Chapter Text
He’s introduced to ‘character’ in the sixth grade.
Not the people prancing around in the books he reads under his covers once he can hear Carl sleeping down the hall, but the very-core of their being. Mr. Ellis, in all of his redundantly formal ways, explains it in a way Eddie takes to mean permanent . A core-trait that’s pre-written into your very heart. Something that never leaves throughout whatever you go through, something that strikes a cord at your very being--motivates, and helps you grow--cultivates the ground so the rest of your personality can bloom around it.
And for a few short days, Eddie pretends that he doesn’t know what his could possibly be, like the only thing that’s never left him is anything but cowardice.
He knows cowardice like he knows his own skin. Knows the knee-jerk reaction, and the door-mat he becomes when someone raises their voice. He knows deep down that everything leaves him when the time comes, everything but the cowardice that infects his mind, poisons his muscles, and inserts itself into his bones until every cell in his measly body is screaming at him to run, but begging him to stay still so he never has to face getting caught.
He tries to admit it to himself--and in some ways he has, but when Mr. Ellis asks them to read a slip explaining their idea of self to the class, Eddie can’t help but ask to go to the bathroom through his turn. And if he tears the half-sheet he’d written, and flushes it away, Mister Ellis never asks if his ‘core personality’ got the better of him.
As time goes on--both with the presentations, and the years passing by, he becomes more and more aware that ‘Coward’ isn’t something that belongs engraved into his heart. It isn’t normal. It feels wrong, infectious even. The pieces of him left after the worst day of his life shouldn’t include cowardice , but it’s there like a stain. Like, instead of his insides coming branded, engraved with it, someone had taken rusty knives, and blunt fingernails, and carved, and scratched, and tore at his tender insides, until all that was left were sharp-angled words carved into every piece of him. It’s not the neat, clean engraving that resides inside of his peers, that holds firm under pressure. His twists under pressure, folding, and molding, and screaming as it conforms to what it’s pressed under, ugly, and scribbled into every surface it can claim until it’s all he is. He wonders sometimes what might reside under the gored scribbling, if there had been another thing before this.
Not that he doesn’t know that it doesn’t matter. Cowardice blooms ugly flowers of a personality, shoves them through unnurturing ground, and cuts their roots off with rot. Everything about him remains shallow, everything but the knee-jerking, clinging variant of a base he’d been assigned--or had found forged for himself. Something leftover to fill him with regret while it lingers, stuck in a selfish circle he can't seem to learn from.
Everytime he thinks he's sure to snap, to stop bending and sneaking around afterwards, he finds himself bending a little further. Just a little more to appease, a little more to get out of whatever he'd gotten himself into. He expects the snap he’s seen in others--a breaking point that isn’t filled with trembling, and crying. And everytime he expects to brush it with his fingers, it jumps back a good ten feet.
He runs for good at fifteen.
He’d never run before. Freeze had always won out, because of the fear of what the world has in store for its runners. Cowardice had a sick way of tearing him in two, of filling him with a knee-jerking chill, a split decision to either freeze, or run, and when it comes down to it, Eddie’s a wild animal under all of it. He feels like one, at the shout of ‘Edward’, something panicked claws at his insides, tears him open with the same blunt nails that had carved ‘Coward’ into him, and for a long time he freezes. He’s too scared to run, even if half of his cowardice begs him to--if he feels like screaming, and crying, and clawing his own leg off to cower out of his life, cowardice is suffocating, and it holds him down just as much as it tries to set him free.
But something changes. He doesn’t know when, or why, or how, but one morning when Eddie wakes up on his kitchen floor, he knows that the last place he’ll ever be is a shallow grave. The cowardice takes him then, he tries to beat it back as he does when he knows the clawing is going to make things worse. But it takes him, claws open his insides, and as he sits there, he knows that he’s going to die there.
He knows that the monster that lives down the hall rather than under his bed will take his life from him, metaphorically, or otherwise. He’s going to end up in a hole in the yard. At fifteen the fear that he’s going to die -that this is where Eddie Brock ends yanks the fear that had been rooting him to the ground out, and he runs .
