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"EDDIE," Venom says, inches away from Eddie’s face. "GROUND RULE 2.5."
Eddie blinks back tears. Never mind ground rule 2.5, it’s been 2.5 fucking seconds since Venom pulled off his dick and slithered out his ass and unplugged from his brain’s pleasure centre, throwing around molecules of dopamine and adrenaline and oxytocin in there until Eddie’s throat grew hoarse, and demonstrably, he’s still recovering, but the revered afterglow doesn’t always exist when your partner is an alien symbiote with the attention span of a toddler. And, since it’s ground rule 2.5 this time, the appetite of a— well, of an alien symbiote. There’s not really a metaphor better than the actual thing for that one; Eddie’s done a lot of investigative journalism in his days, of the weird and wonderful, fucked-up sort to boot, and he’s yet to come across anything with an appetite as voracious as a Klyntar. Lucky him. He means that both insincerely and sincerely.
“You want food?” he asks, still breathless. “Now? Could you not’ve waited until I’d at least—” A ratty towel, held up in the shifting claw of a skinny little tendril, materialises next to Vee’s floating head. Eddie sighs and fights back a smile as he takes it. This is not the time to find that sweet. “Right. Thanks, buddy.”
YOU’RE WELCOME, Venom purrs, now back inside Eddie’s head. GROUND RULE 2.5. NOW.
Since Vee’s in so much of a rush, Eddie multitasks by rolling his eyes as he wipes up his cum. “Jeez, yeah, okay, I get it. Ground rule 2.5.”
Ground rule 2.5 is the revised version of its predecessor, ground rule 2: the rule where Venom demands brains; real human brains. The .5 revision was rolled in when Venom had been enacting the rule too often for Eddie’s peace of mind (what little he had, he clung to, goddammit), causing Eddie to amend the rule so it could only be called upon once a month. In the meantime, it was chicken and chocolate. As Venom skitters under Eddie’s skin in the symbiote’s usual manner, Eddie glances over to the calendar, currently sitting on a glossy shot of an adorable lab puppy, fur the colour of sand and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt while it laps at a fake piña colada, as the poster-pup for July. It’s been exactly a month since 2.5 was last enacted.
Eddie tries not to feel too endeared that Vee waited until after he’d gotten a solid shift of research work in today for his new piece on yet another corrupt politician hiding their millions in nontaxable South Dakota trusts, followed by sex, before demanding brains. He fails.
They trudge down the streets of the Tenderloin district, Eddie’s hi-tops crashing through the stagnant puddles below, the weepy halogen lights streaking through their periphery above, before Eddie’s hoodie swallows it all into a cottony darkness. They pass by awnings huddled with soggy pedestrians, bars of highly varying repute communicated by the amount of smashed glass that glitters their strip of sidewalk, convenience stores where Eddie briefly considers trying to convince—
NO CHOCOLATE! Venom booms into their head, when Eddie cranes their neck to peek at the candy rack within. BRAINS.
Eddie mutters something about not getting any dumb ideas and it being brain singular, buddy. He ignores the concerned look he gets from an umbrella-wielding stranger, and they keep on trudging along.
They stop when they reach an alleyway Venom insists is quiet enough to go racketing up the brick wall of, and Eddie is exasperated enough by his symbiote’s complaining to give in.
Does the brick feel slimier to you tonight, Eddie asks from within, as they scale the side of the building skyward. Vee’s in that initial rush of joy he gets when he’s their front; Eddie’s in his own from being wrapped inside Vee. And being symbiotic means it’s doubled— they’re also experiencing each other’s joy vicariously. Relishing both their own happiness and the other’s. Or is it just me?
“JUST YOU. I WISH IT WAS SLIMIER."
Eddie smiles; Venom smiles. Of course you do, buddy. Of course you do.
They reach the top. It’s not high up enough for Venom, so they go bounding over rooftops, jumping across entire streets and then climbing up the uppermost parts of other buildings to get onto more rooftops, until they reach one Vee’s happy with. The earth is about twenty storeys below, the sea nearly three kilometres across from the south-easterly direction they’re looking in. The city fills the spaces in between; stacks of outer walls and their windows, with roads and their streetlights weaving in between. Eddie and Venom’s eyes are drawn to whatever sticks out from that: piers jut out clumsily from the coastline like hair on a kindergartener’s stickman, Coit Tower and the flock of trees it erupts from look characteristically out of place in the otherwise concrete, aluminium landscape, and then there’s the Bay Bridge, firefly cars dotting its surface all the way out to Oakland. The individual lights should, by all accounts, merge into one amorphous glow at some distance along it, but Venom’s eyes don’t let them. The result is both freakish and stunning. Eddie’s started to get used to regularly experiencing such a combination.
