The first thing I decided that morning was that I was keeping my job. I had packed half of my belongings away with practiced speed when it hit me how long I'd been running away. I thought about Harry first, who never had a defense against the dark arts teacher, and I thought about Dumbledore, and then, with rust peeling away from my heart, I thought about Sirius, a free man.
Albus Dumbledore had come into my office twenty minutes prior, first to tell me that I was welcome to stay on as a professor, but that there would be some complaints from parents, as the details of my condition had been leaked first to the Slytherin house, and then to the rest of the school. I began packing mentally, having only unpacked some baggage the night before. Then he told me the news, that Sirius had been kissed, and not by a beautiful woman. I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, but Albus made it clear that there was more to the story. I listened.
He had woken up after a restorative draught in the hospital wing, and I could see in my mind the waxy death mask of his face break into a smile. "My soul?" was all he said, and then he transformed into a dog, and Minerva translated what he had said in the language of tame animals. "Blacks don't have souls. Dogs don't have souls. I don't have a soul." An ambiguous statement in four wags of his tail and one pant of his tongue.
Having received the fullest penalty the law of the wizarding world had to offer, Sirius had jumped down from the hospital bed and peed on the hospital wing's stone floor. He was, as he had believed himself as a young man, beyond the law.
I went to see him then, still a dog, greeting me with a slow wag of his tail. Something told me, seeing him then, that he had spoken his last words as a man.