Chapter Text
James and Sirius would share their well-earned title as Hogwarts’ Most Likely to Burn Something Down in 1977, but in 1973 they were still meekly following Remus’ lead as they plodded through Boston’s greybrown snow to see a local band play. Despite appearances, this pattern would echo throughout their teenage years and young adulthood as Remus introduced Sirius to bars like Playland, where he first felt the sharp rush of blood to heart and groin when a man touches his ass in public.
None of the Marauders besides Sirius were from Boston, but both Remus and Peter (hailing from Jersey and Brooklyn, respectively) understood the rhythms and smells of a city. Remus and Peter would sometimes give their best friends and the prefects the slip to leave Cambridge behind, share cigarettes and continue their endless and fruitless search for a good slice of pizza. They laughed their way through many afternoons of cold ears and runny noses. Being left behind never bothered James, who was lactose intolerant and preferred marijuana, but often when Remus and Peter returned they would find Sirius sulking on his bed. After Remus procured a fake ID he would attempt to head off the tantrum by slipping him a bottle of Narragansett and letting Sirius scoff at his attempts to pronounce it.
Sirius was a Brahmin to his core—the Boston Blacks could draw a thick black line with their expensive steel-tipped quills through Plymouth Rock, across the briney Atlantic and right into expansive estates in England— but the heir to the most ancient and noble house could barely find Boylston Street on a map. From their earliest days in Boston, the Blacks had taken care to build themselves a small empire from which to gaze down upon the rest of the world. The Blacks had not been overcome with revolutionary fervor and as such had joined several other pureblood families in taking a backseat to the largely Muggle independence movement. This sentiment did not change over time; they disdainfully ignored an invitation to the opening of a wizarding floor of the Old State House highlighting the bravery and achievements of the First Wizarding Patriots. Sirius made a point of accompanying the Potters to see the exhibition when it was renovated and the thrill he felt at knowing that the news would get back to his mother was only somewhat spoiled by Peter’s muttering comments that he felt the whole thing was kind of rotten seeing as how many of these same heroes had had slaves. Fleamont Potter, in the way of aging hippies that had lost their taste for blood, pointed out vaguely that the slaves had probably benefited from independence as well. None of the teenaged boys knew how to respond to a respected adult’s clear rebuff, but Peter shot Remus a glance, hoping that he was impressed anyway. Remus continued to read a placard underneath a moving drawing of two wizards on brooms holding muskets. He didn’t want to engage.
Remus' werewolf senses distorted the world, making the Old State House smell yeasty and fecund. A lot of Boston smelled this way to Remus, like an old wine opened at the wrong time or bad panettone. It had nothing to do with history as far as Remus could ever tell; Newark had its own share of old haunts, but the air there was sweet with the miasma of smog and meats. Boston was brewing or stewing, old juices taking new and dangerous shapes. The smell clung to his thick hair and would occasionally make a lump rise high in his throat, anxiety threading delicately across the tightened muscles of his back and shoulders. By 1977 Remus had learned to drown out these feelings, but it took time to condition himself.
In 1973, after almost three years at Hogwarts, he was still struggling to transition from the near constant sound of Hector Lavoe and Ruben Blades at his Seventh Ave apartment in Newark to the stiff silence of Hogwarts, broken only by the sound of furiously moving quills against parchment. While he’d made brief attempts to explain to his friends how the old stone walls seemed to be closing in on him, it was quickly apparent that Hogwarts represented something else to them. To Sirius it was freedom, to James a refreshing routine after years of poetry readings, jazz clubs and the occasional cannabis-scented party, and to Peter it was a stepping stone to a job that wasn’t at his father’s butcher shop. All of them had taken some time to adjust, but by third year Hogwarts had settled over them like a well-worn cloak. And yet and yet Remus felt suffocated by daily lies, acting like he knew who The Ghoulies were, pretending to give a fuck about Quidditch, smothering the natural lilt of his voice inherited from his Puerto Rican mother, pulling his long sleeves over new scars even on that first warm spring day when the melted snow made the earth smell heady and new and the girls would ditch class to lay out on the Beach in shorts, bared midriffs and sunglasses. He wanted to feel the grass on his knees and bare shoulders, he wanted to suck his teeth when scolding his friends without feeling a rush of hot shame. But most of all, he wanted someone to go see some goddamn live Muggle music.
So when he overheard the owner of his favorite record store tell a customer that the Modern Lovers were back in town and playing a show in Cambridge, Remus decided it was time to engage. It took some doing to convince Peter to sneak out with them past curfew, but James and Sirius were immediately on board. At the time Remus assumed they were simply bored of exploring Hogwarts with James’s invisibility cloak, but several years later James would admit that they were too surprised by the invitation to refuse. They hadn’t realized Remus could get that excited about anything, much less something fun like a concert. “You were kind of wet blanket,” he’d say and smile apologetically. A logical part of Remus understood, but the weary part of Remus resented that James would always have a hard time understanding how necessary silence had been for Remus during their early Hogwarts years. That same weary Remus spared a moment to pity Lily, who understood silence and was pregnant with a child she would have teach it to by herself.
When the four friends, not yet Marauders, approached a fairly nondescript brownstone crawling with well-dressed Harvard students and less-well-dressed Northeastern students, Sirius asked Remus if he knew the password to get inside. It was physically painful for Remus to not roll his eyes, so Peter did it for him with a chuckle. “Dude, Muggles only use passwords if they’re in the mafia.” Remus allowed himself to laugh when James asked if The Mafia was the band they were here to see.
