Chapter Text
Eddie wakes up to something batting at his cheek. He thinks that Mr. Belvedere is being awfully polite about demanding breakfast and that kind of behavior ought to be rewarded with food--but there's something wrong about the light falling on his closed eyelids. He opens his eyes to see the little shiny black extrusion draw back from his cheek.
It just stands there, looking at him without visible eyes, no thicker than his finger. After a few frozen seconds it nudges his cheek again, and Venom says, Time for breakfast, Eddie.
Eddie shrieks a little and flails, trying simultaneously to launch himself out of bed and away from his own body. He manages only to bang the top of his head against the windowsill over the bed.
He feels Venom flow out over the bump immediately, and also Venom twining around his wrists and ankles, tugging him into a safe and mostly-comfortable position on the bed.
Eddie stares at the ceiling, panting, then looks at his wrists and ankles. He can see the bands of black Venom is using to hold him--or using to let him see he's being held.
"V," Eddie says aloud. "Venom. What--you--you were dead. I felt it. You were gone. You're gone. Do I have a fucking brain tumor for real this time?"
Would you expect me to answer that accurately if I was a hallucination?
"If you're a hallucination then I'm not talking to you," Eddie points out. "I'm just thinking out loud."
There's that ticklish sensation of Venom flowing out from his side, and then Venom's face appears, hanging just above his, that familiar grin unchanged. "I am not a hallucination."
Is this the dream? Not Anne looking after him, but Venom coming back? It feels real, it looks real, but somehow Eddie can't quite believe that it's actually happening, not to him. He isn't the guy who gets this kind of happy ending. He's the guy who almost gets something great and then blows it up.
"Prove it," he says, tugging at his ankles and wrists again. They stay pinned in place.
Venom's head tilts, and Eddie can hear him thinking--or is that just the whirring of his own thoughts, figuring out how to prove or disprove the impossible?
Venom extends another tendril and then Eddie's phone is being held up above him. Venom sinks down, pressing his head in close to Eddie's on the pillow so they're cheek to cheek.
"Smile," Venom says, and Eddie does, helplessly, while the shutter clicks again and again, because if this is real--if Venom's really here, pinning him to the mattress and taking still-in-bed selfies with him--
His right hand is freed, his phone dropped into it, and Eddie stares at the screen. It's there, in--well, not exactly black and white, but very vivid and lifelike pixels. There they are, him and Venom looking like one hell of a morning after, Eddie's goofy grin and wonky front tooth next to Venom's sharklike smile.
He feels Venom in his brain again. Venom's not thinking this time so much as rummaging through Eddie's thoughts, trying to understand what Eddie sees in the selfie, pulling up his memories of other selfies in other beds.
"It's not exactly..." Eddie says, remembering Anne and Lindsey and Jessica and college hookups of both genders, but Venom is already nuzzling at his cheek, rumbling, I had a really good time last night, and tugging on Eddie's hand from the inside. Eddie watches his own fingers move without his direction, snapping another half dozen selfies, and then he turns his head toward Venom, because, what the hell.
It's not exactly not like that.
Their lips brush, and it takes Eddie a second to realize what feels weirder than it should. Venom's lips are full and soft. Eddie opens his eyes and sees the narrower shape of Venom's face; it's the face he--she? they?--wore when it was Anne inside them. The first time they kissed.
"Is that, hey," Eddie says, drawing back a little. "V, you don't gotta look like that for me. I mean, if you want to," he adds hastily as Venom blinks at him.
But Venom's in his head and can't misunderstand him, and Venom's face morphs into the more familiar shape, lipless grin widening again. "Aww, Eddie. You love me the way I am."
"Yeah, well, so do you," Eddie says, nestling into the pillow and bringing his phone down to look at the pictures. "You said I'm your perfect match."
"You are," Venom agrees, like it's that simple.
Eddie shakes his head a little but doesn't argue, flipping through the selfies of Venom kissing his cheek, of them kissing-kissing, just a coy hint of Venom's tongue visible, though it hadn't pushed into his mouth. Unlike that other kiss. Probably for the best no one caught a picture of that.
He thinks again of other selfies. Anne had always been careful about what pictures they took, in case they got out. A female attorney had to work hard enough to be taken seriously; she didn't need any remotely risqué pictures floating around. That's not really a problem for him and Venom.
