Chapter 28: Can a Guy Really Be Named Tina?
The door swung open and a wave of something rich and savory hit Uriel square in the face.
He stepped inside and kicked it shut behind him.
She's actually cooking in the dorm. Like, actually cooking. What happens when the neighbors smell this?
Any normal boys' dorm should, by the laws of nature, reek of sweat and questionable sock choices. The kitchen corner, however, told a different story. The 'perfectly ordinary male student' who attended class in her disguise was nowhere to be seen.
In her place stood Galatina — hair loosely pinned up, wrapped in an oversized loungewear top, a floral apron tied over it. She held a long wooden ladle and turned her head at the sound of the door.
Through the gap beside her, Uriel caught the small stove. A little pot bubbled away on it, sending up lazy curls of steam. Chunky potato pieces, carrots gone glossy with hours of simmering, a few cuts of meat — all of it trembling gently in dark, fragrant broth.
A small cutting board sat on the side table nearby. A few cloves of garlic waited to be peeled beside a small knife — handle wrapped in old cloth, clearly not standard dorm issue.
That knife.
Uriel recognized it immediately. It was from home. His mother had always used that exact knife to smash garlic.
She actually packed it.
When Galatina saw him walk in, that familiar, brilliant smile lit up her face.
"Little Uri, welcome back! Would you like dinner first, a bath first, or... maybe —"
Uriel raised one hand like he was stopping traffic, his expression completely flat.
"Stop."
Uriel stared at her, his expression flattening into a mask of pure, exhausted resignation.
"That pause. That specific trailing note at the end. You were setting up the classic 'or me' line. Don't even try to deny it."
"Eh?"
Galatina blinked at him. The expression on her face was one of such complete, untroubled sincerity that it almost looped back around to being offensive.
"Why would I say that? I was going to offer the fatigue-dispelling spell."
"Where did you pick up something that dangerous?! Though — wait, that's actually a spell?"
"It is," she said.
She formed a little heart with both hands and aimed it directly at him.
"Fly away, tiredness."
"THAT'S JUST THE 'PAIN, PAIN, GO AWAY' THING YOU DID WHEN I WAS A KID! I'm not five anymore!"
…Right. Exactly as expected.
No Demon Lord. No grand abyss conspiracy. No weight of the world.
Just an overpowered airhead who never learned how normal people behave.
Uriel exhaled. The last traces of the dramatic, heavy atmosphere he'd carried home from outside evaporated clean — blown off by two words and a heart gesture.
"I'll eat first. I'm starving."
The "dining table" was just the dorm desk pushed to the wall. Two chairs sat side by side facing the window, and Uriel shoved the textbooks aside to make room for two bowls of rice.
Outside, the sky had finished darkening. A few of the academy's lantern-posts had flickered on, casting pale gold against the glass.
Uriel picked up his chopsticks and remembered something.
"By the way — you're presenting as male on campus, right?"
He glanced at Galatina, who was happily piling meat into his bowl.
"Mm-hm."
"Then you need a name. I can't just call you roommate for the next four years."
The chopsticks paused mid-air. Galatina set them down, laced her fingers together under her chin, and thought about it with an expression of genuine, earnest consideration.
A moment later:
"Tina."
The broth went straight into Uriel's windpipe.
"Cough — cough, cough —!"
He doubled over, hacking hard enough to rattle the bowl, barely keeping his face out of the rice.
Galatina stood, moved around to his side, and began gently patting his back.
"Easy, easy," she murmured, soft as always. "Still choking on things like a little kid."
"— I'm fine," Uriel managed.
He grabbed a napkin, pressed it to his mouth, and breathed.
He straightened and looked at her.
"You're disguised as a guy."
"Yes."
"And your name is Tina."
"Yes! Tina. Is something wrong with it?"
"The problem is that Tina is not a man's name!"
Uriel felt his grip on reality wobble.
"No guy is named Tina. You're walking around with a guy's face, and if someone asks your name and you say Tina, we might as well take out a billboard. Do you want to be noticed? Is that the goal? Because that's the goal."
"Is it really that bad?"
She sounded faintly dismissive, which was somehow worse.
"Tina's fine, though? A name is just a sound, really. I've gotten used to this one."
...You didn't hear a single word I said, did you.
Uriel swallowed that thought whole. He looked at her face — that immovable, serene I've-already-decided expression — and accepted his fate.
"Fine. But you still need a last name for cover."
"I haven't thought of one! Little Uri, pick one for me?"
Uriel processed the weight of that request. He stabbed his chopsticks into his rice, drifted through the dusty archives of his past-life nerd memory, and surfaced with a name.
