Work Text:
Eddie didn’t remember getting home last night. Even though he was tucked under his blankets, wearing his most comfortable boxers and softest sleep shirt, he didn’t remember getting in bed or changing his clothes. Running his tongue across his teeth revealed that they had been brushed. He didn’t remember brushing his teeth.
That wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to him anymore. Not since Venom. The symbiote protected him from intoxication, from poisoning, from injury. Around him, Venom shifted, and Eddie realized that he was ensconced in layers of his symbiote as well as his bedding. The slow pulsing rhythm of its tendrils picked up pace as he woke.
Physically, Eddie was fine. Nothing hurt. He was warm. Content. His left hand and forearm felt oddly present, like his awareness of his arm was out of sync with his actual arm. Like it was different even though it was also the same.
What had happened last night?
Good morning, Eddie, Venom whispered a greeting in his head. It was unusually subdued. Worried.
“Morning,” Eddie mumbled into Venom’s mass. He shifted in its hold, rolling onto his left side and tucking his arms in front of his chest. Venom kept his limbs swathed in layers of oil slick plasma. “What time is it?”
Ten thirty-two am, Thursday the seventeenth.
“Thanks.” The last day Eddie recalled was Wednesday the sixteenth. He remembered staking out a facility across the bay in Alameda. The owners had bought out some of Drake's symbiote research, and Eddie had a personal and professional interest in what was done with that information.
They'd spent the evening watching the movements into and out of the fenced-in perimeter. Nothing had been overtly suspicious. Maybe a truck sat a little too low or shifted a little too much for Venom’s liking, but none of it was enough for Eddie to justify risking their safety. That had changed, though he wasn't sure why. Right before Eddie’s memories blanked, they had sprung over the facility's border fence, then nothing.
Or not nothing. Eddie could feel more memories just out of his grasp, behind a shifting mental barricade of tentacles and teeth and tongue.
“What happened? Was it really that bad?” Eddie petted a large tentacle that blocked his view of his left arm—except for his fingertips, which were soft and pink.
It was. Venom clenched around him, a cross between a relieved hug and an anxious squeeze of one hand in another. Glimpses of memory slipped from between the teeth in Eddie’s mind—blood, people screaming in fear and anger, eyes wide and fearful, scraps of desiccated tissue samples being soaked in fluid, a long knife with a blade that blurred even when it was held still—before those mental jaws clenched shut again. But we are okay. The innocents from that place are okay. The perpetrators and their minions are not.
"Y'gotta talk to me, love," Eddie squeezed his symbiote back with both arms and both hands.
It squirmed in his hands, reluctant.
"What happened? Tell me or stop keeping it from me."
More undulations. You started blocking it, I just helped, Venom defended itself.
Again, Eddie hugged it with as much of his body as he could, burying his face in its plasma until his mouth and nose were covered and he was completely dependent on the reflexive transfer of oxygen through its surface. He let it feel how much he wasn't upset with it, just with the not knowing, with the unaligned feeling of his left forearm.
Tell me about it, he thought. It won't be as hard if you tell me first.
Venom didn't fully believe him, but slowly, it started telling him what had happened last night. We were right, there were people in those trucks.
The trucks had sat low. They had shaken like their cargo was struggling. Venom had wanted action while Eddie held them still until–
A woman screamed. Men with guns screamed. We broke into the warehouse and it was a lab, like Drake's but worse. Venom shuddered at the memory, and Eddie braced himself.
The desiccated tissue samples were ones Drake had taken from Venom and its teammates. Some were in nutrient fluid, some in blood agar, some seemed to have been cultured and grown like synthetic meat. Beyond, there were humans with patches of symbiote tissue grafted onto limbs in various states of metastasis.
We're not like that, Eddie assured it as he clung tightly to his symbiote.
I know, it told him quietly. I know, I know, I know–
They knew another way to hurt us.
A knife, almost long enough to be called a sword, hummed in the hands of an armored man. It was awful and grating but nothing they needed to worry about. The man had lashed out—they hadn’t bothered dodging, entirely too sure of themself—and cut their left arm off just below the elbow.
Venom gripped Eddie’s arm, whole now, to reinforce its presence.
The blade had hurt them. Not just Eddie, but Venom too, and for a moment they couldn’t process anything but the shock and pain.
Eddie.
Then the man stabbed them.
Eddie.
Eddie remembered the glass-shattering screech they’d made, remembered biting off the head of the armored man, helmet and all, but everything after was a smear of fear and pain, hunger and anger. There had been more blades. More men. More pain. More and more and more.
