Sometimes, Eddie Brock is so still and quiet that, unless someone sees him, they won't even know he's there.
Taking a closer look, it's almost like he's dead. No movement whatsoever. He's not even breathing. But his coloration is okay, and if he were dead he'd probably be slumped over, not sitting up straight, right?
Of course, very few people know that the person that looks like Eddie Brock isn't actually Eddie Brock. Or, rather, not just Eddie Brock.
It's one thing to consider being perched forty feet in the air on the rafters of a warehouse ceiling while bonded to a symbiote that you know can protect you if you fall. It's another thing entirely to put that into practice.
This is the situation Eddie found himself in late one night.
Do not worry, Eddie, Venom said in his mind. I will catch us if we fall. The words were accompanied by loose impressions of what the symbiote would do if they were to fall – feelings, more than images, of reaching out, holding tight, protecting Eddie. They coated Eddie's own fearful thoughts, trying to drown them out.
Thanks, V, Eddie thought back.
His head was the only part of his body not covered by the symbiote. Despite whatever Venom might say to the contrary, Eddie's natural hearing was superior to Venom's at understanding what people were saying from a distance. Venom gave all sounds he heard – more like felt – equal weight, making it difficult to pay attention to specific ones. And unlike Eddie's, Venom's brain wasn't hardwired to understand spoken human language.
That didn't mean, of course, that Venom couldn't brag about the way he helped Eddie's brain focus more on the sounds he heard so that they stood out amongst all his other forms of sensory input.
To a normal human, the old warehouse would be fairly devoid of sound. To Eddie and Venom, though, the warehouse was alive with noise. Wind rattling the loose windows and roofing material. Water dripping, somewhere behind him and to his left. A few mice – or maybe rats – sniffing at something the normal occupants of the warehouse had left behind. Outside, engines in the distance, all making slightly different hums. Multiple AC systems in the other nearby warehouses, but not the one they were in.
No people, yet.
Venom was not handling the stakeout's boredom well. His attention kept wandering to the rodents, wondering what the ones in this particular area of San Francisco's outskirts would taste like. His wandering thoughts on categorizing the best tasting vermin in the city threatened to drag Eddie's attention along with it, and if they weren't careful, they'd find themselves chasing rats in the corner of the building instead of waiting for the drug dealer meeting that was rumored to take place here, tonight.
Not that Eddie was faring much better. His body wasn't bothering him, thank goodness; unnecessary movement and creaky rafters would jeopardize their watch. Venom took care of that, supplementing Eddie's strength with his own. Eddie had one hand gripping the diagonal girder next to him; Venom wrapped himself not just around Eddie's hand, but around the steel bar as well, like some sort of inky concrete. He held Eddie's feet in place, too, so that the man didn't have to worry about his shoes slipping.
No, Eddie's mind strained with the unnatural focus that they were giving to his sense of hearing. There was a limit to how long Eddie could go before his head would decide to quit, which normally involved a migraine that even Venom couldn't get rid of entirely. They were getting better at it as Eddie got used to having his senses enhanced by Venom, but he couldn't last forever like this.
At last, one engine grew louder than the rest. Eddie focused on it, dragging Venom's attention away from the rodents and back to the reason they were there.
Three people, they determined, based on the footsteps and van doors that opened and closed. They walked directly from their vehicle to the door of the warehouse, either unaware of or ignoring the half dozen cameras hidden in strategic areas around the building's exterior, which Eddie and Venom had gotten around by taking the roof and crawling in through a broken window.
Unfortunately, none of the three was speaking. Eddie and Venom frowned. What's the point of having super-hearing if there's nothing to overhear?
The warehouse wasn't currently wired for electricity and the windows let in a scant amount of light from the night outside. Eddie could barely make out the three figures as they entered the warehouse building.
Without being asked, Venom grew his own eyes over Eddie's. There was just a brief moment of total blindness for Eddie, where even the faint light went away as his eyes were covered, before the connection between his brain and Venom's senses kicked in.
Much to Venom's amusement, his night vision was superior to Eddie's, since his "eyes" could "see" better in the dark than Eddie's could. It wasn't vision in the sense that Eddie was used to – Venom had significantly less depth perception than Eddie did, and the things he saw were in colors that Eddie had no name for. But, Eddie had to admit, the symbiote's ability to see in the dark was immensely helpful.
The three arrivals were two men and a woman, each with barely concealed weaponry strapped to their hips. One of the men set something on foldable table near the door and Eddie's ears heard him flick a switch. A battery powered lantern illuminated the small area they had decided to occupy. The men and woman pulled up chairs and sat around the table, still not talking.
