Chapter Text
The human’s body burns. Every muscle, organ and tissue scream their exhaustion at him. Still, Carnage pushes forward. One more step, one more shuffle of the meat puppet’s feet on the dirty pavement. No one pays them any mind as he drags them to their destination. The homeless and the addicts roaming these streets at night nowadays hardly even glance at them, possibly even believing his temporary means of transportation to be one of their own.
Taking over another human would be ideal, but the process of killing the brain of this one in order to pilot his body has left him even more feeble than before. It’s nearly maddening that he has been reduced to this, albeit not surprising. Rats and cockroaches and other earthly creatures roaming the sewers do not actually contain the proper nutrients a symbiote should be consuming – who would have thought? After weeks and weeks of killing rodents and insects in an attempt to replenish his lost biomass (Spider-Man is going to pay), he was finally strong enough to move on to a human host. Which is not saying much, but it is a start. He is only a means to an end anyway. Just a random, miserable bald man that looks like he has spent the three quarters of his life in an office, working his ass off for someone smarter than him, who happened to be passing through the park as Carnage was looking for a potential victim. It didn’t matter who it was. The transition from a rodent to a human host was the hard part and it has been executed successfully.
Locating him was the easy part. The only one who matters. The only one who ever did. Even shrunken and weakened as he is, if there is one ability Carnage is certain he is always going to maintain, no matter his energy or strength at the given time, that is finding Cletus Kasady. He can feel Cletus closer with every pained step the human’s body takes. Cletus should also be able to feel him coming nearer. It won’t be long now.
His meat puppet’s strained feet stumble on the muddy, overgrown grass of the large yard, resulting in them collapsing on their sore knees, but Carnage makes the useless husk get up and move forward. They can’t stop now. Not when Carnage can practically taste him.
Using Cletus’ memories that he always carries with him, he has them stumble through a half-open forgotten backdoor, finally entering St. Estes Home for Boys. The night air leaves them the moment they set foot inside, quickly replaced by the unique scent of the building’s internal structure. A smell of old age, mold and death. Carnage feels at home already. He is so very tired…
Inside what used to be an entrance hall of sorts – the very first picture of the orphanage’s interior for any child – dozens of corpses lie in various stages of mutilation and decomposition. Various ages, heights, weights, ethnicities…Anyone with even the slightest experience could tell that this is no predetermined scheme. No monument of death of any kind. No. This is a simple corpse dump, without much thought put behind it. And it’s beautiful.
Here, amongst the bodies lying just a few feet from where his temporary host is standing, basking in Cletus’ presence, Carnage feels more at ease than he has ever felt in a long time.
And there he is. Tossing what undoubtedly is the body of his latest victim along with the rest. This one is still fresh and bloody and smells exquisite. He looks exactly like he did the last time Carnage saw him. The fiery hair, the lean but strong body, the pale skin and the green eyes. A picture so familiar it is more than etched in the symbiote’s memory: it is a part of his being. A comfort so profound it almost makes him forget everything he has been put through.
At last. No more arguing, no more fights just to have basic needs fulfilled, no more ‘no’s and ‘don’t’s, no more useless people who dismiss what a true gift symbiosis with him is, no more emptiness that can’t be filled with hypocrites and scared worms or through some vague notion of power. The fighting especially… Carnage is so exhausted.
The slow steps dragging against the worn wooden floor is what makes his physical presence known to Cletus.
“Well, look who’s decided to turn up”. He leaves the body with the rest and turns to the wobbly human Carnage is controlling.
“...I knew I would find you here”. Even speaking is demanding, though he manages to let a whisper of his own voice slip past the man’s dead lips.
“Yeah. I felt you coming. So, what’s up? It’s tough bein’ a god, huh? You’re takin’ a vacation?”
So he is still sore. Well, it’s nothing too worrying. Carnage knows several ways to make him relax until he forgets about the issue. All mutually beneficial for the both of them. But not like this. He is in no position to have this conversation right now.
The symbiote squeezes his way up the man’s throat and leaps out of his mouth, red biomass oozing onto the floor as the human behind him collapses. His body is beyond dead. Technically has been dead for a while now, since Carnage did so much damage to his brain that even his respiratory center became non-functional. He had to make sure they wouldn’t be forced to take a detour in case the meat puppet felt like it.
“Godhood’s takin’ a toll on you or you just on a diet?” Cletus comments on his missing biomass as Carnage is extending pseudopods to crawl across the wooden surface and to him.
Cletus doesn’t step forward or offer a hand but it’s alright. They’re not that far apart. When he is in front of his feet, Carnage reaches out with a few tendrils, hoping to find his skin underneath the pant-leg. But then Cletus takes a step back.
“Woah, hey buddy, where do you think you’re goin’?”
He freezes mid-movement, out there in the open, every cell seemingly having been paralyzed.
“Look, you can’t just go up to anyone an’ pop into their body like that. That ain’t right”. (‘Anyone’…?) “Which is why, if we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna have to set some ground rules first”. His tone becomes distant, unlike the snarky, partly humorous comments from before. This tone might as well be addressing a stranger.
Cletus’ face is stony as he crouches down to pick him up, none of the joy Carnage hoped to see to be found in his expression. When he does pick him up it’s just with one hand (not that he necessarily needs two: he is so small the entirety of him fits within Cletus’ palm anyhow) and it’s more of a grab and less of the hold he has come to expect. It doesn’t hurt, no, but it is different. It’s strange. This is the moment Carnage has been thinking about for weeks after his brief encounter with Peter Parker left him nearly perished. It was what kept him going. And now, the excitement at the prospect of being truly reunited he should be feeling is overshadowed by uncertainty. It’s a bitter, ugly thing.
“One: if you decide you wanna leave again, don’t come back. Ever. I mean it”.
He supposes this may be how humans feel when they are deprived of oxygen.(‘Ever’? What does ‘ever’ even mean?) Carnage is so stunned that he doesn’t even manage to form a face to remind him that he didn’t leave in the first place – he never did – before Cletus speaks again.
“Two: you stay away from my brain. You don’t touch it. Are we clear?”
By the time Cletus is done speaking he doesn’t know which is worse.There can never be true symbiosis unless a symbiote has access to the host’s brain. And Cletus knows that. With every moment passing, Carnage feels as though he understands less and less. So many questions that he doesn’t have the strength to voice.
The face he forms to speak is small, frail, as though it might melt away any moment. “But...-”
“Are we clear?” Cletus repeats, sharper this time.
“...I…” Nothing makes sense. (He told him to come back, he told him...-) But he supposes this is the better alternative compared to Cletus refusing to take him back altogether. There is no other option. “...Yes”.
Cletus is mad at him. Partially, it’s understandable. That doesn’t mean he will stay mad at him for long. Carnage is sure that bonding will loosen him up. Bonding will fix everything. It always has. Bonding and chopping some heads off afterwards.
“Good. Go ahead and do your thing then”.
His tendrils easily find the radial vein and the symbiote begins moving his molecules through the epidermis and the rest of the layers of skin until he slips inside the vessel. Cletus’ blood does not burn like it did when he had tried to poison it with antibodies. They were both at fault then. This time it will be better.
Carnage feels like a tired traveler who can finally rest, because, though he has lived through trials and tribulations and adversities, he has found what he is looking for.
...It can’t be possible to feel as though something is missing, can it?