Chapter 18: Ten Feet
Time moved quickly. Second year arrived, and Uriel noticed something.
He woke one morning to find a cloth bundle sitting on his nightstand. Neatly tied at the top, the knot precise, the whole thing packed full and faintly warm. It looked like takeout, except it clearly wasn't some sketchy, mystery-meat convenience store bento.
He sat up, pulled it over, and worked the knot loose.
Breakfast. Homemade — her work, not the academy kitchen's. The rustic bread rolls were stuffed with spiced meat past any reasonable limit. Tucked alongside them was a small sealed flask; when he twisted the cork, steam curled out. Sweetened hot milk, fresh from the kitchen.
A folded note lay beside the bundle, creased into neat thirds.
He opened it.
Little Uri, did you sleep well? Something warm in the morning is good for you.
He read it twice, folded it back along its original creases, and set it down.
Then he sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, holding the half-empty bottle, listening to the room. Tina was already gone — probably to class. The room had the particular quiet of a space that had recently been occupied by someone very considerate.
I am never going to be a functional adult. That ship has sailed. That ship has sunk.
But the bundle was one thing. What came after was something else entirely.
---
Second year, and Tina's concept of personal boundaries had begun a confident reversal.
To school, together. From school, together. Meals, directly across the table.
Uriel had made a kind of reluctant peace with this. He couldn't stop it, and honestly — having someone to talk to on the walk wasn't the worst thing in the world. At least they weren't sharing a bed.
The problem was the details.
One evening he was sitting at his desk reading when a presence materialised beside him. Tina, holding a stack of his laundry in both arms.
"Little Uri, I washed these for you."
"...Mom. I'm thirteen. I can do my own laundry."
"I wash them cleaner," she said, with complete confidence. "And little Uri needs to read."
"I'm reading because I have nothing else to do right now, not because I'm too busy to do laundry."
"Then keep reading," she said, already moving toward the balcony, "and I'll hang them up when they're done."
The door clicked shut.
Uriel sat at his desk and looked at the empty doorway for a few seconds. He raised one hand toward it, thought better of it, and let it drop. He turned back to his book, got through half a page, and stopped.
He put the book face-down on his stomach and stared at the ceiling.
Nothing on that half page had made it into his brain.
He breathed in slowly. Fine, he thought. You adapt. That's what you do.
The next morning, he opened his wardrobe. The laundry was done, folded, and arranged back in place. And there, hanging in the most visible spot — washed clean, pressed flat, restored to a condition it probably hadn't seen in two years — was a threadbare old hand towel he'd shoved into the back corner and genuinely forgotten existed.
Uriel looked at the towel. He opened his mouth. He closed it again. He shut the wardrobe and went to wash his face.
You are a mama's boy. You are a full, certified, card-carrying mama's boy.
...Yes. Correct. Moving on.
---
The rumours started around that time.
At first, just fragments — a few words dropped in the hallway, something half-heard across the dining hall. Whenever Uriel walked past, the conversations would drop below audible range. He didn't think much of it. The quickest way to make a rumour grow was to act like it mattered.
Then one afternoon, sitting in the corner of the classroom, he caught a few words from the pair at the next desk. Their voices had drifted up without them noticing.
"...does the way Tina looks at Uriel seem strange to you?"
"Strange how?"
"Like... how a mom stares at her kid? Like she's tracking his every move?"
"Oh—"
"Right? Like, wherever he goes, she's tracking him. He coughs once and she frowns. That kind of thing."
"That's so — I mean, that's really — "
"Yeah."
Uriel sat very still and quietly filled in what that unspoken yeah really meant.
He tilted his head and glanced across the room.
Tina was at her desk, reading. As if she'd felt something, she looked up — found his gaze immediately — and the corner of her mouth curved before she looked back down.
Uriel returned to his own book.
That classmate has an extremely accurate read on the situation.
And there is absolutely nothing I can do with that information.
---
The rumours escalated. Rumours always do.
The siblings theory came first and was dismantled almost immediately — "what kind of sister looks at her brother like he's the reason she gets out of bed in the morning?" The counter-argument apparently settled it: therefore, clearly not siblings.
Then cousins. Then childhood friends. Then, from somewhere, the word romantic drifted into the conversation and stuck, and after that the whole thing picked up speed in a direction no one could reverse.
The most widely accepted theory among the student body was elaborate. Two runaway nobles, fleeing an arranged marriage, hiding under assumed identities in a place no one would think to look — the girl so devoted she cooked, cleaned, and managed everything herself rather than let him struggle. The evidence cited was, apparently, the way Tina's eyes followed him, and the expression on Uriel's face which people were describing as reluctantly indulgent when it was, in fact, quietly despairing.
Uriel let it run. Two lifetimes of social experience had taught him that attempting to correct the record with "she's actually my foster mother" would not produce clarity. It would produce a different, significantly worse rumour, and also a reputation for having unusual hobbies.
What he couldn't ignore was what the rumours were doing to his daily life.
