Feveruary [2025] Chapter 3: Caught in the Rain

[mekachu04]

Feveruary [2025] by Mekachu04

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death

Summary: He's not sure why it feels like he's still asleep, even long after he's woken up, tiny child body curled up under smelly blankets in a dingy back alley. He wonders where Killer wandered off to this early, his friend's body heat sorely missed in the dreary summer rain of Kutzk. The air is wet and cold and he reaches up to pull the blanket higher, water beading and rolling down the wool as he huddles under it. It keeps trying to slip off his left shoulder, the stub of his arm aching, partially the phantom pain that regularly haunts him, and then something deeper driven by the bleak weather.

Things are not what they seem when Kidd wakes up in the wrong place, the wrong time.

Additional Tags:

Time Travel Baterilla aftermath Background deaths injury and death discussions De-aging| Aged Down!Kidd Kutsukku

Character Deaths, some more vague and unconfirmed Post-Wano Arc Kidd is 8 and 23 at the start Unreliable Narrator kidd has terrible dreams|nightmares Burn injuries

Chapter 3: Caught in the Rain

Brichtrede Eustace doesn't know who he is, has no answers for whys back, why he's here, like this. She's not able to talk much at all, but he sees it in her face, that confusion to who he is sitting at her bedside.

To be fair, he has no memories of this woman either, he has no loyalties to her.

He has no reason to stay.

But he can't leave either, because he has nothing else. No leads, no name, no home.

He doesn't even have his gang this time around, he's alone in a way he's never been before, not outside that horrible stay in Kaido's udon work camp.

Instead he stands outside the care facility Brichtrede is at, the miserable summer rain trying its best to knock the smog out of the air. Shame it wont wash the filth from the streets, as he sees another group of Marines march past.

Not that history was a topic he paid much attention to, but he was pretty sure the Marines were decades removed from their attempted occupation of Kutzk. They'd tried to bring his island to heel, and it was such a fiasco, they turned in into a dump instead of admitting they lost. Told the world it wasn't worth occupation, resources already stripped bare and left desolate.

What did they want with Kutzk now? Was this really about Roger's kid or something more? He watched them march through the rain, angry coiling up in him. He didn't know where Monkey's brother had been hiding, but it certainly wasn't on Kutzk. He was pretty sure it wasn't it he South Blue at all.

He wanted them off his island. He might abandon this shit hole too in a decade or so, but that didn't mean the Marines had any right to be here.

"Your auntie's lost enough, don't let her lose an nephew too."

Kidd relaxed his fist, let out a breath as the metal around him stopped straining. He turned to look at one of the doctors as he light up a cigarette, gaze on the uniformed men, not Kidd.

The man puffed away, watching until the men marched out of sight. "They're getting desperate, but Roger's kid ain't here. Probably wont be much longer and they'll head to the next remote island and start this whole debacle over again." He looked tired in a way Kidd was used to seeing in feeble old men, the ones unable to do more than sit at their street corners, clanging their cups for handouts.

"Got a whole morgue full of pregnant woman and dead babies. and everyday, I get another widowed husband to add, because he tries to take the Marines head on. Don't be another body in there, kid. We wont win this one by force. There's something much bigger than us drivin' this massacre, and don't doubt for a second the World Government wont level us and be done with it if we cause too much trouble."

He doesn't want to sit back and watch them harass to locals. He doesn't want to idly wait for the outsiders to get bored of tormenting them, of murdering women and babies and anyone else who spoke up against them. "How many times do we have to drive them away?"

The doctor smoked on. "When someone hits their home. When Jörmungandr awakens, and Red Line crumbles down, and those fools are devoured by a real Dragon. Until then, we do our best to live on."

Kidd sneered at him. "You can't wait for a fairy tale to some save you, old man."

The doctor said nothing more, just watched him as he smoked.

In the end, Kidd went back inside, returning to his lonely vigil.