hello. this is a place for me to post Stranger Things + The First Shadow/Symbrock/Venom related writing content. But I’m mostly posting Venom/Symbrock these days
currently working on:
tenebris (+18, very explicit) : Latin. pl. darkness; the darkness of night, of night itself. “Henry knows that once you become brave enough to welcome Him inside, everything else you once knew no longer matters. “We are … One.”
pairings: Henry Creel/Mind Flayer, Henry Creel/Patty Newby. semi prequel, taking place during different times between TFS and S5 of ST
Tbh the opening to Venom: The Last Dance would have been so much more epic if it opened to Sweat by Inner Circle and Venom ridiculously making Eddie slow dance to his “favorite song” in the Thanos bar
just the vision of Venom once their done just turning into a complete puddle and he’s on top of Eddie who now wants up and can’t move and all Venom’s doing is going “nhmhmhnhnhnmmmuHhhhHHHH EddddddddiiiiieeeEEEE we feel so good” and his entire tongue is wriggling all over his face and Eddie is trying not to drown in his drool
I got suspicious when they kept talking about a Stranger Things spin-off in 2027 (but I thought it was a hoax) and when they said the NY show was supposed to close at the end of March... but they extended it. Then they talked about September. Now, this. But at least they're giving it to us even if the London version is goodbye forever 🥲🥲🥲 I'm looking for it but I can't find it. There are slimes only in NY)
Thinking very much abt how the entire introduction of the Other is queer/gay allegory
not just the name “the Other” (think about it - this was the 80s especially. Was a queer person going to be likely to name their queer lover by name? No. It would have been something third person. “Them”. Maybe “my partner”. “MY OTHER”)
but the whole introduction in and of itself. Like. This “entity” that binds to Peter without him really understanding it or wanting it. The way it becomes his “dark”/secret side. The way it is HID IN HIS LITERAL CLOSET. The way it’s treated like an infection - spread between two men - rejected by one, but embraced by another … the way it’s literally like, Eddie accepts the Other and they bond over feeling jilted and scorned by the person who has just rejected them and vow revenge
it’s like “how dare you hurt it/him for being different”
the whole way people view the Other as an entity that infects/spreads evil in an undesirable fashion, but Eddie is the only one who loves it and and accepts it enough to see through that
Someone started talking to me about a Venom and Transformers crossover and my brain kinda ... went with it.
No idea where this will go. I'm just having fun with this. But we're crossing over Venom: King in Black/The Last Dance (kind of a fusion between the comics and the films) with Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bayverse), timeline-wise this is pre-AoE while Optimus is in Mexico City.
This could be a lot of fun, idk.
2,225 words current, T rating.
Part 1/?
'God is Coming'
-
SOMEWHERE far beyond the borders of our own home universe, jailed within a black Cage of darkness…
A walled-off abscess in a dimension of emptiness once called the Void, the true home of His alien offspring from times before the Celestials had begun the war to claim it as their own—
—waits the imprisoned Father of Symbiotes:
Knull.
[TRANSLATION: GOD]
GOD OF THE VOID.
He is locked within a plane where time flows independent from space and gravity.
It is a Cage in which His own first race of Symbiote Children ensnared him with only his lethal sword, All-Black, for company. They believed him a murderous tyrant worthy of such fate.
It is a Klyntar [TRANSLATION: CAGE] made for Him, and Him alone; sealed and impenetrable to any power within all universes, save for the coming prophetic creation of a Codex [TRANSLATION: KEY].
A Codex is only formed from an unfathomable treason: the resurrection of a human host who has died whilst still bonded to their Symbiote partner. No Symbiote was believed to ever be capable of bonding so completely to a host to achieve, not just symbiosis, but mutuality—even love. Not when their race was parasitic by birth, destined to leech the life from their hosts from the inside out.
Such an impossible event was fated only to happen once in every trillionth trillionth splintered-off dimension of time, a needle in a haystack, if you will—
A needle—or a Codex—the Symbiote Father now searches for relentlessly.
