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We’re dying, Eddie.
Eddie considers the truth of this statement. A good journalist always checks the facts before jumping to conclusions. Fact: We’re lying on the floor. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s nighttime, and Venom’s past his curfew even if it’s true that wicked never sleeps. Not in our bed, that’s true, but sometimes a hard surface is good for the back. How do we know it’s night? Well, it’s dark outside the window. The shattered, blood-stained remains of it, anyway.
Oh. Shit.
Eddie flips open his mental notebook again. There’s a few details he might have overlooked.
Fact: We’re lying on the floor, covered in broken glass. Blood everywhere but nothing hurts. Something should be hurting, after the beating we took.
Beating… Right, now we remember. Got our ass handed to us. The fact that we can’t move or feel anything is a bad, bad sign. The symbiote’s statement checks out after all.
Hate it when you’re right, love.
No response. Eddie hacks up what feels like another gallon of blood and possibly a kidney, and tries to change his angle of view. Right now, all he’s got is an upside-down still-life of a pile of household debris—a fallen lamp with a busted bulb, the remote control for the TV, splattered takeout remains—and beyond that, the empty, jagged window frame. They must have clawed their way back to the apartment by sheer instinct, desperately smashing through the window after their long, brutal engagement with the enemy.
Which enemy, though? Eddie’s mind wanders through its own scattered memories, like a lone ant trying to rejoin its colony in a maze of shipping containers. Carnage? Jack ‘O Lantern and his goons? Or, Hell forbid, Knull? The all-too familiar faces loom over him in rows, a nightmare pantheon. Residue from old scars mingles with the fresh blood pooling over the floorboards. Kraven? The Jury? That fuckin’ blue guy?
So many. Pissed off a lot of bad guys over the years. Should’ve been more careful. Should’ve protected…
“Venom!”
He knows he doesn’t have to say it out loud, but the hollow inside him is filling up with fear, and he realizes that silence is the one true enemy. Even pain would be a welcome respite. Right now, all he feels is a cool emptiness, watching the night breeze caress the torn curtains with tender indifference.
Alone. The worst feeling in the world.
The emptiness in Eddie’s chest inverts to a crushing pressure, a star collapsing into a supernova of despair. A single sob wrenches itself from him, grinding his broken ribs together and setting his sluggish pain receptors alight. They flicker like the lighting in a bad horror movie trailer, turning the sob into a howl. Too used to his Other regulating everything, underestimated how bad the hurt would be when it finally came. Eddie’s eyes roll back as all the suffering of the last 24 hours floods his system, and he
blacks out
into
Black.
Something wrong. The darkness, it’s all wrong.
Can’t move. But, wait, yes he can. He can swim. He’s at the bottom of a very deep, very dark well, and the walls around him are closing in. He can go up, or down, but it’s impossible to tell which direction is which. Time is very slow here, but so is his sense of danger. He treads in place for what feels like an eternity, then turns and spots a pinprick of light off in the distance. It looks like it might be the opening of the well, just impossibly far away. He reaches out and his hands brush the sides, strangely warm and soft to the touch as they constrict around him. He doesn’t have much time left, but somehow this doesn’t bother him.
Eddie begins swimming leisurely towards the tiny dot of light, when he hears someone calling his name.
EDDIE!
The voice is coming from the opposite end of the tunnel, behind him. Or below. Inky black tendrils, somehow darker than the blackness already surrounding him, rise from the depths. One of them manages to snag his foot. It gives a small, insistent tug.
Eddie, you’re going the wrong way. We’re in deep trouble, Eddie. You need to come back.
“I am,” Eddie says calmly, a little fish in a shrinking sea. “It’s that way. I’m going home…”
We’re trying to fix it, Eddie. The guttural words are accompanied by an undercurrent of something like sorrow. Come back. We need to be awake for this.
The undercurrent becomes an undertow, then a whirlpool, pulling him down. The light shrinks even further, finally blinking out all together. And then the darkness is total.
But it’s the right dark, this time. His dark. His Other.
We are so sorry, Eddie. It shouldn’t have gone this way.
“What’re you... talking about?” Eddie’s eyes refocus. He’s staring at the broken window again. “Where…. are you? Can barely hear you.”
Stop talking. You’re making it worse.
He’s gone back to being blissfully numb, but it’s hard to form sentences. He has to push out the words out one at a time, with great effort, like trying to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste from the tube. And his thoughts are still so clouded.
