Louis Weasley sat on the low wall that ran all around Shell Cottage, gazing out at the sea without really taking in the choppy grey waves, thinking hard about something that had been troubling him for a while. He had lived here in the little cottage overlooking the sea for all of his ten years of life, and never once had he questioned the gravestone that lay just a few yards from his home.

For most of his life, he had walked round and round the garden, sometimes playing and chasing and running, but more often than not, simply walking round by himself, especially when both Victoire and Dominique had gone off to Hogwarts. He traced the low wall with his small fingers, never caring about the powdery whitewash than usually stained his fingers by the end of the day. He walked up and down the shore whenever the tide permitted him, he strolled through the flowerbeds whenever his dad wasn't watching, he sorted through the huge piles of driftwood that the sea deposited on the sand each morning and he observed the large flat stone with strange symbols that seemed to mark something, though he wasn't quite sure what.

It was a few years before Louis realised that those precise, angular scratches in the stone were letters, words. He kneeled beside it, his curiosity drawn, staring at the letters once his young mind had established that these were indeed words. He squinted his blue eyes, turning his head to the side as though to better understand what the words meant. He knew how to read of course, both in English and French thanks to his mum, but these letters were unlike any he had encountered in books. He wondered briefly if these markings were some kind of code. Yes! He sat back at his heels, beaming delightedly at his discovery. A code, that's definitely what it was. The only problem was that Louis couldn't exactly read or decipher codes.

During the summer holidays when he was seven years old, which were filled with visits to the Burrow and long trips to France to see Grand-mère and Grand-père, and bustling cousins and aunts and uncles popping into Shell Cottage, Louis managed to sneak into his eldest sister's room when she was otherwise preoccupied chatting with their cousins Molly and Lucy, and extracted her copy of Spellman's Syllabry from her Hogwarts trunk. He flipped through Victoire's textbook eagerly, knowing this was what she used to translate Ancient Runes in school. He had decided that these markings had to be runes, and was most disappointed when he couldn't find them in the book. Either the book was seriously lacking in valid information, though he quickly dismissed this thought, reflecting on how often Vic remarked that the textbook had never failed her yet. Clearly, these markings were not ancient runes after all, and as the older and wiser Louis became, he was forced to conclude that perhaps this wasn't a secret code after all.

When he was nine years old, after much observation, Louis finally made the discovery that these were real words after all. It had taken a lot to come to this conclusion, involving taking in the flat, weathered stone from all possible angles, including climbing one of the trees overlooking the garden and obtaining a bird's eye view. They were letters and they spelt out real words. He whispered the words to himself over and over, tracing his finger over the slashes in the stone.

"Here...lies...Dobby," he murmured. "A...free...elf."

A free elf? What did that mean? And who was Dobby and why was he buried in Louis' garden? He had seen graves before, but never one quite like this, if indeed this was a grave. He'd been to see his Uncle Fred's grave many times, but it was a shining white marble stone with his name, and his date of birth, and when he died. He had never known a grave that was simply a flat stone marking a spot among the reddish earth and green shoots. Was this what all graves for elves were like? He pondered endlessly over why there would be an elf's grave in his garden. He wondered whether his family had ever had a house elf. He didn't think so. Granny Molly would never allow anyone to help her in her kitchen, not even a house elf, and besides, Aunt Hermione would have a heart attack if anyone in the family availed of the services of a house elf. In Louis' eyes, Aunt Hermione was the authority when it came to house elves, and he wondered whether she would know anything about this mysterious elf grave in his garden.

Another thought occurred to him as he sat, absently stroking the weathered stone. Perhaps Aunt Hermione wasn't supposed to know about this, and that's why it had never been mentioned. He couldn't remember Victoire or Dominique or even his parents ever bringing it up in conversation. Then again, a dead house elf wasn't something that usually dominated talk around the dinner table.

By the time Louis was ten years old, he had deduced that this strange elf grave must be something to do with the War. It was the only plausible conclusion he could think of. Nobody really liked to talk about the War. Even now, Granny Molly would get slightly tearful, and Granddad Arthur would get that faraway look in his eyes if anyone brought the subject up. Louis knew the basics, of course, it was impossible not to with the family he had been born into, but he felt he was seriously lacking in the finer details. Like why there was a house elf's grave just yards from his house. At ten years old, Louis believed that he was old enough to be privy to the kind of information his parents believed he was too young to hear, especially since he was bound for Hogwarts in just a few months.

