Annie and Dan are visiting his parents back East when the aliens hit New York, and then all the flights are canceled and the catsitter they hired doesn’t have any extra openings, so it’s Eddie to the rescue.
There’s some kind of irony in Anne finally trusting him to feed the cat a year after ending their engagement. He’s walking up the hill to their apartment, Annie on the phone telling him the system Dan uses for watering his plants, because of course Dan has a system, when Venom starts freaking out hard.
EDDIE, he says, so urgently that Eddie almost drops the phone. Eddie, something is wrong.
“What?” Eddie asks, looking reflexively around them–it can’t be Carnage again, unless–? But the street is quiet. The nearest person is an old woman pushing her bubbe cart.
“Eddie?” Anne asks, distant. “Everything okay?”
Something is very wrong, Venom repeats, and he sounds nearly distraught. He lurches sideways in Eddie’s chest, and Eddie does drop the phone this time.
“Whoa, whoa,” Eddie says, “What’s wrong?”
Instead of responding, Venom abruptly manifests, taking control of their body and scaring the pants off of the rest of the street.
“Jesus, V, what the hell,” Eddie says–or tries to say. He suddenly feels it too: something indefinable but essential is–wrong, and getting wronger.
“No,” Venom snarls out loud to the street, where the old woman–jesus christ. Where the old woman has just collapsed into dust, leaving nothing behind but her cart and her purse. A car slams into a lamppost, the driver’s seat suddenly empty. Someone is screaming, and they aren’t even screaming at them. “I said no.”
Oh, Eddie thinks, as a passenger tries to escape from the car’s backseat, and crumbles into nothing as soon as she reaches the pavement. Oh, that’s what’s happening to us.
“It is not.” Venom is surrounding him, is in him, deep as they always are, close enough that no one could tell the difference. Eddie can feel Venom repairing him, hanging onto his brain and his heart and feverishly binding atoms together that want to fall apart, and he can feel that it isn’t going to work, that not even us can stand against the unyielding pull of entropy.
I love you, V, Eddie thinks, fierce as he can.
“Don’t leave me,” Venom orders, frantic, hanging on as hard as they can, with every part of themselves. Eddie’s lost his view of the street, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s lost his eyes, or because Venom is shielding him from whatever there is to see, if the last thing he’ll see is that familiar blackness. “Don’t leave me alone, Eddie.”
Eddie tries his best to project gratitude with the last shreds of himself he can reach. He hopes Venom knows how much his life was changed, how much he wants––
*
I cried then I laughed. Good job.
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 