Eddie has a ventilation tube down his throat and an IV line running to his arm by the time Keller has him fully prepped. She's scowling slightly, still annoyed that he'd woken up, but the situation had quickly resolved itself. After the dose last time had damn near killed him she'd tried to go easier, but it looks like she overcompensated.
The imprecision of the whole thing piques her—same with the speaker she currently has transmitting a supersonic frequency, low intensity sound wave towards Brock's torso, in the hopes that should the sedative fail, it will still keep the symbiote subdued. With all the other test subjects gone and her research woefully incomplete, she doesn't have more refined parameters.
Such is the nature of research, she supposes. Hopefully by the end of this she'll have something more concrete to write about. Maybe publish, though it's not like she would have gotten this past an ethics board. It's looking like she'll be spending several more months underground like she has ever since the Foundation collapsed, but she can tolerate it. For science.
Checking Eddie's vitals one final time, Keller is convinced the mix of anaesthetic gases in the tank is adequate for symbiote and host and quickly scribbles down the proportions. Watching the rise and fall of Brock's chest, confirming the accurate placement of the tube (so what that she's not a medical doctor? Drake certainly let her get plenty of hands on experience) she's almost taken aback by how different he looks to last time she'd seen him this close. True symbiosis. He looks healthy now, and not the dying husk he'd been before.
Healthy enough that the procedure should pose no risk. Should.
Keller grits her teeth as she looks down at her equipment tray and again feels a prickle of irritation. There's no rational reason why Brock should be opposed to this. She has no desire to hurt him—it's actually easier for the both of them if she doesn't. If he could have just stayed asleep chances are he would have woken up oblivious and never even known.
Well, too late. Best to just carry on.
Keller picks up the dictaphone she's left beside the surgical tools and speaks into the microphone. "Subject prepped. Vitals holding stable. No signs of distress to symbiote or host."
She leaves it recording on the table while she picks up a scalpel and efficiently slices into Eddie's chest. Everything's disinfected—equipment sterile, yellow-brown iodine clinging to Brock's skin—but even just the first few cuts make Keller's eyes widen, the bleeding little more than a trickle as the blade meets the resistance of something black and gelatinous. "Symbiotic matter in the subcutaneous layer," she records, her pulse picking up in excitement. "Going down to the muscle."
She carries on. Brock and Venom are out like a light.
By the time she brings out the sternal saw and rib spreaders, Keller is almost giddy with excitement. There's the audible creak of bone as she eases the spreader into the aperture she's created and widens it, but she barely even notices. All Keller sees is the glossy blanket of blackness being revealed as she pries open Eddie's chest.
"The symbiote is...deeply fused to the organs," she reports, staring. "Probing deeper."
She's so focused on Eddie's chest that she doesn't notice the tendril of black bleeding through his wrist, creeping silently along a fingertip until it finds a solid surface and inches closer to the machine she has controlling the supersonic pulse and gas flow of the sedative.
Deciding that her tools won't cut it now, Keller puts her instruments aside, then tugs off the nitrile glove she has cloaking her right hand. There's only one way she can know. She stares down at Eddie Brock's open chest, takes a breath, and sinks her hand into the black sea.
A soft gasp escapes Keller's mouth as the combined heat of Brock's body and the symbiote's dense, silky matter washes over her, clinging to her wrist the deeper she goes. Venom is warm, though a little below standard body temperature she suspects, perhaps heated somewhat for resting so close to Eddie's core. She's careful not to damage any organs, though even with the abundance of hollow space inside the chest cavity, she marvels at how the symbiote can even fit. There seems to be so much of it, not simply draped over Brock's organs but woven deep inside of them. She can feel him—them—breathing.
Lungs are the key, she knows. Symbiotes can't survive in Earth's atmosphere without bonding to them.
"Taking a biopsy of lung tissue," she records, using her left hand to pick up a pair of curved scissors and reaching in. When she makes the cut, that's when she ought to notice: a sharp, focused ripple spreads through the symbiote like a pulse, surface tension momentarily heightening as if in pain, and then eases.
For Keller, it passes too quickly to even register. Maybe there's a moment where she blinks, wondering at what—if anything—she'd just felt, but then it's soon forgotten. She deposits the sample inside a test tube and turns her attention back to Eddie's chest, staring in awe.
"I wonder what your heart looks like…" She muses, not really for the dictaphone's benefit so much as her own. Last time, fused to the symbiote, it had been rapidly failing. She knows it has to be different now.
Once more, Keller eases her hand in.
There's enough time for her to feel it. Enough seconds pass where her fingertips brush the organ, housed in a protective shell of symbiotic matter and a pericardium flooded with black, and feels it beating. It's powerful, and healthy, and strong, and so much more than anything she'd been expecting that there's a moment where all she can do is cradle it in her hand and let it beat.
Then before she can do anything else, a sudden, crushing pressure wraps tight around her wrist.
Keller cries out, instinctively trying to wrench her arm back, but Venom's grip is tight. What happened? she wonders briefly, only just noticing the power light has gone on the speaker, but it's too late to do anything before black tendrils rush further up her arm and then she hears a sharp snap.
