Dedicated to AshNox, Moonlight Dreaming and Kazo Sakamari because they reviewed my last story, the same thing applies here by the way.

Sirius sits on the bed, and twists his fingers into his hair. Swift, nimble movements until it's a mass of plaits and knots. And when Remus stares at him a little too long he mumbles something about 'making it easier.' Because that's how he talks now: too fast for anyone to understand because he misses out the beginning and the end of his sentences. When asked he mutters something about a hive mind and goes back to whatever.

Normally it's sketches – faces and floor plans and portraits and memories. And there's that faze where he just draws everybody as a corpse and Remus can't imagine any other end to the war afterwards.

And he understands – really he does. His friend was away for too long and has sort of forgotten how to be human, not that he was much good at it to begin with. And after twelve years of non-stop torture and hatred what did he expect?

None of them can answer that.

Because they sort-of did expect it to be the same, expect him to be the same. With a too wide smile and stupid jokes and reckless behaviour and a stubborn refusal to understand, to just grow up dammit this isn't a game. Because, sure they'd changed, but you didn't really grow in Azkaban with the world moving on and you staying put and they'd forgotten (ignored) that it was torture and you couldn't expect someone to be fine after it.

And, really, they should have guessed from the photographs. Because he's laughing and it's insane. And Sirius didn't laugh anyway because he'd never understood how. But he smiled instead and it always made the world light up.

Remus is still sort of in denial. Other people expect it to be Sirius who tries to find the old days in this war, and maybe he is in his own way, but really it's Remus everyone's worried about because he's looking too hard. Sirius is insane and always has been but Remus was the normal one, not to mention the only one who could bring his friend back to reality.

But now that they've both lost reality it's different. And harder because there's a war going on and you can't just stop everything for two men.

You just can't.

Remus falls easily back into childhood or young adulthood, regains the years he lost, and forgets that the rest of the world moved on.

Sirius plots and plans and never stops. He prepares relentlessly for a war he won't fight in because even if he was free he wouldn't be ready. Couldn't be ready. Would never be ready.

And it keeps on going until no one's really sure if either of them are still alive.

And it's sort of a blessing when one falls and doesn't get back up because he's probably less broken with the others. And it grounds Remus a little bit.

But even though it was a pretty much unanimous agreement that the man had already died it still came as a shock to them all when it happened. Because you can't die twice.

It just isn't how it's done.

If this didn't make a whole lot of sense then good.