While her coffee cooled in her hand, Felicia watched Eddie gulp down the last of the chocolate clutched in his, fangs flashing in the flickering neon glow of the sign they both crouched behind. The burning pink made the black over his skin look radioactive, and made what the light didn't fall on look even darker than usual. It was like staring at a living black hole that was itself gulping down and tearing apart the newborn light of a nebula as it stretched across the pitch-black, not knowing how easily it would be consumed for straying so close.

Or, considering it was Eddie she was looking at, like watching a man severely regret letting his symbiote eat so fast as he tried to pick pieces of plastic wrapper out from between both its and his own teeth.

"So Osborn never bailed out Tarantula?" he asked, rubbing his tongue across his teeth. Even when the symbiote didn't cover them, his canines managed to still look wickedly sharp. Felicia was half expecting to see blood welling up from his mouth.

"Nope," she answered, daring a sip from her cup. "I guess cause he's done all his share of the work. Hopefully that means Osborn doesn't know that info about his people has gotten out." She used her usual sources to find out that White Rabbit was still loose and Tarantula was still locked up, and though they were both dead ends for now she'd found an even better lead instead.

Her old lieutenant Killer Shrike did get bailed, that very night, from the same benefactor who so generously released the Ringer- even if it was just to try and have him killed. And, just like with Ringer, that meant only one of two things. Either Shrike was needed for a distraction, or he was being offered up as bait to get someone else in with The Hood.

Whichever one it was, Felicia luckily remembered something very vital to tracking Shrike down. Whenever he had something big to deal with, he always went drinking the night before. And one bar in particular was his favourite, the one in the alley she and Eddie were looking down on. It was one of those in the city that had no official name, no sign outside or even windows to show if any lights were on inside. She'd staked it out a few times before when she first went looking for Shrike, but he'd never showed up. She was confident this night, though. If he was going to The Hood, he'd be in there for a while. And Venom would be waiting for him when he came out.

"I looked up this guy earlier today," Eddie said. "Is he in some kinda Captain America situation where he came here from the past or does he just seriously think a ponytail is a good look?"

Felicia knew firsthand just how ridiculous Shrike looked to anyone who didn't know what he was capable. But even as she smirked, she thought it was rich for Eddie of all people to critique hairstyles.

"Didn't you have a mullet in the nineties?" she asked.

He went quiet, though his other seemed to be snickering.

"...We don't talk about that," he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck as if worried his hair would suddenly grow and spill over it. She almost spat some of her coffee out as she snorted. Though she didn't blame him for being defensive; to everyone involved in it, the nineties was like a long never-ending fever dream.

"Don't feel bad," she said. "Lots of weird shit happened back then. I thought full-length cleavage was a good idea, people still thought you were just Spider-Man in black…" She trailed off with another sip of coffee while Eddie scoffed.

"The world doesn't need another spider. Not this one, at least." Of course that hadn't stopped a whole lot of Spider-Women cropping up, but Eddie didn't seem to mind any of them nearly as much as he did the original. All Felicia knew was that the original had only turned out to be a lot more trouble than he was worth. For so long she'd thought that had been what attracted her to him all along, but now… well, now she hoped she was a little smarter than that.

"I have to agree," she said to Eddie. "Though I think one Venom is enough, too."

"That's two things we agree on, then. So long as I'm the only one." He frowned to himself, and Felicia realised just how sore he was over being replaced as the city's resident alien monster. Even now that he was Venom again, almost no-one knew the man underneath the alien. Only those who were likely to be hunted by him knew who to suspect, knew to fear that it was Eddie Brock back from the dead to drag them down to hell in his place, but to everyone else who didn't lurk in the underground he was just 'the monster'. The boogeyman. The reason that most neighbourhoods had curfews even if their crime rates were in the negatives- also because of him. Some thought he was a hoax. Some thought it was another case of someone stealing a costume and name for themselves, not knowing that the costume and name was a being onto itself. Felicia had seen it for herself; dumbass kids thinking they could cash in on Venom's resurrection by pulling on something black and white and letting it speak for them without giving it a voice. Dumbass kids who got themselves killed.

