Penny groaned as she flipped through her notes for the millionth time tonight. She had landed herself in some serious trouble – she had an essay due at midnight, of which she had currently only finished half; and with her computer’s clock reading 23:35, she needed to come up with some way to put the other half together fast. She could do it, she just needed to focus.

Easier said than done when she was bouncing in her seat, with her legs crossed and swinging under the table. She looked away from her work for just a moment to glare at the empty coffee mug and discarded soda cans sitting at the edge of the table.

But Penny could worry about that after her work was finished. After adjusting her glasses, she looked back and forth between her paper notes and the computer screen as she added another block of text to the essay; little by little, it was getting done.

Of course, it would have been done had she not put it off so long – and then ended up repeatedly getting distracted by something more interesting when she tried to do her work with plenty of time to spare. Five hours had passed since the writing of the first words, and only in the last hour had she realized how little she had accomplished, and how little time she had left to finish the rest.

That was when she had rushed to grab a six-pack of the first caffeinated drink she could get her hands on, asked her sister to make her some coffee, and did her best to buckle down and get her assignment done and submitted on time.

And now it was occurring to her that maybe that might have been too much caffeine. She very obviously needed to be somewhere else, but for now she couldn’t be sure that her work would be done on time until she got it done, and even the minute it would take to use the bathroom just down the hall might be enough time to make her late.

“The fuck is this even supposed to mean…?” she muttered as she continued scanning her notes, trying her hardest to forget about anything other than the task at hand. This wasn’t her first time doing an assignment on a full bladder, after all, and with how good intentionally filling herself up felt, it certainly wouldn’t be her last; by now she knew from experience how to focus despite her need. She’d be fine as long as she got her work done.

So she carried on her routine of staring at her notes, then staring at the little blinking line on the screen, looking back at her notes, and then adding whatever she could come up with to fill space and stay at least somewhat on-topic; then maybe checking her clock to see if she wasn’t wasting too much time. So far, she’d added a decently-sized paragraph within the five minutes since last she had checked. Just a whole lot more of those and then she’d be done.

Then she’d be able to pee. Given her thighs rubbing against each other and the hand that snuck down to grab between her legs for a moment, she definitely needed to work quickly if she wanted to meet that deadline. Surely that wouldn’t be a problem, though – her assignment was due in… eighteen minutes. If, somehow, she failed to submit it on time, then there wouldn’t be any more rush and she’d have the perfect chance for a quick bathroom break. And if she did submit it on time, she’d just go to the bathroom immediately afterwards anyways. So either way, she only had to hold it in for another eighteen minutes at most; and of course she could do that.

The hard part would be finishing her homework. Penny was dangerously low on time, and still had more points to touch on before her essay would be done. So she continued flipping through her notes, typing up whatever she found that seemed appropriate, and making sure that it didn’t look like she had just stitched all her notes together.

She muttered quietly as she worked, reading aloud to herself what she was typing to check that it didn’t sound crazy, and occasionally stopping to groan and complain about her bladder whenever the pressure flared up for a moment.

“Almost done,” she assured herself before moving into a new position so that she could squirm with her heel beneath her to apply pressure. “Gotta hold it.”

After another glance at her empty mug, she shook her head and tried to keep her focus on her work. All she had to do was find enough useful information in her notes to get her wordcount up without needing to resort to aimless rambling – she was already pushing it with exceptional verbosity and frequent occurrences of two or three consecutive rephrasings of the same statement, and was really hoping that nobody would notice that most of the essay was written in the half-hour before it was due.

… And that the sudden warmth she could feel down below was a one-time anomaly. Normally, she wouldn’t have worried too much about leakage, but that was only because normally she would be wearing more than the bare minimum of clothing – right now, with just a t-shirt, socks, and blue panties with a little patch of darker blue at the crotch, if she were to leak any more she’d start leaving puddles.

Penny pressed herself even harder against her heel, wiggling a little to try to subdue her bladder just a little bit more, and glanced very briefly at her mug again as she turned her attention to the clock. Ten minutes left. Did she have enough written already to finish the rest in ten minutes? Maybe. Hopefully. Even if she didn’t, whatever she could write in ten minutes would have to be enough.

And so Penny did her best to ignore the wetness in her underwear and the slight moisture it left on her sock as she sat on her heel and squirmed. She had to focus, and pull something out of her notes to make an acceptable essay – she wasn’t gunning for top marks here; just a passing grade would do at this point – in what little time she had left. Trying very hard to focus, she recited the just-barely-not-nonsense filler she was typing as quickly as possible, following her sister’s years-old advice to “just pad the hell out of that shit” before somehow bringing everything back around for a summary of what little substantive information she had actually written.

When she hit save at last, not bothering to waste any time re-reading to ensure it made sense – not her problem anymore! – she was down to the last few minutes to submit her paper, and the last few minutes before she could go to the bathroom. She jumped up from her chair in preparation as she navigated to the site the teacher had told them to upload their work to, squeezing her legs together after the movement forced another leak out.

Penny very quickly found where exactly she could submit her file, stopping only for the second it took to confirm that the filename matched what she had saved her essay as, just to be sure she wasn’t about to accidentally send in some less-than-appropriate fanfiction involving a Citadel, reach, and flexibility – that sort of thing was saved elsewhere, not on her desktop, but she could never be too careful! And when she was sure that she was not about to submit the results of her excessive research into turian physiology, she uploaded her project, waited for the spinning loading icon, and…

“Yes!” With exactly one minute left, Penny had successfully completed and submitted the essay that she was about to pee herself for – which a little trail running down her leg reminded her of, prompting her to immediately flee from her room and down the hall, thankfully finding the bathroom unoccupied as she rushed in, yanked her underwear down, and dropped herself onto the toilet.

With a deep sigh she released a stream that she was sure would wake everyone else up, leaning back and staring at the ceiling as she took deep breaths through her mouth. She hadn’t cut it that close in a long while… and never intentionally, as far as she could recall. As her torrent splashed against the inside of the toilet bowl, she considered how she might be able to make such plans – it felt good, after all, and if she had full control of the situation, she could have some real fun with it.

Though, she would have to figure out a way to avoid needing to do laundry in such a situation… When her breathing recovered, Penny looked down at her underwear, noting the significant wet patch and droplets on her thigh. She could cover up a little accident like that easily enough, but with such razor-thin margins pushing herself so far would entail…

But that was a problem for later.