Chapter Text
New York is a beautiful city, it’s true. There are skyscrapers that touch the sky and kiss the wind, the river looks beautiful against the reddening sky of the city that never sleeps, the pigeons fly in flocks around the buildings like schools of fish swarming in coral reefs. Even so, Eddie doesn’t like the city much. Too much drama, a life too fast for him and Anne to keep up with, and too many lies to expose (which, unsurprisingly, is what gets him run out of the city). Unfortunately, there’s a conference with yet another megalomaniac with deep pockets in Philadelphia he has to get to, and the JFK Airport in Queens is a necessary step in his plan.
Being back in New York causes Eddie some anxiety, but it’s cheaper to simply land in New York and take a rental down to his Philadelphia and Eddie needs to eat, so New York it is. Somehow, the anxiety pooling in Eddie’s gut mixed with Venom’s vague hunger and the sheer boredom of being stuck in a plane for five hours in the economy section made for an uncomfortable flight. Even without their own bias, the flight was awful; the plane was cold as ice when they entered and was boiling by the time they got off, the thirty-something mother of two is quiet and so are her children (god bless) but she smells so strongly of cheap perfume from Kohl’s that Eddie gets a migraine, and they get a window seat which would have been fine, had Eddie not gotten the sudden urge to pee from Venom getting bored and settling too close to his bladder and as such has to climb over said mother of two (twice!) to go to the bathroom.
All in all, not the best flight for Eddie or Venom. Fortunately, it’s over and they can go to the car rental in peace. They decide on taking a taxi to the car rental which turns out to be a good idea and also a terrible one at once. Good because their driver is a New York native, which means that he has seen too much in his life to care about having a man who talks to himself in his backseat; bad because they get stuck in traffic for an hour, which is stupid because the rental was only supposed to be twenty minutes away.
Eddie’s resting his head on the passenger window, beginning to zone out to Venom’s constant dialogue of what they think the driver tastes like (OLD MEN TASTE LIKE MINT TEA, EDDIE. THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS, EDDIE ) when it happens. There’s a weird feeling that goes through the city, like something important happened somewhere but they just don’t know what, and then people begin disappearing. The always-moving New York crowd stops moving, breathing, walking.
That’s when the screaming starts. People are disintegrating left and right, turning into dust with no warning. The people near them begin screaming and crying, as they realize what is happening. Panic rises in Eddie and Venom’s throat, and they look down at their hands. They’re the same as always: strong and lightly calloused, with scars on the knuckles from fights in college.
Relief crashes through them, but before they have time to celebrate and figure out what the holy fuck is going on, they notice their index finger begin to swirl away. Venom’s tendrils materialize and try to regenerate their fingers, to fix something, but they can’t find anything wrong with their body. Even if they could find something wrong, the decay is too fast and Eddie’s body is falling apart too fast for any symbiote to keep up.
“
NO
!” screams Venom, uncaring if anyone hears them, unaware of anything but their vanishing host.
“Ve-venom? Venom, stop! You’re hurting yourself,” cries Eddie, somehow more concerned that Venom was burning too much energy trying to do something, fix something than that his limbs were turning into actual dust before his and Venom’s eyes. Obviously, the situation hasn’t set in properly, but it only takes a second for Eddie to see his bicep disappear and for his eyes to widen.
He only manages an
I love you Ven
- before the deterioration reaches his head and he’s gone.
Venom’s vision goes white and they
scream
. It’s quite a few minutes before they come back to the present
They’re alone on a leather taxi seat, the taxi driver passed out in the front, partially from shock and partially from the sheer volume that Venom was able to reach. Venom themself is shaking and beginning to hurt from not being able to breathe, but they can’t focus on anything besides the lack of Eddie, the lack of their bond, of another mind pressed to theirs so closely they can’t tell the difference between the two.
Life is meaningless without Eddie, and Venom is fully prepared to choke to death without him. They look around and see Eddie’s bags on the seat next to them. They can almost hear him, they can almost feel the pressure of Eddie’s body as Eddie laughs and calls them sweetheart and darling. Their vision begins to fade and they realize: Eddie wouldn’t have wanted this, for Venom to die right after him. He’d have wanted for Venom to live and move on. Venom doesn’t want that, though. He doesn’t want another host, perfect or not. He wants
Eddie
, with a dumb fear of heights and toes that never warm up completely, and not enough money to match his generosity. He wants
Eddie
, who buys them chocolate, who eats his sandwiches upside-down because he swears it makes it easier, who loves plants but can only keep one alive at a time because he always forgets which plants like water and which don’t.
Venom wants Eddie, and he will destroy the universe if that is what it will take to bring him back. They make their choice.
They hop into the taxi driver’s body and feel
wrongwrongnoteddieNOTEDDIE
. They crawl into their host’s brain for anything, any information which could possibly help them, but the driver is so old and out of touch that all Venom can gain is that Tony Stark can probably be found in his tower.
They get out of the car and hightail it to the tower with Venom safely inside the driver’s chest because they won’t wrap themselves around him like they did Eddie and Anne, it’s too energy consuming and gross for them. Venom eats the driver as soon as they reach the glass doors. They hear Eddie’s disappointed voice going,
we don’t eat random people Venom, only the bad ones!
in their mind like an afterthought and they feel a twinge of guilt before they’re consumed in their anger once more. Fuel is fuel to Venom and to get Eddie back Venom will need all the fuel they can get.
They hop from host to host, leaving no bodies and trace they were ever there. They end up in some high-ranking project manager's body, some man who’s been watching the news and knows that Tony Stark is not, in fact, in his tower, but rather in a space donut that left Earth almost half a day ago. They scream and their host begins to feel their eyes fill with tears that are most certainly not his.
EDDIE!
“W-who is this? What’s going on? Who is Eddie?” chokes out the project manager between sobs.
WE WERE VENOM AND NOW EDDIE IS GONE. WHERE ARE THE AVENGERS?
growls Venom, and his host blubbers.
TELL ME, OR I WILL RIP YOUR FLESH FROM YOUR BONES.
“I-I don’t know! Tony’s been missing for ten hours and he was last seen in London! Black Panther lives in Wakanda, maybe they’re there? Please let me go I have to look for my family, I have to see if they’re ali-”
WE WILL GO TO WAKANDA. TAKE US THERE.
“B-but my family!”
EITHER THEY’RE DEAD OR THEY AREN’T. THAT WILL NOT CHANGE, NOR DOES IT MATTER. I WILL FIX THIS AND I WILL GET EDDIE BACK. TAKE ME TO WAKANDA OR I WILL FIND ANOTHER HOST AND BITE YOUR HEAD OFF. YOU’RE JUST A VESSEL TO ME, REMEMBER?
“I- okay, uh. Venom, right? Well, there’s an automated cargo plane leaving the tower in a little over thirty minutes, you could take that, right?” The project manager is an awful host, but Venom can almost appreciate their willingness to cooperate. No doubt that came from working under Stark for so long.
ACCEPTABLE. I WILL TAKE THE DIRECTIONS AND GO.
Venom plunges into the man’s mind, extracting any memory of the cargo flight and rips himself free from the nasty meatbag he was in. He crawls out of an open window and jumps out, latching himself onto a pigeon roosting on a balcony on one of the lower levels. They don’t look at the dust which swirls from the city as they fly up, up, up, onto the upper floor loading docks. Venom finds their plane and goes to sleep on one of the crates, careful to not overload the pigeon’s body and send it into organ failure too early. It’s deteriorating already. How disgusting. If only Edd-
A sharp spike of ice forms in their chest and they cut that thought off immediately. They go to sleep, alone.