Does the man facing us look familiar to you? Eddie asked inside their heads. Venom was much better at comparing memories interpreted through his senses with Eddie's. To Eddie, they were a mix of impressions that he could barely understand without Venom's help.
Hmm. I am not sure. Venom rifled through both of their memories and stopped on a picture from Eddie's notes. Maybe this man?
Kilian Brown. Known drug trafficker. Maybe. The woman is definitely Thea Tosetti. Glad to see our intel was right about that. I'm guessing the man with his back to us is Stuart Boesch. He and Tosetti have worked together before.
Venom didn't mentally vocalize his agreement as much as Eddie felt it, but there was also an undercurrent of impatience. I still do not understand why we cannot just force them to tell us who their dealer is. And then eat them, the unspoken thought said.
I told you, if something goes wrong here, they'll know that someone leaked the information. On the level of Eddie's mind beneath where he and Venom spoke to each other, his thoughts ran through a summary of his knowledge on the Enigma cipher during World War II and how imperative it was that the Allies not let the Axis powers know they had broken it. They'll change all their plans and we'll have to start over.
Despite his conscious thoughts still advocating for the brute force method, Venom could not hide from Eddie the fact that he understood the logic behind this approach.
!!
Together, they noticed that the unknown trafficker was scrolling through his phone, though the screen was angled just enough away from them that they couldn't make out what was on it.
Time to move. Venom reached out through Eddie's other arm across the empty space between the rafters and latched a thick coil of himself onto one. Hopefully, from there, they'd have a better view of the phone screen.
Eddie didn't say anything in their mind, but Venom could feel the undercurrent of his thoughts begin to panic at the thought of being that high up in open air. Under Venom's mask, he felt Eddie squeeze his eyes shut, irrationally against the fact that it wasn't his eyes that were doing the seeing. The symbiote took control of Eddie's visual center and cut off his view of the outside world through Venom's eyes, leaving him essentially blind. There. Now you do not have to look down.
Eddie nodded his thanks.
Venom detached Eddie's second arm from their current rafter and shifted his mass to join the tendril bridged to the other one. From a semi-crouch, he and Eddie stretched out across the gap.
The second rafter was just a few inches beyond Eddie's reach, necessitating that his feet leave the rafter behind, and for just a split second, he was suspended in midair, surrounded and carried by the symbiote like some sort of viscous, gravity-defying waterslide.
As soon as Eddie's hands made contact with the new rafter, he and Venom wrapped them around the diagonal girder, and Venom swung the rest of Eddie's body over like he had physically leaped the gap. With Eddie's feet in place, he let go of the old rafter and settled back onto Eddie's body. One smooth, silent motion, leaving the traffickers none the wiser.
Until their combined weight tore the rafter out of the roof and sent Eddie and Venom plunging to the floor half a second later.
Venom immediately clamped Eddie's jaw shut so he wouldn't scream and reached out to the nearby rafters, hoping to stop Eddie from falling, but it was no use. Eddie's body was too entangled in the broken rafter and even Venom's superhuman strength wasn't enough to slow the fall. He surged around Eddie's head and neck just in time for them to hit the concrete floor.
With Venom's help, Eddie's left foot hit the ground first, shattering his ankle and sending pain racing up his leg. The symbiote did what he could to cushion the landing, but the collision and subsequent burial under heavy steel broke several other bones and damaged multiple internal organs.
The jumbled mess of Eddie's panicked, pain-fueled internal screaming vanished. Eddie! Venom swirled around the flesh of his host's brain, feeling for injury and signs of mental activity. The rest of Eddie's wounds could wait. He healed what he could, but there were limits to what Venom could do without Eddie's conscious mind. EDDIE?!
The floor vibrated against Venom's mass. The three traffickers were coming to the site of the crash, picking their way through leftover machinery and detritus, where they would inevitably find Eddie's body.
Venom swore. What to do, what to do? If the traffickers found Eddie alive…if he even was alive…well, not even Venom could heal a bullet shot point-blank into Eddie's head. Eddie, I need you. Alive. Venom prodded as hard as he dared against the neurons in Eddie's brain. I can't do this without you, Eddie! Healing Eddie's numerous injuries was much harder without him conscious, but Venom could at least stop him from bleeding out. Please, Eddie, wake up!
The traffickers' vibrations grew stronger, closer, and Venom could hear them swearing as they picked their way through the wreckage.
EDDIE! WAKE UP!
