AN: I'm going to cross-post all my Harry Potter stories here from AO3, and only the Harry Potter ones, I think. If you want to check out the rest of my work-Dragon Age and Good Omens and a lot of miscellany-I'm Iselmyr on AO3.

There will be more chapters of this eventually, maybe.


"So you're saying that a dozen people have left estates to me, but I can't touch any of them until I'm an adult because Dumbledore has sealed the wills?" Marguerite is torn between incredulity and annoyance.

"Essentially."

"I own houses and I can't even use them." That's really the sticking point, more than the money, after a childhood in a cupboard.

"If you have anything that wasn't left to you specifically, you could access that," one of the goblins supplies.

"How would I know?" She doesn't even know how that could happen.

The goblins exchange glances for several long moments before another one speaks up. "There are some estates that have been left in our care with more…esoteric requirements for claiming. There is an artifact you can use to test if you meet any of them."

"Esoteric?" She has no idea what kind of esoteric criteria someone might want to set for their estate to be claimed, and she's immediately wary.

"Many wizards are eccentric," a goblin says with impressive understatement. "The requirements range widely, from having touched the moon to never having had a haircut—some of them are deliberately designed to be impossible, from wizards who spitefully wished to bar access to their estates to their offspring or the ministry." Marguerite spares a moment to regret that time Aunt Petunia shaved her head. It probably counts, even though it all grew back overnight. "Our fee for maintaining such estates in waiting is whatever dividends we can make from investing the funds, so long as we are always prepared to return them, and so we are perfectly happy to maintain them indefinitely." The goblin grins unpleasantly. "We do not usually advise clients of the existence of the artifact, one must request it, and pay for the privilege. But we have told you for free, and will allow you to use it in private, if you sign over to us all interest and dividends from all of your vaults until you reach your majority. We won't even tell your magical guardian, if he comes asking."

"What if I don't qualify for any of them?" Marguerite asks warily.

"That would be a pity," says the goblin, who seems to have entirely too many teeth.

Marguerite is pretty sure that means they don't expect her to inherit any of them and just want to bilk her out of interest and dividends. She's tempted anyway. An inheritance that Dumbledore doesn't know about and can't interfere with… because she's sick of being ignored and sent back to the Dursleys'. She was tortured all year and Dumbledore didn't do a damn thing.

She distracts herself wondering if touching a rock from the moon would count. She's fairly certain she learned in primary school that the Americans had brought rocks home from the moon. "Can a person use the artifact more than once, if they think they might have met another qualification?" she asks idly.

The goblin raises a brow. "We publicize no list of qualifications, but of course wizards are welcome to pay us to use it as many times as they please."

And there's no knowing if touching the moon is even a real example. She puts it out of her mind as a possibility. She has no way to get to America and touch a moon rock, anyway.

This is probably stupid, but she's feeling desperate. She hasn't eaten in two days, Vernon has taken to loudly musing outside her door about how well all her freaky magic shite would burn, Dumbledore apparently expects her to kill Voldemort or die trying, and Sirius is dead. "I'll do it," she says before she can think better of it. Fuck the interest on her estate, anyway, it's not like it's doing her any good while she starves in muggle suburbia, nor will it help her if she's murdered by Voldemort before she has so much as a chance to take her NEWTs. Her depressing thoughts only firm her resolve. This could be an ace in the hole.

The goblin nearest her grins and pulls out a piece of parchment and starts writing. An awkwardly silent few minutes later, he slides a contract across the table for her to sign.

She reads through it carefully, but it says exactly what they discussed—all the interest and dividends of all of her estates will be deeded to Gringotts from today until July 31st, 1997, and in return, the bank will grant her one use of the inheritance artifact, and maintain utmost confidentiality that they have done so. She suspects it's a rather steeper price than people normally pay, but she doesn't really care. All that money she can't use is pretty abstract to her anyway.

She looks back up at the goblins. "What do I sign with?"

One hands her a familiar-looking black quill, and her stomach sinks. "No ink necessary," he says with a leer that clearly expects her to be unfamiliar with the quill's function. She gives him a tight smile and makes a point of signing Marguerite Dorea Evans Potter smoothly and without a single flinch, then casually pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the blood off the back of her hand without breaking eye contact. Four words with a blood quill is nothing. Doesn't even come near grating over her tendons.

