Archive of Our Own

Eddie had always thought there was nothing worse than the San Francisco DMV. He was wrong. The worst thing was being hunched over the little desk at the front of the San Francisco DMV, trying to fill out paperwork with a bored symbiote floating around in your head. Especially when it started nagging you to eat the other customers.

"I'm trying to focus," he whispered, glaring at the form. Venom kept dragging his eyes away to look at the crowd. They focused on a man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt, wearing a bluetooth earclip like it was 2004.  

That guy looks like an asshole. Can we eat him?

Eddie projected NO as loudly as he could in his mind. Venom made the mental equivalent of a snort, and let Eddie look at the form.

Eddie was permitted to get through most of it without incident. When he reached "marital status", though, he felt Venom's attention shift fully and completely onto the form, which could not possibly be a good sign.

With no small amount of nervousness, Eddie went to tick the 'single' box.

NO Venom roared in his head, so loud and so sudden that Eddie dropped the pen, which bounced off the table and onto the floor. He hurriedly ducked down. Pretending to look for the pen, he hissed "What the hell was that?"

Not single, it said. Bonded. To me.

"That's not what that means!" Eddie grabbed the pen and stood up again. This time when he hunched over the form, his hand drifted towards the 'married' box.

"Stop it," Eddie whispered a little too fiercely, making the woman next to him look up. He gave her an awkward smile and bent over the desk.   

You are not single. We are bonded , Eddie. Like marriage.

Eddie barely managed to stifle his laugh.

" Married? We're not married. What the hell are you talking about? You're an alien bug that lives in my stomach. How is that married?"

He tried to force his hand back to the 'single' box. There was a brief scuffle, the pen wavering back and forth between the two boxes. Everyone around Eddie edged away nervously.

FINE, Eddie thought. Venom's grip on his hand loosened. Quick as a flash, Eddie ticked 'single', slammed the pen back in the stand and moved quickly to the end of the line. Venom roared so loudly in Eddie's mind that it drowned out the ambient noise of the crowd.

"Relax," Eddie murmured. "It's just a form."

Venom grumbled and muttered and complained all the way through the line, until they finally, finally reached the front counter and a supremely bored employee. She was about 50, with badly-permed grey hair and a name-tag reading "Sharon". Eddie gave her a bright smile, which she returned with a dead-eyed "Form, please". He passed it over.

"Can you confirm that all the information you've provided me is accurate," she intoned.

Tell her it's wrong! Venom ordered.

"No!"

Sharon started in her seat and stared at him.

"I mean uh, no, yeah, it's all accurate. Totally and 100% correct in every way."

Sharon finally showed some emotion: the by now extremely familiar weirded-the-hell-out eyebrow raise.

In Eddie's head, Venom growled. Eddie fought the urge to sigh. Drama queen.

For the rest of the day, Venom was silent. Eddie put it down as a sulking fit that Venom would work himself out of, and went about his day as normal. (If you could call any part of his life normal these days.)

"What do you want for dinner?" he asked, rifling through the fridge. "Tater tots, chicken fingers, chocolate milk?"

He got no answer.

"You wanna go find some bad guys, bite their heads off?"

When Eddie still got no answer, he started to worry that something might be actually wrong.
"Hey, talk to me, what's going on?"  

Single , Venom said. Eddie rolled his eyes.

"Are you still mad about--" He cut off short at the wave of genuine hurt that rolled off of Venom, a cold shiver deep in Eddie’s gut. Slowly Eddie shut the refrigerator door, sat down with his back against the cabinet, and stretched his legs out. He found it was easier to focus on talking to Venom if he didn't have to think about staying upright at the same time.  

"Talk to me," he said softly. Venom was silent for so long Eddie thought the symbiote had changed its mind. When it finally did speak it was slow and halting, uneasy about what it was sharing.

Most hosts are chosen for convenience. You take someone you match with biologically. If you are lucky, you find someone you get along with. 'We' is...a fairy tale.  A host you match with perfectly, in mind as well as body. United as closely as if you were one being. Every symbiote dreams of it. Nobody admits it, obviously. To openly want it is considered...your word would be "childish".  

"What like, true love and soulmates and stuff like that?

Yes. I had stopped thinking about finding it. Too many hosts that didn't work. Too many failures. But you said 'we', on your own. I didn't even need to tell you what it meant. I thought--

Venom cut himself off, but the words came to Eddie's mind all the same.

'Bonded. Like marriage.'

And Eddie had laughed.

"Shit. Look I'm, I'm sorry. I do think we're us, okay?"  

Venom was dubious.

"No, I do! You're in my head, we go everywhere together, you're-- you're right, we are married, kinda. Shit, we were arguing about curtains yesterday! That's not a best friend thing to argue about."

You get angry with me. You call me a parasite.

"I told you that's a term of endearment! Look, the thing about stuff like true love and happily ever after is that it's not that easy in real life. Relationships take work, and sometimes you say stupid shit you don't mean, or you make each other mad, or you have a fight. That doesn't mean we're not still "we"."

He was rambling now, entirely off topic, but the longer he talked, the more he got a warm, bright feeling from Venom, something peaceful and content and happy. It might have been love.  

"I'm sorry about the form. I should have just explained it to you. It's a legal thing. It's got nothing to do with your actual relationship. Even when Anne and I were together I'd have to put down 'single', ‘cause we didn't have the paperwork done. Doesn't mean anything in the real world. We're us."

Venom emerged from somewhere on his lower back and wrapped around his shoulders, nuzzling up to him like a cat.

We are bonded, it said.

"Like marriage," Eddie agreed.