Chapter Text
You know, Eddie says conversationally, I think we might have bitten off more than we can chew.
Behind them, the blood-red klyntar lets out a thunderous roar, followed by the sound of a great swathe of forest meeting its untimely—and rather violent—end.
“I don’t need to chew,” Venom reminds Eddie, barrelling straight through a snow drift and skidding on the ice behind it. “I am superior to humans.”
Uh huh, Eddie agrees dryly. Then, It’s gaining on us.
The ice turns out to be the edge of a vast frozen lake. Venom pelts across it. If it’s being truthful—which in general it tries to be—then it might agree that beating Riot had made them a little cocky. But Carnage was a menace to society, so they couldn’t just let it wreak havoc.
Watch out for weak patches in the ice, Eddie warns from inside the safety of Venom’s body. Venom quickly changes direction, narrowly missing a section that it can see is far too thin for their weight. But the change slows them down and suddenly Carnage is on top of them, throwing them down. Venom twists its head so it’s facing up when they land, but Carnage plants a massive fist on each shoulder, then grows two more to thud heavily over Venom’s lower half. When Venom struggles the fists suddenly spring spikes, impaling Venom against the ice. Venom can’t help but shriek as its body is shredded, and the ice makes a worryingly similar sound beneath them.
“Stupid,” Carnage seethes, and buries the spikes deeper. “You never had a chance against us!”
Acid-tipped claws burst from Carnage’s belly and rip Venom open from chin to navel. There is a sudden wave of something that Venom takes too long to realise is cold.
Eddie is exposed, and he is cold.
“Nope,” Eddie says, and jabs at Carnage’s eye. His hand sinks into Carnage’s face which swells around it and latches on. (When this is over Venom is going to sit Eddie down and talk about why he is an idiot and also why he should never do anything unless Venom says so.)
Venom tries to wrap him back up but it’s too late. Carnage yanks, hard, and Eddie is ripped straight from Venom’s belly. It’s a pain that rivals dismemberment, a feeling Venom is far too familiar with. Carnage flings him backwards and as Eddie flies away Venom collapses back in on itself, losing all the structure that Eddie’s body allowed.
“V!” Eddie shouts as he arcs over the ice. He falls towards the patch that Venom had been deliberately trying to avoid.
Carnage barks a single laugh.
Eddie lands with a thud that sounds like lots of tiny thuds all at once. His eyes meet Venom’s for a split second, then he disappears. A tiny splash follows.
“Good luck finding a new host out here,” Carnage snickers, releasing its spikes. Venom’s body slides back together weakly. The forces that hold it together are useless against Earth’s atmosphere, without a body to sustain it.
It drips viscous black dots onto the ice beneath it. It needs to regroup, it needs to sort out injured parts from uninjured parts. But more than that, it needs to get to Eddie.
Carnage lopes away, cackling, and Venom is alone.
It is already suffocating. It is already starving. Pretty soon it will die.
It lobs stringy strands ahead of itself to haul its body forward. There is a hole in the ice where Eddie fell through. Venom doesn’t even hesitate. It follows Eddie in.
Cold is not something that Venom has the neurons to experience, not without Eddie, but hitting the water is jarring in its own way. Luckily it does not require heat to function, and it certainly doesn’t constantly produce and lose heat like some kind of energy-inefficient leaky tap.
Eddie, of course, is an energy-inefficient leaky tap. Venom has often cocooned him from outside temperatures.
Making any kind of coherent shape is impossible without a host, but Venom manages to flatten and sprout a dozen bubbling tendrils which it extends on all sides, wiggling in every direction. The tendrils immediately lose feeling. It is too weak to sustain the shape. It needs Eddie’s body now.
It retracts all but three tendrils, and gropes around in the darkness. Eddie can’t be too far under.
It expects to find Eddie’s thrashing limbs as Eddie struggles for the surface, but when it does finally touch something solid, it’s unmoving.
It sinks beneath Eddie’s skin with a sigh. Returning to Eddie is like coming home.
And then.
What in the—
“Eddie!”
Eddie doesn’t respond because Eddie is…
Eddie is…
Eddie is dying?
Venom engulfs Eddie immediately. It locates the hole in the ice far above them and it flings a limb up to it, clutching at the sharp edge to rocket them up and then through. They launch into the air and onto the unbroken ice.
“Eddie!”
Eddie wasn’t underwater for long enough to have drowned. He should be fine. He should be fine. He can hold his breath for longer than that, even without Venom’s help.
But his body is in shutdown.
Venom shifts to Eddie’s emergency locations: lungs, heart, brain, spine. It pumps water directly out of Eddie’s lungs and manually manipulates the diaphragm to haul in oxygen to replace it. It expects Eddie’s body to pick up the reflexive action but it doesn’t, which scares Venom even more than the amount of water it had forced out. It anchors a part of itself there to keep inflating and deflating before rushing to the next stop.
