Lupin didn't know what to think. He didn't know what to do.
Sirius.
His friend. His fellow Gryffindor. The spy. The turncoat. The Death Eater. The murderer.
The murderer.
He could not think of Sirius.
He had never been able to think of Sirius. Not since that night, that Hallowe'en, that grief-filled, terrible, wonderful night when the Dark Lord was defeated, Harry Potter lived and everyone else was lost and gone forever.
Lily.
James.
Peter.
Sirius.
Sirius was gone. Dead. Had never been. The Sirius Black he had known and loved, admired and blamed, fought with and beside, laughed with, grown with, ran under the moon with, trusted with himself, his secret and his vulnerability, had never been real. Had turned, plotted, pretended, killed.
It hurt.
It hurt like a bruise deep inside of him, still tender after twelve years, still a fresh pain at any reminder of Sirius. Padfoot.
He could not think of it, could not comprehend the betrayal. He had not then, he did not now. He moved the thought, slid it aside, refused to reflect on it, because then the pain would be so great and he was so afraid of it, afraid he would never be able to escape, that he would sink under the grief flailing desperately for a rescue that would never come because Sirius was not there, Sirius was not Sirius and never had been.
It was Sirius he grieved for every day since then, despite the careful dance he crept around that dangerous sorrow. It was Sirius whose loss was a constant relentless pain, despite the ghosts of James and Lily and Peter that silently pleaded and reproached behind his closed eyelids.
It was Sirius who had really gone forever. Every happy memory was poisoned by what Sirius had become. Every photograph was an unbearable, pathetic irony. Everything they had ever been was a lie.
Sirius was a lie, a nothing, but a nothing that had destroyed everything.
Yet Lupin grieved for him, for the idea of him, for what he had believed him to be. For his friend, who had not been real, but who had been really lost as the others could never be.
And now the man who had been Sirius was free. And now it started again. And now the bruise was exposed and bare and ready to be kicked and bloodied and deepened so far that he would never escape its throb. And now he must fight again.