The Care and Keeping of Your Alien
Day Seven - Eddie teaches Venom about snow and the alien uses his newfound knowledge to his advantage, much to Eddie’s regret.
Eddie grunted as the symbiote crawled around his shoulder to garner a better look at the snow falling from the sky. “Hey buddy, not that I don’t get that you’re totally fascinated by the snow, but we’re in public right now so try to keep a low profile.”
“What’s snow?” Venom questioned innocently, ignoring Eddie’s warnings as per usual. Eddie shifted, trying to ignore the slimy feeling of Venom dripping down his neck. One of the misfortunes of having an alien attached to your skin was having to put up with Venom constantly snaking around his body, completely unaware of any discomfort Eddie might feel. Not that it wasn’t fun in other circumstances, but not when he was trying to buy cheap coffee on a busy New York street.
“It’s like frozen water that falls from the sky,” Eddie explained, wrapping a hand around Venom’s face and trying to wrestle them back under his clothes. People were starting to stare. They didn’t seem as concerned as most people would be if they saw an alien peeking out from a man’s hoodie, but then again it was New York. “When temperatures get cold enough the moisture in the clouds grows heavy, forcing water droplets to fall from the sky and crystalize into tiny fractals, like the snowflakes you’re seeing.”
“They don’t look like crystals,” Venom pointed out, slipping through Eddie’s fingers easily and allowing the snow to fall gently on their skin (skin?). “They feel soft, like Eddie’s hair.”
Eddie flushed, purely a side effect of the cold, obviously. “Yeah, well, they’re too small for them to feel like proper crystals.”
Venom stuck out their tongue, the action nearly giving Eddie a heart attack, and allowed a couple flakes to land on it. They drew it back into their mouth, squinting as they contemplated it. “It tastes cold. Like… air. Cold air.”
“It is air,” Eddie muttered, glancing around anxiously at the civilians who were now stopping to watch the two. “Can you please get back in the shirt? I don’t want the police to have to come again.”
Venom licked what constituted as lips for them and slunk back into his shirt, curling protectively around his stomach. The movement created almost a second jacket and Eddie relaxed into the added heat it provided. He pushed the door to the café open, taking a seat at the bar. It was fairly abandoned, the cold weather giving people pause before they went out on the town. Only a couple other people joined them, including the barista who pushed through locks of greasy hair just to see them properly. “Can I help you?”
“Coffee. Cream and two sugars, please.”
The teenager nodded, clearly already done with the day, and went about the process of making coffee, his expression bored and languid. Eddie tapped his fingers against the countertop, picking up a menu to examine while he waited. It seemed, however, that Venom had grown bored of his position and Eddie nearly dropped the menu as he felt Venom squirming under his shirt, crawling up his skin in a way that made him shudder not altogether unpleasantly. He narrowed his eyes, setting back down the menu.
“Venom,” he said firmly, a quiet undertone so as not to be overheard by the other occupants of the café. “Not here.”
“I’m bored.” Venom gently slid his tongue against the sensitive skin of his chest and Eddie had to close his eyes and force himself to not focus on how good it felt. “I know you love it. You told us you love it.”
“I-I do,” Eddie admitted, his body relaxing slowly into the touches. It was tempting, very tempting, to allow Venom to continue, other people be damned. He knew it would only prompt uncomfortable questions he didn’t want to answer, however, so instead he subtly slipped a hand under his shirt, gripping one of Venom’s many tendrils in a tight grip. “But not here. That’s… private.”
“They cannot see,” Venom answered, the sentence all the more infuriating because it was true. There was nothing the alien was doing that would be visible to the other patrons of the café. It was only Eddie himself that would give them away. “We will make Eddie feel good. We will make Eddie—”
They broke off into a grunt of pain as Eddie squeezed his hand suddenly, nails digging into the slimy material. “No. Not here, or there will be no McDonalds on the way back.”
Reluctantly, Venom drew back and Eddie breathed a sigh of relief and part disappointment. A second later the barista finished his coffee and slid it over, if anything seeming more dead inside than he had before. The coffee burned on the way down and the quality of it made him cringe, but the caffeine was nice, especially as he had a meeting in half an hour that he needed to be alert for. Venom was oddly quiet as he paid and as he walked out the door and made his way down the busy streets. Though he missed the company, it was nice to have some time to himself for once, so used was he to Venom interrupting him with snarky comments or pleas for attention. He even started to whistle as he approached the building, something that normally Venom would berate him for.
When a pile of cold snow slid down the back of his hoodie Eddie was unprepared and he shrieked, nearly jumping out of his own skin.
“What the hell?” he yelped, quickly grabbing the edges of his hoodie and shaking it out, shivering as the snow continued to slide down his back. “What was that?”
He could hear the faint graveling sound that was Venom’s laughter and he glared back at the symbiote, one of their tendrils still lingering on the tree branch that they had swept clean into Eddie’s hoodie. “Payback.”
“Oh, for you not getting to fuck me in public—yargh!” Eddie jumped as even more snow was piled into his hoodie. “Stop that!”
“Will you apologize to us?”
“Fuck no, I have nothing to apologize for—”
His next sentence was cut off as Venom dove under his hoodie, holding a handful of snow in their arms. People on the streets who before had been having a perfectly normal day, were startled by the sight of a grown man dancing and shaking wildly in the streets of New York.
“Fine, fine!” Eddie relented at last, freezing and deeply regretting having agreed to keep an alien attached to him at all times. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Venom slowly slid out of his hoodie, shaking out the rest of the snow for him. “Thank you.”
Eddie grumbled as Venom planted a gentle kiss against his sternum. “You know you can’t do that every time you don’t get your way.”
Eddie couldn’t argue with that, and though he complained the rest of the way to the meeting, deep down he couldn’t find it in himself to be genuinely angry. He didn’t actually mind Venom’s shenanigans, no matter how much he objected to them.
Not that he would ever tell Venom that, of course. He had a reputation to uphold.
