So... this was written for owluvr's Character Diversity Bootcamp challenge... I decided to write about Nicolas Flamel because, in the middle of the night, the reasons as to why he tried to create the Philosopher's Stone started to worm into my brain and attack me. Almost literally. I couldn't go to sleep for ages because I had the prompt 'forgotten' and I kept on coming back to the idea that Flamel created it because he didn't want to fade into obscurity. It's the kind of fear that a lot of people I've met share, and I used to be terrified of being forgotten when I die. I still am slightly, although not nearly as much as before, and you'll kind of find out why I'm not so scared by reading through this fic and getting to the last two paragraphs, which basically sum up my thoughts. Please keep in mind that these are my thoughts, and I'm not in any way saying that they are right, but it's just what I happen to think at this moment in time.

For all the above reasons, it's a subject matter very close to my heart so I tried to put as much of my true feelings into this as possible. I hope it shows :).

Also, yes, this was originally part of a big fic but I decided for some odd reason to make it an individual oneshot... ahem...

Title: Impact

Author: Hesta's Journal

Word Count: 1665 (hahaha... that's just a bit strange considering Flamel lived to 665, in my mind at least)

Type of Story: Oneshot.

Prompt: Forgotten

Rating: T

Character: Nicolas Flamel

Summary: "After eight years, Nicky, one has to move on". It was one sentence, one small sentence that changed Nicolas Flamel's life.

A/N: This is very different to anything else that I've ever written, quite literally. It certainly wasn't what I expected, because I was going to write it in third person but for some reason, first person seemed more... personal and I just went with my feelings. Also, the kings and queen referred to in this story are King Edward II (king from 1307-1327 - the latter date being around the time Flamel would have been born), King Edward III (king from 1327 until 1377) and Queen Isabella of France (wife of King Edward II). If I've got any dates or historical facts wrong - I tried to steer clear of mentioning too much about the times - please don't hesitate to tell me.

Disclaimer: Of course I'm JKR, which is totally why I've decided to write fanfiction of my own work...

18th December 1992

I've been afraid of dying for a very long time. It's difficult, after so many centuries, to pinpoint exactly when I first became afraid of death, but the earliest memory I have of realising my fear is probably when I was seven years old. My mother, who, at the time, worked in the kitchens of Edward III, had been my only parent for as long as I could remember and I suppose, at seven, I had just started to wonder why most other children had two parents instead of the one. So I had approached her one night and asked her who my father was and why he wasn't with us.

Even when she had purple shadows underneath her eyes and a cold, my mother was an amazing storyteller. She had launched into the tale of how she, as a young maid working for Queen Isabella, had fallen in love with a groom working for the King. She knitted the words together, invented expressions the like of which I had not heard of before, and her voice filled with memory and tenderness and excitement as she spoke. She finished the story by saying that she had married my father a little under a year before I was born but, unfortunately, he had vanished whilst she was still pregnant with me and she hadn't heard from him since.

"Do you miss him?" I remember asking, all wide-eyed wonder, when she had finished relating the story to me.

"After eight years, Nicky, one has to move on. I still love him, though," yet somehow, I didn't believe her. I think now that she was telling the truth, but at the time I could only recall having seen her cavorting with the King's blacksmith and having heard their whispered words one night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Although she hadn't intended the tale to frighten me, it impacted my future in a way that even now I've only just begun to appreciate.

The story of my missing father, a man that I should have known, should have been able to remember, but didn't, scared me. My mother's words about moving on meant, to me, that she had essentially forgotten my father, that he was no longer important to her. It worried me that, one day, I might be forgotten by those who had lived alongside me, who had laughed and cried with me. One day, I would be a memory to them and nothing more. The idea of dying, the idea of being forgotten, scared me witless.

I suppose that you could say it was one of the reasons that I grew into an angry teenager. Even my acceptance into Hogwarts at the age of eleven - a reassurance that my lifespan would be longer than the average Muggle's - didn't placate me. I was restless, spending many late nights reading anything I could get my hands on about immortality and increasing one's lifespan. It was through this that I discovered alchemy, and through this that I decided in my third-year to take it as a subject at Hogwarts (during my school years Alchemy was a favourite subject of many students).

