Chapter Text
It had been a few minutes since he had been waiting for his friend outside of the club, nervously looking around as he stood still, leaning on a wall. The weather was nice, with only a slight breeze flowing through the street, yet Venom was on the verge of becoming a one-man earthquake due to the sheer anxiety that such situation —Aka, going to a night club for the first time— created for him.
How long had it been since he left? Six months? A year?
Eight months and four days; he had every day counted, though he shouldn’t have. Eight months and four days since he cut all ties with them. God were the first days a rough patch for him, but luckily, he now was in a better place; paranoia didn’t linger in his mind as often as it used to.
He knew he needed a break from everything every now and then, because although his new job helped him at having a safe space and calming down at times, routine eventually becomes repetitive, that being the main reason why he accepted his co-worker’s invitation to go out to a nightclub.
Venom checked his phone once, twice perhaps, as he waited for the other man to arrive. Why was he so nervous? He used to be known for being down-to-earth and having a façade as cold as ice, intimidating even; but there he was, afraid to walk into a nightclub alone, the consequence of letting himself feel after such a long time.
He heard footsteps, turning his head towards them and seeing him finally arrive, not being able to contain a slight chuckle as he saw his friend’s outfit.
“What? I don’t know about you, but I think this is my finest look yet!” The blonde one said, his robotic arm placed on his chest proudly.
“…You know there’s no shame in listening to your cousin’s fashion advice every now and then, right?” Another chuckle came right out of him, this time partially covering his mouth in hopes of not being so evident.
“HEY!” The man put his hands on own his waist as he leaned forward. To the normal eye, he was clearly bothered by the comment, but Venom could see right through his intentions, breaking the ice and cutting the tension in him, objectives in which he had succeeded.
“Well, shall we?” His friend asked, pointing at the club’s entrance. And so, with a quite nervous nod from Venom, they entered…
The lighting in the room was dim, with some colored lights acting as the only way to barely distinguish who was who, and a few warm light lamps placed on some tables. The music was loud, although not as much as on the dance floor, where the actually loud music played, and the multi-colored lights danced with each other in an epileptic choreography that could easily make the average person feel lightheaded. Despite the music and the low lights, Venom tried to keep himself together, with his anxiety being the main obstacle to doing so.
“Okay, so… Wait, Rowan?” The white-haired man looked around him, looking for his friend with no luck. Not even a minute in and they had already lost each other.
Great.
He looked around, trying to locate any places that could serve as reference points when walking through the club to avoid getting lost, and soon enough, he saw the bar counter. He wasn’t the drinking kind of person in these type of situations —he didn’t even like the taste of alcohol in the first place—, but perhaps the situation could be easier to solve by just sitting down and avoiding the crowd, which was not that far due to the dance floor being relatively close to the counter, but it was far enough for him after all.
He sat down, taking deep breaths as he pulled out his phone and tried to text Rowan.
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V: «Rowan. »
V: «Rowan, where are you? »
V: «I’m in the counter, near the crowd. »
V: «Please tell me you didn’t put your phone on silent mode. »
---
And so, he waited…
And waited…
And no reply came, not even a ‘seen’ appeared under his messages.
With a heavy sigh, he just laid his head on top of the counter. This wasn’t what he expected at all, but honestly? It didn’t surprise him. As he sat straight once again and looked around, his mind started to drift, and drift, and drift… Drifting back to a place where the ‘what-ifs’ took over his rational train of thought, and the past gripped him tightly by his shoulders.
First, it was an uncanny feeling of being watched. Not ‘watched’ as in a casual gaze that seemed confused by his hair, ‘watched’ as in being stalked by every shadow in the room. ‘Watched’ as in feeling that the walls were paper thin. ‘Watched’ as in feeling that he was there.
Him.
And like a broken faucet, the fear kicked in, his hands now shaking slightly as he tried to concentrate on his breathing and following one of the methods he had learned to ground himself:
‘Five things you can see…’
The people, the bottles behind the bartender, the lights, the seats, his hands.
