Summary: Grimmauld Place. December 1995. Sirius doesn't know how he can stand to live here every day. Sirius/Remus.

Spoilers: through OotP

Other Notes: Title from T.S. Eliot's poem "Preludes."

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, including and especially Sirius and Remus, or any of its settings. I also do not own the title. That would be Eliot's.

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Part One: The Letters

Sometimes Sirius can still feel the dirt on him. Sometimes he can't scrub his skin hard enough to get it off.

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The Black house is old and desolate and dying; everyone knows this and it's why they don't stay. In winter, the wind comes in harsh gusts around the edges of the windows, whistling and blowing back the curtains. Sirius knows the house inside and out; he knows which windows are the shakiest, which rooms collect the most cold.

December first comes around, and brings with it a new coating of snow on the streets and the one lone tree outside Sirius's bedroom window. Everyone has gone home, and Remus is out on Order business, and somehow Sirius finds himself slipping into Remus's room. He steals one of Moony's jumpers from his old school trunk: his desperate attempt to keep out the chill.

He is still wearing it when Remus gets back. He has also found an old collection of letters that Remus never sent to him, and he doesn't bother to hide the stack of parchment when the door opens, even though he heard his old friend's footsteps coming from all the way down the hall.

"Padfoot," is all he says. Some days it is the only thing he says. Sirius can tell what the rest of the words are—the words he doesn't want to or can't say—from the tone, and the slight variance Sirius has learned between I'm sorry and I'm sad and I'm scared. Today it is a combination of the first two. Today it is Remus's eyes blinking slowly.

"Don't leave anymore and maybe I won't read your stuff."

"I don't care, Sirius. They're old anyway."

Remus answers like the conversation is over, but he doesn't leave the doorway. Sirius shivers within the warm threads of the Moony jumper. The glass of Remus's window rattles with the force of the wind seeping in, just like in Sirius's room, another thing that they share.

"Maybe you should have told me then, Moony."

"It wasn't important."

Sirius wants to tell him that he is wrong, that it is, it is important. If he had known all those things then, maybe he would have changed things; maybe he wouldn't have been such an arse. Maybe he would have held on harder—just that little bit more—maybe he could have avoided losing everything, and ending up alone in the large and empty rooms of the Black house, with all of its old ghosts.

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Sirius's skin is red. There are lines across it, scars and wrinkles, and he is old. He's not even forty, and he is old. Soap will not rid him of all the dirt and grime that has become a part of him; long showers that take up the morning will not make him feel clean. He tries anyway, unwilling to give up, and by the time he steps out, Remus has arrived home.

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The length of Remus's trips varies, or so he says, when he tells Sirius how long he'll be gone. Sometimes he'll leave for a week or more, and he'll send Sirius an owl to tell him how things are going. For Sirius, all time passes much the same, and when Moony is gone he can't tell if an hour or a year has passed from his departure to his return.

To pass the time, Sirius sometimes slips into the old library, where he used to sit and read adventure stories and mysteries when it was too hot or too cold to go outside. The room has a high vaulted ceiling, and many bookshelves line the walls and form low rows across the room, housing their hundreds upon hundreds of volumes. It is somehow different from what Sirius remembers, darker and dustier and more foreboding.

He is surprised to remember that it is almost Christmas. The realization fills him with that feeling that wants to remember the past, and the memories of former holidays make him almost smile.

He begins to bring down Christmas decorations from the attic. The occasional box of them will trip Remus up while he walks, and Sirius watches from doorways and the shadows where he sometimes clings, from odd ingrained habit that he cannot shake. Remus falls into habit easily, too, but he has always been that way. It is part of his comfort.

It is difficult to know what to get a friend like Remus for Christmas. Sirius sits in the library to think.

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end part 1/5