"It's been a few days." Eddie grunted as he slowly lowered the weight in his hand, relaxing his bicep in preparation for another rep. "Should we be worried?"
Symby stirred across his shoulders, careful not to slip into his muscles while he strengthened them. It knew Eddie didn't like cheating. "I don't think so. Felicia had warned it may be a while before she found anything. And her foot may still be healing."
"Still." Eddie exhaled, letting himself sweat for a second before continuing the exertion. "You'd think she'd at least have given us an update by now." Since he'd carried her back home they hadn't heard a word from her, and something stopped Eddie from going to her like he'd done for the last week… probably embarrassment, at her catching him ogling her like a teenager. Maybe she was biding her time to figure out how to best torment him over it. Even if he might have deserved it… he just wanted to know that they were onto something, that their efforts were getting them somewhere. Maybe he should have asked if she had a cellphone or something. He only used his for work, and even then only rarely. But then... she would have had a way to stoke his guilt 24/7.
Dammit, this was why he didn't work with other people.
"Patience, Eddie." The symbiote flicked at his ear, laughing in its own way as it tried to soothe his frustration.
"You know I've never had much of that to go around."
"Put some aside for her, then."
"...Alright. I guess she's earned it." Eddie released the weight at the end of the set, curling and uncurling his fingers to ease some of the ache in the hinges. Symby dribbled down his arm to meet his hand, circling his wrist as he twisted it.
"You've been thinking about her a lot," it said. It wasn't an accusation, or even asked out of curiosity. Symby just liked stating facts, sometimes to prove it was paying attention. Eddie didn't deny that it was true, and knew that he couldn't when Symby was often so deep inside his head. Even so, he felt a hot blush flare across his face. He had been thinking about her... not just because of how he'd been frozen a few nights ago, at just the thought of her undressing in front of him. No, it wasn't the thought. It was hearing the zipper glide down. Seeing her glove peeled off her wrist, the fur around her chest plume over her shoulders as the front fell open...
Eddie grunted again, not from the throbbing of his muscles, and hoped Symby didn't notice it wasn't just the exercise making him flushed. If he was anyone else, anyone other than Venom, he might have given into it (what 'it' was, he didn't want to name). But Venom had to be more than just the man underneath. Venom didn't have the luxury of being human, and neither did he. He knew it in how little he ate, how little he tried to sleep. The symbiote did everything for him. Almost everything. So what was the point in trying to be normal when he didn't need to be?
That was the standard he held himself to, one that he at least tolerated… until the Cat came along and made normal, her kind of normal, seem so tempting. No grand purpose of trying to right a thousand wrongs in a single night. No desperate need to feel useful, to justify his place in New York or his own existence as who he was, what he was.
Just taking one evil down at a time, chipping away at the crumbling moral foundations of the city until the whole thing collapsed to be rebuilt anew one day, one day soon enough, but not by them. By people better than they were.
It was so… small. So ineffective. So demanding of patience that he didn't have to give. And yet Eddie had felt better, cleaner (not just from showering) in the last week than he ever had after one night of taking down ten, twenty, even fifty evil souls. He felt lighter, as if this whole time all his strength had been used to carry a weight that had now simply dissolved, leaving him with no idea of what else to do with his muscles.
Other than make them bigger. He hadn't even realised he'd transferred the dumbbell to his other hand until he felt the burn in his forearm, and his fingers were locked too tightly around the handle for him to drop it in defiance. He'd been so sunk into his mind that he'd went on autopilot. It didn't happen so often nowadays with Symby there to guide his mind back to his body, but it still threw him off when he realised he even had a body to return to.
The symbiote itself didn't seem to notice how he'd been jolted, or if it did it wasn't concerned by it. It was still waiting for him to speak, in his own time. Though it could read them well enough, Symby preferred that he spoke his thoughts. It didn't like having to dig to understand him- and Eddie didn't want to give it reason to have to. He wondered how it could be so patient while bonded to someone like him, but then he remembered it was hundreds of years older than him. Then again, if he had all that time to live he knew he'd never learn how to get that kind of endurance.
"I'm still not sure what I should be thinking, really," he admitted, mechanically lifting the weight as he tried to shield exactly what had been going through his head. The symbiote gurgled, suspicious.
"About what?" It probed his brain without actually probing it.
"About… her. About whatever it is she's really wanting from us."
Because that had to be part of it. There must have been something she wanted from them that she couldn't get from anyone or anywhere else. Usually where Eddie was concerned people only wanted his symbiote, or him dead. Or both. Both was the most common since they were so tied into each other. And Felicia's favourite hobby was stealing… but after being under Maniac's control, he doubted she wanted anything to do with symbiotes for a long long time. Was there something she wanted to steal from Osborn, which was why she was so focused on figuring him out? No, they hadn't even known Osborn was involved when she asked for his help.
