Disclaimer: To my knowledge, I own no rights to Hogan's Heroes.
"Oh, no, no no," Corporal Pitts muttered, nearly in tears as he flung everything out of his bag with a fanaticism usually associated with nothing less than life or death. From the look on his face, it was death.
"Is there something you need?" Kinch asked him cautiously.
"I forgot to pack my notebook!" the distraught man exclaimed.
"You forgot to pack your notebook? Is there something you needed in it?" Hogan asked him, feeling less sure of this man's sanity the more time he spent around him but wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had, after all, just been shot out of the sky and nearly captured by enemy forces. Still, it was easy to see how the two other men that Hogan's people had retrieved from the forest were avoiding their crewmate like the plague. There had to be some sort of story there, and Hogan was only hoping there would be no need for it to be relevant to him.
Corporal Pitts immediately looked straight into Hogans eyes, baring his teeth. "That notebook is my life," he growled.
"Only until you get the next one," one of the other men sing-songed from across the room. The other elbowed him in the stomach to shut him up, and Corporal Pitts rounded on them.
"That's oh so easy for you to say, given your boring, pointless lives. This moment is the most interesting you'll ever have, and you'll spend the rest of your silly, sheep-like lives repeating it at your mother-in-law's parties and wondering why no one has laughed in years. So savor it and remember that some of us are destined for a greatness you are too insipid to even imagine."
"Alright, there's no reason to call names. We have the Germans to do that for us already. Now, do you need that notebook for anything that can't wait until we get you back to England?" Hogan said, hiding his shock at how cruel this man could be at his own people for what looked more like longsuffering teasing than any true malice.
"It's my life," Pitts howled.
"What he means," said Sergeant Potts, stepping forward at last, "is that he has been writing the drafts for his short stories in it for some time now. He tends to get worked up when he doesn't have it with him and he knows he'll have nothing to do for a while. While we appreciate your help more than we could ever say, the fact is, Pitts here is not looking forward to sticking around here with nothing to write on."
"It's more than that," Pitts moaned. "My latest story was going to be submitted to a contest. Now there is no way I can finish it and edit it into final draft quality even if we did get back to England in time for me to submit it."
Hogan though fast. While not exactly precious in the way some things were, paper was a limited resource, and Hogan did not want to waste it if he did not have to. Still, they always made a point of keeping their guests comfortable when they were able to do so, and they had recently diverted a German shipment of office supplies into a convenient ditch as part of doing anything to hinder or inconvenience the Nazis. "If helps, I can get you some paper, and something to write with too," he offered at last. "But in return I need you to stay quiet if possible. You're safe here as long as you don't do anything to compromise yourself."
If anything, Pitts looked even more despairing than before. "You don't understand how art works," he said, still angry. "You could give me all the paper in the world, but unless it already had my outline, draft, and edits on it, it would do me no more good than throwing a seahorse into my archnemesis' garden."
"Your archnemesis?" Carter asked, more to himself than anyone else. But Pitts heard and continued speaking.
"J.Y. Nettles," he said with such derision that all the insults he'd dramatically handed out before seemed nice and friendly.
"J.Y. Nettles is an author who keeps beating him in all the contests they both enter," said the third rescued man.
"I didn't catch your name," Kinch said to him, and Hogan was thankful for any distraction from the mercurial author
"Corporal Pete Putters, but please call me Gregory. My parents had an awful sense of humor."
Hogan decided not to ask what joke Gregory's parents thought they were making and instead send these three children to bed. Hopefully they would be in a better mood when they woke up. "Okay," he said. "Pitts, Potts, and Gregory, We'll do everything we can to make sure you can get to England. In the mean time, we'll get you some paper, but I'm afraid that's the best we can do."
The next few days were filled with Potts doing everything they could to get away from Pitts and Gregory, a habit that quickly spread around the camp. Pitts had an unfortunate habit of latching onto the nearest person who would listen and treating them to an earful of all the inconvenience that came with starting a story from scratch, and Gregory seemed to take a special joy in Pitts' declarations of suffering.
"You do not understand what it is like," Pitts complained to Newkirk as Gregory mocked all his actions behind his back. "I cannot write it over again. I have lost the mood. It was supposed to be a great masterwork of a murder mystery, but now—I cannot write it. The artistic temperament is my grace and my undoing."
"Then write a different story," Newkirk grouched, trying to finish sewing Olsen's latest disguise.
"That is just the point. I must write a different story, but all I want is to finish my current one first."
"Maybe it would help if you told us about it?" Carter suggested, not liking the man's whining any more than Newkirk but determined to stick it out as long as he could. After all, Newkirk promised to forgive all his poker debt if he only made sure he never had to be alone with Pitts.
Gregory faked a dramatic faint in the background at Carter's suggestion, but Pitts latched onto it. "It was a spy story, where our intrepid heroes received information from the wrong contact. Instead of getting the newest missile plans from a nearby underground contact, they accidentally were sent to the neighbor's house where they found a murder confession stuffed inside a teddy bear. Unfortunately for them, the person who was actually supposed to find the murder confession and use it to blackmail the family of the murderer, who died a decade before, was onto them, since he did not have the confession like he expected to have. The rest was a complicated story about discrediting the man and keeping the innocent and guilty alike from getting arrested, but I'm sure no one here actually wants to hear the details," he said, turning and glaring at Gregory, who was in the middle of miming a dramatic arrest scene. "Some people thing art is funny."
"You forgot to tell them the best part," Gregory said, snickering.
"Oh, and what would you know about my story?"
"Only what I've learned from you and the advertisement for the contest. Guess what? He had to tell that whole story in under 5,000 words."
