VENOM ( moon knight.. ) ✔

005 | Diamonds Have Many Sides..

Jay Vespertine has once written the lines which unknowingly foretold the beginning of their once in a full moon encounter, the first piece in a domino of fate. Separated by destinies, linked by the moon. However, no scribbles on papers or writings on walls could have appreciated the evolution through the phases.

Above San Francisco, the moon was long into its waning gibbous phase, getting ready to pass into its third quarter by the end of the next week. Its spiritual meaning laid along the lines of looking inward, rather than at the havoc of the world around, slowing down not to cease taking action, but to focus everything on the needs of the self: to protect it, to nurture it. This moon, prepared for the transitions to come, dimmed its light to leave room to regain composure.

The moon called for rest but there was no rest left in Clara Carita's angry soul, nor Jake Lockley's easily swayed heart.

Across the narrow alley from them, Louisa Mccarthy, because that was apparently the name of the front desk lady, was still pinned to the wall by Venom's arm, coming from Clara's shoulder and wrapping around Louisa's bottom half of her head. The woman's whole body was drenched in her own blood, from calculated puncture wounds, from one bullet hole and a broken bone sticking out of her skin. That same crimson was under Clara's nails, painting scarlet stars on her cheeks and chin, and staining her clothes with the mess she had to work through to get the very bare minimum of information out of this brainwashed minion of Harrow's.

"Something tells me this silence between us might as well mean you didn't miss me at all," Jake sighed. It's been twenty minutes since he fired that bullet and he was pretty sure it did nothing but annoy Clara, even if the echo of emotion he was left with from Marc told him that she needed them that night. It surely didn't look like it to him, not now that the carnage was over and she calmed down from a high of adrenaline she rode with a grace he felt absolutely blessed to witness.

Violence was an art into the eyes of a man who didn't care to seem anything else but what he was: a criminal, a thief, the sort of man you wouldn't like being the target of. This violence was never going to scare him, the gore was not something his eyes have never seen, though usually, he was the one whose fists got bloody.

Clara ignored his joke with a sharp inhale. That was Jake's cue to search his pockets and finally give the woman a tissue long forgotten in his jacket's pocket by Steven, who liked being prepared at all times. Surely, Jake was certain that tissue was meant for anything other than being held by his hand and tampered against the gorgeous skin of a woman in a try to help wipe the blood off.

She shrugged his hand away, grabbed the tissue herself and started violently wiping off any inch of her face that she could under two seconds before scrunching that thing into her fist. "Are they all like that?" Clara finally nodded towards Louisa, bordering the state of blacking out from all the pain she had endured for twenty minutes of torture. Yet even helpless as she was, Clara wasn't leaving her out of her sight, not even as she found the need to walk away, towards that other wall, and sit right down on the dirty, smelly ground.

Lunatics. Fanatics. True believers of the cause Louisa presented as "liberating the world of flaws". They idolized Arthur Harrow and his research to better the humans as a unitary whole.

Jake sighed. He too had lowered down, to be at her level, even without properly sitting. His back leant against the wall, knees supporting his now draped wrists, while his head was, at all times, turned to the side, watching the woman he had forced himself aware of. He knew he had caught her at a bad time, but even so, there was no denying it: he liked this side of her too. The side of worry creases, of dangerous breaths and of sharp words without mercy to poor souls such as his.

He nodded for her, because how could he ever deny her any answer. Him, the very personification of the other's lack of emotional awareness. "They are," Jake confirmed. "All I could track down myself, all wearing that symbol." Even if he disliked that their talk seemed to want to gravitate just around work, he breathed close to her defensive presence and the company in a dark alley was better than his usual lonesome walk.