Sev tuned Frank's brother's guitar contemplatively, plagued by the one question every budding musician must face one day. "Do I have to play rhythm?"

Frank, playing a repetitive riff on his bass, shrugged rather helplessly. "Talk to Phoebe. And then duck."

"Right, because it's totally viable that I would ever challenge her in anything." Sev put the guitar down. "She's better than me, right? So it would jeopardize the band if we switched."

"And she's the only person we know scarier than your sister. And she knows karate. And you've been bloody in love with her since we were sorted."

"I have not."

Frank stood up, pushed his hair over his eyes, and suddenly acquired a nervous tick. "Hey! Hey, Frank! Do you know that girl? If I turn my head like this, does my nose look smaller? What's her name? Is she looking over here? She's not a pureblood, is she? Does my hair look okay? Should I have washed it sometime this year?"

Sev flung the tuning fork at him. "I didn't say that."

"Yes you did."

"…Not the last part."

"Well, okay, your hair wasn't that gross until puberty."

"Throw that back so I can throw it at you." Sev sighed and lay back on the bed. "If you tell her, I'll kill you. With, um, a stick. …I suck at guitar, don't I?"

"You're better at your cello. Maybe we could work that into the songs. It'd give us a unique edge." Frank thought for a minute. "We might actually get someone to listen to us besides my Mum."

"She just pretends to listen. But, hell. We've got a vision. What're we supposed to do, sell our souls to the masses?"

"I know. We're not about selling out, and doing whatever they want to hear."

The door opened, and Mrs. Longbottom stuck her head in. "I find you both somewhat unnerving when you talk like that. It's lunchtime, and you have a visitor."

"Each, or do we have to share?" Frank held his grin as his mother slammed the door. "Bet I know who that is."

"If it's Phoebe, I've seen this movie."

"You wish." Frank stood up, stretched, and led the way downstairs. Their visitor waved at them from the kitchen table, her feet up on the chair beside her, her mouth already stuffed with Mrs. Longbottom's prize mystery meat casserole. She was a rather plump girl, with untamed brown hair, wearing an expression of benign bemusement and a lot of glass love beads.

"Alice!" Frank slid around the table with an easy suavity Sev could never achieve, putting an arm casually over her shoulders and kissing her cheek. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"

She ignored him. "Sev, are you okay?"

"Of course I'm okay." Bracing himself for the inevitable, resenting Alice's kind nature with every fiber of his being, Sev helped himself to a plate and purposefully took a huge bite, rendering him unable to speak. The delay was long enough to think of a distraction. "Do you think I'm so petty as to resent my best friend's ability to get any girl he might desire and luck in finding the perfect one?"

Alice raised an eyebrow at him. "Nice try."

"I thought it was okay." Sev felt his carefully cultivated oblivion, denial, and normalcy begin to disintegrate. "Hey, you two snog for a while. I'm doing a run for clothes and to pick up Asclepius." He was vaguely aware of Frank starting to say something, and Alice cutting him off in her usual pleasantly abrupt way.

Sev plucked a pinch of floo powder from the bowl above the fireplace. "Number twenty-seven, Privet Drive." He stepped into the fire, gritting his teeth, and stumbled out into the kitchen. He'd been half afraid to find it full of either Riddle's minions or ministry types, but was greeted instead by a horrible emptiness. Sure he wasn't being observed, he flung himself into the corner and sobbed uncontrollably.

Cried out, he leaned back against the wall. He'd spent half his childhood in this corner, though it had ended when he'd gotten taller than the garbage bin that had protected him from the rest of the family. Well, actually, his father.

He rose and walked into the lounge. Someone had cleaned the corpses out, at least. Looking over his shoulder, he could make out the crack in the floor through which he'd witnessed the massacre.

Sev dropped into the dilapidated easy chair that had always been his father's. It smelled, not comfortingly, of cheap cigars and mold. He needed some serious thinking time.

Put in perspective, he hated most of his family and resented the rest to varying degrees. Equally in perspective, the least resented of the lot were the senselessly dead ones. Certainly, Mark was a jerk, his mother was a twit, Tully was a pansy, Maeve was remarkably uninteresting, Julia was preternaturally perfect, and Oran… Well, he couldn't think of a single thing that might possibly condemn his godfather, but it would come.

And it was hardly out of keeping with the rest of his life that the god forsaken pureblood bastards would be fine.

And his father.

Sev was shocked to realize the urge to kill his father was gone. It always did eventually disappear, and had been coming up less and less lately. Since the man had had to agree to sober up and stop hitting them to get them back.

He winced, his hand automatically straying to his knee. It didn't hurt anymore, and the limp had finally been spelled away. Even when it happened, getting kicked down the stairs by the worthless drunk he owed his miserable life to was a lot worse than some wrenched cartilage.

So was having no one to protect you but a timid, spiritless dimwit who could almost be said to deserve her husband. Except she was very decidedly dead, the most exonerating of all circumstances.

That was what haunted this place. Not the dead. Memories.

He stood, hoping it was bold resolution that moved him and not a subconscious urge to find somewhere better to cry. Starting up the stairs, he cupped his hands over his out and called, "Asclepius! Lisha! Nevermore!"