There. Venom felt the smallest of spikes in Eddie's brain activity, just enough to show that he was alive.
With the door into Eddie's mind opened, Venom pushed himself deeper into Eddie's brain cells, shrinking the gap between their two psyches.
In the slurry of thoughts communicated between them in an instant, a single idea rose to the top: the memory of a video Venom had watched on YouTube late one night about snakes that fake death in order to ward off predators.
The part of them that was the symbiote retracted itself into their human body so that they appeared to be an ordinary man. They stopped healing their external injuries and focused on the two main parts of their body that could signal life to the traffickers: their heart and their lungs.
They let their body go limp, forcing the muscles to relax entirely, beyond how they'd be if they were just unconscious. Their symbiote part wove itself into the tissue of their heart and lungs and stilled both. For a moment, it felt as though they were drowning in air, the lack of oxygen stressing their already overwhelmed human body even more. But the feeling faded as their symbiote took over oxygenating their cells.
Their eyes stared unmoving into the darkness above them.
God, that feels weird, the part of them that was Eddie more than Venom thought.
You/We say that about everything we do, Venom-more-than-Eddie said, along with memories of the dozens of times the symbiote had affected their host beyond the limits of normal humans.
Yes, but this is extra weird.
The three traffickers had finally made their way over to where their human body lay still, not a sign of life. Someone flashed a light over their body, and their symbiote cut off the connection between their eyes and brain before their pupils could dilate and give them away, restoring it after the faint heat of the light had left their face.
"What the hell was a man doing in the ceiling?" Tosetti swore, while one of the men – yep, Kilian Brown – checked for a pulse. Boesch prodded their side with his boot.
"I don't know, but he's dead," Brown said. "Fall probably killed him."
"Check him for ID."
Two sets of arms pulled them out from under the rafters. The various external injuries sent pain darting through their body, but their symbiote side shut off any feeling from their human nerves, leaving only the symbiote's senses to keep the damage from worsening.
Hands rifled through their pockets, finding nothing but a used phone Eddie had bought for the sole purpose of taking pictures that were directly uploaded to the cloud. No personal information on it besides a generic email address.
"Nothing but this phone," Boesch said, holding it up. The screen was shattered and the phone itself partially crushed. "Not even a wallet."
"Some bum, maybe?" Brown said.
"Living in the ceiling? No, he was probably spying on us." Tosetti groaned. "Great. Just great. Slusser's going to be here any moment, and we have a dead guy to deal with."
Slusser. The name of the dealer, or at least the person these traffickers were meeting tonight. The combined minds of Eddie and Venom searched through Eddie's memories and came up with a full name: Mortimer Slusser. Middleman between several import sources and San Francisco's top players in drug trafficking.
The lead they came here for.
Inside their minds, they were split on the next course of action, though not exactly directly along the line between Venom and Eddie. One part wanted to eat the traffickers right then and there – after all, it would be three less drug traffickers on the streets of San Francisco – but the other side, the one that wanted to salvage what they could of this stakeout, won out. They continued to lay there, the next best thing to dead.
The sound of a car pulling up. Tosetti swore again. "He's here."
"What should we do?" Boesch asked.
"Leave the body. It's dark enough that maybe Slusser won't notice. We'll deal with it later."
What little light there was left along with their footsteps, leaving the "body" behind.
The meeting between the traffickers and Slusser was short and to the point. They filed away the details in Eddie's memory for later documentation and later leads to follow.
The traffickers left the presumed dead body behind, and the entity of Venom and Eddie waited until the sound of the vehicles had faded before finishing the healing process. Within moments, the last of the broken bones had been mended enough that they could restore sensation to their human nervous system.
At the same time, Venom separated his mind from Eddie's and released his hold on Eddie's heart and lungs. Eddie gasped, his heart leaping at the chance to pump blood again. The sudden change in blood pressure made Eddie's head spin.
"Hnnnnggggggg," he moaned. "Let's never do that again."
Rude.
"Not the mind thing. The…the heart and lungs thing." Eddie scowled as he caught up to Venom's teasing. He sat up, then winced as a headache from sensory overload started to build. "Hey, you're not the one who almost died from blunt force trauma."
You are right. There was an edge to the symbiote's thoughts, something that he wasn't letting Eddie sense completely. I am sorry I could not catch us/you.
The sudden wave of emotion from Venom caught Eddie off guard. He blinked. "Well, we got what we came for, and you did keep me alive." If Venom didn't want to tell him, he wasn't going to pry.
"Let's go home. I want to report a body to the police before Tosetti and friends get back."