Summary: It's almost Christmas and Sirius is missing again. James and Remus come up with a brilliant plan to keep track of him. Post WWI AU.

Notes: This was originally written during the winter of 2008 for the rs_small_gifts community on livejournal. My prompts were AU of any sort, the making of the Marauders' Map, and MWPP inventing/carrying out their own festive traditions.

The story is set in interwar London, in 1924. Our heroes are in their early 20s. I was inspired and (perhaps overly) influenced by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which I was reading for my modernist British lit class at the time prompt claiming was going on.

Title is from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing.

This story will be published here on ffnet in five parts.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, or any of its settings.

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The night the Walsh boy died was a full moon night. Remus thinks about this often, imagines, often, Sirius sitting in some trench, some hollow, some hole, lying in some deep scar in the French soil, staring out his eyes into nothing. He hadn't known what was happening to him. He couldn't have known. But maybe he'd sensed something, even then, something he couldn't explain, and maybe he'd been scared.

Remus had been scared. Not for Sirius, whose breaking he did not yet know, but for his own mutation. Sometimes now, as he is making coffee, as he is stepping onto the bus, or tying his shoes, he thinks about this night. How he might say of it, they had never been closer, a parallel breaking, how as the first cracks began to run jagged through Sirius's mind, his own frail bones were cracking into pieces. How he could say of it, they had never been farther apart, much more than a sleeve of water separating them, at that moment.

No, no, he decides: it was not the moment of Sirius's homecoming that changed them (how tightly they'd hugged each other, oh the feel of him again, so solid and real), nor the moment of his departure, nor even less the moment, the pause, the slash of the window the first sound of alert, as Sirius pushed it open, creaky and stiff a long winter, they all gathered in the common room, right the edge of spring that day, and turned around and declared, I'm leaving. For a long time, for many years, that was the moment Remus thought changed everything. But he's reconsidered, by now.

He'd been reading Yeats. What an odd detail to remember, really. He'd been sitting on the center couch, Peter next to him and James in the armchair, and everyone else had been outside, the dorm deserted. "A real war," Sirius had said. "Wizards haven't had a proper one in ages." He'd said this as if it were a bad thing. Another fault to add to the list. Wizards are complacent. They don't know how to live. They rely on magic. They fail to consider the possibilities, fail to take risks, fail, in some way, to be human.

But the refrains are only a cover. It's disillusionment—he won't see this until later, a long stretching final year of school and every night his face sunk so deep into his pillow he's waiting to stop breathing, and he's thinking, where are you, Sirius, where, and he's thinking through these moments again and again, and he's coming to conclusions—it's disillusionment that's pushing him. To say these things.

"All this time we've been hiding in towers, we've been throwing about spells. But I want to live with my hands and my teeth and my eyes and my feet. I want to walk on a tightrope without a net. I want to jump into waters that drown me."

"You're such an idiot," James had said, and thrown a pillow at him, but when Peter asked him if he was enlisting too, he said, "Of course. Aren't you?"

Hold your breath. Remus's inside breaking. Peter's mouth was open. And Remus had saved him, had said, "Well we all know I can't." A rush of spring breeze fluttered the pages of his book. He still held it open, his fingers carefully weighting down the pages.

"Oh I don't see why not," Sirius said airily, loping behind the couch—when he put his hands on Remus's shoulders, so strong and hard on his shoulders, and leaned down next to his ear, breath on his skin by his ear, Remus jumped. Sometimes when Sirius touches him his whole body cinches up. "A werewolf to send to the enemy—that would really get them!"

Werewolves are ugly creatures, magic deformed, as uncontrollable as the worst magic always is, and Sirius knows this, and that's why what he says, it is so stupid, that no one can answer it. In the end, events unroll exactly as they must, people contacted and papers altered, two boys to stay and two boys to go: they take their OWLs, and four days later there's a full moon, and Remus's howl is one of such great sadness even Sirius hears the broken notes.

(He puts his key in the lock, click, click, the door slides open when he puts his hand on the doorknob, and as he closes it behind him he leans against it. Sometimes he sees those minutes so clearly it is like he is a kid again, a child merely, a boy, jumping into waters that drown him. Like he could reach out and touch him.)

"Are you okay, mate?" The room is dark. Why is it dark? He can't remember. Maybe he is imagining it all. The moon, still great and large and round, steals in through the window. Sirius in moonlight, planes of his young boy's face, unlined. That aristocratic nose, high forehead, cheekbones. (Remus is the kind of boy who notices cheekbones.)

"Are you okay?"

Had they touched? Even just a hand to the arm or the shoulder, even that? He remembers it so.

"We won't be gone long. And Peter's not going, you know, you won't be alone."

And already he felt alone. Yes, Sirius's hand on his arm. And he'd turned full towards him and he'd wrapped himself in him, and he'd noticed how strong his arms were. (Remus is the type of boy who notices how strong another boy's arms are.)

Sirius's whisper. "It's okay." How he'd dared to be comforting. "It will be okay. It will be okay. It will…it will…"

Voice trailing. Lips closer. Later, they had not spoken of it. Later, busy train station, James already yelling, come on mate come on, their gazes had caught, snagged, one on the other's and his breath had snagged, caught and he couldn't uncatch it.

There had been letters. Sent through Muggle post. A seventeenth birthday, a telegram. When James came home, he stayed in a Muggle hospital. The nurses say, poor boy, only 20 years old, and Peter sputters outloud to hear them, and Remus punches him, and tells him to learn some discretion. But James, tired and pale against the hospital sheets, doesn't care. "Let them think I'm 50," he says. "It's how I feel."

"At least he's home, now," Peter says later, as they splash through the street puddles. But Remus can't answer. He's preparing himself to see Sirius, preparing and preparing and preparing, but when the war ends, finally, and he comes home, finally, the injuries he carries aren't the type Remus was expecting.