"Technically, we don't have to change the routine," Sirius mused. "I mean, it doesn't actually take seven people to destroy a block of muggle houses. I could easily just blast all the houses myself while you cast a few dozen summoning charms and tripping jinxes, and then get out of there when we've caught sufficient attention and caused sufficient mayhem."

"Didn't you say the point of all this was to cause problems for the Ministry obliviators? If we just show up, blow up a street, and disappear, most of the muggles will have no idea what happened and won't even need to be obliviated. They could send one guy who'd be done in an hour."

"You're right... that was the advantage of the bigger team. We could afford to take our time and be really thoroughly seen because we could handle the first wave of Ministry busybodies." He grinned darkly. "In theory. Until we couldn't." No doubt, Sirius could ask Moody to pull some strings to give him some slack, but that was a temporary fix. He thought silently for a moment while Avery... Sirius should really work on calling him Richard... massaged his temples. Unfortunately, the only strategic solution that came easily to him was the same one he had thought of ages ago. Too bad Avery didn't have any of his own original ideas and just expected Sirius to tell him what to do. Sirius sighed. "If we have to prioritize speed, then we need to go someplace where the eyes are all ready and waiting."

"Come again?"

"You know, sport, or a party or something. Whatever it is muggles like to do in large numbers."

Avery laughed. "You and I, pureblood heirs to two of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, are going to go to a muggle party," he drawled disbelievingly.

"Only to shake it and break it," Sirius said reasonably, though he too was grinning imagining it. Sirius could picture himself at a muggle event, maybe a concert or something, but stuffy Avery was another matter entirely.

"Right. Got any invitations handy so we can RSVP?"

"Obviously not, but I was thinking tickets, not invitations. Much easier to come by."

Avery stared at him. "You're joking. We're not actually buying muggle tickets, are we?"

"We can afford it." His grin widened at Avery's scandalized expression. "But no. If we want them, we'll steal them. Mostly though, I just want to know what sorts of ticketed events are coming up in the next few weeks."

Comprehension lit Avery's face, but then he frowned again. "How do muggles sell tickets anyway?"

"No idea. We'll have to do some field research. Come on, Richard, we're going to London."

Going out into the muggle world with Avery was even funnier than going with James, turned out. Sirius used to have a set of muggle trousers, button-down shirt, and leather jacket he was rather fond of, but he'd left them all at the Potters' mansion. Avery had none of these. They therefore went to Diagon Alley first and stopped at the one overpriced muggle clothing boutique there to pick up something besides robes. While Sirius chose plain black trousers and a lightweight long-sleeved shirt (he didn't want to show off his Dark Mark particularly), he barely restrained himself from letting Avery buy a sundress. Instead, the oblivious Slytherin was kitted out in a plaid waistcoat, lime-green pants, and orange paisley bow tie, but no shirt underneath. A lot of pureblood wizards assumed that since muggles clearly had no taste when it came to the shape and cut of their clothing, that meant they had no taste when it came to color either and intentionally chose clashing palettes in hopes of blending in. Sirius knew that logic to be untrue from simple observation, but it was the funniest thing he had seen in months, so he offered Avery no further suggestions. He looked forward to seeing what the muggles would make of it.

Sirius was comfortable in the city, even the muggle side of it, because he had grown up here. He had frequently absconded from Grimmauld Place to wander the streets, once he was old enough to manage it. Avery's childhood on the other hand had been spent in a country manor, and then at Hogwarts. The only parts of London he had ever seen before were Diagon Alley and Kings Cross station. When they emerged in muggle London, everything was new to Avery, and therefore alarming. He had never seen so many people crammed in one place. He had seen cars before, but not so many driving so perilously close together. He kept ridiculously close and even grabbed Sirius' arm when they crossed the street. He hadn't seen enormous skyscrapers before and leaned in to ask Sirius how on earth the muggles had managed to build them, to which Sirius could only shrug. He wasn't an architect, after all.

Sirius stopped at a newspaper stand and was contemplating the least noticeable way to break into it when Avery poked him.

"Merlin, what is that?"

"What? The siren?" Sirius mostly just tuned out muggle city noise.

"What's a siren?"

"The loud, screechy thing."

"Oh, no. I meant the smell."

"Smog? Sewage? It's not that bad right now..."

"No, you idiot, I know what that smells like."

"Well, then use your words, or I'm using Legilimency," Sirius snapped at him. So saying, he leaned against the newspaper box, vanished the glass, pulled out a paper, and conjured a replacement pane.

"If I knew what it was, then I wouldn't be asking. It smells...spicy?"

Sirius sniffed the air. "It's foreign food. There's a lot of immigrants in muggle London."

"Huh. You know, I've been to wizarding Paris, Rome, and Berlin, but never someplace that smelled like this. Where do you think it's from?"

