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Battleship 2025 - Team Grape
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Published:
2025-07-30
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500
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1/1
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7
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Chinese Violet Weed

Summary:

Alex is having a fantastically bad day already, and then It shows up again.

Sharp doesn't love having a soulmark.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Work Text:

Alex is having a fantastically bad day already, and then It shows up again.

It likes to show up right as he starts to believe that maybe It’s gone for good. When he forgets that his left forearm was ever anything but cool metal and responsive screen, built to do nothing but acquiesce and follow his every whim, It appears; a mocking reminder that he appears unable to fully outrun the confines of his old meat vessel.

(For now.)

It makes so little sense that It’s very existence is an insult. Something etched into his skin without his explicit approval, adding to the diminishing list of disgusting little fleshy functions he’s stamping out like he’s playing whack-a-mole.

‘Function’ is perhaps a strong word.

Its ‘function’ is to guide him to his ‘soulmate’, which he doesn’t need. Soulmarks, they call them. Alex’s response to his was obvious: slough off the skin of his forearm and replace It with something better—which he’d been meaning to do anyway, even as a young man. It just slightly reordered his priority list, really.

Oozing flesh gives way to titanium and soldered plates and everything was beautiful and then It comes back, sitting in stark contrast to his arm of beautiful metal: two small, white flowers. Five petals each. Pale yellow centres, and a hint of a deep purple sheen when the light hits it just right.

He removes It. He forgets about It. It comes back.

He looks it up, eventually. Idle curiosity; a bug baked into his human hardware. Chinese violet weed, the search tells him.

Weed is right. He’ll eradicate It again and again, however many times he needs to, until It gets the message that he’s not going to give into this ugly, base idea of ‘soulmates’.

One day, as he’s lasering it off the shimmering surface of his metal forearm, he makes a mistake.

He thinks, ‘It’s just as persistent as Xu’.

This is a fuckup of monumental proportions.

He cannot unthink it. He cannot stop himself thinking it, over and over again, as he tells himself explicitly not to think it (and subsequently thinks about it even harder).

His doctorate wasn’t in the human brain, but you pick these basic sorts of things up when you tinker with flesh, and he settles on reworking his midbrain’s ventral tegmental area. He read about it in a study once and then immediately deleted the parts about the link between the ‘human desire to meet basic needs such as eating and drinking’ and the whole study about how it lights up when you’re in love. Yeah, he doesn’t need that. He’s not got a nutrient paste processor and auto-dispenser for nothing.

The parts he needs to rebuild his midbrain’s ventral tegmental area aren’t available on the open market, so he composes a message to Invisible Inc (and then has his inbuilt AI rewrite it to be ‘polite’, because he is requesting a job interview, essentially).

Xu is there.

That goddamn fucking weed.

Notes:

The chinese violet is on Australia's alert list because it just keeps coming back :)

Works inspired by this one: