The airplane would have never been Clara's first choice, but to get to Casablanca, it was her one and only option.

"I don't like this, I don't like flying," Venom kept repeating in her head, all throughout the check-in procedures and even once they got their seat, towards the wall, in the very middle of the plane.

"Just calm down, Venom," Clara whispered under her breath, even though she had her earpods in and it wouldn't have looked so weird that she talked with herself while they were still on the ground, waiting for all passengers. Ten more minutes.

Venom built a certain 'displeasure' for flying vehicles made by humans, ever since that horrendous crash which killed so many of his kind and would have ended him too, were it not for Clara to have been nearby. But the symbiote's fear was echoing in her body as well, triggering her fear receptors and making her shake even though this phobia for flying was not hers.

"You are making both of us panic and we are not even off the ground, buddy. Just let me breathe us through this, it's just fifteen hours and I will make us sleep through half of it, if you let me."

"Fifteen hours?!" Venom exclaimed. "No, I am not doing this." His fearful determination was trying to force full control over Clara's body out of the blue. Though she gritted her teeth and held Venom inside, he managed to accentuate the shouts in her mind by having her violently shake her head.

Then, just as suddenly, Venom made her hands clasped the seat before her. He got them up on their feet. "I don't even want revenge anymore. Not unless we can take a boat-"

"We are not taking a boat to freaking Casablanca," Clara fought against Venom's crippling strength, bowing her head and finally, managed to sit both of them back down. She fastened the seatbelt on.

"How dare you?" Venom gasped at her last action. Beginning to feel his control over her hands, knowing they won't be listening to her soon, Clara placed them under her thighs and heard another gasp from her symbiote. "You are the worst! Why do I have to go through this torture?"

"I know it's hard for you, but we are not going to back out of this now. It's too late. So just rest assured that as long as you are in me and I am your host, you are safe."

"What if we crash?"

"I know how to swim."

"What if we crash on land?"

"You can form a parachute for us and we'll still be fine," Clara replied without hesitation. She has been keeping an overall composed, quiet tone, as much as she could but the moment Venom stopped fighting to control her body, her sight of relief was loud enough to make her lean forward, tiredly resting her forehead against the front seat. She looked to her left side, at the empty chair.

"Not even Marc wants to travel by plane," Venom puffed.

The empty seat's sight caused her distress, an inner confusion of acknowledging what exactly it was that she was feeling... Perhaps a nuance of disappointment became to crown over everything Clara did not know how to explain and wouldn't want to either. "Why are you taking him as an example? I thought you didn't like him...," her mumble followed.

"I don't," Venom reassured. "But you do."

Clara straightened up and leant back to sit properly. "No, I don't."

"In decades of symbiosis have you ever been able to lie to me?" He waited, and ultimately, took her silence for a sufficient answer, making her cross her arms at her chest. "There's no lies between us. Perhaps you were indifferent at first, but now it's very clear that you like all three of them."

"You don't know how human affection works, Venom, you can't know for certain."

"But I know how you work. When I first met you, you still had that crush on that boy with the cassette," Venom reminded her without hesitation, forgetting all about how his host would rather not talk about all the failed tries at love, even the childish ones. In that moment, Clara just needed him to shut up, but by saying nothing, Venom thought that was his cue to keep on blabbering, about how it was unlikely that any of the three personalities she grew a notch too fond of would actually call things off because of the symbiote nature, apart from Steven, whom he made it paramount to point out he'd hide to leave her room to do the "human thing".

If talking made Venom less likely to panic throughout the flight, Clara was willing to endure the headache of a loud mind for both of them.

Unfortunately though, her gaze kept flinching to the side, at that empty seat and she was strongly fighting the urge to just pick up her phone to call Marc. She went to the extent of getting the ticket for him as well, but she forgot to consider that Steven might be in charge of the body for longer than anticipated, in which case... Well, she was going to go to Casablanca alone.

It shouldn't have bothered her nearly as much as it did. After all, even in 'the Horsemen operative' -and she believed with a pathos that was a stupid name for a part-time team-, the work was almost always solitary, because neither her, nor Michael and especially not Paul, were team players or the sort of weaklings who would like to get saved from pain every step of the way. They were strong separately, just as they were together, and that was exactly why their supposed team was so efficient.

But this brought loneliness on the plate and plunged from a life of facing pain head on and embracing it like a childhood friend at all times, Clara might have been struck a shard of weakness for being allowed to be weak for once, for being allowed to let her guard down and not assume it was just her and Venom, always and forever. Nothing more, nothing less.

