A/N: Ya know, if the movie *said* Eddie was in heart failure due to Venom, it really ought to HAVE SHOWN AS MUCH. So, here's a fix-it of sorts. It's entirely possible I've misremembered this scene since, while I've seen it twice, it's not fresh in my mind (and the UK does not get the blu-ray until February) but I wanted to write this anyway. I've tried to be more accurate that you'd typically get when it comes to the medical stuff, but I've also taken some liberties because, well, drama. And whump.
I asked the audience on AO3 if they also wanted a follow up to this after Eddie gets Venom back, and the response was a resounding yes, so there will be at least one more chapter to come.
A prickling heat creeps its way around the back of Eddie's skull and down his spine as he staggers along the hospital hallway. He stumbles, grasping more than once at the wall for balance while his feet refuse to keep a straight line, thrown off by the nauseating spinning of his head. With Venom gone, he'd expected an end to the heaviness and persistent pressure that had settled in his chest. Instead, it only feels tighter, lungs drawing breath too shallow and too fast, his heart a queasy flutter beneath his sternum.
No shit, he thinks. I'm dying.
The sensible, self-preserving part of his mind is screaming at him to turn around and march straight back to the MRI room to let Dan check him into the ICU, but he's never been too good at listening to that. Instead, he stumbles the final few steps to the elevator where he stands, shivering and sweating through his clothes once again, while his thrumming heartbeat counts the seconds it takes to arrive.
The edges of his vision are turning grey when the doors finally slide open, delaying his reaction time by a second or two as he struggles to focus on who's standing on the other side. He's just about managed to process enough to think oh shit when the next thing he's aware of is what feels like a sudden hard punch to the chest.
Eddie drops. His breathing ceases and suddenly he's on the floor, blinking, shaking, until a final burst of strength lets him lift his head enough that his eyes land on the stun dart protruding from his chest. The needle has punched deep through his sternum. Straight to his already failing heart.
Guess this is it, then. I'm gonna die thanks to some murderous fuckers from the Life Foundation.
He'd ruminate a little more on the irony of that had his consciousness not failed him, and his head dropped to the floor before there was even chance.
"Did you get it?"
Those are the first words out of Dr Simone Keller's mouth when Treece and his men lug the unconscious body of Eddie Brock into the back of the hijacked ambulance they're using for cover and throw him face-down onto a gurney. A more pressing question might have been, " Did anybody see you?", considering they've been carrying an unconscious man in the exact opposite direction to the ER after shooting him with a tranquilizer no doubt on CCTV, but it seems most of the hospital's residents have their own problems to worry about. In terms of avoiding unwanted attention, the ambulance has served Drake's crew well thus far.
"We got Brock. It's in Brock, isn't it?" Treece huffs, sitting himself in the back of the ambulance alongside Keller while his goons shut the ambulance doors and disperse to their respective vehicles. The red haired biochemist shoots him a glare, casting an anxious blue-eyed gaze over Eddie's unconscious form tossed unceremoniously onto the gurney with his limbs askew.
"It was in Brock, last we knew. This thing can change hosts, remember?" As the engine starts up, Keller rummages among the equipment she's brought from the lab for a scanner, but already, just from looking at the state Eddie's in, she isn't hopeful. He's pale, drenched in sweat, and quite obviously in a bad way. Even tranqued, she'd expect to have seen some evidence of the symbiote by now. "Dammit," Keller growls, the device in her hand showing negative readings for signs of life. "It's gone."
Treece tenses. "What?"
"The symbiote. It's not in him anymore."
"Then where is it?"
"How should I know? You're the one who picked him up from the hospital. Maybe it's still there?"
Treece balls a fist, caught in a moment's indecision as he wonders if they should go back, then grunts in frustration as he just manages to refrain from punching a nearby medicine cabinet. "We don't have time to go off on another wild goose chase for it. Maybe he can tell us?"
"You'd better hope he can. I don't want to be the one to tell Drake we still don't have his creature. Do you?" She gives the hired muscle a filthy look before looking down at Eddie again, her mind half on how to begin interrogation, and then a sudden realisation dawns on her that makes her blood run cold.
No signs of life. The scanner had shown no signs of life.
" Shit, " she hisses, rolling Eddie's completely limp, pliant body onto its back before pressing her fingers to his throat, desperately hoping to feel a pulse. When she doesn't, she looks up at Treece again and snarls. "What did you do to him?"