She screams. Her fingers have gone numb, wrist broken clean, but it's enough that Venom finally lets go and she staggers back. Her left hand flies to the tray of surgical tools, as if any of them would do her any good, but from deep beneath Brock's split sternum a sudden black tentacle extends and flips the table, sending instruments clattering to the floor.
Panic flooding her, Keller trips over her own feet and goes down. She hits the floor with an ooph as she clutches her injured arm to her chest. Shit shit shit is all she can think, at this point not even able to coherently wonder what went wrong.
Blackness is spilling haphazardly out of Brock's open chest, discarding the rib spreader violently so that she throws up an arm to shield herself from the hurtling metal, and then a tentacle finds the controls for the gas pump. She hears the soft hiss of the machine dying, and realises it's over.
Fuck.
She isn't looking when Eddie's eyes open, still vacant and dazed before Venom sweeps over his face to obscure them completely, but picks herself up and runs as fast as she can towards the door. Goddamn fingerprint scanner. Right hand.
There's no time to worry about the pain. Keller grasps at her own fingers to press hurriedly against the glass. It doesn't save her.
A glossy black hand slams against her own, shattering both scanner and bone, and she screams. The next thing she knows, she's flying through air until her back slams hard against the wall, then, too winded to even cry out, she crumples to the floor.
Picking up her head, through the haze of her vision, what might as well be a shadow stalks towards her. The hulking, muscular shape of man melded with symbiote reaches down and grasps her by the throat, lifting until she finds herself staring into blank, menacing white eyes.
That toothy maw opens, wider than should be possible for any non-reptilian jaw, and Keller braces herself. If she's about to meet the same fate as Treece, she wonders how badly it will hurt.
She doesn't find out. The opening mouth widens further, until the slick surface of the symbiote recedes and she finds herself staring into Eddie Brock's face. He looks out from beneath the hood of darkness with pure hatred in his gaze.
"Please…" Keller gasps, her one good hand clawing feebly at his grip.
Eddie's eyes are hard, and she almost thinks she'd prefer to be staring into the inhuman white paint-spatter of the symbiote's. "Give me one reason not to."
The growling menace belongs to the symbiote. The voice is all his.
"Back when...Treece captured you..." It's an effort to speak, and she almost fears she'll pass out before she gets to the end. "Brought you to Drake. You were dying. Your heart stopped. I brought you back."
Eddie says nothing. He glares, eyes boring into her, and then they're hidden again behind a rippling dark mass that swallows his face. Keller shuts her eyes and braces for the end.
It's late evening, or nighttime. Eddie can't really figure out which and doesn't much care to as he makes his way as far as possible from the lab. He hadn't stopped to check for any of his things—not his clothes or even his phone or something that might have recorded evidence of what just happened, in a hurry to get the hell away from there as he lets a still woozy and confused Venom carry them as far as he's able.
They've gone a few miles by the time it becomes too much for the symbiote still shaking off the mystery sedating chemical, and, exhausted, he sinks back beneath Eddie's skin. Not quite all the way: a thick blanket of black lingers over the contours of Eddie's torso and arms, shielding his bare skin like a warm coat, and Eddie feels a rush of gratitude. He's almost afraid to look at his own chest.
Eddie?
Venom's voice is a rumble in his mind.
Why didn't we eat her?
"Because…" Eddie's mouth is dry and a bitter taste sits on his tongue. He doubts that's just the anaesthetic. "It wouldn't have been right, V."
She was a bad person, Eddie. He lets than linger, then, We wanted to eat her. You wanted to.
Eddie swallows. "I know. But I believe her. She saved our life, so we owe it to her. This time."
Beneath Venom's protective shell, he shivers, and feels the symbiote squeeze him tighter. Their shared heart is still racing. He doesn't think it will slow for a while.
"I'm not sure we can go home tonight," Eddie says shakily, and is grateful when the symbiote seems to understand.
Say no more.
It isn't long later when they rock up outside a house on a hill where a particularly fluffy cat is watching them from the window, and Venom pulls back from Eddie's knuckles to let them rap on the door. There's still a horrible queasiness in the pit of Eddie's stomach when somebody answers and he sees Dan, sleepy eyes widening in surprise and dressed in pajamas. It's later than he realised, then.
"Hey, Dan." His voice is hoarse.
"Eddie?" The look of surprise quickly slides towards alarm as he takes in the state Eddie's in, wearing the symbiote like a particularly puffy hoodie with tired eyes looking out from his left shoulder. "What happened? Are you alright?"
"I'm...not sure." Eddie doesn't know that he can talk about it. Perhaps not to a surgeon, especially. He just knows he doesn't want them to be alone. "Do you think we could stay here tonight?"
Dan blinks, still bewildered and rapidly growing more concerned, but there's no hesitation as he opens the door wider to invite them in. "Of course."
A/N: I'm sure Keller may well have deserved to die, but with a confirmed sequel to Venom on the horizon, I'd like to keep her around. She may prove useful yet. Hope you guys enjoyed the read and a bit of a fix-it for one thing in the movie that didn't make much sense.