"It's not anything I want to do," he said, a little more nastily than necessary. His fingers were twitching like he wanted a cigarette, but Sirius hadn't smoked since he was sneaking fags behind the Quidditch broom shed back in Hogwarts with the rest of the wild-haired, disenchanted teenagers born of a turbulent era who had somehow gotten the idea that smoking would ease the nerves, with the added bonus of making the smoker look really cool.

Back then, Sirius had been a sucker for appearances. He looked like a feral thing, now. Azkaban, and then the veil, had taken much.

"I... I don't know what to do, Moony," he continued, a little softer, just as angry. Frustrated. "I was--I don't know how I went from a mission--more than that, it was almost, almost--some sort of self-imposed geas, if that's possible--how do you go from that to this?" His flung-out arm took in the tiny bathroom and Remus's razor and half a year of quiet nights and cold hands and feet in a single bed. "I don't even know where we stand. Where the wizarding world stands; where we stand. I feel--you remember, in school--with Voldemort knocking on the one door and you were on the other, and I didn't know anything. Fear on one side and..." he didn't finish. He didn't need to. All the frustrated bewilderment in his face finished for him.