"Oh, fuck," Eddie snaps, fumbling at his phone to stab on the airplane mode button. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, I gotta--"
He pulls up the photos, thumb hovering over the delete button, but it feels like a stone in his stomach, a lead apron crushing his heart. These are the first pictures he and Venom have taken together. They represent this moment, finding themselves together, and realizing they're together. Deleting them feels like damaging something that won't heal, like putting a knife to his own skin. This time the idea is scary enough to make him stop and stare.
Eddie?
Venom's retreated mostly inside, though there are still black bands wrapped around Eddie's wrists and ankles. "It's--fuck, V, the FBI--I told them it was all you, I told them you did everything and you were dead."
I did. I was, as far as you could detect.
"Yeah, but--shit, okay, air gap," Eddie realizes. He bolts out of bed and over to his desk, digging into a file box to pull out the ancient-looking laptop he keeps stashed there. Black gaffer tape reinforces a few corners and covers most of the ports. More gaffer tape covers the one peripheral that's plugged into it, a fan of connectors dangling off, routed through an innocuous looking box.
This is his air gap laptop. Its guts have been updated, so it runs as well as it needs to, but it's mostly for storing things that he can't risk being hacked, so it doesn't have to run all that well. The shitty exterior is part of its protection, making it look too old and thrashed to be worth stealing if somebody breaks in. It's set up to wipe itself if someone enters too many wrong guesses for the password--which is any number at all, because it has to be unlocked with the thumbprint reader hidden under one of the taped corners.
Venom's head comes out to peer at the laptop while Eddie logs in. "What are you scared of?"
"The FBI," Eddie says. "They're--if we're lucky they would want you, us, in prison or dead. If we're not lucky, they'd stick us in a lab somewhere and study us. And they can get into my phone if they want to, they'd be able to get the warrants and do it legally. And I just took fifteen pictures of us looking like anything but a guy being helplessly controlled by an alien that died a few days ago."
"Looking happy," Venom says, and Eddie's pretty sure he's not imagining the faintly questioning tone under the demonic rumble.
"Happy together," Eddie agrees, and then has to hum the old song, half-mumbling the words--imagine me and you, and you and me--while he waits for the laptop to start up. The dongle would nuke the phone's wifi and data connections if they were active, but as it is it just opens up a file directory for him.
Eddie's stashed a lot of pictures on this thing, so he's able to find and transfer them quickly, and deletes them off the phone when he's done, scrubbing them absolutely. He leaves the ones Jack already knows about, but makes copies of those too, just in case.
"There," Eddie says. "Now they're safe. We can keep our selfies on here and the FBI can't find them."
If they do we will eat them, Venom says. We will protect us. We will not go to another lab.
"Yeah, no, see, the FBI is--that's more than we can eat, okay?" Eddie disconnects his phone, and only then opens one of the selfies to admire in full size on the laptop's screen. He lets his phone reconnect and checks to be sure it hadn't had time for a cloud backup before he deleted the selfies.
"They're like policemen but more," he explains to Venom. "We don't eat those guys, and we don't hurt them unless we really, really have to. If they find us, we just run, okay? No arguing about making us look bad, we just go for the water and get out of here."
Out of San Francisco?
Eddie sighs, going to sit on the bed again, thinking about it. "I mean, we'd have to get out of California. Out of the United States. You can swim so fast, though, we could go right down the coast," Eddie gestures with his hand, swimming through the air along a southward line on the map he pictures in his head. "To Mexico, and past that. We could go to Guatemala, Honduras, someplace like that where things are real fucked up, where good people are in danger. Eat our way through some drug cartels. Bite off all kinds of heads. Bad guys' heads."
I like the sound of that. Maybe we should tell the FBI where we are now.
Eddie shakes his head, still smiling. "How about we don't totally fuck up our lives here and we can go to Central America for a vacation sometime, okay? Take lots of travel photos, eat some heads, and come back without anybody chasing us. That way Anne won't worry about us." Eddie frowns. He can't tell Anne that Venom's back if there's a danger that she might have to lie to the FBI about it. He can't put her in that kind of position, not after what he already did. "About me, anyway."
Ah. If we stay in San Francisco, we can win her back.
Eddie shakes his head but doesn't actually tell Venom no, checking the messages on his phone instead. Jack called twice, and also Eddie apparently slept for something like twenty-six hours. He squints at the drift of Snickers wrappers, just barely remembering sharing them with Venom in the dark. "We gotta eat some food and take a shower, is what we gotta do, okay?"
I have no objection.
