Work Text:
It’s warm beneath the city.
Warm and quiet in the sewers.
Only the soft hum of electrical cables strung along the walls like veins, the nerve-like thrum of the telephone wires over the brick, the trickle of water and skitter of rats.
Pulsing with life, just like Eddie.
It’s warm inside Eddie.
Warm and quiet and full of life.
The symbiote is safe in here. Safe wrapped around its Other’s heart, feeling it beat against its tendrils; safe twined around his stomach, feeling it churn; safe embedded in his brain stem, feeling the tiny electrical impulses that make up Eddie.
Safe from prying eyes, safe from those who don’t understand. Don’t understand the symbiote, don’t understand Eddie.
Can't understand.
Safe from the men who kidnapped the symbiote. Kidnapped Eddie.
Experimented on them. Tortured them.
Tried to tear them apart.
Safe underground. Safe in the sewer.
Safe and warm and quiet.
They go aboveground sometimes, to buy food and go to the theater, the library and the park, walk the dark rainswept streets or watch the sinking sun turn the river into a ribbon of fire.
Go out to protect innocents as Venom. Keep the city safe.
Scaling skyscrapers is the symbiote’s favorite, half because it knows it’s Eddie’s favorite, too, and half because it’s like being back in the stars. The moon above them, the thousands of twinkling city lights carpeting the darkened earth like embers, like stars come down to wrap around the earth.
Bathing in stardust, drinking moonlight.
Beautiful, Eddie, it whispers to him, not in words, not in thoughts, but in impulses, in emotions, in the faintest echo of human speech. Learning. Still learning. Beautiful…
It recedes from Eddie’s face so it can hear his response in his rich deep voice.
“Everything is beautiful from up here, love,” says Eddie, clinging to the tower’s spire. “Can’t see the city’s filth.”
The symbiote extends a tendril, brushing Eddie’s cheek. Enjoy the night, Eddie...
The symbiote thrives on Eddie’s intensity, but sometimes it needs to remind Eddie to relax, to allow himself to sink into the softness of the night. To melt into the symbiote’s embrace as it envelopes him in inky blackness, let the symbiote take care of him, protect him, just as Eddie’s body envelopes and protects the symbiote.
Don’t hear any sirens. Quiet, quiet here with us…
It feels Eddie relaxing inside it, his chiseled muscles relaxing into the dark liquid enveloping his limbs. “You’re right, dear, as usual. Here.” He holds up a heart-shaped box chocolates. “For you.”
For us…
"For us."
A tingle of what it’s learned to identify as pleasure as it brushes the pink box with a tendril. The symbiote has known Eddie was carrying it—known they were carrying it—but had waited to be given it.
A new experience, being given things. On Klyntar, the symbiotes had not existed as individuals. Every symbiote was expendable, their knowledge released back into the hive mind upon death.
Perhaps that need to belong had driven its desperation to force a bonding with Peter even though Peter had treated it like nothing more than a tool, a piece of clothing, something to be used and discarded.
Something to kill, to be cleansed, same as on Klyntar.
Was alone on Klyntar, even while part of the hive mind.
Cast out. A pariah. An aberration.
But it's not alone anymore.
It has Eddie now. And Eddie is different from all the others.
Has been from the start.
Has taught the symbiote it was more than a tool. More than a costume.
Is a being. An individual.
Something—someone—worthy of affection, with something all of its own to offer.
“I got the kind you like, love,” says Eddie, though the symbiote had been there when he’d bought it. “Solid dark chocolate.”
…thank you, Eddie.
It wraps a tentacle securely around the spire and flows half off of Eddie, forming a floating head. It nuzzles Eddie’s ear with where its nose would be if it were human, still thrilling at the word “love.”
Eddie laughs, patting the symbiote’s head, planting a gentle kiss on its smooth black forehead. The symbiote can see itself through Eddie’s eyes when it concentrates, a piece of the night sky brought to life, a being of black silk and iridescent white eyes.
