Stalag Christmas + clegan daughter
(@buckpregnant stealing betty from you again)
Stalag,
December 25th — Christmas.
“What are you doing?”
John lifted his head, and the question seemed to graze him rather than strike. Light—small, tinted bulbs salvaged from somewhere improbable—caught along his cheek and brow, tinting his face in alternating flushes of exhausted red and jaundiced yellow.
The bulbs were threaded through bent tin cans and crookedly painted wires, their colours mutating as if unsure what era they belonged to. The effect was unintentionally antique, the kind of sad nostalgia that suggested a past no one present had actually lived, only mourned.
“Making a tree,” John said, as if this were self-evident. “What’s it look like?” A breathy huff of laughter followed, too quick, too hopeful. He gestured with his free arm and nearly dislodged a strand of lights. “Seasonal cheer. Festive wonder. Artistic expression.”
Cradled in his other arm was Betty, bundled thickly in a blanket that smelled faintly of soap and smoke. She gnawed with solemn determination on the blunt wooden end of a horse that had clearly suffered under John’s knife—one ear too long, the muzzle lopsided—but she regarded it as a marvel nonetheless.
Her eyes, enormous and unblinking, tracked the lights as they changed colour; as if each shift were a revelation. She blinked slowly, reverently, absorbing it all with the gravity of someone witnessing something sacred.
The ‘tree,’ such as it was, consisted of an old log John had dragged in from outside—dragged, Gale imagined, with a kind of triumph inappropriate to the object itself. It had no branches, no leaves, no natural suggestion of festivity. John had compensated by jamming fern shavings into the cracks of the bark, where they protruded like desperate green thoughts.
The strings of lights were wound around it unevenly, cinched too tight in places, sagging in others, the whole thing leaning slightly. Even it seemed tired of pretending.
Gale lingered in the doorway, arms crossed, unmoving. The room smelled faintly of damp wood and soldered wire. When he finally stepped inside, his shoulders drew in tighter, and he circled the battered couch with the careful, assessing gait he used everywhere else; in tents, in briefing rooms, in the cold geometry of survival.
He stopped close to the log, looking it up and down with the expression of someone evaluating a flaw that might later become fatal.
“…That’s a log.”
“Correction,” John said lightly. “That’s a tree. A minimalist one.”
“It’s damp.”
“Adds character.”
“It’s covered in dirt.”
“Authenticity.”
Gale stared at the base for a long moment. He could already see the consequences: mould blooming invisibly, insects burrowing, rot creeping in quiet increments. His mind catalogued risks the way other people catalogued pleasures.
“It’s an infestation waiting to happen.”
John only grinned, wide and unapologetic. He bounced Betty gently, the lights stuttering across her round face. “Betty likes it,” He said. “Don’t’cha?”
Betty responded by drooling with renewed enthusiasm and gnawing harder on the horse, a thin line of spit shining at her lip.
Gale glanced at her—quickly, treacherously—and then back at the log. “She also tries to eat rocks.”
John clicked his tongue. “Exploration phase. Very advanced for her age.”
“This is unsafe.”
“It’s decorative.”
“It’s wired.”
“Loosely.”
Gale exhaled through his nose. The sound carried everything he didn’t say. “You dragged this in from outside.”
“Braved the elements for it, actually.”
“You didn’t check it for insects.”
John sighed then, a small surrender. He shifted his weight and sat fully on the floor, his movements careful now. He settled Betty between his legs, creating a basket of himself, and she immediately reached for the lights, swatting gently at the dim bulbs as if testing whether they might respond to touch alone.
“It’s her first Christmas,” John said, softer now, the words pressed flat by something earnest and unyielding. “I’m just giving her some festive cheer. Just because we’re stuck in this…place doesn’t mean our daughter can’t have a nice Christmas.”
Gale felt the familiar irritation rise—sharp, efficient, useful.
There were procedures for this sort of thing.
There were priorities.
Outside, the camp crouched under snow and barbed wire; generators coughing, boots crunching, the low thrum of war pressing in from every direction. Softness did not keep people alive. Softness got them hurt. A part of him—larger than he liked—thought John stupid for trying to grow tenderness in such soil.
And yet.
The sight of Betty’s awe, her small hand hovering just shy of the warmth of the bulbs, twisted something uncomfortable in his chest. John’s face, lit unevenly, wore that infuriating, guileless hope Gale both loved and resented.
This was John’s flaw: the insistence on gentleness as if it were a discipline, as if care could be constructed from scraps and willpower alone.
Gale wanted to dismantle the whole thing—to list its failures, to fix or discard it. He also wanted, impossibly, to let it stand. The guilt of that desire mingled with something warmer, something he rarely permitted himself to examine.
He looked away instead. Towards the window. Towards the snow crusted against the glass, the distant shapes of tents and watchlights, the world as it truly was. It was easier than watching John build a small, flickering lie against the dark—and easier than admitting how badly he wanted that lie to hold.