Somehow though, Louis could never bring himself to ask his mum and dad the questions he needed to know. Many times, he found himself almost on the brink of blurting something out, but he always stopped himself just in time. Did he really want to know all these details he'd never been allowed to hear? The young child inside him shied away from this, insisting he really didn't need to know the precise, gory details, whereas the ten year old boy Louis Weasley was simply dying to find out the mystery of Dobby's grave, whoever Dobby was.

This was how Louis found himself to be sitting on the garden wall, pondering, as he so often did these days, over the grave that endlessly occupied his thoughts. So deep in thought was he that he didn't hear someone coming behind him until that person had scooped him up in strong, capable arms and thrown him high into the air.

"Dad!" Louis squealed, momentarily snapped out of his reverie as his father tickled him mercilessly until tears of mirth gathered in his eyes and he batted away his father's hands good naturedly.

Bill sent down his only son back down on the wall and smiled, though Louis could see that his father's familiar grin did not quite reach his blue eyes. Louis eyed him warily. He hoped he wasn't about to receive a telling off, though he couldn't think of anything he had done recently to warrant one.

"Is everything alright with you, son?" Bill asked, sitting down beside Louis and extending an arm round him.

"Fine," Louis answered, far too quickly to pass unnoticed.

Bill raised an eyebrow. "That's not what your mum thinks," he sighed.

Louis frowned. "Why would she think that?" he retorted. "I'm fine."

"You've been very quiet recently," Bill remarked almost casually as though they were discussing nothing more than what they'd had for breakfast that morning.

"Only because I can't get a word in edgeways whenever Dom's around," Louis laughed, hoping he could pass this whole matter over as soon as possible.

"True," Bill admitted, though his tone suddenly turned serious, "though Dominique's been back at Hogwarts for weeks, and you've been very quiet for a while now."

Louis sighed. Perhaps now was the time to come clean. He opened his mouth to speak, then foolishly closed it again, looking remarkably like his cousin Lily's treasured goldfish. His father looked at him expectantly.

"Is there anything you want to talk about?" Bill asked eventually, sensing that Louis wasn't about to start talking of his own accord.

"Maybe," Louis replied, his eye firmly back on the grey waves.

The two sat in silence for a few minutes, Louis absently swinging his legs, his father's arm still tight around his shoulders.

"Dad?" Louis finally began, though his voice faltered off before the sentence could fully form on his lips.

Bill didn't speak but merely looked at Louis, silently encouraging him to continue.

"Dad," he said again. "Why...why is there, erm, a, you know, a gravestone in our garden? For an elf?" He spoke quickly as though determined to get the words out of his mouth as soon as possible.

For a moment, a brief look of old sorrow seemed to pass over his father's heavily scarred face. Sorrow. Louis had never seen his dad look like that before, and he felt strangely frightened of what was coming next.

Bill sighed. "So that's what you've been looking at," he said softly. "I should have known this was coming soon enough. Although, both the girls were a lot older than you before they asked."

Louis' head snapped up immediately to look at his father. "Victoire and Dominique both know?" he asked incredulously.

"Well they are quite a bit older than you," Bill said fairly.

"Not by much," Louis said quickly, though he decided to put this matter on hold for the moment. There were more pressing issues than the age gap between him and his sisters right now.

Bill smiled, though again Louis noted that his eyes remained somewhat sad and faraway. "So you want to know about the elf grave, then?"

Louis nodded slowly. His father sighed once more. "Don't you want to tell me?" Louis asked, as his father's hesitation became more and more apparent.

"To be honest, Louis, I wish I didn't have to tell you. You have no idea what it was like. Merlin, I don't even know all the ins and outs of it!" He allowed himself a brief smile, as though to reassure his son before continuing. "Those were really terrible times, Louis, and you can't imagine how glad I am that you and your sisters have nothing but old stories and other people's memories of those years. So, back to the elf grave in the garden. Well, at that time, it was just me and your mum living here. Granny Molly, Granddad Arthur, your Uncles Fred and George and Aunt Ginny were all living with Great-Great-Aunt Muriel-"

Louis interrupted. "Why were they all there?" he asked, scrunching up his nose as he concentrated on the details of the story.

