Chapter Text
The sea never let up at Shell Cottage. It was in the walls and the floorboards and the windows that rattled when the wind came in off the water, and even late at night, when Fleur's voice had stopped drifting up from the kitchen and Bill's footsteps were no longer crossing the hall, it went on breathing away below the cliff. Harry lay awake and listened to it because there was nothing else to do. Every time he shut his eyes he saw a flash of green, or a silver hand closing, or Dobby going limp in his arms, and he was awake again before he had properly gone under.
Dobby lay in the garden, out where the grass turned to rough ground and the wind bit harder. Harry had dug the grave himself, without magic, until his palms blistered and the spade turned clumsy in his hands, because doing it any other way had felt wrong. The headstone was plain. HERE LIES DOBBY, A FREE ELF. He had cut the words in slowly, stopping more than once when they blurred and the wind stung his eyes, and the letters were still pale where the knife had gone in. Every time he caught sight of the stone from the window, something in him settled and ached at the same time.
The cottage was full without ever feeling crowded. Fleur went through it in flashes of silver-blond hair and sharp scent, talking in a voice that managed to be cross and kind at once. Bill was quieter, but rooms seemed to settle when he was in them. Dean and Griphook kept to themselves. Ollivander had the look of a man dragged back from somewhere very far off who had not quite made it the whole way home. Ron and Hermione were never far from Harry, even when they were pretending not to keep an eye on him.
He knew they were, because he was doing the same to them. Ron had more colour than he'd had in the Forest of Dean, and his hands had stopped shaking for no reason, but the tiredness had gone into his face and looked as though it meant to stay. Hermione hid hers better, which only made it easier to miss. Now and then Harry caught her standing still a moment too long, staring at nothing, the way you did when you'd walked into a room and forgotten why. Then she'd give herself a little shake and start talking, quick and bright, and Ron would watch her with that helpless look he got when he wanted to do something and there was nothing to do.
The worst of it was that Harry couldn't stop thinking. Dumbledore's gifts sat in his head with sharp edges — the Snitch, the book, the Deluminator, and the wand he'd never wanted and couldn't leave alone. The Hallows were there too, at the edges, unwanted and impossible to ignore. He knew where that road went now. He'd felt how easy it would be to start dreaming about beating death instead of just staying ahead of it, and he hated that about himself, that in the middle of everything — the Horcruxes, the hunger, people dying for him — part of him still turned back toward the wand in that white tomb.
That had changed in the cellar under Malfoy Manor. Dobby had changed it.
Once the grave was dug the cottage didn't turn gentle. It just became the place where they were still alive. Harry noticed the small hard things first: the grit under his nails, the raw patch on his palm, the way tea went cold if nobody remembered it. Fleur remembered. She went from room to room with bowls and bandages and blankets and that fierce, put-out tenderness she kept for anyone daft enough to get hurt in her house.
Nobody said much about being afraid. It came out in other ways — a quick look at Bellatrix's wand where it lay wrapped in cloth at the end of the table, the care they all took not to touch it, the silence that dropped whenever Malfoy Manor got too near. Ron picked his words more carefully round Hermione now, as if each one had to go past the cellar first. Harry didn't say out loud that he was scared of stopping, because stopping gave the dead a chance to catch you up. He just kept moving, and made himself keep moving, and found that his hands would take the work before the rest of him was ready for it.
Bill came out to the grave one evening and stood beside him and said nothing at all, which was the right thing. Another night Fleur brought him a mug of tea and told him, in a tone that dared him to argue, that if he didn't sleep he'd fall down before they ever got near the bank. He drank it, because she was right.
He kept coming back to the small thud of earth on the grave. To how heavy Dobby had gone in his arms, and less like himself. To the flat, ordinary quiet after. Dobby had come because Harry had called for help and taken it for granted that Harry was worth running into a knife for. There'd been nothing grand about it. No speech, no prophecy — only a blade thrown across a cellar and a little elf glad to be with his friend.
That mattered more than the wand. More than Dumbledore's secrets, more than any daydream Harry had ever had about power, or control, or some way of forcing the ending he wanted. Dobby had died helping them keep going, and just then that felt like the only thing worth anything at all. Not mastering death. Just moving. Get up, keep going, find the Horcruxes before Voldemort found them gone.
So he pushed the Hallows down as far as he could and made himself think about things he could actually put his hands on — the cup they hadn't stolen yet, the snake somewhere near Voldemort, the last piece that had to be Ravenclaw's or Gryffindor's or some scrap of Hogwarts itself. The list had got almost comforting, in its ugly way.
There were still too many unknowns, though. It was Griphook who started giving them a shape.
The goblin had no use for gratitude. Harry had worked that out fast. Griphook took the food and the bed and the fact that they'd got him out of Malfoy Manor, and none of it warmed him by so much as a degree. His eyes were dark and clever and suspicious, and when he spoke it was usually to correct somebody, or to remind them that goblins and wizards did not think about who owned what in remotely the same way.