" EDDIE."
One side of Venom’s face unfurls into Eddie’s. Eddie takes a deep, dizzying breath. “Mm?” he says, prompting, while he drinks in the view, the sensations, everything.
"T HAT TOWER LOOKS LIKE A DICK."
He’s talking about Coit Tower and maybe also its trees. Eddie sighs with their mish-mash mouth.
"YOU AGREE, EDDIE. IT EVEN HAS HAIR." Venom goads, this time definitely talking about the tower’s trees, and Eddie’s about to let it devolve into petty bickering, him planning to feign the moral high ground in defense of a ninety-year old tower he doesn’t give a rat’s ass nor its associated shit about, just because, when there’s a curdled scream from somewhere below them. Venom picks it out like a hunting dog on a bloodied trail and boosts it into their eardrums: another scream, and then a few shouts, aggressive and snarling and from another voice, follow soon after. After that, Venom doesn’t waste even a second.
"TIME TO SHINE!"
For a minute or two back there, Eddie had given into his sentimental side and forgot that they hadn’t climbed a building just for a night-time sky-line view. Okay, can we at least check before we ass—
"NO!" Venom roars happily over him, and then they’re leaping across to the roof’s edge in the direction of the noise, hopping over a safety railing, and heading down into the gloomy gulf below.
The altercation stops in its tracks as they slam to the ground, leaving behind size 40-ish impressions in the concrete. They use the freeze-frame moment to briefly assess: it’s an old lady getting her bag stolen by a thug wearing a balaclava, a cliché so clichéd that Eddie wants to laugh. Venom does it for them, though in part it’s over his excitement. Eddie can feel them thrumming with it.
Easy, Vee, he mutters in apprehensive warning, the way you would at an over-excited animal. In response, Venom only unhinges his grin further and unfurls his tongue. You’re the worst.
A garbled “What in the actual fuck?!” interrupts the moment. They turn to its source.
Through the holes in the balaclava, the thug’s eyes are two glasses of spoiled milk viewed from above. Fear leaks out of him. For Venom, it’s tantalising, for Eddie, it’s humanising: for a moment, Eddie wonders how the guy under the mask got here, what cliffs life had pushed him over for him to be at this depth, committing theft against an octogenarian. Because surely no one does this for the fun of it. Surely this was his last resort. But then, maybe not so sure— people do some fucked up shit for kicks, especially in Tenderloin, and the fact that the thug’s piss-scared isn’t necessarily an indicator that any morals are present. Even the coldest psychopaths leak fear when they’re faced with life or death in the form of an 8ft tall thing that could only be described in monster-ish terms.
"EDDIE…"
Venom can taste his apprehension clotting up in their connection. Don’t worry about it, he replies, and tries to package away the spate of thoughts.
“Who the fuck is Eddie?! I’m Alan!" the thug shrieks, stupidly.
Was he a bad guy, or not? Can you even put morality in such black-and-white terms to answer that question, without being driven insane by how much morality doesn’t fit into black-and-white terms in the first place?
‘Alan’ doesn’t get an answer, and neither does Eddie, like always. Venom surges their legs forward and scoops up the thug in one hand like he’s a bag of groceries. The handbag is dropped in the process, saving them a job, and so they turn to the old lady, who’s staring at them like you’d stare at the big fish that’s about to eat the fish that tried to eat you.
"GRAB IT AND LEAVE. YOU PROBABLY WON’T WANT TO SEE THIS NEXT PART."
As she does as she’s told, Eddie tries to communicate an eye roll from inside Venom. Vee, d’you have to do the dramatics?
Venom replies aloud. "LET ME HAVE MY FUN, EDDIE! ALL YOU GIVE ME IS A TYRE SWING. I NEED MY ENRICHMENT!"
“Who the fuck is Eddie?!”
"SHUT UP!" Venom roars, turning to ‘Alan’, whose mouth clacks shut. They watch as a darkened patch begins to spread outwards from his crotch. The guy’s pissing himself. Venom narrows his eyes and grins. He drags his tongue across the thug’s face, from cheek to cheek, and purrs, "ALL THAT FEAR... EDDIE, PLEASE CAN WE EAT HIM?"
No, Vee. We’ve talked about this— no murder.
Alan is somehow still capable of words. “Eat me?!”
