It took forever to pull the frozen goblin off the wall.

“Okay but look at the bright side -- Totally found a new hatchet.” He spoke to himself as he dragged the corpse out of the house by its heels. It was pretty light. Like the weight of a small child, which made for easy dragging.

If that child was a vicious and hateful mockery of life. Blessedly, it didn’t leave any mess on the floor as he navigated out the door.

Once he dropped his package unceremoniously off about thirty feet out, he flexed his new shoes. Well, Moccasins really. And he’d had to pierce the front of them with the hatchets blade to get his toes to fit.

But he was wearing shoes again.

It’s the little things. Like not having to clean the floor twice.

He stepped back to the cabin and laid his eyes critically on his new space.

Most of the pottery and bedding was ruined. But he managed to find enough soft things to make a nest where it had previously been. Which was generous, but the sun had already gone down over the hills and the temperature was plummeting. The light was getting thin.

He was feeling pretty generous.

He piled up the broken pieces of the door so that it was half closed, and the rest of the odds and ends he discarded in a pile next to the door. Nothing else he could do for the draft tonight.

“Plus, i’m absolutely nackered.”

He curled up into his bedding-nest. And listened to the wind moan.

It took a while to sleep on account of the cold and the multiple homicides that had happened recently.

--

He woke up cold. And hungry.

“Mmhhhhhrrrrr.” The thought of no coffee being available made him grab for his sheets.

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Which woke him up more when he realized he didn’t have any sheets. “Worst day ever.”

He stumbled up and through the “door”, taking care of water needs on both ends.

Once the cabin was cleaned up it looked better than it had by a large margin. A simple wooden table. Some odds and ends that looked maybe useful, a handful of leather strips, some simple nails and a bucket that had been in the corner.

There had been a chair, but it looked smashed up. Still, the pieces didn’t look unsalvageable.

Something that he noticed in the light of dawn where the burned holes in the back of the house near the empty hearth, but they also looked patchable.

The day was looking busy.

His stomach rumbled, and he clicked his tongue in his mouth. First things first.

Priorities: fire and heat. He was *not* going to be spending another night huddled in his bed-nest shivering. Not with a perfectly good fireplace and a copse of trees not thirty feet away, even with a dead goblin between them and a broken axe handle.

He got to work.

A few splinters and several curses later, a piece of the chair became a new handle for the hatchet, whittled to fit its hole and held together with strips until he could get a proper wedge in.

And best of all, when you flipped the hatchet over it doubled as a hammer. He spent a good hour or two covering the holes in the back of the house.

The chair became a stool. The backing was totally trashed, and he incorporated some of the wood for the door project. But the stool looked sturdy, if a touch short for the table.

The door became a unholy travesty of a wood-bulwark. It took awhile and he was legitimately embarrassed on behalf of his woodshop teacher and father who was a construction worker.

He surveyed his patch-job critically. “Whelp, you’re ugly as sin, but you’re less noisy.” He paused for a moment to confirm. “Can’t even hear the wind.” He patted the side of the cabin absentmindedly.

A small piece broke off from door, startling him.

He was better with small things.

He stared accusingly at the door. Nothing else happened. After a moment he returned to the list in his head.

“Fire.” He nodded forcefully. “No more shiver-cold.”

He looked up at a sky, figuring it to be sometime after noon.

--

It took him an embarrassing amount of water breaks, and he was still bleeding from three different places on his body, but he sat in front of small fire. His hands had friction burns on the palms. The sun had long since gone down, and the door laid across the entry way -- as secure as he could make it tonight.

Still.

The warmth felt absolutely delicious. His toes curled gratefully forward, almost burning from the heat.

There was one small nagging thought he had, while he was trudging back and forth from the small copse of trees and back to the cabin. Couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

He thoughtfully stoked the fire. And then it hit him. Ah.

“The goblin corpse from outside is missing.”

So many nopes.