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Venom stands over Sorrow, watching her die.
He has known this moment would come one day--known it, perhaps, since the first time Raphael set him to guard the girl whose mortal parents gave her a merry name years before she rechristened herself the embodiment of devastation and sadness. Known that one day, the changes wracking Sorrow's unique bones and blood would reach a crisis point.
Known that one day, she would have to choose.
If the control Venom exercises over everything touching his life that will bend--or break--to it extended to the mastery of seasons, he would have delayed that day for years yet, even decades. He would have given Sorrow more space to learn herself, to strengthen her spine. He would have bought her more hours, more days to take what Uram forced on her and make it her own. To the best of his knowledge, however--more importantly, to the best of Jason's knowledge--not even the Cadre of Ten have achieved that terrifying level of power. Venom knows himself for what he is, knows his skills and his strengths and the slippery slopes he must walk with care or risk returning to what he was under Neha's foot. Were such power to show itself to him, he would walk away from it without a backward look, even knowing it might snap him in two for that retreat.
Still, he has his senses. The five Brahma grants all living beings, honed in him to an edge that is neither purely vampire nor purely human. An extra, deadly awareness of his surroundings, combat-readiness taken to a naja's extreme. And one more, the newest and most painful, attuned solely to Sorrow: pitiful mortal, Uram's victim, ready at any moment to withdraw into what remains of her sanity and cede her cruel new world its unsought, unearned victory, and yet as necessary to him as his next difficult breath.
And so it is that when, two days before this moment, Dmitri asks him to stay behind at the end of the Seven's weekly meeting, Venom somehow knows that Sorrow's time has come. Bracing himself against the ebony table centering the boardroom on Dmitri's floor of the Tower, he waits for the news from Raphael's Second, breathing deeply against a sudden stabbing pain deep in his chest.
"The Sire's braintrust has broken the code." Dmitri's voice is dry, but he looks at Venom with a compassion Venom has never before seen in the older vampire. Honor has much to answer for--and perhaps, if Vishnu wills it and Venom can bring himself to ask, to explain and to teach.
" ... so fucking fast," Venom says when his wits return. "How?"
"Finally occurred to some genius among them that the anshara project might perhaps be relevant." Dry has turned to arid in Dmitri's tone. Someone will be paying for their slowness of thought.
Even under ordinary circumstances Venom would not care--and this moment is in no way ordinary. "And? What's happened?" The answer is not immediately forthcoming, and Venom feels his fangs lengthen. "Tell me, damn it, Dmitri. I don't wait well."
Dmitri's eyebrows arch, but he does not rise to Venom's impatience. Another change in his demeanor since he met his mate again. "I heard from Keir last night."
"And?"
"You remember the angel we found shattered beyond his ability to repair just outside Michaela's territory last Midsummer."
It is not a question, and Venom does not answer it. Difficult to forget, that sight, even for one who has seen such carnage in the service both of his former mistress and of the Sire as would blanch the face of the most hardened criminal.
Dmitri nods as though Venom has responded. "Knowing neither he nor the young one had anything to lose, Keir fed the boy the last round of synthetic shar the researchers had sent him."
"What happened?"
"The boy heals."
"On his own?"
"So Keir reports. The shar took the angel very deep--just short of death, from the sound of it--but Keir's healing senses tell him the young one's still alive, and evidently there are now visible signs that the damage is repairing itself."
Venom's breath freezes. He coughs to clear it. "How?"
A shrug from the Sire's second. "No one seems to know. It just ... is."
Venom knows that Raphael's pet science geeks have been trying to find a way to stabilize Sorrow’s powers before their unpredictability kills her--and, almost certainly, others who have the misfortune to be in the way when she snaps. The scientists' theory has been that if Sorrow can be put into a state resembling anshara, her conscious mind and human-formed expectations will stop resisting the process and ... whatever it is she is meant to be will solidify past the danger point.
The problem with theories, of course, is that they remain just that--speculation, supposition, guesswork--until they are thoroughly tested.
And that drives home the other problem with theories. Sometimes they prove to be wrong.
Sometimes they fail.
Dmitri is speaking again. Venom yanks his attention back to the present. "So. The lead researcher on the shar team believes that this iteration of the drug is simple and stable enough to be chemically compatible with Sorrow's altered genetic makeup as they understand it--"
"No one 'understands' the way Sorrow works," Venom interrupts angrily. "If they can't explain her Making, how they can explain the result, let alone drug it into submission?"
"Venom." Dmitri's eyes flash, and Venom realizes he is close to an edge he did not see coming. He does not submit to anyone--he had his fill of that for this lifetime and beyond in Neha's court--but that does not excuse him from the responsibility of respect where it is owed. He straightens away from the table and bows his head to the other vampire.
"I-- this-- it's just ..." Venom does not remember ever finding himself at a loss for words. But then, he has never before been in a situation like this one. Whatever it is.
"We're all ... concerned, Venom. But something must be done. You know that. The safety of our people--and of Sorrow herself--depends on it. She can't be allowed to shatter under the weight of what Uram did to her. She must either move fully through the Making however she can or--"
"Or be unMade." Venom cannot imagine what such pain would be like. "Yeah. I know."
"And they're not trying to--how did you put it? to drug her into submission. They're trying to give her a real choice. Far more than the Sire has given others in the past. You know that, too."
Venom nods slowly. He does not like this--he does not like it at all--but he acknowledges that it is necessary.