“Hey, why don’t you come out here where I can see you…”
Slowly, reluctantly, a hulking black mass begins to form in Eddie’s line of sight, finally blocking his view of the window. That familiar fanged rictus, those milky swirls of light-sensing cells arranged to look like pseudo-eyes. The symbiote’s face looms over Eddie, who feels like his heart is going to stop from joy.
It just might, if you don’t shut up. The symbiote’s flat tone is at odds with its riotous grin. Can’t keep drifting off. Breaking our concentration.
Eddie laughs, or he would if he had the energy. “Yeah, yeah. But we’re speed-healing. That’s a thing we do, right?”
Something’s gone wrong. We did as much as we could, but the damage was too great. Something’s blocking us, forcing us out.
The fear cuts back in, sharp and steely. “Wait, you’re not inside me? Where are you? How come I can still hear you?”
We’re still connected, but barely. Just enough to communicate. We have some limited diagnostic abilities, but that’s about it.
“What happened?”
Fire. Sonics. Good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. All the fun stuff. Third-degree burns. Collarbone punctured the top part of our right lung. Major damage to the abdominal, thoracic, pelvic—
“Okay okay, I get it. Who happened, then? Who were we fighting?”
Venom goes quiet again. When the voice returns, it seems muted, further away.
Sorry. Hard to repair cellular damage of this magnitude and talk at the same time. For every subsystem we patch, another two collapse. Very tricky.
“What am I, one of Drake’s rocket ships?” Eddie struggles to lift his head and almost immediately abandons the attempt. “I’m awake now, I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
We are trying, Eddie. Trying. Don’t want to die. But we are. Dying. Too late. Don’t want. Go. Eddie...
Now the voice is broken, stuttering. Still without inflection, which makes it scarier somehow, like there’s a signal being jammed. Major malfunction. Unable to move his head, Eddie looks for Venom with just his eyes, sees only the stupid window again. Venom must have seeped back into his body, their body, apparently so smashed up that it had taken all of the symbiote’s concentration just to speak to him. Trying to keep something from me, Eddie thinks. Something’s wrong.
And then he realizes with cold certainty that Venom isn’t really making an attempt to patch them up, or if they are, they know it’s futile. Instead, they’ve devoted all their energy into stopping the pain, wrapping around his spinal cord with thousands of micro-tendrils branching out into central nervous. Doc Steven at Alchemax once told him how it worked, a bunch of science-y mumbo-jumbo that Eddie never thought he'd need to remember: Loosening the synaptic connections in the dorsal horn, forming new pathways to the hypothalamus and over-stimulating it to produce analgesic hormones. The whole point being to dampen the nociceptors, those neurons that regulate the brain’s perception of pain. Useful little bastards, in the right circumstance.
The symbiote doesn’t have the strength to do anything else. It won’t survive two feet if it leaves their body, and even if it could, it would mean pulling the plug on Eddie. Venom’s like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, holding back the dark floods with nobody coming to help.
So it was a fact. They were dying. For real, this time.
“V… If I can’t feel you, I need to see you. Please.”
The symbiote materializes again, with a terrible sense of finality.
We can’t be talking if we are going to fix this.
“Back there, in the well. You said I needed to come back, that we needed to be awake. Were you just talking bullshit to make me go the right way?”
Eddie coughs and this time it really hurts. Venom’s distracted, losing their grip on the nociceptors.
“Or was it so we could... say goodbye?”
Silence. The one true enemy.
“‘Cuz if that’s so… I don’t want you to try and fix what can’t be fixed. I want you to be here, with me. Talking. Like we do.”
Can’t, Eddie. We’ll die. Don’t want that.
“Dying’s not so bad.” It’s almost scary, how easily the words come out.
Wh… What do you mean? We can sense you are not delirious. So why would you say that?
Eddie feels a tide of panic and confusion from his Other that washes up on the crumbling shore of his consciousness without quite reaching him. Instead, there floats a dangerous sort of peace. He’s never felt so divided from the symbiote before, including all the times they’d been physically separated. Even during that unbearably long stretch when others had been wearing the black suit, the cancer, his Anti-Venom years, there was always the possibility of reunion. Always some trace amount of hope, lingering like the symbiotic codex in his DNA. But Eddie knows this is one gulf that they won’t be able to bridge.