"UGH! FINE. I WILL THROW HIM AROUND A BIT INSTEAD."
Great. Sure. I’d rather him than the tyre swing, because I don’t think the tyre swing is gonna last much longer.
" BECAUSE YOUR WORKMANSHIP IS TOO POOR!"
Nope. You just don’t know your own strength.
Venom’s voice pitches into a yell. "I WILL SHOW YOU STRENGTH!"
In one hand, the thug gets swung like a lasso, round and round, screaming the whole time, and then thrown in a perfect arc all the way into a dumpster at the end of the alley. There’s not much of a resulting clang. Eddie hopes that means the guy landed amongst trash bags.
"BULLSEYE!" Venom growls, positively elated.
They leave the way they came, vertically, and head for the real destination of the night.
San Francisco is the only US city in the only US state with a morgue that keeps only bodies that are organ donor registered, but with organs not fit for donation. It’s an incredibly odd set-up, one that Eddie has no idea the specifics of, but for their purpose, none of that matters. Because here, Venom can eat real human brains while Eddie doesn’t feel even a wisp of guilt over it: these people are already dead, their organs are of no use, and most of them, for whatever reason, are also John and Jane Does. Identities unknown and unmournable. That might be part of the reason their organs aren’t fit for donation, but again, Eddie’s not sure. If he didn’t use this place as a once-a-month dine-n-dash for Venom, he’d consider writing an investigative piece on it just for fun, but he needs this morgue. In a field of black moral choices, this is the one closest to white.
Eddie’s taken the black choices before, of course. The gang member in Mrs Chen’s was the first, and there’d been a few more after that, but guilt and a conscience— human nature— catch up to you very quickly. And they make working out who is truly bad a very hard time. These moments of uncertainty were enough for Eddie to want to put an end to the brain eating and the murder, at least for the blue-collar, working class criminals they’d been using it on. And this was fine, for a while. Up until Venom was getting strength enough back after the Life Centre incident to start stretching out his presence within Eddie more, where his frustration at the lack of brains had space to stretch out with him— the chocolate orders from Mrs Chen weren’t giving him phenylethylamine at the rate he wanted, and his recovery had slowed down once it was through its initial burst. He needed something more. Eddie had tried to reconcile him, saying this always happens with human recovery, but no number of scientific studies and wikipedia pages they read backing Eddie up on that would diminish Venom’s impatience. It reached its head one night when, after a late night visit to get not enough chocolate from Mrs Chen, Eddie, feverish and stressed and exhausted and looking very much the easy victim, received a yanking into a car and a gun pressed into his temple. Give them all his money, he’d been demanded, or they’d shoot him right there and then, drive his body to Pier 27, and throw it amongst the shipping containers.
It had been an obvious bluff. In the still-populated street, the muggers’ handgun didn’t have a silencer, and no one these days carries enough cash for a mugger to seriously threaten murder. But Venom, faced with the prospect of not one, but two human brains, ripe with definitely enough phenylethylamine to tip them over the edge of their recovery’s agonising plateau, wouldn’t listen to such logic. Especially not when Eddie being threatened was added into the mix. In a blink, their fists had grown into black, engorged claws that shot out to the muggers’ throats and began squeezing hard enough for eyeballs to look fit to burst in their sockets.
Eddie just about managed to stop them in time by taking a memory of Annie, shell-shocked and frightened in the lobby of Eddie’s old work as he as Venom were surrounded by dead and dying SWAT guys, and shoving it into the web of their shared consciousness. Annie, their moral compass, in that moment being terrified both for them and of them. Venom had dropped the men from their grasp and let Eddie scramble them out of the car back onto the street.
Ground rule 2 (not yet 2.5 back then) clearly needed some work. The brains Vee wanted couldn’t involve murder until they figured out a way to investigate assholes who genuinely, unflinchingly deserve it; assholes who were also probably very hard to get to. And so, the morgue was discovered. Eddie’s job means he’s good with a search engine and asking the right people the right questions.
“See anything that tickles your fancy?” Eddie asks, low and under his breath thanks to the secrecy and silence raiding a morgue after-hours demands. The air is still and heavy, like it has a physicality to it, like as they walk, it resists their body for a fraction of a second before allowing them to push through. They’re in the negative temperature chamber. The sterile-white aisle is a cool 14 degrees fahrenheit and the steel-silver units the bodies are kept in are an even cooler -58. Vee, currently in his head-on-a-stalk state, hovers at Eddie’s shoulder, smelling around the seal of each unit. Eddie considers this for a moment.
