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The fire was a hungry, acid-spitting thing, boiling away parts of him until only a charred sliver remained, safe inside the comparatively cool chamber of Eddie's chest, enclosed by his curved bones and coiled around the muscle that distributes his blood. It was hammering hard when he hit the water, throwing bubbles to the surface with his screams, and Venom wanted to call out, reassure, but he was too weak even to writhe. He'd been reduced to a pathetic fragment of his former mass, and the pain was immense.
He survived the fire, if just barely, but he would have died soon afterward, frail and voiceless, had Eddie not sensed him.
“I feel you,” Eddie said the following morning. He was leaning close to the mirror, hands braced to the sink, studying his weary eyes as if he might find evidence of Venom there. Venom wanted to provide this, sweep a tendril down from under Eddie's thin eyelid and over his soft sclera, but he was helpless with exhaustion. “You’re still in there, aren't you?” Eddie asked. “The explosion hurt you bad, but you're still in there, somewhere deep down. You're weak.”
Venom remembered the bitter taste of Eddie's hatred, his accusing eyes, “we're done,” and half expected him to bare his small blunt teeth in a show of cruelty, wish Venom a quick death and starve himself until all that remained of Venom shriveled away. That was all it would have taken to finish the job, perhaps a day of fasting.
“Don’t worry, buddy. I've got us,” Eddie said instead, and Venom felt a warm flood of the chemicals humans call affection. Eddie bought all the chocolate at Mrs. Chen’s store and ate every piece, even when it made him moan with discomfort. Venom felt Eddie's disgust, but Eddie persisted anyway, to feed Venom and give him strength. At one point the desperate thought crossed Eddie's mind that he would have to find a human brain to eat, and it didn't come to that, but Venom was deeply touched.
Venom is much stronger now, though currently only half of what he was, and he feels a new reverence for his host. Eddie is more than just an unpleasantly fleshy husk, a vehicle for Venom to override and smother into submission. He is a true match, the kind of host Venom's species have all but forgotten. Venom enjoys stretching himself very thin and weaving between the fibers of Eddie's muscles. He enjoys pooling inside Eddie's ever expanding, constricting lungs, listening and watching the branch-like structures sway with the steady wind of Eddie's breathing.
He even enjoys sitting in on Eddie's dreams, secret and often ridiculous things. Last night Eddie dreamed he was a juvenile again, walking pantless and distressed through the winding halls of a place his memories call “high school.” Venom was enthralled, though the whole scene was sour with humiliation. Eddie had to be reminded of that dream when he woke from it, and he laughed at Venom's description.
Tonight Eddie's dreams are similarly amusing. Venom watches through his eyes as he sits down for an interview with a man his memories call “Abraham Lincoln.” Eddie says, “So, ‘Honest Abe.’ Let's cut the bullshit and get right to it. Are there vampires under the White House?”
Venom wriggles gently through Eddie's brain, exploring the concepts of folklore and historical figures, and returns to Eddie's cortex when this dream dies, bleeding into the next. Eddie never has just one. Venom sees Anne, and is overjoyed by the way Eddie has conjured her, her skin glowing, eyes bright. She is without clothes, and Venom admires the female shape of her. He had no time for proper exploration while he was inside her, and he indulges that fascination now, marveling at her reclined on a bed in a room he doesn't recognize. He watches as Eddie crawls toward her and touches her where she's dark and strange, parting the folds of her and curling his fingers inside.
Consumed with curiosity, Venom retreats to the hippocampus to reference Eddie's memories. Mating for humans is not as it is for Venom's species. Humans mate excessively, often solely for pleasure with no thought of procreation. Eddie has so many memories of what he calls “sex,” Venom is overwhelmed, lost for where to begin. He returns to the dream to watch Eddie slot his genitals into Anne’s, and leaves Eddie's body when he feels it squirm as though in discomfort.
He coalesces a head, rising from Eddie's chest and into the moon-broken dark of their bedroom. He studies Eddie's face, the way his cheeks puff out around quickening breaths. His heart is squeezing, but not for fear. Venom feels what Eddie feels, feverish and flushed, twitching between their legs. Some of Eddie's blood has diverted from its usual path to fill his genitals.
“Eddie,” Venom hisses, nudging Eddie's sweat-damp cheek. “Eddie, wake up. We are…swollen.”
Eddie groans, and Venom feels his soupy displeasure as he cracks open one eye. “Too early,” he whines. “Go back to sleep, V.”
“But,” Venom says. He looks to where Eddie's sweatpants have risen over the swelling.
“Oh.” Eddie groans again, and sits up, blinking slowly. “Shit. Sorry, man. This is freaking you out, I can feel it.”