It has been created. Now, He must find it.
To achieve this, he births a new race of more faithful Children, His Xenophages [TRANSLATION: SYMBIOTE HUNTERS], and instructs them how to open portals to alternate timelines across space itself to pursue the Codex from far beyond the limits of his own Klyntar cell.
He is searching for just one Symbiote in particular. One Codex.
Knull seeks the exiled Symbiote-and-human pair humanity will someday come to know as Venom.
They have the Codex he needs. The seeds of Knull’s now-inevitable rebirth have been planted within the host’s neck, conceived via the young Symbiote’s foolhardy treason.
His Xenophages must all but retrieve it.
How will he reward the young Symbiote for his blindsided treachery? Perhaps with a kiss from All-Black. How sweet it was that the ultimate act of true love itself served no purpose for a Symbiote but to open the Cage of Death and unleash Knull Himself.
Knull speaks to his Children in a gaunt, terrible voice, one that swells like inhuman, cold thunder through his Void-black Cage, beckoning his new, indestructible, most faithful daughters to come forth.
“BRING ME THE CODEX.”
Several dozen molten gold rings burst through the Void like overlapping ripples, splitting wide open the great pond of night. The Xenophages spring forth, leaping into them, tails lashing, destined for multiple dimensions at once.
Each vanishes quicker than the last with one final deadly whip of their scorpion-like tail.
Knull is Coming, their God revels in anticipation. Nothing in any universe can change that, now.
But through space and time…
Impossible lifetimes and distances away…
In a dimension far removed from Knull, on a planet once mostly spared from the worst of the God of the Void’s wrath…
The ‘Venom’ Symbiote’s host Edward Charles Allan Brock awakens with a gasp, surfacing from a dream that’s chilled him to the bone.
Wide-eyed, he blinks back streaming tears and chokes. The dream has felt like being drowned underwater. It has ripped him from this realm and thrust him headlong into a millennium he could never have witnessed, never have lived through, before yanking him back home like a dog on a chain.
His human grey matter screams with oxygen deprivation and panic, rendering him nauseous and shaky. He wills himself not to vomit all over his mattress as he struggles to reclaim his bearings.
Eddie cannot think. The memory of the dream fills all his braincells, all his senses. It is a nightmare he knows without doubt does not belong to him.
*
MEXICO CITY.
NOW.
(JULY 5TH, 2018. 2:13 A.M.)
The first thing Eddie becomes aware of, outside the dream, is the humidity.
It is so humid he can hardly catch his breath. The weight of the air is so heavy on his chest it is suffocating.
The dampness clings to every molecule of his skin. Drenches the threadbare blankets he’s mostly ripped from his body during his slumber, his tossed sheets, turning them sticky and puddly. The discomfort is helped along by the clammy glistening sweat still beading from what feels like every pore he possesses.
His head is spinning round and round inside his skull. Vertigo at its finest.
It is always humid in Mexico City, but this barometer-breaker of a night is unlike the usual brand of tropical dampness he has grown accustomed to in recent weeks. His time spent living off grid as a fugitive in this hard-knock city has been filled with sweaty, smoggy days and nights, but this is something else entirely.
It almost makes himmiss the fresh air of the coast. The beach with the hotel where he and Venom had spent an afternoon at sharing whispered romantic secrets at sunset what felt like lifetimes ago, now.
The air had been so clean, there. Not like here. Eddie swallows thickly, rubs his gummy itching eyes, and glances at the red-numbered digital alarm clock on his nightstand. Two AM.
He sighs. The air is thick and stifling. It’s practically punishing, he finds. Pregnant with the burnt tang of ozone, the ominous threat of what is surely a looming gigantic storm.
The darkness around him, broken by only the Radon-like red glow of the alarm clock, is absolute. He can barely make out the dark square of the tiny window hovering above his bed.
As he lays in silence, the first wet smacks of giant raindrops ping an increasingly persistent percussion against the hundreds of corrugated tin roofs squeezed tight into the dense slums surrounding him, including his own one.
