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Eddie stared at the images on the screen in front of him. He felt… odd. Hollow.
The images were meaningless shapes.
He glanced around the MRI control room, hoping Dan could explain to him what they meant, but the place was abandoned. They remembered more than saw the overturned chair, the bottles knocked off the shelves, the sealed glass doors. They were on the wrong side of the glass. Weren’t they? No. Yes? Annie and Dan had been standing right next to him. Where had they gone?
Eddie looked at the screen again. The shapes had turned into scans. They watched as organs disintegrated on the screen. Dread seeped through their veins.
There was a sudden lurch in their abdomen and Eddie doubled over as blood and slime poured out of their mouth. He tried to retch, but he didn’t have a stomach. He tried to stop and catch a breath, but he didn’t have lungs.
No. You don’t have to do this.
Eddie fell to their hands and knees, feeling like their body would cave in on itself. It’s okay. V, it’s okay.
He collapsed on the ground and felt warm blood soaking through his hoodie. It’s me. Please. You don’t have to do this. It doesn’t have to go this way again.
A tendril caressed their face. Venom.
Darkness crept across his vision.
The darkness resolved itself into familiar shadows, cast in blue by the neon sign across the street.
Venom huddled in the pit of their stomach.
They hadn’t been together long, but it was already a habit. Venom blanketed Eddie while they slept, and when Eddie dreamed of Riot spearing him through the chest, when he dreamed of Riot ripping Venom out of him, when he dreamed of Venom burning away before his eyes, Venom wrapped tightly around him and reminded him that they were okay.
But when he dreamed of this, Venom could only cower inside them and wish he knew how to fix it. Then in the morning it’d be like it never happened, and they’d be fine, but at night the dream would come again and again, not every night but never fading, taking different forms. Venom wondered if it would ever get better, or if he’d poisoned their bond from the very start.
Eddie usually calmed down quickly after nightmares, but when it was this nightmare there were long, painful minutes of Eddie reorienting himself to the present and then long, painful hours lying awake and stone-still. Venom thought Eddie might recover more easily if the object of his fear wasn’t curled up in his belly, but Venom could not leave his other. He wondered if, someday, Eddie would ask him to. Soulmates almost never separated, but then, soulmates never hurt each other either.
And Eddie wondered why their bond wasn’t clicking.
Eddie pushed them up into a sitting position and Venom realized suddenly that his partner had heard every thought.
“Come out, V,” Eddie whispered into the darkness. Venom manifested a head.
They watched each other’s faces for a minute. Eddie looked scared, but he didn’t flinch away from the bared teeth in front of him.
I’m sorry, Venom started to say, but Eddie cut him off.
“It’s over,” Eddie said. “I know it is. Just tell me and I’ll believe you.”
“I will never hurt you, Eddie,” Venom said.
Eddie pulled him into a hug. “I believe you.”
Slowly, cautiously, Venom wrapped tendrils around Eddie, clinging to him. I will not hurt you, he said again. I love every part of you that keeps you alive.
“I know,” Eddie sighed. “I do. I understand why you did it and I don’t hate you for it. I'm not gonna let this separate us, V.”
It struck Venom, for the first time, that contrary to what had happened in real life, in the dream Eddie made no move to turn on the MRI, never called him a parasite. V, it’s okay. It’s me.
The dreams didn’t go away entirely, but after that night, Eddie woke not to silence and stillness but to warm tendrils wrapping around him and his other’s voice murmuring reassurances in his mind and it wasn’t fine, but it was better.
~*~
Riot lifted them by the throat.
“This is your last chance. Kill the host,” he snarled.
“Let us leave,” Venom pleaded. “We are not a threat to you. You do not have to do this.”
Riot purred a deep, rattling purr of amusement. “No, you are not a threat. You are weak. You let a lower life form puppet you.”
The spectators trilled with excitement. Venom faced the raging hunger in their eyes. “Please. You don’t have to do this. We do not have to be this way.” There was no acknowledgement.
Riot dug in his claws and ripped Venom out of his other inch by inch. Eddie screamed. The sound seemed to go on and on, more painful than any sonic weapon. First Venom’s name; and then just wordless sound; and then silent convulsions that wracked his body like sobs; and then finally a limp, dead-eyed silence. Riot snarled in satisfaction and threw Eddie to the waiting mob of Klyntar.
And Eddie didn’t scream again, not for himself, as the Klyntar tore him to pieces with eager teeth and claws. Without his other’s eyes and ears, Venom shouldn’t have been able to see the feeding frenzy over Eddie's body or hear the hisses and celebratory trills of his killers. In this thin atmosphere, he shouldn’t have been able to taste the blood and viscera on the air. But he sensed--remembered--all of it as he writhed in Riot’s grip.
Then he was being lifted, and all he saw were glistening yellow teeth.
Eddie woke abruptly. Venom was shuddering unevenly, wedged between their organs as if bracing himself.
“He’s dead, V.” Venom startled. He hadn’t noticed Eddie waking. “You killed him.” Eddie remembered the blooming gold of the rocket’s explosion with a vicious satisfaction. “It’s not real. You won.”
We won.
“Yeah.” V relaxed his grip a little, curling around their organs in a way that Eddie, over the past couple months, had come to think of as “inside cuddling.” Eddie kind of wanted to ask him to come out, just to see him and touch him, but he understood that Venom needed to feel Eddie alive and warm around him right now.
You saw it all, V asked after a moment.
“Yeah.”
You have never seen my dreams before. Our connection is getting stronger.
“You had dreams like this before?”
Yes.
Eddie rested a hand on their chest, and Venom snaked a thin tendril over it. “You could’ve woken me up; I wouldn’a minded. You can always talk to me about this, V. About anything.”
His other was quiet for a minute. It was real, Venom said at last. It happened. Not to me. To Calamity and her other. I was there in the crowd. I saw it.
Eddie felt that Venom was waiting for a reaction--horror, disgust, judgment. But it was hardly a revelation. He didn’t ask what V’s role in the scene had been. He already knew. “I’m sorry, V. Maybe things’ll change, now that Riot’s gone.”
Maybe. But he was not alone. You saw how eager they were.
Eddie often wished he could find every Kree that had a hand in what happened and set them on fire too, but he knew his anger didn’t give Venom any comfort.
“You don’t think they could ever come back from that?”
Venom was silent for a long time. You do not have to do this echoed in his thoughts.
“Hm?”
They were Calamity’s words. To Riot and those watching. She thought the corruption could be cured. She thought they could change.
Eddie recalled where he'd heard those words before, and it occurred to him that maybe Venom had been with him in his own dream in more ways than he’d realized.
“And what do you think?”
I am still trying to find out.