Sirius gazed around, until his eyes came to a restaurant across the busy road called Lahore Kebab. He pointed. "Bet that's it. I've got no idea what a kebab is."

"Isn't Lahore in Pakistan? Let's try it," Avery said, sounding unusually excited about the prospect.

"Have you got any muggle money on you?" Sirius asked pointedly.

"No, but that's what summoning and Confundus charms are for."

Sirius groaned and laid a hand on Avery's shoulder. "Thievery? I've corrupted you. Whatever will your mother say?"

"What she doesn't know won't hurt her. And it's only from muggles, who I'm supposed to be out slaughtering every week anyway. And it's not like either of us are getting the traditional grand world tour after graduation. We deserve a taste of something besides Britain."

So saying, he started off towards the restaurant in question. Sirius hastily grabbed his hand before he walked right into the street in his single-minded distraction. "Zebra crossings, remember?"

Sirius did take Avery's suggestion of summoning a change purse right out of a woman's handbag as they crossed the street. It was much easier than stealing from Filch and more discreet than Confunding the restaurant staff. He dragged Avery into an alley so they could count the contents before venturing into the restaurant. Even with both of them puzzling over the coins, it took a good fifteen minutes to work out how much they had.

"I could have sworn the muggle studies students were always muttering on about chillings, fartings, pennies, and hate-pennies," Sirius complained in confusion. "There's none of that, just pence and pounds."

"Maybe that muggle lady finds all the extra words just as confusing as we do and throws them out. I think pennies and pence are the same thing, though."

"Well, pounds are bigger than pennies, I know that much." The times he and James had gone to muggle pubs, Fleamont had given them exclusively pound coins and instructed them to bring the "small change" back so he could put it in a jar and eventually take it to Gringotts to be converted. It was an easy cheat to the system that Sirius still used to buy his cigarettes, but it meant he had never learned how muggle currency actually worked. He knew the abbreviation for pounds was £, at least.

"In which case there's more than fifty pennies in a pound," Avery commented, examining a coin marked with a 50. "Probably a hundred."

"How do you figure?"

"I think it's a decimal system. Look, they double most of the coins. Here's 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence. If they're going to keep the same progression, the next should be 100 pence, but they don't, unless we're missing those. All we've got is 1 pound and 2 pound, but that would keep the pattern if there's 100 pence to 1 pound."

"I think you're right. Damn, that actually makes more sense than the galleons-sickles-knuts conversions. Why didn't wizards think of it?"

"So..." Avery started counting coins back into the purse, starting with what they assumed was the most valuable. "That makes it 10 pounds, 67 pence."

"Sure," Sirius agreed. "Let's order something less than £10, yeah?"

Sirius tried the lamb kebab Avery ordered and agreed it really was quite delicious, but he let Avery have most of it while he perused his stolen paper. The paper was much thicker than the Daily Prophet and divided into multiple sections that made it initially more confusing. But then he found the sport and entertainment sections, and it didn't take long after that to find what he was looking for. He laid the paper down on the table and pointed to a headline. "Here we go."

Avery leaned over. "Football League Cup Second Round to Commence 29th August," he read. "What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Football is a muggle sport."

"Ah."

"I think this is like the quidditch cup, but with a shit-ton of teams. First round finished up the week before last. That table is a schedule of all the games in the second round. Should be well-attended." He folded up the paper again and tucked it under his arm. "Go pay up, and then we'll figure out which game we're going to."

"Before you get too enamored with this plan, remember the 29th isn't until Tuesday. Aren't we supposed to be working Saturday?"

"Damn, you're right... fuck it, we'll do an abridged version of the usual gig on Saturday, and if that gets up the Dark Lord's nose for some reason, I'll explain the big show is Tuesday and beg him to hold off on killing us until he's seen it."

"Oh, cool, are you guys musicians?"

Sirius looked up at the sudden voice and blinked in astonishment. A young man had approached their table. What was astonishing was that his mode of dress was as loud as Avery's currently was, though not so tasteless. His pants were excessively tight blue denim. He had a red, sleeveless shirt that looked much too small for him, hugging his muscles like a second skin. The neckline was so low as to expose his hairy chest. He had a long-sleeved plaid shirt tied around his waist. His hair was dyed yellow and poofed high on his head though hung long in the back. "...Yes," Avery answered eventually.

"That's great! What do you play? Rock? Punk? Pop? New Wave?"

"Rock," Sirius answered quickly. He knew what rock music was, had no idea about the others.

"Nice! And you've got a gig on Saturday? Where?"

"Er, small club. You wouldn't have heard of it."

The young man's eyes turned knowing. "Oh, I wouldn't be too sure about that..."

Maybe his clothes were so bad because he was actually another wizard messing with them? "Three Broomsticks," Sirius said.

