The Wrong Way

What makes you touch?
What makes you feel?
What makes you stop and smell the roses in an open field?

	Nicolas Flamel worked frantically.  He always worked frantically.  
He acted as though his time would soon be up.  
	Of course, it wouldn't be.  Nicolas Flamel was only twenty-three 
years old, sturdily built, with a penetrating look and a heart only for 
alchemey and equations.  
	He strived so hard, and accomplished so much despite his youthful 
frame.  But it was never enough.  And it was never what he wanted.

What makes you unclean?

	His late nights often extended into early mornings, and then to 
late afternoons.  He hardly slept.  He hardly ate.  He was focused on his 
goal, his one and only goal.  

What makes you laugh?
What makes you cry?

	The goal.  So close, close enough to touch.  A goal that so many men 
had attempted to master, to conquer, to become.  Muggle and wizard.  
Good and evil.  Poor and rich.  Status didn't matter.  Everyone wanted it.  
But Nicolas Flamel would be the first to get it, if it was the last 
thing he ever did.
	The goal was eternal life.

What makes our youth run
From the thought that we might die?

	It sounds strange, a young man striving towards such a goal 
when he had nothing but time ahead of him.  But to Nicholas, this was 
his obsession.  
	And obsession was the best qualification for it.  He ate only when 
his wife, Perenelle, reminded him.  He slept where he dropped.  He worked, 
only worked.  His once strong frame had paled, become frail.  And through 
this obsession, he never saw the truth.  
	This strive for life was killing him.

What makes you bleed?
Somebody told me the wrong way...

	When he achevied it, finally achevied it, it was the happiest day 
of his life.  It took years of struggling, failing, and weeping about 
lost causes.  But his cause was never lost, and he could never be thrown 
from the track.  That's why he acheived it first.  That's why he alone 
achieved it.  He had an iron will, and his stone gave him the ultimate 
power to match.  
	And as he drank the elixer he had worked so hard to make, he 
couldn't help but think that something was missing...
	He didn't realize what until it was too late.

What if I died?
What did I give?
I hope it was an answer so that you might live...
 
	  The stone was his reason to live.  But what, prey tell, happens 
when your reason to live is accomplished?  And through that accomplishment 
you have nothing but life ahead of you?
	Flamel had set his own trap, and walked straight into it.  
	And now he had nothing, nothing but time...

I hope I helped you live.
I hope I helped you live...

	What could he do?
	Nothing.  
	Nothing but live...
	So he would.  
	And as long as he did, he would stop others from making the same mistakes.  
No other soul would achieve eternal life.  He swore it.
	There is more to life than living.
	Nicolas Flamel learned that the hard way.

Somebody told me the wrong way...