Title: Rocketman

Description: During the battle on the launchpad, Anne remembers a pair of statistics, does some quick mental math, and is terrified. Reality ensues, then continues ensuing.

-Rocketwoman-

Disclaimer: "Venom", "Eddie Brock", "Anne Weying", and "The Life Foundation" are intellectual property owned by Sony Entertainment. I claim no ownership over these characters, nor any others borrowed from their 2018 movie appearance "Venom." I release this story for free and intend no monetary nor other harm toward Sony Entertainment.

-Rocketwoman-

Chapter 1: Merlot

-Rocketwoman-

It wasn't a big statistic. Just a little number, a saying from the rocket industry that someone had leveled against the Life Foundation, back when they were first constructing the SF launchpad:

"The launch of a Saturn V can ignite grass within a mile radius from the sound energy alone."

Anne shook her head. Not important; the Life Foundation shuttle was a completely different spacecraft, and now that the-

"At launch, the Life Foundation spacecraft outputs 1.2 times the thrust of the Apollo missions' Saturn V rockets."

Anne's view snapped away from the camera feed, back to the window. Forget the Symbiotes; was she even safe from the rocket launch? The pad couldn't be further than a half mile out! She didn't want to imagine what kind of damage would be happening up close.

As if to set in the urgency of the moment, the mission control center's automated computer informed her of the time to launch: "T minus one minute."

"Holy FUCK." Casting about on the desks, Anne tried - and failed - to keep the panic from setting in. "Fuck fuck- damnit-"

Papers, computer monitors, and halves of human bodies were strewn across the floor of the mission control center. She had seen that before, of course, but now it seemed far more visceral, far more dangerous, considering any blood-soaked piece of paper could hold the instructions to abort the launch.

She assumed that the guy who could stop the rocket would be in the middle row, maybe even the middle computer. Running around the control stations cost her ten whole seconds of the countdown. How long was left? She didn't have time to look. Any time was too long.

She snatched up the first paper she saw on the middle desk. It showed some graphs, some quantity versus distance, with different San Francisco landmarks marked on each chart. Her experienced lawyer's eye caught the words "auto sequence," "noise," "throttle," "too high," and "permits." She tossed the paper away, grabbing for the next one. This, too, had something to do with noise.

Risking a glance at the clock, Anne stopped dead at the scene on the other monitor. Eddie, without Venom, was walking away from the lip of the launchpad exhaust director. But behind him- "EDDIE!"

The other Symbiote, the silver one, rammed what would be best be described as a plate of metal right through Eddie's ribcage. Even through the grainy camera feed, Anne could see the blood spray.

She stared, frozen in shock, even as thoughts competed for her attention, urging her to get keep searching.

"It's up to you to stop the silver Symbiote!"
"The rocket exhaust might kill you this close to the pad!"
"MOVE, DAMNIT!"

Anne took a faltering step, directly into a pool of blood. Her footing went out from under her, sending her collapsing to the ground. Her head hit hard, leaving her blinking for a number of seconds.

In her daze, a glint of gold stood out to her - a simple gold band, on the finger of the body of a scientist in the row behind her. And this scientist had almost the same injury Eddie had just received. It wasn't the same thing that had killed everyone else, and that was the only body in that row. Maybe…?

"Ten," the loudspeaker announced.

Anne scrambled beneath the desk, toward the scientist's body.

"Nine,"

The hole through this man's body was straight through, front to back. That would have had him sitting…

"Eight,"

Anne threw herself at the desk with the frequency generator she'd used before, her eyes flicking over every scrap of paper.

"Seven,"

A red bar caught her eye. Launch abort sequence. Yes!

"Six,"

The sequence listed some sort of code for the SSEN input box. She stared at the user-unfriendly mishmash of windows on the computer in horror.

"Five,"

She picked a box and clicked it. Nothing happened. She clicked again, then realized it was greyed out. "F-!"

"Four," the loudspeaker drowned her out.

More panicked than before, she smacked in command-tab to cycle through applications. Nothing happened, as she realized the computer was running Windows. She bit her tongue, hard.

"Three," the automated sequence informed, helpfully.

A window that had been hidden behind the others leaped to the front as she tried variations on tab plus a key. This one looked like a big text status readout with an input box at the bottom. The window title labeled it "SSEN." Yes!

"Two,"

She started frantically typing the code. With the first S, the box became red. That was good, right? She wasn't sure. The instructions had some blood spray on them; one of the letters was obscured. G or Q?

