He didn't wait for Harry to respond.
"I didn't think so. I guess we can only hope he misunderstood the severity of the threat and hope we get this guardian thing taken care of before you get yourself killed or it'll make everything we've done here today irrelevant."
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
"Well, with you dead, your line gone," Lichfield explained, "and you being too young to name an inheritor, the guardian becomes only one with a viable claim. It won't matter then they had abandoned you, or stole from you, the Ministry will just give everything over to them."
"Harry Potter must stay where he is safe!" Dobby's voice cried again in his mind.
"So you're saying that this guardian has reason to kill me?"
"I'm saying it's a theory. But yes, this guardian has plenty of golden reasons to kill you, especially now you know what they've been up to."
"And all I wanted to do was be nice to a house-elf," Harry said stupefied.
"Yeah, they'll make you want to. It's hard not to like them, even the old crusty ones. It sounds condescending but they're really a lot like small children - only with a lot of power behind them and an eagerness to please."
Harry wanted to say something in Dobby's defense, but really couldn't since he had been treating him the same way without even realizing it. Even Cadogan did it. 'Maybe it's their tiny bodies that makes us treat them like children, ' Harry thought. 'That way we'd look after them .' It'd certainly explain why the word 'family' was repeated so often when dealing with them.
"I'd ask how much you wanted to spend," Lichfield continued, "but since you've got no real idea about the size of your own funds-"
"I'll leave that up to you," Harry said. "You just find him and get them to sell. He's the whole reason I'm here in the first place so no matter what it costs he's worth twice that much."
Lichfield looked over at the Overseer.
"You want me to poke him or do you want to wait until he finishes?" Lichfield said with a slight smirk.
By this time Barchoke had switched to some kind of harsh-sounding music for his humming Harry was sure must be goblin in origin.
"Poke him," Harry said with a smile.
A quick prick by a gnarled poking finger soon got the goblin's attention.
"Ow! Sorry about that, Mr. Potter," the goblin said, rubbing his side. "Overseers are required by law-"
"I told him," Lichfield interrupted. "Final details?"
"Right, right. Now the Seal's in place all that's left is the Key," the Overseer said.
"You have your Key," Lichfield asked, "or is it in your stuff back at the muggles?"
"Er- neither," Harry said. "I don't have a key."
Lichfield looked at the Overseer, the Overseer looked at his files.
"It says here your Key was presented to a Teller on July 31st of last year to be inspected before withdrawal, and that's corroborated by the report filed by the cart operator who led you to your vault and opened the door," the Overseer reported. "Are you saying these reports are in error?"
"Er- No, it was there. It's just-," suddenly a really uncomfortable thought occurred to him. Hagrid was the one who had given his Key to the Teller. But how did he get it? Suddenly Harry heard Hagrid's voice echo in his mind. "An I've also got a letter here from Professor Dumbledore," Hagrid said importantly, throwing out his chest. "It's about the You-Know-What in vault seven hundred and thirteen… "
Hagrid coming to see him had been "Hogwarts business," or so he'd told the bartender at the Leaky Cauldron. So had retrieving the Sorcerer's Stone from vault seven hundred and thirteen. To get his money out of his vault Hagrid would've had to have his Key, but no one besides the guardian could have had it to give him. 'And wasn't Hagrid always going on about how great Dumbledore was?' Harry asked himself. 'He'd do anything for the old man without asking why .'
And then Hermione's voice sprang to mind, "We were dashing up to the owlery to contact Dumbledore when we met him in the entrance hall - he already knew - he just said 'Harry's gone after him, hasn't he?' and hurtled off to the third floor."
And then she was replaced by Ron, "D'you think he meant for you to do it? Sending you your father's Cloak and everything?"
Harry's mind bounced back to that Christmas, "Your father left this in my possession before he died-"
"Well," Hermione exploded back into his mind again. "If he did - I mean to say - that's terrible - you could have been killed."
'But Dumbledore had rushed to help me. He saved me, didn't he?' Harry asked himself.
'We can't know that, ' the Harold side of him said. 'Quirrell could have already been dead by the time he got there. We were unconscious, so how would we know the difference? He could have just taken credit for it. '
'Then why didn't he just kill us then?' the Harry side asked.
'Maybe he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. But if horrible things just happen around us… '
No part of him liked where this was going. Especially since he was now talking to himself in his own head.
"What will happen to them?" Harry asked the others. "The people around the guardian. The ones who knew about the Dursleys and didn't think anything of it. I can't think they'd betray me like that, no matter what his motives might be," Harry said scornfully, unable to bring himself to say the name.
"I can't see charges sticking against people who didn't know any better even if you wanted to make them," Barchoke said. "We all made the same mistake, so there's plenty of blame to go around. It's the money we're going after and this guardian is the one who took it. Him and the ones he gave money to, they're the ones Gringotts will be holding liable for the debt."
"You know who he is," Lichfield said. "You know who has the Key." He hadn't said it like a question.
"I want to see what happened to the last Account Manager," the Harry who was Harold said. "The one before Gropegold." He looked Lichfield in the eye and didn't say it like a request.
.....
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