“I am not freaking out,” Venom says, affronted. “Explain this at once. We tingle.”
“Tingle?” Eddie smiles, tasting of oxytocin. “Oh, man. Let's talk about it tomorrow, okay? When there's coffee.”
“Now!” Venom insists. It's throbbing, too, in time with Eddie's heart. “Why do we tingle?”
“First of all, stop saying ‘tingle.’ It’s gross.” Eddie scrubs his eyes with his fists. “Second of all, I'm hard. It's a thing that happens sometimes, to us guys. Nothing to be weird about.”
“It is weird,” Venom says. “My species once sought each other out for reproduction, one moving into another to extract their seeds, but there was no pleasure in it. Now we procreate alone, the more efficient method. Humans seem to have gone in the opposite direction. Like this.”
Venom conjures with disgust a memory of Eddie making himself vulnerable for another male, allowing himself to be restrained and penetrated in an unfamiliar place, wrists bound with black leather. Eddie shudders, seeing this memory as Venom does, and Venom struggles to parse Eddie's response, not regret but increased arousal.
“Get out of my head,” Eddie says roughly. His tension angers Venom, this stubborn desire to withhold things. This body belongs to them, weird swellings and all. They must be together at all times in all things, a complete match. “Are you really gonna make me give you the birds and the bees talk? At two a.m.?”
“Yes. Explain how birds and bees are relevant to this,” Venom says, unable to connect these three things as Eddie understands them.
“Maybe it'd be better if I just showed you.” Eddie moves his hands, hovering them over his lap. “Um,” he says. Venom tastes his reluctance; it's acrid like shame, something that should not exist between them. That there's room for anything to exist between them, no matter how small and abstract, is unacceptable. “This is too freaky, you breathing down my neck,” Eddie says. “Can't you hang out inside while I do this? Just watch?”
“Fine.” Venom retracts into Eddie's overly warm skin, caressing the blood vessels as he goes. He counts two hundred and six bones, and seventy-eight organs in Eddie's body. Sometimes Venom can't resist the sweet allure of Eddie's liver, and that number drops down to seventy-seven until Venom regrows it. He can't imagine a better home than Eddie, a more agreeable host, and he longs to understand everything, every minute function. He lines Eddie's eye sockets, cradling the too-delicate twin organs with his mass.
“Thanks.” Eddie blinks twice as he hooks his fingers under his waistband and works his pants down to his knees. Venom purrs his approval, releasing chemicals that make Eddie shiver with trust and confidence. “Okay,” Eddie says in a dark voice. His genitals — “cock,” Eddie's thoughts call it; Venom is endeared by this term and decides to adopt it — are engorged, and Venom could seep down to them if he chose, explore more thoroughly, but he wants to know Eddie as Eddie knows himself.
“There was a hole in Anne,” Venom says, a small part of him curled in Eddie's ear canal. He wants to encase all of Eddie, make himself a second layer of skin, but he's not recovered enough for that. Yet. “You cleaved her. She liked it. You have been the cleaved one, too. Is that not unnatural for one of your sex? A…man?”
Eddie grimaces. Every time Venom mentions Anne, or conjures memories of her, Eddie recoils as though a nerve was plucked. “Here’s an idea: let’s not say her name or think about her at all,” he says.
“Why?” Venom asks, frustrated as always by Eddie's refusal to discuss their mate. Venom savored her, though she was not a true match, and he could be convinced to share Eddie with her, to share her with Eddie. Through Eddie's eyes, she's the most perfect woman in the universe, worthy of Venom's perfect host.
“Or I'm done,” Eddie says. “Okay, V? Don't think about Anne. I don't want to feel you rummaging around in my memories. This has nothing to do with her, or anything. It's just…me showing you how it works.”
Venom snarls, displeased with this concession. “You are mine completely,” he says. “All of you. You may have fed me, but you never embraced us. Do you still not understand symbiosis? They are our memories. This is our body. There can be no distinction between you and I. Eddie, I am in your cells.”
“You’re so all-or-nothing,” Eddie hisses. He slides one hand under his shirt, up his stomach, and presses down over his heart. Venom feels the touch everywhere at once, on the skin of Eddie's palm, the tips of his spread fingers, his chest and sternum. “Shut up and watch if that's what you want. Or don't, and we'll just go back to sleep.”
Venom is quiet, seething but needfully curious.
“Good,” Eddie says. He breathes deeply, riding the movement with one hand while the other forms a tight fist around his cock. Venom jolts at the sharp flaring of nerves, dopamine released like a sprung leak. “You feel that?” Eddie asks. He squeezes, and slowly drags his fist up and down. Venom pulses, unsure of the sensation but wanting more of it. “I’m kinda jealous, actually,” Eddie says. He repeats the motion, and again, gaining speed, slicking his palm with a thin secretion from his urethra, easing the friction. “It’s gonna rock your world, feeling this for the first time.”