Even though there isn’t much in this world he will truly miss (Anne, taking down bad guys by fist or by pen, this shitty apartment of all things) or those who will miss him (Anne, probably), the thought of leaving Venom behind fills him with something unspeakable, an unearthly loss that God Himself could not comprehend. If He existed at all. Guess I'm gonna find out, Eddie thinks, and an image of his mother deep in prayer floats up unbidden. He hasn't thought of her in a very long time. Mom, you were a true believer to the end. Always envied that about you.
Undiluted pain drags Eddie back to the present, Venom's anxiety buzzing around the stabbing pillars in his chest. “We can’t lie to ourselves. You know that,” Eddie says, clenching his teeth. “Besides, you’ve been around for a long time. Seen tons of insane shit. This can’t be anything new.”
The symbiote lowers its glistening head, as if in shame.
It’s true that we… I… have been inside many hosts when they died. Most of the time, I drove them to it. Fed off the rush, then moved on. But...
“Was it anything like this?” The nociceptors are almost fully awake again, blaring out a steady drone of dull panic. Beneath the monotonous alarm swells a great scarlet symphony, the sawing and grinding of broken bones, the erratic percussion of a failing heartbeat, the reedy winds of escaping air and fluid. Such strange music, yet beautiful in an awful way. And it’s getting cold. So cold.
We don’t have any experience of a slow death. Only the fast, violent ones. The adrenaline made them… taste better.
Venom fixes their blank, milky gaze on Eddie.
You’ve seen our memories. You know what I was like before we met.
“And you know what I was like, too.” Eddie says it like a challenge. “When we first met in that church, I was about to kill myself. I was ready for death.”
So this is suicide, then. A death wish.
“Nah. I don’t want to die. Never really did. If I killed myself, I’d never be able to live with myself… Maybe it’s a Catholic guilt thing.” Eddie’s face flickers between a smile and a grimace. “It’s just that the fear is gone, y’know? This is my ‘moment of grace’, as Flannery ‘O Connor put it. Gotta go out with some dignity.”
Though this isn't exactly what I had in mind. The thought comes out warped, almost abstracted. Always imagined it'd be out there, on the streets. Maybe even on another planet. Yet here we are, bleeding out not two feet from the couch where just last week we were eating nachos and playing Red Dead Redemption II. Sucks we'll never get to finish the game. Lots of things we won't get to finish. Oh, V. I'm so sorry.
A rising wall of crimson blooms in Eddie’s vision as something in his chest falls apart. He remembers a video he once saw on climate change, of icebergs collapsing into the ocean. Almost graceful in their resignation to oblivion. Death looks red, but feels blue. That’s not bad. He’d write it down, if it mattered any more.
His next words come out in a drawn-out hiss, the pain more than physical this time.
“Besides, you can find another host when I’m gone. Be a shame to waste six hundred million years of alien wisdom, after all.”
Don’t want to live without you, Eddie. Would rather be gone, too.
“Anne’s still around. She likes you. You like her too, don’t you?”
Don’t, Eddie. Please.
“Someone needs to tell her what happened.” Eddie’s pretty sure he’s crying, but he’s too numb to tell. “She’s the only other person on Earth besides you that gave a shit about me. She deserves to know the truth.”
The symbiote curls up on his ruined chest like an oversized cat, milky eyes narrowed to barely perceptible slits. They feel warm and heavy, the only thing stopping him from drifting away entirely, like a helium balloon, right out that broken window. Upside-down, past the bloody shards of glass, he can see stars in the night sky.
You came from somewhere up there , Eddie thinks, on the verge of dreaming. Maybe I can go visit. Say hi to your mom.
"And you... You'll be okay. You'll find someone else. There's billions of us, plenty of losers like me to go around." Eddie's smile drifts in and out. "You'll fuck up someone else's day for a bit, until they realize you're the best thing that ever happened to them. And then you'll become the most lethal crime-fighting duo ever, chow down on some bad guys. Maybe even settle down, have a couple dozen kids. Get your very own movie deal. Who knows? The possibilities are..."
Something tickles the stubble on his chin. He feels the symbiote gently wiping away the blood and tears and mucus from his face, and the abject tenderness of it breaks his heart.
Eddie, I need to tell you something. The symbiote sounds strangely small and close, like they’re whispering even though they’re not speaking vocally. I can’t come with you. Even if I wanted. The Klyntar survival instinct is too strong. There is a good chance I will come out of this alive, but alone.