"Good," Eddie says, heading to the bathroom. Someone rehung the shower rod and put a new curtain on it. Eddie wonders if Anne will blame that on Dan too. He smiles at the thought of talking to her, teasing her, and at the thought that she might not even be lying. None of it was a dream, and he has his symbiote and he has friends, and maybe even a job again. Things are looking up. Way up. Sky's the fucking limit.
"Venom," Eddie says, turning the water on. "Venom, buddy, we saved the fucking planet."
Yes. That seems fairly obvious from the way that no one attempted to eat you while you were sleeping.
Eddie snorts and gets in the shower.
He's offering Venom the idea of all different kinds of food to figure out where they should go for lunch. Venom is ransacking his memory, so that a thousand different tastes and smells flicker across his senses, his mouth watering and empty stomach aching. Eddie is looking around to check he's got his keys, his wallet, his phone, that he's wearing both pants and shoes. He's pretty sure he's got everything and he heads for the door, glancing around the apartment to see everything miraculously in place.
"NO!" Venom roars with Eddie's mouth as he takes control, freezing Eddie in place while black wraps around his upper arms, his thighs, his entire torso and his neck. A thick rope of black smashes into the kitchen wall.
Eddie is frozen for a moment, looking around to try to spot the threat Venom is protecting him from, and then Venom draws that rope back in, and Eddie sees what it took away. There are no knives on the magnetic strip now.
He saw them as he was walking to the door, in the same place as always, and he thought, Good, I still have those, I could use them. Just another escape route to know. Just in case.
"Venom," Eddie says, a little choked. Venom loosens his grip slightly but stays circled protectively around Eddie's throat and chest and around the tops of his arms and legs where the big arteries are easy to find. Eddie closes his eyes. "V, buddy, it's not... that wasn't..."
You thought to destroy yourself. You looked at the knives and you saw your own blood. Your own death.
"I mean..." Eddie waggles a hand. "Not, like... not really saw. Just... it was nothing, just a thought, it doesn't mean anything. I'm not gonna do anything."
He can feel Venom rummaging through his thoughts, memories, finding the sources of all his scars, running through every one of his lowest moments--including the whole time Eddie was in the hospital, numb and aching and unable to think at all. Eddie slumps in Venom's hold--he would be sitting on the floor if it was up to him, and as it is Venom turns him and moves him to the couch, sitting him down. He wraps a blanket aggressively around Eddie, holding him in place.
"I thought you were hungry," Eddie tries.
I thought you were competent in basic life functions like not destroying yourself.
"Okay, to be fair, I don't know that the time we've been together completely supports--"
Venom lets out an internal howl of rage that rattles Eddie's bones and stuns him silent.
Because it's not just rage. It's fear, and hurt.
Venom squeezes him tighter, like a kid clutching a toy someone has threatened to take away. You were happy, Venom says. He sounds angry and hurt and bewildered.
You were happy, you said you were happy. Together, me and you. You were glad to be us. You said we would escape together if there was danger. I could feel it was true. And still you looked at the knives and thought of shedding your own blood.
Eddie sighs and relaxes into Venom's hold, tipping his head back to stare up at the ceiling. "It's just... it's a habit. Can you tell when the first time was that I thought about it? Because I honestly don't know."
Venom takes the question seriously, searching back and back through Eddie's memories.
Eddie is hiding, curled inside the big tub by the washing machine--small enough to fit down inside it, wrapped in the knitted blanket the housekeeper made for him. He's looking at the bleach on the shelf over the washing machine. It says WARNING on it, and he knows that means he mustn't touch it, and he thinks maybe his father would notice him if he did.
You were a spawnling. Still forming, not yet old enough to survive alone. And already you were thinking of ways to die.
"Yeah, well, so now you know," Eddie says wearily. He kind of wishes he didn't remember that, although it's not exactly something he ever forgot, he just... didn't have to think about it before he had somebody poking around his brain all the time. "You got a defective one. If you wanna trade up, I'll--"
You are mine. I will not let you come to any harm, including from yourself.
"Well, there you go then," Eddie says, shrugging, already tired of talking about this. "Problem solved, right? You're here, you won't let anything happen." Eddie looks over at the empty magnet strip again. "What did you do with my kitchen knives?"
Digested them. You have never used them for anything you should use them for.
"Yeah, but... there's you now, I should probably cook. We can't eat out all the time."
I will handle the cutting of things.
Eddie squints down at himself, flexing against the bands holding him. "You can digest steel?"