"One,"

G, she guessed, tapping out the code. "SIGSEV"

"Ignition,"

As she slammed home the return key, a wall of light and sound came barrelling in from the pad. Anne was bowled over immediately, her every bone rattling like the ground in an earthquake. Then, as suddenly as the wall of sound and heat had come, it left again.

She had done it.

Taking a few moments to lie on the ground, Anne let out a soundless groan. Everything hurt.

"-ch aborted. Warning: Launch aborted. Warning: launch aborted. Warning:"

As her hearing slowly returned, she almost wished it hadn't. The repeating drone of the launch abort warning grated at her frayed nerves. She struggled to a sitting position, looking in the direction of the rocket.

A niggling voice in her mind told her she hadn't stopped anything, that the silver Symbiote would just race to where she lay, kill her, restart the sequence, and launch anyway.

Her adrenaline restarting, Anne pushed herself to her feet through the pain. She could run, hide from the Symbiote, stop the launch again. That would work. It had to. And the frequency generator! She could stop the Symbiote using-

The desk she was leaning on for support suddenly became blinding bright, as if someone outside had just switched on the setting sun. Anne had barely a moment to turn her head toward the launchpad and see the fireball engulf it before the overpressure wave slammed into her.

She flew. A fraction of a second later, she slammed into the backrest of a rolling chair, sending both it and herself skittering across the wrecked room. A wheel of her chair caught on a binder left on the floor by a fleeing scientist, stopping the chair dead. Anne did not stop, tumbling out of the chair and over another two meters of ground. Something snapped.

She finally came to rest with one of the mission control desks between her and the fireball. The world was pain and, try as she might to rise and convince herself of the silver Symbiote's destruction, she couldn't find it in herself to move.

Battered and exhausted, Anne succumbed to the darkness encroaching on her vision.

-Rocketwoman-

Anne opened her eyes to a blur of white and grey. Her mind jumping immediately to the silver Symbiote, she bucked, attempting to escape. Other than splitting pain in her right shoulder, her efforts accomplished nothing - not even a sound.

She blinked, hard, but her eyes refused to focus even as the white began to move. Something darker white came into view, maybe the ceiling? She had been in some sort of pod.

A human-shaped blob leaned down over her, pink with a black scalp and eyes as dark as night. Anne struggled as she felt it pressing down on her shoulders, saw its mouth working. Whatever Symbiote this was, it has so many teeth that they appeared like a solid wall in Anne's frazzled state.

Another Symbiote came into view, this one a deep chocolate brown with the same black eyes. Something flashed in what she could only assume was its clawed hand. She felt a prick against her neck. She screamed, but no sound came from her lips that she could hear.

She wouldn't go out like this.

She wouldn't fucking go out like this.

With all of her dwindling strength, Anne hurled her left fist at the pink Symbiote, right where the nose would be on a human. She connected with a sickening crack that she felt through her bones, rather than heard. The pink Symbiote stumbled away, actually falling back from her assault. Feeling empowered, she brought her fist back around toward the chocolate brown one.

She missed, her arm falling limp over the side of whatever table she was on. She cried out as the momentum caused a twinge in her right shoulder, then again as she realized she was done for. That was it. Whatever they'd done to her, she had nothing left to fight it with.

As darkness filled her vision again, she closed her eyes and cried.

-Rocketwoman-

Anne awoke to the feeling of puffy comfort she had really only half expected heaven to have. Despite that, she still felt like a pile of bricks was weighing down every inch of her body. It took her almost a minute of struggling to open even her lead-lined eyelids.

Heaven was a blurry hospital room. A preposterously large vase of flowers sat at the foot of the bed, staring her in the face with their fuzzy majesty. Anne stared back at them, almost missing the flicker of motion at the door indicating someone had just stepped out.

"... What…?" Anne managed to say. Her voice sounded distant, like someone talking from the far end of a long tunnel.

The motion at the door returned, resolving after a moment into pink blob approaching her. Remembering the Symbiotes that had killed her, Anne flinched away, finding to her surprise that it no longer hurt as much to move her shoulder.

"Hey, hey, don't move too much," the blob said. He, too, sounded indistinct and far away.

Anne stared at it in incomprehension.

It came closer, resolving a little more. "How are you feeling?"

Anne blinked as she realized she was staring into the face of Eddie Brock. Except, Eddie had died on that launchpad. He couldn't be here. He couldn't be alive. So she must be…

"You had everyone pretty worried for a bit there."

