A House is not a Home (December Challenge)

[rebel-wulf.livejournal.com]

Otto, as it turns out, had spent a decade or two in arcadia. It had felt like an eternity at the time, but it would do to you as well if you'd been there. A ruined cityscape was a terrible place to live at any time, doubly so when there was a war going on.  If you were lucky, where you were sleeping had three walls and part of a roof. If you werent, there was one wall and some scavenged tentmaterial nailed to it. AND it was raining.
     Nowadays, he had a house. It wasnt a great house, and was more like a small studio apartment filled with junk and debris. Today, that junk and debris included a human skeleton with the right forearm missing that had been stripped of anything edible. He hadn't had time to tidy up, and it had started to look like something off of a vapid 'how clean is your home?' tv show. He'd been supplying a war. He didn't have time for himself anymore.
     He dropped his satchel down on a stained sofa and cracked open the lid of the chicken chow mein he'd bought himself driving back from essex and tried to locate a fork in the bombsite that he called a kitchen. Breifly running the mangled peice of metal under the tap, he dried it on his jeans and picked up the mail that had accumulated on the floor as he passed by, sitting down and resting the greasy metal container on one knee as he tore open the envelopes. They reminded him he was behind on his bills, even though he needed no prompting. There was a war, and he hadn't had time to work on his little stall and make the pittance of cash he needed to live in the real world.
     The next envelope gave him a one word message that he hadn't expected. "Sorry" it said, in the Spymaster General's cursive script. They were supposed to be renewing their Motley Oath tomorrow. The empty pit that the message had left in his stomach wasnt filled with the cheap and greasy meal that he had shoved into it. All he felt now was sick. So. That was that then, he guessed.
     He washed down the chinese with a bottle of water. No, lets be a little more precise. A bottle of tapwater. He really didn't have the money, and this thing with the Warm weather clothes, he really regretted offering to do it for free about five minutes after he had. He was going to have to get desperate, or, no. There wasnt a war anymore. He had a hard time telling himself that, and struggled with the concept. He'd curled up with an unzipped up sleeping bag by the time the message arrived on his phone to come to the Freehold hollow. Ten minutes of sleep. He decided that the first person that asked him why he was in a bad mood was going to get shot in the left bollock.
     Twice.