If I encounter just one more story in which poor little Remmykins bemoans front and center how ruddy awful life as a werewolf has been for twelve lonely years, I. Will. Puke.

Try twelve years in prison with the creatures of nightmares sucking all feelings of happiness, comfort and memory of better times out of you, and see how you like that.

Remus had freedom (even though limited by his status as a registered werewolf), food (at least more and better than the swill you get fed in Azkaban if your shut-down body even remembers what eating is), hygiene (twelve years without a toothbrush, baths, a comb?!), friends (at minimum nodding acquaintances willing to exchange a "good morning").

Sirius, freshly escaped from Azkaban, is a man out of his time, a 22-year-old boy who never had the change to grow up psychologically because his emotions were a wasteland raped daily by monsters, and the best his so-called "friends" could do was send him running across the countryside in secret (thereby starving) to "alert the old crowd" just before they topped even that by locking him up in the house of his adolescent nightmares at 12 Grimmauld Place - the very house he fled from to the Potters when he was just 16 years old because he couldn't bear it any longer.

Lupin is the most spineless gomer I've ever heard of. During the Marauders' Hogwarts years, he was afraid to speak up for Snape despite being Prefect - most likely because he didn't want to upset his bullying friends. Over the intervening years, he clearly hasn't changed at all. When Sirius was arrested in 1981, he didn't speak up, didn't even, for one second, doubt Sirius' guilt. Dumbledore, supposedly oh-so-powerful, didn't either. Twelve years later, Dumbledore keeps Harry from Sirius, doesn't even attempt to get Sirius' name cleared (despite the fact that Albus Dumbledore's word should count for enough to at least arrange a trial, Veritaserum, witnesses, etc.), doesn't find the Wizarding equivalent of a psychiatrist for Sirius, relegates him to a house that brings up nothing but bad memories, and lets Molly Weasley treat Sirius like his time in Azkaban was his fault, and the wreck he's become because of it - and because his fellow Order members abandoned him! - should be locked away from decent people's eyes.

Sirius might have treated Remus like a possible traitor for a few months in 1981. But that doesn't, cannot, amount to the same as instant disavowal and twelve years of unquestioning hatred.

How can Sirius forgive anyone? They all left him to rot, and, apart from Remus, never even felt the need to apologize or admit that they were wrong.

In 1971, Sirius' old teachers all saw him renounce his heritage by choosing Gryffindor instead of Slytherin when he was a mere eleven years old! - the first Black to ever do so. They were there when he joined the Order, when he fought by their side during Voldemort's first rising. And still, they were all too quick to wash their hands of him.

They should beg him on bended knee for forgiveness, and he should send them packing with icy disgust.

My idea of book #5 would have been Sirius kidnapping Harry and running away with him to a Caribbean island (or somewhere sunny, anyway), with a half-grudging invitation to Remus to accompany them if he dared. They'd bask in the sun, relax on the beach, run to town as a boy, his uncle and their dog, and Sirius and Remus would teach Harry more DADA than he'd ever learn at Hogwarts so that he had a true chance to vanquish Voldemort as everyone seems to expect him to do with close to no preparation.

Yes, I love Sirius Black. And at the moment, with the possible exception of Harry Potter, I want the rest of J. K. Rowling's characters to die in screaming agony. Wankers.