“Or— smell anything, I guess?”
"WE WANT THE FRESHEST ONE, EDDIE."
“Uh-huh. Well, if you could hurry up with finding the freshest one, that’d be great.”
With some tentacle jiggery-pokery, they’d snuck past the locking system and disabled the CCTV with ease. But Eddie doesn’t know how deep security in this place runs, and he doesn’t want them here any longer than is absolutely necessary. Who knows if there’s a tripping system that wires in an alert straight through to the cops?
Venom’s— stalk?— frissons. His tongue makes an appearance, ostentatious as ever, sliding out between its hinge of teeth to lick around the rim of one of the units. Eddie raises a brow.
"THIS ONE." Venom rumbles. "I CAN SMELL IT, EDDIE."
All Eddie can smell is bleach trying its chemical best to stifle the miasma of death in this place, but whatever, he’d probably prefer that to whatever’s got Vee’s bloodlust roaring. He glances over to the body’s chart, an A4 print-out slipped between a clear plastic frame. Male. Caucasian. Unknown birth date, but estimated around the late 1980’s— similar age to himself, Eddie notes, unnecessarily. Time of death 2:47 AM three nights ago. Identity is, of course, unknown. Once Venom pries the body out like an anteater ravishing a termite mound, they’ll find out why, but it’s probably because his face is mashed, shredded, or hacked into obscurity, teeth gone. That’s the usual reason. The other reason is advanced decomposition, but Venom doesn’t tend to reach for those ones, for reasons of their obvious unfreshness.
Yeah. Okay. So there’s not a whole lot of guilt doing it this way, but that doesn’t mean Eddie likes it. They’re eating a dead person’s head, for fuck’s sake: the sacrifices he makes for love.
So while Vee works, Eddie wonders. How and why do they all end up here? There can’t be that many unidentified corpses cropping up in the US, so he guesses it makes sense they all centre in one morgue, in one city. And there’s plenty of helipads in SF. He goes to wonder further, but realises he’s answered all his own questions. Well. That kept him occupied for all of three seconds.
“Uh,” he says. He takes his hands out his jacket pockets, is smacked in the proverbial by how fucking cold it is, obviously, they’re in a negative chamber morgue, and promptly shoves them back in. “You done, yet?”
"EDDIE."
“Hm? Yeah?”
Venom’s head swivels to face him. "WHO IS THE ONE THAT TELLS US WE HAVE TO BE CAREFUL TO NOT LEAVE A TRACE OF OUR PRESENCE WHEN WE EAT IN THE MORGUE?"
Eddie cracks a sheepish, crooked grin. “That— that would be me.” Venom’s own grin, omnipresent, widens further, satisfied with Eddie’s answer, and he goes to turn back around to the unit, but Eddie stops him: “But now that we’re actually here, in temperatures that I’m pretty sure are freezing my— our balls rock fucking solid— mind making yourself be careful and quick?”
Venom stares at him. He leans in until their faces, separate, are inches apart. "ARE YOU COLD, EDDIE?" he asks.
Eddie huffs a breath. It comes out as a thick cloud that fills the gap between them. At the obvious answer, Eddie raises his eyebrows and Venom’s rippling eyes narrow like they would in a smile.
" PUSSY."
“Asshole, it’s fucking—” Eddie starts, but then stops, because he’s not rising to the obvious bait when it’d only prolong the time he has to spend being this fucking cold. “Just— Hurry up.” He grits his teeth. “Please.”
Venom stares at him for a bit longer in the unnerving way where he feels like he’s being stared through . It’s something Mr. Belvedere used to do to him, except Mr. Belvedere is a dumb cat, and not the symbiote sharing Eddie’s literal brain space. Vee eventually turns back around to his dinner prep. His tendrils, snaked into the unit’s seal, soon result in the dull clunk of the lock being opened. Eddie looks up at the morgue ceiling as those same tendrils, thickening in their anticipation, slide the body out— he’s seen plenty of dead bodies in his career, and even more in the time Vee’s been using him as his ride, but he still prefers not to look if he can help it. Especially when this one probably has a face that more closely resembles a smashed up pie, bloodied tissue as the filling and torn flesh as the crust, than an actual, human face.
Actually, that way of thinking about it helps. Vee’s just eating a pie. Just a ready-made pie that’s still frozen because he’s too impatient to heat it up. Eddie used to occasionally eat tater tots right from the bag while he waited for his actual batch to cook, he’s in no place to judge.