The heart, it is relieved to find, has a beat, though it’s weak and too fast. It knows from past experience that it can’t manipulate the heart like any other muscle, so it takes over the role of blood circulation as well, using the weak thrum of Eddie’s heart as a base. It leaves another anchor to alert it if the thrum stops.
Eddie’s brain and spine appear unharmed, but it hurries the delivery of oxygen and hopes there is no unseen damage. It doesn’t know how to fix that kind of injury. It’s knowledge of Eddie’s organs is only as good as Eddie’s knowledge, and Eddie knows surprisingly little about his inside bits, especially the soggy thing in his head.
“Eddie?” it tries again, but Eddie is still unresponsive. Venom pumps blood, pumps oxygen, sweeps for injuries. Eddie’s bones are in place. There is no torn skin. There isn’t so much as a bruise. “Eddie,” it calls, “there is nothing left to fix.” It prods Eddie delicately, in the soft spot beneath his ribs. The spot that makes him flinch and swat Venom away. This time Eddie doesn’t even twitch. It prods harder. It keeps pumping air, pumping blood, pumping, pumping, prodding, pumping. Eddie doesn’t react.
Venom sweeps Eddie again, and this time it finds something wrong. Eddie’s fingers aren’t circulating blood properly. The tips are necrotic. The skin is dead. Venom makes new skin, then replaces the ruined flesh. It leaves more anchors in both hands in case it happens again. It is spreading itself too thin but Eddie still isn’t waking up.
“What’s wrong?” Venom wails.
It unwraps from around Eddie to inspect him visually. His clothes are soaked through. His lips are blue. He is so pale as to be almost translucent. As Venom pulls away, Eddie’s clothes begin to freeze solid in the breeze.
“You’re cold!” Venom realises. It engulfs Eddie again. Usually it gets temperature cues directly from its host, but with Eddie unconscious there had been no signal. But cold is something they have had experience with! Venom has done this before. Protecting Eddie from the elements is easy.
It manipulates Eddie into a ball—harder now with his clothes frozen—and blankets him, holding him aloft from the ice beneath them. Venom can’t make heat, only retain it. But previous experience has shown that retaining Eddie’s heat is more than enough to keep him warm. It pokes Eddie hopefully.
“You’re protected now,” it prompts, in case Eddie hadn’t realised.
The anchor at Eddie’s heart alerts Venom to an increased pulse rate, but each pulse is still too weak, and without Venom circulating the blood it wouldn’t make it anywhere. If anything, the increased pulse seems to indicate a worsening in Eddie’s condition.
Venom dives into Eddie’s memories, looking for help. But it’s impossible to pull any information out when Eddie isn’t around to direct it to the right place. It finds a memory of laughing with Annie, but it’s warped and stretched out like taffy, like Eddie isn’t strong enough to hold the memory together. There’s another memory of singing in the shower, overlaid haphazardly with an interview from before Venom’s arrival. These memories are useless.
Venom is at a loss. It doesn’t know what else it can do. This is the only way it knows of to make Eddie warm. And it’s not working.
It searches its own memories this time. Of all the times Eddie had been cold. There was that day when they had been walking home and it had started snowing. Eddie had rubbed his arms and stuffed his fingers in his armpits. Maybe that will work? Venom manipulates him into the same position, fingers tucked up tight beneath his arms. It rubs itself over Eddie’s skin.
It doesn’t… not help.
But Eddie is still unconscious.
It keeps rubbing, wedging itself into all the nooks and crannies it can find to make sure it’s getting all of Eddie’s skin.
What next?
Once, Eddie had sat in a cold office for hours, typing and shivering. He had left his jacket at home and the air conditioning had been up too high. Venom had watched with interest as Eddie’s muscles had started rapidly contracting and releasing, making Eddie shake. The shaking had stimulated warmth.
It shakes Eddie.
Eddie’s head lolls uselessly.
Maybe the shaking needs to be more localised.
It selects a half dozen muscles in one of Eddie’s arms, and contracts them all at once. Eddie punches himself in the chest. Venom releases the muscles and then clenches them again. It reselects muscles that work in tandem, and then does the same with the other arm, and then when it thinks it has the hang of this whole ‘shivering’ thing it does the same thing with Eddie’s legs, and then his chest. When it’s done Eddie looks like a scared little morsel. A rabbit shaking beneath its prey.
It’s not a good look on Eddie.
It keeps going. It pumps Eddie’s blood, fills his lungs, chafes his skin, shakes his muscles. It is semi-aware (in a maybe-Eddie-knew-this-long-ago kind of way) that what it’s doing is exchanging energy. It doesn’t have heat to give, but it does have kinetic energy, and maybe that’s the same thing.
“Eddie?” it checks. “Are you feeling better?”
No response.
Healing Eddie has made it hungry, and Eddie is in no condition to feed it anytime soon. It resigns itself to miserable starvation—at least for the time being. It needs to get Eddie warm, first.
