For a moment, he sees it through her eyes: a nondescript cottage bordering the ocean, his bare feet on sand and the impartial, effervescent lapping of water over his skin. The world turns somewhere far away from the both of them, hunger and death and famine a distant nightmare that they remember when they close their eyes against the idyllic hum of the seabirds outside their window. He forgets about serpents as easily as the accident rendered him unable to delve into the past, all those years ago. Like the man in the burning hospital that gave him his moniker, Ahab, Eli will give him a new name. Maybe something Biblical. She seems the type.

The moment comes and goes, drowned in acoustics. His fingers slide down the length of her palm and find her cephalic vein, traces along the length of that branching blue line.

"'Only the dead have seen the end of war', huh."

A sigh that lilts on the edge of self-deprecation, and Venom shakes his head. Acknowledging futility would only still his heart— this is all he has, the violence he causes and the faint hope that he, too, will become obsolete. His loyalty to his men is his blood, and the absence of his past— his real past, the one that doesn't read like scripture, memorized for the sake of memorization— only cements him further into the unforgiving present.

"I'm a soldier, Eli. I'm never gonna know how to be anything else."