Emma Potter; Going to War

113: Decisions

Bill and Fleur's cottage stood alone on a cliff overlooking the sea, its walls embedded with shells and whitewashed. It was a lonely and beautiful place. Wherever I went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, I could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. I spent much of the next few days making excuses to escape the crowded cottage, craving the cliff-top view of open sky and wide, empty sea, and the feel of the cold, salty wind on my face. Harry and I had decided that we let Voldermort get the wand, we need to focus on the Horcruxes.

 The enormity of our decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scared me. I could not remember, ever before, choosing not to act. I was full of doubts, doubts that Ron could not help voicing whenever we were together. 

 "What if Dumbledore wanted us to work out the symbol in time to get the wand?"

 "What if working out what the symbol meant made you 'worthy' to get the Hallows?" 

"Harry, Emma, if that really is the Elder Wand, how the hell are we supposed to finish off You-Know-Who?"

I had no answers: There were moments when I wondered whether it had been outright madness not to try to prevent Voldemort from breaking open the tomb. I could not even explain satisfactorily why I had decided against it: Every time I tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to my decision, they sounded feebler to me. The odd thing was that Hermione's support made me feel just as confused as Ron's doubts. Now forced to accept that the Elder The wand was real, she maintained that it was an evil object and that the way Voldemort had taken possession of it was repellent, not to be considered.

 "You could never have done that, Harry, Emma," she said again and again. "You couldn't have broken into Dumbledore's grave."

 But the idea of Dumbledore's corpse frightened me much less then the possibility that he might have misunderstood the living Dumbledore's intentions. I felt that I was still groping in the dark; I had chosen my path but kept looking back, wondering whether I had misread the signs, whether I should not have taken the other way.

 From time to time, anger at Dumbledore crashed over me again, powerful as the waves slamming themselves against the cliff beneath the cottage, anger that Dumbledore had not explained before he died.

 "But is he dead?" said Ron, three days after we had arrived at the cottage. Harry and I had been staring out over the wall that separated the cottage garden from the cliff when Ron and Hermione had found us; I wished they had not, having no wish to join in with their argument. 

 "Yes, he is, Ron, please don't start that again!" 

 "Look at the facts, Hermione," said Ron, speaking across Harry, who continued to gaze at the horizon. "The silver doe. The sword. The eye Harry and Emma saw in the mirror —"

 "Harry and Emma admit they could have imagined the eye! Don't you?"

 "We could have," said Harry without looking at her. 

 "But you don't think you did, do you?" asked Ron. 

 "No, we don't," I said.

 "There you go!" said Ron quickly, before Hermione could carry on. "If it wasn't Dumbledore, explain how Dobby knew we were in the cellar, Hermione?" 

 "I can't — but can you explain how Dumbledore sent him to us if he's lying in a tomb at Hogwarts?"

 "I dunno, it could've been his ghost!" 

 "Dumbledore wouldn't come back as a ghost," said Harry. There was little about Dumbledore he was sure of now but I knew that much. I nodded my head, "He would have gone on."