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It was surprising how boring five hours could be.
Contrary to Eddie’s belief, it wasn’t like Venom could sit and watch his dreams like a television show. There wouldn’t be a problem if he could. Eddie had even suggested watching television while he was sleeping, since their attachment to each other would allow him to be in the living room while he slept in the bedroom, but it was a decision he’d quickly changed after it started keeping him up at night. Eddie said it was like he was still watching the television, but it was like doing it through a tunnel filled with fog. (Venom couldn’t believe Eddie told him that he was the one with the weird use of English when he would come out with stuff like that from time to time.)
So watching television was out.
The laptop was fun for a while - Wikipedia made him glad that the human race hadn’t been wiped out. But stuff that didn’t really apply to Eddie or have anything to do with him quickly lost its charm. He began to notice that his nights spent reading articles on Wikipedia were providing Eddie’s brain with enough stimulus that he wasn’t getting proper deep sleep and decent rest, and that concerned him enough to drop it. Eddie was always worried about him being bored and lonely at night, so he told him he was fine, but Venom lived in his body - he could see beyond the lies into the truth of the deepening bags under his eyes.
(He still wasn’t sure what made a lie ‘white’ - if it was untrue it was a lie, even if it was for a ‘good’ reason. Good and bad were still concepts he was learning about too. Wikipedia couldn’t tell him the differences between good and bad that would allow him to judge whether a person was edible or not. He wondered where Eddie had got his scale on good/bad vs edibility from.) (Eddie still maintained that it was a feeling he would understand one day. Unless he saw someone committing a crime. But even then there were scales of badness for crimes too.)
Earth was a difficult place.
Venom was glad every single day that he had Eddie to live on it with.
After the laptop was no longer an option he spent many nights in silence, either sitting inside Eddie’s body, quietly monitoring everything about his host from the inside, or draped over him like a blanket, cording through his fingers softly or travelling along his skin and waiting for him to wake up. It was a lonely, boring five hours. (Wikipedia had told him that humans were supposed to sleep for eight to function at their best, but Eddie only ever slept for five or six at most. Venom lectured him about his unhealthy sleep schedule most nights.)
It was actually Eddie who first suggested the knitting.
They were in a classier part of the city, trying to find a present for Anne’s birthday, when they walked past a quaint little shop full of wool in the window. Something made them pause and gave Eddie a thought. They entered the shop with a little chime of a bell above the door, and the small old lady behind the counter smiled pleasantly. Eddie returned it a little awkwardly. His nose wrinkled as he went further into the store.
You do not like the smell of this place, Venom rumbled into his mind.
“Reminds me of the cardigans my grandmother used to knit me when I was a kid,” Eddie replied quietly with a shudder, making sure he was facing away from the old lady.
Venom was treated to flashes of memory; a little kid with messy brown hair and a graze on his cheek scratching incessantly at an itchy black woolen cardigan, other kids yelling names at him, and the determination to continue wearing the itchy horrible piece of clothing anyway, so that he didn’t offend his grandmother.
Something warm bloomed in Venom at the memories of his perfect Eddie, and he used a thin tendril to subtly stroke his cheek before he hid away under his skin again. Eddie scoffed, suddenly embarrassed.
He’d ended up asking the old lady what the best wool for a beginner would be, much to Venom’s confusion - he wanted to knit the clothing he hated from his memory? And came away from the store with a bundle of wool, two long thin pieces of plastic and a book on knitting.
(They got Anne a little ceramic cat that Eddie said looked like the cat he wasn’t allowed to eat whenever they went to visit.)
Venom spent the first few nights reading the book Eddie had bought him, cover to cover, before he even attempted to use the knitting needles. It seemed easy enough in theory. Then he began to knit. It ended up being the perfect occupation for him while Eddie slept - since it was repetitive but interesting, and it was perfectly quiet aside from the clicking of the needles, which was apparently a soothing sound?
But Eddie woke up for the first week of him starting covered in tangled wool, the knitting needles embedded in the wall where Venom had thrown them in frustration.
He encouraged Venom to stick with it, sure that his dexterity would increase every time he tried, and concerned about the increasing number of holes in his bedroom wall. In the end the idea of finally finding something to occupy the five hours he spent alone was enough to keep him returning to the difficult activity every night.
Then he started to get it.
Venom’s knitting got better and better. He would smugly present a tiny hat to Eddie in the morning, modelling it on his head and making Eddie try it on too. (It never fit him but he always said it looked great.) The first project that kept him occupied for over a month’s worth of five hours a night was a full-sized scarf in black wool, that he handed over to Eddie with so much pride it leaked over and they both beamed at the slightly misshapen accessory. Eddie wore it every single day until Venom got jealous and hid it, demanding to be his scarf again.
After a while Eddie had an entire drawer full of hats and scarves and the old lady at the store knew him by name. When he ran out of wool one night he woke Eddie up so that they could go there and get more, though Eddie just turned over and moaned that it was too early and something about how he’d made a monster.
Eddie, he said with excitement as they approached it the next morning, Eddie there’s a sale on. We can afford more than usual. Put more in the basket. All of those. And this one. And these.
“Oh God.”
Eventually they ran out of space in the hat and scarf drawer. Eddie suggested he should start making them for homeless people. It wasn’t quite as motivating as knitting for Eddie himself, but he was so proud and happy when he got to hand over bags of knitted accessories for the less fortunate that Venom found it was enough. It was worth it for that glow of pride. All for him.
It was when he started being able to make more than one item a night that Eddie decided they could keep making them for free for the homeless, but they could start to sell some of them too. Apparently there was a place on the internet they could put his creations and people would want to buy them? Eddie would package them up and send them away, and that meant they could keep affording the materials to make even more. He started diversifying into sweaters and cardigans (much to Eddie’s disgust) and they had enough orders to buy better quality wool. There were always boxes to post, and people sent them pictures of themselves in the things he made.
Eddie laughed one day as they were packaging up a large order, and when Venom asked what was funny he said that these customers had no idea that they were buying something knitted by a huge predatory alien with teeth as big as his hand that lived inside him. He didn’t see what was amusing about that.
It was surprising how productive five hours could be.