The view through Eddie’s eyes is tinted with affection. Seeing itself through his eyes has always made the symbiote feel beautiful. Feel worthy.
Feel wanted.
Eddie lays a heart-shaped chocolate on its tongue. “Here, love…”
His words are even more delicious than the chocolate. The symbiote has watched enough movies to know that "love" is no longer a common term of endearment, not anymore, no more than “dear” or “darling” are. Eddie has taken them from the old books he likes to read, the ones with faded covers and torn bindings, with his beloved long words telling of how the heroes defeat the villains.
Special, this way. Words that exist just between it and its Other and heroes long since dead and gone. Private.
Unique.
Just like its Eddie. Just like what they have.
What it has with its Other, as the symbiote thinks of Eddie, just as Eddie thinks of it.
All people see is Venom. The fangs, the claws, the tongue. They don’t know.
All they know is Venom does not belong.
But Eddie and the symbiote belong to each other.
Enough.
More than enough.
Enough to make up for how the world fears them. Spurns them. Casts them out.
Pariahs. Aberrations.
But not alone.
Not alone, no matter how the world spurns them.
Eddie shares its thoughts, its goals. Loves it, wants it. Cherishes it, values it. Embraced it, welcomed it, rescued it.
Desires it.
It can see Eddie’s dreams as he sleeps on the cot near the hot water pipes deep in their home beneath the city. Dreams the symbiote shares, having no dreams of its own, no need to sleep unless wanting to mingle with Eddie’s dreams.
Dreams of black tentacles wrapped around taunt muscles, of twisting black talons pinning him to a ground made of heaving pink tongue and gnashing teeth.
Of beautiful horrors and twisted terrors, of glistening monsters in the moonlight and the redness of madness, of chaos personified. Glorious grotesqueries with opalescent eyes and tongues dripping with green…
Took the symbiote time to understand what it meant. Nothing like that on Klyntar, nothing like any previous hosts’ thoughts.
But Eddie is different from all of them.
Better.
Warmer. Quieter.
More intense. Alive. Vibrant.
Safe.
They swing through the city, through the streets filling with fog as the night goes on. They fly over a busy cluster of squares in the center of the city, streets full of bright lights and flickering screens, of teeming crowds and throbbing life.
The mist catches the colorful lights, refracting it, illuminating the night with a pastel glow. They swing through rainbow clouds, unable to see the ground below or sky above, flying through a fairy world out of one of the books with the heroes and villains and dear and love.
Swinging makes them hungry.
Can finish the chocolate…
Or can eat something else.
The symbiote spools out of Eddie late that night as Eddie lays down. Their little sanctuary is full of empty crates, lit by a single candle the symbiote has learned not to fear.
Hungry, Eddie...
It leans over Eddie, leaving his chest bare. It slides a tendril over the thick, well-defined muscles, curving over his collarbone, brushing his throat. His pulse pounds beneath its touch, breath hitching as the symbiote curls tendrils around his thighs, coiling over his skin, his muscles hard and taunt in anticipation.
Warm against the symbiote’s tendrils, soft and warm and humming with life.
Ready, Eddie? Ready to be shown?
Eddie swallows, running a finger over the symbiote’s cheek. “Ready, love.”
Tongue gliding over his chest, the symbiote’s tentacles encircle Eddie’s body, his big muscular body that’s suddenly so fragile beneath the symbiote. So open, so vulnerable, gilded in the flickering candlelight…
It can see itself through Eddie’s eyes again, see skin like the blackness of space, luminous white eyes and gleaming teeth. Can feel Eddie’s desire, feel how Eddie needs the symbiote around him, inside him. Part of him. Different than their usual merging, their usual bond.
A joining of another kind…
It twines around Eddie, binding him to the cot, pale skin hot beneath its black tentacles. Brushes Eddie’s lips with its tongue, licks his throat, his face, his chest. Embraces him, restrains him.
Twitches its tendrils deep in Eddie’s brain.