Once inside, none of them dared approach the makeshift bar. Instead they huddled nervously against one of the walls, pretending to belong and trying to mimic the bodies and voices around them. James overheard someone announce they were ‘stoked’ and wouldn’t stop saying it for weeks. Peter eyed a pair of converses he begged his sister to buy for him the following summer. It was an educational experience for all of them. Sirius made a bad joke about where the Old-Fashioned Lovers were playing.
Remus only knew a few songs by the band from a bootleg of a live show that Gideon Prewett had played for him, but Pablo Picasso in particular had reminded him of Sirius. He was only five foot three, girls could not resist the stare. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Gideon had unsubtly dropped a hint that he felt the song described himself, but at fifteen he was already a gangly five foot seven and Remus saw nothing special in his stare. This would change, but in 1973 he hadn’t yet grown to understand the relationship between the awkward shifting in his seat and any time he stared too long at a picture of Iggy Pop.
The boys barely spoke between sets and then finally finally finally Jonathan Richman came on stage. In hindsight the band members were all limbs and hair on stage, but in that moment Remus could only take in Richman’s rueful smile, relishing in his deadpan humor and the way the entire room followed the ebb and flow of his voice and no one was edging away. He not only wanted to be him, but he wanted to close his eyes and pretend the words belonged only to him. Even the more upbeat songs pulled Remus away from his constant anxieties and he yelled along with the rest of the audience even though he didn’t know the words.
In 1984 Remus will watch Jonathan Richman perform Hospital again in a concert hall in Catalonia and will try to laugh at how obvious it should have been even at thirteen that he would fall in love with Sirius Black. He will hum the song for days, until the Hidebehind he works for threatens to disembowel him if he doesn’t stop acting like a llum de ganxo. Remus will curse back halfheartedly, but the echoes remain until he gets blackout drunk and wakes up with vomit drying on his shirt and pieces of his new Modern Lovers record floating in the toilet bowl.
I can’t stand what you do, but I’m in love with your eyes
The morning after the Modern Lovers show in 1973, Gideon took up as much space as possible in his favorite Gryffindor armchair as Remus rambled on about the show, hiding his jealousy and respect well. The rush of getting away with sneaking out to go to a Muggle concert where they could have (but hadn’t) gotten drunk or smoked pot had passed and James, Peter and Sirius were deeply invested in a game of chess in which Peter (always the better strategist, always with an eye on the endgame) went from one side to the other, advising both James and Sirius to make things more interesting. No one interrupted Remus as he went on to talk about how he wouldn’t mind learning to play drums except he didn’t have anywhere to put them (or money to buy them, but that went without saying) and that he never thought Richman would look so clean cut and suburban, that—
“Have y’listened to Lou Reed?”
In 1996, at 12 Grimmauld Pl., Molly will share two bottles of wine with Sirius and Remus and laugh herself hoarse at Remus’s retelling of the first time they met, shortly after Molly had found out it was Remus who had convinced her younger brother to take the Knight bus to New York to see a punk show.
“I thought you were going to set me on fire, there were sparks flying out of your hair. And, if you can believe it, I really did think it would make you feel better to know that the blood on his shirt wasn’t his—”
Sirius will laugh along, but he’ll only be pretending to remember. 1976 will be mostly lost to him by that point and after some brief historical mathematics he figures this was probably around the time that Remus still believed Sirius was beyond forgiveness. In their youth they’d really believed Snape’s brush with a werewolf mangling was the biggest test of their friendship and once they got past that, nothing else could ever come between—
Sirius will look up from his hands, pale and steepled on his lap, in 1996, to watch Remus comforting Molly. She will be mumbling about her father’s LP collection and how he encouraged all his children to share in his joy of music. “But Gid was really the only one, they’d sit in silence listening to Johnny Cash.“ The deep breath Molly takes before continuing will shatter the air around Sirius and he can’t look Remus in the eye or else he’ll shatter with it. “Part of the reason I think Arthur married me was to get direct access to Gideon’s records. Before he died…he must have known something was coming… he told Arthur they were all his.”
Not all of them, Sirius will think, but say nothing. The memory is stored delicately on the shelf where almost all his recollections of 1980 are safe and sound. They are all poisoned by suspicion, blood and cheap gin, which did not appeal to the dementors. Gideon knocked on the door Sirius shared with Remus and the rat, soaked from the spring thunderstorm and dripping on their brown welcome mat. Sirius told him that Remus was out (he was) and that he wouldn’t be back any time soon (the first lie). After waiting and not receiving an invitation to sit or to at least an offer to dry off in the bathroom, Gideon pushed a paper bag toward him. The bag was heavier than it looked and the impermeability spell was holding extremely well. He went to open it, but Gideon interrupted. “Could you give that t’Remus?”
“Do you want to leave a message?“ Sirius snarled back.
Gideon was used to Sirus’ tantrums and so he only shook his head. “Just make sure he gets ‘em.” Sirius nodded (the second lie). After Gideon left, Sirius laid the records out across the kitchen table. Even after all the shows Remus had dragged him to over the years, he still hadn’t picked up a real taste for Muggle music and he couldn’t recognize any of the bands on the covers. He wondered if Gideon was still in love with Remus as he removed the vinyl from the sleeves and stepped on them until they were shattered. He transfigured the pieces into a paperweight of a sleek black dog.
The third and biggest lie will be on his tongue in 1996. He’ll lean over to place one of his hands on Molly’s knee and tell her that they all miss Gideon. Inside Sirius feels something like tar churning and remembers that the only parts left of him are the ugly dangerous parts. He is proud that he will be able to be useful to Dumbledore as a weapon, but understands that once this war is over there will be no use for all his sharp edges.
But in 1973 they were all so soft, sprawled out on top of their pillows on the floor as Gideon's Velvet Underground bootleg serenaded them an introduction for all the beautiful painful years to follow.