Tony’s half buried in paper work ready to throw all caution to the wind and throw himself out a window when Eddie walks in looking pleased with himself. Probably means he sniffed out a good story and he’s found something compelling but he doesn’t look like an absolute human disaster so he’s not too deep into it yet. Once he is he kind of looks like he’s homeless and Rhodey doesn’t really get the charm but Tony once watched Eddie overheat to the point of just fucking losing it and sitting in a lobster tank at one of the fanciest restaurants in Manhattan so he thinks Eddie is the best. Venom being around doesn’t seem to help that except now maybe he’ll eat the lobsters instead of just bothering the hell out of them.
“Happy birthday,” he says, walking over to him and behind his desk, greeting him with a kiss.
Except Tony’s kind of confused. “Wasn’t my birthday last week?” he asks and Eddie frowns.
“No, honey its today. I... who forgets their birthday? And why would you assume everyone in your life also forgot your birthday?” he asks. He looks extra confused but that’s probably just the way Eddie’s expressions work. Rhodey finds his over expressing annoying but Tony thinks it's endearing.
“You all have lives, its fine,” Tony says. Pepper’s always busy running around doing things for him, Eddie seems to have found himself some new thing to rip apart for the next couple months, and Rhodey regularly gets shot at so he figures they all have more pressing concerns.
Eddie sighs. “Sometimes I think you’re a prick and then you do something sad like make excuses for why everyone in your life would forget you were born. We didn’t forget, Tony, you got the date wrong. How did you forget when you were born?”
He shrugs, “I don’t memorize useless details. And in your defense I am a prick,” he says. They both know it, though Eddie is obviously a lot less hostile then when they met. He seems to have fallen for Tony’s charms, which he’s been reliably informed are pretty disarming.
Eddie leans in and gives him another kiss, “no you’re not, but you play one well,” pulling away and dropping his bag on Tony’s desk. Its disrupted his thread bare attempt at organizing his own life- not exactly his strong suit admittedly not that he’d tell Eddie he's managed to mess up what little organization he had. He pulls a stack of files out of his bag and drops them on top of Tony’s already too large pile of paper work. “Happy birthday, an organized list of all the moral and ethical problems I have with your company,” he says, grinning like its the best gift ever.
Tony snorts and starts laughing, shuffling closer to Eddie. He lays one hand on Eddie’s hip and pokes at the pile of folders with the other. “Well this is... intimidating.”
“Yeah, but you’ll look through it all because you do genuinely want to be a good person. You should be glad I didn’t go with V’s gift,” he says, wincing.
Fuck, Tony can only imagine when one of the first five things he did in Eddie’s body was eat several people’s heads. Sure, V turned out to be an overly sappy romantic ass goo alien but that’s a pretty rough start to things and now Eddie has to live with kind of eating people that one time several times. “Was it flowers?” he asks.
Eddie laughs, “that was suggestion like... fifty two. After I banned violence, drugs, sex- don’t give me that look it was a soft ban because that’s not a present, terrorist activities, harassing children, petty crimes of all varieties, eating heads, murder, grand theft auto, breaking and entering, space, possession, and about a half a dozen other things. He’s not too good with presents.”
“Well, he did alright with the cat,” Tony points out. V doesn’t really get Christmas, turns out his species wasn’t too cuddly and had no holidays, but he does have all Eddie’s memories of it. Conveniently, he tends to lean more towards Eddie’s view of Christmas as mostly a capitalist holiday that’s far more about big businesses making money, overworking retail employees, and present buying pressure that leads to suicide than the happy stuff. And that doesn’t even touch on Eddie’s view of religion. Though to be fair V probably gathered a lot more religious vitriol from Tony than Eddie.
“He’s threatened to eat that cat at least once a day since he decided to pick it out. Claims he’s a dog person,” Eddie says.
“Dogs are bigger, usually, so I’m not really surprised. More meat.” Given the look on Eddie’s face Tony’s going to assume V has agreed with that statement.