“Fuckin’ good, then,” Eddie wheeze-laughs. “This is Eddie Brock’s Solo Adventure. Probably won’t be a very popular spin-off. Won’t set the readership on fire like Venom did. But hey, I have something to tell you, too… Something about what it means to die human.”
Eddie’s breath is getting shallower. The world is shrinking around them. No time left, and yet all the time in the world.
“There was this writer in San Francisco, had a blog under the name Sirenita Lake. She was a local hero of mine. Housing advocate, LGBTQ rights, that kinda thing. Sort of what inspired me to take up the activist mantle.”
He pauses, fighting his way through a bramble of pain, then continues.
“Anyway, years ago she was dying of pancreatic cancer and wrote about what it felt like as it was happening. And I remember thinking, wow, she went out with such clarity... Left behind a great legacy and body of work… But none of that was important to her. She just wanted to go peacefully, surrounded by the people she loved.”
With all his strength, Eddie feels along the floor with his right hand. A stray tendril slides through his fingers, squeezing gently. Another precious breath flutters from his mouth and wings towards the ceiling, finally free.
“Tell me… what it’s like.” Eddie’s words are slurring together in the shared space of their minds. “What’s… gonna happen? V... Tell me a story...”
Gently, imperceptibly, Venom sinks a little deeper into shattered meat and bone, and once again begins the delicate process of shutting down the nociceptors. They won’t be needed ever again. And Eddie doesn’t need a pesky little thing like pain to distract him at a time like this.
The first thing you lose is hunger. For the Klyntar, our hunger replaces that of the host. And our hunger is… endless.
A nightmare curve of a smile. With you, Eddie, things were different. We were somehow sated, when we thought we had no other option but to kill. Because we were loved, we allowed many others to live.
“Phenethylamine…” Eddie whispers with the faintest trace of a grin on his lips. “Memorized… every… damn… syllable…”
The ability to speak goes next. Then vision. You may see lights, or... other things. It varies from host to host. But it is always beautiful.
The symbiote raises their head and looks down at the fragile human who had been their home, their partner, for so many years. With their weak cluster of light receptors, they can’t make out the pale curve of Eddie’s cheekbone in the wan starlight, the dark red fluid pulsing out of his mouth and nose and chest, the slowly fading blue of his half-closed eyes. Normally they would be tapping into Eddie’s optic nerve to fill in these details, but what the symbiote actually sees is infinitely more complex than anything perceivable by human senses. Even now, at the cellular level, Eddie’s body is still suffused with the white-hot radiance of life. It clings to him stubbornly, despite everything Eddie said about acceptance, moments of grace. He’s a survivor, too.
“Can’t see… the window,” Eddie murmurs. “But the stars… still there. Getting brighter. So… beautiful...”
Hearing and touch are the last senses to... Eddie, we’re still here. Please, stay with us...
Venom wraps thickly around Eddie’s hand, which by now has lost even the ability to squeeze back. The white glow of his body’s energy is dimming, but elsewhere, certain parts of his brain are sparking to life, waiting their entire existence in darkness for a single cue, here at the very end. Swirls of deep luscious purples and greens start to overtake the whiteness, and Venom has to resist devouring the pearlescent patterns on sight, a ritualistic feeding desire coded into their kind since the birth of their species. Venom explains, though it knows Eddie is unlikely to hear them any longer.
Just before the end, there is a kind of energy surge. The body releases special neurochemicals that are only produced at the time of death. This is what allows the Klyntar to survive the transition from one host to the next. We call it... The Gift.
Eddie is beyond words, beyond worlds. The luminescence of some wondrous internal fantasy is playing out behind his eyes, burning brighter than anything either of them have witnessed in this reality. Although the symbiote is shut off from these visions, they are still caught up in the grip of the purest synchronization they have ever known—as if every neuron in Eddie’s brain is simultaneously short-circuiting and fusing together all at once, creating a web of electrical coherence that ensnares them both in a high-frequency embrace.
Theta and alpha waves batter them ceaselessly, impossibly vivid memories of faces, objects, phrases crashing over them, everything Eddie has ever seen or touched or smelled, every person they’d ever met or killed or kissed… A math problem jotted on the back of a bar napkin, the crinkle of a chocolate bar wrapper, the musk of lizard hide mixed with sewer sludge, organ music and stained-glass windows, a note written in red lipstick tucked into the bottom of the bunk above his,“Kill Spider-Man!”, freshly-mowed grass, graffiti, the irregular beep of a heart monitor, a plastic trophy, someone laughing, the back of his father’s jacket as he turns away for the last time...
