But Moony never shows up, and that is why Sirius thinks sometimes that the world he returns to after Azkaban is worse than the one before it, because he is haunted by the idea that perhaps this is not only a world without James and Lily, but it is also a world without Remus. When the healers ask him to think of something happy, images of Moony smiling become images of Moony returning from a mission, smelling of the wild and other men, scars and bruises Sirius doesn’t recognise; they become the memory of Remus, arriving at the flat sometime while Sirius was out, collapsed on the couch, unable to make it to his room or heal himself properly after a moon no one was at, because they didn’t know where Remus was.