"By this stage, the Death Eaters, dark wizards," he explained quickly at the look on his son's face, "were targeting anyone who'd shown loyalty to Professor Dumbledore or the Order of the Phoenix, so it wasn't safe for anyone to go to work anymore, or for Aunt Ginny to stay at Hogwarts. Obviously, there wasn't enough room for everyone here at Shell Cottage, whereas Muriel had a huge house all to herself. It made sense for them all to go there since it wasn't safe at the Burrow anymore."

Louis nodded slowly, wondering how this had anything to do with the mysterious grave in the garden.

"Following everything? Well, one evening, in late March as far as I remember, a rather strange assortment of people turned up here out of the blue-"

"Death Eaters?" Louis asked fearfully, imagining a group of these forces of evil turning up on the beach and duelling with his mother and father.

"Not Death Eaters, no. Your mum and I were sitting in the living room, just talking and having a cup of tea, when all of a sudden, I saw a few people appear, out of nowhere, on the beach." He pointed to a spot on the sand some yards away. "I grabbed my wand and sprinted straight down there, convinced they had to be Death Eaters."

"Who were they?" Louis whispered.

Bill smiled. "Well, they weren't Death Eaters by any means. One of them was a girl, only about sixteen, the same age Aunt Ginny was at the time, another was a boy, who looked to be the age of Uncle Ron. One of them was a very frail, very elderly man who looked fit to collapse. All three of them were in a bad way, as if they had tortured or badly injured. Darting amongst them, asking quickly if they were alright was a house elf, and just before I reached them, he had disappeared again."

"Who were they?' Louis asked again, his interest hooked on a story he could hardly believe was real.

"The girl was Luna Lovegood, yes, Lorcan and Lysander's mum," he added as Louis began to ask. "The boy was called Dean Thomas, I think he works in the Ministry now, you may not know him. Then there was Ollivander, he was the elderly man."

"The man who owns the wand shop in Diagon Alley?"

"The very same."

"What were they doing here?"

"Well, that's what I asked. Originally, I thought they had been sent to trick us or something, but one of them, Luna I think, quickly explained that they had been imprisoned by the Death Eaters, but they had been sent here by Uncle Ron, and he'd be along in a minute with Uncle Harry and Aunt Hermione."

"Did you just believe them?" Louis felt rather sceptical that his father could just trust three complete strangers who had just turned up at his house.

Bill looked rather sheepish. "I wasn't entirely sure, to be honest with you, Louis. Obviously I knew who Ollivander was, and I vaguely recalled seeing Luna at me and your mum's wedding. I admit, I was unsure as to whether or not I could trust them. Then they mentioned that Ron had sent them here, and I relaxed a little. You have to remember that we had barely seen or heard from Ron, Harry or Hermione in months. The three of them disappeared after the wedding in August, then the next time I saw Ron was when he turned up here that Christmas alone-"

"Why did he come here by himself if he was supposed to be with Uncle Harry and Aunt Hermione?"

Bill did not answer for a moment. "That's an entirely different story," he said eventually. "I'm afraid it's not really my story to tell, Louis, and I don't really know all the details about it."

Louis nodded quickly, eager for his father to continue his story.

"Anyway, a few moments later, Uncle Ron himself turned up, with Aunt Hermione, who looked like she'd just been tortured. Seconds after, Uncle Harry appeared with, would you believe it, an injured goblin and the same little house elf I'd seen only moments before. Only, something was wrong, and nobody seemed to realise it right away."

"What was wrong?" Louis asked in hushed, awed tones.

Bill's voice took on a deeper, more sombre tone. "Well, the elf had been killed."

Horrified, Louis gasped, his hand leaped instinctively to cover his mouth, though in hindsight, he should have realised that a dead house elf would crop up in the story somewhere. After all, the very question that had started this all was why there was an elf grave in their garden.

Bill smiled sadly, pulling his son closer to him. "The little elf had somehow known to come to Malfoy Ma-, er, the place where Ron, Harry and the others had been captured and because of the unusual properties of elf magic, he was able to Apparate in and out, even though they couldn't, and could take others with him."

"So he rescued Mrs Scamander and Mr Ollivander, and the other boy?"

"Well, she was still Miss Lovegood then, but yes, that's what happened. Then, he went back and helped the others escape too, though unfortunately, he was killed just as he was about to leave with Harry and the goblin, Griphook."

Silence fell between them, as each was lost in their own thoughts; Bill reliving the awful events of that night, Louis trying to imagine what it must have been like to be alive in those times. Eventually, words rose again to Louis' lips.

