Ashleigh Snape was already six when her brother came along. Perhaps this was why she didn't love him. Rather than having her father all to herself she now had to share him with some strange new woman and a squalling baby whom everyone seemed to think was the dearest thing ever to be born.

Much cooing ensued from, well, everyone and little Ashleigh became very jealous. And it didn't seem to help that people gave him attention even after the novelty of a new baby should have worn off. At three months he was diagnosed with epilepsy at a year it became obvious that he was developing abnormally, speech and walking and such all too far advanced, the doctor just said he was gifted. Her father was thrilled.

When he was two he was attacked by two men and became quite adverse to human contact from that point on.

When he was three Ashleigh pushed him out of a firth storey window. Babies and toddlers are said to bounce and that was probably the only reason he survived, albeit with two broken wrists a crushed collar bone and all means and manor of internal injuries. Her father took him to st. Mungos where he yelled at her and then her step mother yelled at her and then they both doted on the injured toddler. When he grew up he would forever be desperately afraid of heights.

At four he was kicked in the head by a shire house and didn't say a word for a year afterwards, not until at five he contracted bacterial meningitis, he nearly died but at least his voice came back.

When he was seven, Ashleigh shoved him and hadn't meant for anything to happen but his eye caught the corner of a kitchen cupboard. They were new and pristine white and it was as though someone had taken a pot of red paint and splashed it up the side of the cabinet. Nathan's mother had blamed her and her father had defended her, two days later they filed for a divorce. Nathan was blind in his right eye after that. It was also after this that he stopped showing any signs of the magical prowess that he had before. Severus Snape had just shrugged and said 'maybe it was all just too much' but she could tell it upset him.

With her father and step mother living apart Nathan wasn't their all the time, she had more time with her father and as she matured begin to like her little brother more to boot. She didn't like him by any means but she had to admit that he was amusing at times. Being older (and a good deal scarier than him) meant that often he would follow her around like a kicked puppy and this satisfied her to no end.

At 16 she left school and joined the army, at 20 she came back a bonafide hero, her brother was 14 and had so much love for her, such pride in his eyes and that's when, for a short while, she had thought it would all be okay.

For the next four years they would be close friends and when her son was born Nathan would sit and hold him and coo over him and offer to babysit when she was missing Toby, still in the army. This didn't last. At that age she was working hard, she had seen a lot and she was tired and stressed all the time trying to build up her business, Nathan was bring and eccentric and a breath of fresh air.

When he was 16, his mother died of breast cancer and two years later, a scant few months before Nathan's 18th birthday, came the death of their father. Nathan especially had a hard time with it, still practically a child with no job, no chance at education as he found himself having to drop out and find work, a mortgage on the very house he was living in and no way to pay it and no support from anyone he found himself quickly bordering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Ashleigh was too busy brooding and simultaneously trying to look after her brand new baby to realise the state things had left her brother in and at the funeral they argued. Out of spite she used her influence to get him fired from the job he'd managed to procure and he didn't talk to her again not until a few years later when his name cropped up on the front page of The Independent with an article called 'I Will Not Comply to Society's Norms and Conditions'.

That had been one of the first sentences both of them had ever learnt to say, painstakingly taught to them by their father and thoroughly embraced by her liberal minded brother. She flagged him down, found him with a little boy all of his very own and no wife and their tenuous relationship began anew. But now she had the luxury of money, and with that, of being light and easy with her life and he was the one who was stressed, tired, desperate to make ends meet and suffering from bouts of depression.

They clashed with everything, he called her a sadist she called him a hippy they frequently began to argue and only a grudging respect for one another kept them on speaking terms.

Then she began this war and realised that she had long ago stopped loving him and well, why not finish the job she'd already botched up twice. He was nothing but a nuisance to her now. The first time she'd pushed him out that window it had been planned in so far as her childish brain had thought 'well I might as well just make him go away' and seized the opportunity when she saw it. The shooting the other day had been in annoyance and frustration and she hadn't considered what she was doing at all.

This time it was thought out, yes, that was indeed the way he deserved to go.