It had been the most painful to deal with that reality, not in their first years of still forming symbiosis, those wretched times when they would argue every ten minutes and the nights would be anything but spent sleeping, but during the rough days after Priscila decided to move out and Clara realized, in the detriment of too many failed dates, that this was it: this was her life. Perhaps that was part of why she accepted G's offer to join his "Horsemen" and make something out of it all.

If anything, the trip to DC gave her the illusion of normalcy, but an actual connection with Marc or Jake, be it forced by some God... that gave her hope.

Well, waiting in that airplane for take-off with Venom pretty much shouting and making scrambled eggs of her thoughts did nothing but confirm that hope was not what they were made for. She had her symbiote, for better or for worse. If this constant cycle of loneliness was her prison, she'd be the happiest prisoner of all.

Finally, the very posture of having her arms crossed at her chest felt like a hug.

"You sure you meant to get my seat next to yours?" Marc's voice interrupted the loud thoughts which made Clara glare ahead, absently. The thud of placing his travel bag above their seats was followed by him taking his seat next to her and therefore, interrupting Venom.

"You came," Clara barely mumbled, hence Marc didn't even hear the sincerity of her tone, right before it got louder and truer to herself. "Sorry to disappoint you, but the flight was almost fully booked. Feel free to spend your journey mostly in the bathroom or you'll just have to deal with me sleeping for half a day."

"If he touches us while you sleep, I claim the right to eat all of his fingers and poke his eyes out with the bones I will be spitting back," Venom hummed, all of a sudden brushing under the mat the whole talk about liking or not liking.

Marc was too busy adjusting his seat to look at her and since she wouldn't be seeing it, he dared play with a little smile, tugging the corners of his lips. Getting to the airport had been a true struggle. After Steven woke up at the wrong time, he also had to deal with Khonshu's dramatic leave. In his view, Marc has been acting 'unreasonably ungrateful'.

His mind was all over the place. His body was running on no hours of sleep and the fact that Clara pointed out that she was planning on resting all the way to Casablanca appealed to him. In fact, he was going to do just that. Why worry about sitting next to the glaring woman and her inner monster when he could just try and have a controlled sleep, the rabbit type of nap, with waking up every ten minutes, like the army and his disorder during Khonshu's mission taught him?

But he didn't quite settle into his seat properly, that Clara extended a bandaid towards him. Busy fastening his seatbelt too, Marc was too tired to also notice that she's been giving the cut on the bridge of his nose a pointed look, nor even the fact that Venom procured from her pocket for her the bandaid she now passed on, wordlessly.

Marc stared down at the white little piece then up at Clara, highly confused, until, moving her eyes away from him -to roll them, of course-, she pointed with her free hand towards her own nose. He lifted his hand over his and felt that the little cut from getting hit in the face with a lamp was bleeding again.

"Oh, shit," Marc huffed and took the bandaid from Clara, opening the little thing carefully, and blindly sticking it over the cut to just make sure it won't make a mess. These superficial cuts were always overly dramatic with smudging. "Thanks."

"How did you explain this trip to Steven?" It was a very round-about type of way of asking how the heck did he get that cut in less than eight hours. She couldn't imagine him -whichever personality for that matter- being that clumsy, neither was the option of getting it while shaving a viable one in her mind.

Marc didn't answer for a long moment and Clara felt her heart sink. She turned her head back towards Marc and watched as he deliberately avoided looking at her. "You explained this to Steven, right?"

"How I handle my disorder is none of your business-"

"It is my business when Steven appears out of nowhere and I have to hide a body to cover your lies!" Clara mercilessly interrupted him and Marc had to look completely the other way because he knew damn well she was right. Only once he heard her sigh did he turn his gaze around. Clara was massaging the place between her eyebrows, slowly. "Please, just don't make me stress about lying for you again."

Marc hasn't really ever had the time to keep someone around enough for them to get to know all of his sides. But now, he had Clara, and Khonshu could be his witness: it was weird to actually feel like he wanted to be more careful about how much he was impacting her.

The take-off was another loud moment, the first time he actually saw a distinctive emotion written on Clara's face, be it the fright of her symbiote -she mentioned under her breath that Venom was not fond of flying- or the faint jealousy that he had no such thing creating tension. Once they were at the right altitude though, the good rest swept both sleep-deprived people right up, hurling them in the direction of an either dreamless or dream-littered sleep.

Clara caught the end of the short straw, because images haunted her rest and from the moment her body was properly out of it, that part of her mind which was only her own, that side which was still awfully human and subject to dreams and nightmares alive, sparked up a twisted memory.

The noise diffused away from the turbines of the airplane, into the haze of mind, distancing from Venom's chatter and right into the dull background of a loud human crowd, cheering, shouting and cursing, while the deaf sounds of impact and hits collided with a metallic tingle. The sight of the dream started clearing out and the vision solidified: Clara was recalling her first ever cage fight, four months after she ran away from home with Priscila.

