For some of us, understanding is an ephemeral entity. It's like a distant dream you have a couple minutes before your alarm clock rings. Oda is woven of understanding and acceptance — everyone has a reason to behave the way they do, to speak the way they do, to feel the way they do. Especially children, because no child lives the way they do because they want to. It's just like organisms don't evolve because they want to, they just try to adapt to what's around them. No child would want to be cruel or rude intentionally — it's what they do to adapt.

In his view, you too are just a child like so many others. You may be a brilliant tool, a queen on the chessboard beside the king, a prodigy instilling terror in the hearts of pawns, but let it be so, you don't become a child any less in his eyes. A cruel one, with an atrophied emotional intelligence and sense of empathy, but still.

And like all other children, you long to be understood, accepted — even if you grit your teeth at him and shouted otherwise. He didn't pity you like a street animal, didn't try to be a parental figure for you to teach you about life either. Oda believes in what you've seen and heard enough to have a formed vision of this world and isn't going to tell you that the sky is green. His goal is different — to show you that he understands. That loneliness inside you that comes with the fixed phrase "smart beyond your years" is as familiar to him as anyone else. Your skepticism and the "rely on yourself" principle so uncharacteristic of your age is almost native to him. He understands.

"I don't think people are stupid," he shrugs, the sounds of glasses clinking and voices at the bar slightly overshadowing his own. Familiar discussions of topics others wouldn't understand the way he understands sound between the two of you. "Just different backgrounds. "They grew up differently, think differently," well. Prodigies seem to have youthful maximalism, too.