He runs from the burning pit he’d called home, and goes as far as the clawing and scratching can take him. He runs until his cowardice burns out, and the tearing at his insides stops.
And when he’s not there--when things have changed, and he’d run for it--run for it and makes it, and he feels raw on the streets of New York, the cowardice retreats. It doesn’t leave--never does anything less than shadow his every move--but it’s a movement without it breathing down his neck, and it’s almost glorious. He’s a coward through and through, but now he can pretend otherwise. He finds his breaking point--grabs it by the tiny grasps he’s been brushing for years, and drags it kicking and screaming closer and closer into his reach. He finds a fight within him---not a big one--hardly one at all that sits with the breaking point he’d barely managed to get a hold onto--hardly an ember amongst ashes, barely holding onto its size as Eddie tries his very best to feed it.
But it doesn’t make him less of a coward. Even as the spark sits amongst the rot inside him, the shadow of cowardice makes it hiss as it nearly fizzles out. As he does his very best to avoid anything and everything at all times. To pretend he’s not caught up in the viscous selfish--self-cowardly cycle he’d born himself into.
He finds a spark of a fight within his hollow insides, and finds that it’s not fond of catching. That the only thing he seems capable of doing are self destructive--fear blooming a want he can’t seem to satiate. And he tries to hold onto the spark when the pushing comes past shove. He clings--and tries everything under the sun to avoid it--because as soon as he can he wants to disappear. Fold himself into the rotten insides he’s found himself with, and give into the fear.
But when the animal claws, and screams, and the words carved into his soul start to weep, Eddie lets it carry him again. And it’s almost intoxicating-another easier option of avoidance over confrontation--a way to get out of just taking it , without the claws that had been taken to Eddie’s insides being brought to him all over again. A way to escape his cowardice--to go with it without facing his consequences. And it’s pathetic, but it’s what Eddie begins to crave.
He’s a runner. When the pushing is over, and shove finally arrives, all of his freezing, and fawning goes out the window, and he can’t do anything but let the screaming in his soul carry him. He’s a runner-an avoider, when given the chance.
Venom is a runner.
He’s a runner, but he’s not like Eddie.
Venom isn’t laced with cowardice--there’s not a trace of it within him. No, there’s a boldness to him, a type of fearlessness Eddie can’t imagine finding within himself. A spark that catches, and burns into a forest fire. A willingness to snap back, to buck up against people telling him otherwise, an unwavering sense of what he’s willing to take that’s not molded, and rotted by weeping sores on his insides.
He’s a runner, but he’s not like him. Venom ran because there was nowhere else for him to stay. He went through hell, and only left it because he was taken. He fought against someone bigger and stronger than him, knowing damn well he might lose just because he wanted to stay . He wanted something, and fear didn’t keep him from it.
His very presence is a comfort Eddie knows better than to think he deserves. A soothing weight that calms the panicked animal in his chest, someone that makes him feel known, in a terrible, and wonderful way at the same time. A being that had cracked open his ribs to see the ugliness inside of him, and instead of running screaming for the hills, he’d gone and kissed it better. Had seen the catastrophe he was, the walking destruction, and decided that he was worth it, that he was worth protecting.
He made him feel a safety Eddie wasn’t sure he’d ever personally known. A contentedness to find themselves alone together--a feeling that maybe , his cowardice wouldn’t get to him that time. That even when it did, Vee would be there. In some desperate way, Eddie wanted to give the same back to him. As impossible as it was, he wanted to give Venom the same feeling--the same contentedness, the same safety he’d given him. And he tried to--he wanted to. He wanted to claw his own insides out, and find some kind of presence of safety, and comfort for Venom, and Venom alone underneath all of it.
Eddie strokes Venom that night, his cowardice shining through at the worst time, the imaginary taste, and feel of swallowing one of Venom’s children whole lingers in his throat the same way creeps linger in alleyways. It’s unrelenting, even under the panic of his cowardice. He wants to breathe all the words locked in his throat into Venom’s not-quite-skin. His brain knows what to say underneath the cowardice, knows how to reassure. Eddie wants to. He wants to shove everything he is aside, and give Venom everything he’d given him tenfold. Hold the symbiote close, and mend his hurt the same way Vee had done for Eddie.
