As It Should Be
- Sirius' encounters his first love. Of a sort.
By: JulesJanson
Disclaimer: I neither own any of these characters nor am I making any money off of my borrowing of them.
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He hadn't been able to keep to himself in the house. Summertime's heat, by the very discomfort it produced indoors, had driven him out into Muggle London, to watch and think and be bored. There wasn't much else to do, except for homework.
There were, to the city's credit, already plenty of places to go, stoops to sit on, warm, wary steps in front of old, decrepit houses. When nobody was home, he could even pretend that he lived there, if he wanted to. He preferred to keep to the more populated streets, where there was usually a steady flow of people passing by to pass judgment on him, instantaneously and egregiously, exactly the way that he liked. Assuming the most theatrical, moody, adolescent of poses, he could pass the hours in relative leisure.
It was on one of those days that he caught his first glimpse of it. He had found himself a brand new haunt, where clusters of loud and weakly-opinionated social workers, mild-mannered businessmen, and conservative old ladies in from the country to see a matinee would walk in front of him with disapproving looks, and when he would turn to stare pointedly at them, scurry away with scandalized expressions.
The sun had started setting, and Sirius was attempting to detach himself from the set of stairs that he had commandeered, when his eyes just fell upon it, and it was the simplest and most casual thing in the world.
Sitting there, just sitting, at the mouth of a grubby alleyway, was the most striking and fantastic object that Sirius had ever seen. It barely even resembled a motorbike, splattered with mud, dented and heavily scratched as it was. But it looked like it had been magnificent and powerful in its day, and, for a moment, he saw it as it must have been, gleaming and massive and positively humming with ability. He had to have it.
Looking conspicuously inconspicuous, his eyes fixed on his goal, he rose from his seat and crossed the busy road with a group of Japanese tourists who were brandishing cameras and pointing excitedly in a way that was annoyingly familiar and pleasantly distracting.
Had he been a bit more collected, he might have amused himself tallying up just how many laws he was breaking, wizarding and otherwise, in the space of those thirty seconds. With a crisp economy of motion that seemed to suggest that he had been preparing for this moment all his life, he drew his wand, conjured up a set of keys to fit the ignition with a complicated little spell of his own invention, shrunk the bike, charmed it almost weightless, and placed it gingerly into the pocket of his jeans. Before the Improper Use of Magic Office knew what had hit them, he had disappeared into the darkness of a side street, knowing that a new era had dawned.