There’s a sharp snap, like the sound of an icicle breaking off its trunk. That’ll be the head breaking off a trunk of its own.
“Gross,” Eddie can’t help but mutter, pie analogy aside.
"I HAVE OFFERED TO EAT THE PART OF YOUR BRAIN RESPONSIBLE FOR GROSSING YOU OUT," Vee says, in the tones of an exasperated spouse.
Eddie huffs. “And I’ve told you, I’m pretty sure I need that part for other things. Brains are really— interconnected, or whatever.”
"YES. I HAVE NOTICED WHEN CHASING YOUR NEUROTRANSMITTERS. THEY TAKE ME EVERYWHERE ACROSS YOUR BRAIN." Vee says, disapproving. "IT IS A VERY POOR DESIGN."
“Well take it up with Mother Nature, not me.”
"YOU ARE COMPLAINING TOO MUCH." Venom says, and before Eddie can argue for his right to complain, given they’re very illegally in a very cold morgue very late at night while he lets Vee eat a human head, Vee’s taking over. Eddie rolls his eyes while he still can.
“You’re so controlling,” he mutters, smirking, as he watches his clothed body become their inky black one.
"AND YOU LIKE IT."
A gentleman never tells.
Venom tilts their head to the side to reply, like Eddie sometimes does when he’s their front and Vee’s a little gecko-like head sticking up from his shoulder. "WHAT ABOUT A LOSER? DO THEY TELL?"
Low blow! You’re inhabiting this loser. Also — Eddie pauses. Oh. We’re —
They’re warm. Warmer than usual. Venom feels like he’s taken Eddie’s consciousness and wrapped it around a heating tank, like a cat would in the utility closet of its home.
You put the heating on in here, or something?
" YOU SAID YOU WERE COLD."
I did, didn’t I. Eddie feels a rush of affection, and Vee volleys it right back. Thanks, love.
"YOU ARE WELCOME. NOW," He throws up the frozen head he’s now holding in a hand rather than with tendrils and catches it in the style of some morbid basketball taunt. "HOME TIME."
It’s now nearing midnight. Eddie’s ass is fully rooted to the sofa, a bowl of instant noodles hastily garnished with some spring onion and a hard-boiled egg in his lap, while he scrolls through the words he’d managed to get into a google doc that day. Two hours later and they still make sense, so he’s happy enough to finally snap his laptop shut for the day. Vee’s also happy— over in the kitchen, attached to Eddie by a long, sinewy thread of gelatinous black, he’s humming to himself as he holds down the lid of the blender (the industrial strength, five hundred dollar blender) that is currently whirring his own dinner into a thick liquid that looks uncomfortably similar to the strawberry milkshakes Eddie used to get from McDonald’s. Vee doesn’t like to chew through frozen heads like he does with fresh ones, apparently they hurt his teeth. What a fucking baby.
Eddie slurps up a mouthful of noodles and watches as Vee pours his slop straight from the blender jug into his maw.
“That any good?” he asks, dubiously.
Venom’s tongue licks its way over his many teeth. "I PREFER FRESH, WARM HEADS, BUT IT IS BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE OR CHICKENS."
Eddie smiles. He’s not the only one to make sacrifices in this relationship. “So overall, another successful dinner date, then.”
" YES. WE EVEN GOT TO BEAT UP A BAD GUY. I LIKE IT WHEN WE GET TO DO THAT ON OUR DINNER DATES."
“Well I’m glad one of us does.” Eddie pats his chest with the hand not holding his noodles. “TV to finish?”
Venom’s already jumped back into Eddie, pooling his presence just underneath the area Eddie’s hand is now resting on top of. His reply comes from within Eddie’s head. KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS?
“If we must.”
THEY ARE A VERY GOOD STUDY IN HUMAN NARCISSISM, EDDIE.
Eddie stabs his fork— he’s too uncoordinated for chopsticks, and Vee doesn’t have the patience to help him with it— into his bowl. “More like a very boring study.”
WE CAN HAVE DESSERT AFTER. TO COMPLETE OUR DINNER DATE, AND TO STOP YOU FROM WHINING.
Eddie pauses in his chewing. “Dessert?”
Venom’s head emerges from his shoulder, and his voice drops to a purr. "YES." His tongue slips out and snakes its tip along the underside of Eddie’s jaw and round the shell of his ear. "DESSERT."
“Ohhhh,” Eddie says, as his confusion shudders into understanding, all the way down his spine. He grins. “Dessert. Yeah. Yeah, I’m game.”