Ready, Eddie…
Eddie cries out as the symbiote shows him the merest fraction of the terrors born of millennia of hive knowledge, digs Eddie’s own fantasies from the deepest recesses of his mind, brings them forward warm and pulsing and alive. Lets him taste the smallest fraction of his desired horrors. Fills his mind with lusting monsters, feeds his terror tangled with desire, gifts him with exquisite nightmares and gorgeous perversions.
With madness made real, with terrors so monstrous they become beautiful, with nightmares given form and shape, with lashing tongues and curving fangs.
Gives him a glimpse of writhing bloody flesh, of dancing monsters, of hellish orgies of fantastic creatures and twisted beasts.
The mind-melting enormity of space and time, the endless spiraling of the cosmos. The horror of eternity, of infinity, of the expanding galaxies and endless ether. Stars rushing past, suns imploding, black holes stretching the beautiful monsters into ribbonlike strips of nightmare.
Hurtling them through the cosmos together, burning in the starlight, freezing in the empty nothingness, exploding into nebulas and spinning through the rainbow stardust scattered across galaxies.
Eddie’s heart beats faster, faster, body flooding with the sweet chemicals the symbiote needs to live.
Delicious. Eddie is delicious…
Its Other’s lust and terror permeate the symbiote as it slides over every inch of him, tasting his sweat, stroking his muscles, probing deep inside him. Wraps itself around Eddie as he writhes, as he gasps with terror and pleasure mingled into a blend so potent it flows back into the symbiote, filling it with Eddie’s dark delight and distorted bliss.
The symbiote slides deeper, squeezes harder, and Eddie gives a strangled cry, wrenching at the tentacles, thrashing frantically.
Something snaps in his leg.
He cries out as his climax flows into the symbiote, mirroring its host as they tangle around each other, inside each other, galaxies dissipating into moondust, dwindling down to a single candle set on crate in the sewers.
Slowly the symbiote releases its Other, hovers over him in the dying candlelight.
…Eddie?
Eddie opens his eyes, still gasping for breath, slowly coming back to himself as the last of the beautiful horrors fade from his mind.
The symbiote smooths his long sweaty hair away from his face, touches its forehead to Eddie’s. Constricts its tentacles around him, soothing him, before releasing him.
Here, Eddie. Here with you. Safe. Safe, Eddie. Not alone…
Safe here with us.
Eddie draws in a shuddering breath. His leg is broken, wrist wrenched from the socket by his thrashing.
This is the symbiote's favorite part.
Embedded in Eddie’s brain, it numbs its Other’s pain, then twines delicately around his leg, his wrist, knitting him together from the inside. Binding bone, melding muscle.
Making Eddie whole again.
Something only the symbiote can do for Eddie.
Taking care of him.
Keeping him strong. Keeping him well.
Keeping him safe.
Eddie rests his trembling hand on the symbiote’s head, pulling it close to him. He kisses it gently, pulse gradually slowing. The symbiote wraps a thick tentacle around him, savoring the flavor of Eddie’s hormones humming through it, sating it, mingling their essences.
“Thank you,” Eddie murmurs, fingers resting on the symbiote as it spreads out on his chest. The symbiote forms a hand, gently holding Eddie’s, stopping his hand’s violent trembling. “Thank you, love…”
Eddie’s heartbeat thrums through the symbiote, his satiation flowing through his limbs, lighting it up with the firm proof that their Other is here, their Other is with them.
That their Other is happy.
Happy with the symbiote.
Happy with Them.
The symbiote settles deeper into Eddie, twining its tendrils into Eddie’s chest, slipping down to brush his heart, to slip inside his veins, his arteries, to feel it for itself.
Feel Eddie’s life as it rushes through him.
“I’m here, darling,” Eddie murmurs, as if sensing the symbiote’s thoughts. “Rest, now…”
His heart is warm and steady against the symbiote’s tendril.
Warm and steady and belonging entirely to the symbiote.
Home, the symbiote thinks.
Safe.
Safe and warm and full of life.