One night, half-way through my seventh-year, I stumbled across a paragraph about the Philosopher's Stone. The exact content of the paragraph is blurred to my mind now, veiled by the passing of time, but I do remember realising that this Stone could be the solution to my searches. If I had been relentless in searching for the key to immortal life before that discovery, it was nothing compared to the obsession that caught hold of me from that night on. The Philosopher's Stone became more than just a few words on paper to me, it became my life. Every waking moment was devoted to looking for it, to trying to discover its whereabouts or the formula needed to create it.

After Hogwarts, I became one of those stereotyped old professors who sit inside their laboratories all day and night, disregarding their own health, as I attempted to recreate the Stone from the legends. It seemed futile to everyone else, yet I persisted because my fear of death and being forgotten was larger than my worry of what other people said about me, larger than my fear of, oddly enough, what might happen to my body if I continued to neglect it.

It wasn't until I was in my late seventies that I met my future wife Perenelle. She had heard stories of the crazy old alchemist who spent all his time trying to discover the secret to immortal life, and had decided to pay me a visit. An alchemist herself, she too had been researching the Philosopher's Stone and thought that, together, we could finally succeed where countless others failed. Her carefully planned and executed speech to me about how strong we could become together, how much faster the research would proceed with her on my side, convinced me to allow her into my laboratory and into my life. I showed her my working and she showed me mine. There was an almost instantaneous understanding between the two of us, and, considering this, it should not have surprised me so much when I woke up one morning at the age of eighty-three - five years after welcoming Perenelle into my laboratory - and discovered that I was in love with her.

Young ones might laugh at us, in our twilight years, falling head over heels in love like a pair of teenagers, yet at the time it was no laughing matter. We became closer than I had ever believed possible, and it was with excitement that I realised, through our mutual love and understanding for one another, we had managed to create the perfect formula for bringing the Philosopher's Stone into reality.

At the age of eighty-five, after sixty-eight years of devoted research I had finally reached my goal. I became famed throughout the wizarding world for my achievement. Perenelle, who had always been ambitious, said to me the morning after the achievement that she would rather the credit for creating it go to me. To this day, I still do not know why she decided at the last minute to remain credit-less for arguably one of the greatest achievements of wizard-kind, but I suspect she, being the clever witch she was, had predicted some of the less golden moments that followed due to the Philosopher's Stone and it was her way of staying out of it.

For the next two hundred years I was the target of power-hungry witches and wizards, all determined to become immortal and/or be granted the vast riches that came with owning the Stone. It wasn't until almost two hundred and fifty years after the Stone's creation, and thanks largely due to Perenelle's skillfully Obliviating the would-be thieves, that the majority of the wizarding world began to either forget about us or just think the Philosopher's Stone's legendary powers out of their reach. There were always a few thieves that attempted to take the Stone away, but they became less and less by the decade.

So, now, at the age of six hundred and sixty-five, and after having guarded the Stone for almost six hundred years, I'm going to bring my story to a close. I have handed the responsibility of the Philosopher's Stone over to Albus Dumbledore, a man that I know will ensure its safety for the years to come. Maybe he will even have the strength of mind to destroy it, for, although I do not regret the years I have lived and the wonders I have seen (the disasters I do not wish to recall), I know now that I did wizarding kind no favour by creating the Philosopher's Stone. Immortality and endless riches may sound awe-inspiring and goal-worthy to the inexperienced, but it also brings with it much bitterness and heart-ache. I have seen the few good friends I had - I was never the kind of person with many friends - become history as I lived on. They were forgotten as years turned into decades and decades turned into centuries. I have seen great evil committed, which has, thankfully, been forgotten. Yet great good has also been done, and it, too, has been forgotten whilst I lived on. The world I was born into has changed forever, and, although it is still my home, I feel that my time has long been and gone.

Ironically, the one event that I used to fear the most - death - is now the one that I am most willing to embrace with open arms. Perenelle has agreed with me that now is as good a time as ever to let ourselves be known to Death. I no longer fear being forgotten, because I know now that that is what comes with time and age - it is a part of death just as being known is a part of life. There is nothing to fear in being forgotten because ours is an ever-changing world and, in a sense, by just living we have left a part of ourselves in all those that we have met. We have changed the world just by being present, and, although we may not be remembered as the reason the world has changed just infinitesimally, the fact remains that all of us impact this world just by living our lives.

The only thing that is left to ask for is that we try our best to make our impact upon the world a good one. One that will remain within the hearts and minds of the people on this planet even after we, the impacters, are long forgotten. Perhaps the true secret of immortality is not being continually present in our own bodies, but living on in the hearts of the rest of the people on this planet,

Nicolas Flamel