They had been frenzied.
EDDIE, Venom broke him out of their half-remembered terror. If Eddie’s face hadn't been pressed against his symbiote, he would have been hyperventilating. As it was he'd bitten Venom and was harmlessly grinding its mass between his incisors. We are safe, they are dead. We ate them all, it will not happen again.
He turned his head and took a sharp breath. "You healed us."
There was just enough of a pause before Venom answered, of course, that Eddie knew it was still holding something back.
"What aren't you telling me?"
Venom twisted anxiously in his hands. There are… it paused and twisted in his arms, worse scars than normal.
"Worse than normal?" The only scar Venom had ever left was on his chest and back where Riot had impaled him. Eddie shuddered at the memory.
Yes.
Venom finally pulled away just enough that Eddie could see himself, and he pulled up his shirt immediately. They'd been stabbed in the gut, just left of the center. He pawed at his skin, looking for any kind of mark. The most he could find was a two inch line of fresh, pink skin slightly below and left of his belly button.
"Here?"
Not just there. Venom nudged Eddie’s head with a tendril until he was looking at his left arm.
The calluses from years of living were gone.
The scars he’d gotten on his knuckles when he punched a wall after New York had happened were gone.
He clasped his hands together. His left was soft, smooth, and horribly new against his weathered right.
The start is higher, Eddie.
Eddie had gotten a tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm when he’d moved out of his father’s home. The symbolism was admittedly very on the nose, but he’d been so excited and free and optimistic at the time. Its wings had spread over the entirety of his inner forearm from the inside of his elbow to the base of his palm, beak open and screaming a challenge, and talons spread wide to grasp every opportunity.
All that remained of the bird was a single wing, clean cut at the base where its body and Eddie’s forearm had been removed.
“What— what—” Eddie stammered. He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to ask.
We ate it. Venom looped heavily along Eddie’s back and over his shoulders. We could not leave our hand behind.
“And you just grew my hand back?” Eddie’s voice was near hysterical. It explained the out of sync, misaligned feeling: phantom limb for a missing limb that hadn’t stayed missing.
Why would I not?
“I don’t—no, no it’s good. I just didn’t think…” Didn’t think what? Venom had healed him so many times. It had healed him from fractured bones, from cuts of an astounding variety of lengths and depths, from stabbings and shootings and blunt force trauma. “I just didn’t think this would happen.”
Rolling onto his back, Eddie held his left hand over his head. Light from outside their apartment outlined his limb. Aside from his tattoo, it was perfect. Completely intact. Even the misaligned feeling was dissipating as Eddie twisted his wrist and wriggled his fingers.
It will not happen again, Venom reassured him.
There was a spot, Eddie realized, on his bicep. A rough, blank circle of empty skin amongst ink. He’d been shot by a mugger, barely felt the burning pain before his symbiote had engulfed him. The blank spot was smooth to his touch, unremarkable except for what Eddie only now realized was missing.
Both hands dropped to his sternum, where the thick line of scar tissue left over from the night of Drake’s failed rocket launch lay. They’d been stabbed by Carnage too, precise where Riot had been traumatic. He’d mostly ignored the blank marks speckled across his chest, and had jokingly accused Venom of eating his ink. There had been bigger things to worry about than blank skin and the marks hadn’t really mattered.
Eddie.
“What?”
You should take a shower.
Eddie’s thoughts stalled. “Sure, yeah,” he huffed disbelievingly and levered himself out of bed and into their tiny bathroom. Stripping out of the clothes his symbiote had carefully dressed him in, Eddie stepped into the shower just outside of the stream of water as it warmed up.
One of the good things about their current place was the size of the hot water tank. Once it got up to temperature, the heat lasted for ages. Normally, they would wring every last drop from the shower head, but today Eddie went through the motions of bathing as quickly as he could.
It is okay, Eddie, Venom assured him as he viciously scrubbed his hair.
“I know.”
Do you?
“Yes.”
Then why are you clawing yourself?
“I’m not.”
You are. Venom halted Eddie’s washing and pulled their hands away from his head. His scalp was stinging. There was blood underneath his nails.
Would the abrasions leave white streaks in his hair after they healed?
It does not work like that.
"Oh!" Eddie exclaimed. "You’re gonna explain now? Tell me how it works? Why you never mentioned any of this?"
Never hid it from you, Venom insisted. Eddie could feel how much it wanted to hiss and squint its eyespots at him, and he knew the only reason it wasn't leering at him was that his symbiote could feel how much Eddie didn't want it on his skin in that moment.
