"Cadmus?"

The portrait had fallen off to asleep, chin dropped to his chest, but he stirred at the sound of Regulus's voice... he'd been nervously waiting for Regulus to come back around after the sheer panic of the moment when he'd begun screaming about the locket...

"Yes?"

It was a bit after two in the morning and there was a long streak of moonlight that cut across the floor of the library, where Regulus had fallen asleep on the floor. Kreacher was curled up on Regulus's stomach like a cat would do, his big ears tucked around his body like a blanket. Kreacher, too, had spent the hours worrying and trying to console Regulus.

But Regulus had been inconsolable for hours, pacing and muttering, shaking, rocking himself, and losing himself in recounting nightmare after nightmare, remembering the horrible things the dementor venom had called to his mind that day in the cave... He had rattled on switching from English to Latin to French at times, and it had been so brutal that Cadmus had wondered for a bit if it would ever stop, it Regulus might have lost his mind completely. But eventually the boy had tired, exhausted himself, and fallen down to his knees, eventually sinking onto his back and fallen into a dead silent, nearly catatonic state, staring at the ceiling, fingers absently digging at the carpet...

Cadmus was just relieved to hear the boy's voice come in a level, measured tone again.

Regulus was staring at a point on the carpet a few feet away from where he was laying, one arm stretched out to touch a particular spot.

"May I ask you a question?" Regulus asked. "It's sort of personal."

Cadmus thought about it. "Yes?"

"In all the stories, you asked for a way to bring someone back from the dead. Someone you loved. And Death gave you the Resurrection Stone."

Cadmus was hesitant. "Yes."

"Who was she?"

Silence fell over them, silence gaping wide like an abyss.

When it had dragged on for too long, Regulus murmured, "Nevermind. I understand you don't want to talk about it. I know how the story ended, too... what you did. I mean, how you - you know - died." He paused. Then, "I don't blame you. I've thought about it before."

"Don't."

Regulus turned his head and looked at the portrait.

Cadmus wasn't looking at Regulus, but off to the edge of his frame, staring as though looking at something off the canvas. "Whatever you do -- don't."

"Yeah?"

"Yes." Cadmus's voice was firm. "I positively, radically implore you that whatever you do - whatever is done to you or however dark and hopeless you ever see a situation as being - do not ever do what I did. Don't even think about it." Then, in an impassioned tone, making sure his meaning was very clear, "Suicide is never the answer, Regulus. No matter how awful things seem."

Regulus stared up at Cadmus, a sadness in them. "I mean, I never really intended to, I - I don't reckon I'd ever be brave enough to --"

"It isn't bravery. It's the coward's answer. It's bravery to stay. Every step, every breath, from the moment it's even half crossed the mind of a person to end it is pure bravery."

"I suppose."

"Not suppose, no. What I say is truth. Who better to take that truth from than from me - as somebody who has actually done it themselves?"

Regulus murmured, "You regret it?"

"I do. I do more than I have ever regrettee anything in all of the time I have... existed. And you may think that you would feel differently, once you got to the other side of things, that I just don't understand because perhaps your situation is quite a lot different than mine was, harder than mine was... Maybe you think that you truly wouldn't be sorry for it and that I'm a soft old man, irrelevant and not as sorry or sad or hopeless as you are... But I assure you that I understand precisely the pain, that my sufferings were not mild, and I chose what I did because I truly - just as you may be thinking now - believed there was no hope in life."

"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."

Regulus's eyes opened.

"Tom?" he looked up at Cadmus.

Cadmus sighed. "I haven't been fully honest with you, Regulus."

Sirius brushed the curls back from Remus's forehead, staring into his eyes, and brushing a thumb gently over the edge of the scar that ran across his face in the corner by his temple. He couldn't hardly remember what Remus's face had been like before the night he got that scar, though he could remember the morning he'd come back from the full moon night with it fresh. He remembered putting the ointment on it.

Remus's eyes were chocolate, but there was pain in them - clouding from a terrible headache, Sirius could feel it, Remus hadn't told him. But Sirius could tell it was so bad that Remus was struggling to keep his eyes from crossing and his mind to stay focused. Remus's lips were dry, but Sirius kissed them anyway.

"I love you," Sirius said.

"I love you as well," Remus answered. He closed his eyes; and he stretched out his legs. They had been tangled up in Sirius's legs, but they needed a stretch and when he did, the muscle in the calf of one of them hung up and he took in a sharp inhale of breath and his toes curled from the pain of it and he gasped and rolled quickly away from Sirius, wincing as he struggled to stand up because he'd learned ago that was the only way to unhitch a muscle like that. It killed to do it, though, and Sirius winced with him as Remus forced himself to put his weight on it and he limped, hobbling a pace in the space between the bed and the wall on his side. He cursed under his breath, biting his lips and muttering as he banged his wrists together to cope with the pain of it.

