They say it takes seven years for all of your cells to completely regenerate.
So Remus supposes he met a stranger.
Fresh out of Azkaban, desperate and shaking with madness
Not a single grain of sand in the desert that his world has been for these lonely twelve years,
Not a single shred of his being, none at all, recognised this disheveled man in front of him.
They say that it it takes ten years for your entire skeleton to be replaced completely.
So not even his bones — broken and mended in solitude for a lonesome decade,
No part of him, battered, time-scorched, him.
Nothing remembered him.
But they say that your eyes last forever, original and unchanged.
Forever and always.
And he knew the second his eyes swept over him,
Pleading and begging at his knees.
He knew that he knew him.
He was his Sirius, his respite from his pain.
Sirius Black was the stranger he knew everything about.
‘A stranger,’ Remus had called him,
Yet he knew his favourite colour, favourite food, his birthday.
He would know him, then, now, and forevermore.
Even in death,
In the blindness of total darkness,
Had they both been mute and deaf;
He would be able to pick out Sirius among a thousand others and hold his hand as they returned to the world of the mournful living.
And he knew Sirius would too.
Even after everything,
Even through change,
Even through pain and loss.
Remus would always, always, be his.