The goblins look a little less smug and more considering now, which is satisfying even if it's probably pointless. One of them leaves the room for several long minutes, leaving them all in awkward silence again, before coming back with a weathered black cube of stone completely covered in intricately curving lines carved into the surface.

There is a hollow approximately shaped like a spread hand in the side of it the goblin presents to her. "Place your hand here," he says.

Marguerite feels like this is probably a bad idea, but she's committed now, she signed a contract in blood and everything. She places her palm in the depression on the stone, lining up her fingers with the spaces they barely reach. She knows she's small, but it's kind of depressing how dainty she is even at almost-sixteen.

She's broken out of her musings on hand size by apparently hitting the correct alignment and the stone lighting up gold in all of the twisting lines. Her palm feels locked to the surface now, and she has the sense of something rushing through her from the stone, and then back into it. The gold flares brighter, and suddenly there's the weight of a sizable signet ring on her finger, before her hand comes unstuck and the light goes out.

She blinks down at her hand and the ring now adorning it, which is worked into the shape of a book held up by two clasped hands. "Did I get one of them?"

The goblin holding the artifact unceremoniously drops it on the table so that he can grab her hand and peer at the ring. "You have indeed," he says, sounding grudgingly impressed. "Bring the box for account 237," he snaps at one of the other goblins, and the remaining goblins burst into low conversation in their own language.

"What did I do?" Marguerite wonders aloud.

"The qualifications for account 237 are twofold," one of the conversing goblins pauses to say in English. "First, you must have a bond of true friendship with a nonhuman magical being, and second, you must have no place that you call home."

Marguerite feels rather horribly exposed by the second part. The first she supposes is probably Dobby? Or maybe Hagrid, if half-humans count. It's probably not Hedwig, since everyone has owls? It's definitely not Kreacher.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the goblin who was sent out returning. The wooden box he's holding is quite small, and she braces herself for disappointment. The estate could be anything.

"Account 237 is a bequest of one property, Ystan Isle, and one vault, number 237," the goblin says. "The contents of the vault come to 27,493 galleons, 6 sickles, and one knut, in addition to assorted items." He hands her the box, which is dark with age. "This contains your new vault key and the portkey to your new property."

For lack of any better ideas what to do, Marguerite opens the box. The key is small and gold, much like the one for her trust vault, and next to it is a pendant on a chain she assumes is the portkey. The chain is blackened silver, but the pendant itself is a tarnished bronze disk with words engraved around the edge and a little needle that can twist to point at them.

She scrubs her thumb over it and manages to clear the tarnish enough to read that the notation at the top of the dial says HOME.

Her throat catches at that, at the idea that she now has a home to go to—who knows what condition it's in, but she doesn't care. It's hers and no one else's, and she can go there and be safe.

"Um, will my portkey from this morning take me back to where I came from?" She needs to get her stuff from Privet Drive.

"Yes," the goblin says. "Was there anything else you needed?"

She thinks about taking money out and buying some things, clothes or books or something, but quickly decides not to. Not right now, anyway. She wants to see what her new home is like first. "That will be all for now," she says. "I appreciate Gringotts's help."

The goblins nod jerkily at her, and she activates the letter portkey to go back to the smallest bedroom for the last time.

The room looks even dingier in comparison with the shining marble of Gringotts. Marguerite stares at the locked door and realizes she may not have fully thought this through. She pulls up the loose floorboard under the bed, anyway, and retrieves her treasures from beneath it, considering how she might get the rest of her things.

Maybe… "Dobby!" She calls, and is rewarded with a loud pop.

"Miss M calls for Dobby!" The elf exclaims ecstatically. "What can Dobby do for Miss M?"

"Would you help me get my stuff so I can leave here?"

"Of course, Miss M!"

Marguerite grins at him, feeling a rush of fondness. "You're the best friend a girl could have, Dobby. Can you get my trunk out from the cupboard under the stairs, without letting anyone see you?"

"Of course! Dobby would do anything for his wonderful friend!" Dobby snaps his fingers and the trunk appears on the bed. That was even easier than she expected. She opens the trunk and adds the contents of the floorboard to it for ease of transport.