It was a couple of days before Harry went to him. Ron reckoned he should be blunt about it. Hermione said he ought to be careful. In the end Harry managed both.
Griphook was in the little back sitting room, standing on the hearthrug with his long fingers laced behind him, looking into the cold grate as though there were something in the ashes only he could see. He turned before Harry had said a word.
"You want something," Griphook said.
"Yeah," said Harry.
"At least you do not pretend otherwise."
Harry shut the door and leaned on it a second, buying time. "There's something in Bellatrix Lestrange's vault at Gringotts. We think it's Voldemort's."
The goblin's eyes went sharp. "You are certain of this?"
"No. But it's important enough that we've got to get it out."
"And you think a goblin will help you rob Gringotts."
Harry had been braced for a sneer. He hadn't expected the flicker of interest under it. "I think you know that bank better than anyone alive," he said. "We wouldn't get past the front doors without you."
Griphook looked at him for a long moment. Somewhere below them Fleur laughed at something of Bill's, and the sound came up through the floor and went again.
"You have something I want," he said at last.
Harry didn't waste time asking what. "The sword."
"The sword of Godric Gryffindor." The hunger was plain in his voice now, old and bitter and proud. "Goblin-made, and taken by a wizard, and handed down from one to the next as if the making of it were nothing. Kept behind glass. Called a wizard's treasure by people who never lifted a hammer to it."
Harry said nothing.
"It was made by my people," Griphook went on. "It belongs with my people."
"It belongs to Gryffindor," Harry said, before he could stop himself.
The black eyes flashed. "That is how wizards tell it."
Harry thought about arguing and let it drop. He was too tired, and it wouldn't have got them anywhere. Griphook wanted the sword. Without him the vault was as good as impossible; with him it was only fairly likely to get them killed.
"All right," Harry said carefully. "You help us get the thing out of that vault, and the sword's yours after."
Griphook weighed it word by word, trusting none of them. "You give me your word?"
Harry felt the trap of it close round his ankle. He thought of Dumbledore, of all the plans folded inside other plans, and something in him pulled tight. He didn't want to turn into the sort of person who learned how to say things that were true in order to lie with them. He also couldn't see another way through.
"Yeah," he said in the end. "You help us in and out, and you get the sword."
The goblin studied him a moment longer, then dipped his head. "Then I will help you."
It should have felt like winning. Instead Harry went out sick, knowing he'd just promised away the one weapon they were sure could destroy a Horcrux — basilisk fangs aside, and whatever else they might turn up if their luck ever changed. Hermione would say he'd had no choice. Ron would say the same with more swearing in it. He could hear the pair of them already. It didn't help.
Hermione was in the kitchen when he came down, sleeves shoved up, her hair knotted back and half of it already loose. She was cutting bread in short, sharp strokes. Ron sat at the table like a man who'd offered to help and lost before he'd finished asking.
"Well?" said Ron.
"He'll do it."
Ron sat up. "Brilliant."
Harry didn't answer fast enough, and Hermione looked round. "What does he want?"
Harry took the water jug and poured himself a glass before he said it. "The sword."
Ron swore. Hermione shut her eyes for a second.
"I knew it," she said. "I knew he'd ask for that."
"He'll help if he gets it after."
"And you told him yes," said Ron.
"What was I supposed to say?" Harry drank half the glass and set it down harder than he meant to. "Yeah. I told him yes."
Ron opened his mouth. Hermione got in first.
"You couldn't have said anything else," she said, and she didn't look happy about it. "Not if we want that vault."
"It's still mental," said Ron.
"Yes," said Hermione. "So's all of it."
That was the first time Harry had laughed in days. It came out short and rough and not at all cheerful, but something in him came loose with it, and for a moment the kitchen felt like an ordinary kitchen.
After that the planning started for real, and it ate the days until time went strange and slippery. Harry slept badly, woke early, ate when Fleur put food under his nose, and spent the rest of it at the table with the three of them, trying to fold four people into the shape of a plan that had no business working.
Polyjuice had to be brewed, and none of it wasted. Hermione would be Bellatrix again — that much was obvious straight off, however much the thought of it made her mouth go thin. They had Bellatrix's wand too, though Ollivander told them, in a voice worn down to almost nothing, that a wand did not forget.
He was hunched in the chair by the fire under a blanket, his long fingers moving even when the rest of him was still.
"A wand does not give up its true master easily," he said. "It may answer Miss Granger, at need. It will not fool anyone who knows how to look."
"How would they look?" asked Harry.
"There are ways to know a wand under pressure. Small things." Ollivander's hand turned over, vague. "Its flex. Its temper. Loyalty is a subtler matter than ownership — but to a careful eye, it shows."
"So if somebody at Gringotts checks it properly," said Ron.
"Then they may see it has changed hands."
"Marvellous," Ron muttered.
Hermione ignored him and looked at Griphook. "Would they check?"
"If they suspect," said Griphook. "Bellatrix Lestrange is a valued client of the bank. But the bank is not what it was. Recent things have made it careful."
Harry glanced up. "What recent things?"