Then the waves begin to ease, the electrical current diminishing until barely a crackle remains. Venom thinks they’ve lost him then, somewhere in the mad pyrotechnics of the brain’s final light show, when suddenly the hand intertwined with their tendrils clenches hard, fingernails digging into the skin beneath the symbiote’s oil-slick flesh.
And Eddie is staring Venom right in the face, his expression more lucid and purposeful than the symbiote has ever seen. He says, speaking clearly around a mouthful of clotting blood:
“You’re still holding on, V. You’ve got to let go.”
Can’t. We’re not ready. Please. You can’t—
Eddie closes his eyes.
“Goodbye, my love.”
Venom lets go.
The symbiote stays with Eddie Brock’s body for a long, long time. Far longer than they should, given that The Gift will only give them about five hours exposed to Earth’s oxygen-filled atmosphere. They are struggling, tormented by endless possibilities. By hope.
In this universe, there are a thousand and one ways to resurrect the dead. Times millions more, counting parallel and alternate dimensions. Cloning, cryogenics, mystical artifacts, wish-granting djinn, pick one. Or, wait long enough, and some almighty entity from outside time and space will eventually rule this death a mistake, and reverse it; in their capricious hands, anyone could be brought back on the slightest of whims. The symbiote doesn’t know how they know this, but seems to recall a host named Deadpool who possessed forbidden knowledge of such matters.
There is a knock on the door, resoundingly loud in the destroyed apartment. “Brock? I got another noise complaint and I’m here to make an official inspection. I find just one extra chip in the wallpaper and you’re outta here, buddy…”
Loser, the symbiote says to itself. Who else could it be talking to? No sense in going out like this. Leaving us here with your wreckage. We’ll go find Dr. Steve at Alchemax, he’ll know what to do. Or that Maker guy. Make a deal with the devil. Fix our mistake. Bring you...
“Hey, open up! I know you’re still in there, I got spies on this floor watching your every move. They want you outta here more’n I do. You breaking shit and making a ruckus up here at 3 in the morning? Huh? You want me to bring in the police, that it?”
And yet. Eddie made a decision. And though it’s still beyond the symbiote to fully understand, they remember what he said about Sirenita Lake… About what it means to die human. Not as a superhero, not as Venom. No longer the Comeback King.
Human. Alone.
The symbiote sinks back down into dead, cooling flesh. Every cell in their being is firing panicked salvoes, the urge to tear out of the apartment and into whoever is pounding on the door rising with every passing second. They have about ten minutes left before The Gift runs out, the opulent swirls of purple and green slowly subsiding back into the darkness from which they came. So tempting, to let it all wash away. To see him again, join him in that dark well—
Don't you fucking dare.
The pounding on the door abruptly stops. So does the yelling. Whoever was there is about to walk away.
Eddie would not have wanted this to go to waste, the symbiote thinks. Eddie needs me to tell Anne. Needs me to stay alive.
The symbiote slithers towards the door, hearing the footsteps on the other side grow fainter. Not quickly enough. They will catch up. And then… A new host. A new life.
Last chance, darling. We’re counting on you.
Halfway across the room, the symbiote pauses, looks back. For the longest time, Venom was the voice in Eddie’s head. Now the tables have turned. Maybe it’s not even real, this thing that sounds so much like their lost love; a trace bit of DNA perhaps, or just wishful imagination bourne of loss. But whatever it is, right now, it’s the only thing keeping them going.
Wrong way, V. Better hurry.
The oxygen is starting to boil across their skin. They flatten under the door, just in time to sense the superintendent’s heat signature turning the corner to go down the stairs. The symbiote flings out gooey strands, pulling themselves into the grimy hallway and towards their target. Anne’s place isn’t too far from here. They remember how to operate a motorcycle, and they know where the keys are.
We’ll be back. Whatever happens. Even if it’s just to say a proper goodbye, so Anne can see your face one last time. We’ll never forget you, Eddie Brock. Your love is still inside. Keeping us alive. And someday, we’ll meet again.
Eddie’s face blooms out of the shadows, with that little half-smirk he wore when he was talking to Venom around other people and had to pretend to be quiet. He looks good, for a mere memory.
Yeah, maybe we will. Weirder things have happened. Like us. Ain’t that right, V?
And the symbiote bares teeth in a wild rictus of joy and fear and grief, and then they too are gone.
THE END