Work Text:
When Anne and Dan reach Eddie’s apartment, a small crash sounds past his new door.
“I told you we should have done this on the bed!”
“It is not stable enough for us.”
“Look, I’m below you. I should get to decide what I get shoved against.”
“Shut up and squeeze your legs harder.”
Anne looks at Dan in horror, finding his face set in a painfully polite smile.
“What the fuck,” she mouths. Dan has not moved his lips from their bedside-manner rictus, but his eyebrows lift a little when Eddie speaks again.
“Yes! Right there yesyesyes . . .” Anne feels a strong urge to die.
“Stop moving so much.”
“A’right, I will, I will!” Eddie’s breaths are loud enough to hear.
“Is this correct?”
“You’re perfect, babe. Now get your hands on—” Anne finally unfreezes, somewhat frantically.
“Eddie? Hi, it’s me and Dan. Remember we told you we were coming?”
“Oh, Annie! Hey, yeah, I uh.” Eddie punctuates his words with a soft grunt. “I remember that.”
“You should come in.” Dan exhales what could charitably be described as a laugh.
“You sure about that?” Anne’s voice is remarkably even.
“Yeah, but you gotta let yourself in. Me’n Venom are . . . a little busy.” Yeah, no shit.
Anne opens the door slowly, and gapes at what she finds.
“When did you get a yoga mat?” is what she ends up with, at the same time Dan asks a question of his own.
“So you weren’t having sex, then?” Eddie jerks with surprise, falling out of his supporting position in some sort of bizarre duo acrobatic pose. Venom, fully humanoid, had melted back into Eddie when he started falling.
“We weren’t—what? No, we weren’t having—hi, Annie! We were just,” Eddie looks some mixture of mortified and hopelessly confused.
“We will . . . get there. Just start with the yoga mat.” Anne knows how to work with Eddie. Eddie picks himself up from the frazzled lump he’d formed on the floor, sitting upright on a bright pink yoga mat, one leg folded over the other.
“Well. I got the mat at a store when Venom made me bite into it—”
“You thought that it looked tasty, so we ate it. Not my fault, Eddie.” Venom pops back out, this time just a tiny snake-like figure weaving out of Eddie’s shoulder.
“Venom, I’m sure Eddie’s brain makes connections to food all the time. That doesn’t mean he wants to eat them,” Dan says patiently. Eddie winces slightly, and Anne can’t stifle the squawk of laughter that bursts out of her.
“So anyway,” says Eddie, somewhat desperately, “there was a bite that was taken out of the yoga mat so I bought it and now we do partner yoga?” Eddie’s shoulders creep up while he speaks, and Anne realizes that he’d previously been sitting perfectly straight. Yoga, huh?
“And you were only doing yoga when we got here? That’s all?” prompts Anne. Eddie pauses, shifts a little.
“When you got here,” Eddie says slowly, “we were only doing yoga.” Anne squints at him, and he blushes faintly.
“Could you do it again?” asks Dan, frighteningly earnest.
“Oh! Uh, yeah. For sure.” Eddie rolls onto his back, bracing his arms out to the side and extending his legs to the ceiling. Venom swells out of his legs (which, nasty) and forms a body, upside down. He bends his legs into a diamond sort of shape, supported on Eddie’s outstretched legs.
“Venom, why are you doing that with your chest?” Venom has pulled out folds from himself, for a kind of ruffed lizard effect.
“Eddie said it adds pizzazz. We like pizzazz.” Well. It’s not like things could get any weirder.
“This is fascinating! Can you do anything else? Maybe add another person?” Scratch that.
“Dan, really?”
“What? It seems fun. I mean, the implications of Venom forming a full body outside of Eddie alone are super interesting. Do you think he could support my weight?”
“I’m going to go.” Anne grasps for something to do. “Get some coffee.”
She opens the door for a second time that night, to see Dan planking on Venom while Eddie holds hands with Dan so that he can do a fucking headstand on Venom’s feet.
“Eddie. I, um, I didn’t know you could do a headstand,” says Anne.
“Y-yeah,” Eddie grits out. “Hang on.”
“Anne, you should try this. It’s great!” She turns around and closes the door for the second time that night.
Anne doesn’t know what she expected, what would happen, after—after the LIFE Foundation, after the breakup, after an indeterminate series of events that never managed to establish an end point.
It had been a change, had been surprising, when something else was fucking Eddie’s life up for him, and Anne hadn’t really prepared for that. She was ready for him to self destruct. That had always been a possibility, and it might have been unfair to Eddie, but she’d spent not an insignificant amount of time making sure that she would be okay if that happened. Maybe the problem was that they both, deep down, had ascribed a “when” and never an “if” to Eddie’s self-immolation.
Anne had looked back at Eddie, damp and terrified in her rear view mirror, and realized that she had never been ready for something to happen to him.
What a fucking revelation.
Eddie, it turned out, had been ready. Well, as ready as he was for anything, which meant a consistent amount of not very. She thinks about how toddlers can fall and get back up over and over because they’re already so close to the ground, and then she stops thinking about that with a shudder because she had sex with Eddie and their relationship isn’t that fucked up that she actually thinks of him as a toddler.
So here she is, walking through Chinatown, staring down a crisis in the foam of her macchiato, while her boyfriend does fucking partner yoga with an alien and also her ex. Anne can’t tell if she’s finding it weirder or more normal than she should. There probably hasn’t been a “should” assigned to this particular situation yet, she thinks.
Was this the future she had imagined with Eddie? No, but what the hell would a domestic future with Eddie Brock even have been? A family?
Well.
Maybe this time around, family can be group yoga conducted between a woman, her boyfriend, her ex-fiancé, and her ex-fiancé’s alien tagalong.
The door doesn’t let any dubiously sensual conversation through this time. It just exists in front of her, conspicuously bullet hole-free, solid against her knuckles.
“Come in,” she hears Eddie say, barely audible.
“I was thinking,” Anne starts, and then trails off. “What’s going on?”
Eddie is sitting down and leaning in some kind of a stretch toward Venom, who has now formed a small face by his toes. He grimaces slightly, rocking forward, and says “I’m doing a cooldown stretch.”
“Why is Dan facedown on the yoga mat?” Anne should know by now to ask Eddie direct questions.
“Hhheeuuurgh,” says Dan.
“Dan? Oh, I taught him corpse pose. And then he kinda rolled over, and I figured he seemed more comfortable like that, so.” Dan, in Anne’s more experienced opinion, doesn’t look comfortable at all.
“Hey, Dan, honey, you ok?”
“Hhhmmmmhm,” says Dan.
“I take it you guys are done?”
“What, were you going to join us?” Eddie looks up at Anne, his smirk faltering. “Which, you know, would have been good! We’d love to do yoga with you!”
“I didn’t expect that you’d give up this early,” Anne says.
“Yoga’s hard.” Eddie shrugs with his whole body. “We’ve been practicing, but I think—”
“Dan has not,” Venom says with glee. Dan makes some sort of groan that Anne hears as ‘well, duh.’
“Next time, I’m joining in,” she says. Eddie looks up, meets her eyes.
“We’d like that, Annie.”