Chapter Text
Their heart contracts, expands.
Blood pulses, coursing through and around the symbiote in the same way it’s been doing for the last five hours: a small eternity with only the wet drag of plasma and the throbbing of organs for amusement.
Eddie, by his own description, is a “light sleeper" and even something as passive as watching TV might rouse the body they share, making it weaker, more susceptible to disease, slower to heal. The symbiote has grown used to these daily bouts of stasis, understands the necessity of it better now than it did at the onset, but the boredom isn’t getting easier to deal with.
Tonight is worse. And better. Their bloodstream is flooded with a wash of slowly digesting nutrients, the endorphins that exploded from Eddie when they embarked on their wonderful meal, and the symbiote’s own euphoria. The combination is like an electric current coursing along its molecules. Every instinct is nagging at it to put this energy to use, to press its advantage, expand its territory and track new prey, but that doesn’t align with the needs of its host and so it drifts, waiting.
Eddie uncovered the trafficking cartel by connecting bits of seemingly meaningless information from the stream of emails and documents on his laptop. His best guess is that Drake wanted a backup source of test subjects in case the lab ran out of “volunteers” and while the symbiote isn’t too concerned with such details, it couldn’t fault his logic. The cartel’s leadership skipped town when Drake went up in flames, but the house Eddie found – a swanky estate tucked in the mountains off Interstate 580 – was occupied by a group of mercenaries and the “suppliers” they were meant to protect.
Together, they stalked, they pounced, they fed. Not a quick, reactive chomp in the heat of a fight like before. This time, with surprise on their side, they picked off their targets one by one, dragging them into the shadows where they could savor.
It was as exhilarating as it was vital.
Defying a superior nearly killed the symbiote and recovery took a lot from its host. Barely strong enough to be Venom again, this was their chance to replenish and they used it, gorging well past the point of satiation, simply because they could.
When they returned to the bike, the symbiote withdrew, eager to help break down the glut of brains, and fat, and marrow in their overfilled belly. No sooner had it settled, then it was forced to retake control and constrict their esophagus, or Eddie would have wretched their hard-won feast all over the roadside.
He’s been eating the meat of various species since childhood – the symbiote has seen the memories, even endured “a burger” first-hand, though when it asked, Eddie snapped about “beef” and “chicken” and a need to shrivel the flesh over heat until it tasted like ash. The distinction was hardly apparent, but Eddie was sweating, their entire digestive tract cramping with a sickness that wasn’t physical. It seemed best to stay quiet, to focus on keeping their food inside their stomach and making sure their wheels stayed on the tar.
They have got to hunt, though.
There is no way around it.
Chocolate and raw fish and kale might tide them over for a few weeks, max. Only because those foods help Eddie make more of the proteins and lipids the symbiote needs to maintain their connection, allowing it to live off its host without depleting him too quickly. It’s a delicate balance, hard to maintain. Eventually, inevitably, they need to feed from an outside source, or one of them will suffer.
Back in the apartment, it tried to explain this; Eddie said that it was fine, that he got it, but the bitter, sickly feeling didn’t go away.
The symbiote is still learning what it can fix and what’s best left to Eddie’s devices. Hunting is the axis their mutualism revolves around, which is very much a “we thing,” but the biases fueling Eddie’s unease are squarely his own.
All it knows for sure, is that it doesn’t like it when its host is upset. It wants to soothe, to help, but it has no idea how, aside from letting him sleep it off undisturbed.
Feeling restless, the symbiote pushes upward, skirting kidneys and disks of bone until it leaks through Eddie’s skin. It emerges on his back, in the dip where his spine curves inward. His limbs are sprawled at awkward angles, the sheets kicked to the floor. The rhythmic susurrus of his breathing is muffled under a pillow, his shoulders rising and falling with the respiration of air.