"Drake's symbiote-" Anne croaked.

A look crossed Eddie's face, one Anne couldn't make out in her current state. "No. They're… they're dealt with."

"But who…" Anne shook her head, weakly. If the Symbiotes hadn't won, who had killed her? Who had she punched?

"Who did you punch, right out of the MRI machine? That was Dan."

Anne coughed, spluttering. "Dan?!" Given that crack, she must have-

"You actually broke his nose with that one. Not bad for somebody with 60% coverage 3rd-degree burns."

Closing her eyes, Anne tried to put the facts together. "I'm… not… dead," she asked, so softly she almost couldn't hear it.

"Anne!" Another blob appeared at the door, white and pink and looking exactly like the one she'd punched.

Anne winced. As Dan approached, even she could make out the medical tape on his nose. "Sorry…" she mumbled.

Dan pushed past Eddie, diving right in for a hug. She felt his breath on her shoulder like he was mumbling something, but she couldn't make out a thing he said. After a moment, he pulled back.

The conversation stalled for an awkward second. Evidently, Dan had been expecting a reply from Anne to his mumbling, at least, he indicated so with a throat clearing.

"How long…?" Anne asked.

"About three months of medically induced coma," Dan filled in. "We tried waking you up here and there, but everything seemed to terrify you. I made the decision to keep you under until your brain accepted the cochlear implants."

Cochlear implants? Anne knew that fancy medical speak - it's a replacement inner ear, for deaf people. But she wasn't… or hadn't been…

"We've also been doing skin grafts to help you recover from the burns. After the gruesome scene at the Life Foundation…" Dan gave a sidelong glance at Eddie so pointed, even her blurry vision couldn't miss it. "... there was enough donor material that the waiting list vanished."

Anne took a few moments to process all of the information. "And the Symbiotes?"

Dan froze, staring at Anne. "Did you just say Symbiotes? Plural? You mean that parasite we pulled out of Eddie-"

"Gone," Eddie cut him off. "Riot - that silver one - burnt up in the rocket. Venom burnt up when he set the rocket explosion in motion. There was one dead in the Life Foundation lab before I even found Venom and-"

Dan turned to Eddie with a look of incredulous horror. Anne, meanwhile, snapped her attention to motion near the door. Her eyes were still unable to focus at distance, but she could make out a number of blue and grey blobs piling through. "Mr. Brock, Dr. Dan, cease and desist corrupting the witness' story!" the first one said, the first person Anne had heard reach regular speaking volume.

"Excuse me?" Dan asked, "I wasn't-"

Eddie took him by the shoulder. "They're cops, we're not. C'mon, let's get out of their way."

"But-" Dan glanced longingly at Anne even as Eddie guided him toward the door, through the press of what Anne guessed were police officers.

"You can reunite with her after we get her side of the story, Doctor," the lead investigator said, ushering Dan past.

At the door, Eddie gave her a pointed glance, then stepped out. Anne wished she had any idea what the glance was supposed to mean.

The lead investigator sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he stepped up to Anne's beside. She could barely make out him mumbling, "First responding to reports of that monster again, now Ms. Rocketwoman woke up three months early."

Anne ignored the comment, unsure if she had heard correctly, and more focused on her own defense. "I will... not answer any questions... until... I have spoken to my lawyer."

The detective glared at her. "Ma'am, you are a lawyer."

"Former… prosecuting... attorney." Anne coughed. Her voice was not ready for this much talking. "Wrong… field. Need… to call… a colleague."

Giving her a look that was half annoyed, half pitying, the officer handed her a flip phone. She fumbled with it, barely able to read the keys. Before hitting call, she reactivated her bitch glare and turned to the detective. "Client… attorney... confi… denti… ality." She took a deep breath, trying to reach regular speaking volume "Out."

Grudgingly, the detective and his men filed out of the room.

-Rocketwoman-

A/N:

Not over yet! Since I turned up the realism a notch on the rocket, I've found a couple more ways I'd like the world to respond to Eddie and Venom's escapades. There are also a few background explanations that need to be made about that hospital visit. So expect maybe one or two more chapters here!

Chapter name:

Merlot is a dark blue-colored wine grape variety, that is used as both a blending grape and for varietal wines. The name Merlot is thought to be a diminutive of merle, the French name for the blackbird, probably a reference to the color of the grape.

I selected this name because it looks a lot like blood and because I injured a bunch of characters in this chapter. Cheers!