His place is on the top floor of a nondescript shanty practically identical to all the other shanties leaning into his. His hilltop vantage point adds a fair view of the surrounding rolling hills, glimpsing the skyscraper-thick core of much richer downtown on days when the smog allowed for it, though that was the only thing even remotely ‘fair’ about the place he lives in.
It is a slum, after all. It wasn’t poetic.
Rivets of rain begin to run down the tin walls. The tiny apartment becomes filled with the wet tinkle of running water as Eddie shuffles around, pulling at sheets.
The rhythm of the raindrops beats out a swelling song like a moonlit sonata, threatening monsoon, only, there is now no more moonlight to soften the night sky outside the empty hole in the wall that, in a normal house, would host a solid window. Here, there is nothing—just a gap—the window simply opens to the narrow, sloping street outside. Through it he watches the sky above be stolen by the same formidable entity that begins to bear down on the Mexican capital mere seconds later with full vengeance.
A searing, blinding, green-blue flash so bright it burns the distant shapes of Mexico’s finest skyscrapers right into the back of his retina forks itself across the horizon, splintering into spearheaded trails like a Devil’s trident.
Eddie blinks and rubs his eyes again, trying to rid himself of the image. It remains burned there. He sucks a frightened hiss from between his teeth, and counts out—one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three.
-
KRAKA-DOOOOOOM
-
The thunder feels like the loudest thing he’s ever heard in his whole life. It threatens to blow his eardrums wide open.
It takes a fraction of the moment the lightning flash took for the following ringing silence to sink in.
Tinnitus. It is the loudest ‘silence’he has ever heard in his whole life.
That’s when he realizes.
“W-where—? Where are you?!” he gasps, suddenly terrified, feeling alone.
Because the second main thing Eddie has come to realize, is that he can’t sense the Other.
Thankfully, this doesn’t last long. He’s not alone, after all. But he can feel Venom’s fear, too. His hesitancy. The symbiote is more afraid than he’s ever been in his whole life right now.
“Venom!” Eddie cries out, desperate for his Other to answer him verbally. The alien feels somehow diminished in his veins—removed—the blackness of him has exuded from his skin while he slept. It forms gooey trailing puddles over the floor, his legs, his arms. “It’s only a storm, love,” he consoles him. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
Finally, Venom pulls his matter tight against the palms of Eddie’s hands like a being decidedly trying to pull himself together. But when he speaks his voice is little more substantial than a whisper within the confines of Eddie’s skull. Subdued … submissive. Out of character in a way that makes the hairs on the nape of Eddie’s neck stand up on end.
“…Not the storm, Eddie,” his Other murmurs, curling tendrils around his torso, his arms, squeezing, nuzzling.
“No?” Eddie feels the bottom drop out of his stomach as he remembers it wasn’t the storm that had awoken them. He asks the dense, silent air around him, “Are you sure?”. But he already knows the answer.
“…The nightmare,” he says redundantly, chews his lip, wondering, as the storm begins to rage around them.
“Yes, Eddie.” Another clingy squeeze. Another tremble of symbiotic flesh, and it breaks Eddie’s heart.
“I didn’t know you could have nightmares.”
“Neither did we.”
Eddie tries to remember the series of images that had played within his mind during it. They had felt so real. It made his heart leap hard in his chest.“What was—” his brows knit in a confused frown as he works his fingers into the symbiote matter flat against his palm, tracing calming circles, wondering if maybe this was a conversation best saved for later. “What was it?”
“…I don’t know.”
The papery thinness of his Other’s normally dominant voice terrifies Eddie.
Something is wrong.
But before Eddie can begin to figure anything else about this out, begin to untie the knot that his symbiote feels tied in, the haunting wail of sirens cry from beyond the absent windowpanes.
