Title: Words Like Smoke
Author: L. Stone
Written for:
sugaredarsenic Rating: PG-13 for war themes
Prompt: I officially wrote for prompt #1, AU of any sort, although the story is also for prompt #2, the making of the Marauders’ Map, and I tried to get a bit of #3, MWPP inventing/carrying out their own festive traditions.
Summary: It’s almost Christmas and Sirius is missing again. James and Remus come up with a brilliant plan to keep track of him.
Any other notes, warnings, etc.: This is an interwar London AU, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, which I was reading for my modernist British lit class at the time prompt claiming was going on. It’s set in 1924 and our heroes are in their early 20s. Everything else should become clear during the story itself, but because I like making notes on things, I’ve posted some semi-coherent ramble on the universe at my journal
here. (ETA: unlocked. sorry about that; I just didn't want the notes to be available before the story itself and only unlocked the post this morning.)
I had a lot of plans for this piece but ultimately didn’t have time to write it until the week before the deadline, so of course it does not live up to my expectations. I hope it is still okay. It’s also, I must warn, WAY over the word limit (about 5,500 words)—hope that’s all right.
Title is from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing—which I know is post-1924 but I kind of suck at titles. I was also considering titling it “I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place,” from the same piece, but thought that was too dark for this story.
( The night the Walsh boy died was a full moon )