"…Pendragon."
"Hm?"
"Last name: Pendragon." He didn't look up. "If anyone asks, say Tina's a family nickname. A childhood thing. It'll hold up."
Galatina repeated the name quietly to herself. Then she smiled.
There was a softness in it — the kind that only shows up when someone treats you with more seriousness than you expected.
"Okay. I'll listen to Little Uri."
She picked up her chopsticks and transferred the largest piece of meat into his bowl with practiced precision.
"What's this for."
"A reward."
The tone was exactly the one she used when reading him bedtime stories as a small child.
Uriel stared at the meat for a moment, then ate it.
"…It's just a last name. You don't have to make it a whole thing."
It was literally the first thing that came to mind. I stole it from someone else's story.
It was braised soft, seasoned just right.
So this is what people mean when they say someone keeps house well.
Uriel bent over his bowl and ate.
A guy named Tina.
…Honestly, when it's her, even the completely ridiculous somehow ends up okay.
But I'm not letting this slide. Obviously.
Outside, insects had started up their nighttime chorus, filling every soft edge of the dark with thin, steady sound. For a moment, Uriel felt like he was back at the Old Cottage — back when it was just the two of them, and dinner was always this quiet.
---
The next morning, Uriel showed up at the Student Affairs office with two faint bruises under his eyes and Galatina in tow.
He had barely slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it: roll call on the first day of term, the registrar calling the name, and a pretty-faced young man rising from his seat and saying present, I'm Tina. Followed by the stares of every student and faculty member in the building.
No. Absolutely not. A guy named Tina is not compatible with the words 'ordinary person' in any known language.
The fix was minimal. Tina becomes Tian. One letter. That's it.
Uriel stopped them both in front of the office door, gripped Galatina by both shoulders, and delivered his instructions with the energy of a man reading out a will.
"Listen. When we go in there, you open your mouth and you say it yourself. Tell them the clerk misheard you — accent, dialect, whatever excuse works. The name is Tian, not Tina. Do you understand me? Tian Pendragon. That's who you are."
"Little Uri, honestly, I think Tina is perfectly —"
"No. You don't think that. This is a matter of personal safety and my ability to eat lunch in peace for the next four years. Move."
He pushed open the door and walked in like a man marching to his own execution with perfect posture.
The clerk was a second-year student with glasses and a truly impressive stack of paperwork. She looked up, pushed her frames back, and let her gaze travel between the two of them before settling on the suspiciously pretty "male student" across the desk.
"Name correction?"
Uriel nudged Galatina with his elbow.
Galatina received the signal. She could tell from the look on Uriel's face that refusing would result in something close to a medical emergency for him, so she complied. She pitched her voice into that naturally androgynous register of hers — soft but faintly magnetic, with a sort of unhurried cluelessness baked in:
"Ah—excuse me, miss. There's a mistake in the register. It's not Tina. It's Tian."
The clerk tapped her pen against her chin. Her eyes stayed on Galatina's face a beat longer than strictly professional.
Even through a disguise spell, the face was unfair. Porcelain skin, eyes carrying that specific quality of someone who grew up far from cities and hasn't quite adjusted yet — exactly the look of a sheltered young noble freshly arrived from the countryside and slightly overwhelmed by the existence of crowds.
"Tina to Tian…yeah, that tracks. Probably the clerk got the vowel wrong."
She looked at the register, looked at the face, and the professional fatigue in her expression softened noticeably.
"Poor kid," she muttered, barely audible. "Boy this pretty showing up in the boys' dorms with a name like Tina — that would've been rough."
She uncapped her pen and made the corrections in a few brisk strokes.
"Done. Keep a copy of your ID filed with us, and next time make sure the clerk gets the pronunciation right."
"Thank you so much! You're a lifesaver!"
Uriel practically snatched the form off the desk and had them both out the door at a pace that stopped just short of running.
By the time they hit open air, he felt like a human being again.
…That actually worked. The register's fixed. The cover holds.
Good. This is fine. This is exactly the quiet, unremarkable life I intend to protect.
He turned and looked at the "male student" beside him, who was currently staring at a lamppost with open curiosity.
"Remember — you're Tian from now on. Understood?"
"…Sure, sure. Tian it is."
Galatina tilted her head. The loose strands of her disguise-hair caught the morning light.
She didn't entirely follow what Uriel kept insisting on, but whatever he decided, she always found it interesting. And whatever he decided, she would go along with it — without question, without hesitation.
Uriel watched her completely unbothered face for a moment, then exhaled, turned away, and walked toward the classroom block at a slightly faster pace than necessary.