"Can you open the padlock on Hedwig's cage?" Marguerite asks next.

Dobby snaps his fingers again and the lock falls open. Marguerite opens the cage and lets Hedwig step out onto her shoulder.

"Thank you, Dobby. I'm going to take a portkey to a property I just inherited, but it's a secret," she tells Dobby. "Do you want to come explore with me? I have no idea what it will be like."

"Dobby would love to go exploring with Miss M!"

"Right then," Marguerite says. "Do you suppose the trunk will come with me if I hold onto it?"

"Dobby can be shrinking the trunk so Miss M can carry it in her pocket," Dobby suggests.

"That would be fantastic, if you would. I'm not sure if I'm going to be hitting some kind of limit taking it and you and Hedwig."

Dobby snaps his fingers again and the trunk dwindles down to the size of a deck of cards, and Marguerite carefully crouches to pick it up off the bed without disturbing Hedwig so she can slip it into the pocket of the pair of Dudley's old jeans that she's wearing today. She reaches out the hand of the arm Hedwig is on to Dobby. "Here, take my hand and I'll use the portkey."

Dobby grabs her hand, bouncing a little in place in excitement, grinning from ear to ear. "An adventure with Dobby's friend Miss M!"

Marguerite grins back at him. "Here goes nothing!" She turns the needle on the pendant to HOME and slides the little catch that (she hopes) activates it, and is rewarded with the unpleasantly familiar sensation of a hook behind her navel.

When the swirling colors stop, they land with a jolt in a small stone courtyard. Dobby's surprisingly strong grip keeps her from falling over this time, for which she is grateful.

Outside the courtyard is a lot of overgrown garden, and a tangled meadow in an odd shape around a fairly small stone building. There are no windows on either of the sides she can see, which is odd.

Hedwig preens Marguerite's hair and takes off into the air. "Good luck hunting!" Marguerite calls after her. She's so glad Hedwig is finally out of that cage and has a chance to eat. She turns back to contemplation of where she and Dobby should head. "Let's check out the building first, I think," she decides.

Dobby bounces on his toes and nods. "It is being very old, Dobby thinks, Miss M!"

Marguerite steels herself for a crumbling ruin, so she is quite surprised to instead find a door that opens into a perfectly clean and organized library.

"An elf loved this place," Dobby whispers, looking around in awe.

"Is that why it's so… clean?" Marguerite would never guess this library had been abandoned for any length of time.

A figure shimmers into view in front of them, more transparent than a usual ghost. Dobby's eyes widen when he sees the apparition of a house-elf. "You is putting yourself into the room!"

"I could only save one room of our house, and the library was its heart," she says in an echoing whisper. "I was being Gilly, and this is my library. I can feel that you have inherited our island," she says to Marguerite.

"Dobby is honored to be meeting Gilly," he murmurs, looking overcome. "This must have been being the best of houses."

"The very best," what's left of Gilly agrees. "Gilly was very happy here." She turns to Marguerite. "Are you going to live here, miss?"

"Oh, um, I'm Marguerite. I'd like to, if you don't mind," she says. "It would be lovely to have somewhere I couldn't be turned out of."

"An heir without a home… you are welcome here, Miss Marguerite. Take care of her, young Dobby."

"Can Dobby be building here?" Dobby blurts out, looking between Gilly and Marguerite, like he's not sure which one of them he's asking.

"Gilly would love to see a house grow around her library again," Gilly says with an air of finality, and fades away into dust motes on a sunbeam.

"Building? You can do anything you like here, Dobby, but what do you want to build?"

"Dobby has never had the chance to build something himself," he says with the air of confiding something. "With bad old masters and again at Hogwarts, Dobby was brought into a building already breathing, only for support. Dobby always thought he could build a good place, if he had the chance. Miss M really means that she would let Dobby build?"

"My answer is still yes, but I'm getting the impression that I'm missing like, a lot of context. I never knew house-elves built anything, and I've never heard of a building breathing? Can you tell me about what that means? You know I was raised by muggles, and I'm beginning to think this is another thing everyone else knew and never bothered to tell me."

"House-elves is being house elves because we is making houses," Dobby says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Usually wizards is designing them and then signing a contract with elves to build and maintain the structure. Magic buildings is taking a lot of energy, and wizards is not having enough to do it themselves, especially not at the scale of mansions they is preferring."

