When we last left Saul and Jonathan, they were dead.
They're still dead.
But what I wanted to bring up again was how that happened. At the end of 1 Sam, Saul's sons are killed in battle, and the enemy's coming for him, too, so he asks his armour bearer to kill him so that he's not killed by his enemies. His armour bearer declines, so Saul offs himself. His enemy, deprived of the opportunity to actually kill him, instead parades his bits all over their kingdom.
Cut to 2 Samuel, and David receives an out-of-breath visitor who brings news of the battle.
Now, it seems to me that Saul's relentless pursuit of David couldn't possibly have been a secret. For starters, Jonathan always knew exactly how to find/get ahold of David while the latter was on the run. Secondly, Saul was consistently being informed about David's whereabouts, and finally, David was trotting around the country with an entourage of 600 men and their belongings/families, and every time Saul set out to find/kill David, he did so with an army of thousands. Neither of these groups would have been easy to hide from anyone living anywhere near any of the places where David was hiding and/or Saul was looking.
Plus there's the fact that David had been earning a reputation for himself all along the way, and people had already been singing songs about his awesomeness for some time, so people would have known where he stood.
It's perhaps not too surprising, then, that the messenger who finds David decides to make up a story in a thinly-veiled attempt to curry favour with the man who will surely be king now that Saul's out of the way. He reports Saul dead, and then goes on to claim that he himself did the killing. You can almost see him basking in the expected downpour of grateful adulation and adoration by David for his grim victory.
However, it also seems that David's multiple sparing of Saul's life were maybe less well-known, because if this guy had known how committed David was to not taking the life of God's anointed king, he probably would have thought twice about his claim.
But he didn't - he thought once, apparently, and claimed responsibility for Saul's death, and just before composing a dirge for his lost pursuer and best friend, David orders the execution of the self-proclaimed killer of Saul.
So that's weird - the guy who's been hunting David for a long, long time is dead, and David is downright crestfallen about it. And it's not the last time in this three-chapter section that David will mourn an enemy. After Saul's death, David's made king of Judah, and another of Saul's sons is made king of the rest of Israel. Civil war breaks out, and the leader of Saul's army, Abner, is front and centre throughout. The battle goes better for David than for Ishbosheth, but both sides are suffering losses, etc.
Until Abner is accused by someone of sleeping with Saul's concubine, at which point he becomes insulted, and vows then and there to devote his entire strength to David's cause from then on, which he does.
Eventually, however, he is actually killed by the brother of a guy he had killed previously, and again David goes into a period of intense mourning and fasting. It's all very strange. I'd really, REALLY like to just attribute it to David's general awesomeness and generous spirit (and I'm 100% that's a big part of what he's doing), another potential explanation is found in verse 36-37 of chapter 3:
36 Now all the people took note of it, and it pleased them, just as everything the king did pleased all the people. 37 So all the people and all Israel understood that day that it had not been the will of the king to put Abner the son of Ner to death.
His mourning was looked on by the people as being awesome, and that, I would postulate, was an important consideration. David is, after all, still in the middle of a civil war, and it makes loads of sense that there would therefore be a sizable portion of the overall population that would have still supported Saul's line of succession, as they would have undoubtedly supported Saul himself. By publicly mourning both of these guys (Saul and Abner) David sends a message of solidarity with those people that does not go unnoticed.
Or maybe I just ruined the 'moral of the story' for you.
Sorry.
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