Disclaimer: Anything you recognise isn't mine.
"Why do you cry so hard? You can't remember him that well, you hardly knew him?"
"But I did mum, I've known that he's innocent for a year now; we've been working together, with Dumbledore – fighting against Voldemort."
Andromeda raised her head and stared at her daughter.
Nymphadora had come round early in the morning to inform her of her cousin's death and newly-found innocence and while the second part of her sentence had not sunk in, the first had. Sirius was dead. Sirius. Her brave, confident, foolhardy, brilliant cousin had died. It did not seem possible, although she had not seen him for fourteen years and had hardly thought of him for almost as long she did not remember him as the howling man on the front of the Prophet; her Sirius would always be a laughing teenager telling her that he's fine and that they haven't hurt him – or a nervous eleven year old trying to shake off the name Black – or a scared child trying to find someone to shield him from the monsters and finding no one – or even, and her heart broke at the memory, a young man, barely out of school and fighting in a war on a side that most think he should be trying to defeat; she remembers him standing in her doorway urging her to join the Order of the Phoenix:
"To fight, Andy; I know you want to stay neutral but now isn't the time – we need more fighters, He's too strong and soon they're going to make you decide and if you go against them they Will kill you!"
And Dora standing on the stairs where neither had noticed her "I'll fight him, I'll kill him" but Sirius just ruffles her hair and tells her that she's too young then glances back at Andromeda like a wounded dog and turns towards the door, but Dora has launched herself at him because he is her hero and she doesn't want him to die and she is sobbing and crying and pleading with him 'to be safe, to please be careful'. And she wants to break down like her daughter and tell him to stop fighting – not to leave her, to stay, please to stay. And that was the only moment in the war that she came close to breaking down.
So when she hears news of his death she breaks down completely for the first time in years.
And so does her daughter.
"Innocent?" She repeats the word in her mind – does this mean he is still Her Sirius and not a murdering traitor (not that she ever considered him one, not really) but does this mean that Her Sirius (not the murdering traitor) has spent twelve years in hell and another three on the run, that her frightened cousin had faced monsters far worse than any he had dreamed of as a child, that it was Her Sirius who had died.
"Yeah," Dora sighs, "He's innocent"
Yes that is what it means.