"So house-elves are… carpenters?" Marguerite still feels like she's missing something.

"Oh, no, Miss M. Elves is not building things in a muggle way. Magical buildings is a part of house elves. If elves leave building, it isn't anymore."

"…So when Gilly was talking about the house that used to be here, it wasn't torn apart and it didn't fall down or anything, it just ceased to exist?"

"Yes, Miss M. It must have been a very good house, for her to put herself into part of it so it could stay."

"She made herself permanently part of the library so it would never fade out like that?"

Dobby nods vigorously. "It is being very honorable to become part of a place, but many places wizards use are not being worth it. It is being very rare. Most elves would rather try again to find a place worth being with in the next life."

"…Do house-elves reincarnate?" Marguerite asks faintly.

"Oh, yes, Miss M. Dobby is being very young, this is only his second life. But an elf that puts themselves into a place is never born again, they choose to stay in the world as they are."

"Oh," is all Marguerite can think to say. She tries to muster up a better response. "That's amazing, Dobby. Was Lucius so angry to lose you because you were part of what was keeping his fancy house around?"

Dobby nods vigorously. "Dobby was glad to sever himself from that place, it was being very sick. Bad old masters do not treat their house or house-elves well."

Marguerite comes to a decision. She can sleep on the floor in the library and pee in a hole in the ground. She's not going to make a single request about what gets built. Dobby deserves the chance to build anything. "Dobby, you can build whatever your heart desires. I would consider it a privilege to get to see what kind of place you would make, and to house you and it on my land."

Dobby beams and flings himself forward to hug her. "Dobby knew Miss M was a wonderful friend, but he did not realize how wonderful! Dobby Will make the best of houses for his friend, and to be fit to stand with Gilly's library, you will see."

He starts to bound off but Marguerite has a sudden realization before he can leave the library. "Wait, Dobby, can you unshrink my trunk first?" She pulls it out of her pocket and sets it on a nearby table. Dobby turns back long enough to snap his fingers, bringing it lurching back to full size, and then he's out the door and away.

Marguerite has no idea what to do now. She wishes she could buy some food and things… there were other locations on the portkey pendant, maybe she could do that at one of them?

She pulls up the hem of the giant t-shirt she's wearing and uses it to scrub vigorously at the rim of the pendant until she can read more of it. Conveniently, one of the points along the edge is labeled DIAGON. She doesn't know if there's anywhere to buy groceries in Diagon Alley, but if she takes out some muggle money from Gringotts, she can go out the Leaky and find the nearest grocery store and get enough shelf-stable things to last a bit. And she thinks she remembers seeing a display of owl-order catalogs outside the owl post office, she should pick some of those up so maybe she can buy any wizard things she needs.

Mind made up, she heads back out the door she came in. The ghost of the skeleton of a building is flickering into different shapes around the corner of the library, and she decides it would be better not to disturb Dobby. She ducks back inside to scrawl a note on the back of an old essay—Dobby, gone to buy some groceries and pick up owl order catalogs, back soon, M—then puts on one of her school robes over her shabby hand-me-downs, pockets the keys to both her vaults, turns the portkey to DIAGON, and presses the catch.

Without Dobby to steady her, she does end up falling over on reaching the Diagon Alley apparition point, but fortunately no one is watching. She brushes herself off and heads for the bank.

Twenty minutes later, she has a featherlight anti-theft money bag and similarly charmed wallet, both full of what should be more than enough money to be getting on with, and has realized she has nothing to carry her purchases in. She has a bookbag for school, and she could portkey back and get it, but it doesn't have much room in it. Her eyes land on the enchanted luggage shop. They're sure to have something that's lightweight and bigger on the inside.

Browsing the shop turns up an inconspicuous canvas bag in a back corner that she can barely reach the bottom and sides of with her arm in it up to the shoulder. It weighs so little she nearly overbalances when she tries it on, and it has half a dozen somewhat less expanded pockets on the outside. It's perfect. Honestly, she's never using her old bookbag again. She buys it and heads to the owl post office, scooping one of every catalog into the bag, then follows a trio of middle-aged witches through the wall into the Leaky, ducks into the bathroom to stash her robe in her bag, and makes her way out into London proper.