"Love, lie down, I'll rub it for you," Sirius suggested, sitting up, feeling the pain echoed in his own calf as Remus struggled. 

Remus kept pacing. "It won't help," he gasped out, "It won't help. It's - it's a werewolf thing. You won't understand..." and Remus grit his teeth, thinking about how very much he wished that Sirius - or anyone else he knew who was alive - could understand. He was suddenly very much flooded with a huge sense of loss and grief for Ned Veigler and paused in walking, leaning so his hands clung onto the bedpost and he lay his forehead against it.

Breathe, Remus, he thought. It's been a year. Why does it feel as fresh right this moment as it did then?  Remus closed his eyes, kicking his foot trying to be rid of the hurt in the muscle and mourning the feeling of being fully understood in a way that no one who wasn't turned ever could - even his precious Sirius. Oh poor Sirius, Remus thought, and his mourning turned into a feeling of shame for having closed him off, for snapping at him about it being a 'werewolf thing' in one breath and then standing here wishing somebody understood him.

Maybe somebody would understand if you told them! a voice in Remus's head scolded him.

But he hated really talking about being a werewolf. He hated it. It had been different talking about it with Ned because he could be real and raw with Ned. He knew when he told Ned that the wolf was craving flesh with blood in it, with life in it, and it was driving him mad with hunger that Ned understood because Ned had felt it too and it was less of a monstery thing to say to somebody who had felt it and was probably feeling it at the same time.

Ned didn't look at Remus with an expression of disgust mingled with misunderstanding... and the last thing in the world entire that Remus wanted to see what that look of disgust and misunderstanding on his friends faces... on James or Lily's or Sirius's faces. He'd seen it too many time on Peter's and that hurt enough. The others - especially Sirius? - that would kill him.

Sirius could feel the grief clearly and he hung his head, looking down at the blankets and his hands. It felt very private, this grief that Remus had, and Sirius felt like he was aware of something that Remus didn't particularly want him to be... and he felt shame... He felt it and thought it was his own. He felt shame for not being able to be there for Remus the way Remus needed him to be, and he almost wished he was a werewolf, too.

James sat bolt upright in bed, gasping, his heart racing.

He looked at Lily, who had rolled during the night and was laying on her back, limbs sprawled about, hair whipped across her face as her breath came out of her mouth with the tiniest, cutest little snores... Roger lay curled between her knees. It was simultaneously the least and the most attractive he had ever seen Lily Evans, he thought. And the sight of her alone, so vulnerable and real, was enough to calm the nerves that were coursing through him at least a little. 

Which was why he didn't wake her up.

He tip toed out of the room and down the stairs. He nearly tripped on the landing. Even going down, that bleeding landing got him every time. He'd have to figure it out, what it was about that bloody damn landing that tangled up his feet - perhaps it was something he could fix. 

In the kitchen, James made himself a cup of tea and sank onto one of the chairs at the table and stared down into the steamy liquid.

"Alright," he whispered to himself. "It's alright. It was just a bloody dream, does it necessarily need to be meaning anything? It really doesn't, Potter."

But it did mean something. It did, he knew it did, just that he didn't know what it was. And it was deeper than even what it looked like on the surface and he wasn't sure what it was on either of the levels... 

Level one, the meaning of the particular digital wrist watch. What was it that bothered him about that one particular watch? Where had he seen it before? Why couldn't he get it off his mind, and why - when there were thousands of watches under the water - did that particular one bother him so that he was screaming into the sky with anger and remorse? Why not the others that floated in the water? 

Level two, what was the meaning of all of the clocks all over the beach? Mopsus ought to have been taking care of those clocks, yeah? Yet here they were, just tossed about everywhere, nobody caring for them or cleaning them off. Nobody even bothering to put them on shelves! They just lay there, all untended and some of them struggled just to tick because of the angles they were at or how sand was getting in their clockwork and James hated that, he hated that, and he didn't know why he hated it - it just didn't seem right - because clocks were made to tick and they bloody well deserved to be able to tick. What good was it to have a time keeper and not have them keep the time well?

It angered him, James, how careless Mopsus was being with the clocks, as though Mopsus had been quite careless with his job lately and he, James, wanted to speak to his supervisor. James laughed at the idea of that, and he shook his head, and sipped his tea. 

It did not occur to him that he had thought of Mopsus as a time keeper, rather than a time thief, which was what they'd always called him. The term had simply slipped into James's mind as naturally as though he'd heard it a thousand times.