As some people have asked (and happened to be already written), I present the first of I think four pieces speculating on Zoro's past. I probably wouldn't have written it if not for the themes supplied by 30 Pieces, but it was fun and I gradually began to convince myself that it might be true, haha. It could have been a lot better fleshed out but that was all the time I had for it back then, and I'm not so invested in it that I wanted to rework this completely, so, sorry about that!

Title:The adventures of young Roronoa Zoro (Part 1)
Theme: Set #3 - Kingdom
Claim: Zoro
Words:2584
Rating: K+
Warnings: Pre-canon Zoro, rampant undeveloped OCs, random speculation about Zoro's past.
Disclaimers:I don't own One Piece.

Ten years ago, in a kingdom in East Blue

"OWWWWWW!"

"Ha! I got you!" a green-haired boy grinned triumphantly, brandishing his makeshift "sword", which was really nothing more than a branch snapped off a tree.

"Yeah, you've got me," his stick-fighting opponent admitted. "But what else is new, huh? Once more!"

"Okay!" The boys took up ready stances once more, only to have their mates interrupt their "duel".

"Look out, it's Ryo's mother!"

"Boys! Come back! It's time for supper!" Ryo's mother called.

"Already?" came a chorus of groans, despite the very obvious evidence of the sun setting in the distance. "We were just getting started!"

"You've already been playing for three whole hours," she said with a smile. "Look at you all! What filthy little ruffians! You'd better go wash up before supper. Go on with you now!" She shooed the reluctant boys back to their respective homes, then turned a kindly look on the only boy remaining besides her own son. "You don't live around here, Zoro, so you'd better get going before your mother misses you."

"Yes, ma'am." He began running off.

"Don't get lost, Zoro!" Ryo called after him, a mischievous grin on his face.

Zoro turned around enough to stick his tongue out at his friend. "I won't!" He looked back at the castle in the distance, overlooking the city. It was hard to get lost, when home was within sight wherever you were.

.

Once he was within the castle walls, Zoro looked about him cautiously, wondering what to do next. As Ryo's mother had said, it really wouldn't do to present himself at dinner looking this dirty. Best to just go up the walls, then.

Hand over hand, he pulled himself up the ancient creeper with an ease born of plenty of illicit experience, glancing around every once in a while, hoping that none of the guards would take it into their heads to make a round of the grounds just then. But the coast remained clear. Just a little bit further...

"It's a bad situation." Zoro froze as he heard his father's voice from within the walls. Since when had the throne room been moved over to this wing of the castle? "The World Government's claiming suzerainty over us."

"I don't understand." Mother's voice..."The Treaty of Renades clearly states that we are an independent kingdom, free to do as we please so long as we do not interfere with World Government affairs."

"That was signed centuries ago, when what presence the World Government had in East Blue was too new and too weak to challenge us." King Jiro sounded weary. "They have more than two hundred member countries by now, fleets of Marines in every Blue...more than enough authority to tear up a treaty and rewrite history so that it never existed. We did nothing to stop them in all the generations that came in between. Now we have to bear the consequences of our foolish inaction."

"But why us? Why now?"

"They're doing it to every independent kingdom in the east. Goa has already ceded to them. The Tenryuubito are on their way there as we speak, under the guise of an 'inspectional tour'. Apparently Mariejois and Sabaody aren't enough to satisfy their greedy appetites any longer."

"Will they occupy Goa, then?"

"Better Goa than us. Goa has been rotting from the inside for years now, what with all their ridiculous ideas about societal purity. They were practically falling over themselves clamouring for the honour of having the Tenryuubito in their midst." Zoro could hear the disdain in his father's voice, and decided he was very glad he wasn't its target this time. He decided to risk hitching himself up a few more inches so he could see over the sill of the window.

"Better Goa than us?" Zoro's mother echoed, a note of question in her voice. "Are you saying that we concede as well?"

Jiro sighed. "If gold and jewels were the only tribute they desire, that would be fine. But..." Zoro watched as his father crossed over to his mother and wrapped his arms around her. "They want a 'guest', to seal the pact."

"No!" the queen gasped. "You don't mean...Zoro?"

Zoro's heart plummeted to his stomach, and he made an involuntary noise. He ducked down beneath the window as his father cast a suspicious look in his direction, so he could only hear rather than see his mother's sobs.