His eyebrows lifted. "You're right, I never heard of it. Sounds kinky."

Sirius blinked again and shared a glance with Avery, who looked just as bewildered. Then another brightly dressed muggle man slid up. "Hey Pete, who's your new friends?"

The original intruder, Pete apparently, shrugged. "Haven't had time for formal introductions, love. But they're a couple of musicians with a gig this Saturday at a place called the Three Broomsticks."

The newcomer grinned. "Sounds like our kind of place alright." He inclined his head. "Gentlemen, pleased to meet you. I'm Jacob, and this is my partner, Peter."

Sirius finally caught on and grinned widely at Avery. Jake and Pete thought the Three Broomsticks was a queer establishment, and possibly a racy one. Well, now he knew what the muggles thought of Avery's eccentric attire. "I'm Star, and this is Dick." Avery's mouth fell open, but he appeared speechless. Sirius bouldered on gleefully, "Pleasure to meet you both. We're new to this part of town and don't really know too many people yet."

"Oh! We should show you around! There's a couple places young fellows like you really should know..." Jake and Pete sat down and proceeded to tell them all about every queer-friendly bar, restaurant, and club in the borough, pointing out which might be in need of musical performances in the near future. Jake politely attempted to pull Avery into the conversation several times, until Sirius took pity on him and said he was shy. The conversation turned to music, forcing Sirius to regurgitate everything the muggleborns in Gryffindor Tower had ever said about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Queen, and the Lead Zap-line, even though the Beatles were the only group whose music he had actually heard. He did not count Lily's attempts to sing 'Somebody to Love,' off-key while drunk. Her rendition of 'Stairway to Heaven' was even worse.

An hour later when the gay couple had finished their own kebabs, the four of them finally left the restaurant together. Sirius wrote down a made-up address for the Three Broomsticks Bar in London and gave it to them. "Gig's at nine. We'd love to see you there. By the way, do you know the best way to get to Craven Cottage from here? We're supposed to be meeting a friend near there..." Pete nodded and pointed them in the right direction, and then they parted ways.

After a few minutes of walking, Avery glanced back, then at Sirius. "Why didn't we hex them?"

"What for? For striking up a conversation under incorrect assumptions?"

"Pretty much. They thought we were homosexual."

"Yeah, but coming from them that's definitely a complement. It's not like they actually propositioned us or anything. Better than them thinking we're wizards when we're not currently trying to break the Statute of Secrecy, eh?"

"True. My mum would have still slipped them a cursed coin or something. What's the Craven Cottage?"

"One of the game locations. I figured we should check it out to see how big one of these things really is."

"Good thinking."

"If it makes you happier, I did jinx the paper with that phony address," Sirius said. It was only to cause the ink to smudge to illegibility in five minutes, but Avery didn't need to know that.

"Oh... right. Makes sense."


Turns out, Craven Cottage football grounds could seat over 20,000 people. This must not be a regular stadium, he reasoned, but the one that hosted the cup finals. Sirius didn't figure the place would be full on the day, but it was still much, much bigger than he had imagined. Avery had been similarly impressed, but then had turned to Sirius with a look of both wonder and determination. "If we hit that..."

"Yeah."

There was no question of picking a different, smaller target in either of their minds. They spent the next seven days intensively planning, including two more trips to London to learn the layout. They took a break on Saturday as planned to apparate to three different, totally random villages, burn down a building or two, and leave.

Most importantly, Sirius warned Moody's portrait what he intended on Sunday morning when the house was empty and silent. It was Monday before he found Portrait Moody waving frantically for his attention. He raised his eyebrows at it and brought it close to his ear. "Did you know these football games can be televised?" Moody hissed.

"I don't even know what that means," Sirius whispered back.

"It means... they make... ermm... nevermind, I don't actually understand it. I'll have myself figure out how to take care of it on our end."

And then it was Tuesday. Avery arrived at Lestrange Manor bright and early. They sat in the parlor while Sirius used some human transfiguration to disguise both of them. Then they changed into their muggle clothing for the day, this time carefully chosen to blend in with the people they'd seen around the stadium. And then they went to London and queued up with all the regular muggles to acquire tickets, entering the place entirely non-magically to avoid catching any kind of suspicion ahead of time.

They thought they would be early, but there were already several thousand muggles filling the stands. Sirius didn't like that. Maybe this wasn't a special football grounds, and the games always boasted audiences of 20,000, not just the final. He leaned in towards Avery. "If this gets much bigger, it will be impossible to control."

"Agreed," Avery said, sounding nervous.

"We're not waiting for the game to start."

"Pity, I was so looking forward to it..."

"Is that a joke?"

"Duh."

"Not the time." The two of them had reached the front of the stands and stepped aside to let others past them onto the stairs. Sirius surveyed the grounds and pointed. "That'll be our apparition spot. And that will be the area we clear and blow up." He checked his watch. "Five minutes."