Dmitri continues. "The researchers believe that because Sorrow's caught between states and species, the shar will put her a good deal farther under than it seems to have done with Keir's patient."
"How much farther under?"
Dmitri's face becomes very still. "They expect it to shut her down completely, rendering her effectively dead for some period of time."
"How long?" The other vampire's continued silence feels like a poisoned arrow through Venom's chest. "How long, Dmitri?"
Dmitri stirs at last, reaching out to grip Venom's shoulder hard. "There is a chance she won't come out of it."
*****
Presented with her options, Sorrow chooses death or certainty over the internal chaos she battles every day. Venom cannot pretend to be surprised by this. What does surprise him is the request she makes of him then: to be there when she goes under and--her eyes drop away from his at this--to be there when she awakens.
When.
He could, of course, say no.
He does not even consider doing so.
*****
Sorrow has not struggled since the drugs entered her system. Not outwardly, anyway: she lies silent and still on the tatami mat before the back bedroom's French doors, gaze fixed on the blooming cherry trees that grace the property line. But Venom has danced with her so often, in the sparring circle and elsewhere, that he knows everything of which her muscles are capable, sees every move she makes. He hears her screaming silently, the only indication of her distress tiny twitches around those changing eyes of vivid brown and sharp green intermingled--eyes that, if he is honest with himself, look more each time he sees her like his did in those first few years after he was turned. He sees the terrible fight she wages against panic and despair as the drugs pull her inexorably under--and the bone-deep defiance that has given her the strength to win that fight thus far.
Defiance, in part, of Venom himself: of what he expects of her--or does not expect. Of what she thinks he thinks of her, even after everything they have done to and with one another. Paltry. Puny. Breakable. Expendable.
Insufficient.
She does not know how far from the truth her fears have taken her. How wrong she is about how much--how very much--she matters.
Not just to him.
To Dmitri's Honor, reborn into love and infinitely stronger for the scars she bears, searching for any way available to help Sorrow find her own excruciating strength and rebuild the mental and emotional walls she so desperately needed in the wake of Uram's infinite cruelty and her weak human boyfriend's abrupt abandonment.
To Raphael's hybrid Consort, her persistent human weakness improbably twinned with the unique and steely grace of an angel Made in fire and blood. Avoiding Venom's mesmeric gaze on her visits to Sorrow's plush suburban prison, Elena has shown him far more than is safe of her still-human heart in the way she looks at Sorrow when the younger woman is occupied with teacups or katanas, as though Sorrow could become the immortal sibling Elena's own sister Beth will never be.
Even to the Sire himself: defying his own history and practice of iron-willed, immutable judgment, Raphael has not simply prevented Sorrow from dying--at her own hand, under the knife of a lover chosen for their lethal intent, in a hail of law-enforcement bullets fueled by human fear of one who is both of them and other than them--but devoted his resources and those of his Seven and their mates to helping her figure out how to live.
But above all these unsought ties, Sorrow matters to Venom himself--matters like thin, icy air or water heated to the boiling point, like a part of him with which he is never at peace but without which he cannot function. Much as he despises the bone-deep weakness in his character the admission reveals, it would be the worst kind of folly to continue to deny to himself how essential to him Sorrow has become. Need, rejection; scorn, honor; hatred, tolerance, love. He wonders sometimes how any living being can contain such contradictions, so deeply rooted and so entangled in their growth that their contrary actions should by all rights tear one limb from limb from within.
If Sorrow wakes from her drug-induced temporary death, Venom thinks, he will ask her, if only to see her curl her lip at him--a kitten's snarl--at the impossibility of answering such a ridiculous question.
--when she wakes. When.
Hope had no place in Venom's life after Neha turned him, making him not simply--simply!--a vampire but something as alien, as other to his kind as Sorrow is to hers. Being taken into Raphael's service carved out a fractional space for good to exist in what Neha's rule had left of his heart; remaining in that service for centuries has restored to him a measure of decency, more yet of honor and loyalty, and thus engendered some life in that withered remnant. Still, until Sorrow, he had thought himself irrevocably sole and alone, had even told himself that such sereness was what he needed, what he wanted. Easier not to hope for something different, something else, something … more.
Today, though: today he holds hope within him like a single candle throwing shadows through a rough-hewn warren of caves, warming all it can of the cold darkness, reaching out to illuminate what might just be a pathway towards light.
Abruptly, Venom finds himself sliding to his knees by Sorrow's side, a motion so sudden and unexpected that he--who moves always with calculated, tactical grace--is saved from falling only by the closest hands of those trusted few who keep watch with him: Honor on one side, Dmitri on the other. He can see Elena and Illium against the far wall; the Sire stands out of Venom’s line of sight, but his presence infuses the very air around them.
Chosen family and an expectation of angels, all focused on one small woman who is neither mortal nor Made, neither one thing nor the other, but the sum of both and more, and who might one day be everything to him.
"Don't die, kittycat. I’m not done playing with you." Venom's voice hurts his throat, rusted nearly shut with fear and with other feelings to which he does not yet wish to put a name. Tearing his sunglasses from his face and fixing his cobra’s gaze on Sorrow, he reaches out to her almost without volition, hands coming shakily to rest on her head and heart. He watches as the movements of her small breasts beneath the fabric of her gi falter and slow, as her slender fingers with their bitten nails unclench from defiant fists and become unnaturally still by her sides, as her mouth slackens and her shocking eyes--eyes like his, mutated and mutable--flutter closed and start open again and again, meeting his every time, until, finally, they are as silent as the rest of her.
And he waits.