And then, one day, she just...didn't feel bad any more. She had ordered a young adult lion beaten for some infraction, but the usual guilt didn't hit her like a charging elephant. She held her breath, waiting for it to descend, but it never did. Her mate was whispering sweet nothings to her, hyenas were piling more food in front of her, and Nala was content.

She was more than content, in fact. She felt great! Out of habit, she started eating again, and was surprised at just how flavorful the meat was when she wasn't trying to stuff it down as fast as possible. She'd forgotten how good it felt to just eat with no specific goal in mind; it was ecstasy. She moaned with pleasure, which caused her whole body to jiggle, every useless inch of her. To an observer, the ripples that moved along her vast form would have looked like savannah grass rippling in the wind. Nala was actually a little surprised by how huge she'd gotten, and she wished she had managed to get over that whole "conscience" thing a lot sooner. One downside of eating herself comatose all the time was that she hadn't been able to appreciate her growing body.

And grown it had. Her limbs and tail had all but vanished beneath huge rolls of fat, making her whole body more or less one continuous blob. Underneath that fat, her legs more closely resembled puddles than usable limbs, being spreading masses of fat that had long ago atrophied into uselessness even as they continued to increase in bulk. Her stomach pushed her up so her "shoulders" (as much as any part of her monstrously obese body could be considered a shoulder) were more than three times as high as Scar's, and she was of course much, much wider, a veritable ocean of oozing, corpulent flesh, of which she could barely move a muscle.

It occurred to her, all of a sudden, that she would never walk again. That had been true for some time, of course, and she'd suspected as much for even longer, but at this moment, while taking stock of her massive body, she knew that she had passed the point of no return. She was nothing but a burden now, consuming and consuming and never giving anything back. The thought thrilled her endlessly, sent her into paroxysms of delight that would have had her thrashing if she had been able to move. Nala thought back to when she'd told Simba to run away, the first serious step she'd taken toward her current state. She wanted to slap the stupid cub she had been back then for ever having second thoughts. She'd grown into a debauched, gluttonous tyrant (as well as a mountain of a lioness), and she was incapable of imagining a better life.

Okay, well, maybe it could get a little better. "Scar?" she said questioningly.

"Yes, my darling?"

"Do you think I'm beautiful?"

She knew that her mate loved her for her mind, for her long-sought (if only recently achieved) remorseless cruelty, for her nearly perfect selfishness. But he rarely said anything about her body, and when he did, it was all irritatingly vague. Nala had worked hard to become what she was, physically as well as a mentally--though there could be no denying that it had been highly enjoyable work, for the most part--and she wanted to know that Scar loved the whole package. The question seemed to shock him. She wasn't used to catching him off guard.

She pressed on. "I'm serious. I know how you feel about my personality, but I want to know what you think of my body."

"Your body thrills me," he replied, without even a moment's pause. "It's a physical manifestation of everything I love about your mind, a testament to everything you've done and sacrificed and become to get this far. And it's beautiful, too. When you were a cub, I feared that I would find you disgusting as you put on weight, and that I would just have to pretend once you became my queen, but you've only grown lovelier." There was no hint of an edge to his voice, no audible cues that he was working any kind of an angle. Nala didn't think she'd heard him speak so candidly.

"Did you really plan all this out that far in advance?" she said wonderingly. Scar laughed at that, and licked her closest roll affectionately.

"Nala, my love, I've been planning some form of 'all this' since the very first time you ate with me, though I admit that I didn't seriously start considering it until you left and came back."

"Oh? And why's that?"

"Because once you abandoned your family for purely hedonistic reasons, I was confident that you could make it the rest of the way."

"And just look at me now," Nala said with a smile. "You've absolutely ruined me."