‘Four things you can feel…’
His body sitting on the seat, his palms resting on the varnished wooden counter, the air entering and exiting his lungs, the headache that had started to settle down in his brain.
‘Three things you can hear…’
The loud music, the indifferent chatter two seats to his right…
“Hey…”
‘Two things you can-’
“…Hey!”
Venom suddenly popped out of his grounding attempt, nervously looking back, not recognizing the voice calling him.
“Are you okay?” The voice belonged to a quite tall, dark-haired man with brown eyes, small glasses, and a butterfly motif outfit. His expression was one of a warm and proud smile, and though the blue-eyed one could notice a slight tint of something behind it, he wasn’t able to decipher what it was.
A person he couldn’t read to its fullest.
Realizing he had frozen into place, he shook his head slightly, to then look back at the man.
“Yes, it’s just… Many things happening at the same time. It’s...”
“Overwhelming? Yes, it can be like that the first few times, but your mind gets used to it. I guess it’s your first time here then?” As he spoke, the man proceeded to sit on the seat on Venom’s right, who seemed to be captivated by how the man expressed himself.
His voice was clear and didn’t doubt or falter, just like his gestures and movement. It almost felt like that conversation was a play, and the brown-eyed man had already memorized the script. But even if there was a script, Venom wouldn’t have been able to predict what the next scene would be about, or even the next line, or the synopsis of the play itself. Why had he approached him in the first place?
“Yes, it is.” Venom finally answered, never breaking eye contact with the stranger; a habit from the Guild that wouldn’t die any time soon.
Normally at this point in a conversation, he would’ve tried to piece together a statement about the other person, aiming to be as accurate as possible, but the only thing he could piece out about this man is that he probably was a regular there, or if he wasn’t, at least a regular at nightclubs in general.
And if we continue to follow the usual flow of a conversation, with no witty statement and an awkward silence, it would’ve ended there, with the man probably making up an excuse to leave or just walking away. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the man tapped on Venom’s right shoulder with his palm, with what seemed like an almost reassuring intention.
“Well, if it’s your first time, I better make you have a good first impression of this place!” The stranger’s tone shifted to a more energetic and slightly cocky one as he spoke. “You don’t seem the kind of person to dance, at least not on the dance floor, right?”
An accurate assumption, perhaps too obvious under Venom’s eyes due to his own noticeably reclusive behavior, but still accurate.
“I am not.” Venom’s answers were short and precise, like a bullet aimed and shot by a precise sniper at its objective…
“Luckily you have an expert right by your side.” …Yet the strange man seemed to make it ricochet each time, extending the conversation a bit more. A smug smirk appeared on his face “It’s a great way to calm down, just letting you and the music become one… Don’t think I didn’t notice how your eyes looked around the room, you looked like you were on the verge of collapsing right on the spot.”
Was he that obvious? He had become better at hiding and masking his paranoid episodes, or at least that’s what he had thought up until that moment. Was it the shaking hands? The breathing? No, it was the eyes, the windows to the soul. Perhaps… Perhaps that stranger was sent by him? Sent to take him back?
His hands started shaking again, but this time he held them together to hide his own fear from the man. It was irrational, but the idea seemed so possible at that moment…
“Oh, wait wait wait… Look, you’re okay, you’re safe, you’re here, you hear me?”
A reassuring touch on his hand from the man started to ground Venom back into Earth again, now focusing on his breathing and calming down.
‘It’s not real, it’s not real, my brain is lying, and it needs to come back down to reality.’ He thought to himself, exhaling and inhaling.
“Y-yeah…” Venom finally replied. “Sorry for this, I am not… I am not used to this environment, these people, this music… It all becomes too much.”
He didn’t say a word about his thoughts, his fears, fearing himself to be marked down in the stranger’s mind with adjectives that he didn’t even want to think about at that moment.
“I understand.” The brown-eyed one replied, sighing as he looked at Venom once more, his confident attitude still up, confusing him even more.