Outside, a flare bloomed briefly—white, then dying to a sullen ember—its reflection skidding across the window like a thought Gale refused to follow. The camp resumed its low, habitual breathing: the cough of engines, the murmur of voices dulled by canvas and cold.
War, he thought, was nothing if not punctual. It arrived every morning, stayed all day, and tucked itself in at night with the discipline of a creed.
Behind him, the room glowed faintly, treacherously warm.
Gale did not turn at once. He could feel the scene pressing at his back: John on the floor, all loose joints and intent care; Betty’s quiet fascination, her trust unreasoned and therefore absolute; the ridiculous log-tree, damp and stubborn, insisting on being seen as something better than it was.
It made him ache in places he did not have language for. He resented the ache. He resented John for eliciting it so easily, for believing—no, deciding—that gentleness could be assembled from junk and hope.
He cleared his throat, a sound sharpened by restraint.
“You know,” Gale said, still facing the window. “That if this thing short-circuits, it could spark.”
John hummed, unconcerned. “So could the generator. So could the heater. So could you, if you keep glaring like that.”
Gale turned then, sharp. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.” John looked up at him, eyes bright in the alternating light, earnest to the point of recklessness. “I checked the wires. Mostly.”
“Mostly,” Gale repeated, tasting the word as if it were a flaw in metal.
Betty laughed suddenly—a small, startled sound, more breath than voice—as one of the bulbs shifted from yellow to red. It was not a practiced laugh; it arrived unannounced, like grace. Gale felt it land squarely in him, an impact he had not braced for. His jaw tightened. The child’s delight felt unfair, an unearned absolution bestowed on a world that had not earned forgiveness.
“She won’t remember this,” He said, too quickly.
John tilted his head. “Maybe not. But I will.”
That, Gale realised, was the true offence. John was not building this for Betty alone; he was building it for himself, for a future recollection softened by the knowledge that he had tried. Gale, who believed memory was a ledger of errors and near-misses, could not forgive that kind of optimism without first punishing it.
He stepped closer despite himself. The lights hummed faintly, a fragile, insectile sound. The log smelled of sap and cold earth. Gale knelt, inspecting the wiring with a care that bordered on reverence, fingers hovering but not touching.
“The fern will dry out,” He said. “Crumble.”
John shrugged. “Then it’ll snow indoors.”
Betty reached out again, brushing Gale’s knuckle this time. Her skin was impossibly warm. He froze, as if contact might undo him. She stared at him, solemn, curious, unafraid.
Gale felt an old, unwelcome thought stir: that perfectionism was merely fear dressed up as vigilance, that his insistence on hardness was a refusal to trust what might break him open.
“She’s watching you,” John said softly, teasingly, like it required a conspiracy between them.
“I know,” Gale replied, though he wasn’t sure what that meant.
“You want to hold her?” John offered; he often offered a lot more than Gale would have liked.
“I don't.”
“You never do.”
Gale shot him a quick glance; a stare, if anything. He held the look for a beat longer than necessary, the way one holds a blade suspended just short of skin—not to wound, but to remind. John met it calmly, incurably patient, as though Gale’s severity were merely another weather pattern to be endured.
The lights shifted again, laundering John’s face through cheap reds and anaemic golds, granting him for a moment the theatricality of a saint in exile.
Gale despised the effect; he despised how easily John wore it.
“I don’t,” Gale said again, more carefully this time, as if precision might make the refusal true.
His gaze dropped, traitorous, to Betty.
She was still studying him with that unblinking seriousness, her mouth parted, the ruined horse forgotten in her lap. Awe, Gale thought with a sour pang, was such an irresponsible emotion. It asked nothing of the world but to be dazzled by it.
John shifted slightly, adjusting the angle of the lights so they no longer threatened to scorch Gale’s eyes.
“You’re allowed,” He said, not pleading, not pushing—worse. Inviting. “She doesn’t mind. Maybe she misses being with you. You'd be less scared of her if you actually gave her a chance, Buck.”
That, too, felt unfair. Gale had trained himself to believe that everything worth touching came with terms and consequences, with rules spelled out in advance. Betty offered none. She leaned towards him with a trust so complete it bordered on accusation. He imagined, absurdly, how easily that trust could be ruined—by a spark, a dropped bulb, a moment’s inattention. By him.
He straightened instead, brushing dirt from his knee that wasn’t there. “She needs consistency,” He said, reaching for doctrine. “Routine. Not…this, what you're doing.”
John smiled all the same. Betty had the same smile. “This is the routine. Tonight.”
Outside, another engine coughed to life, obedient and ugly. The camp exhaled again, a reminder. Gale felt its pull like gravity, like permission to retreat into usefulness. He nodded once, sharply, as if conceding nothing at all.
“Fix the wiring,” He said. “And don't keep her up past her bedtime.”
John’s eyebrows lifted, just slightly; not quite disappointment but something close to it. He said nothing. Betty, however, rewarded Gale’s retreat with another small laugh, and the sound followed him as he turned away—light, insubordinate, lingering far longer than it had any right to.