Eddie wouldn't have known about them, though. If he did, there wouldn't have been any of the fakes left to make him look bad- well, worse than he usually was. Felicia took a deep sip just as her coffee was starting to get cold.

"From what I've seen," she said, "you've got some competition there."

His eyebrows jerked up. "Like who? And don't say Flash, cause that symbiote-stealing asshole didn't even call himself Venom."

She rolled her eyes. Flash just couldn't stop making enemies by being better than everyone else around him. "I just mean that black is a pretty popular colour among the morally challenged. But I wore it way before you did."

Eddie frowned again, but as he looked away he seemed to come to some kind of compromise in his head. "It does go with everything…" he conceded. "Better than purple, at least. And if I had to choose, I'd rather have a spider on my chest than a bird."

Felicia smiled. He really had done his research on Killer Shrike. With his habit of hunting down villains she suspected he knew more about some of them than she did, but it was nice to hear he knew how to fill in the gaps.

"What d'you think causes it, Eddie?"

"What d'you mean?"

"This city is just about the only one on the planet that has a costumed villain epidemic. What is it about New York specifically that makes someone decide one day to dress up in a leotard and get their ass kicked every night by a guy who can stick to walls?"

Eddie looked away for a moment. "What made you do it?" he asked back.

If it was anyone else, she might have hit him. But it was Eddie, and he had a point. "Blame the parents," she said with a shrug, idly swirling her half-empty cup. "Well, parent in my case. World-famous cat burglar Thomas Hardy. I was just trying to follow in Daddy's footsteps while he wasn't around."

Eddie clicked his tongue, somehow making it into an empathetic sound. "Been there, tried that. Got the emotional scars to prove it."

"Really?" Felicia asked, not that she found it hard to believe. She'd just never given much thought to Eddie as a child, or anything other than Venom.

"Yeah." He leaned back, stretching a leg over the edge of the rooftop. "Mine spent my entire childhood blaming me for killing my own mother just by being born. So that kinda got in the way of anything like a healthy relationship."

He said it not like it was a slice of good old-fashioned family trauma, more like it was an interesting bit of trivia he just so happened to know. It was the tell-tale sign that he'd long since made peace with the facts, as sad as they were. All of a sudden, the man that he was made a lot more sense to Felicia. Understanding was forced upon her, deep and rich and jarring, and she could only give one immediate reaction to it.

"Ouch." She tried to cover up the awkwardness with a gulp of cold coffee, though Eddie didn't seem all that bothered by it. With all the shit he'd been through, she wasn't so surprised anymore by what did make him angry, and by just how angry he could get.

"But don't let me one-up you in that department," he said apologetically, leaning his head against a giant clawed hand. "Do go on about Daddy's footsteps."

He was joking, yet he still managed to sound genuinely interested. Maybe just to see how his father stacked up against hers.

"I guess I was hoping to eventually catch up to him at the end of them," she said. "Course, he wasn't around to tell me that was exactly what he didn't want me doing. Not until right at the fucking end." She sighed, not afraid to make the sound as dramatic as it deserved to be. "Typical men, never telling you what the hell they want until it's too late."

"That's a sweeping generalisation," Eddie said.

"But it's true."

"Course it is. I was just saying what it also was." He leaned his head over his shoulder, away from Felicia. "What about you, Symby? You got any daddy issues we should know about?"

The surface of his arm rippled, and the black on his shoulder bubbled up until it resembled a serpentine face. Its hidden mouth didn't move, but Felicia could hear it speak in her mind just as Eddie did.

"My parent expired on Klyntar from lack of resources shortly after I was spawned."

Felicia felt like Symby was the lucky one out of all three of them.

"So we have an absent dad, a shitty dad, and a dead dad." Eddie gestured between them all as he matched up the bad parenting to each victim. "Full house."

