I know nothing about motorcycles.


Sirius dumped his robes in the dirtiest alley he could find. He hoped, viciously, that whoever found it next might be a homeless Muggle, who would use the delicately spun silk on it much better than he would.

Once he was done with that, he shuffled out the Muggle money he had exchanged at Gringotts. It was a single piece of paper, all green, with the wordsBank of Englandon top andOne Poundwritten next to a picture of a lady gazing serenely into the distance. She didn't move, of course - Muggle pictures didn't do that.

He was not particularly sure how much it was worth, or how he would even use it. The only real knowledge he had of the Muggle world was his loose shirt, one he was fairly sure had been James's at some point, and the mags that Peter had given him, which had been so tacky and vulgar that Sirius had immediately stuck them to the wall of his bedroom with a Permanent Sticking Charm. He was certain Pete had nicked them from his dad's stash or something, and he doubted he would ever find anything like them in the shopping street he was in. On the other hand,anythingMuggle was bound to anger his parents, and they would never think to find him in the Muggle street outside Diagon Alley.

It looked a lot more like Diagon Alley than he expected it to, as he wandered aimlessly down it. The shops all had giant signs made of some hard material that reflected the bright sunlight, and some of them even glowed like they were enchanted, though Sirius could not imagine how they did it, because he didn't see any sort of fire or mechanism powering them. None of the displays in the shops moved, but they were still colourful, and the people still chatted cheerfully. Only the great bit of grey road in the centre, with cars running down it every once in a while, was different, but aside from the occasional vehicle it was empty, and people didn't hesitate to walk all over it.

He thought to himself that he would buy some sort of obviously Muggle object, one that he could take home and enrage his parents with. For that reason, he ignored the bookshops filled with books that looked identical to any wizarding book, and the restaurants - he certainly did not want to learn what Muggle food tasted like. But when he did that, it left him with a lot fewer options than he thought it would. Perhaps he was simply on the wrong street. He turned a corner and was disappointed when nothing caught his eye there, either.

There was a clothing shop. Maybe he could go in there. He wrinkled his nose at the perfectly still mannequin in the window and the odd dress it was wearing; maybe not, then. There was a shop selling sweets that he didn't recognise and which looked infinitely less exciting than any sweet shop he had ever seen. A pawn shop. A grand building that looked like a theatre. A shop selling arts and crafts, although he hadn't the slightest idea what that could entail.

When he was on his fourth street the novelty was wearing off and he was beginning to feel very restless and impatient. Somehow in his mind he had made up the Muggle world to be a place full of crazy contraptions and novelty gadgets that would be sure to drive his parents mad, yet everything he had seen looked just like a normal street. Even worse, it wasboring:there was no wonder, nothing of the atmosphere that Diagon Alley had. Perhaps superficially, it looked the same, with the same sort of shops lining the streets and the same sort of people walking along the road. But the buildings didn't have moving displays or wares lined outside their doors, the interiors were dull and lacked any excitement, and even the cars moving along the road were starting to become less interesting. Maybe his parents were right, maybe the Muggles really did have nothing to offer…

Then, he saw it. As tall as he was, and twice as wide, it was sleek, and black, and sharp. It was a metal and leather monstrosity whose nature laid beyond the wildest of imaginations. It was compact and yet casual, streamlined, confident in its angles. It stood proudly on its wheels like it knew how it caught the eye of all those who walked by, and welcomed it gladly. It was a marvel of engineering, with silver pipes and a firm frame. It was completely, wholly, Muggle, and it would drive his mother mad.

'Interested?'

Sirius jumped. He was nearly pressing his nose to the glass, but he had been so engrossed he hadn't noticed. There was a man standing by the door of the shop, with greying hair, a receding hairline and laugh lines around his eyes. He was grinning down at him knowingly.

'What is it?' Sirius couldn't keep himself from asking.

'A Triumph Bonneville,' the shopkeeper told him proudly. 'A real classic, that one is. You want to come inside and take a closer look?'

The shop Sirius was in front of was calledMotorcycle thing he had been ogling - a motorcycle? - was standing just behind a glass frame. Sirius followed the shopkeeper inside, eager to examine it more, but he only got a few steps in before he stopped in his tracks, astonished, because the shop was utterly filled with machines just like the one outside. Motorcycles of all types and colours were lined up against each other for customers to look at. It seemed like every sort in the world was contained in that little shop: massive red ones, tiny white ones, ones with giant handles and shiny leather seats, ones that looked like a pile of metal on wheels. At the edges of the shop were shelves filled with items that looked simultaneously useless and necessary, containing everything from gloves to jackets to odd metal headgear that rather resembled a knight's helmet. There were even the giant, two-wheeled contraptions loaded up onto the walls next to the shelves, as if they had run out of room on the shop floor. The one that Sirius had seen from outside was near the front, lit up by the sun and standing on a raised platform to be admired from the street. From inside he could see that it was a lot smaller than he had thought, especially when there were so many others to compare it with, yet it seemed to him like it towered over all the others.

