Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Harry Potter. I am not associated with JK Rowling, Scholastic Inc, Bloombury, or Warner Bros. Entertainment. No copyright infringement is intended, as this is only for fun.

Author's Note: 30minutefics challenge fic.

The owl came very early in the morning. Sirius had been very quiet about receiving it, he had not cried like he thought he'd have wanted too — from sorrow or joy. He'd sat at the kitchen table in his flat quietly that Sunday morning, his tea growing cold in its mug in front of him. The only other sounds in the flat were from Remus, sleeping like a rock on the couch in the next room. The full moon had been the previous Friday, and Remus had apparated in shortly after sunrise on Saturday, taking up Sirius's open-ended offer of the couch in his flat to sleep on (broken or not). He's hardly moved since.

It was just as well. Sirius needed to think for a minute, although it had been a few hours since he had gotten the owl. He wasn't sure who it was from, there was no signature; it only declared in bold, black letters: REGULUS BLACK IS DEAD.

Regulus Black is dead.

Dead he was indeed. Sirius had known it would only be a matter of time. The brothers had had little in common since their younger days other than the dark good looks of the Black family tree and the tendency to fly off the handle, particularly at each other. He didn't know what to feel. So he felt nothing.

"Padfoot?"

Sirius glanced up at the affectionate nickname from the letter to the doorway. Remus looked at him tiredly through hair that fell in his face, and he irritatedly brushed it aside. "Sirius, is something wrong?" He looked at the letter on the table, and his expression became panicked for a moment. "It's not James and Lily, is it? Or Peter?"

"No," Sirius answered blandly. "My brother."

"Regulus? What's he done this time?" Remus had never heard anything nice about Regulus from Sirius, he could only assume it was bad.

"He's dead."

"...Oh." 'I'm sorry' didn't seem appropriate. Yet it seemed incredibly cold and calloused to say nothing. "Er... how?"

"I don't know," he said, pushing the parchment across the table. Remus picked it up and examined it carefully. "He's just dead."

"Indeed," Remus answered dryly. "I imagine Dumbledore will know."

"Probably. He seems to know everything."

"If you ask... I'm sure he'd tell you. If you wanted to know, I mean. Do you?"

Sirius shrugged. "I don't know," he said, coolly but honestly.

The kitchen was quiet. This was maybe the most awkward silence Remus had ever shared with Sirius, and there had been some very odd ones of those. Empathetic as always but unable to be truly sympathetic as an only child, Remus felt very out of his league. "Do you... want to talk about anything?"

Sirius let out a cold, barklike laugh; chilling from someone who was usually jovial. "What is there to talk about? My brother is dead." A dark look passed over his face. "I hated him. I'm glad he's dead!"

Taking that as his cue to exit to the living room and doing so, Remus left Sirius alone in the kitchen. Sirius pushed his chair away from the table and stood angrily, snatching the letter from the table, and looked at it once more.

REGULUS BLACK IS DEAD.

But how did Sirius feel?

Love and hate, hate and love. It was all mixed together, unrecognizable but apparent. Sirius would not miss the snarky, bigoted brat that his brother had been, but he would miss hanging their cousins' dolls from the stairwell by their necks, and games of hide-and-go-seek that eventually ended with one of them getting stuck behind the family tree tapestry. For every good memory, he immediately matched a bad one.

The dead needed to be buried.

"Good-bye, dear brother," Sirius murmured with finality before dashing the letter into the kitchen fire. No one would have known if it was sarcasm or regret that laced his voice