"Must not be so full if the dad isn't there in two of them," Felicia pointed out, and almost toppled off the roof when Eddie actually laughed. More like a bark, really, but it was still something she'd never heard from him before.

"Touchè," he praised, while she was still trying to recover. He was smiling. He'd done that before, but this one was much more than skin-deep. Baring his fangs not as a threat or as defense, but simply because he couldn't keep his mouth closed. She swore that he was glowing, and not just from the neon bathing them both.

He'd just laid out part of his soul to her, let her prod it and joke about it, and somehow he was happier because of it. Maybe just because of her. She wondered if it was proper to feel proud of herself for it. At least, for giving back instead of taking for once.

"Well, I may be biased," she said, uncurling her legs so that they dangled beside his, "but I think we turned out alright."

Eddie twitched his eyebrows in a facial shrug, as Symby's face dissolved back into him. "I suppose someone out there's done worse than eat a few brains cause Dad didn't love them enough."

Felicia was about to nod, but the symbiote-carrying elephant in the room that, until now, had been happy to mind its own business was starting to trumpet and stamp and wreck the damn place. She'd heard the stories, sure. Heard him threaten Peter enough with a thousand different ways to end up in his teeth. Not that Peter really seemed to ever believe him, but just because he had all his limbs intact didn't mean that the threats, or Venom's belly, were all empty.

"Have you... ever actually eaten anyone?" she asked, biting the bullet like he would have bitten a head off.

Eddie looked at her, then away for a moment before forcing his guilty gaze back to her. "Well… there was this one time," he said slowly, dragging it out with the aching surgical precision of a man who really didn't want it to go any deeper.

Felicia braced for the worst, because she had to know what the worst was. "Really?"

"Yeah…" He hissed uncomfortably through his teeth. "She seemed to like it, though." Then he burst out into a grin, blowing apart the tension he'd so deliberately built up just as she swatted at him. God, how long had he been waiting to make that joke?! Too long, from how he laughed again; another sound that just from its sincerity almost bowled her over for a second time. He was having the time of his life- and Felicia couldn't help joining in, since her annoyed pout only seemed to make him laugh even more.

"With a tongue like Venom's, I bet she did." Even as she said it, she realised her mistake. She'd just pointed out yet another elephant that was waving its trunk around very, very suggestively. Venom's tongue was pretty much impossible for anyone to ignore, but even then most tried not to think too much about it. What it could do… how long it really was. Felicia wished her coffee was still hot so it could hide the blush that was starting to ruin her face, but the more she tried to ignore the line of thought she'd just opened the worse its effects became. Looking at Eddie, trying to remind herself of the man behind the tongue, didn't help at all. Yet she knew it wouldn't. And she still kept doing it. The heat on her face was starting to get unbearable- dammit, Felicia, just stop staring at that gorgeous smile!- and she had to bite down on her lip to keep her mouth closed, trying to drag her eyes away, resisting the urge to slap herself-

Not that Eddie noticed any of it, thank God.

"I wish…" He sighed, looking at her just as she managed to regain some self control. "Believe it or not, most women don't stick around when they find out they have to share you with slime from outer space."

"...I think some girls would be into that," she admitted, all that she was willing to admit.

"Well, if you know any who don't dress up like rabbits, you can give them my number."

She nodded, letting the night wind chase away her burning blush. "I will. If you find me a guy who only has one kind of webshooter."

'And keeps it in his pants where it belongs,' she added silently, forcing her attention back to the task at hand. Waiting for Shrike to appear. Watching the door. Not watching Eddie. Paying attention to the door. Not Eddie. Not Venom. Not thinking about that infectious laugh even as it tugged at the corners of her mouth.

Not thinking about any of it… hoping that Symby hadn't been paying attention to what she'd been thinking about before. But she'd hidden it. Tried to, at least. And it had said that as long as she tried to hide a thought, it couldn't-

"...Can I ask… something personal?" Eddie ventured.

Oh, shit. She didn't manage to hide it after all. Felicia chased all trace of panic from her face before turning it towards him again.