The shopkeeper was standing nearby, looking over his reaction with a smile. Sirius realised his mouth was open and quickly closed it.

'You like this one?' the shopkeeper asked him, nodding at the motorcycle up front.

'It's cool,' Sirius admitted. It still looked cool to him, even with all the others in the shop.

The shopkeeper seemed gratified. 'Good taste, lad. The Bonnie's been the best bike ever since the 50's, you know, can't get any more iconic than this. All the kids these days, looking for these new Japanese bikes… I say, nothing wrong with a bit of British pride! These new models wouldn't exist if they didn't have old Triumph with them!'

Sirius was not particularly certain what the man was talking about. He went towards the display so he could peer up at the bike. Up close he saw that wheels appeared to be made of rubber, or something that looked like rubber, and the piping was even more intricate than he thought. To him it seemed like it was powering the whole thing.

'I used to have one of these myself, you know,' the shopkeeper reminisced, almost dreamily. 'Fifty horsepower, twin carburetors on the 650cc parallel twin engine… ran like nothing you've ever seen. Used to ride it every day, cruising along the streets…'

'Can I have one?' Sirius asked before he could stop himself. The idea of riding on a Muggle vehicle, especially one that looked like the one in the shop, was just too tempting.

The shopkeeper laughed. 'Maybe when you're older,' he said. 'Bit too young for it now, I say - how old are you?'

'Fourteen,' Sirius told him. 'How old do I need to be?'

'That's a right shame, then,' said the shopkeeper, shaking his head. 'With the new laws - they're for safety, of course - but with the new laws the age's been bumped up a bit. You'll probably have to wait until nineteen or so to own one of these.'

Nineteen! Sirius would be an adult by then. He looked longingly at the bike. It was the exact sort of thing that Mother would hate, horrendously Muggle. He imagined bringing it home, and the look that would spread over Mother's face as she saw it, in perfect horror of what her son had got… she would loathe it, and in the dead of night when she thought Sirius was sleeping, she would creep out of her room and raise her wand to destroy it, but she couldn't, because Sirius had charmed it to be Unbreakable… and Sirius and the others would come down with the commotion, and Mother would be furious, and demand to understand it… but Sirius would only laugh at her and tell her how foul and stupid she was… and he would hop on the bike and ride off into the night, the rest of his family watching…

'Tell you what, lad,' the shopkeeper told him, startling him out of his thoughts. 'Since you're so keen on it, why not look at one of the manuals? You can learn up on your bikes till you get one of them yourself.'

He led Sirius to the desk, where there was a stand filled with books and magazines. All of them had Muggle pictures of bikes on them, and some variation of the word motorcycle on the cover. Even though the images were still, Sirius fancied he could hear them roaring through the street.

With his single paper of Muggle money, he was able to buy two items: a book that promised to teach him how to identify motorcycles and ride one of his own, and a magazine filled with prints of motorcycles and people riding motorcycles, along with all sorts of things beside that, like the logos of the biggest motorcycle makers and gear that one needed to ride a motorcycle. He passed them to the shopkeeper, who took his money and marked something down behind his desk. The moment he handed the books back to Sirius, he stuffed them into the pockets of his trousers, thanked the man and hurried through the streets back to the Leaky Cauldron, where Mother was outraged to find that Sirius had disappeared and further that he had lost his expensive robes. She did not look at the lumps in his pockets.

Of course, the first thing he did when he got home was to tear out the biggest, most egregiously Muggle pictures in the mag and stick them all over his wall, right there with the bikini pictures and the Gryffindor banners James had got him. When Kreacher popped in to clean that evening, Sirius had the pleasure of hearing his screech of fury at finding yet more Muggle pictures on the wall, and it was so entertaining that he wasn't even bothered by Mother's angry questioning.

Over the years, Sirius collected more and more pictures of motorcycles, and all sorts of manuals about motorcycle parts and repairs. Though his knowledge of the Muggle world remained woefully lacking, motorcycles caught his interest more than he'd like to admit. He told himself and anyone who would ask that he was simply interested because it angered his parents, but the truth was that it was, plainly, very cool to him. Images of scantily dressed Muggle girls fawning over attractive, dark-haired young casanovas, leaning against their sporty luxury bikes and staring up at the camera with frozen smiles, remained under his bed at Hogwarts, though he was too embarrassed to show them to anyone, even James. He enchanted the pictures of motorcyclists he came across in his purchases to move, and watched them race across the page and wave at him as they screamed by, with more fascination than he would ever admit to. The idea of owning one himself, though, remained a faraway dream. He thought at some point after he graduated Hogwarts, he would go through the Muggle tests, and get one - but that was only in the future.