Without the filter of lungs, said air tingles, but it doesn’t burn like it used to. This planet’s atmosphere remains acrid and unpleasantly volatile to the symbiote’s exposed receptors, but since finding Eddie, its DNA has reconfigured, reducing what would once have been fatal to a minor discomfort.
Slowly, as unobtrusively as it knows how, it creeps higher. It settles on a shoulder, extending tendrils of itself across Eddie’s throat, along his jaw, up to his temple.
The arrangement of holes and protrusions that make up human features are uniquely strange, if oddly intriguing – this human’s, anyway. As for the rest, their appeal begins and ends with the hot spurt of blood, the satisfying tear of muscle and sinew as Venom’s teeth scrape meat from skull, but with Eddie…
Everything is different with Eddie.
Until that first release in the Life Foundation Lab, the symbiote’s experience with hosts was limited to deep space vermin that flourished on the rock where it was spawned. Dull, mindless things, barely sentient enough to register their own demise when their usefulness expired.
It was easy to believe the rhetoric, then: that a host is a conveyance, a source of information and ultimately, sustenance. Something to utilize and discard. They weren’t supposed to become… attached.
Addicted.
The thought squirms, perverse and accusing. There is no one around who would criticize, but until very recently, all it knew was the collective’s zero-sum consciousness and, in some ways, allegiance is proving easier to slough off than conditioning.
The symbiote doesn’t regret its decision to stay. Life among its own was a continuous pendulum swing between tedium and jeopardy; an endless cycle of staving off its own hunger and dodging assimilation by superiors. On this world, inside a body that can process a million sensations, shared with a mind on par with its own, everything is so new, so bright, so spectacularly vivid.
Granted, it was terrifying, at first.
Back in the lab, each new host’s thoughts and feelings came rushing in, drowning out all but the most basic instinct to merge and feed, to take what it could before the host’s immune system tipped the balance between danger and safety, forcing it to flee back into the toxically oxygenated air. With each transition it expected to die, so when the last of its Life Foundation hosts, “Maria,” recognized Eddie through the glass of their cell – an outsider, a way out – it seized her flicker of hope and made it its own.
Once the glass lay shattered and it had curled itself around the base of Eddie’s brain, it felt his fear, just like the others,’ but there was something underneath, angry and coiled, that resonated down to the symbiote’s core.
Maybe that’s why Eddie’s antibodies never rallied against it; maybe it’s because it matched his resentment of his place in the world, synched with a being as desperate and vengeful as himself, and that’s why their bond took.
The symbiote doesn’t know and, at first, it was too overwhelmed with rage over everything humans had subjected it to, to care.
It figured out that members of this species identify themselves with sounds linked to symbols, and when the time came to reveal itself, it followed suite: Venom. The reverberation in the earthling language, coupled with visions of permeating death, was plucked from Eddie’s mind at random. And, if the host’s recoiling associations with the word coaxed him into quicker submission, all the better.
It was never meant to... fit. But, at some point, in-between threatening to devour Eddie’s organs and braving fire to keep him safe, Venom became them. Separate, yet singular.
Oblivious to his occupant’s ruminations, Eddie shifts. Synapses spark and the cadence of his sleep changes as he begins to dream.
Glad for any scrap of entertainment, the symbiote reaches inward, winding along nerves and seeping between folds of gray matter until it can feel the hum of Eddie’s subconscious. Images unfurl. In Eddie’s mind, they are back on the hunt. Their muscles twitch with the memory of prowling through a hallway; blunt, human teeth clench in imitation of something much sharper, ears ringing with abrupt silence as a spasming throat collapses between their jaws.
A shudder ripples down their shared nerves. A vague sense of horror-elation pulses low in their torso, potent and inviting.
The symbiote perks, surprised. The urge isn’t new, but after Eddie’s reaction in the aftermath of their hunt, this is the last thing it expected to sense.
It has pieced together a basic grasp of the human reproductive process, knows that this is linked somehow. Not to procreate, but to… feel.