"Who else could I mean?" Jiro's voice was hard and bitter. "We have but one child. They know that much. That's why they're asking for him. He's the last of our line, and if he goes who will carry on our line when I'm gone? He's the only heir, even if -" and here his voice rose rapidly in volume – "he happens to be eavesdropping on us at this very moment."

"Oh, shit!" Zoro desperately looked around for a quick exit, but short of leaping the height of a few floors...it was too late, anyway, as an iron grip encircled his wrist and he was pulled into the room.

"Zoro! What are you doing out there? And...in those clothes?" his mother looked wide-eyed as his dirty, dishevelled appearance.

"More importantly," the king cut in, "Why were you listening to a confidential conversation between your mother and me?"

"I didn't mean to!" Zoro protested. "I was trying to get back to my room!"

"Oh? And what were you doing before that? Did you sneak outside the castle grounds again?"

Zoro hung his head.

The king sighed. "And how much did you hear?"

"Enough," Zoro admitted in a small voice. He hated that disappointed tone of his father's. But when no further rebuke came, he risked an upwards glance. His father was gazing down at him, not angrily, but sorrowfully. Emboldened by the lack of censure, he ventured, "But Father, can't we fight instead?"

"Fight?"

"Yes! Why don't we fight? We're strong! I'm strong! I can beat all the boys in town when we play at stickfighting!"

"So that's what you've been doing in town? Fighting with the boys there? Hardly becoming for the crown prince. Perhaps that explains where you picked up such language."

Zoro squirmed. "Well...I have to fit in, don't I? They don't know I'm a prince, truly they don't. There are plenty of Zoros around."

"All named after you," the king pointed out dryly.

Zoro shuffled uneasily, finding it hard to read his father's current mood. "I guess. Anyway, our soldiers are really strong too, aren't they? We can beat them! All we have to do is fight!"

"You would choose to fight the greatest naval force on earth, then?"

"Yeah!"

The withering look his father gave in response to his enthusiastic assertion crushed him more than any physical blow could have.

"You mean...you're not going to fight? You're going to give up? Give me up? Just like that?" he asked, feeling the knot in his stomach from when he'd first heard the anguish with which his mother cried his name harden and expand. His fists clenched and he began to tremble despite himself.

The king walked to the throne and sat down heavily. "What would you choose, Zoro? Your life? Or the lives of your people? The lives of countless soldiers who would fight and die in this war? The lives of those friends you play with in town?"

Zoro stared wordlessly at his father.

"Because if we choose to defy the World Government, that is what will happen. Our soldiers will die. We will lose the war. And do you know what will happen to the rest of our people?"

Zoro shook his head.

"Not far away from here, in East Blue itself, there is a bridge being built on the backs of slaves whose crime was nothing more than to be born of ancestors who dared to oppose the World Government. That is what will happen to our people, if we choose to fight."

There was a terrible silence.

"Tell me Zoro, what do you choose?" Jiro said softly.

Zoro stared at his father's face for an eternity. Then his lower lip began to wobble and he flung himself into his father's lap. "It's heavy," he sobbed.

"Hush," the king said soothingly, gathering Zoro into his arms. "That's what it means to be a prince."

"Then I don't want to be a prince!"

"It's what you were born to be."

"But what good is it being a prince if it means becoming a slave to the Ten - Tenryuubito?" Zoro wept.

"You won't be a slave," his father said firmly. "You are a prince. You bow down to no one. Now, go wash up and make yourself look like a proper prince again. The Tenryuubito will never accept a street urchin like you for a hostage."

One month later

Zoro watched glumly as his freedom was signed away for his kingdom's sake. One sheet of parchment. That was all it took.

He eyed the grand ship waiting in the harbour, dwarfing every ship in the kingdom's fleet, so huge it couldn't even pull up to their docks. So that was the power of the World Government. Or, perhaps, the power of the Tenryuubito.

He glanced at the man sitting across from his father at the table where they were signing the new treaty. He looked utterly and completely ordinary. What was so great about the Tenryuubito anyway? Just because they were the descendants of the founders of the world? What made them so different from everyone else?

The same thing that made his life somehow worth so much more than his friends' lives, he supposed. Even though he would give anything, anything to be able to trade places with them now. He'd seen a few of them - Ryo, Kenta, Minoru - darting in and out among the crowd. He wondered whether they recognised him. Probably not. He looked the furthest thing in the world from a street urchin right now. He'd miss their stickfights. He hadn't even been allowed to go out and play with them for this last month, subjected instead to interminable lectures on history and etiquette that had gone in one ear and out the other. Which meant that that victory over Ryo had been his last. He highly doubted he would be allowed to train as a swordsman when he was in the "care" of the World Government. They would hardly let a hostage become dangerous to them, even if they persisted in the pretence that he was an "honoured guest".