In the end, the idea was discarded when he ran away at sixteen, left behind with the dozens of posters stuck on his bedroom wall. It did not occur again to him until he was eighteen.


Godric's Hollow was an odd blend of magical and Muggle residences. The Potters lived alongside Bathilda Bagshot on one side, author ofA History of Magicand possibly a dozen other history textbooks Sirius had never bothered to read, and the Smiths on the other, whose children went to the local school and who made a damn good crumble every time they went to visit.

As such, when walking around the town, one would randomly find odd wizarding items scattered around areas that on first glance seemed entirely Muggle, like the gate of the church graveyard that someone had enchanted to scream any time it was opened, easily mistaken for rusty hinges, or the bed of honking daffodils in the park that would strike up a chorus any time you drew near, and whose presence was usually dismissed by the Muggles as very ugly birdsong. James had made it a game of sorts to find as many such objects as possible, and when Sirius arrived at the village, he was roped into it. They had kept it up even after they began Auror training and the war was rising, and it was on a Sunday morning, when they were on one such outing, did something of interest occur.

Namely, the two of them were on the street outside the Potters' house, examining a seemingly innocuous crack in the pavement. James swore that it must have been jinxed, because James had tripped every time he walked over it, so he and Sirius were now examining it to see if there was magic on it. So far they had spent the majority of the morning doing everything possible with the crack, walking across it, jumping over it, and other activities that no doubt made them look like loons, and so far Sirius was of the growing opinion that James was just clumsy.

'It must be one of the ones that don't work when you think about it,' James insisted. 'So we're fine because we're doing it on purpose, but when someone walks by -'

'Sure,' Sirius said dryly. 'That's fair.'

'No, no, it makes sense! We just need to find someone -'

'What're you doing?' said a voice. It was Frank Miller, a Muggle boy who lived at the end of the street. He was only a year or so younger than them, with blond hair, protruding ears, widely set blue eyes and a pointy jaw. He was standing on the road opposite them, watching with confusion.

'Hey, Miller,' James said instantly. 'Come here for a bit, won't you?'

Miller, eyeing them warily, crossed the street and began walking down the pavement towards them. Almost immediately, he tripped over the crack.

'That doesn't mean anything,' Sirius continued stubbornly while James guffawed and Miller swore. 'That was one person -'

'Oi, what was that for?' Miller protested loudly. 'Did you just want to see me fall on my face?'

'James thinks the crack is magical,' Sirius told him. James made a noise of disagreement, except it was true.

'Magically annoying, for sure,' Miller grumbled. 'Aren't the two of you s'pposed to be at work, or something?'

'It's Sunday,' James said. 'We've got the day off. So we're here -'

'- investigating magic pavements -'

'- I'm telling you, this isn't normal -'

'Yeah, whatever,' Miller cut in. Then a thought seemed to occur to him and his face changed. 'Say, that means you're free all day, right? Wanna see something?'

'I'm sure James just wants to look at more cracks,' Sirius began in a bored voice.

'Shut it,' James said quickly. 'We'll come.'

Miller gestured for them to follow him with an expression that promised something marvellous. He sauntered down the street, grinning, until they were in front of a pale blue house that Sirius recognised as Miller's own.

'Wait here,' he told them. Then he disappeared round the back of the house. Sirius and James looked at each other in confusion.

It took a few minutes for Miller to return. When he did he was pulling something behind him. For a moment it was hard to tell what it was in the shadows, then he pulled it into the light and Sirius had a good look at it.

'A Honda CG125?' he said before he could think.

James stared at him in bewilderment. Miller grinned, obviously happy that someone recognised it.

'Got it for cheap,' he told them happily. 'You like it?'

It looked brand new. The body was a striking maroon, and contrasted the black seat and handles. It was low-lying, languid and well rated for being cheap and reliable - or so all the magazines said. Sirius could imagine the sound it made when revved.

'First bike?' he asked. 'Looks sweet.'

'Yeah,' Miller agreed. 'Got it so that I could go into town without asking my mum. D'you have a bike too, then?'

'No,' Sirius admitted. 'I've been thinking about it.'

It was actually the first time in about three years that he had thought about it. The sight of Miller's motorcycle seemed to have brought a renewed vigour into the idea.

James boggled at him. 'I didn't know you were into motorbikes!' he exclaimed. 'When did that happen?'

Sirius shrugged, not sure if he should be amused or indignant. 'You don't need to be so surprised, mate.'

'I think you should get one,' Miller inserted, before James could answer. 'You'd look cool.'

Sirius did his best to look nonchalant. 'Yeah?'

