#thread | venom

A flash of familiar, impossibly red hair catches Harry’s eye and he pulls his cap down and the sides of his hood forward to better hide his face as she passes. Acting on instinct--or perhaps simple loneliness--Harry ducks around a corner without a second thought to will on his symbiote suit, taking to the rooftops a moment later.

“This isn’t weird,” he whispers under his breath as he follows Mary Jane for a few blocks, trying to convince himself of that as he leaps from shadow to shadow. “Just checking up on her. She’s my friend.”

The creature sharing his body says nothing, but still somehow seems to agree with him as it observes Harry, sampling the dopamine released in his brain immediately after Mary Jane’s sudden appearance. The pair continues in silence for a few blocks, hanging back and staying out of sight.

He hadn’t intended to actually need to intervene, or to make himself known, but when he realizes that MJ was entering known Maggia territory, pulling out a camera and crouching down to avoid being seen, he’s suddenly terrified. It had been a long-running complaint of Peter’s that Mary Jane often put herself in danger, but Harry hadn’t realized how much merit that complaint held; he’d thought Pete was just being overprotective, and even a bit overdramatic.

Holding his breath, he keeps a steady eye on her, and as she ducks down behind a car, he can hear broken glass crunching beneath her feet. Silence hangs thick in the air just long enough to give the impression of safety, but a deep, threatening voice shatters it;

“Someone’s here.”

The black suit sends alarmed shivers down Harry’s spine, and he’s forced to make a choice as a burly, armed man begins to search of the intruder: MJ. He can either confront the would-be assailant, giving her cover to escape or go deeper into the lion’s den, or he can grab her and go, assuring her safety.

It’s not much of a choice; not really.

Noiselessly, he drops down near her, webs her into his arms, and leaps up and away from what could have been a bloody scene. When they land on a nearby building, Harry runs his hand over the mask to assure himself that it’s still in place, quickly pulling away from his friend and holding his hands up in front of him in a gesture of peace.

“Not... good,” Harry pants, hugging his arms around himself as he squats down, doing everything he can to calm and comfort the symbiote as it writhes violently upon his skin. 

This has only happened a few times, starting soon after he’d somehow been sucked out of his own world and into this near mirror image. But this episode has been the worst--drawn out well beyond the others--and Harry feels like he’s losing control of the creature.

          Pain, it screams in the back of his mind, taking control of his limbs and forcing him to stand so it can throw him back at the wall behind their shared body hard enough to crack the bricks. Dying!

Reeling from the impact, Harry falls forward onto his hands and knees and screams, his own guttural cries mixing with Venom’s screeching wails as more and more of the suit builds up around him in a grotesque mockery of the human form. Claws--longer and sharper than any Harry had created before--sprout from his fingertips and the suit’s mouth gapes, filling with several rows of needle-like teeth and an obscenely long tongue.

Finally, the pain subsides, and Harry--though horrified by the suit’s previous control and the form it’s given them--breathes a sigh of relief. But when he tries to will the suit away, it refuses.

We are injured, it tells him, wicking away the sweat from Harry’s skin. We must replenish.

Before Harry has a chance to ask how Venom plans to replenish them, someone--undoubtedly curious about all the terrible noise they’d made--joins them on the rooftop.

Venom’s tongue, dripping wet, pushes between gaps in the gruesome teeth to loll out the side of its mouth at the sight of Spider-Man, and Harry pales beneath the mass as he recognizes Venom’s interest in the figure as a very predatory sort of hunger.

“Fuck,” he curses, struggling again to move, to try to somehow halt Venom’s progress, to yell loud enough to get past the suit and warn the young man to run. But nothing works, and Venom grins a sharp, deadly grin.

Harry feels trapped, unable to move within his own body as the creature overrides his will and pushes their shared form to its feet. He gasps when he realizes just how tall, how massive they’d become when they tower over the much smaller Spider-Man.

Lying to Harry has never been something he’s been overly fond of doing, but Theo is finding it easier and easier these days. The draw of the city, the freedom this cure has given him, and of the good he knows he’s capable of doing now are just too strong. So when he tells his younger brother that he’s headed to bed, putting on a show of brushing his teeth and stretching as he heads toward his room, it seems convincing. And why wouldn’t it? It’s not like his brother would expect that to be a lie; they’re well into the wee hours of the morning.

Plus, their floor is far enough off the ground to make what he’s about to do seem impossible. Careful to lock his door behind him, Theo allows the suit to reshape itself and seamlessly flow over his body before he cracks open a window and jumps.

He swings and parkours around the city’s boroughs for a while, losing track of the time as he enjoys the rush it gives him, but as the sky begins to lighten, he knows he has to head home. Something stops him, however.

Before, getting from one research station to the next had been a pain; one that had only gotten worse as his condition had declined. But now-- Now it was absolutely exhilarating. The rush he got from seeing the city like this was incomparable. He used to wonder what it would be like to swing through the city like Spider-Man, hurling himself off rooftops and running up walls.

Now he doesn’t have to.

Landing--a bit more clumsily than he’d wanted to--in front of one of his favorite stations, Harry enters his passcode, only to find the positive results of a recent login.

“Huh.” Harry laughs under his breath, pleasantly surprised. “Looks like Pete had time to check these out for me after all.”

In all honesty, Harry hadn’t thought Peter would remember to help him out with this. It sometimes seemed like Peter had only grown more unreliable as they got older, with him flaking on Harry and MJ with increasing frequency. Even still, Harry thought the world of him; despite his absentmindedness, he knew Pete had a heart of gold.

He decides to check the next outpost, curiosity suddenly burning, begging him to check to see if he’d gotten to them all. And that’s when he sees him: Spider-Man. Two roofs over, fighting some of the few remaining Sable mercenaries his father had hired. Beneath the black and white mask, Harry’s eyes light up. He’d seen the man in action before on a television large enough to make him feel like he’d been there, but this was on another level. He had to get closer.

And hey, if that meant taking out a few of the jerks who’d been heartlessly harassing his fellow New Yorkers on his father’s pocket change, well that was just a bonus. Maybe--and he hoped he wasn’t getting too far ahead of himself here--the two of them could drive them out for good.