Chapter Text
Ladies and gentlemen, this is mambo number five.
With a little hopping you begin to mop the floors of the corporation Life Foundation,
occasionally tapping your foot against the ground to the beat of the music blaring from your headphones.
You’re feeling surprisingly cheerful today. Maybe it's because it's payday, or maybe it’s because today you are cleaning the laboratories of the corporation and not the bathrooms this time. After all, your dream when you were a little girl wasn’t disinfecting toilets, but to try to make the world a better place anyway you could. Cleaning the research facilities seemed closer to your past wishes than the alternative.
Currently, you are covering the turn of one of your cleaning mates who had been injured during a man's infiltration two days ago. The incident had been treated as a very juicy gossip that had caused a lot of furor among your co-workers. Soon theories had arisen about why someone had tried and managed to enter the restricted areas of Life Foundation.
Particularly, your favorite theory’s the one proposed by Ollie, which said that the faceless man had apparently infiltrated to save his beloved from one of Mr. Drake's illegal experiments. Ollie swore to have seen the man carrying his beloved out of the labs to safety.
You sigh.
Daydreaming about pure, sweet love stories is a normal occurrence for you. You blame it on reading far too many fairy tales growing up. As a child you were sure you would grow up to be a princess, and then a handsome, honorable hero, as brave as they came, would end up falling irrevocably in love with you.
It’s embarrassing the countless times you have imagined what the love of your life will look like. Will he be loud or quite? He’ll be handsome, for sure, with kind eyes and a soft smile that’ll be reserved just for you.
Ah, but you know it’s ridiculous. Because the truth is that you are no princess, you never were and never will be. And no, princes and heroes that love so much it hurts are not a possibility for you. Not for a woman that barely manages to survive with two jobs and too many dreams.
Frustrated with yourself, you take off your headphones and roughly dip the mop in the water, you squeeze it and continue mopping, now in a bad mood.
That’s when you hear it.
To the left side of the hall someone is shouting, it’s muffled and is accompanied by what sounds like desperate thuds.
In an instant, you are running towards the noise, mop forgotten and what you find makes your skin prickle and a shiver run down your spine. The screaming is coming from Doctor Dora Skirth, who’s inside a transparent room hitting her fists on one of the plastic walls. Her eyes are wild, her skin looks gray and she’s sweating profusely.
“Oh my- Doctor! are- are you alright?” It’s a stupid question because you already know that she’s definitely not fine.
But, when she sees you her eyes go wide, hopeful. “Help me, please! Let me out!”
“Y-yes! Of course”. With trembling hands you try to open the door any way you can, you pull the door, push it and then you punch the plastic wall too and it only hurts your knuckles in the process.
“I- I need a key,” you tell her, trying to calm your nerves for her sake (and yours), “I’m gonna call for help-”
“ No! ” Dora screams, her chest rising and falling rapidly. The sight makes your heart race incredibly fast. What is Dora Skirth so affraid of?
“The key- it’s there,” Dora taps her trembling index finger against the transparent wall insistently, pointing at the furniture behind you. “Third cabinet,” she chokes, “golden key. Hurry up!” The doctor looks at the sides with wide eyes, as if waiting for someone to appear and catch her doing something she is not supposed to.
“Alright, I have it!” You announce for her sake, and slide the key inside the keyhole while Dora tells you to hurry up and please please be quick .
The force of the collision makes you jolt back and you fall to the floor. The dark moving mass that came out of the mouth of Dora is sticking to your chest. You pat your shirt rapidly, trying to get it off of you but it is as if your clothes absorbed it because suddenly it is no longer there. A sudden sense of dread invades you before your legs and arms start shaking. You take a look at the doctor, who now lays on the floor.
Oh god she’s dead .
Gasping, you scramble to your feet quickly. Dizziness almost makes you fall to your knees, but you stop yourself from falling and without looking back at the Doctor you start running for help.
In the following days you are sure you have caught a bug, or maybe the stress is finally claiming you because you can’t stop sweating, puking and burning up in a fever.
Two days later your malaise ends and you start hearing voices. Or, more accurately, a voice.
“ Food ”.
You jerk your head up, rapidly looking to the sides to spot the source of the voice. It’s in vain because you know that the voice is inside your head. You have been trying to ignore it, pretend it isn’t there . The stress over seeing a person’s death, Doctor Dora Skirth’s death, was bound to cause something to snap in your brain. You just didn’t expect to end up downright crazy. You didn't even know the Doctor that much, you were merely acquaintances that sometimes exchanged a good morning at best. So why did it affect you to this point?
We are not crazy. We are hungry .
“Said every crazy person ever”, you scratch your head nervously. Look who’s talking to herself now.
You get up from the old chair where you had fallen asleep and start pacing. What am I going to do now?
Find food first. Then, we search for them .
“Wha- Who’s them ?”
Our kin .
You still have no idea what the voice is talking about or why it is talking at all. Needless to say, it’s unnerving. But you are actually hungry, it’s just that nothing on your fridge seems right. Drained, you walk to the door and go out in search of food. Here goes nothing.
Oh god, is that Eddie Brock?
Concentrate, get the food.
He is! Oh my god, he looks even better in person.
Somehow a bizarre shapeless image of the voice getting frustrated appears on your mind and you’re fast to dissipate it with a shake of your head.