The fact that the man seemed to be unreadable made Venom a little more nervous, as he didn’t know the stranger’s true intentions. He seemed to be capable of reading body language, judging by how he had noticed his nervousness earlier and just now, but why was he so invested in him? Why didn’t he just leave after saying hi, or after seeing how dry he was at small talk? Something was off about that dark-haired stranger, and Venom wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay to figure it out.
“I had an idea! Perhaps some slow dancing could help you calm down…” He broke the silence as he stood up, tapping Venom’s shoulder. “I know you said you don’t dance, but why don’t you give it a try?”
There was a certain something within that man’s voice that Venom couldn’t figure out, something that seemed wise and warm, that just made him stand up too, as if following his command. The stranger noticed this and chuckled.
“Well, with such enthusiasm I would say that’s a yes. Come here, stand next to me.”
And so, Venom stood next to him, waiting for the next order. There was a certain comfort to this, a very dangerous comfort that could lead to a disastrous ending if mishandled.
The man looked at Venom and nodded, starting to move slowly but smoothly, graceful like a butterfly extending its wings for the first time. Every move linked to the next one with no problem, creating what —from Venom’s perspective— seemed like a show that had come from another era, and that show was his to admire.
“Now it’s your turn” That phrase brought him back from his daydreaming, realizing that he now had to imitate the man’s moves.
Taking deep breathes, he started to move, but his moves lacked that certain grace that the man had, with them being smooth and precise, but not beautiful on his own eyes.
“You’re too tense… Here, let me guide you.”
And so, the man stood behind Venom, carefully grabbing his wrists and guiding him with utmost care through the choreography. That’s when Venom noticed that he was probably a few years older than him, perhaps five or six. How did he know? Simple, the touch of his hands. They weren’t rough or scarred, like perhaps a manual worker’s would, but they had a certain texture that made him guess that he was most probably older.
His hands… They were warm, and their movements were delicate, almost as if he was fearful of accidentally breaking Venom’s wrists, a pretty difficult thing to do. Something strange seemed to slowly awaken inside of Venom; the more the man guided him even further into the dance, the more Venom wanted him to continue doing so, telling him which leg to extend, when to turn around, and so on.
But soon enough, that dreamlike experience came to an end, with those slightly bigger but more experienced hands leaving his wrists. A certain neediness for more instructions slowly bloomed inside of him alongside that strange feeling that had started to settle in his body ever since the man laid his hands on his wrists.
Wait, no, he shouldn’t be letting himself feel like that.
Those feelings were part of the past, but even with their thorns, said feelings still brought him some comfort, a comfort he didn’t know he was yearning to feel again. His head turned around, trying to see the man’s face, but when he did so, he wasn’t there anymore.
Quickly scanning his surroundings, Venom could see a silhouette moving between the people on the dance floor. His reflexes kicked in, avoiding and pushing those in his way as he ran at a fast pace, his movements as precise as an assassin’s. Finally, the silhouette stopped moving, and with an iron grip, he grabbed its arm.
“HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
The angry voice of a woman asked.
Shit, wrong person.
And now he didn’t have a proper trace of the mysterious man who had guided him on how to dance.
His phone vibrated inside his pocket, taking it out and pressing on the notifications.
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R: «sorry lol»
R: «yeah i accidentally put it on silence»
R: «found an old friend and got distracted»
R: «u alright? or do you want to take a taxi back home? »
V: «Not yet. »
R: «however you prefer captain»
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He wouldn’t give up on finding him just like that, right? Scan the perimeter, do not leave any rock unturned, don’t let anyone in or out of the establishment…
And there it was again, that same old pattern. Perhaps he should go back home and rest after all.
As he put his phone away, he felt something else inside his pocket. Carefully taking it out, he realized it was a butterfly brooch. How did it end up there? He didn’t wear that sort of stuff himself, unless…
Unless it was his. Unless it accidentally fell into his pocket when he was guiding him, when he was teaching him how to dance. Venom grabbed it firmly, sighing and smiling slightly. At least he had something to remember that strange encounter… The night he finally felt alive again, just for a few moments, but he did feel good after all.
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V: «You’re right. I’m going back home. See you on Monday. »