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Kid understands metal more than people, at times.
Never in the way a smith would, though. He finds it annoyingly outdated, smelting and hammering and pressing all for a flimsy iron stick; and it’s technical to a personal extent, creating, birthing from fire. But he doesn’t value anything weak enough to fall to fire— no, he’d rather build mechs, ones that can take any form he desires, layer upon layer of impenetrable metal, bruising instead of slashing, bending and crushing when skin cannot be pierced; inorganic and free from rot, a rot he can’t seem to shake.
He’s tried to wield a sword. Matchlock guns were wildly expensive for a child who sold partly-rusted nails and screws to carpenters for cents, so the available self-defense choices were the occasional discarded swords and daggers he came across in the landfills. Rust is a mech’s only weakness, unlike swords that had a nasty tendency to crumble in their sheaths, unlike the wear and tear the sword’s hilt suffers from.
A mech lives as long as it possibly can, up until the moment each layer of metal returns to the earth, and his mechs call to him as he works each piece under the flat of the screwdriver or beneath the palm of his hands, at an atomic level only seen by him. Maybe it’s the reason why he had to do a double take at the sight of that one Straw Hat, the cyborg; human and metal voices congealed into one. Kid admires it like a little boy might.
Even now, as he assembles a new miniature prototype of a bull, magnetically puppeteering the scraps he finds around his workplace to construct exactly what he imagines; the bull speaks. I want the same things you do. The bull, unbidden by human weakness, withstands whatever is thrown at it, strong and hardy. It trudges forward into the face of danger, fear response be damned. The sword, grasped in a child’s stumpy fingers, struggling to hold the weight upright, fails; the bull passes. Horns gouge. Ribs crack. Metal stands, dented but unbroken. The world is right.
There’s no telltale thud of a body, like the kind that rings out in his dreams on those days: a memory of something unrecognizable rag-dolling on stone floors in a pile of limbs that bend a strange way, marred with shallow scrapes and scars from the times they ran too fast over a brick set astray and, subsequently, face planted on the road; bruises that reveal themselves from who-knows where and who-knows-what; a young girl’s face speckled with a mix of angry pimples and brown freckles and expression relaxed like a doll; almost picture perfect, save for the bullet hole straight between the eyes that seem to take up the whole face. It is so glaringly obvious. Kid watches as a friend disappears into gorey black and red, wound expanding until she becomes nothing but the bullet itself. The murmuring crowd disperses. The corpse gushes liquid of all colors, until it doesn’t. The bleeding heart blooms. Dream Kid prays she is still alive, holding a soft hand twice his size in his folded own, but no amount of imagining an exhale or a breath stirring in her lungs can change reality.
The bull he had felt a burst of pride for in the moment of its creation falls apart as he releases his magnetic powers, and the scattering of metal of all qualities resembles his long-lost toy robot, if he squints and tilts his head this or that way. Jingling bolts and nuts almost sounds like laughter, whispered reassurance.
Everything’s always temporary— but oh, how he’ll fight it.