Sleep came for Eddie Brock the way it rarely did - without warning, without resistance, and without dreams.
One moment he was staring at the low ceiling of Isabella's cottage, the fire across the room burned down to a slow amber pulse, the old witch a quiet shape in her chair. The next - nothing. Not the hollow nothing of unconsciousness, not the fractured dark of pain. Just sleep. Real, genuine, uninterrupted sleep. The kind Eddie hadn't managed in longer than he could honestly remember. Even before Knull. Even before the running. He had always been a bad sleeper - too much noise in his head, too much unfinished business rattling around. But here, in a cottage in 1978 Sheffield that smelled of dried thyme and woodsmoke and something faintly sweet he still hadn't identified, his body simply… gave up the fight.
He didn't know how long he slept.
Long enough that when he woke, the quality of light through the small window had changed entirely. What had been the dim gold of a winter evening was now the pale, flat grey of morning - thin and honest, the kind of light that made everything look exactly as old as it was. The fire had been rebuilt at some point and burned steadily. A blanket had been added over him that hadn't been there before.
Eddie lay still for a while, taking stock.
His body felt different. Not entirely fixed - there was still a low, bone-deep ache that he suspected would be his companion for some time yet - but the sharp, splintered quality of the pain was gone. What remained was duller. Manageable. The kind of hurt that said healing rather than dying. His thoughts were clear in a way they hadn't been since before everything had gone wrong, and that clarity was both a relief and faintly alarming, because clear thoughts had a way of turning toward things he'd rather not face.
He turned inward, cautiously.
"You there?"
A pause. Longer than usual.
Then, slowly - "…Here."
The voice was quieter than yesterday. Not weakened, exactly. More like someone who had also just woken up and hadn't yet decided to be fully themselves again. There was something almost peaceful about it, which was so unusual for Venom that Eddie didn't remark on it. He just let it sit.
"Good sleep?" he asked.
Another pause.
"…Different," Venom said finally. "We did not dream."
"Yeah." Eddie stared at the ceiling. "Me neither."
"It has been… a long time. Since we did not dream."
Eddie didn't answer that. He knew what Venom meant. The dreams - when they came - were rarely kind. Fragments of things better left behind, stitched together by a sleeping mind that didn't know when to leave well enough alone. No dreams meant no Knull at the edges. No Necro sword. None of that particular cold.
"First good thing to happen in a while," Eddie said quietly.
"Second," Venom corrected.
Eddie raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah? What's the first?"
"Macnair."
Eddie snorted softly, then immediately regretted it as his ribs reminded him, they were still in the process of forgiving him.
"Of course it is."
He was still working out how to sit up without embarrassing himself when Isabella appeared in the doorway, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been awake for hours and had opinions about people who weren't. She carried a tray, and the smell that preceded her into the room was enough to make Eddie's stomach announce itself loudly and without dignity.
"Ah. Awake at last," Isabella said, with the particular satisfaction of someone who had predicted exactly this. "Good. You slept well over fourteen hours. I checked on you twice."
"You didn't have to do that," Eddie said, managing to push himself upright with only a moderate amount of visible effort.
"I am aware I didn't have to," Isabella replied, setting the tray across his lap with practiced ease. "I did it anyway. Eat."
He ate.
There was no point in being proud about it. The soup - different from yesterday's, darker and richer, with thick bread on the side that was still faintly warm - was the best thing Eddie had tasted in longer than he could calculate, which said something either about Isabella's cooking or about how thoroughly the universe had beaten his standards out of him. He didn't speak while he ate. Isabella settled into her chair by the fire and occupied herself with something at the small table beside it - vials, dried things, the quiet industry of a person who was very deliberately not watching him but very clearly paying attention.
When the bowl was mostly empty and Eddie had stopped eating with the urgency of a man who wasn't sure when the next meal was coming, Isabella set down what she was working on and turned to face him properly.
"Better?" she asked.
"Better," Eddie confirmed.
She nodded once, with the air of someone filing that information away. Then she folded her hands in her lap and said, with a gentleness that did not entirely conceal the weight behind the question - "I found a wand near your bed when I returned yesterday, Eddie."
Eddie went still.
He kept his face neutral, which was something he was reasonably good at - old journalist habit, the practiced blankness of someone who had learned that your expression was always the first thing a source read. "Yeah," he said carefully.
"It belonged to Macnair," Isabella continued. "I recognized it. Walnut, fourteen inches, dragon heartstring. I have seen it before, at a distance. He was not a man who surrendered his wand easily." She paused. "He was also not a man who simply walked away from an unfinished task. And yet - he is gone. His companion left in a panic. And you were the only person in this house."
Silence.
The fire crackled. Somewhere outside, a bird made a sharp sound and was quiet again.
"I am not asking you to confess to anything," Isabella said, quietly but precisely. "I am not frightened of you. I am not going to run to the Ministry with whatever you tell me. But I need to understand what happened in this house, because I brought you here, and whatever occurred under this roof is - in some measure - my responsibility."
Eddie looked at her for a long moment. She met his gaze steadily, without pressure, without accusation. Just that same patient, unhurried attention she always brought to bear, as if she had all the time in the world and was genuinely willing to spend it.
"He pointed his wand at me," Eddie said finally. "He used one of those curses. The pain one."
Isabella's expression tightened, just slightly. "The Cruciatus."