It’s been a shitty week, so you might as well take any small blessing that presented itself with open arms. Quickly, you grab the first thing your hand finds from the freezer and absently pay for it. Your eyes eagerly following your latest crush leaving the store. As soon as the cashier gets the money you sprint towards him, the bag of freshly purchased chicken wings in one hand.
“Hi! Uh, Mister Brock?” you make your way from between the people swarming the sidewalk, raising your voice to gain his attention.
Eddie Brock turns to you and then quickly averts his eyes, pretending he didn’t even heard you. He looks squitish, his skin clammy as if he was running a fever. Maybe he caught the same bug as you? Your brow furrows in concern, is he sick? or maybe… is he being followed? Quickly scanning your surroundings you don’t notice anything amiss, maybe he just doesn’t want to be bothered. Your mood dampers a little.
If you like to annoy so much, bother him, then.
What?
Without thinking you’re hurrying your steps. If you didn’t know any better you’d have thought someone was controlling your own body. Maybe you don’t need antibiotics to fight a bug, but an exorcist to get some wayward demon out of you.
Once you are practically breathing in his neck, you hear the famous periodist grumble, “No, I’m not ”, in a hushed tone.
“Sorry?” you ask.
He jumps a little, his body going rigid as he turns to you.
Eddie Brock has really pretty eyes.
You can practically feel the voice rolling its eyes at your wandering thoughts.
“Hi,” you clear your throat, “are you okay?”
He smiles, but it looks tight, forced, “yeah, thanks… just, you know”, he waves a hand around, “looking for dinner”.
He doesn’t look alright, but you avoid commenting on it. Instead you just smile genuinely at him and raise your own frozen dinner, “same”.
When he starts to get fidgety again you realize you had been staring like-
- A moron.
“Hey!” you snap and Brock’s eyebrows go up at your sudden outburst.
You quickly add an “ahh, sorry, haha! I just wanted to congratulate you on your work! I really admire what you’re doing and...” you start rambling, as is normal when you’re nervous, but you’re not lying, you really look up to what he does. He has a nice soul, you think, and a nice face- and a nice everything, it seems . And frankly you feel lonely, voice in your head and all. So no one can blame you for wanting to stretch what small moment you could gather in the company of a smart, attractive man. That is, until he yells at you to shut up.
Dick.
Your words along with your hopes die in an instant. Embarrassed, you turn away and start walking to the opposite direction, blinking back the pathetic tears you didn’t ask for.
“No, no, nonono, sorry! Idiot! ” you scoff, disappointment turning into anger, “It wasn’t- not you! ”
So much for thinking he was actually nice. Now you get it, Eddie Brock is actually just a diva that pretends to be good in front of the cameras, but in person he is just another ugh person. Your grip on the frozen chicken wings turns white knuckled.
We can eat him.
You groan internally.
Just leave me alone!
“Look, I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you. I didn’t-” when Eddie Brock grabs your arm, tingles spread all over your body starting from where his warm palm is and you stop walking. The voice goes quiet.
Slowly, you lock your gaze with Eddie’s, his eyes mirroring your own wide ones. Did he feel that too?
“Venom”, your mouth hisses the words, but that’s not your voice and that wasn’t your command. Eddie’s eyes flash completely black and you feel the sudden urge to just jump him and sink your teeth into his shoulder.
And another part of you, the one that’s all you one wants to run far, far away from this madness, but why can’t you move?
“ Viper ”, Eddie growls lowly, his voice too deep, foreign , but you don’t have time to mull it over too much because then the tingling sensation inside your body intensifies. A very strong desire to close the distance between the two of you fills you and suffocates you. A pleasant buzz takes over yourself, but when Eddie reaches for your arm again, you jerk it back. Except it’s not you who moves your own body, and now you’re sure something else is pushing your legs to walk away from the reporter. Something else is swaying your hips side to side. Something else makes your body look back at him and smirk and then turn your nose up, as if you were telling him you were too good for him, daring him to get close.
We are not something.
Get out of my head! What are you doing?! Leave me alon-
“Fire!”
Suddenly you realize Eddie and you are not the only people in the world. Your blood runs cold when you hear the loud gunshots echoing in the street. The people around start running in all directions in search of cover like headless chickens. Your head snaps back and you see Eddie being swallowed into a black, huge mass that wraps around him like a second skin.
Venom , the voice- Viper , provides.
You are frozen in place, trying to decide if you run towards Eddie to help him or run towards your house to hide from everything beneath a soft blanket. It’s a suicide mission -trying to get this Venom out of Eddie, or trying to stop the men from shooting him- and you know it, but that’s not what stops you from running towards him. It’s Viper.
Leave him. If he deserves to live he will fight, he will win.
I have to help him! Eddie is- oh god!
He must prove himself. Your body pulls back.
What kind of fucked up shit is that?
Once again your legs carry you away from Eddie without your consent. No. You order and stomp your feet on the ground, only for them to forcefully be moved again. I said no. Stop.
If he dies he does not deserve us.
Maybe you don’t deserve him.
Something pulls roughly at your hair, your head thrown backwards at an awkward painful angle.
Ow. Bitch.
Your body slams itself at the wall, your head colliding with the concrete surface. It’s enough to shut you up.