It’s fascinating and bizarre. Sensation for sensation’s sake is a rare, furtive decadence among its kind, but with humans, even the most mundane activity can be a sensory indulgence. Eddie has shared much of what he likes: soft sweaters, songs on the computer, the scent of roses from a cart in front of the building where they go for his job. But not this.
Spawning offspring aside, sex – “fucking,” “making love” – all referring to the same spectrum of activities as far the symbiote can tell, seem to double as form of inter-human symbiosis. And yet, it has also seen memories of Eddie’s own fingers curled around his penis, and a few, steeped in a thrilling sort of shame, where the touching happens on the inside. It’s a weird type of hunger, a frantic yearning for something that won’t kill him if he doesn’t get it and won’t sustain him if he does, but Eddie’s flustered panic when it rears while he’s awake has kept the symbiote’s curiosity at bay.
Carefully, experimentally, it moves the exposed part of itself along the contours of Eddie’s face, lapping at the curve of his lips, spilling down an arm and retracting again, just to enjoy the sensory feedback that spark along their cells.
Beneath and around it, Eddie shivers. A warm exhale flutters from his mouth.
Eddie wants touch, craves it, but he doesn’t think he deserves it; believes he needs to earn it somehow and that, the symbiote can relate to. Where it comes from, access to hosts is how the strong become stronger and the weak remain trapped in the ranks of fodder-on-standby. That is why four were sent to Earth and not one: to scout, yes, though mostly as provision, to serve as food for the superior who called itself Riot if earthlings proved inedible.
But they are Venom now.
They survived when others didn’t. Among its race, that is victory and the reward for victory is satisfaction. They fed tonight, because they were strong enough to take down prey. The symbiote is sated; Eddie should be too.
It knows it has to ask, get permission to slide around the places that humans hide from each other, where blood pools and nerve endings cluster close to the skin. There’s a ritual to it, rules and conventions that it doesn’t fully grasp, but it’s learning.
In the dream, they’re gnashing through a femur, tongue probing into the bone.
The symbiote remembers how delicious it was, warm and juicy and fresh enough to taste alive. It wants to share this pleasure, like Eddie shares his. And so, it lets its contentment flow outward, dripping red and dark and sweet into the grooves of Eddie’s brain. It takes effort to commune with a human like this, like it would with another like itself, but tonight, cells swollen with the bounty of their meal, it has the energy to spare.
Eddie shifts again. He mumbles, turns his head. Legs tense, pelvis tilts and then—
Something like a shock flashes through them. Their heart spasms. Blood throbs in their groin. The sensation lurches, through the symbiote and back into Eddie. Intense, incredible.
Eddie’s hips grind down and another wave of stimulation tremors through them. Hormones surge. Endorphins pour into their bloodstream.
It feels… It feels…
Eddie makes a sound, raw and plaintive in the back of his throat.
Their whole body tightens. Their heart trips over its rhythm – like it does when Eddie’s afraid. His eyes roll beneath the lids and the symbiote freezes, suddenly unsure. Their limbs are trembling with a sensation very close to pain. Eddie wants, strains toward it, but the symbiote doesn’t let him reach.
It has hurt Eddie before, in its hunger, in its ignorance. It made a promise: never again.
It has memories from the hosts in the lab, even a few from Eddie himself, that say humans will chase pleasures that can kill them. This feels good – so, so good – but also like something Eddie should be aware of, present and awake to explain.
The dream has receded. Eddie writhes, his breaths coming quick and harsh against the mattress.
Their nerves are humming, practically crackling with feedback. Redirecting is difficult, but the symbiote calls on shades of blue and the sound of rain and slowly, Eddie stills.
Half-light flickers through the blinds. The temperature dips as the night dies away and Eddie shivers, the fine hairs on his body rising. The symbiote contracts and heaves, spreading up and out to cover its host in itself, and waits for the day to begin.