With the assistance of a telephone directory and a couple of kind passerby, Marguerite manages to locate a grocery store nearby.

When she gets there, she nearly bursts into tears from the idea that she can buy—and later eat—anything she wants. She's done the shopping for the Dursleys before, of course, but that was always a depressing lot of things she'd never get to eat. And some things she didn't really want to—she doesn't think she'll ever fancy eating as much cake and crisps as Dudley.

She fills her cart a fairly ridiculous amount, even sticking to things that don't need to keep cold, because she can't legally cast a cooling charm and the library definitely does not have a fridge.

Paying for it all barely puts a dent in the funds she took out—canned goods especially are pretty cheap, even if she had to buy a can opener too, and some cheap dishes and cutlery. It's not quite stocking an entire kitchen—she doesn't have a real kitchen to stock—but it's a big variety of stuff, and the cashier gives her a bit of a strange look that she manages to put off by chirping about how her older sister just moved into uni dorms and they're housewarming. She's always had to be handy with a lie that would make strangers stop worrying about her.

Since she still has so much money left, Marguerite decides to make her next stop a charity shop she saw on the way, for some clothes that fit better. She comes away with a couple pairs of jeans and a handful of tops both sensible and cute, plus a bunch of sundresses and one pointlessly ruffley dress that was so pretty she couldn't resist.

She's always had old things and practical things and she just wants to have things that are pretty, for once.

She also finds a sleeping bag and realizes that it would probably be a good idea to have something to sleep in, so she picks it up too.

Every step of the way, she ducks into an alley out of view and loads her prizes into her new bag, and it stays light and easy to carry, and it all fits. Best purchase ever.

On her way back to the Leaky she passes a department store that she stops into to buy some new underthings and socks—and a pair of steel-toed black boots, because she's full of impulses today—before heading back to the apparition point and portkeying back home.

Home! What a wonderful word. Marguerite is bouncing on her toes with glee when she portkeys, and somehow the movement translates into better balance when she lands in the courtyard again. She doesn't fall over at all this time, just stumbles forward a little!

She heads back into the library, which still has flickering outlines of rooms out the direction Dobby went. She stuffs her now-pointless note back into her trunk and starts unpacking her bag.

There are a lot of desks and tables in this part of the library, so she takes advantage of them. All the food and associated goes on one, all the clothes on another, with the sleeping bag under it. The owl order catalogs go next to her trunk.

She can't resist changing right away, and ends up wearing a pair of the jeans under a sundress, with her wonderful new boots, boots that actually fit her, unlike the manky old pair of Dudley's trainers she had been wearing.

Suitably attired, she heads out of the library to explore the island. The courtyard she's of course already seen, and she's distracted for a few minutes pulling up weeds choking the flowers around the edges of it and starting a compost pile just outside the space where old foundation of the house once was.

Sighting herself by the sun—it's well into afternoon by now, so she's quite confident which direction is west—she heads due south from the courtyard, investigating everything she comes across.

There are some decaying outbuildings—those, apparently, built the muggle way, since they left ruins behind—and a low stone wall that she clambers over and finds herself in a grove of gnarled trees. When she climbs one with branches too temptingly perfect to resist, she discovers that it's an apple tree—this is an overgrown old orchard. She's pleased as anything to have another source of food to hand—and fresh food, at that, it'll make some nice variety from all her shelf stable muggle stuff. There seems to be something magical about the orchard, too, because as she walks through it, sections are in all different stages of growth, some trees just flowering, some setting fruit, some with the ground below them littered with windfall. She pulls a huge pink apple off a branch and munches it as she walks—she's been so caught up in having a home that she's forgotten to eat anything, because it had been long enough since the Dursleys fed her that she stopped feeling hunger.

The apple whets her appetite, though, and she breaks from exploring to eat another, several plums, and far too many cherries. She has no compunctions about spitting the pits out on the ground, since the windfall fruit has been landing there for goodness knows how long anyway.

Filled with energy from her meal, she forges on south until she reaches the rocky shore. She can see where it curves around to her left and right—this isn't a terribly large island, but she hardly needs an enormous piece of land all for her. (Okay, really, this is an enormous piece of land all for her, but she doesn't need a bigger one. It may not have really sunk in yet that she owns an island. Honestly, at this point, she feels like Gilly owns it more than like she does.)