While she blinked back to this reality, the context returned to her in an overwhelming wave. The money had been so scarce they barely had enough to eat, far less to settle down unnoticed and continue Priscila's studies. Clara needed to feed Venom at night, raiding chicken stables, when he led her to this place by mere instinct. She had explained the concept to him and he had said this was exactly what they needed, that they would be winning every fight, making money and also feeding him something more proper than some poor chicken.

But this time around, the dream stripped Clara of the inner voice of Venom and she was watching helplessly, in an out of body experience, how a scrawny girl, thin and down half her height approached the broker, presenter of the cage fight. Joaquín Collazo. Yes, she still recalled his name like this had happened yesterday.

"I... want to sign up for the next fight," Clara heard herself gulp. At the same time with the little girl, she mouthed the words too. It has been years since she thought back to this day, the overwhelming pressure of being surrounded by strangers, by terrifying people and by the pending iron scent of blood which she craved unknowingly.

"How old are you?" Joaquín grabbed her hand as she went for the pen.

Clara felt her flinch all over again.

"Eighteen."

She wouldn't have believed herself either.

"How old are you really, kid?" Joaquín insisted, bowing his head to look down at her.

Though Venom's voice was not present in this dream, she remembered the symbiote's curses and threats to murder Joaquín for keeping them from their calling. She started shaking at this point, taking from Venom's anger and snapping back at the man, by first forcing her hand away from him, no matter how bruised her wrist got.

"Fine, I am sixteen! So what?" Clara paused, she was listening for Venom's words, trying to learn what he was saying. "Are you going to try and stop me from fighting, human? Doubt it."

Joaquín admitted her spite and fire, leaning back at the sight of it, but he pondered for a long time before speaking again. It felt like a century and it was even more horrifying as Clara knew at least five other people around him were starting to notice her. Proper adults, looking down at a child.

"Where are your parents? How did you get here?"

"This ain't no place for a child," one of the watchers added over Joaquín's shoulder.

They had kept that going for at least another five minutes, until the true founder of this illegal activity took one look down at the child and laughed, "This should amuse my sons. Sign her up." He was smoking a thick cigar, about to rejoin his third wife as she pampered four nine-year olds too accustomed to violence, about to grow into the riots of the Hand in NYC in a couple of years.

It was for their entertainment that Clara was allowed to sign the register. Joaquín stopped her with one more sighed question though, "How should I announce you? Any name ideas?"

"Venom," she answered effortlessly through the symbiote's voice, a deep tone which shocked Joaquín to the core.

"I don't want to watch this," Clara shook her head, more lucidly, the moment the dream morphed and the perspective changed to inside the circular arena, surrounded by metal chains to form a fence on which she could see flashes of memories in which they draped in blood, in thick scarlet trying to form rivers of pain.

The dream listened to her desire to stop and after trying to close her eyes, the moment simply slowed down. She could see Venom slipping out of her young body, she could spot the fear in her own eyes and the mistakes in how she held her fist against an adversary twice her size. He was about to be murdered and he didn't even know what monster crawled under her skin, aching for sustenance he could find in his brain, lungs and liver.

And from that moment, they stopped wanting the entertainment of a small girl winning and rather the one of an alien, ripping humans apart.

"Isn't it just tragic?"

That was not a voice Clara knew. It was not the feeling of any familiar instance, but she sure as Hell was aware her whole skin caught goosebumps starting from the back of her neck. "What?" But before she could turn around and see what casted such a tall shadow over her, the voice continued, relaxed, composed.

"You did well for now. It's time to wake up."

Clara inhaled sharply.

Marc tried to shake her shoulder to wake her up but just before his hand could have touched her, both her grip and Venom's stopped him by the wrist. She woke up in an instant, eyes still holding the strands of tiredness, the little waves of sleep tugging at someone wanting some more rest.

But she had literally slept throughout the whole flight. Unmoved and unbothered, even by Marc's constant flinching, in and out of sleep. At some point, he was tempted to check her pulse, make sure that she was truly still alive, but well... she was audibly breathing. How could she still be tired if she slept for fifteen hours like in a coma?

Then again, he was in no position to judge anyone's sleep schedule.

"We're preparing to land." Marc shook her hand off of his and leant back in his seat, to look ahead.

Clara huffed, "Yeah, right." Of course, she didn't believe she slept for that long either.

"Whatever you take to sleep for that long, I would like some too."

