𝐑𝐄𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐒-ℍ𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕪 ℙ𝕠𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣❥

𝐃𝐇 𝟐𝟑

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 Emily went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, she could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature.

She 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 cold, salty wind on her face.

The wind howled across the cliffs, cold and hollow, carrying the scent of salt and rain. Emily sat at the edge, her knees drawn to her chest, her eyes fixed on the horizon where the sea bled into the sky. The world stretched endlessly before her, but it all felt so small—so painfully quiet.

Every choice, every battle, every sacrifice replayed in her mind like ghosts whispering in her ear. Where had it all gone wrong? Which decision had brought her here—to this point where everything she loved had slipped through her fingers?

She closed her eyes, but the darkness behind them was worse. She could see him. Ethan. His lifeless body lying still in the spare bedroom of the cottage, sealed under layers of protective charms. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go back inside—to look at him again. The memory of his final breath in her arms was already carved too deeply into her soul.

Her stomach twisted violently at the thought. Her baby brother. Gone.

And still... no one came.

Remus hadn't returned. Her father hadn't come to the cottage.

Emily was utterly, completely alone.

She told herself that it was better this way—that if she stayed distant, no one else would die because of her. If she vanished quietly from everyone's lives, maybe the world would stop taking the people she loved as punishment.

But deep down, beneath the armor she had built and the strength she pretended to have, she was still just a girl. A girl who had lost too much too soon. A girl who wanted someone—anyone—to tell her she didn't have to carry this weight alone.

Harry hadn't noticed. How could he? His own world was falling apart, his mind consumed by the impossible choices he had to make, the looming war he was trying to outthink. She couldn't blame him. She didn't blame anyone.

She just wished... someone had looked a little closer.

He could not remember, ever before, choosing not to act. He was full of doubts, doubts that Ron could not help voicing whenever they 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, if that really is the Elder Wand, how the hell are we supposed to finish off You-Know-Who?"

Harry had no answers: There were moments when he wondered whether it had been outright madness not to try to prevent Voldemort breaking open the tomb. He could not even explain satisfactorily why he had decided against it: Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.

The odd thing was that Hermione's support made him feel just as confused as Ron's doubts. Now forced to accept that the Elder 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," she said again and again. "You couldn't have broken into Dumbledore's grave."

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