Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who took your place
Life in the former Splinter Fiefs didn't really get better or less chaotic for a long time after the war, the dysfunction of neofeudalism rotting away the roots of every shiny postwar initiative the People's Fleet tried to import. Social housing developments flew from utopian drafting tables straight into a pipeline of hangdog headshaking: here? Can't work. Here? Can't be done. A few modifications, a few concessions to local conditions, and crumbling-before-completion cardboard Brutalism eyesores bloomed, sinkholes of misery and desperation, the keystone amenities making them livable somehow never materialising, leaving the residents deep in food deserts, bereft of laundry facilities, common social areas, and in cases of extreme difference-embezzling corner-cutting, windows.
But you were one of the lucky ones, in a way you kept quiet about, because by the time your Fief instituted the draft for its fuckhead tyrant's doomed war effort, its own bureaucracy had broken down to the point that although your name went down as drafted, enlisted, and sent to the front...you were never actually called up. No letters arrived for you, no transport, no threats or arrest; you simply carried on quietly living as the world ended, and well-meaning socialism tried to build something on the foundations of corrosive liquid shit that were left behind.
All fine, until today, and the crisp letter from the Post-War Office of the People's Fleet; combing through the millions of fragmentary files of the Splinter Fiefs, they've reasonably concluded you're one of the press-ganged many. That you're owed for the time and civilian innocence that the Fief supposedly stole from you, in the form of an honestly pretty miserly veteran's pension.
You try to work out how to navigate the bureaucracy of the Post-War Office enough to tell them to take it back, chasing from phone number to phone number to departments that were reorg'd out of existence three initiatives ago and "oh, not our remit, try this extension" and numbers that ring forever and ones that don't ring at all.
And your doorbell rings.
You've seen them around, you think, in the desaturated background sense one sees war detritus around. Clean but shabby, in a military longcoat that's outlived the military that issued it, and indeed the state that operated that military, obviously living from bed to bed, their life packed in a mech pilot's duffel, ready to go. Kipping sitting up in decaying bus shelters, sometimes, when the bed-to-bed benevolence of others fails them.
"Hello," they say rustily, as if they're trying to remember how to talk to people, eyes skittering around you like a water droplet dancing itself to evaporative nothing on the hot surface of a stove, never quite landing on you directly. "We don't — know each other. We never met. I need you to—" and they blink and shake themself, a lean grey washed-out remnant of a person. "They're down to our block of identity numbers," they say. "They'll give you a war pension, if they haven't already. Just — take it. It's not worth the investigation they'll have to open if you turn it down. Just take it."
"What?" You stare at them, shuffling foot-to-foot on your doorstep, like they're ready to bolt. "Who are you?" and they twitch and grin, a shadow of someone they once must have been.
"I was your next-door neighbour," they say. "It was just me and Dad, after Cosmopol, and he was half-dead from drink, and I was fixing to be half-dead from him drinking. Everyone was hungry and half the kids from the old block were malnourished — nobody looked twice if you said you were old enough to enlist. When they came to drag you off, I just — I was you. For a bit. You were a mech pilot. I got you a minor commendation medal, once, for not running away. I'm afraid we pawned it, that bad winter after the war ended."
You gape at them.
"But," you say. Try to formulate something cleverer.
It was the sort of thing that happened, in the shambolic bureaucratic gaps of the late war.
"Please," they say. "I stole your identity. It'll cause trouble. It'll cause you trouble."
"Then I'll give the money to you," you say, before you even know what to say. "Are you. Do you have somewhere to stay? They'll send all the — paperwork and things. Here. You can — there's no spare room, but there's a couch?"
You can see their body straining away from the idea, as if you've offered them a bear trap to put their foot in. But even as they physically cringe away from the open doorway of your tiny grey apartment, their attention snaps back to you, over and over, even as they visibly don't want it to.
"Do you." They bite their lip. "Do you have. Hot water?"
The war's more over for some people than others. Still.
"You don't have to stay," you say, shuffling back and to the side, so they can come in, if they want. "Leave when you like. Just come by for the payments, when they come in, if you want. But I do have hot water."
The promise of so fucking little, in the end, that gets them over the threshold. And the war ends, maybe, a little more, for one more person.