The dark eyes came to him. "The break-in at your Ministry. The war. Whispers of certain items being moved from certain vaults." A pause. "Goblins hear a great deal more than wizards suppose."
That didn't help either.
Hermione made lists, because lists didn't scream at you. The first was tidy for three lines and then fell apart into cramped arrows and warnings and measurements she could barely read once the light shifted. Bellatrix's wand lay wrapped in cloth at the far end of the table, as if a bit of fabric could make it anything other than what it was. She only touched it when she had to, and even then her fingers seemed to remember the cellar a second before the rest of her did.
Harry caught himself watching her the way she'd watched him. She'd work steady for an hour and then just stop, the pencil hanging over the page, and he'd know she'd gone somewhere else. Then she'd blink and carry on, and Ron would find a reason to move his chair a bit nearer without a word about it.
"You don't have to be the one," Ron said to her once, low, while Harry pretended to study Bill's sketch.
"There isn't anyone else," said Hermione. "I'm the right height. I've done her before."
"That's not what I meant, and you know it."
"I do know it." She didn't look up. "It doesn't change anything."
Ron let it go, which cost him more than pushing would have.
Bill talked them through how the bank ran in a voice so flat it made the whole thing sound almost doable — right up until Griphook smiled at some little detail, and then it didn't sound doable at all. Ron got a goblin name wrong twice and took the correction without a joke, and that told Hermione more about how frightened he was than anything he could have said. Griphook watched the three of them the way you'd watch people you fully expected to cheat you later.
Fleur had no time for people making martyrs of themselves in the name of being useful, and kept putting food by Hermione's elbow without asking. Once she stopped behind her chair and read the wrecked list over her shoulder.
"You cannot read zis," Fleur said. "You 'ave written ze same line twice."
"I can read it well enough."
"You 'ave written it twice," said Fleur, and set a plate down on top of the page. "Eat. Then write it once."
Hermione ate. Before it got light she copied the whole thing out again, because her own hand had smudged the first one, and she didn't let herself wonder whether the smudge was ink.
They sorted the disguises after that. Ron drank Polyjuice and turned into a stocky, thick-bearded wizard Hermione picked out of a Daily Prophet photograph because he looked solid and easy to forget. Harry would go under the Cloak as long as he could. Griphook didn't like the plan and said so in a way that made sure the blame would be theirs, not his — but there wasn't a better one, and even he couldn't produce it.
At night Harry was outside more than in, standing by the grave or walking the edge of the garden where the wind off the sea pulled at his clothes. He could think straighter out there, with the stone pale in the dark and the tide grinding away at the shingle below. The plan was thin. He knew it was thin. But it went forward, and forward was the only word that meant anything now.
The morning Remus came was cold and bright. The wind had swung round in the night, and the sea sounded different for it, lower and further off. Harry was in the kitchen before anyone but Fleur, who was already laying out breakfast with the same fierce concentration she gave everything, as if the bread basket might be hiding something that wanted watching.
The knock came once, sharp. Fleur was at the door before Harry had put his cup down, wand up out of habit, asking the question they'd all agreed to ask before opening to anyone. Whatever came back through the wood satisfied her. She stepped aside, and Remus came in on a gust of cold air, greyer than Harry remembered — but there was a light in his face that hadn't been there in a long time.
"Harry," he said, and shook his hand hard, and then, before Harry could ask what had brought him all this way, said it anyway. "It's a boy. Tonks had a boy. Teddy — we've called him Teddy."
For a second Harry couldn't get a word out. He'd been living among the dead so long that news of somebody just come into the world didn't seem to have anywhere to go. Then it landed, and he found he was gripping Remus's hand back.
"That's — Remus, that's brilliant," Harry said. "Congratulations. Really."
Remus laughed, a short, dazed sort of laugh, and sat down at the table like a man whose legs had only that moment told him how tired they were. "I wasn't sure I ought to come. With everything as it is. And then I thought, no — I want to tell him myself. And there's something I want to ask you, as well."
Fleur put a cup down in front of him without being asked. Remus wrapped both hands round it.
"We'd like you to be godfather," he said.
Harry's mouth opened and shut again.
"Me?" he said. "You want — me to —?"
"You," said Remus. "There's no one we'd rather ask."
For a second Harry couldn't think of a single thing to say. He thought of Sirius — his father's choice, and then his own — and of everything the word had come to mean to him. Then it all went out of his head at once, and what was left just came out of him.
"I —" He stopped. "Blimey. Yeah. Yeah, of course I will."
Something in Remus's face let go. He lifted the cup an inch off the table, half a toast, and drank, and for a few minutes the kitchen at Shell Cottage held nothing worse than the smell of bread and the sea getting quietly on with things outside the window.
It wouldn't last. Harry knew that even while he sat there. There was a wand to disguise and a goblin to keep happy and a bank underneath a bank that nobody had ever robbed and lived to boast of. But for as long as a cup of tea lasted, on a cold bright morning with a new name spoken into the room, it was enough to keep going toward.