"Is that why Dobby is buried here then?" he asked eventually. "Is that what normally happens with dead house elves?"

To Louis' amazement, his dad had actually smiled at these words. "Not really, Louis," he said, with an almost laugh. "You see, back in those days house elves weren't treated nearly as fairly as they are. Now this particular elf, Dobby, had actually been freed by Uncle Harry himself a few years previously, though I didn't actually find this out until much later. No doubt, the elf came to think of Harry as something like a friend, and I believe those feelings were returned in full. In the end, the elf had given his life so that the rest of them could get away safely. Harry felt that someone so brave deserved what he thought was a proper burial, so he dug the grave in the Muggle way, using a shovel instead of his wand, and when Ron and Dean saw what he was doing, they helped as well. They all thanked the elf for saving them, gave him their hats and socks, and laid him to rest like the free elf he was."

Louis gazed wide-eyed at his father, remembering all those times he had walked round the grave, traced the markings in the stone, pondered what it could mean, never realising he was sitting by the final resting place of a hero; a hero who had saved his aunt and uncles, and all the others. He wondered how he could have ignored it for so long, could have put off those questions all these years. It was only now that he realised how much he had needed to hear the answers his father had provided. And yet, there was so much he still didn't know.

What had Uncle Ron and Harry and Aunt Hermione been doing when they'd been captured that night? How had the elf known where to find and save them? Even closer to home, he suddenly realised how much he took for granted as part of everyday life, without ever asking or questioning. Why was his father so heavily scarred? He thought he'd heard years ago a whisper about it being the work of a werewolf, yet that didn't make sense. If his father had been attacked by a werewolf, wouldn't he transform every full moon? Louis would admit he had been somewhat ignorant in terms of Dobby's grave, though he could hardly fail to notice if his dad mysteriously disappeared every time the full moon was clear in the sky. And what about his mum? He knew she had been part of the Triwizard Tournament when she was a teenager; the same one Uncle Harry had somehow taken part in. But why did his mum, Beauxbatons champion and the absolute queen of poise and grace, grow suddenly close to tears whenever the subject was brought up?

There was an awful lot Louis Weasley didn't know about the War, even in relation to his own family. Only now that he knew about the elf grave that had plagued him for so long, did he understand that that was merely the tip of the iceberg.

It was a while before either of them spoke again, but in the end, it was Bill who broke the silence first.

"Does that answer all your questions, son?" he asked.

"Sort of," Louis answered truthfully.

His dad smiled understandably. "I know what you're thinking. I've only touched on one night, one very small portion of the events of the War."

Louis sighed. "I'm really glad I finally know about Dobby," he admitted. "But there's still so much more I need to know!"

It was Bill's turn to sigh deeply. "I know, Louis, I know. But you need to remember, son, you are only ten years old," he said gently, knowing full well his words would do nothing to bolster his son's spirit or morale.

"Do Victoire and Dominique know everything?" Louis couldn't help asking.

To his surprise, Bill shook his head. "In all honesty, I don't think anyone knows all the details about everything that happened, except perhaps Uncle Harry, and, understandably, he doesn't like talking about it, so don't even think about pestering him, or James for that matter."

Louis nodded resignedly, knowing his case was lost. This was all he was going to find out for now and perhaps that was alright, at least for now. Maybe he didn't need to know everything just yet.

He thanked his dad for his honesty, received a one armed hug and a ruffling of his hair in return, and then swung his legs off the wall. He left his dad sitting there, gazing absently out at the sea, and headed back towards the garden, his feet pounding the familiar track he had taken so many times before. Without even being fully conscious of what he was doing, he had arrived back beside Dobby's grave, though this time, he was filled with the knowledge he had never known before.

Silently, he knelt beside the gravestone, full of a new found respect for the previously unknown elf who slept beneath the earth. His finger traced the words as they had so often before, but now his mind buzzed with the thoughts and his father's recollections of that night.

"Here lies Dobby," he whispered, unsure of whether he was simply talking to himself or to the elf who'd died so long ago. "A free elf."

A free elf. He'd never been uncaring towards house elves as such, he'd never really had much contact with them, but at that moment, ten year old Louis Weasley made a solemn promise to himself, to Dobby, to anyone who cared that he would treat any house elves he happened to come across with the utmost respect. He had learned that bravery did indeed come in all forms and, at least for his family, the house elf who'd died a war hero would not be forgotten.