“Oh,” Venom says, knowing now why humans mate with such reckless frequency. This is heady, and it seems to be building toward something like approaching a soaring ledge. Some of Venom seeps from Eddie's chest to twine around his fingers.
“Here we go, babe — buddy, sorry. Hold on,” Eddie stammers. He releases himself to retrieve a tissue from the box on the nightstand, and Venom feels the loss like separation from his host, a visceral Need That Back. “Here we go, buddy.”
The pumping becomes more violent upon resuming, but somehow doesn't hurt. Venom watches from Eddie's fluttering eyes, waiting eagerly for the ledge, wondering what will emerge. He knows there are no seeds in Eddie's body, or eggs, and possesses a vague understanding of human reproduction. Last week he and Eddie walked past a woman with a stomach so disproportionately large Venom was certain she harbored a symbiote of her own, one too powerful to be contained by her otherwise puny form. Eddie laughed, and explained how there was a child inside.
Venom considers this, and whether or not he would be willing to share Eddie's body with their developing offspring, but his thoughts are interrupted by a whirlwind of too-much vibrations. Eddie goes limp, falling back onto the mattress with a breathy laugh, still wringing his cock, and the muscles in the cradle of his hip bones contract spasmodically. Venom dislikes that something so huge and possibly dangerous has happened to Eddie without his permission, and is made dizzy by the onslaught of endorphins. It drives Venom into Eddie's rib cage, seeking shelter, but Eddie's heart is hammering the way it did when he thought one or both of them were going to die.
The stark contrast between the fear palpitations of Eddie's heart and the pleasure chemicals of his brain is disorienting. Venom feels everything Eddie feels, but never anything so strong as this. It's good, but uncomfortable for being too much, like pleasant warmth that grows into mass-consuming flames. He's relieved when the contractions end and Eddie relaxes, his hand still pressing his chest. Venom feels it, and rises to meet it, pushing against Eddie's palm from between his skin and sternum, not wanting to come out yet.
“And that's an orgasm,” Eddie says, and rocks Venom when he yawns. He wipes a thicker, nutrient-rich secretion from his stomach; Venom is aghast to think they've just ejected so many valuable proteins. “Pretty cool, right? And it's good for us. I think I read somewhere that jerking off prevents cancer, but don't quote me on that one. Um. Are you okay?”
Venom feels unraveled, chilly aftershocks buzzing through their body. “I…do not know,” he says. “That was much.” For a second, he thought they might be broken.
“Shit. Okay, come here.” Eddie sits, fumbles his pants up and puts his arms out. Venom hesitates to leave the safety of Eddie's chest, where not even fire could reach him. “Baby, come on,” Eddie says, a high note of pleading in his voice. “You gotta let me hold you.”
Venom doesn't see the necessity, but he seeps out from Eddie's shirt and into his lap, shapeless. He's both uneasy and overly relaxed, so loosely formed he almost oozes through Eddie's fingers when Eddie lifts him up and cradles him against his chest. Venom wants to call this pointless. Eddie holding him this way should not be beneficial; it is a lesser bond than when Venom is wound up Eddie's spine or webbed between his ribs. But it soothes them, and Venom listens as Eddie's heart slows, from the outside for once.
“Yeah, that's better. We're okay.” Eddie touches his lips to Venom's mass, and Venom preens. He knows kisses are affectionate gestures to humans, and rare, not bestowed upon just anyone. “Sorry, V. I thought you'd like it. Fuck, I'm an idiot. I should've known it would be weird for you.”
“I did not not like it,” Venom says. “I would not be opposed to experiencing it again, except…”
“Hm?”
“Eddie.” Venom projects his concern, so Eddie will understand. “Are we pregnant now?”
“What?” Eddie laughs, and Venom feels his surprised humor. “No, buddy. Only women can get pregnant, and it's not something you can do alone.”
Venom hisses. “We are not alone.”
“I know. Shh, I know.” Eddie tastes of pleasure, the gentle, slow-flowing kind that Venom enjoys lapping from their brain stem. Eddie lies down, and sharing his exhaustion, Venom sinks back inside. He doesn't require sleep, but he can achieve a brief dormancy, mimicking it. His favorite place to rest is Eddie's stomach, where the fluids are too weak to harm him but still potent enough to bubble soothingly against his mass. “We’re not alone,” Eddie says, rumbling around Venom. “It’s you and me against the world now, huh?”
Venom purrs, amused; as if this world would stand a chance.