The Potter Twins and the Deathly Hallows {7}

28. Shell Cottage

"In a world of black and white,  we were getaway green," - Getaway Green, All Time Low 

Bill and Fleur's cottage stands alone on a cliff overlooking the sea; it's walls embedded with shells and whitewashed. It is a lonely and beautiful place. Wherever I go inside the tiny cottage or its garden, I can hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. I've spent much of the past 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. 

The enormity of our decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scares me. I can't remember, ever before, choosing not to act. I'm full of doubts, doubts that Ron can't help but voice whenever we're together.

"What if Dumbledore wanted us to work out the symbol in time to get the wand? What if working our what the symbol meant made you worthy to get the Hallows? Harry, Haylee, if that really is the Elder Wand, how the hell are we supposed to finish off You-Know-Who?"

Harry and I have no answers: there are moments when we're alone that we wonder whether it had been outright madness not to try and prevent Voldemort breaking open the tomb. I can't even explain satisfactorily why we decided against it: every time I try to reconstruct the internal arguments that led to our decision they sound feebler to me. 

The odd thing is that Hermione's support makes me feel just as confused as Ron's doubts. Now forced to accept that the Elder Wand is real, she maintains that it is an evil object and that the way Voldemort had taken possession of it was repellent, not to be considered.  

"You could never have done it," she says again and again. "You couldn't have broken into Dumbledore's grave."

But the idea of Dumbledore's corpse frightens Harry and me much less than the possibility that we might have misunderstood the living Dumbledore's intentions. I feel that we're still groping in the dark; we've chosen our path but keep looking back wondering if we'd misread the signs, whether we should have gone the other way. From time to time, anger at Dumbledore crashes over me again, powerful as the waves crashing against the cliff beneath the cottage, anger that Dumbledore hadn't explained before he died. 

"But is he dead?" says Ron, three days after we've arrived at the cottage. Harry and I had been staring out over the wall that separates the cottage garden from the cliff when Ron and Hermione found us; I wish that had not, for I have no wishes of joining their argument. 

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

"Look at the facts, Hermione," says Ron, speaking across Harry and I as we continue to gaze at the horizon. "The silver doe. The sword. The eye Harry saw in the mirror --"

"Harry admits he could have imagined the eye! Don't you, Harry?"

"I could have," says Harry, without looking at her. 

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

"No, I don't."

"There you go!" says Ron quickly, before Hermione can 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! He could have been brought back, like James!"

"Dumbledore wouldn't come back as a ghost," I say. There is little about Dumbledore I'm sure of now, but I know this much. "And I don't think he would come back, either. He would have wanted to go on."