Staring at the water, she suddenly realizes that she hasn't bathed in weeks. The fact that she's out in the open gives her pause for a moment, but honestly, she's alone on an unplottable island, the only other beings here are Dobby (busy), Hedwig (an owl), and Gilly (sort of dead, and probably doesn't care).

Marguerite strips off her clothes and leaves them in a careful pile on a boulder above the tideline, then makes her stumbling clattering way down the pebbled shore, wincing when she steps on barnacles, until she makes it to the water.

It's so cold her skin goes immediately numb and pale, all the blood driven back, but she doesn't care, caught up in a frenzy of scrubbing at herself with nothing but water and her hands. She takes her hair out of its messy braid and dips her head backwards, digging her fingernails into her scalp and trying to scrape herself clean by force of will, spluttering when a wave crests over her face. She finds herself laughing, on her knees in the surf, seaweed in her hair and barnacles digging into her ankles, feeling like the ocean has washed away a weight that had been there so long she almost had stopped noticing it. Her scalp tingles with cold and stings with salt where she was a little too vigorous with her fingernails, but she untangles the seaweed from her hair and makes her way back up to her clothes, slipping even more on the pebbles and streaming seawater, shivering and smiling.

She has absolutely no desire to put jeans on when she's soaking wet, so she just pulls her sundress back on and carries everything else, boots included, as she head back north towards the library. She can use Dudley's old shirts as towels, probably, and get her hair properly dry, and then it might be a bit weird with the salt but she still should be able to braid it.

…Or maybe there's a well or something around where she can rinse off the salt and get clean in a normal way that doesn't smell slightly of fish. Which probably should have been what she did in the first place, but, well, hindsight and all that.

She doesn't regret it. She watches the ground while she walks through the orchard, but the ground is mostly covered in soft moss, and she makes it back to the courtyard without a problem.

Marguerite sets her clothes and boots down on a clean bit of stone, then starts spiralling out, looking for a well or something. She hits the jackpot on her second orbit, between a couple of tangled saplings to the east of the courtyard and south of the footprint of the old house, under what looks like it might once have been an arbor. It's not a well, but what might be even better, provided it still works: a pump, the kind she's only seen in pictures before.

She doesn't really know what she's doing, but that's never stopped her before, so she pushes and pulls on the groaning lever until the rust flakes off and suddenly a gush of water pours out of the spout, at first brown-speckled but then clear.

There's a sort of stone trough under the pump, so she scoops out the rusty water as best she can and then pumps more until the whole thing is full, then strips her dress back off and hangs it on the pump and sticks her whole head in the trough.

It's cold, of course—less cold than the ocean was, but in a way that's somehow worse, because it doesn't make her numb instantly, so she can feel it. Her teeth are chattering, but she rinses her hair out thoroughly, until the strands are no longer sticky with salt, then kneels in the trough to contort herself around and splash the water all over herself as best she can to get the rest of the salt off of her, then wrings out her hair.

She's shivering a lot by the time she puts her dress back on, and the breeze has picked up. She decides it's time to go back inside and heads over to pick up her other clothes and go back into the library. She feels bad about the idea of dripping on Gilly's floor, so she drops her jeans on the floor and stands on them and sort of slides her way over to her trunk with the denim absorbing the water running down her legs.

Once she's at her trunk, she can pull out a couple of Dudley's old t-shirts and wrap one around her hair, then pull off her now-damp sundress and rub herself dry with another shirt before pulling on a fresh sundress. When she's sure her legs are dry, she drapes the damp jeans over her trunk to dry and switches the wet t-shirt on her hair for another one, draping the wet shirt next to her jeans.

She's a little worn out now, it's been a long day, so she pulls on some pajamas, unrolls her sleeping bag to get cozy in, pulls out one of the books she was assigned reading in over the summer—she can actually do her summer homework for once!—and curls up on the floor to sip out of a can of soup while she reads.

She's clean and the sleeping bag is clean and the floor is hard but it doesn't have any broken springs, and she's pleasantly full for the first time since she left Hogwarts, and shortly after she finishes her can of soup she drifts off to sleep.