“We are not eating dogs,” Eddie hisses. Mostly he only does that around Tony, but its hilarious when he does it in public because most people don’t really recognize him anymore so he looks like a homeless loon being led around by a celebrity. Or at least he did before he became recognizable again through Tony’s fame and yeah, Tony knows all Eddie’s opinions on celebrity culture. None of them are positive and yeah, Tony can see why that is.
“Tell V to go hunt New York rats at night. He might have fun with that,” Tony says. “Wait, does Venom have a birthday? That a thing his species does?”
Eddie shakes his head. “Says he doesn’t have a proper earth date translation for his hatching day and I know he didn’t come from an egg so that’s a horrifying term to use. Do not enlighten me, V. I’m happy to stay in the dark.” He makes another face and Tony assumes V has let out some detail Eddie didn’t want to hear.
“That ever get annoying, the voice in your head?” he asks. Feels like it’d be exhausting. Tony doesn’t even like his own voice in his head let alone some random alien who decided pretty much on a whim to save the world strictly because he likes Eddie. Though to be fair Riot was an asshole and Tony was sick of being compared to Carlton Drake anyway. Guy was like cartoonishly evil. Though Tony will admit that he was good looking and damn smart, even if that didn’t really turn out to be a good thing later.
“Sometimes,” Eddie says, “but mostly V offers some good entertainment on human customs. Turns out his species tended to eat each other to solve problems. He thinks our petty politics is fun to watch.”
Yeah, an alien would find that funny. Or everyone outside of America at least until America decides to invade for oil or some other resource. “So who did he want to possess?” Tony asks, grinning.
“No!” Eddie says, presumably to him and Venom.
*
Tony’s laying in bed pretending to have died when Eddie walks over and crawls over him, laying his entire weight on Tony’s back. He sighs because of course Eddie would find the most inconvenient way to get him to stop taking up the entire bed. “This is a king and you’re like three feet tall. How is it that you take up so much space?” Eddie asks as Tony starts wiggling around.
“Ask the cat, she’s a hell of a lot smaller than me and she always manages to take up at least half the bed.” Eddie rolls off and Tony props himself up. “Thanks for the present by the way, half the stuff you pointed out happens to be things I was already looking to fix.” But Eddie is a fuck of a lot picker than him and its nice to have someone trying to hold him to account. And Eddie has no problem doing so, he gives Tony his opinion on a lot of things all the time whether or not he wants to hear them.
“Yeah, I got you something else too but its taking eighty years in the mail so I had to improvise,” Eddie says.
“Let me guess, you refuse to use Amazon,” Tony says.
“Look, that fuckstick can’t even pay his workers and he’s the richest guy in the world, and what’s all that crazy shit about pissing in-” Eddie starts but Tony cuts him off before he really gets going.
“Jeff Bezos is a prick, I get it. Actually, might get stuck at the same charity event with him next week so I can bring you along if you want to punch him,” Tony says.
The bright look of unbridled glee in Eddie’s eyes makes him smile. Yeah, he’s maybe argued a lot about Tony’s wealth, but he at least appreciates that Tony does his best to spread it around a little. Its just that he has trust issues and he knows how corporate charity works- its all tax write offs and siphoning money out of most of the ‘donations.’ So he does his best to do his research and lucky him Eddie is probably a little too good at it so he’s got some more reputable charities to share with. And he thinks its fun to pay off random people’s debt. If he’s having a bad day he’ll pick a person and bam, debt free. He likes making people happy so Eddie only kind of side eyes his money.
Generally that means he only brings it up like twice a day instead of non-stop and if nothing else Tony can appreciate that he’s passionate about his views. Rhodey thinks he’s annoying but Rhodey isn’t dating him so he can deal with it.
“Yeah, alright,” Eddie says but the way he says it tells Tony that he’s not talking to him.
“Do not eat his head, V!” Tony says, panicked. “I do not want to deal with the fallout of that. Just ruin his life like a normal person. Get JARVIS to help, he’s been helpful in my long standing efforts to ruin Hammer.”
