I always found it fascinating that Remus, in canon, seems to have accepted that Sirius was a murderer. It's interesting to speculate how he came to terms with that.

Hmm. It should just be that Remus is thinking of them as being as good as dead, which sort of makes sense. I could have missed something, though - I realised halfway through that he was referring to everyone, including Sirius, as actually being dead, and I had to do a huge rewrite (I swear this was so nearly the fic in which Remus Lupin got halfway down the Pilgrim's Way and then your humble author lost patience with the moody little git and flushed his head down a toilet and ran off to break Sirius out of Azkaban). While I can quite believe he would have lied to himself like that, it really screwed up my plot. So, um, no, they're not meant to be dead.

Thanks for commenting :)