Butterfly Effect ; H. Potter

140. here lies dobby.

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

After a minute or so, he realised that they had, after all, come to the right place, for here were Bill and Fleur, Dean and Luna, gathering round him as he knelt over the elf.

"Antheia?" he said suddenly. "Where is she?"

"Ron and Hermione've taken her inside," said Bill. "She'll be all right."

"You're sure?"

"Quite."

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; Harry listened to it while the others talked, discussing matters in which he could take no interest, making decisions. Dean carried the injured Griphook into the house, Fleur hurrying with them; now Bill was making suggestions about burying the elf. Harry agreed without really knowing what he was saying. As he did so, he gazed down at the tiny body, and his scar prickled and burned, and in one part of his mind, viewed as if from the wrong end of a long telescope, he saw Voldemort punishing those they had left behind at Malfoy Manor. His rage was dreadful and yet Harry's grief for Dobby seemed to diminish it, so that it became a distant storm that reached Harry from across a vast, silent ocean.

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

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

His scar burned, but he was master of the pain; he felt it, yet was apart from it. He had learned control at last, learned to shut his mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted him to learn from Snape. Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry while Harry was consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry now, while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out ... though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love ...

On Harry dug, deeper and deeper into the hard, cold earth, subsuming his grief in sweat, denying the pain in his scar. In the darkness, with nothing but the sound of his own breath and the rushing sea to keep him company, the things that had happened at the Malfoys' returned to him, the things he had heard came back to him, and understanding blossomed in the darkness ...

The steady rhythm of his arms beat time with his thoughts. Hallows ... Horcruxes ... Hallows ... Horcruxes ... yet he no longer burned with that weird, obsessive longing. Loss and fear had snuffed it out: he felt as though he had been slapped awake again.

Deeper and deeper Harry sank into the grave, and he knew where Voldemort had been tonight, and whom he had killed in the topmost cell of Nurmengard, and why ...

And he thought of Wormtail, dead because of one, small, unconscious impulse of mercy ... Dumbledore had foreseen that ... how much more had he known?

Harry lost track of time. He knew only that the darkness had lightened a few degrees when he was rejoined by Hermione, Ron, and Dean.