It peers around them but there is only ice and, in the distance, the snow-laden trees they had barged through while trying to escape. There’s nothing that it can use to transfer heat. No nice, warm buildings. No steaming mugs of hot coffee. Not even a terrible, terrible fire.
Well…
It looks back at the trees in the distance.
Oh…
Eddie isn’t going to like this…
“The things I do for you,” it says.
Eddie, in typical human fashion, doesn’t bother responding.
The fire, when it finally gets going, is hideous. It spits up big orange tongues that snap at Venom like whips, and it cackles while it burns. Terrible, loud, cracking laughter that doesn’t shrink away even when Venom hisses at it and threatens it with disembowelment. It’s like the fire knows Venom can’t get close.
Evil, wretched thing.
Venom takes all the half-frozen clothes off Eddie and then plasters itself along his back, using the bulk of his body as protection from the fire. It wedges as many tendrils as it dares beneath Eddie’s skin to keep him breathing, and to keep his blood circulating, and to keep an eye on his fingers and his toes and the cold vulnerable tip of his nose. It continues to rub against everything it’s touching, to entice warmth back into the places the fire can’t reach.
Keeping a human alive is a lot of work.
It is so hungry that Eddie’s organs start to look awfully appetising.
But it has spent so long trying to fix Eddie that it is loath to undo any of the work.
Maybe just a nibble of a kidney, though…
No, no, better not.
It snags a piece of the demolished tree that it is using as both kindling and protection from the wind, and—from a safe distance—it lobs the wood at the flames, ducking behind Eddie as the fire sizzles and spits bits of superheated snow everywhere.
It rolls Eddie onto his other side, so his back can be warmed by the fire too. This time it plasters itself to Eddie’s stomach and chest. It takes the opportunity to check Eddie’s extremities for signs of necrosis. Circulation is poor everywhere, but nothing is dying on Venom’s watch. It rubs Eddie’s ears until they are pink instead of white. Then it rubs Eddie’s fingertips, and then his toes, and then all the other poky-outie bits that it can find.
The poky-outie bit between Eddie’s legs has a very strange reaction.
“That’s new,” it says to itself.
If Eddie has a thought on the matter he keeps it to himself.
Venom quickly peeks over Eddie’s side to confirm that the fire isn’t doing anything it shouldn’t be doing (besides existing) and then it ducks back into the safety of Eddie’s midriff, where his body is curled over almost as though he’s cuddling Venom.
How sweet.
Venom rubs itself over all the bits of Eddie that aren’t exposed to the fire. And then… almost not deliberately… it rubs itself over Eddie’s crotch again.
“Very interesting,” it says out loud.
A quick check of Eddie’s insides confirm that everything is still working. His heart has dropped to a semi-normal rhythm. His lungs are… well, they’re trying. The important thing is that they’re trying.
“The important thing is that you’re trying,” Venom tells Eddie considerately. It thinks that might have been a line on Eddie’s yoga tape.
It rubs over Eddie again.
Eddie burps out another memory. Maybe he’s waking up or maybe what Venom is doing is directing his unconscious thoughts, but either way this memory is actually useful. In it, Eddie looks up at Annie adoringly and she smiles back open-mouthed, rocking slowly above him. In the memory Eddie is flushed and panting. He is warm even though he is naked.
Hmm.
Searching its own memories Venom can find nothing comparable, though there have been occasions that have been somewhat similar. Eddie sometimes touches himself in the shower, or in bed. Touching himself is always paired with increased blood flow and a release of endorphins.
It takes a closer look at the appendage between Eddie’s legs. It doesn’t look all that important, but maybe it has a secondary function as a source of warmth and wellness.
Excellent.
With a new goal in mind, Venom gets to work. It focuses its rubbing on the warmth-limb, which responds admirably. Circulation improves considerably.
After a few minutes it’s time to roll Eddie onto his other side again, and in the shuffle Venom loses hold of the appendage. With Eddie’s front now facing the fire the appendage is out of reach.
Venom attempts to access it by going over Eddie’s hips, but the fire growls menacingly and Venom slinks back. It then tries to sneak between Eddie’s thighs, but the angle isn’t right and the fire is much too close to do anything worthwhile.
So Venom tries the internal route.
“It’s lucky I’m so superior to you humans,” it tells Eddie. “I bet you didn’t even know that you could reach the limb from the inside.”
The only bit of Eddie that reacts is the bit poking out in front. It twitches as though it heard. Venom finds it quite endearing. If only Eddie were always so responsive.
In the distance, a wolf howls. If Venom didn’t have Eddie to worry about it would be heading towards the howl in hopes of some dinner. But as it is, Venom doesn’t think either of them is strong enough to take down anything bigger than a hamburger.
It licks its lips longingly.
Hopefully Eddie will wake up soon, and then they can go hunting.