Kingdom Keepers: Once Upon a Dream

Chapter 36

A/N: I'm back! Hope you enjoy the chapter!

"What are you saying?" Finn asked, once the initial tension from Willa's statement had dissolved.

"I'm saying that we have to undo whatever we did," Willa said. "And soon."

"And if we don't?"

Willa huffed.

"If we don't, reality as we know it ceases to exist."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning what I said, Finn! Everything, including us, gone: poof, goodbye!"

She fell back on the couch and threw her head into her hands.

"I don't see why we wouldn't undo it anyway!" Maybeck said. "We're supposed to just stay here? Where our lives are absolute hell?!"

"Were absolute hell," Finn interjected. This turned all of the attention in the room to him, and earned him quite a few raised eyebrows.

"You are not suggesting what I think you're suggesting Whitman," Maybeck said.

"What made our lives so awful here was that we didn't have each other in them," Finn insisted. "But we do now, and we have our memories of our real pasts to counteract whatever happened to the people we thought we were, so maybe..."

"Finn you're not listening to me," Willa yelled. "We don't have a choice! If we don't leave it's game over...for real!"

"No, you said you're pretty sure that's what it is. Maybe we still have a shot if we stay."

Finn looked at Willa with pleading eyes, but she returned the gaze with only a confused and angry stare that bordered on horrified. Around him, the reactions from his friends were all the same, save for Amanda who was clutching his arm and looking at her lap, and Casey who still hadn't passed the point of stunned silence. He sighed before going on to explain himself.

"We worked so hard to get to this point," he said. "To eliminate the Overtakers and everything they've ever done to us. Dill is alive here, Wayne too. How can you say we should leave a world where that's true if there's a chance we could stay in it?"

"You're not understanding the consequences that some of us have here though, Whitman," Maybeck yelled. "Maybe you weren't as close to your parents here as you were back home or whatever, but for me there's no fixing what's wrong; I doubt my Aunt makes it a month in this place, if she even makes it a week. So you can stay here if you want but I'm going back!"

He exhaled sharply like he might cry, and Charlene tightened her grip on his hand before pressing her chin to his shoulder, close to tearing up herself. He leaned in closer to her and closed his eyes, visibly in agony. Watching the exchange, Finn felt two inches tall. He cursed himself for being so impulsively selfish, but still couldn't shake his desire to stay.

None of his friends understood what it was like for him to lose Dillard, not even close. His best friend never saw fifteen and it was entirely his fault. Now he had the once in a lifetime opportunity to fix it, and he had to bring himself to give it up. His gut twisted in physical pain as he battled with the knowledge of what he knew he had to do, and the overwhelming thought that he couldn't bring himself to do it.

"I have to say it again, because you guys still don't seem to get it," Willa interjected, breaking the brief awkward silence that had befallen the room. "There's no choice for us to make here; we have to find a way to reverse what we did with Hollingsworth or we're gone–and I don't mean dead; I mean never even existed. We go back or we face an apocalypse. There's no way we can bet on the slight chance that it's not what I think it is, not when the stakes are this high."