Kingdom Keepers: Once Upon a Dream

Chapter 10

A/N: This one hurt. A lot. I'm not even gonna dance around it. Enjoy chapter 10, and get ready to meet Terry Maybeck without the Kingdom Keepers.

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Terry Maybeck didn't have time for fairytales. In fact, he barely had time for anything. His life was based on and scheduled around harsh reality: it had been that way for as long as he could remember. With the attitude of a realist forced upon him at a young age, he took the world at face value: nothing less, nothing more. As far as he was concerned, life was made up of two kinds of things: things that could hurt him and his Aunt, and things that couldn't: it was that simple; he'd learned to stop looking for things that could actually help them a long time ago. The only things that would help them would be things that came from themselves.

He'd been orphaned at a young age, so young that he didn't remember his parents at all. His Aunt Bess, Jelly to most, who'd taken him in, was the only parent he'd ever known, and he liked it that way just fine. They'd had a rough go of it in life, but she'd never given him anything less than the best she could offer, and never loved him like anything less than a son. He would do anything to protect her, just like she'd always done everything to protect him, and she was the only person in the world that he trusted at all other than himself. As far as he was concerned, it was she and him against the world.

There was a time when believing in fairy-tales hadn't been too far-off of a possibility. Sure life had never been easy: growing up as a poor, black kid with no parents had plenty of challenges, but Jelly had always taught Terry not to focus on the world's darkness. There was good in the world, she told him, every chance she got, every time he would cry as a kid: there was good in the world and you just had to be willing to look for it, and to put more good into the world in return, and not to ever forget that.

For a while, it had worked. Terry, an artist at heart from a young age, looked at the world with the bright attitude his Aunt had always instilled in him. He was good to others, even when others weren't good to him, and he, like all the other kids did, described big dreams to his teachers when they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. For a while he really, genuinely believed that he'd beat all adversity, and go to art school, and spend his life pursuing his passion, maybe becoming successful enough in it that he'd be able to make it so that his Aunt never wanted for anything ever again. Time went on though, and as he got older, Terry started to think that there was no point expecting good from a world that had never shown you any ounce of it to begin with, and there was no point making a real effort to give any good back either: this eventually became a life philosophy.

Things had been especially bad for the past few years. As high school ended, it had finally become certain that college was not in the cards. Jelly encouraged him to apply, begged him even, insisted that they'd find a way to make it work, but he knew it wasn't even close to a possibility. He'd never have a life that would allow him to pay off the student loans that he'd have to take, and besides, he couldn't leave her. Technically his Great Aunt, she was past middle age now, and getting too old to run her pottery painting shop, their only source of income, by herself. She would never admit it, not even to herself, but she needed him, and he wouldn't abandon her.

A year ago, she'd come down with a bad cough, and, without being able to pay for good doctors or medicine, she'd never fully healed, and she'd been getting worse as time went on. Terry fronted the shop most of the time, took on all the responsibilities of running the business. He didn't mind: this was his life; this was his job. Jelly had taken care of him his whole life when there was no-one else left to, and now it was time for him to do the same. He didn't care at all, but it meant that any chance of doing anything else with his life truly was gone.