Emma Potter; Going to War

111: Thank You

It was like sinking into an old nightmare; for an instant Harry and I knelt again beside Dumbledore's body at the foot of the tallest tower at Hogwarts, but in reality we were staring at a tiny body curled upon the grass, pierced by Bellatrix's silver knife. My voice was still saying, "Dobby . . . Dobby . . ." even though I knew that the elf had gone where he could not call him back. 

 After a minute or so i realized that we had, after all, come to the right place, for here were Draco, Bill and Fleur, Dean and Luna, gathering around us as he knelt over the elf. 

 "Hermione?" I said suddenly. "Where is she?"

 "Ron's taken her inside," said Bill. "She'll be all right. Are you sure you don't want to rest Emma? From what Malfoy tells us, you really need it." 

"Oh, no," I said. "I'm fine, I was--" I dropped dead, how do you say that you were used to torture? I wasn't immune to the pain, but the shaking, sobbing that happened afterwards was no longer there. "I'm fine."

 Harry looked back down at Dobby. He stretched out a hand and pulled the sharp blade from the elf's body, then dragged off his own jacket and covered Dobby in it like a blanket. The sea was rushing against rock somewhere nearby; I listened to it while the others talked, discussing matters in which I could take no interest, making decisions. Dean and Draco carried the injured Griphook into the house, Fleur hurrying with them; now Bill was making suggestions about burying the elf. Harry and I agreed without really knowing what we were saying.

 As we did so, we gazed down at the tiny body, and my scar prickled and burned, and in one part of my mind, viewed as if from the wrong end of a long telescope, I saw Voldemort punishing those we had left behind at Malfoy Manor. His rage was dreadful and yet my grief for Dobby seemed to diminish it, so that it became a distant storm that reached me from across a vast, silent ocean. 

 "I want to do it properly," were the first words of which Harry seemed, fully conscious of speaking. "Not by magic. Have you got a spade?" 

 And shortly afterward we had set to work, alone, digging the grave in the place that Bill had shown us at the end of the garden, between bushes. We dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of our sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved our lives. 

 My scar burned, but I was master of the pain; I felt it, yet was apart from it. U had learned control at last, learned to shut my mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted us to learn from Snape.

 Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry or me while we were consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry or me now, while we mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out . . . though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love. . . .

 On Harry and I dug, deeper and deeper into the hard, cold earth, subsuming our grief in sweat, denying the pain in our scars. In the darkness, with nothing but the sound of our own breaths and the rushing sea to keep him company. 

"You can go rest," whispered Harry. "You need it."

I shook my head. "I'm fine."

"That's what you said when Dumbledore died," said Harry, looking at me. "It's ok not to be fine, you know."

"Your not one of the people who can say that."

"True. You know the tale of the three brothers?"

I looked up at him, "what about it?"

"The gifts Death gave the brothers were known as the deathly hallows." He then took a stick and drew on the ground the triangular eye which was on Hermione's copy of the tales of beedle the bard.