He looks back on those days, often.

It isn’t healthy. It amounts to nothing.

But he thinks, the cracks were there all along.

Peter’s smiles were genuine, but--there was a tilt. Straight line where there should have only been a smooth curve.

And hadn’t his laugh been a little too loud, often?

“No,” Sirius says, as if reading his thoughts. “I would have killed him.”

Remus says, “You’ve mentioned that.”

Sirius counters, “You don’t believe me?”

But tilted smiles and exaggerated laughs are not the whole story. This is what he comes back to, always. “He was our friend, too.”