He was answered by a sound like the boiling of a teakettle with too wide a spout and a raucous croak in his, Mark's, and Tully's room. He wasn't ready to assume sole ownership. "Two down." Sev kicked the door until it popped open. Exactly what mechanism operated that door had always been a mystery to him. "Okay, guys. Did you miss me?"

"Nevermore"

"Oh, thanks." Sev flipped his hair out of the way so his raven could sit comfortably on his shoulder. "I don't care how cool that poem is. Learn to say something else."

"Nevermore."

"Bite me." He did. Sev glared. "One more and I'll get an owl, you hear me?" Tired of arguing with so limited a vocabulary, he directed his attention to the pet he could converse with coherently. "Asclepius? Dude? Where are you?"

The answer was an unseen voice, in hissing, eerie tones that would have raised the hairs on the back of any but the neck of love. "Can you please speak parseltongue?"

Sev acquiesced, but grudgingly. "You understand English fine. This makes my throat feel all slippery."

"It's a snake thing." The source of the voice, a seven foot najanaj (Indian cobra), slithered out from under Mark's bed. "I'm hungry."

"I fed you last week. Your metabolism doesn't require anything beyond a good bi-monthly gnome feast."

"Then I'm feeling neglected. Oh, and I'm now sticking out my tongue petulantly." As Asclepius was heavily into his atmospheric, terrifying exotic snake persona, his tongue was usually flicking around. Sev understood the need for clarification.

"I've had a nasty couple of days, if you didn't notice. Bother me much more and I'll change your name to Nag and buy a mongoose."

"You read to much. And you should wash your hair."

"I hate you." Asclepius slithered up Sev's back and coiled around him like some rather tasteless scarf, belt, and shawl, depending on the way the snake had chosen to drape himself. Ignoring the burden, Sev opened his trunk and pulled out an armload of robes, his wand, and a bag of books and potion ingredients. "Alrighty, guys. Either you help carry this junk or you're off."

"Nevermore."

"Must you always have the last word?" Sev looked around. "Where's Lisha?"

"With our sisters."

"Of course." With some careful maneuvering, Sev managed to get his bag over his shoulder and hold onto his robes. "Neither of you is helping. I hope I'm radiating disappointment."

"Nevermore!"

"Eat him, Asclepius."

"Wouldn't you have to get an owl, then?"

Grinning, and wondering how on earth he was supposed to get floo powder into the fire to get back, Sev felt his way down the stairs, unable to see over the robes. At least it didn't feel haunted, anymore.

"Sev, man, this is so messed up, I don't even know what's going on."

"Ahhhhh!" He shrieked and jumped a few feet in the air, dropping everything, and making Nevermore fly into the rafters with an indignant squawk as he spun around to face his exceedingly dead brother. "Tully?"

"Yeah…" Tully, newly translucent and hovering a few inches off the floor, tried to lean on the wall, but slipped through it. "Is there an instruction manual?"

Sev was still gaping. Normally he liked ghosts, but hanging around the Bloody Baron to discourage Potter was quite another thing. "You're—You're a…"

"No, I lost weight. You're supposed to be smarter than me." Tully looked miffed, but his face was too good-natured (just how he managed that with the severe profile and permanent scowl inherited from the Snape line was unclear) to hold the expression long. "What the hell do I do now?"

Sev swallowed and forcibly collected himself. He hadn't lost quite as much as he'd thought, perhaps, but according to the ghosts at Hogwarts, you weren't supposed to be a ghost. It was nice to have Tully, but he'd rather his brother was… wherever. Nearly-Headless Nick hadn't been too explicit on the subject.

Tully, meanwhile, was trying to pick a book up off the floor. He managed to twitch it a little from time to time, but it mostly just lay there. It looked immensely frustrating to Sev, but Tully was contentedly holding his smile and began to sing under his breath. "Chains. My baby's got me locked up in chains. And they ain't the kind that you can see…"

"Tully, shut up while I'm thinking."

"I thought the Beatles make you think better."

"Not in your voice."

"Huph. Have some respect for the dead."

Sev ignored this last comment. "Well… I guess you could come with me… Mrs. Longbottom probably wouldn't mind…"

"Please, dude. You're creepy enough to inflict on… Human society. I guess… I just… You know. Wanted to talk to someone. Go do your thing. I'll find you if anything develops." Tully waved his hand dismissively and sank through the floor.

Sev distractedly gathered all of his robes up again. "If anything else disturbing would like to happen, let it do so now!"

Asclepius raised his head and looked around. "Well, nothing happened."

"They're lulling us into a false sense of security." Sev somehow managed to get hold of a pinch of floo powder, and drop some onto the eternally smoldering coals left in the fireplace. Dumbledore had worked out the spell for his mother's convenience, as she obviously couldn't start a fire by magic.

"That's creative."

Ignoring his scaly companion, Sev stepped through the flames and landed back in the Longbottom's kitchen. Frank and Alice were, predictably, sucking face (to borrow another of Phoebe's phrases). Unnoticed, he traipsed up to Frank's room and dumped his belongings in a corner. Stopping only to pull Asclepius off his back, he collapsed on the bed for a none-too-peaceful sleep.