Work Text:
This is disgusting, Eddie. Why do you insist on doing this to us?
“Hwha?” Eddie asks around his toothbrush before Venom makes him lean forward and spit everything in his mouth, toothbrush included, into the bathroom sink.
“What the hell, V?” Eddie coughs as he regains the use of his mouth, wiping the remaining foam on his lips onto the shoulder of his ratty tshirt. “Impulse control, we talked about this!”
You also said I am welcome to stop you from getting hurt, they huff in return, settling almost entirely in the muscle of his lower back. It makes the tissue dense and uncomfortable, and they know Eddie doesn’t like it when they do that.
Taking a breath, because he needs to work on his impulsiveness almost as much as Venom, Eddie grabs his toothbrush out of the sink and starts rinsing it off. Venom hadn’t done more than writhe stiffly in Eddie’s guts the last dozen or so times he’d brushed his teeth after their recovery. They hadn’t actually said anything, though. So either they've finally had their fill of stupid human wierdness, or Eddie has done something different this time to set them off.
“How is this hurting us? Am I brushing too hard or something?”
No, it is that substance. A tendril jabs out of Eddie’s gut and knocks the toothpaste tube off of the counter and into the wall as he finishes rinsing his toothbrush. It is poisoning us.
“The toothpaste? I’ve been brushing my teeth with it every night, how is it just now poison?”
You swallowed it the past two nights and have swallowed it intermittently in the past. The, and here they insert the concept of a specific molecule they don’t have a name for, damages our kidneys. If you are unable to not eat poison I will stop you.
“Okay, then I won’t swallow it.” While Eddie was well aware he shouldn’t swallow toothpaste, there were times when it was more convenient. Those times were mainly when he’d been up way too late and just wanted to get in bed. In his defense though, he’s pretty sure that the damage wouldn’t be enough to hurt him even if he didn’t have Venom to heal him. “We okay now?”
No, even if you do not eat the poison it still tastes terrible. It binds to our taste receptors, and then everything else tastes terrible. Why do you need to do this?
Eddie can feel Venom’s reluctance. They don’t want to compromise on this, but, as Eddie has insisted, everything they are together depends on communication and compromise. They’ll fall apart, otherwise.
“It cleans the bacteria off my teeth and kills them. If I don't, then they’ll build up and damage my teeth. I’ll get cavities, and if I get cavities I’ll have to get fillings.” Eddie brings up memories of the dozen times and several dentists he’d gone to for fillings through the years. They cringe away from the recalled whine of the drill and heavy numbness of the local anesthetic.
I will take care of the bacteria then, so you will not assault our mouth and poison us.
“Alright… I guess that’ll work then.”
As Eddie finishes up his nightly routine he can’t help but feel Venom’s curiosity nibble at his consciousness.
“Just ask,” he says as he pulls his shirt over his head, “you’ll keep me up if you don’t.”
They are not for decoration, then?
“What’s not for decoration?”
The metal and fluorescent portions of your teeth. They are artificial, so I assumed they were decorative like your tattoos.
“Nah, those’re fillings, probably. At least the metal ones are. What do you mean by fluorescent?”
The ones in front are visible in ultraviolet. And then they turn Eddie back towards the mirror, cover his vision with their own, and bare his teeth in a snarl.
See, those ones. They focus on a couple of especially noticeable spots at the base of Eddie’s front teeth.
“Huh. Weird.”
The next few nights Eddie doesn’t brush his teeth. Venom keeps their word and there’s no noticeable buildup or bad smells. Like paper cuts, seasonal allergies, and sore joints, brushing his teeth is now seemingly a thing of the past.
For a few nights at least.
“Venom give me the toothbrush, I need it.”
No, you said you would stop! We have an agreement!
Venom is holding the offending toothbrush over Eddie’s head on a tendril longer than his arm could ever hope to be. The rest of their mass is in his lower back, tensing the muscles there with displeasure.
“Just give it to me. I won’t use toothpaste, I promise.”
Then what is the point? They ask, suspicious, as their tendril droops almost in range of Eddie’s grasp.
“Routine.” Eddie answers, darting his hand up at the last second and just barely missing the toothbrush as Venom twitches it away. “C’mon!”
