Chapter 21: The Char Problem
Two years. Not short, not long. The kind of duration that feels different depending on which end of it you're standing on.
Uriel sat at his desk and looked out the window for a while, running a quiet inventory of the time.
Academy life had not been particularly smooth. That was a fact.
His social situation had remained, throughout, in a state of managed awkwardness — especially with the opposite sex, where things had settled into a permanent register of polite, glass-walled distance. Also a fact.
But he'd made it through. Somehow. That part was also true.
He pulled his gaze back from the window, looked at the open book on his desk, closed it, leaned back in his chair, and pressed two fingers against his temple.
The problem was that making it through had generated its own problem.
Two years of switching, daily, between being Uriel the ordinary fourteen-year-old student and being Uriel the adult soul who knew exactly what Tina was. Back and forth, over and over, for seven hundred and some odd days.
Objectively speaking: her appearance was without flaw. Her presence — warm, edged with something faintly sacred, unchanged even when wearing the face of a thirteen-year-old girl — had not weakened. If anything it had sharpened into something more dangerous, the way contrasts do when they're pushed far enough apart.
And then there was the third thing. The bottomless, structurally unsound, apparently infinite maternal energy that she directed at him without any apparent awareness that there might be a ceiling on it.
Two years had not made that feel smaller. Two years had made it feel larger.
And underneath all of that, still running, still intact, was the thirty-year operating system from his previous life — the full set of aesthetic sensibilities and pattern-recognition software that had not been wiped by reincarnation, only compressed into the body of a fourteen-year-old, where it sat and hummed and occasionally made its presence known. Especially since the confession incidents.
Uriel pressed his temple again.
He wasn't unaware of the risk. Every time the warning signs appeared, he had to grab himself by the back of the collar and haul his own reasoning away from the edge. Drink some tea. Look at a wall. Reboot.
The issue was that lately, her passive aura seemed to have picked up some kind of secondary effect—like a cognitohazard or a memetic hazard. Something harder to ignore. Because recently, with increasing frequency, a very specific figure had been materialising in the back of his mind.
A masked man. Red colour scheme. Famous, in certain circles, for standing in front of a teenage girl and announcing, with complete sincerity, that she was the kind of woman who could be his mother.
I will not be going full Char.
I will not be going full Char.
That road ends with me calling a teenage girl “Mom” in a way I do not permit. I have not fallen that far. I refuse.
Every time the masked man surfaced, Uriel breathed in, pressed his palms together, and recited whatever internal mantra was available.
He was not there yet.
He would not be going there.
He opened his book again.
---
The final semester had barely started when Uriel acknowledged something he'd been deferring for months. The question of what came next had officially run out of road to kick down.
Graduation. And then: where, and doing what.
At fifteen, this world offered two directions.
Out into it — adventuring, skilled trade, apprenticing somewhere, earning a living with your hands and your abilities. Or: further education, a higher academy, narrower and more specialised and longer.
He turned both over in his head, and then realised he hadn't asked Mom's opinion.
Not because he'd forgotten. Because he could already predict the answer, and had been quietly buying time.
---
That evening, Tina came by with a small plate of fruit — sliced, arranged neatly — and sat down while he finished the last problem on his coursework.
"Little Uri," she said. "Last semester. Have you thought about what you want to do after?"
He set down his pen. "What does Mom think?"
She propped her chin in her hand. "Mom thinks continuing your studies is better."
Of course she does.
"Going out to work is hard," she continued, with the ease of someone who'd had this conversation assembled in advance. "And adventuring — if you got hurt, Mom would worry."
"So higher academy," Uriel said. "Which one?"
"Wherever little Uri wants to go. Mom will come with you."
Uriel felt like he had just taken critical damage.He stared at her.
"Mom will come along," he repeated, one word at a time.
"Mom. I'm going to study. You don't need to—"
"Mom's grades are excellent," she said, pleasantly, with the tone of someone raising a practical point rather than starting an argument. "Any school would be fine."
"..."
"And," the smile she'd been containing came loose at the edges, "Mom would worry, leaving little Uri on his own."
Uriel looked at her. Good old 'would worry.'
"Mom. I'm fourteen."
"Fourteen," she agreed, nodding seriously. "Still a child."
"..."
"Two more years at the next school," she said, her finger tracing a small idle circle on the desk's edge. "Two years, and little Uri will be grown. After that, Mom won't interfere."
"And in two years you'll say something different."
She considered this with visible honesty. "We'll see in two years."
He hadn't expected a different answer. He still sighed.
"Mom. At a higher academy, your ability level — won't it stand out?"
"Mom will be careful. Holding back — Mom has practice at that now."
"You have experience with it," he said. "Let's revisit the entrance exam situation."
"That time Mom genuinely forgot," she said. "This time Mom will remember."
"You said that last time."
"This time is different."
Uriel looked at her face and found it completely unassailable. There was no angle of attack. He dropped it.
"Mom," he tried a different direction, "have you considered that if you enrol alongside me again, the students there will—"
"Think our relationship is strange," she finished. "Yes, little Uri mentioned that before. Mom remembers."
"And you still want to go."
"Because little Uri will be there."
That logic. He'd run into it enough times to know it had no seams. A wall with no handholds, no cracks, nothing to grip.
He picked up a piece of fruit and bit into it. Sweet — the variety he'd mentioned preferring a few days ago. Of course she'd remembered.
"Worst case," he said, chewing, "what if someone at the higher academy tries to — you know. That situation."
"Homesick ones, Mom will comfort."
"Not that situation. The other one."
"Confession," she said.
"Yes."
She thought about it. "Tell them Mom doesn't have those kinds of feelings. And then check whether they need comforting."
He ran the projected outcome in his head. Someone was probably still going to cry. But that was their problem, and a future problem, and therefore currently ignorable.
He worked through his remaining objections one by one. Each one found a wall.
He finished the fruit, pushed the plate aside, picked up his pen.
"Mom. For the higher academy entrance exam — how much are you planning to hold back?"
"Whatever little Uri thinks is right. Mom will follow little Uri's lead."
"Middle of the range. Not top marks, definitely no special scholarship. You have that memorised this time?"
"Middle of the range," she repeated. "No special scholarship. Memorised."
"And," he added, "if they offer a private room for top scorers, don't take it."
"Why not?"
"Because." He kept his expression neutral. "I’m at that age where personal space matters. You know. Adolescence."
Tina was quiet for exactly one second.
"...But if Mom is in a regular dormitory with other students," she said, "how would Mom get little Uri his breakfast in the morning."
Uriel set his pen down. Breathed in. Breathed out.
Mom. Your son is capable of acquiring his own breakfast. He has legs. He has currency. I can get my own breakfast. You do not need to be in range for that.
"Mom," he said. "Let's continue this conversation later."
"Okay." She stood and collected the empty plate. "Sleep soon. We can talk more tomorrow."
She went out to the balcony to wash up. The door clicked shut.
Uriel sat in the warm lamplight and looked at the closed door, the words we can talk more tomorrow orbiting his head without landing.
He could already see tomorrow's conversation. He could map it to the end. Every branch, every dead end, every wall.
And then, without invitation, the masked man surfaced again in the back of his mind — red colour scheme, that particular silhouette — and this time, standing at the conclusion of a long day of being thoroughly outmanoeuvred, the figure of that masked man suddenly felt dangerously relatable. Disturbingly alluring, even.
No.
Absolutely not.
I am not going full Char. That is the line. The line does not move.
He shoved the thought into a corner of his mind and refused to look at it.
Then he picked up his pen and went back to his coursework.