Chapter Text
The symbiote was ugly, it really was – a horror story of blacks and greys and greens and blues all at once, shrieking and whipping and crying and crawling like something you'd see in a nightmare across the thick glass panel it's trapped behind.
Doctor Abhi Normand stands close to the glass, watching it wail and drag itself back and forth in front of him, his eyes showing no fear or hatred but pure, unbridled curiosity instead. He’s never found himself afraid of the unknown - just fascinated by it, interested by what it’s hiding, desperate to find the potential for good it could hold within. He doesn’t see something ugly in the symbiote, but something wonderful and riveting instead. Something beautifully dark and different and... and perfect.
He taps the glass. The symbiote screams at him, crawling to where his finger had touched only moments ago, whipping at the glass again and again and again until it seems to decide its escape attempts to be useless. “It… it sure is something,” he observes, eyes still shining. He turns to one of his lab assistants, a woman by the name of Lara Woodcock. “Where did you say you found it?”
“A forest in Kent, England,” she supplies to him, nervously glancing down at her clipboard. “In that glass tube.”
“I wonder what it was doing there,” Abhi murmurs. He taps the glass again, relishing in the way it reacts to it. Without taking his eyes away from the symbiote, he asks one of his lab's computer technicians, “has the test results on the sample come back yet?”
“Not just yet,” the man reports. He’s a good-looking fellow by the name of Arin Headerman. “They… they say they’re nearly done, they’re just having trouble keeping the sample still enough for them to finish...”
Abhi doesn’t know if it was a good idea to take a little bit of the symbiote away from its host in order to run some tests. Maybe that is why it is so desperate to escape – it just wishes to be whole again.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get it back,” he mutters to the symbiote. He has no intentions of harming it, and he guesses that losing a part of itself is stressing it out.
It’s then that Arin’s face goes slightly white and he’s leaning closer to his computer screen for a closer look at the message that he’s received. “Do- sir?” he says. “Sir? Sir, the symbiote got out. They said it broke through the door and is making its way… probably towards us, they say.”
Abhi doesn’t quite know why this doesn’t strike at least some anxiety through his heart. “Is it attacking anyone?”
“I… well, they haven’t mentioned...”
Abhi breathes out hard through his nostrils. If it were to harm someone, it would definitely be something they would report. “It’s probably trying to return to the host,” he states, probably calmer than he should be, “just as I thought it may. Maybe the symbiote will grow calm once it’s whole. Maybe it will be... friendly.”
“You think that it’ll be fucking friendly?” Lara objects, nearly throwing down her clipboard. “Have you seen it? There is no way that its fr-”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Are we not as a society trying to be less hostile towards the things we don’t understand? Why should I assume that this is a hostile organism because it looks different, because we don’t know what it is, because we don’t yet understand it?” Abhu counters, his manner calm and civilised as ever. “We reserve the right to be wary, yes, but we will not treat it as hostile based off assumptions, you hear me?”
Lara opens her mouth but doesn’t even get the chance to begin her sentence before something small and black and shrieking comes launching into the room and sticks itself to the thick glass panel that holds it back from its host. Arin is quick to make his exit, as is Lara – leaving Abhi standing alone, watching the sample desperately attempt to reach its host.
He doesn’t even hesitate to open the panel so that the two could unite. It slides open at the press of a button. He doesn’t think about what letting the symbiote as a whole loose in the same room as him could result in – only about what could happen if the symbiote were to act grateful for it. About what could happen if the symbiote tried to thank him for it.
The sample and the host connect immediately and for a moment, Abhi watches it settle and grow that little bit stiller on the floor. His face breaks out into an infectious grin. He was right. It’s calmer. It’s happier, almost, because it is finally whole.
Maybe it’s the adrenaline that this situation has pumped into his blood that took away his ability to think professionally, because he finds himself stooping, now, and reaching out a hand to touch the symbiote. It’s the symbiote that connects his fingers and its body mass, however, and shudders cascade over his entire body as it begins to crawl up his sleeve. It feels as if a snake is slithering its way up to his shoulder - it doesn’t harm him or begin to constrict. It just feels… odd. Very, very odd.
“You’re not as scary as you look,” the doctor murmurs as the symbiote appears out of his shirt collar and runs over his chest. “No, you’re not scary, or hostile. We just don’t understand you yet.”
As if it’s listening to him, it stills at his words. Abhi’s heart is beating hard, too hard to be at all healthy, but he’s grinning from ear to ear. The interaction is thrilling; a one of a kind experience he knows he will always treasure.
But then it begins to hurt.
Abhi’s smile is quick to turn to a bated gasp, and that bated gasp is even quicker to morph into a scream. The symbiote stains his shirt a chilling, ash-grey as it sinks through the material and under his skin, where it whips and shrieks and fights and turns his blood from red to black in his veins.
His vision goes white and he is screaming, screaming, screaming, clawing at his skin, begging for it to get out, to stop hurting him, to stop doing this, to stop, to stop, to fucking stop, to stop ripping at his insides, to get out, get out, get the fuck out-
And then it does stop.
Abhi hears it, then. Speaking to him.
"Get up ."