No. Explain first.
“Fine,” Eddie sighs. It’s a partnership, they need to communicate. They both just happen to suck at it. “I’ve had a harder time than normal getting to sleep these past few nights, yeah?”
Yes , they reluctantly agree, you feel like we missed something. Or like we forgot something.
“Right, and the missing thing is brushing my teeth.”
How is not doing that an issue? I told you I would maintain our teeth.
“And you do, you’re doing a great job. I literally couldn’t do better myself,” Eddie soothes, “but it’s part of my routine. When I don’t brush my teeth, even on purpose, I feel like I’m forgetting something. It makes me just a tiny bit anxious, and that makes it harder to sleep.”
Eddie feels them turning the idea over in the back of his head. They relax the muscles of Eddie’s lower back and drift up along the backs of his ribs. He thinks anxiety as a concept isn’t new to Venom, they just didn’t have a name for it until they got to him. Before him, Venom didn’t have much in the way of definition for how they felt. There was want and do-not-want, superior and inferior, strong and weak. Now they are accustoming themselves to the shades in between.
It is a ritual, they determine. You believe that our teeth will be damaged if you do not brush them, even if you know that is not true.
‘Ritual’ is Eddie’s go to explanation for weird shit that humans do, especially when the weird shit involves things that aren’t necessarily true, and Venom has picked up on it.
“It's one of the things I do before I sleep, yeah. It kind of lets my body and my brain know that I’m gonna try to sleep soon. Gets me in the mood to sleep.”
You believe if you brush our teeth, you will sleep better?
“I think so. I shouldn’t need to use toothpaste, though, just brushing.”
You think. They sound like they don’t entirely believe him.
“Can’t hurt to try?” Eddie offers.
Fine. They reluctantly place the toothbrush into Eddie’s hand, but not before flinging the toothpaste off the counter and into the toilet.
Eddie quickly determines that the toothpaste-in-toilet thing is a problem for future him, and gets to brushing his teeth using only water from the sink. It doesn’t take long to finish, but, in the couple of minutes it does take, Venom goes quiet.
That was… nice without the poison. Like a massage.
“I guess?” Eddie shrugs, but when he turns to leave, he finds that he can’t. “Use your words.”
You are not finished brushing our teeth. Venom says as their appearance overtakes Eddie’s in the mirror’s reflection.
“You mean you want me to do yours too?”
No, Eddie. Not mine, ours. Then their pointed teeth ripple into place in Eddie’s mouth, overtaking his own and making speech difficult.
Can you not? He thinks as loudly and clearly as he can, attempting to direct it towards the symbiote. Venom’s usually better about asking before they do things like that, but they seem to have forgotten in their odd eagerness.
Then how Eddie?
Instead of words, Eddie attempts to send Venom the idea of them emerging from somewhere roughly on his back near his kidneys. They haven’t tried this since that moment on the buoy a month ago. In the image he sends Venom’s face is solidly formed and twisted in front of Eddie at chest height. He has access to the full breadth of their many pointed teeth instead of just the portion of them that they’ve currently jammed into his human mouth.
Something of it must transfer because, after a ripple of surprise washes over him, Eddie’s teeth return on his next breath. Immediately after he feels familiar pressure of Venom condensing on his right flank and the unfamiliar push of them pressing out of his body instead of coating him.
“Thank Christ, that worked!” Eddie can’t help but run his tongue over his teeth in an attempt to make sure everything’s been put back correctly. He catches on something in the lower right, where he used to have a wisdom tooth. With all the enthusiasm of someone who’d very much like to go to sleep but who has to brush someone else’s teeth first, Eddie reaches into his mouth and pulls out a pointed tooth the size of his thumb. Thankfully it doesn’t hurt or bleed.
“You forgot something, Venom.”
“You can keep it,” they say generously after twisting their head around to inspect the giant fang Eddie’s holding out.
“...Thanks.” Their tooth makes a heavy thunk when he sets it by the sink, another thing for future Eddie to deal with.
“Start with the string, Eddie,” Venom instructs as Eddie reaches for his toothbrush.
“Floss.”
“Whatever.”