"Didn't tell me about it either." His voice was bitter, and the sour taste of Venom’s offended anxiety lingered on the roof of his mouth.
Venom didn’t respond, and Eddie didn’t push it.
He scrubbed his body—less violently this time—and couldn’t help the discerning eyes he ran over his tattoos. Four thin lines ran through the broad strokes of black ink on his right deltoid where Riot had sliced them. The cuts had been clean and the damage done minimal when compared with his chest.
The road rash on Eddie’s right side from their second much less successful motorcycle ride had lightened the dark inks but left no other sign he’d been injured.
How many less obvious injuries had Venom healed? How many times should he have died?
Eddie shuddered and shook out the tension in his left hand. There was a demarcation in his forearm where he imagined he should be able to feel the difference between his arm and the new flesh Venom had grown. He clenched his left hand into a tight fist.
You should not be afraid, Eddie. Venom spread veins of itself down Eddie’s arm until it reached his fingertips. It was warm and he relaxed despite himself. We can do anything we want.
“You know anything about the phrase ‘memento mori’?” Eddie felt Venom pause then sift through his knowledge as he twisted the shower off, stepped out, and started toweling himself dry.
Remember you must die, his symbiote murmured the translation it had found. I do not want to do that.
Eddie sighed.
“People don’t really have a choice.” He pulled on a pair of boxers that passed the sniff test and walked across the studio apartment to the kitchen. He’d done stupider things than cook in his underwear, even still had the marks to show for most of them.
Wrong.
“V, you can’t stop me from dying.” Like a lot of things, they’d hashed that out after Carnage. He’d live longer than he had any right to if Venom had its way, but he would eventually run out of time.
Frustration rose in the back of Eddie’s throat. Scars do not need to remind you of dying.
A sigh blew out of his mouth and Eddie shook his head as he poured tater tots onto the tray of their tiny toaster oven. He looked at his pristine left hand and tried not to remember the feeling of a blurring, vibrating blade cutting neatly through their forearm. They’d been shocked, confused, horrified. Then enraged.
Eddie clenched and unclenched his fists. He couldn’t feel a difference between them but he thought he should.
You should not. I fixed it perfectly.
A clot of Venom built up on Eddie’s left shoulder and dripped down his arm until it reached the dividing line between old and new. Like water into a paper towel, it leached underneath his skin and spread, tinting his forearm in gray.
There is no difference.
“You want a gold star for that?” Eddie lifted his arm up and watched as Venom continued to spread, unaffected by gravity. “Too bad, I’m missing tattoos.”
Decoration, Venom said derisively, smirking knowingly inside Eddie’s head.
“No.” Eddie had been firm the first time Venom had asked about the point of his tattoos. “My history, my symbols. My meaning.”
Then these– Venom pressed from within against all the bone and flesh it had repaired –are my symbols, my history, my meaning.
Eddie shook his arms out and the pressure let up.
This, Venom said, caressing rough surfaces of Eddie’s thoracic vertebra and the inside of his sternum, is my desperation. It had found a perfect host, a place to be outside its terrible hive, and something possibly more that it could not yet conceive of. If it had to, it would fight, intent on a future in which it could learn, belong, and know—or at least one in which the glorious possibility of Eddie Brock still existed.
My fear. A tendril smoothed over the blank circle on his bicep. How had it not known of the danger? They were supposed to be safe. Why was he hurting and bleeding and— oh. That was why. Then they ate.
But also my determination. It tapped lightly on the scattered freckles of unmarked skin across Eddie’s chest. They couldn’t admit anything now, they were too focused on the fight. Anne and Dan needed protecting, Carnage and Kasady needed stopping, and they needed to live so they could share a future. But the spawn was strong. No matter how hard it was, there had to be a way. They just needed to find it.
“Then what’s this supposed to be?” Eddie asked his left hand, now completely saturated with Venom. It looked ink-stained, night black at the fingers which faded up his arm, and it felt connected.
Dedication. They would be whole. They would be fixed. They would go home and dress and sleep and recover and everything would be perfect. The details did not matter. Not of their broken host flesh, not of their symbiote instinct to abandon an injured body. They would be safe and they would be okay.
None of it sat right with Eddie. His body was its body and its body was his. That had been difficult to accept, but he had. Mainly because, for all of Venom’s talk about how they were a perfect pair and how they were better together than apart, nothing had really changed. Yeah, head colds and allergies were of the past, but he still had to pee in the mornings and scratch his ass when it itched. Eddie mostly looked the same as he always had.
