into his family’s various bellies, the first time the little boy had gotten mixed in with a dragon’s actual lunch had been… frightening, to say the least. But he was much more experienced now, and that experience had taught him that this instinctively dangerous situation didn’t actually pose any danger. Not to him.

The walls themselves were the most outwardly threatening, clearly working hard to destroy all that lie within. But he’d learned they weren’t actually that powerful- not in the sense of crushing strength. They were only persistent. They’d press and knead his family member’s meal, softening it up, letting the digestive juices sink deeper inside, rolling it over and mixing it around so that the acids could cover every surface and sink into every nook and cranny. And only once a meal had thoroughly stewed, did he ever see a deceptively destructive contraction of a fleshy wall smoosh a piece ‘instantly’ into paste.

The stomach juices treated him quite differently. The liquids pooled around him and swept across his skin harmless as water. And so the walls, for all their activity, never harmed him. And far from being at odds, the relationship between them was nearly symbiotic. As the walls contracted against him, their smooth, supple folds felt like a relaxing massage, rocking him back and forth and pushing him leisurely around the chamber. And as he moved, he would squish against mouthfuls of undigested food, mashing them with his weight or squeezing chunks firmly between folds where they could be worked more intensely- and that was all when he wasn’t actively trying to help with digestion.

The other natural fear one might expect would be drowning or suffocation. The sloshing lake of chyme rose past Toby’s chin and left very little room to breathe. But much like his skin somehow managed to keep the digestive juices at bay, his lungs somehow managed to keep him full of breath. He could relax within his siblings’ guts long past the time when any air would have gone stale- or even stay completely submerged in their meal- and never feel the urge to inhale.

He didn’t even have the darkness to fear, because he could make light of his own. And so every potentially scary sound had a clear sight to explain it, and every touch of the walls or brush with a passing meal could be plainly seen.

It was incredible and odd how easily he could survive in such an inhospitable place. He seemed almost perfectly crafted for it, even more so than the stomach around him had been perfectly crafted to dissolve every other creature it took in- everything but Toby.

But even odder still, Toby didn’t just survive in the bellies of his dragon family, he’d grown to love them. It wasn’t something he could really explain, but when he watched everything around him melting away with such ease, and knew that the deadly, wild forces that claimed them were leaving him completely untouched, he just felt… special.

He knew a dragon’s belly wasn’t really alive- well, it was ‘alive’, very alive- but it didn’t think, not like a person. It just did its job, mushing up food and then sending it on its way. But Toby liked to imagine that this big, primal force of nature knew him, that it recognized him, that it chose to keep him whole and alive while ending everything else.

And sometimes he liked to imagine he was helping it. He’d grab clumps of food and mush them up, just like he saw the stomach walls doing. He’d splash the caustic fluids onto huge hunks, sometimes almost his own size, and he’d watch them slowly go over hours while he stayed perfectly safe. He could feel safer in there than maybe anywhere else.

And it made him happy. And it made his family happy. And so his strange life went.

And right now, taking in that special, comforting emotion, Toby let himself relax within Torh’s belly, feeling the great warmth- that very same warmth he’d only barely felt while resting on the surface- now permeating him to the core. He closed his eyes and sunk below the surface, letting the stomach floor support him as it ebbed and flowed and churned the meal around him. The muffled gurgles and sloshes were just as soothing as any lullaby.

And before he knew it, Toby was asleep.

Originally Published: 6-Dec-2020