"Your Royal Highness." He was jolted out of his musings when the Tenryuubito spoke. "Come. The ship awaits us."

Zoro swallowed. So this was it, then. He glanced at his father and mother. His father looked stonily calm, as always, but his mother's sadness was written all over her face. Zoro said nothing, made no gesture. Their goodbyes had already been said within the privacy of the castle, and his father had instructed him to show no weakness in front of the Tenryuubito.

Well, he certainly wasn't weak! He'd show them! That thought, and that thought alone, was all that prevented him from bursting into tears as he walked up the gangplank to the smaller ship that would carry them out to the flagship.

"Hey, isn't that Zoro?" He stiffened as he heard a familiar voice shout out.

Ryo!

"That's not the prince! That's our friend!"

"Your Royal Highness?" the man accompanying him asked, giving him a quizzical look, as those around the boys shushed them into silence.

"It's nothing. They've mistaken me for someone else," Zoro replied, and walked on.

He was telling the truth, he told himself. They had. They truly had.

.

He stayed on the stern of the Tenryuubito ship for a while, watching his kingdom, the town, and all the people in it, shrink into a tiny speck on the horizon. He'd never felt so thoroughly alone. Though he'd always been on uneasy terms with the royal guard, what with all his breaking into and out of the castle, he desperately wished that he had one of them at least to accompany him, a face from home. But that request had been abruptly denied. They would take him, and only him.

"Your Royal Highness." He turned to see that it was the man from earlier. "Saint Purliss will see you now."

"Saint Purliss?" Zoro's brow furrowed. "I thought you were Saint Purliss." Maybe he should have paid better attention just now...

The man looked horrified. "Me, Your Royal Highness? I could never presume to such heights! I am but a mere servant. My name is Kilnore." Zoro frowned. A mere servant, sitting at an equal place with his father, a king?

"You had better cleanse yourself before going to see Saint Purliss," Kilnore decided, giving Zoro a critical look.

"But I already had a bath before the ceremony," Zoro objected.

"Yes, but you are going to meet a World Noble," Kilnore said, as if that explained everything. "Come."

"No. Have him come to see me. I'll be in my room."

"I'm sorry, Your Royal Highness, I don't think you understand." Kilnore was trying to look amused, and failing utterly. "He's a World Noble. Now, when you enter the room, you will bow, and..."

"I won't. I'm a prince. I bow down to no one. My father said so."

"Yes, yes, but clearly he meant, to no one but a World Noble." Kilnore was starting to look impatient, but also a mite fearful.

"Are you saying my father lied?" Zoro demanded, summoning every ounce of princely indignation he could muster.

"I am saying that since he's been holed up in the backwaters of East Blue, he probably isn't sensible to the prevailing etiquette in the centre of civilisation," Kilnore snapped. "Everyone bows to the Tenryuubito. If even the Fleet Admiral himself were here, he'd have to bow too."

"Now, now, what's all this racket?" They were interrupted by a third voice, that carried all the commanding assurance of Zoro's father's voice, but was reedy where Jiro's was strident, self-satisfied where Jiro was neither overbearing nor humble. "Kilnore! Are we away from that horrible country yet? All those ghastly commoners, actually daring to come within twenty yards of their king. It's an outrage! I'm devilish glad I didn't go ashore! Hmm?"

Saint Purliss halted and blinked out of two beady little eyes, weirdly distorted by the glass bubble that surrounded his features, not helped by the folds of fat that padded his cheeks. He gaped at Zoro, who gaped in turn at the Tenryuubito's means of locomotion - a chained and utterly miserable-looking slave. Zoro roused himself from his stupor when he caught a kneeling Kilnore making frantic gestures at him to bow, and looked around to find himself the only person standing.

Yes, he decided as he wondered what to do next, maybe he really should have paid more attention in etiquette class.

A/N: Brownie points to people who get references to lines spoken in the actual manga...as always, I very much enjoy hearing your thoughts, whether positive or otherwise, either on the writing or on my version of Zoro's past. Thank you for all the kind reviews and feedback you've already sent my way!