"Well, you've gone over a week without biting any heads off, so I'd say you've earned a chance."

Even with her permission, Eddie took his sweet time in getting it out. "What did you see in Parker that made you… go after him?"

Felicia blinked. It wasn't what she was scared to hear, but even so… it was strange that he was asking. Maybe he was just trying to figure out what kind of good other people saw in his mortal enemy. If so, at this point in her life she was the wrong person to ask.

"Nothing," she answered honestly. "It was never Peter that I was in love with. Hell, when he told me who he really was, I was heartbroken. He was so… boring. How was I supposed to reconcile a man who saved the city every night with one who could barely pay his rent?"

She remembered that night. From the moment he removed his mask, she remembered everything after it like the heartbreak had branded her brain. How real the pain in her chest had felt even though she felt so stupid for it, stupid for letting herself believe that the Spider-Man she fell for could really possibly match up to what she thought of him. She knew it wasn't Peter's fault that, under the mask, he was just as ordinary as she was under hers- at least, as she was back then. Even so, she'd hated that he let her in on the secret. That he'd almost ruined what they had, just because he'd wanted to make it into something better.

She'd thought her days as a crime boss were her darkest ones, but no. The bitterness she'd felt towards Peter, the selfishness that had consumed her long after she'd tried to make peace with it… that was the Felicia she'd just turned back into, and it was the one she'd been trying to run away from all along.

Eddie still looked at her, not betraying whether or not he was surprised by what he heard. "Alright, lemme rephrase it," he said. "What did you see in Spider-Man?"

Felicia opened her mouth, but nothing came out. If she'd been asked that ten years ago, she wouldn't have been able to stop the reasons for loving him from gushing out. Now, she couldn't even dredge up one that didn't make her sound as shallow as she really was. She looked away from Eddie, turning the question over and over until she found something to give to it. When it finally did find it, she wasn't entirely sure that it even came from her.

"Same thing I guess Symby saw in him," she said. "Another kind of life…. took me a long time to realise that it wasn't one I really wanted." She stood up, working some circulation back into her numb legs as she stretched them. "Bit of advice, Eddie. If you need to change who you are to make someone else happy, and I mean completely overhaul your whole self, then it's not meant to be."

Eddie looked up at her, though even with her standing and him sitting he was still just as tall as her. "What if it's to change for the better?" he asked.

When she'd been with Peter, had asked herself that more times she could count. It was only recently that she'd found the answer to it. "They'll still always hate you for what you once were."

Something flickered in Eddie's eyes. Something similar to the harsh jolt of sudden understanding she'd felt before. Before she could try and decipher it, a door banged open down below. She angled her head down, and saw their target being dragged out of the bar with his ponytail by another of her former employees; the Melter. He had Shrike's arm slumped over his shoulder as his friend's feet dragged behind, though he himself didn't look all that sober.

This was going to be a bloodbath.

"Your audience awaits." Felicia gestured down to the stumbling idiots as Eddie put his scary face on with an eager grin.

"About time. You have the camera ready?" He wasn't about to give up on the idea he inadvertently stole from Peter. Unless it was really Symby's idea all along… Felicia sighed but nodded anyway, taking up position while Venom found a good spot to ambush from. She aimed the viewfinder down at them, listening in on their slurs and hiccups and wondering why she even hired either of them in the first place.

"I'm… I'm tellin' ya', Melt, these guys… they're the real deal. Y'know he even brought Hammer back from the dead? Legit, I mean like, legit fuckin' ressurection!"

"Bullshit. They're fucking pussies, Shrike, that's why they wear hoods. I'm telling you, just forget 'bout them. Take Ozzie's money and run."

"Nuh uh. Nuh uh, man. Os' just the start. You get in with this guy, you get away with anything. Trust me, and I'll even get you in with 'im!"

"Just do me a favour. Don't come haunting me when ya' end up dead."

"Dead or alive," Venom snarled, landing right in front of them and taking up the whole camera sight, "you're coming with us."