'Yeah,' insisted Miller. 'There's a dealer opened up in the town over, you know? It's where I got mine. You can get a good bike from there, like a Z1, or a-a -'

'A Bonneville,' Sirius remembered. The first bike he had ever seen, on that day he had escaped his family's clutches at Diagon Alley. In the fog of memory, it seemed grander than any other motorcycle he had ever seen. Even with all the other models out there, none of them hit him like the Bonneville.

''s not as fast, isn't it?' Miller asked.

Sirius shrugged again. 'Doesn't matter. It's iconic, isn't it?' And he could always just enchant it if he wanted more speed, he thought.

'Yeah,' Miller admitted. 'It'd look good.'

'I don't know what you two are talking about,' James grumbled, obviously not eager to be left out. 'But since you've been getting on so splendidly…'

Sirius snorted. 'Leave it, James. Can't believe you're getting so pressed over a bike.'

'I'm not,' James protested. 'And it's a nice bike.'

'Thanks,' said Miller. 'I reckon you wanna look at cracks now, right?'

James sputtered angrily. Sirius laughed at him, and in the back of his mind he imagined himself on a motorcycle.


Six months later, he was giving a Muggle test. A few things had happened in those six months: he had joined the Order of the Phoenix, become a Junior Auror, and bought Remus a new set of dress robes when he accidentally tore up his last one.

But the idea of actually getting a motorcycle did not seem important for a long while. Indeed, he had typically dismissed the thought as soon as it came. He was far too busy, with the Ministry and the Order and all that, to bother with going through some boring Muggle paperwork for something he probably wouldn't use.

But he began to consider it seriously when Albus Dumbledore turned up on the doorstep of the Potter residence one night, as the five of them celebrated Lily's pregnancy, and told them, with a grave expression, that Voldemort was targeting them.

It suddenly occurred to Sirius, then, just how badly the war effort had got. Voldemort had moles everywhere in the Ministry, entire families were disappearing, people were too afraid to trust each other, and even the Order had a leak somewhere, and not even Dumbledore could stop it. There was so little time - for leisure, for happiness, or for life in general. Because Sirius now had no illusion that he would die in this war.

So it came to him that this was his last chance to fulfil an old childhood dream. He did not know if he would live or die, or if Voldemort would win or lose. But today, at least, the Muggle government still stood, and motorcycle dealerships still existed, and Sirius was young and lively and eager for adventure. It was why he began to hunt through newspapers and magazines, looking for a way to earn a licence. It was why he was nineteen and on the road, dressed in a dragonhide jacket and his old Herbology gloves, with an examiner watching his every move. For the first time in his life, he was seated on a motorcycle.

The normal riding experience was probably different from this one, he thought to himself, as the examiner begged him, for the umpteenth time, to turn off his indicator. He could just use a Sensing Charm instead of having to glance over his shoulder all the time, he thought grumpily, as he jabbed at the button once again, and he could probably make the damn light work automatically too. It felt like he was on a broomstick, if the broomstick was made of metal and flew on the ground, and also had a half a dozen controls to deal with. He could feel the bike vibrating any time he stayed still at a traffic light. There was a lot to keep track of, from signs to crossings to pedestrians to other cars. It probably didn't help that he lived in London, either.

But even on the bike he'd gotten from a riding school, there was still a thrill of his old teenage recklessness in every turn he made, the one that prompted him to become an Animagus for his friend, the one that urged him to join the war effort. The Muggle world was still peaceful, and the most interesting things on the streets were the cyclists, yet he found when he paid attention that there was some wonder to riding along the road after all.

So about a month or so later, with some rushed testing and a licence obtained under questionable legal circumstances, he was outside the only dealership he knew. It looked like it hadn't changed since he first came. The sign was still shiny and hard, the glass fronts still filled with motorcycles. And the Bonneville was still in its rightful place at the front of the shop, gleaming with its glory and tempting all those who walked past.

The shopkeeper still looked the same when Sirius walked in, and what was more, he recognised him. His face lit up in a smile.

'So you did it!' he said gleefully. 'And you've come back here too, to boot. Still got your old taste?'

Sirius couldn't help but grin. ''Course,' he said. 'Why wouldn't I?'

Buying the actual bike involved a lot more paperwork than Sirius actually expected. He would've Confunded it away, if he didn't feel bad doing so. Despite that, the Bonneville was his.

He rode it home. It was nothing like the tests. It felt like the Bonneville was part of himself, revving and roaring underneath him as he flew through the London streets. The whole city seemed to have cleared itself for him, with barely a car in the road and only the buses to watch him turn corners a little too sharply. If a Muggle official took issue with him, they quickly stopped.


I am trying to work on my prose and pacing. Criticism on that front would be appreciated.