"Come on, don't joke around like that," her left hand hit his shoulder in a slap which aimed to be gentle, but thanks to Venom's raspiness was far harder and it made Marc properly wince. Her right hand though ran through her hair, rearranged that little mess again.

"I'm not joking, Clara," his voice, that borderline anger, hummed on low tones while he rubbed the place of her slap. "You closed your eyes and you were out for fifteen hours straight."

"He's not lying," Venom confirmed. "Couldn't wake you up either. If I knew you were this tired, I would have forced you to get more naps lately." Clara didn't understand the half of it and all of a sudden, a little bad feeling told her that she had forgotten something very important by quarreling with her seat neighbor.

Unknowingly, she did not remember her dream.

Hours after it had been sent, the briefing message from Clara, sent before she left for the airport, had reached its destination and was playing, lonesome, on a mahogany table, beside a crystal ashtray about to hold a thick and generously flavored cigar.

"This is the Horsemen operative, War reporting back. I know Famine is usually the one doing these briefing talks, but I am about to explain exactly why we are changing it up. He's leaving for Cairo, on a little reckoning task. We had a bad feeling about my sister and he's more likely to not piss her off by sniffing around. I will be leaving the city too, going to Casablanca, after Conquest. He might have found traces of O.M.N.I.U.M. there and he could use a hand with what he's dealing with anyhow. I'm not going alone though. Marc Spector will go with me. So that's about it, boss. We'll be right back-"

After hurriedly stomping from the kitchen back to his office, a man pampered into a full suit, minus the jacket, played the recording back with the press of a button.

"... I'm not going alone though. Marc Spector will go with me."

He pressed the same button again.

"... Marc Spector will go with me."

The man stopped the message from playing and kicked his head back in thought. The right hand dropped the cigar into the ashtray, while the left brushed upwards, fingertips grazing his beard until they pinched the bridge of his nose, from under the heavy glasses. "Marc Spector," he repeated out loud, in a low tone, eyes closed. "Where have I heard that name before?" The posh tone, usually bored out of its mind to even be spoken and used, fell off his lips now, draping from under his mustache in a little river of curiosity.

He couldn't leave the question unanswered, not even if he knew for certain that those eggs he was frying in the pan were about to fry. That detail about the kitchen had long faded away, especially with the blue light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses, while he sat down and opened his laptop. From the side pocket of his vest, he pulled out a memory stick and plugged it in.

"Marc Spector," he repeated, absent minded. The interface he was using was familiar because it was part of the only thing he could take with himself after the Hero Control Team dissolved and they all went their separate ways.

The Sparrow did what she did best and disappeared without a single trace. Agent W was now leading his own branch within SHIELD, trying to do good, the old fashioned way. But Grizzly took the intelligence of the Hero Control Team, the one skill he's always had and will forever make him the dangerous man on the loose. Knowledge was turned into power and with that power, he knew the old fashioned way didn't work anymore. But his division... His Horsemen operative was showing positive results, just as he had anticipated, from years on end of studying data sets on supposed "heroes".

He knew all their names. Marc Spector sounded familiar to Grizzly and when files started opening before his eyes under his guidance, he recalled everything he needed to know about the ex-military chosen avatar of an Egyptian God. The Fist of Vengeance... The Moon Knight.

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse," Grizzly found himself smiling as he played once more one of the more gruesome recorded sightings of Moon Knight. A whole market of terrorists against one man. Guns against fist and blade.

"And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him," Grizzly continued thoughtfully in his Revelations quote.

"And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth," before his eyes, Moon Knight's inhumane strength was obvious, those wounds he took, one after the other, without stopping, without healing, without even spitting his blood on the white cloth covering his face as part of the suit.

"To kill with sword," Grizzly narrowed his eyes on the moon shaped blades that Marc Spector was using, "and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."

Marc's bright white eyes stared into the camera of who was filming and the recording was cut with his first step forward. Grizzly's screen went back and he could stare at his own reflection, at last. Deep in thought, he saw only the blur of his shape, the haze of old age and the promise of aging even further soon, like the fleeting human he was on this Earth.

The smoke alarm screamed from the kitchen. 

author's note:     if i had to describe this act, but like very shortly, i would use three words

confused, horny, demonic

and if that's not badass, idk what is.
basically, this is the turning point, the middle of the book where stuff is starting to peak. and we already have clara having very weird "dreams".

also, this new end gif i made, here's a little context: Steven starting to see Clara from an out of body experience and yes, she's mouthing "it's okay", and yes this is gonna be an actual scene

pre-writting this act for the holiday is going swell, i already have up to chapter three written and the other two planned. Next update gonna be on Friday <3 and y'all pls link me to some graphic shops cause i wanna get more in my visuals section 😭