The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

A Bit After Two

"And you're sorry for it? Even though you now defend yourself for having truly been suffering? You still regret having done it?"

"I am most sorry for it." Cadmus drew a deep breath. "Surrendering myself too soon to death because I believed that what I had nothing to live for... was not right. It was foolish. And I would do anything --" He stopped.

"I'm sorry, Cadmus."

"There's no undoing it once it's done, and when it's finished, when you wake up in death you realize what's happened and -- You know the feeling in the pit of your stomach that you've done wrong and yet you've no one to confess it to... and you feel sick to your very toes because of what you cannot change? I feel that feeling constantly... and my entire soul is always hollow with this feeling of separation... Separation I can't quite reach across."

"Separation from what?"

"Hope. Love. Time. Peace. Rest."

Regulus closed his eyes. An eternity separated from those things sounded even worse than the pain of living through something felt. The way Cadmus said it, it sounded like the same sufferings of life that would cause a person to consider such a horrible thing as ending it - but magnified and irrevocable.

"As long as you are alive, there is always hope, boy, unless you cast it off." Cadmus said. "Always-always-always hope. You just have to look for it... and it comes. And sometimes it comes like a flickering little light that barely can shine, that seems ready to be snuffed by the darkness but that little tiny light - that little pinprick of a star - but it can contain galaxies.

"But once you're dead... you cannot change things then, and you see things for how they really were. Life is about change and time and things that are in it, though they seem all consuming, they really only last but a breath -  a vapor. The things that last eternity are not the sufferings - unless we allow sufferings to take our lives, see. The things that last are the things we build up, the chances we take; the changes we make; the hearts we earn and burn for...

"Suicide is an escape, an out, a cheat of what's natural... and all it does is leave wreckage in it's wake.

"In my wake, I've done so much damage, and for many centuries I've leveraged my place as a spirit of revenge against the living. The things I've done are regrettable, unforgivable. In my feelings of separation and hopelessness post-mortem, I've done nothing but create suffering for others... I've been an agent of darkness, trying to drag down others into the same pit of despair and pain that I has been in during life." Cadmus paused talking. "But I was wrong for that. For the things I did. I see that now as clearly as I see how wrong I was in asking for the Resurrection Stone to begin with. The answers have never been in avoiding or cheating death - but in living."

Regulus asked, "Didn't the Resurrection Stone work?"

"Oh it worked. It worked... horribly worked." Cadmus shook his head, "You don't always realize what a terrible thing you've wished for until you've gotten it."

"How could bringing her back be terrible?" Regulus asked. His fingers dug into the carpet where Maryrose's tears may have fallen into the fibers.

"Because she isn't meant to be here," Cadmus replied. "She had done her living - beautiful, fulfilling living. She was at rest and I am the one who pulled her from that rest, back into this awful midland space where I reside now, separated from myself, separated from life and from death, separated from peace and rest... I did this to her, and it drove me mad."

Regulus pulled his hand back from the spot on the carpet. He closed his eyes.

Cadmus shook his head. "And I might have had hope of being with her again one day if I hadn't of done it... but now we both live in separation... she in the separation I used the stone to pull her into... and I in the separation that I caused of my own accord. She was able to rest after I gave up the stone, after I let her go... but I can never forgive myself for what I did... to her in my life, to myself in my death, or to... to Tom... in my afterlife."