Once they got back into the barracks, things slowly began settling down. Hogan buried himself in a somewhat tattered copy of A Tale of Two Cities. Newkirk went back to his sewing. Carter rummaged a length of yarn from the capacious depths of his jacket pocket, and wound himself a cat's cradle. LeBeau fussed over his marinating turkey, which—who knows?—might even have appreciated the attention. Even the singers ran out of either energy or inspiration, and began towards their bunks and whatever time-wasting activities they preferred. It wasn't as though they hadn't all had plenty of chances to practice killing time.

The tunnel entrance swung open; up popped Kinch. "Colonel Hogan?" he called. "Colonel, I think you need to see this."

There's something very ominous about that sort of declaration. The things that a person 'needs to see' are pretty much never the things a person wants to see, and sometimes they're even the things they desperately fear seeing. As unwelcome conversation-openers go, in point of fact, 'I think you need to see this' is right up there with 'We need to talk' and, the all-time favorite, the quiet 'Uh-oh.'

Hogan took a breath, and almost automatically let his expression slide into the cocky, everything's-under-control mask he'd spent more than a year wearing more or less constantly. He was fairly sure that his men either hadn't quite figured out that he was making the whole thing up on the fly or were willing to pretend that they hadn't, and he did his best not to try to guess which it was. "Sure thing, Kinch," he said pleasantly. "Let's go see what's what."

Twenty very quiet, very tense minutes later, they still hadn't come back. LeBeau had given up pretending that he was doing anything more productive than staring at his bird as though expecting it to fly away and walked over towards the table.

"What do you suppose is happening?" he asked.

"Two possibilities spring to mind. Either we've won the war or we're all about to be rounded up and shot," said Newkirk, not looking up from his work.

Carter's eyes widened. "Boy, I sure hope it's the first one, not the second."

Newkirk didn't even bother rolling his eyes.

The trap door opened again, and Hogan climbed up the ladder. "Well, I've got some good news and some bad news," he said breezily.

"What's the bad news?" Carter asked. "Tell us that first, and then tell us the good news to cheer us up."

"Fair enough. The bad news is, there's trouble," Hogan said. "London's scrubbing the mission. Some last-minute intelligence came through; seems the train we were supposed to bomb was a decoy. A trap. Someone's been feeding the Underground phony information, and it's going to take a few days to sort out the good intelligence from the fishy stuff. Everything's on hold until they've gotten themselves squared away."

They let that sink in for a moment. They'd come within a whisker of walking straight into a firing squad, via a Gestapo interrogation room. It was a miracle they'd gotten the word in time. A genuine Christmas miracle.

"The good news is that we won't have to rush our Christmas dinner," Hogan finished as cheerfully as he could. "And Newkirk, that rush job on the civvies is hereby cancelled. Take a break. We're all going to be playing possum for a couple of days."

"A few days? We're just going to sit 'ere on our arses for days?" Newkirk clenched his fists, crumpling the jacket. "We can't just… bloody 'ell, there's got to be something we can do!"

"We're already doing it. We're decking the halls, jingling our bells, and harking the herald angels like the only things on our minds are eggnog and sugarplums. We're not going to do a single thing that would attract attention until we get the word that we can get back to work."

"But Colonel—!"

"I want those stockings hung by the chimney with care! Pronto! And that's an order!" Hogan paced the length of the table. "Look, fellows, London is positive that the leak was strictly one way. Nothing to worry about on our end; we're as safe as we ever are. We're just taking the holiday weekend off, is all."

"Just as well, mon Colonel," LeBeau said valiantly. "After you have all tasted my Buche de Noel, my Christmas cake, you will not wish to hurry away from the table in any case."

Carter threw himself into the breach, as well. "It'll sure be nice to have a few days off. Hey, how about this? We can blow up that train on New Year's Eve, instead! Boy! We'll count down to midnight, see, and it'll be just like fireworks."

"Let's hope so," Hogan said. "Just remember everyone—act natural. No funny business. Or rather, no more than usual; I'm not asking anything crazy like being polite and cooperative at roll call. We'll be back in business before you know it."

"You've got it, sir," agreed Kinch. "We can do that, no problem."

"Great," said Hogan, and turned to head back to his office, scooping up his book along the way. "Thanks, everyone. And to all a good night."

Newkirk forced his hands to unclench, glared at the abused jacket for a moment, then pulled his pencil sharpener from beneath his collar and used it to slice through a half-finished seam, pulling the sleeve free from the body with one quick jerk. "Charming," he muttered under his breath as he rethreaded a needle to start over. "Just bloody charming."

"Gee, what'd you do that for?" Carter asked. "You were almost finished!"

"Wasn't set right," Newkirk said smoothly. "Can't go around with crooked sleeves, can we?"

It might have been true; he was an exacting, persnickety tailor, and doggedly redoing stitchery that had looked perfectly fine to the others was not unheard of in the Stalag 13 atelier. (He had a strict rule, which he had imposed on all other needleworkers under his direction, to the effect that the wrong side of the seam had to look just as neat as the right side. He swore that it made all the difference in the finished piece. The other tailors mostly just swore.) So the Jack-the-Seam-Ripper routine might have been perfectly innocent. On the other hand, it might… not. Carter didn't know which; he suspected that Newkirk might not have known, either.