But Eddie’s a coward. His words turn gelatinous in his throat the same way Carnage did in Vee’s. Every inch of him is engraved with the cowardice that he’d born himself from, and like the disgrace he’d always been, he lets himself fall asleep, knowing damn well that Venom wouldn’t. And he meant to talk about it. When he’d awoken the next morning, and realized what he’d done, he’d meant to talk to them about it. To tell Venom just how sorry he was for being a fucking idiot--for sitting there petting them, when obviously that was not going to do anything for them. For being a coward that they didn’t deserve--for being physically incapable of comforting Vee in the same way that they did for him--for being the wrong kind of runner--the scared, cowardly kind--instead of the brash one.
He meant to. He really did. He brought it up inside of his own head over and over during the day, and each time the coward he’d always been found a way to refute it. Some less-than-decent excuse to push away the need to do something .
He spends his day arguing with himself. Back and forth and back and forth until he feels like he’s going insane. Procrastination lingering in him until it’s almost their bedtime, and Eddie’s got absolutely no other choice. He can’t say he’s happy about it either.
He tries to pretend leaning back in his chair is a casual thing to do right now. Like somehow the confidence of a middle school boy will possess him, and shove his own cowardice down into the cells it raised itself from. It doesn’t really work, confident poses hardly ever do much for his own confidence--not that for a moment, he couldn’t try to pretend it did work. That he was very confident as he scouted around behind him for the definite love of his life.
They’re where he left them--sorting through their on-sale halloween chocolate, some cheap netflix film droning on on their television as they sorted through their chocolate--M&M’s thrown by the wayside on the table as they put the rest of the red ones into the bowl.
Eddie tries not to glance between the half full bowl on the table, and the other red-bowls on the other surfaces of the apartment. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a tiny red-splotch is squealing as it tries to cling its way out of Venom’s maw. There’s suddenly a bad taste in his mouth, wax and grease mixing together with something gritty in the back of his throat that makes his stomach turn the same way it had the night of the most recent horrible blip of Venom’s past.
Eddie made a silent face, watching as another M&M went into the bowl.
It wasn’t that . The connection trying to wave at him through his minds eye was false-ridiculous at the very least--and he wasn’t even going to leap to it, even if it sunk its teeth into him, and refused to let go.
Sure , last night he’d been witness to a nightmare-type-memory of Venom’s in which he ate Carnage. Baby Carnage--who was tiny and red, and tasted absolutely horrible, and cried on the way down. And Venom’s habit of putting red-m&m’s in a bowl, and leaving them to sit, and annoy Eddie while he was cleaning came far before Carnage was…born. Months before.
Maybe there was a tiny whiny impossible connection there that didn’t at all turn his stomach over. Not that Eddie wanted to acknowledge it now --no--he wasn’t entirely sure he was capable of acknowledging another quirk of Venom’s spawning out of something ugly . Even if that would make him just as horrible and selfish as he’d always been. If it wasn’t fair that he’d let Venom take a good look at him--and hadn’t even tried to do the same for them.
If being unable to hold a simple conversation about what he could do was downright pathetic.
…
Right.
He’d just say something casual. Just a little something casual, and if they were fine--because he was a horrible partner, and they’d had to go and comfort themselves, he would leave them be, and rot with his stupid immovable guilt all by himself, and let them be fine . He hadn’t been there then --even if he’d seen the dream--who knows how long ago that was? How often literal horror movie things happened where…ever Venom used to live! Klyntar--or-- whatever . They could probably be fine, with or without Eddie’s shitty partnering.
In all honestly, whatever happened wasn’t Eddie’s business if Vee didn’t intend for it to be--but he could ask . He could ask how the whole thing with having to eat his freaking kid felt after he’d been forced to do it before. If Venom was even okay at all--he hadn’t even properly apologized for saying he wished he never met him! Sure, they’d been on the road , and--and it had sucked --but Venom was always right there . The very least he could do was ask if he was okay , and he hadn’t. Why should Eddie get to get to be known entirely when Venom doesn’t ?