“Yeah, pretty sure all you two have managed to do is turn Hammer into the knockoff version of you, but he uh... seems to like that so I don’t know.”
Tony damn well knows he looks offended because that’s the fucking rudest shit he’s ever heard. “What did you just call Hammer?” he asks.
Eddie realizes his mistake right away and Tony fucking resents that he looks a little dead behind the eyes because he was the one who damn well decided Hammer was good enough to be the anything version of him. “I would sooner take Carlton Drake as the cheap version of me than Hammer,” Tony hisses. “At least Drake was actually smart and hot! What’s Hammer? He looks like he came out of the womb dressed as the class clown who decided to be an accountant!”
Honestly Tony resents that Eddie sighs at that. “No V, you can’t eat Hammer’s head,” Eddie mumbles.
“Yes you can,” Tony tells him.
*
Tony’s attempting to make coffee while also ignoring Eddie due to his previous transgressions. Compare him to Hammer on his birthday. The disrespect. Eddie walks out of their bedroom and Tony resolutely ignores him as he starts looking around the pent house for some reason. Tony side eyes him as he moves a bunch of papers around- Eddie’s, not his, knocks the pillows off the couch, and picks up the cat. He looks at Cotton for a moment, frowning before he shakes her a little. She meows in an annoyed, disgruntled way and Eddie sighs, releasing the cat.
“Uh, the fuck are you doing?” Tony asks eventually.
Looking for me says a voice in his head and Tony throws his coffee cup, startling so badly his entire body jerks and he slips, falling on his ass.
“Oh thank god I thought he went and possessed some random secretary so he could go eat heads!” Eddie says, rushing over to him.
“Oh no, you stay back there you don’t get to come near me or V after comparing Hammer to me!” he says, pointing an accusatory finger at him.
Eddie sighs. “Tony-” he starts but Tony has already picked himself up and turned around with his arms crossed, ignoring him.
So rude. Venom agrees. We should eat Hammer V says, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.
Tony sighs and it pains him to do this, truly. “V, we can’t actually eat Hammer,” he says in perhaps the most dejected, upset tone he’s ever produced.
Eddie gives him, Venom technically, an offended look. “You decided to crawl into him in the middle of the night and risk killing him so you could eat someone?” he asks, hand pressed to his heart quite like an offended PTA mom. “V, you better get your ass back in here!” Eddie tells him, pointing at himself.
He compared you to Hammer. We should leave him, go sight seeing V says.
Tony rolls his eyes. “V you aren’t going to manipulate me into carrying your ass out of here because Eddie put you in the dog house.”
“Venom!” Eddie says, voice rising.
Tony swears to god he feels Venom extend from his body and that is some worrying fucking shit how’s Eddie put up with that? “Tony thinks you sound like an offended PTA mom,” Venom tells Eddie and Tony squints.
“Since when the hell are you a rat?” he asks.
Venom turns to face him, “you take that back! I am not vermin!”
“No, technically you’re a parasite now get back here,” Eddie tells him.
“Maybe I will find a new home with hosts who appreciate me,” Venom says, sinking back into Tony and he does not like that.
“How do you get these things out?” he asks.
Eddie walks over and leans in, squinting at Tony shrewdly except he’s actually looking at Venom and Tony’s not sure how he knows that. “If you don’t get back in me I will play Bohemian Rhapsody at top volumes with Tony pressed against the speaker!” he hisses.
“That kind of sounds like fun minus the speaker thing,” Tony says.
“They don’t do so well with loud noises and vibrations,” Eddie explains and oh, that makes sense. Tony watches as black goo extends from his hand to Eddie’s and it almost looks resentful for it. Or maybe Tony’s imagining that.
Tony gives Venom a sad look as the last of him disappears back into Eddie. “I’m so sad he won’t ever experience Freddy Mercury like the rest of us,” he says, hand pressed to his heart.
Eddie sighs. “V says your music taste is heinous and he would rather listen to my music.”
He listens to exclusively shitty electronica music. “I’m leaving you both,” Tony tells him, turning and walking away.