The road ahead is long

Venom’s face was like an impassable wall when their gazes met, and Kiyo had to avoid flinching. Normally their interactions were all smiles, like that between two close friends, but now she was being held at more than arm’s length. It felt a bit like how it had when they’d first met, when Venom hadn’t known she was pregnant and Kiyo hadn’t known they were her grandchildren. There was suspicion and hesitance, and she desperately wanted to wipe it all away.

Still, she was granted permission to enter and the pale woman obliged, her silver gaze taking note of the things stacked around and tidied up. She sat on a fur nearby, but there was more space between the pair than had been there before. The ghostly woman looked at the crackling fire briefly, trying to get her wits about her and decide on how to go about this conversation. But she knew Venom, and she knew there was only one real way to do it.

”I do not approve of what he’s done, or what he’s doing,” she said bluntly, figuring there was no need to clarify who ‘he’ was. ”I want to say to you what I wish someone would have said to me, when Hideki was being unfaithful to me and abusive. When I felt like everything was ending and it was somehow my fault,” the entire time, Kiyo had been staring into the fire, but now she took a deep breath and turned to meet Venom’s sunset gaze.

“You are better than him. You are stronger because you tried, you are wiser because you’ve experienced love, even if it’s turned into regret now. You cannot control someone else or know what they truly think, no matter how much you might want to, just as they cannot control you. None of it is your fault. You are a wonderful mother and a righteous, intelligent queen and no man can take that away from you.” She tried hard to fight the tears that had begun to swim in her eyes. The words had come from her soul, and she trusted her daughter in law to know that. She’d spoken to her of her previous marriage and the children she’d lost when birthing Hattori. Yet, Kiyo had survived despite it all, and she wanted like no other to let Venom know that she would too. That it would hurt like hell for a bit, but it would eventually grow to a dull ache, then to a scar that she would glance at once in a blue moon. A memory, an event in her past as she continued to her future.

"Hattori Kiyo"