"Got it." Avery turned around and headed back the way they had come while Sirius climbed the stairs to the very top, where hardly anyone was sitting. When he was sure no one was looking his way, he disillusioned himself, pulled on his Death Eater robes and mask, and when the time was right, apparated to the middle of the field. He Finited the disillusionment charm the instant Avery appeared right next to him.

Avery briefly met his eyes, then gestured to the stands and bellowed, "YOU ARE SWINE! BOW BEFORE THE SERVANTS OF THE DARK LORD!"

Of the two of them, Avery had the much more impressive baritone voice, and it was doubly alarming with the amplification of a Sonorus. They had already quite caught the muggles' attention with their sudden, unnatural appearance. With Avery's disdainful words, the first of them started to fear.

"Transmogrify!" Sirius shouted, pointing at the nearest muggle, who collapsed in a screaming heap as her arms and neck elongated and legs shrank in. He cast the curse three more times, fighting back the urge to cringe at the screams. The Transmogrifian Torture curse wasn't as bad as a Cruciatus, so the books said. He had reminded himself of that multiple times when planning this show earlier in the week. But it was still unspeakably painful, causing its victims' bodies to morph and twist for exactly one hour without the countercurse. It was like watching Remus transform, except it didn't stop. The curse had distinct advantages for today: he did not have to maintain it as he would a Cruciatus, and it got the point across to everyone who was watching in horror. He kept casting.

"GET OUT IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIVES!" Avery yelled. He cast a few Transmogrifian curses of his own, then turned to face the pre-selected, sparsely-occupied section of stands where he aimed an Enbublio, a stunner, and a few Jelly-Legs jinxes, which were bright purple, red, and orange respectively. The spells contrasted marvelously against the green grass, so the muggles could see exactly what was happening.

The muggles scattered away from the spell lights as intended. Sirius glanced at his watch. They'd allotted themselves only five minutes of action, and already used up two. He couldn't wait any longer. "Confringo!" He did not put as much power into the blasting curse as usual. The very emptiest part of the stands blew up. There was an instant stampede away from the area, and the Enbublio popped. As the dust cleared, he could see several muggles down, but so far all of them were still moving. Hopefully, none died.

"FLEE!"

Avery cast Incendio to burn an enormous Dark Mark into the field. Sirius silently levitated or banished a few lagging muggles out of the way, then blasted up two more sections of seating. As soon as he saw Avery was done with the grass, he pointed his own wand skyward. "Morsmordre."

They both disapparated as the Dark Mark bloated skyward. Sirius popped through three locations before reappearing at Lestrange Manor, and Avery joined him instants later.

"THAT WAS INCREDIBLE!" Sirius covered his ears. Avery blushed scarlet and pointed his wand at his throat to whisper "Quietus." His voice resumed a normal volume. "Sorry. Forgot I had that going. But I can't believe we did it!"

"You did well," Sirius agreed. He grinned. "And it was incredible." It felt good to come up with a plan and execute it perfectly... even when the plan was for terrorism. And terrorizing a crowd that big was, well, thrilling, if Sirius was perfectly honest with himself. Controlling so many people at once was a different sort of excitement from what he felt exploding houses, or even from the euphoria of last week's triumph. Merlin, Avery was right. Sirius was enjoying himself far more than he should or than was normal, particularly for the last month. He couldn't look guilty in front of Avery though. He'd save the feeling for later.

The two young wizards were still reveling in their success when an owl unexpectedly arrived and dropped an official-looking letter on Avery's lap before winging right back out again. Avery fell silent and opened the letter. His eyes widened in alarm as he read, and he passed the letter to Sirius with shaking hands. "They know it was me. How do they know it was me?!"

Sirius snatched the letter from him and read it quickly. It looked like a duplicated form letter, not actually hand-written.

Dear Mr. Avery,

You are hereby summoned to the Ministry of Magic immediately, on this day the 29th of August.

Report directly to the Office of Obliviation. Failure to report shall result in a fine of 20 galleons and possible additional legal action.

Signed,

Millicent Bagnold

Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic

As he read, his left arm started to burn. He looked back up at Avery, who still appeared panic-stricken. "This doesn't mean they're after you," he said firmly. "If they knew, they would be here arresting us, not sending you letters and threatening you with fines. This has got to be related to what we did, though." He stood up and gestured towards his Dark Mark. "I'm being summoned. I'll take you with me so we can figure out if you should report to the Ministry as instructed or not. Come on."

Author's Note: Sirius might end up friends with Avery if he's not careful... Also, unfortunately, Sirius has the mind of a genuine terrorist. But then, we sort of knew that. Thank you for the reviews, will continue to update Saturdays.