Kingdom Keepers: Once Upon a Dream

Chapter 8

A/N: It's time to explore the lives of the rest of the Keepers, and man did writing these next few chapters hurt. I hope you enjoy nonetheless!

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Dell Philby had never much understood other people, and by that token, no one else much understood him. He just didn't get it; he didn't get the desire to go out, to have as many friends as possible, to be loud in public, to watch reality TV. Everything else that everyone else in the world seemed to do and want and accept as normal...weren't appealing to him at all.

His parents nagged him constantly to get out of the house, to get a job, to meet new people, but they didn't understand that he didn't need any of that to be happy. All he wanted was to be alone to do research, or try out new technologies. Of course, to his parents, and everyone else, these things apparently indicated that there was something wrong with him. But he'd never understood that either: he'd just never felt the need to be all that social; what was wrong with that?

It wasn't that he didn't enjoy any "normal teenager" things, or that the idea of them was unappealing, he just didn't seek them out. The opportunities had never presented themselves, and he was happy the way he was, so he saw no reason to risk potential discomfort to gain something that he didn't feel he was missing. He had a best friend, Hugo, who he saw plenty often, and he had the things he loved: that was all he needed.

Things had started to feel different in the past year however. After they went to college, he and Hugo had faded apart, and they hadn't seen each other in over a year. Now Dell really did spend all of his time alone. At first it wasn't so bad, but lately...sometimes little things just made him think that maybe having something more might actually be nice: little things, like watching a group of friends on campus heading to the dining hall, or seeing a picture of Hugo on Instagram arm-in-arm and smiling with his girlfriend...or seeing Willa Angelo at Earl of Sandwich.

For all his lack of interest in others in high school, Willa Angelo was the only person he'd ever found himself wanting to understand. She'd had the locker across from his and every day, as he packed up his books after dismissal, he'd watched her doing the same. There was something about her that was just intriguing; he'd never thought about any girl, or anyone, in any kind of way that even approached romantic...except for Willa.

They'd been in a lot of classes together; the way she answered teachers' questions, the way she thought about the world just seemed so insightful and beautiful. To look at her...she made him understand what it meant to think that other people were pretty, and it was because she wasn't pretty in the way people usually described it; she was a Willa kind of pretty. More than anything though, what made Willa the one person he'd ever wanted to understand was the fact that she seemed like the one person in the world who'd be able to understand him.

Willa had friends: he knew that; he watched them come up to her when she was at her locker, but at the same time, he could see the look on her face when they talked. He recognized that look; it was the look of feeling like a fish out of water, even when nothing was measurably wrong. After school sometimes, waiting for his Mom to pick him up, he'd see her sitting by a tree, all by herself, reading a book, and the tiniest smile was on her face. He recognized that look too: the look of finally being able to breathe.

And yet, though he was able to notice all these things about Willa- probably because he was able to notice them- he never worked up the courage to go and ask her out, or even to just say hello, to try and get to know her better. She was the only thing that ever made him think that maybe he did need more than his room and his laptop and a LEGO robot-making kit, but he always brushed the thoughts off, because the fear of what she might say to him was, like everything else, too great to sacrifice his comfort.