Except now he didn’t. Now he had new, blank parts. So far just his hand, but what if it kept happening? There were ways to hurt them, what if he just kept losing parts of himself to Venom’s symbols?
You are not a boat, Eddie, Venom grumbled as it seemed to drain out of his hand or at least let the newly normal color of his skin show.
Their toaster oven dinged before Eddie could respond, so he busied himself emptying it before he could say something spiteful.
The motions were rote, completed quickly, and Eddie was seated on the couch with a plate of warm tater tots before he really wanted to be. Venom was back inside, waiting in his guts in the most neutral way it was capable of. Dubiously he picked one up with his left hand. The texture was strong. It felt hotter than he knew it was. Eddie popped it into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed before he could focus too much on his new hand’s sensitivity. He could feel the slip of oil and grit of salt left behind.
He ate the rest with his right hand.
They needed to talk.
He didn’t really want to put it to words.
“You get why I don’t like this, right?”
He was still sitting on the couch, hands carefully on his thighs, leaned back into the cushions. Venom had gotten better at reading him as time passed, just like he’d learned it. Maybe it had figured out why the new, alien hand left Eddie’s skin crawling.
You dislike unexpected change, Venom told him.
It wasn’t wrong. But.
“It’s different. It feels different.” He closed and opened both hands. The left smoothly, fresh and flexible skin with no scars to catch and pull. The right as it always had, a tug on the knuckles at a certain point and the familiar click of his index finger where he’d once broken it on some drunk’s face. “Like it’s not mine.”
And if it wasn’t Eddie’s…
It isn't ours either?
“Yeah.”
I can make it weather faster.
Eddie grimaced. “That’s not it exactly, it’s…” he recalled their earlier argument. History, symbols, meaning. “It was mine, you made it again, but really it just doesn’t feel like either of ours.”
Venom made a mental tone, the symbiote equivalent of a filler word. I have an idea of how to fix it now.
Their left hand started tingling before Eddie could ask what Venom planned to do. Fine black lines extended into delicate twisting patterns from where his tattoos ended. They joined into bold strokes on the outside of his forearm, though the thin fractal lines were still distinguishable, and those strokes formed characters that Eddie didn't recognize. There was a sheen to the color, iridescent like a beetle's elytra or Venom’s eyespots.
Structural color, Venom told him.
"Yeah?" Eddie couldn’t help being awed. "What’s it mean?"
Ours, its voice purred.
"You need—" a quick count "—five letters to spell that?"
Symbols. 'Ours' is a relatively complex mental concept in script.
"Huh." Eddie twisted and turned his hand so the marks caught the light in their apartment. The way Venom said "ours" felt possessive in Eddie’s mind, like two indifferent parents with shared custody of a child. Not a connotation he was particularly fond of.
I can do something else, it offered hesitantly. The marks shifted before Eddie had a chance to say anything. The first two melded together into a completely new symbol and the rest changed in detail. They were mostly the same, but the flourishes, the serifs, accent marks, whatever they were in this alien script, were completely different.
"What does this one sound like?" Or, not sound but feel or taste or any other close but not accurate way to describe their communication. Venom would know what he meant.
Ours, it pronounced. This time it was an alloy, two things come together stronger, mutualism. Something that the two of them worked towards, even if they stumbled. Intimate and taboo.
He hummed low in his throat. It was sort of like the tone Venom made and Eddie knew his symbiote liked the sound. “I like how that sounds.” The more Eddie looked at the markings, the more he liked it. "You gonna just stay there forever?"
Do you want me to? his symbiote asked with the dubious air of someone who would absolutely stay in place on Eddie’s forearm for the rest of his life if he asked but would prefer not to.
"Nah. If you give me a drawing I can get a tattoo artist to take care of it." Eddie traced around the symbols' flowing lines. A tattoo gun might not even be capable of this, but there wasn't much else they could do. "No idea how 'm gonna explain this to an artist, though."
I can do it. Venom wrapped around his old, right hand and gripped. Get me pigment and I can make it perfect.
"Like from an art store?”
Sure, Venom agreed too easily to actually be sure.
"We'll figure it out." Eddie pressed a reassuring kiss to the tendrils wrapped around his hand. "Just let me know what's going on with us."
Yes… it trailed into harmonic hiss and slung a tendril onto their new hand.
Venom was warm, soft, and buttery smooth on the new skin. The best texture Eddie had felt in a long time.