Chapter:9 The Choice that wasn't a Choice
It was an ultimatum. A line drawn in the nonexistent sand of the clean floor.
For a long moment, they held the stare—uncle and niece, Keeper and Burden, the embodiment of Sloth and a girl who had just decided to fight for her life.
He was the one who broke. Not with anger, or a confession, but with a sigh that seemed to drain the last of his will. "Alright," he murmured, the fight gone from his voice. "Let's go out."
Mabel stared, dismayed. Her hands, which had been clenched, came up in a clumsy, instinctive fighting stance. "What did you do with my uncle, demon?"
Nathaniel let out a breath so weary it could have dusted the already-spotless floors. "We need to get you a mattress. And… stationery. Pencils, I assume. Do they still make those?"
Mabel just stared, her defensive pose crumbling into pure, dumbfounded confusion.
Nathan raised a single, tired eyebrow. Then, a slow, understanding smile touched his lips—the first genuine one she'd seen. "Wait. Did you think I would make you sleep on the floor?"
The comment landed like a physical blow. Nathaniel's smile vanished. Mabel flinched, her eyes darting back to the pot on the table. The weight of it flooded back into the room, the momentary absurdity popped like a bubble.
"The ash isn't going anywhere," Nathaniel said, his voice low, all traces of humor gone. He wasn't looking at her, but at the door. "It can wait. You can't sleep on a floorboard."
"But…" Mabel's protest died in her throat. How could she explain that stopping to buy a mattress felt like surrendering in a war he didn't even seem to know they were fighting? "We can't just… go out. After… that." She gestured at the pot, the hidden history, the sheer scale of his failure.
"Why not?" He finally looked at her, and his golden eyes were hollow. "What would you have me do, Mabel? Kneel and weep? I've done that. It's… tedious. It changes nothing." He moved toward the door, a statue of resignation on the move. "The world doesn't stop for grief. Or for failure. It just keeps demanding more effort. A mattress. A pencil. A tomorrow. It's the universe's most brutal design feature."
Mabel understood then. This wasn't him ignoring the problem. This was him being himself in the face of it. The most profound apology he could muster was the grueling, active effort of getting her a bed.
He opened the door. The grimy, beige hallway outside was just a hallway.
"How are we paying for a mattress?" she asked, her voice small, conceding to his bizarre logic.
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched Nathaniel's lips. "The universe abhors a vacuum, Mabel. And it despises my administrative hassles. It will provide."
He stepped out. After a final, long look at the pot of ash—the heart of the mystery—Mabel shouldered her backpack and followed him, leaving the door to his perfect void unlocked behind them.
The trip was… normal. Eerily so. They took a bus, and Nathaniel spent the journey with his head leaned against the window, eyes closed, while Mabel watched the city, waiting for a sign, any sign, of the strange world she now knew was lurking underneath.
In the department store—a temple of human wanting called "Mega-Mart"—Nathaniel moved like a ghost. He didn't browse. He walked directly to the furniture section, pointed at a mid-range, unobjectionable twin mattress, and said, "That one."
"An excellent choice, sir!" a far-too-cheery salesman chirped, materializing beside them. "Shall I arrange delivery?"
"No," Nathaniel said. He placed a hand on the mattress. It didn't vanish. Instead, the salesman blinked, his eyes glazing over for a split second. A perfectly printed delivery ticket, with their address and a time slot for this very evening, appeared in his hand.
"Right… delivery… this evening. Of course. It's all arranged," the salesman said, his smile never faltering.
As they walked away, Mabel saw the salesman shake his head as if clearing a fog, then continue on his way, whistling.
In the stationery aisle, surrounded by a riot of colorful pens and notebooks, Nathaniel finally seemed to flag. The sheer variety was an assault. He stared at a wall of glitter gel pens with the same look of profound distress he'd given the rebar in his gut.
"This is a nightmare," he declared.
"It's just pens," Mabel said, a real smile tugging at her lips for the first time.
"It's a monument to unnecessary choices. A tyranny of options." He sighed, a world-weary sound. "Just… pick the ones that don't smell. I'm going to find the single most comfortable chair in this building and not move until you're done."
He shuffled away, leaving her alone in the aisle. Mabel looked at the basket in her hand—a mattress, a notebook, a pack of simple, non-scented pencils. Normal things. Human things.
It was then she understood his strategy. He was, in his own infuriating, slothful way, making a home for her. And a home, it turned out, was the most rebellious thing Sloth could possibly create.
She selected a single, deep blue pen, and went to find her uncle.
She found him five minutes later, not in a chair, but standing perfectly still in the sporting goods section, staring at a wall of camping tents with an expression of deep, philosophical betrayal.
"They expect you to assemble these," he said, without turning. "Voluntarily. For fun."
"It's called camping," Mabel said.
"It's called voluntary homelessness. A baffling cultural fetish." He finally turned, his gaze falling to the items in her basket. "Are we done? My tolerance for commerce is reaching its event horizon."
"We're done."
As they joined the queue for a checkout that Nathaniel seemed determined to bypass through sheer force of will, he spoke again, his eyes fixed on a spinning rack of cheap sunglasses.
"School," he said, as if pronouncing a diagnosis.
Mabel blinked. "What about it?"
"You'll need to go to one. It's a requirement, I'm told. For people your age." He sounded like he was describing a peculiar tribal ritual.
"I know. I guess… I'll just go to the local one?"
Nathaniel was quiet for a moment. The line shuffled forward. "No," he said, finally. "That seems… suboptimal. Too much paperwork. And I'd have to attend parent-teacher conferences. The very concept makes my bones ache."