The only other answer was that, like him, she just wanted to take bad people off the streets. It would have been the ideal answer for him, which was precisely why he didn't buy it. Things never fit that well together for him, or if they did it was because it was convenient for someone else that he thought everything was okay.
Even so...
Eddie remembered when she first showed up, another thing he'd been thinking about as he tried to decipher her just as she deciphered her list. He remembered how everyone clambered to get pictures of her and then of her and the spider, because at one point you could rarely find one without the other. He remembered everyone at the Globe thinking they were a cute couple. He'd even bought into it, only slightly. Other than that, no one had really known what to make of the Black Cat, not even back then, and certainly not him. Headlines would brand her a criminal when just one page over there'd be a photo of her kissing the city's hero. Eddie hadn't written anything about her back then simply because he knew he'd have to change the narrative every other week if he did. He'd read a lot, though. Reading was enough, at least back then. Now that he'd seen her for himself, he knew just how little the pages really said about her. And when he did finally write about her a few days ago, making up as much as he had to about her confrontation with Tarantula, he found it was impossible to be unbiased. He couldn't step back and see her as a criminal, as another menace to the city.
After the third torn-up draft, he caved in and did as he'd promised. He made her look good, and his boss loved it. Which meant that most of it must have been true, cause she had an acute bullshit radar that told her what was just believable enough to get away with publishing, what was too stupid and fantastical not to publish for the paper equivalent of clickbait, and which always went off when he tried to give Venom the same treatment.
So it must have been true… to him, at least. Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to write it without grinding his teeth. There were some things that he simply had to admit to. Like that she was… attractive. Very attractive. And the term 'fiercely intelligent' fit her as well as her suit did.
But she was also flippant. Willing to give up the empire she'd spent years building, even if it was a lost cause, just because he happened to suggest something better. Not to mention the very definition of conniving, almost as bad as him when it came to holding grudges, impulsive, selfish… though she only took from those what they could afford to lose. She took regardless of who they were, of what she thought of them. Where Eddie had made the world his enemy, she had made it her target. The Earth was nothing more to her than a big blue jewel to keep in her safe. Not to hold it for ransom or hold control over it. Just because she thought it looked pretty, and she wanted it. Compared to the typical kind of megalomaniac that New York seemed to breed, Felicia was practically a breath of fresh air.
And Eddie had done worse than she ever would. Much worse. Which made him all the more suspicious of why she'd come to him. She didn't want his symbiote, but he had nothing else to give. There had to be a price for her help, for trusting her. It hadn't come when they took down Maniac together, but that only told him that it was now overdue to be paid. Maybe he'd already paid it, and he just didn't know it. And if he hadn't the question was, what would she end up taking from him? And could he really afford to lose it? After all, the bad luck had to hit him at some point.
"May I offer my own thoughts?" Symby asked, its head hovering over his shoulder.
Eddie blinked. How long had he been out of it again? From the ache in his arm, it must have only been a few seconds. "Of course, love." He'd never silence his other, as long as it wasn't craving anything unsavory.
"I think she's as good as we could hope for."
He raised an eyebrow. "In what way?"
"She's a remarkable woman," it explained. "An excellent teammate. We should be grateful to work with her."
Symby really must have been cured, from how it completely forgiven her for her deception before. He was glad about that, but this glowing endorsement of her was making him cautious. He trusted the symbiote to be his second sense, his intuition. It so rarely gave anyone praise that he couldn't help but be suspicious when it did.
"You're not just saying that cause you were bonded to two of her exes?" he asked.
Symby pulled back from his shoulder and into his skin, making its irritation known by causing a cramp. "I am more than my previous hosts' opinions, Eddie. You should know that."
Eddie winced, rolling his shoulder to ease the symbiote spasm. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that, I just…" He trailed off as Symby relented, spreading across the affected muscle to bring it back under control.
"I know. But I'm sure of what I say."
Eddie reconsidered its words, the way it said she was the best they could both hope for. Whether or not Symby still shared his doubts about her or had different ones altogether, it was able to put them aside. Once again proving itself as a better person who wasn't even a person, and forcing Eddie to accept that he may have been wrong about her, as he usually was about everything.
Maybe the lightness he felt, the satisfaction and contentment so foreign to him that it took him this long to even label it, maybe it wasn't because of what they'd been doing. The body count was irrelevant.
Maybe it was just because of her.