WHHEEE—WOOOO
WHHEEE—WOOOO
WHHEEE—WOOOO
The whine is deafening against the quiet of the night. He feels the symbiote tense up, expectant, listening for the predictable noise that reliably follows. A slow-rolling crackle of radio static prickles tensely through the peeling room as the ancient scotchtaped police scanner with a bent antenna resting on their bedside table beside the alarm clock fizzles into life.
“*-KISH-* COME IN CEMETERY WIND ALPHA TEAM, DO YOU COPY? I GOT A HEAT SIG DOWN ON CLOVERFIELD. NEAR THAT BIG SEWER CULVERT. POSSIBLE CYBERTRONIAN PRESENCE—SPOTTED TWO DUALLY TRACKS LEADING DOWN THROUGH THE MUD, LOOKS TO BE A BIG RIG, IF I’M NOT VERY MISTAKEN.
*-KISH-* *-KISH-* —CONFIRMED. I DO BELIEVE I’VE GOT EYES ON THE PRIME, BOYS. THIS IS IT. SEND ‘EM OUT—EVERYONE YOU’VE GOT!”
Yet another massive trident of lightning splits the sky just then. Neon aqua echelons carve shadows through Eddie’s darkened room, throwing his harrowed, exhausted face into sharp relief. The pulse casts hollows into his eye sockets as black as his Other’s are white.
The thunder rolls again, and its bone-shaking. Ever closer than before.
-
KRAKA-DOOOOOOOOOM
-
“*-KISH-* I REPEAT! I REPEAT! THIS IS BETA TEAM, DO YOU COPY?! TEAM ALPHA, CEMETERY WIND, REQUESTING MASSIVE IMMEDIATE BACKUP! DO YOU COPY, ALPHA?! WE’RE DEALING WITH A PRIME HERE!”
The scanner pleads into the suddenly empty bedroom, but nobody is listening anymore.
Eddie—now encased as Venom—has already vanished. As the Lethal Protector, he’s so nimble the transformation only takes a picosecond, as does their exit. The feeble curtains shrouding the corners of the empty not-quite-window swirl and dance in the sucking wind, heavy and sticky with dampness from mist riding the breeze.
Down below it on the cracked, trash-littered pavement of La Colina Callejon (the hill alley, was a rough translation, Eddie had gathered), Venom’s gigantic toes hit the ground with a wet, muddy squelch.
They were running. Leaping. Then, they were webslinging. Cloverfield, they’d said, remembered the Other as they slung through the torrential weather. Is there a bounty on the Cybertronian? Captured dead or alive? Will we have a treat? How do metal faces taste? Brains? Eddie? Eddiiiieee? Edddddddiiiieee? Can we KILL—Can we EAT—We are HUNGRY—
Eddie felt suddenly uneasy.
Kill? He thought back. Eat?! Hey, are you okay? We are the Lethal Protector, buddy. We don’t kill, remember?
…Sure we are, Eddie. We know that. … We are sorry. That wasn’t what we meant to say.
Something was certainly wrong, Eddie realized.
Distantly, yet another blinding flash of white-hot electric blue hit the sky with incredible power.
The fork sprawled so massively that Eddie could almost imagine it reached all the way to God himself.
If God is listening, he thought, watching the trailing ends of it burn themselves out, Then let Him help us weather whatever this coming storm is.
I need to write an essay on why Eddie bonding with Carnage in Eddie Brock: Carnage is a trauma response and how and why Carnage’s treatment of Eddie is not just a drug allegory but has SA allegory he is abusing a trauma victim and. While it’s not full Stockholm syndrome, Carnage is manipulating Eddie into not leaving him. Eddie bonding to him in general was definitely a trauma response post Venom War
allegory in work like this is important. It can add hella character depth on the heels of a run that was all story 0-60 and largely lacked character depth bc of it (Ewing). Eddie Brock: Carnage lowkey acknowledging Eddie’s post-Venom War trauma is one of the more under-appreciated things in more recent Venom-related runs imho
I will be talking abt this more in a later time when I fully finish this run. But for now. I am a fan