I can digest a human skull. Carbon is carbon.
Eddie tilts his head, accepting the point. "Okay, well, can we go have lunch now?"
He doesn't really feel hungry anymore, but he knows going outside and moving around and eating will all help with the gray haze creeping into his brain.
I don't understand. This is damage, but I don't know how to repair it. You are not safe. What if I was separated from you again?
Eddie sighs. "Look, I... a while ago, I promised Annie I wouldn't do anything stupid. I can promise you too, if you want. I'm not gonna, V, I'm really--I know I do dumb stuff, but I used to be way, way, dumber, okay? And I survived that. I'm not gonna fuck it up now."
But you think of it. Even when you were happy you thought of it. And now thinking of it has ruined your happiness.
Eddie worms a hand under his shirt to pet over the weird silky-slime feeling of Venom over his skin. "I'll get happy again, I promise. It's just... it's shitty thinking about how bad my brain works sometimes. And I don't like that you're stuck in a brain like that."
I don't like that you are stuck in a brain like that!
Eddie rolls his eyes. "It's my brain, V. Always been like this, you saw. Who'd I even be if I didn't have this brain, huh? I wouldn't even know myself."
Do you know yourself when you share your brain and body with an alien symbiote?
That is kind of a deep philosophical question, but, "Okay, yeah. I get your point. But brains, minds, they aren't like hearts or bones, there's nothing you or anybody can just go in and fix."
You are not telling the whole truth, Venom insists, probing at his thoughts. There are treatments.
"Yeah, but the drugs take forever to figure out and some of 'em got all these side effects, I might not be able to work, and what am I gonna go tell a therapist about? 'Sometimes I think about dying but I don't actually try it, I just think about it, and now I got this buddy who thinks that's not okay, so take some time away from all the poor bastards that might actually hurt themselves because I wanna be happier.' I'd probably start arguing with you halfway through and end up in a straitjacket, or Thorazined to the eyeballs."
I could metabolize it. I could break you free. I won't let any harm come to you. But I can see in your mind that you know there are ways to get better. You don't have to hurt.
"I'm not hurting, it's just--I just--just in case I can't take it anymore. Later. If things are bad. And things are good now, I got you, Annie's speaking to me, Dan likes me for some reason--"
And you still looked at the knives.
Eddie closes his eyes, giving in. It's obvious Venom's not going to let this go. "Fine. Fine, I get it, that's not good. I'll find somebody to talk to. But if the drugs make me feel all fucked up you gotta clear 'em out for me, okay?"
Obviously, Venom growls. And if anyone tries to tie you up we will go to Guatemala and eat all the drug cartels.
Eddie figures that technically being stuck in some horror-story asylum is fairly unlikely, so that's more or less safe to agree to. "Yeah, okay."
Venom pulls his phone out of his pocket and brandishes it in his face. Eddie grins, letting himself feel Venom's determination and relief. "I, uh, I don't know if I can make an appointment right this second, V, I gotta do some research and figure out who takes my shitty insurance and everything. Can we go have lunch first?"
Put it on the calendar then. With an alarm. And make it color-coded.
Eddie snorts, but takes the phone--Venom's let up his grip enough that Eddie can--and navigates to his own empty calendar to schedule it for ten o'clock tomorrow morning, with an alarm: Find therapist, make appt.
He sets the color to black, so the text shows up in white. Then he changes the text to all caps, so it really looks like Venom shouting the reminder at him.
Good. Yes. Now. We will go eat a very large burger. Rare. With bacon on it. And tater tots. And drink something fizzy with no poisons in it.
"Okay, V," Eddie says. "You gonna let me off the couch, though?"
Venom unwraps the blanket from around him and pulls him back up to his feet. Eddie can still feel Venom holding on, gripping tight around his arms and legs and belly and chest, even if he melts reluctantly away from Eddie's throat. Eddie can still feel him, like a hug. Like armor. He's not gonna ask Venom to stop, even if he thought Venom would do anything other than laugh at him and hug tighter.
After lunch we will get coffee. And something chocolate to eat. And we will take Annie some to tell her thank you for helping. That way we can start to win her back.
Eddie smiles, shaking his head as they head out of the apartment. "Tell me the truth, are you an optimist?"
One of your many deficiencies I can make up for.
Eddie only remembers when they're down in the alley that his bike is still only God (and the SFPD) knows where. They're going to have to walk everywhere, but that's all right. They have plenty of time, and it's a beautiful day.