"Tranqued him. With the sedative you provided," he snaps back, but there's a sudden look of panic in his eyes.
"Well, without the symbiote, looks like it was too much for him. His heart's stopped."
There's a beat as they both contemplate what they're going to have to tell Drake, then Treece leans closer to Keller, lips curling back from his teeth in a deliberate look of menace. "I'm not taking the flack for this. You're a doctor. You fix him."
"I'm a biomedical engineer," Keller spits, uncowed, but there's a definite sense of urgency to her voice. "But fine. Guess it's close enough. Hand me that AED. Quick."
She gestures at the automated defibrillator mounted on the ambulance's wall, and suddenly feeling out of his depth, Treece flounders for a moment before finally identifying it and thrusting it towards her.
Keller doesn't take it. She's already shoved Eddie's sweat-drenched shirt up to his chin and has begun CPR. "Turn. The. Fucking. Thing. On," she grunts out between compressions, and he hurries to do as she says, fumbling to bat her hands out of the way when he leans in to stick the pads to Eddie's chest.
Keller steps back and the AED takes a few seconds to do its thing. Treece holds his breath, waiting for the device to deliver a sudden shock so that Brock's eyes will fly open, then all that's left to do is scare him with the threat of stopping his heart again until he reveals the location of the symbiote.
But it doesn't happen. In a cold, robotic voice, the machine advises no shock and resume CPR.
Keller does. " Crap, " she mutters, not even looking up at Treece. "There's no heartbeat. At all. Epinephrine—there has to be an epipen on board this ambulance somewhere. Find it."
Treece doesn't even pause to think how readily he's begun taking orders from the scientist he had until now considered well below him in on the pecking order. He just doesn't want to roll up in front of Carlton Drake still symbiote-less and with nothing to show but Eddie Brock's corpse.
The medicine cabinet that had avoided a punching now gets upended as Treece searches frantically, desperately, not even knowing what he's looking for, and it vaguely occurs to Keller how much he would make an utterly shit paramedic before he finally finds the epipen and thrusts it at her.
No, not even at her. He just barges her aside and, in a panic, punches the needle straight between Eddie's ribs.
For a moment, there's a lull. Time stretches out as Treece waits once again to see if it worked, and Keller simply stares at him in shock. When it still doesn't get the desired response, he looks up to see her glaring at him with what appears to be utter disgust.
"What, giving him one needle to the chest not enough for you?"
His hackles rise, but at the same time, the sheer contempt in her expression makes him feel a little sheepish. "Was I not supposed to do that?"
" No."
It doesn't matter. The AED, its pads still stuck carelessly to Eddie's chest, announces its second attempt to gauge his heart rhythm. Keller waves a scornful hand for Treece to move back, and this time, the device advises a shock.
Keller's sigh of relief she knows is premature, but it gives her hope that Eddie's heart is showing any signs of life at all as she reaches for the shock button and glares at that fucking idiot of a security chief to stay well back. The machine delivers its shock. There's a brief zap without any grand display of Eddie's body convulsing or his eyes flying open, but then the AED goes back to assessing his heartbeat again.
A few seconds pass, and then, " Sinus rhythm resumed. Cease CPR."
Now Keller can breathe that sigh of relief. She reaches out to press her fingertips to Eddie's carotid artery, this time feeling the tapping of blood against her touch. Weak, admittedly, and unnervingly fast. But present.
With a heavy sigh, she rips the electrodes off of Eddie's skin then lets her eyes scan round the semi-wrecked ambulance, swiftly locating a stethoscope lying atop one of the shelves next to a blood pressure kit and reaching for it. She puts the listening ends in her ears and the business end on Eddie's chest, verifying that the pulse she'd felt corresponds to a heart that's actually alive and beating and isn't about to spontaneously quit again.
She isn't sure she can guarantee that last part. Eddie Brock's heart sounds like it's just run a marathon and is ready to stumble over the finish line and collapse, but Keller listens for ten seconds, and then thirty, and then a minute, and still she doesn't hear it give up.
Treece is watching her, his expression some combination of nervous and perplexed as if he isn't sure what to expect next, but then there finally seems to be some reaction as Eddie draws a deeper breath and a sliver of white emerges through the crack in his eyelids.
Instantly alert, Treece leans closer. "Is he waking up?"
Keller follows his gaze to Eddie's fluttering eyelids, tensing when that apparent attempt to open again falls still, but the heartbeat in her ears remains steady. "No," she says flatly, taking off the stethoscope. "But be grateful that he will."