It's the most wonderful time of the year! Illness and injury abound. Allergies, chills, snakebite, curses, and... cake? Whatever will the Rats and Dietrich do to preserve their health?

Sicktember 2024, Prompt #26: "Cardiac Arrest." Love blossoms anywhere, but on a dung heap?

A little bit of fluff just for the fun of it.

Hitch's journals contain stories of his life in the Army and his exploits with the Rat Patrol.

Greetings. Please forgive my absence, the length of this story and, for those German speakers, please forgive my inability to include umlauts! The Rats and Dietrich meet again but none of them can guess where their encounter will take them.

Finally completed after all this time. I was never satisfied with any drafts until I sat down at 4am and hammered out a good final chapter. (The writing gets a little facetious, fair warning lol)

For one brief moment, Hitch holds the North African Campaign in his hands. Fluff.

One is interested, the other is not.

Whether the Rats were blowing up an ammo dump, or chasing down a convoy, it was always there, the Steel Soldier.

Dietrich makes the long journey to New Zealand in order to help a new friend of Jules's get on a path to success, which is not something Dietrich ever thought he would be doing. This proves to be more challenging than he initially expected, but after everything else Dietrich has undergone over the years, what's one more challenge in his life?

'It wasn't every day that Sergeant Troy met other commandos, but whenever he did, he always felt a little strange about it.' And what happens when Troy finds these commandos mistreating a prisoner of war with a familiar face?

A mission to capture an uncharacteristically aggressive sea krait sends Jack Moffitt, his son Jules, and Egyptian cobra companion Anah on a trip to New Zealand. While Moffitt is off rescuing the krait, Jules finds himself facing an unwelcome visit from his past in the form of temperamental Australian magpies. For Janna12.

Months after Dietrich has reconnected with his older brother, an unexpected visit from Troy results in numerous events being dredged up from everyone's pasts that they must work together to address.

For the month of March: a series of shorts as time MARCHES on for our favorite Rats.

Troy makes a grave mistake and Dietrich pays quite dearly for it, ending up gravely injured in an Allied field hospital. This is a pre-story to "Change of Ways" introducing some of the characters and providing a background for them, but can also be read separately.

Missing Rommel by inches, the Rat Patrol leave him something … unforgettable.

Hitch wakes up a prisoner in a German hospital. Since he is a lady's man, he starts flirting with a nurse. But things don't go quite the way he wants them to go.

Tully attempts to help Dietrich make a difficult decision in regards to reconnecting with his blood family.

A bit of household cleaning leads to Moffitt recounting the time his schooling was delayed due to a bout of serious illness.

For Jack Moffitt, few things could be worse than having to watch someone's dog. He's never particularly liked dogs, and having to share his own house with one seems like the stuff of nightmares for him. Perhaps the lovable Siberian husky stuck with him for the next two weeks can change his mind.

The magpie prophecy comes to its conclusion as the final battle rages between man, snake, and bird. It's all that stands between the Rats, Dietrich, and their families resuming normal, quiet lives, but the magpies and their lust for control over luck and misfortune aren't going to make it easy for them to attain.

A series of 14 vignettes about love and relationships. Since Hitch is my favorite, there are more featuring him than the others but I can live with that. Enjoy.

Love is in the air for the Rats and Dietrich.

Whoever would have thought that a simple knife-fight could decide the outcome of WW II?

The threat of mad magpies continues hanging over the Rats, Dietrich, and Anah as the search begins for a magic sword and adder-stone, but internal conflicts and past traumas may prove to be just as destructive as the magpies themselves.