the_wanlorn | Carol the night away.

Have you ever experienced anything so beautiful, so perfect, so right that your chest tightens up and you can't help but cry a little? It can be a sight, a smell, words on a page, a sunset, a scene in a movie, fresh apples from the first picking, anything.

That's the reaction I had to reading All Through the Night, by Casira. It's a Sirius/Remus MWPP-era fic that, for one, doesn't ignore Peter. For two, is set during Christmastime. And for three, involves a choir.

The boy was singing "The Coventry Carol."

This song was from the girls' repertoire, not theirs, so Sirius had hardly paid attention to it; they'd rehearsed separately. He'd only thought from what he'd overheard that it was a pretty song. But this --no, this bore as much resemblance to that rehearsal as a snowy owl did to a raven.

The girls had only been singing it. Even Aria, as good as she was, had just been walking through the text.

This boy understood it.

His voice rose above the soft sound of turning pages, not in the clear,steady tones Sirius was accustomed to now, but something more real,tired, and almost frightened. There was a longing to it that sent a shiver up Sirius' spine, and his fingers trembled around the box.

A memory of the first rehearsal finally hit him:

It's about the slaughter of the innocents, James had explained.

Bloody cheerful topic, Sirius had replied, and flipped past it in the music book.

And until now he hadn't actually listened....

That particular passage hit me the hardest, a solid thunk to the gut.

Every who knows me knows about my love for Christmastime. And everyone who knows me knows my passionate love for carols. A lot of the reasons for the former - in fact, all of them - I won't go into now. But for the latter, that passage sums it up.

It's like I can feel the music in my bones, in my blood. Which is ridiculous, I know. But my entire body thrums with that music, all the time. It's... I don't know. Perhaps it's just another broken bit of brain. But for now, it's me.

Carol the night away.

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