A/N: ok so I had this idea the other day and I was thinking what it would be like if the Straw Hats had never met, if Luffy never came along. It's pretty crappy and sad cuz he saved all of them and gave them a family so this is how I imagine things would be. First off is Luffy. The only way I can think of him not wanting to be a pirate is if he never met Shanks so here it goes.
Differences:
No Shanks, No Straw Hat, No gomu gomu no mi, and No aspiration to be a pirate.
IF I NEVER KNEW YOU
By: Ashleigh Errow
CHAPTER 1
Luffy
I thought our love would be so beautiful
Somehow we'd make the whole world bright
I thought our love would be so beautiful
We'd turn the darkness into light
And still my heart is saying we were right
we were right
The skinny seventeen-year-old boy walked down the narrow forest path. The afternoon sun barely shone through the dense cover of trees but the few rays peeking through forced the boy to shield his eyes from the brightness. He absentmindedly scratched at the irritating bandages covering his latest injury; he had fallen off a cliff, again. As usual, the boy had been too busy thinking that he hadn't notice the sudden drop off ahead of him until he was tumbling down it. He had amazing luck though and had walked away from the fall with only a broken arm. For someone as young as he was he had a surprising amount of scars and bruises.
He didn't own an article of clothing that wasn't ripped nor did he have a bone in his body that he hadn't broken. Throughout the years the boy's various adventures had taken a toll on the poor kid, but he never stopped searching for something to fill the odd emptiness he felt. Nothing, not the familiar rush of adrenaline as he risked life and limb in crazy stunts or the time spent with Makino and Ace, could fill the odd depression he had been feeling since he was ten. He remembered one day, he just felt wrong.
All day he had a feeling something special was supposed to happen and when it didn't he had felt… wrong. It was wrong and he hadn't felt right since then. Soon after that fateful day, Luffy was sent to live with Dadan and that's when he found a temporary solution. With Ace to lead him to adventure he had many exciting times and would come out of each endeavor stronger than before. The best part was, when he was running for his life, or fighting and beating a strong opponent, the emptiness seemed to lessen somewhat and he felt like he was doing something he was supposed to, something he was meant to do. The years went by, and with each year his stunts became more dangerous, that added to the fact that he had always had a problem with balance and an extremely short attention span meant injury was an inevitable and often occurrence. The townspeople often told him that it was a miracle he hadn't died years ago.
The boy was soon to be sent off to join the Marines, his grandfather had been livid when Ace had left three years ago and refused to let the younger boy go down the same path, but once again like all those years ago the boy felt the odd expectancy. Something important should be happening today, but it wasn't. Here he was in the forest, with that odd feeling of emptiness and a peculiar sensation on his head like the ghost of something missing.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Everything about him and his life felt like it should be different. He fell to his knees, the twinge of pain from the scab-covered joints didn't even come close to the pain of the loneliness he felt.
Lonely. Empty. Lost. Wrong.
"What?" he cried out, choking on the sob that accompanied the sudden fall of tears. He coughed and sobbed begging the words, no, the names that were just beyond his reach, to come to his mind. They meant something to him; those names he couldn't think of were everything.
He cried. For hours he cried for the thing, the life and the people that were just out of his reach. The names he would never hear, the family he would never know that had haunted him and it seemed they always would. He stood once the last tear that had been shed was just a dry trail of salt mingling with the thousands of other tears that had fallen from the dark eyes over the years.
He put a hand up to his left eye. It was another phantom injury, a pain just under his left eye that he felt on occasion from an injury he never had, just like the feeling on his head that was almost like a hat, and the emptiness in his heart. He knew something was wrong. There was something out there that was supposed to make him happy, make the emptiness disappear and his dreams come true. He knew, deep down, that he would never find it; it was too late to even try. But the boy still wished and would never stop wishing that at least some semblance of an answer would come to him, because he needed the names like he needed air, he needed that wrongness to be erased. He knew it never would.
Review Please. This is Un-betaed and i would appreciate critiques : )