"Whatever it's called. Yeah." Eddie kept his voice even. "And then - something that was already part of me dealt with him. The same something that's been keeping me alive since before I ended up in your park." He tapped his temple once. "It's not separate from me. It's not something you need to worry about - not on my behalf, anyway. Macnair woke it up. It handled the situation. He isn't going to be pointing that wand at anyone else."
Isabella was quiet for a long time.
"I see," she said, in a tone that suggested she didn't entirely see but was choosing to accept the shape of it for now. She glanced at the wand on the table beside her - Eddie hadn't noticed it sitting there until this moment - and then looked back at him. "You were protecting yourself."
"That's one way to put it," Eddie said. It was technically true.
She nodded slowly. Her hands, still folded in her lap, tightened fractionally and then relaxed. The practiced composure of someone absorbing difficult information without letting it knock them over.
"Then we will leave it there for now," she said.
Eddie let out a quiet breath.
But Isabella, it turned out, was not finished. She reached for the teapot on the tray - Eddie hadn't even noticed there was tea - and poured two cups with the calm deliberateness of someone who was about to change the subject to something harder.
"I want to ask you something else," she said, handing him a cup. "And I want you to know that whatever the answer is, I am not going to panic, and I am not going to call anyone. I simply want to understand."
Eddie accepted the cup. Waited.
"Before the park," Isabella said. "Before I found you. You told me a name, in your sleep, in your fever. You said it more than once." She paused. "Knull."
Eddie flinched. Even the old journalist habit couldn't suppress the innate fear that was still lodged somewhere deep in his soul, below thought, below training. It was pure and animal and it moved through him before he could stop it.
Her eyes caught it immediately. She didn't press. She simply waited, and after a moment her voice came quietly.
"What happened?"
The question settled over the room like weather.
Eddie had known it was coming. She was too careful and too intelligent for it not to come, eventually. He turned the cup in his hands slowly, thinking - not about whether to answer, but about how. There were things he couldn't tell her. The Hive, the symbiotes, the full cosmological horror of what had been done to them in the dark between stars - none of that was going anywhere near this conversation. Not because he didn't trust her. But because some weight, once handed to a person, couldn't be handed back.
But she deserved something.
"Knull," Eddie said, and just saying the name out loud in this small warm room felt wrong - like tracking mud into a church. "Yeah. That's the name."
"Who is he?"
"Someone very old." Eddie kept his voice level. "Very powerful. The kind of powerful that doesn't have a ceiling you can point to or a door you can close against it. He'd been looking for us - me and the part of me I mentioned - for a long time. When he caught up..." He paused, jaw tightening fractionally. "He did what he wanted to do. And then we weren't worth the trouble of finishing properly, so he just let us fall."
Isabella's expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes did. "He tortured you."
"Yes."
"And then discarded you."
"That's about the size of it."
She was quiet for a moment. The fire shifted, settling lower. Outside, the pale morning light moved incrementally across the window.
"What is he?" Isabella asked. Not who - what. Eddie noticed the distinction. She was sharp enough to understand already that the answer to who wasn't going to be sufficient.
"Not something anyone has a file on," Eddie said. "Not something anyone dares to have a file on." He met her eyes steadily. "I know that's not the answer you want. But sending anyone after Knull - any person, any authority, any force I can think of in this time - would be sending them to die for nothing. The best thing, the only thing, is to make sure his name stays in this room."
Isabella studied him for a long time. He could see her working through it - the healer in her cataloguing, the witch in her calculating, the woman in her simply trying to understand how someone this young had ended up this badly broken by something she couldn't name or file or fix through official channels. He could see the resistance in her - the deep, instinctive resistance of someone who believed that problems had solutions if you were willing to work hard enough toward them. He could see the moment that resistance met the look in his eyes and quietly stood down.
"Alright," she said at last. Soft. Reluctant. Final.
"When did this happen?" she asked quietly, after a moment.
Eddie hesitated.
This was the part he had been circling. He exhaled slowly, looked down at the cup in his hands, and made a decision.
"As best as I can remember it," he said, "somewhere around 2030."
The silence that followed was a different kind than any that had come before it.
Isabella did not gasp. She did not stand up, or knock anything over, or make any of the dramatic responses that the statement probably warranted. She simply went very still - the absolute, focused stillness of a sharp mind doing rapid and uncomfortable work. Her eyes, fixed on him, neither widened nor narrowed. She just looked at him, and Eddie could see, behind the careful composure, something shifting. Something recalibrating.
"2030," she repeated. The word came out very precisely, as if she were testing its weight.
"Give or take," Eddie said.
Another silence.
Then Isabella reached forward, picked up her own cup of tea, and took a slow, deliberate sip. She set it down. Straightened slightly in her chair.
"You are telling me," She said, very quietly, "that you are from fifty-two years in the future."
"Closer to fifty-one," Eddie said. "But yes."
Isabella looked at him for a long moment - this battered, young-faced, ancient-eyed boy sitting in her guest bed holding a teacup, who had survived something she didn't have a name for, who carried something inside him she didn't have a category for, who had dropped out of the sky on All Hallows' Eve and proceeded to quietly upend every assumption she had about the shape of the world.
Then she exhaled - a long, slow breath that seemed to carry quite a lot with it.
"Well," she said, in a tone that was somehow both perfectly composed and utterly staggered. "That does explain rather a lot."
Outside, the grey Sheffield morning continued in its indifferent way. The fire burned. The vials on the table caught the light.
And in the quiet that followed, neither of them spoke for a while - because some things, once said, need a little time before the next question can find its footing.