"I am one of the world's best short story writers. I'll have you know that I would have found a way to do it."
"Oh, but I'm sure J.Y. Nettles would do it far better."
Pitts let out an indecipherable roar and lunged at Gregory, who quickly fled the room, yelling things about how Pitts would be faster if he only spent more time exercising instead of sitting around and writing mawkish murders of mayhem.
Newkirk and Carter looked at each other, breathing a sigh of relief that at least the two were still dressed like prisoners and the tamer guards were currently on duty. Then a quiet noise attracted their attention, and they turned to look as Potts carefully got out from under the bed.
"Thank you for sitting there, you two," he said. "Pitts would have been sure to see me if you hadn't been."
"You're their superior officer, right?" Carter asked. "Isn't there something you can do about them?"
"Our superior officer was the pilot, and I'm half convinced that our plane getting hit was his attempt to do just that. No, I'm kidding," he added on at Newkirk and Carter's horrified looks, "but after the past two months, I'd hardly blame him if it were true. In fact, I'd just be upset that I got stuck being rescued with them. You sew?" he asked, suddenly changing the subject.
"We get a lot of customers looking to have local clothes," Newkirk shrugged.
"Ever make anything other than clothes, like a teddy bear?"
"I don't have a teddy bear," Newkirk snapped. Potts was the best of their guests, but his line of questioning was starting to get on Newkirk's nerves, especially after Pitts' summary of his sordid story.
"No offense intended. I just thought I'd check. Nothing like driving Pitts up a wall, after all," Potts said.
The first chance they got, Newkirk and Carter went straight to Colonel Hogan and repeated the entire conversation. By popular vote, Pitts, Potts, and Gregory were immediately upgraded to high priority cases and shipped off to England so fast it literally made a few people's heads spin.
"You'll be safe here, Major Plotts," Hogan said, greeting the man who had escaped from his camp and was making his way back to England.
"Oh, I'm sure. Feel free to take all the time you need getting me home."
"All the time you need? Most people want to get back as soon as possible."
"Ah, but you don't know my crew. I have to admit, getting shot down was almost a relief to get away from their constant bickering. Half the time I had to pretend I had no idea of what they were all up to just to keep them from thinking they had a right to involve me in it themselves."
"Well, I can't say much about that, but for the next few days, you will be Sergeant Olsen," Hogan said, and Olsen saluted genially as he made his way up the ladder.
The next day, the mail arrived, and Miller gave a whoop of triumph when he saw what he received. It seemed to be a magazine of some sort, with the words, "New fiction from J.Y. Nettles!" splayed across the cover.
Plotts looked at the magazine in surprise, a smile slowly creeping across his face. "Well, can't say I expected that," he muttered. "How about you read it aloud?"
"You're a fan of J.Y. Nettles?" Carter asked.
"Not a fan, per se, but you might say I have an interest in his works. Now, what has he given us this time?"
Miller flipped to the page and looked at the introduction. "Not sure. I subscribed to the magazine after a couple of people mentioned it a bit ago. I'm surprised the subscription already came through, on this edition, no less. But here we go: 'Read the latest from our most recent contest winners! In first place, J.Y. Nettles does it again with confessions, teddy bears, and a decades-old murder with an entire spy operation at stake!'" Miller slowly lowered the page, a look of shock on his face. "This can't be possible."
The other men in the barracks glanced around, memories from a few months ago making them uneasy. "I thought that was the plot that Pitts said he was working on. Wasn't J.Y. Nettles his 'archnemesis?'" Carter asked.
"You know Pitts?" Plotts said in surprise.
"Unfortunately Pitts, Potts, and Gregory all came through here right after they were shot down. I take it you know them too?" Hogan asked.
There was a brief pause as Plotts seemed to collect himself. "I was mistaken earlier when I said you did not know my crew."
"Our sympathies," Kinch said quietly, which Plotts seemed to find highly amusing. "But that still doesn't explain how J.Y. Nettles got ahold of Pitts' plot."
At that, Plotts burst out laughing. "Now you know what I am dealing with. My crew is willing to give as good as it gets, both to others and to each other. Now I don't know if you've ever read Pitts' writing, but he is pretty good, and he likes to think that makes him the best.
"When our crew first formed, it did not take long for J.Y. Nettles, who uses a penname, by the way, to get tired of hearing Pitts moan all over base about how he was the best and anyone who said otherwise was clearly biased. Now, Nettles is a good man, and he has won every writing contest fair and square, but I guess it got to be too much for him. The day we got shot down, I saw him swipe Pitts' notebook. I said nothing, of course, because I did not want to have to report that a good man was muttering about throwing it into the bombs like a deranged maniac. Turns out he didn't have to, since we were all shot down together after all."
"Are you saying that both Pitts and Nettles were on your crew?" Baker asked.
"Worse than that, they were both people you picked up. Nettles is Pete Putters, AKA Gregory."
There was a pause as all the men absorbed that piece of information, remembering how Gregory had mocked Pitts' writing abilities as much as he possibly could. At last LeBeau broke the silence with the only thing left to say: "Poor Potts."
Plotts found that funnier than ever. "Oh, don't you go around feeling sorry for old Potts now. He was the worst of the three. See, he has another name too. Not a pen name, exactly, but one equally significant. Hand me that, please."
Miller handed Plotts the magazine, and Plotts quickly found what he was looking for and jabbed a finger to point right at it. The men all gathered around to see.
"T. Splot: Chief Contest Judge."
Author's note: not the story I intended to write at all, but I just couldn't get it ironed out in time, so instead you got this. Anyone care to guess what my original story was? But thank you all for reading!