"Well, I can't argue with you," he conceded, letting himself smile as he restarted his weight set. He'd been so distracted that he lost count of his reps.
"Her apartment is lovely, too," Symby mentioned.
"Sure is a lot better than ours."
"Why don't we get a better one?"
"Because we can't afford a better one. Because Felicia steals, and we don't."
"Stealing isn't so bad. We don't have to kill thieves."
"Maybe not, but we're not doing it." Eddie had made that a second rule on top of no more uncontrolled killing. Anything a criminal had that was worth stealing was likely taken from someone else who needed it more than they did. "And anyway, this place isn't so bad. Neighbours are quiet, it's close enough to the stores,-"
"Nice view, too."
At the sound of a second voice that wasn't inside his head, Eddie almost dropped the weight right on top of his foot as he jumped. "Fuck me!"
Perched in his window, her suit looking out of place in the lingering evening daylight, Felicia was a picture of amusement. How long had she been there for?!
"You'll have to buy me dinner again," she told him.
Eddie tried not to look like he'd almost had a cardiac arrest, exhaling heavily to mask his heart rate. He saw Symby holding his dropped weight in a tendril, saving it from crashing into the floor. "You-You startled us. Don't do that."
She shrugged. "Sorry. I just didn't want to interrupt. You working off all the chocolate?" She pulled two bars out from an inside pocket and threw them in his direction.
"Something like that," he said as he grabbed them out of the air. One for the other night, one for this one. He put them down for later- now that Symby didn't need them to stay sane, he tried not to let it indulge too much.
"Mind if I come in?" she asked. "Unless you usually have women in your window, people on the street might start staring."
He shook his head, wiping at his forehead with black claws while she pushed off the window sill with her own. "You manage to find something?"
Felicia nodded, doing her usual refusal to sit normally as she perched again on the chair across from the window. "Turns out most of the code really was just shitty handwriting. The rest of it was vague abbreviations, but they were easy enough to crack. From what I could gather, it's all details of other distraction hits. Some of them have already happened, but the next earliest date on it happens to be tonight."
Eddie listened as he grabbed some water from the fridge. "Any address?"
"Pet store. The big one in Queens."
Eddie knew of it. It was the reason he stayed out of Queens for a while, in case the temptation of so much food in one place became too much for Symby. But now that they were cured, it wouldn't be an issue any more. He gulped down half the bottle in his hand as he plotted out how they'd get there with someone else in tow.
"Venom can get across the bridge," he said, "but there's a gap between where it ends and where there's buildings tall enough to swing from. We could try and use one of the towers as a vantage point to-"
He broke off when he noticed Felicia wasn't really paying attention to him. Well, she was, but it wasn't to what he was saying. Her hooded eyes went much lower than his face, and he suddenly felt very self conscious about insisting on working out shirtless.
"Felicia. Focus." He snapped his fingers until her eyes snapped back up to his face.
"Hm? I'm listening," she lied, completely guiltless and somehow making him feel embarrassed for noticing.
"No you're not, you're staring at my chest." How did she deny it so easily yet when he got caught wanting to look where he maybe shouldn't have been looking he spent days afterwards blushing about it? Unlike him, maybe she was just used to getting away with it. Must have been why she shot him with a deadly raised eyebrow.
"Oh, so when someone stare at mine's it's okay, but if I do it to a guy-"
"That's not what I meant and you know it." She did know it, and she suddenly smirked over it, all irritation suddenly swept away. God, she was exhausting sometimes.
"Well, I can stare and listen," she told him, as if that excused her eyeing him so openly. Though, it kinda did since he'd only been annoyed cause she wasn't listening. He thought he heard Symby laughing as he shook his head.
"What I was saying was, we'll be better off jumping from one of the high points if we don't want to be seen. How's your ankle?"
"My boot was more damaged than the skin was." She swung her leg up from her perch, showing off both her flexibility and mending skills. The boot didn't even look like it had a scratch on it. And if she was feeling well enough to run all the way over here, she wasn't lying just to get going somewhere.
"Good. Cause we're gonna be doing a lot of uphill running."
"I know." She pulled her leg back down and used it to propel herself in a cartwheel back over to the window. "The Queens Bridge is where I first practiced disappointing my mother by going out at night with strange men in spandex."
"How does she feel about strange men in symbiotes?" Eddie found himself asking, as the black bubbled over his skin. Unlike Felicia's apartment, his window was at least big enough for both of him. She looked down at him as she stood in the tall portal, and shrugged.
"She'd probably say I could do worse." A backflip onto the lower roof carried her out into the young night, unable to resist showing off again, and Venom had the feeling she was only just getting started.