"So what, then?" Mabel asked, a knot of anxiety forming in her gut. "I just… don't go?"
"Don't be absurd. Not going would lead to more questions. More hassle." He finally looked at her. "You'll go to a private school. A boarding school."
The word hit her like a physical blow. "You're sending me away?" The fear from the apartment returned, cold and sharp. Another flame he might let flicker and die.
"No," Nathaniel said, and for the first time, he sounded not weary, but precise. "I am presenting a strategic option. There is a difference."
"It doesn't feel like one."
He sighed, a sound that seemed to draw from the depths of a millennium. "Mabel, look at me. Look at the white void I call a home. I consider the act of chewing a high-effort activity on a good day. Do you genuinely believe I can pack a lunch? Remember a permission slip? You would spend half your time managing me, and the other half explaining to child services why your legal guardian is a semi-amnesiac immortal who considers blinking a high-effort activity."
The logic was, infuriatingly, sound. But it was logic without heart.
"A good boarding school," Nathaniel continued, his gaze drifting over the traffic, "is a contained system. It provides food, shelter, education, and supervision. All the tedious, repetitive tasks. It is the most efficient solution. You will be safe there. And you can… be normal. Or whatever passes for it."
"But… I just got here," Mabel whispered, her voice small.
"And you will come back," Nathaniel said. It wasn't a warm promise; it was a flat, factual statement, like stating the time. "On holidays. And summers. This isn't a disposal. It's… an enrollment."
The cashier, a teenager with purple hair, smiled at them. "Find everything okay?"
Before Mabel could speak, Nathaniel looked at the cashier. "We're done."
The girl's eyes glazed over for a microsecond. She scanned the items in Mabel's basket with a blank scanner, the beeps sounding like an afterthought. "That'll be seventy-four dollars and thirty-eight cents."
Nathaniel pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. Mabel had no idea where it came from. He took the change, took the bag, and started walking towards the exit.
Mabel followed, her mind reeling. They stepped out of the synthetic cinnamon air and back into the city's exhaust-fumed reality. The word hung between them, cold and institutional: boarding school.
The hopeful bubble she'd felt in the store was gone, replaced by the cold knot from the apartment. "You're sending me away?" The question was a whisper, laden with the fear that she was just another responsibility he was outsourcing.
"I am presenting a strategic option," he repeated, stopping on the sidewalk and forcing her to look at him. "There is a difference."
"It doesn't feel like one."
He ran a hand through his dyed-black hair, a rare gesture of actual frustration. "Mabel, be logical. I am a logistical black hole. A contained system is the only one I cannot collapse."
"But it's containing me," she shot back, her voice trembling. "You'd just be swapping one void for another."
They reached the bus stop. The silence was heavy, filled with the unsaid thing between them—the pot of ash, the voice in their heads, the weight of his failure.
Nathaniel stared at the graffiti on the bus shelter, his golden eyes distant. "However," he said, the word cutting through the silence like a scalpel. "I am… factoring in a new variable."
Mabel looked up at him. "What variable?"
"You." He finally met her gaze. "Your stubbornness. Your… unsettling habit of kicking loose floorboards and unearthing inconvenient truths." A corner of his mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile. "It has come to my attention that my solution, while efficient, may be suboptimal for morale. And low morale leads to questions. And questions are a hassle."
He took a slow breath, as if the next words required Herculean effort to form.
"So. Here is the choice." He laid it out like a general presenting a battle plan. "Option A: St. Cyprian's Conservatory for Gifted Girls." He gestured vaguely, as if the Voice had just handed him a brochure. "High walls, robust curriculum, and a headmistress who believes in paperwork, not parapsychology. You would have structure, stability, and a peer group. A defined life."
"And Option B?" Mabel asked, her heart hammering.
"Option B," he said, his voice dropping, "is the white void. It is me. It is forgotten groceries and silent dinners and a guardian who may, on occasion, fall asleep mid-conversation. It is a public school where you will have to lie about your home life, and the constant, low-grade terror of my past occasionally catching fire in the living room. It is chaos. It is undefined. And it will be, I cannot stress this enough, a colossal hassle."
He wasn't selling it. He was describing it with the grim honesty of a man diagnosing a terminal illness.
"The decision," Nathaniel said, his tone final, "is yours. I am too tired to make it for you. The bureaucratic inertia of Option A is powerful. But Option B… is available."
The bus hissed to a stop in front of them, its doors flapping open.
Nathaniel didn't move. He was waiting. For her.
Mabel looked from his tired, ancient face to the grimy bus interior, a portal to two different futures. One was safe, orderly, and distant. The other was a mess, a fire hazard, and a pot of ash on a table. But it was also a challenge. It was him.
She thought of her mother's words. "When the world was actually on fire, he was the only person you'd want at your back."
Their world was on fire. A cold, silent, white fire.
She hoisted her bag of stationery, her one small arsenal against the void, and stepped onto the bus.
"We'll start with Option B," she said, her voice not trembling at all. "We can always switch to A if it gets too tedious."
For a fraction of a second, something unreadable flashed in Nathaniel's eyes—not relief, not happiness, but something sharper, like the gleam of a long-forgotten key. He followed her onto the bus.
the Voice mused, sounding strangely satisfied.
And as the bus pulled away from the curb, carrying them back toward the white void, the pot of ash, and their colossal, shared hassle, Mabel knew, with a certainty that settled deep in her bones, that she had made the right choice. She wasn't just living with her uncle. She was staying to fight for him.