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Every morning after he woke, Adam had to take at least ten minutes to remember that he wasn’t on earth anymore. He’d shift and stretch, waiting with trepidation for his alarm to blare, in horror of yet another day in the workplace. (Not that he didn’t enjoy his work, he did! He liked helping people overcome their problems and facilitating conflict resolutions. It just…felt hollow in the face of what he knew he was meant for, the role he knew he would play as a prince.) When the alarm never did sound, he’d roll over to reach for the clock and find instead a huge warm, furry mass where he no longer even expected there to be bed. Perks of a ‘king’ (ha) sized bed. Not that anything less than that would suffice when one’s animal companion was as large as Cringer.
Generally, Cringer’s undeniable presence was almost always the first reality check to come Adam’s way. As soon as he came too, Cringer would lazily lick Adam’s cheek, stretch his enormous green toe beans and then curl up again, the lazy cat, rumbling something about thirty more minutes.
Typical.
Except, really, it wasn’t typical at all. For fifteen agonizing years, Adam insisted and waited, begged and pleaded with the universe and everyone around him to prove that he wasn’t crazy, that the home to which he knew he belonged truly did exist. Over half his life spent being told he needed to process his trauma and now, when he was finally home, finally vindicated, he could hardly believe it was the real life he’d always insisted it to be.
His first day on earth was one Adam could never eradicate from his memory if he tried. Waterlogged and devastated, he sobbed his way across the lake, splashing ungainly through weeds and algae. When he made it, bedraggled, to shore, he hadn’t the strength left to do much of anything except flop down onto the sand, his cheeks wet though his eyes had run dry. Shivering, his breath hitching, Adam lay there with his thoughts. Were his parents dead? What had happened to the sword, the one which he’d promised to look after? (Yet another failure. What would his dad have thought?) Would he ever get home again?
Just after the break of dawn, a jogger found him.
As familiar as people looked to him, the world was entirely alien. Most of the foliage was green, none of the vehicles he saw could fly, and no one bore arms at their sides or wore clothes the construction of which was familiar. No armor, no leather. Not even a tunic.
At the police station, the ring of phones made him flinch. Even the percolation of coffee makers alarmed him. Eventually, after a conversation in a language which he understood in principle but could not make heads or tails of, a man with an enormous and strangely manicured mustache asked Adam for his name.
In retrospect, it was lucky he’d never been in the habit of introducing himself as ‘prince’.
“And your last name?”
At that, Adam only blinked. It took some twenty minutes of questions before he finally understood that they were asking for the family name his mother bore, ‘Glenn’. His father’s line wasn’t availed of a ‘last name’, at least not one he knew of.
He told the story faithfully, having been raised to believe that the greatest dishonour was to lie. But for his age, they might have put him somewhere worse than Child Protective Services and as it was, the System was no picnic. He’d bounced from foster family to foster family for a time. The third one took him to a barber. When he looked himself in the mirror, he felt further from home than ever before. The face looking back at him was unfamiliar without his curtain of ashy hair. Even his cheeks were pinched, and he’d grown thinner in general, which he’d never thought possible, considering he was already such a string bean to begin with.
School was hard, not that that was anything new. He’d been picked on at school in Eternos, he got picked on at school in Oklahoma City. It was the rest that sucked harder. Hopping from family to family, therapist to therapist, constantly wondering about his parents, his home, the sword, struggling to make friends and keep them once he had them. Then high school, technical school, the workforce.
For as long as he’d been on earth, the first ten minutes of every day he’d spent cataloguing everything he knew about Eternia, every detail of his family, their champions, their history, lest he forget. And man, did he ever not want to think about the absolute pain in the ass that had been learning a new alphabet at ten years old. All the things he had been good at, like history and literature, were useless on earth. The few things his mother taught him about (NASA! NASA was so cool) weren’t enough to get by without being demarked as odd.
Now, despite the fact that literally his entire life was altered, seemingly nothing had changed. He was still the odd one out, his Earth references indecipherable to everyone else, even his mother, she’d been away so long. And he still spent the first ten minutes of his day convincing himself that his life wasn’t just a dream.
The desire to say ‘I told you so’ never dissipated, leaving Adam to wonder what that said about him. He’d bellowed his truth to a crowd of randos, had his former roommate brought to Eternos in a fitful desire for vindication, but it still wasn’t enough to slake the visceral hunger which gnawed within him.
Not because he couldn’t say I told you so to the foster parents, teachers, therapists, and classmates of the past decade and a half, but because he still woke every morning expecting to find himself back in the vicious cycle Hussein prophesied for them both: miserably going to work while living for the weekend and counting the days till his next vacation. In the days just prior to his return, when everything had come to a head, he’d been about as hopeless as he’d ever been that he would get to go home, much less ever make his father proud.
Just because he’d done both of those things didn’t magically banish his deep-seated discouragement.
Starfished out on the mattress beside Cringer, one hand idly scratching beneath the big cat’s chin, Adam lay contemplating the absolute rollercoaster that was his life. After about five minutes of that, he began recalling an equal number of positives. He was home. He’d saved Eternia from Skeletor. His mother lived. His father loved him. He had true friends. He made a halfway decent ruler. And he would do everything in his power to deserve the position to which he’d been born.
Only then could he begin to think about crawling out from beneath his luxurious bedding.
“Today’s the day,” he said, just like he always did.
Like always, Cringer peered out at him from a half open lid. “What’s today?”
“A new day. A new chance to make the best of whatever’s to come.”
It was a promise he renewed each morning, a promise due to the universe for reuniting him with all those Adam held dear. He had the power, and he swore that he’d use it fairly, justly, in service to his people.
With each act of mediation, each heroic deed, maybe he could whittle ten minutes down to eight, to six. Maybe someday, he might be able to get up without having to remind himself at all. Maybe.
Dreams, after all, did come true. They just took time. Fifteen years and countless internet searches worth later.
Still, as Adam dressed – tunics and jerkins! Way better than button ups, seriously – he finished the ritual with the customary reminder:
Everything he’d been through had brought him to that moment in that place, had made a lanky youth into a man. A clumsy one, maybe, and for certain awkward, but most importantly, a man who cared, who persevered, who loved. The man Eternia deserved.
Not a man who punched first and asked questions later, but a man who opened lines of communication, but who wasn’t afraid to stand up for what was right. A man who tried his best every day.
This new day, and every day after, was a job for Adam Glenn.