Armed with a length of floss, thankfully unflavored, Eddie picks a corner of Venom’s mouth and starts. It’s not difficult to get in between their teeth, instead the complicating factor is the sheer number of teeth and the fact that they’re laid out in a double row. At least it doesn’t matter how thorough Eddie is, since there’s nothing between teeth that didn’t exist minutes ago.
At first there’s no reaction, but as Eddie continues Venom seems to, not relax, but maybe lean into whatever’s happening. He starts to get flickers of something from the depths of his mind where everything that’s Eddie fades into everything that’s Venom. Their guard is lowering. Wisps of thoughts drift aimlessly into Eddie’s awareness (trust, relaxation, the beginnings of something complex that they do not fully understand), and he realizes they’re not his as more complex ideas start appearing.
Even as he runs the floss between Venom’s teeth, Eddie also feels it run across Venom’s gums. He feels the warmth and presence of Eddie’s hands in their mouth. Their host, their Eddie, trusts them. He is not afraid of the projection of not-self that they have formed into a semblance of their shared face.
He trusts them.
Eddie's hands are in their mouth, and he does not even begin to think that Venom might damage them. Eddie's hands are inches away from the most sensitized part of their external mass, he does not know how vulnerable they could be if he just shifted his grasp. A shiver runs through the mass that remains in Eddie’s abdomen, and he feels it from both sides.
They trust him.
“Okay…” Eddie has to gather himself when he finishes. “Okay. That… That was a lot.”
It was good. They rumble in his head, content in front of him with their jaws still open.
“Yeah.” He’s still a bit blown away. Nothing like that had happened during his time with Venom so far. But, then again, neither of them had ever interacted with each other quite like this before.
Eddie doesn’t have a spare toothbrush, so he wets his own again and starts at the same corner of their mouth. The brush head is dwarfed by Venom’s fangs, and Eddie almost immediately gives up on brushing the entirety of each tooth. Because he wants to go to sleep sometime before sunrise, he focuses on their gumline.
Venom’s mind never stopped leaning on him, and, as soon as Eddie starts brushing, their thoughts start flowing. This time it’s expected. Eddie doesn’t get pulled into their perspective quite as thoroughly as before, but they still press into him. The feelings are the same: trust, and contentment, and relaxation, and that complicated feeling that they don’t understand. Eddie thinks he might understand it, but it’s too close to everything he went through, everything they both went through, for him to give it a name.
Instead he focuses on the sensation of repetitive, circular, brushing motions that they feel. Their mouth is one of the most sensitive places on their shared form, and that’s true whether it’s Venom layering themselves over Eddie or Venom alone mimicking them together. Venom had said it felt like a massage when Eddie had brushed his teeth, and, from the way they’re interpreting the sensation in their mouth, he decides they’re not wrong. It’s immensely relaxing.
As Eddie focuses on what Venom is perceiving, the sensation starts to transfer over to him. It’s a little off, probably because the area of Venom’s mouth is so much greater than Eddie’s. What Eddie feels is a gentle pressure and circling motion that spreads over his jaw, cheekbones, and brow. It feels like the time Anne had taken him to a spa, insisting that they both needed some relaxation. The package had included a facial massage and it ended up being a good experience in spite of Eddie’s misgivings.
The shared sensation they have now is even better. By the end they’re passing relaxation and soft pleasure and contentment back and forth. It’s impossible to figure out what started where or who started the exchange, but they both end up puddled against one another. Eddie is resting against the counter and on top of Venom who has pooled in the sink. Venom’s head is leaning into Eddie’s shoulder, and is only mostly separate from his skin.
Eddie, Venom murmurs as softly as he’s ever heard them. They’ve lost definition and have mostly melted back into him by this point.
“Yeah?” Eddie knows he should get to bed, and he will. But right now his limbs are so loose that he’d probably fall over if he tried.
Since you do not need to brush your teeth, they pause as the last of them seeps into Eddie’s abdomen, I will allow you to brush ours.
“Of course, I’m glad you’re willing to make that compromise.” Eddie leans backwards and onto his feet, nearly overbalancing before Venom lashes him into place. His bed across the apartment suddenly feels miles away.
“Could you help me get to bed?”
Of course.