"Really?" he probed. "It looked okay from here."

"So speaks Stalag 13's very own fashion plate," Newkirk snarled at him. "Would you like to be the one parading about 'Ammelberg in a coat what looks like something the cat wouldn't bother dragging in? You think the Krauts aren't on the lookout for escaped kriegies wearing coats pieced out of old blankets and parachute silk? You want someone to get shot because I couldn't be arsed to do the job right? Even if you do, I don't!"

"Whoa! Newkirk, slow down," Kinch said. "Carter was just asking a question. The whole war doesn't depend on one jacket sleeve."

"It might for the bloke wearing it," Newkirk snapped. "Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs, all right? I don't tell you 'ow to man the wireless, I don't tell Carter 'ow to make bombs, and I don't tell Louie 'ow to go about poisoning people."

"Poison!" LeBeau rose to the bait. "You barbarian. One of these days, I'll show you poison—" Even as he fell into the well-worn rhythm of trading insults, he saw, just for a second, a flash of relief cross the other man's face. LeBeau had not spent all this time in a sabotage unit without learning how to recognize a diversion when he saw one. He changed his tack, sweetened his voice. "Ah, never mind, Pierre. You cannot make me angry on Christmas!"

Yes, there it was. Somewhere between disappointment and frustration. Newkirk scowled, and, deprived of one way to change the subject, rummaged in a pocket for his cigarettes. LeBeau frowned, but before he could say anything else, they all heard a voice.

The windows were closed, of course, but the rickety plywood didn't do much to keep out the weather, let alone sound. And apparently the guards were not immune to the magic of Christmas. Langenscheidt actually had a fairly good tenor, and Richter's baritone was better still. Schultz was not nearly as good as he obviously thought he was, but the effort was there. Who would have expected harmony from Nazis?

"Stille Nacht; Heilige Nacht! Alles schlaft—"

Newkirk's shoulders tensed as the slow, familiar melody wafted into the barracks, and his thread snapped under the sudden pressure.

Olsen took up the song. No more jokes, no more parodies; just the simple purity of the powerful words they'd all known from childhood. "—All is bright! Round yon Virgin—"

Kinch joined in; his warm, deep voice anchoring the carol, then Mills and Carter. Hogan opened his door, slipped back into the room, listening intently. After a moment, LeBeau sang, too. Newkirk did not. The wooden shutters swung open; Langenscheidt, still singing, peered into the barracks. The song filled the dismal hut; three languages and a single cry for peace, ally and enemy alike. In a twisted way, it was both beautiful and heartbreaking, hopeful and hopeless, in accord… and slightly off key. They sang the same song with the same emotions, more alike than unalike, and for a moment the gap between them was as slender as the wires in the fence. Which only made the barbs feel that much sharper.

Langenscheidt smiled, a bit wistfully, as the song came to a plaintive close. "Frohliche Weihnachten, Colonel Hogan," he said quietly. "To all of you."

"Merry Christmas, Corporal Langenscheidt," Hogan replied. No one else said anything for a moment, and no one moved to close the shutters, despite the icy wind.

"It… it will be lights-out in an hour," Langenscheidt said, obviously not sure where he wanted this conversation to go and falling back on generalities.

"Yes, we know," Hogan said. "We'll be sound asleep, I promise. No digging tunnels tonight."

Awkwardly, the young corporal managed a smile, then gently shut the window and resumed his patrol.

"I can't bear this," Newkirk told nobody in particular, and stood up. Baker was sitting on the bunk-slash-tunnel entrance. "Budge up," he said, not unkindly, and slapped the switch to activate the pulley approximately three eighths of a second after Baker had scrambled to his feet. Another two eighths of a second after that, he was at the bottom of the ladder and stalking down the tunnel.

Hogan's brows knit. This was not exactly what he had intended by 'act normal.' Granted, a certain amount of irritability and outright crankiness were well within the bounds of normal Newkirkly behavior, but given their current precarious situation, deliberately adding to the tension and strain of the barracks was not. When the chips were down, Newkirk invariably rose to the occasion. Therefore, either something was distinctly wrong, in which case it needed handling, or he was being unwontedly nasty for no real reason, which looped right back around to something being distinctly wrong.

Santa's reindeer, it seemed, had left in their wake a whole pile of something that sure as hell wasn't gingerbread, and Hogan had stepped into it up to his waist. Ho ho ho indeed.

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: Newkirk's cardinal rule of tailoring was actually passed on to me from my grandfather, who learned it from his mother, and I do actually abide by it. Sewing and/or embroidery must look just as good on the back as it does on the front. End of story. This does occasionally mean unpicking and resewing a piece two or three or six times, but such is life. As the saying goes, the devil's in the details… but as the other saying goes, so is God.

The multilingual rendition of 'Silent Night' is, of course, a reference to the 1917 Christmas Truce, where enemies did spend a few hours singing carols and playing games; different languages, same song, and same beliefs. Not necessarily religious beliefs. But the longing for peace, for home and family and a life without a gun in one's hand… how could that not resonate with both sides of the war?