Because he was a selfish-bastard. He was a selfish bastard who never asked anything , not about Vee’s life before--about him --everything he knew about Venom were things Vee had had to tell him himself-- hell Venom hadn’t even trusted Eddie enough to tell him about Carnage’s existence in the first place, because he was an ass about everything . He knows exactly why he wouldn’t have told him--all Eddie ever does is bitch about Venom needing stuff-- food , brains , the whole freaking lot--he knows how he would have been about the news of a third mouth to feed besides theirs.
He would have liked to know. He would have liked to--but just as he’s doing right now, Eddie keeps proving time and time again that Venom can’t trust him--can’t trust him to listen for one fucking second--much less deal with what he has to say--and that’s not even for a lack of trying . He tried to tell him some of the things he knew--and--and instead they got pulled into the ‘shit name world’. And then Eddie never asked again. They just…moved on.
They just moved on, because he was a coward , who had a selfish streak a mile wide. Whether the ugliness in his core liked it or not, Venom deserved to be known as much as Eddie did. To be understood somehow--and he certainly wasn’t going to pull that off if Edde was too damn cowardly to ask if Vee was doing alright .
Eddie crossed his arms in an attempt to look casual, kicking out a foot onto his desk to catch himself from spinning around in a circle. “Hey Vee?” Eddie tapped his fingers on his elbow for a moment, watching Venom not-watch the movie he’d probably had on repeat all day. After a few moments of awkward silence between them, Eddie pulls himself to his feet with a bit too much effort, hoping somehow being on two feet would ease the bounciness in his knees. “ Babe ?”
He tries not to make a big deal of chewing on his pre-scabbed lip as tries to make leaning against the back of the couch look casual. He shouldn’t be like this. Eddie shouldn’t be such a shitty partner that he can’t put aside one selfish set of nerves and at least offer to talk about it.
“Babe?” Eddie tore a little piece of his lip’s skin off with his teeth, leaning somehow harder into the couch. Venom grumbled, apparently done with his habitual sorting of halloween candy bought a month too late, sunk his somewhat-snakey-form back into the couch, milky-pupiless eyes still focused on how Maximillio was being invalidated. Eddie half forced himself to ignore the stupid, unhelpful urge to just watch her tell him she was pregnant again.
Somewhere between Eddie zoning out into the unfolding scene, and snapping back out of it, Venom had pressed up against what little of Eddie was dangling over the couch. He took what was definitely not an exaggerated deep breath, getting a lung full of the sickly sweet scent he’s pretty sure Venom shouldn’t have , as he pressed his face into the top of Venom’s head. After a moment, when Eddie wasn’t certain he could take any more of the smell of Venom’s not-quite-skin, he fidgeted just enough to leave his face free.
“This episode gets better every time, huh?”
“ Not really. No. We have overwatched it. ” He’d only had it on repeat until the next upcoming season came out. Whenever it was supposed to…do that. “ I have been…busy. ”
“Thinking a lot?” Venom did something akin to rolling invisible shoulders, angling his head so that he was looking past the television, and through the wall. Eddie couldn’t say he was enthusiastic about receiving any form of response to his question. It was fine. It would be fine if they weren’t fine, because Eddie wasn’t the only one who got to be not fine. Right.
Right.
“ Something like that. ” A few too many moments of silence passed between them as Eddie leaned into the couch.
“You want to uh…talk about it?” Venom somehow got quieter. As several moments went by, Eddie was suddenly aware of the small spark of middle-school-boy-confidence going out--and….whatever semblance of a plan he’d had--which…hardly a semblance at all--going out the window. After the episode had rolled credits, neither of them really keeping it in mind, Eddie had tried his best to seem at peace with…the new silence hanging out in their home. “You don’t--I love you. So-it’s not like--you don’t have to talk about it-if you don’t--you don’t want to.” Eddie, apparently intent on making it worse , rambled on until Venom thought to interrupt him with a metaphorical stomach punch.
“ I miss him. ”