Home of the Trash Panda

Let's go:

This is what Red had to say about the incident:

"[Cletus] went away".

So Red does revel in his newfound independency for the entirety of "Carnage 2022", believing Cletus was "holding him back", but it's worth mentioning that he never expresses any initial desire to leave on his own.

Red has always wanted to pursue Godhood along with Cletus, which is further reenforced by the fact that he made an entire clone of Cletus to keep him company later on when he realized he was incomplete.

That line alone, however, is not enough to tell us what happened, since as readers, we don't know how much we can trust from what Red says.

Thankfully, one of the summaries in Carnage 2022 clears this up:

So it's definitively confirmed that Cletus indeed "left" first, and Red was honest. Cletus was the one to reject Red, not the other way around.

...Why though?

I'll get to what I believe Cletus' thought process was in a minute, but first, there's something I find particularly fascinating that I need to talk about:

"I lost my last one".

"They went away from me..."

Twice Cletus talks about the incident, twice he implies and/or states that he was the one left behind. He never admits that he was the one to push Red away. And I don't think he is lying. I do think his psyche earnestly believes that he lost Red because Red wanted to abandon him, even if this is very clearly not the case.

So, it's safe to say Cletus has some... abandonment issues.

His digging up his mother's grave, his obsession with keeping things static because he is afraid people are going to "change on him", his returning to St. Estes alone with the extrembiote after all these years when he could be literally anywhere else...

My theory is that Cletus thought Red was going to leave him.

Why? Well, I imagine Red ended up liking Cletus' idea far more than Cletus himself did. So even after Cletus stopped being interested, Red kept pushing the matter multiple times.

There were quite a few issues with Cletus at the time:

1. He had no physical body of his own, only his conscience remained, and he was essentially more dependent on Red than ever. At least before the extrembiote.

2. Before he lost his body, it had been controlled (for...months on end? Presumably? How long does Absolute Carnage last anyway?) by a completely different symbiote which turned him into a mindless puppet and forced him to do the bidding of a dictatorial cosmic entity. For someone who likes to retain control of the situation at all times, it must have been quite the blow, once he realized what happened, and would have left him understandably shaken.

3. They had never argued with Red before. Not to this degree. Not for anything this serious.

I think that regardless of whether you see their relationship as romantic or not, no one can disagree that ever since they met, Red has been the only constant in Cletus' life. The one person who would never let him down, who would never leave, who would always be on board with him and who would never change on him. They share everything, after all. Beliefs, a mind, a body...

Although, I would imagine that sharing Red's body might have augmented the argument? This is of course purely personal speculation but it seems likely to me that 2 consciences trying to coexist within Red's body - as opposed to the union of a human and a symbiote - might have made the disagreement more intense.

In any case, the moment Cletus started feeling insecure about Red's intentions, he locked onto that belief and would not be able to sense that Red meant for them both to become Gods and had no interest in becoming one just by himself. (He does tend to get quite headstrong at times.)

In the end, his psyche couldn't handle the thought that Red, of all people - his Other half - would leave him too. Red kept pressing and it made Cletus reach a sort of a breaking point.

"Oh, you want to leave me so badly? Fine. I'm leaving you first". - Sort of thought process.

At which point he fully seperates his conscience from Red's body, lets it stay connected only to the extrembiote and leaves.

And so... that's how we got where we are today. Obviously there are still a lot of gaps, it's not a perfect theory by any means, but I really wanted to share my thoughts on this.