Boys who had previously registered him as mildly inconvenient were now looking at him like a personal affront. Someone in the hallway shoulder-checked him with enough weight to make it a statement. In combat class, a bubble of empty space formed around him during group formation. At the dining hall, a commoner cadet on mess-hall duty would develop a slight tremor when serving his table, and somehow the best cuts of roasted meat would "accidentally" end up on the floor.
Uriel managed all of it with the flat patience of someone who has dealt with considerably worse. But flat patience was a resource, and resources depleted.
He turned it over for a few days. Then one evening after classes, he found her in the corridor.
"Sis," he said. "There's something I need to talk to you about."
"Go ahead."
"Lately," he said, choosing the most direct route, "we've been spending too much time together. People are talking, and it's starting to affect how I interact with everyone else here."
"Talking about what?"
"They think we're a couple."
Tina's brow creased slightly. "That should be corrected."
"Right. So for now, I need us to keep some distance. Don't walk to school together. Don't sit at the same table at meals. The laundry — I'll handle my own. And in general..."
He quickly did the math.
"Ten feet. Between us, at all times. In public."
Tina nodded without hesitation.
"Okay," she said. "Whatever little Uri thinks is best."
Uriel waited for the rest of the sentence.
There was no rest of the sentence.
He looked at her. "...That's it?"
"Yeah." She smiled. "You said so."
"You're not going to push back at all?"
"You said you need to look after your relationships here," she said simply. "Of course I'll support that."
He studied her face from several angles. The answer was correct, and that was exactly the problem. It was all a little too neat.
She agreed too fast.
This is suspicious.
A thought surfaced, one that had the same quality as the thought he'd had the day he first called her Mom — the kind you don't want to be right about.
"Mom," he said slowly. "You agreed that quickly because you think I'm going through adolescence and need space. And you're just... going along with it. Aren't you."
Tina blinked.
Then her lips pressed together, and her eyes curved into the particular crescent shape they made when she'd been caught and had decided not to admit it.
He had seen that expression exactly this way since he was five. It appeared whenever he'd correctly identified something she wasn't planning to confirm.
Uriel exhaled through his teeth.
"Mom. This is not a rebellious phase."
"Well," she said warmly. "I know."
The tone of I know you feel that way, so I’ll let you have your moment was, Uriel reflected, one of the most maddening things a human being could possibly say.
He stood in the corridor for a moment, looked at her, and swallowed the remaining half of what he'd been about to say.
Fine. Think what you want. I don't actually care.
"Ten feet," he said. "We agreed."
"Ten feet," she repeated. "Yes."
---
The ten-foot rule went into effect the next morning.
Uriel walked ahead. Tina followed behind. He checked once with his peripheral vision.
She was maintaining exactly ten feet. When he sped up, she sped up. When he stopped to check whether a notice had been updated on the board, she stopped too — a precise, immediate halt, like a very attentive shadow.
Is this a children's game. Are we playing grandmother's footsteps right now.
But the distance wasn't the problem.
The problem was her expression.
The look on her face — I cannot be near you but my eyes will be with you always — combined with the mathematically maintained ten feet, read to outside observers as exactly one thing: a girl who had been given the cold shoulder by someone she loved and was choosing, with quiet dignity, to follow at a respectful distance anyway.
"That's awful..."
He caught it clearly as a group of girls passed in the other direction, voices lowered but not low enough. "Just because he's good-looking doesn't mean he gets to treat her like that. Making Tina trail behind him like some kind of — "
I just took an arrow to the knee for no reason.
Things cannot get worse than this. I am choosing to believe that.
---
There was still one remaining problem. They lived in the same room.
Ten feet worked in the corridors. It worked in classrooms and dining halls and anywhere with enough space to measure. The room was tiny — two beds, one nightstand between them, and nowhere near ten feet of space.
The first evening back, he tried.
"Mom. About the distance — inside the room—"
"The room doesn't count," Tina said, turning a page. Her voice had the easy certainty of someone reading from a rulebook she'd personally written. "You said ten feet outside. In public. This is inside."
Uriel opened his mouth, then closed it.
She was right.
I said: don't walk to school together. Don't sit at the same table. Ten feet in public.
I did not say: maintain ten feet in a room that is physically incapable of containing ten feet.
And there are only two of us in here, so apparently that counts as enough.
He turned toward the wall, pulled his blanket up to his shoulder, and let it go.
"Goodnight, Mom."
"Goodnight, little Uri."
The light went out.
In the dark, he heard her cross the room — careful, quiet steps — and tuck the corner of his blanket back in where it had come loose. Then the soft sounds of her settling into her own bed, and then nothing.
Okay.
Inside doesn't count. Fine.
Nobody's watching anyway.
---
The bundle still appeared on his nightstand every morning.
The notes kept coming. Today the weather's changing. Did you sleep well last night? Mom thinks you could approach that problem set from the other direction.
He read each one. Folded it back along its crease. Put it in the back of the desk drawer. He didn't throw them out, and he didn't mention them.
The drawer was getting full.
Sometimes, sitting at his desk in the quiet of the evening, he'd think about it: ten feet was ten feet, and it was holding up fine. But some things, it turned out, didn't much care about the distance between two people.
He'd put the thought down and go back to his book.
You got used to it. That was the thing.
You always got used to it.