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Alexander Foxglove Evans was a terrible human being, or at least a dodgy one, (that's what everyone he'd ever met told him at some point anyway). Regardless, graduating Hogwarts as a mudblood Slytherin in the year of '75 with a class that included the likes of Bellatrix Black, Rabastan Lestrange, Frank Longbottom, and the Prewett twins left eighteen year old "Fox" Evans with a seven year history of schoolboy violence (self defense, most of it), a mental and physical library of illegal Dark curses broad enough to make You-Know-Who raise an eyebrow (if his status as a mudblood Slytherin Parselmouth wasn't enough), his family a target for Death Eaters (whom he personally knew), and an understanding that no matter what side won he was probably going to Azkaban no matter what he did.

 In short, Alex Fox Evans had a desperate need to leave Wizarding Britain. Possibly Forever. 

So that August, he collected his NEWT scores, had a blowout fight with his sisters, put a highly illegal blood ward on the house that would keep his family safe from Voldemort himself up until they sold the house, committed a murder, secured a promise from Frank to look after Lily and Sev, and disappeared the fuck off to Africa, where there was enough work on the horizon to keep a Parselmouth with a talent for violence busy for life. 

Beat that for problem solving. 

The Rhodesian Bush War ended in '79 and after that came a constant stream of more wars to fight, bounties to claim, refugees to evacuate, Parselmouths to meet, and politicians to assassinate that it wasn't until he was assisting Uagadou with a magical snake problem in Uganda in '86 that he found out that Lily was dead and had a baby boy who could block the Killing Curse with his face. 

Clearly it was time to pack up his life and go home for a while. 

……..

Doing so took a little bit of effort. There were accounts to consolidate, money and resource caches to gather together, and of course most of it was not in something as simple to liquidate and convert as fiat currency. Most currency that wasn't the Euro, British Pound Sterling, or American Dollar was less than worthless out in the remote and war-torn countries where he operated and so a large portion of his wealth was in caches of shrunk down weapons, ammunition, rare potions ingredients, and blood diamonds accumulated over his decade of arms dealing, smuggling, and mercenary work and stored in buried trunks scattered about the continent and warded to the brass fittings with curses and magical locks and ritually fused to the bedrock like a pharaoh's tomb in the labyrinth underneath a pyramid. 

And getting all that liquidated into trustworthy currency would require contacting an old friend. The goblins would be happy to take the diamonds, they'd never given a knut how much blood was on the gems before, and he doubted they would now. 

So with close to a hundred thousand pounds in weapons and diamonds in a pouch in his backpack, he sent an owl off, and apparated in short cross continent jumps until he hit Kenya before boarding a plane to London under a fake passport and a notice-me-not charm. He wasn't even questioned once. 

……….

After a decade of African summers, the mild weather of British July was almost chilly. Having not checked any bags, he began descending the exit stairs to leave, intending on finding a cab and afterwards perhaps a cheap hostel for a nap before meeting his associate the next day. 

Until he saw the familiar green of a Slytherin banner waving from a muggle broomstick in the far corner.

The intercom rang out in a bored, professional tone. "Fox Evans, party for Fox Evans waiting at gate three." 

Well, it's nice to be wanted. 

Aoife Collins was a lanky, strawberry blonde woman with blueish grey eyes and a button nose and a talent for sweet talking the unwary into agreeing to just about anything. No one expected a Hufflepuff to be involved in something like the IRA anyway. "Good flight?" She asked in a soft, lilting accent and drawing him into a hug. "It's good to see you again. What's the occasion?" 

He returned the hug. "It was fine. I found out about Lily and decided I should come back to figure it all out."

She snapped her head up in shock. "You just found out!? It's been six years since then!" 

"And I've been a bit busy in the middle of nowhere Africa, yeah? It's not like I drop in to see our people but a few times a year. And I don't exactly stop to chat. Okay?" Alex brushed a hand through his dull red hair. "I shouldn't have stayed away this long, alright?" 

She nodded, leaving the matter alone for the moment. "Well, you look like you've been taking care of yourself?" She asked hopefully, leading him out of the building and down the street by the hand. 

"More or less. You?" He returned, relaxing into the easy companionship.

"Oh, I'm alright. Hungry?" She raised an eyebrow. 

"Starving. Do you have a hotel room already?" 

"Bought and paid for, and I have a few rats for your friend from Eeylop's under a warming charm. But I figured we'd go out. Ready to apparate?" 

He squeezed her hand. "Go for it." 

They disappeared with a crack. 

His first thought upon entering the hotel room was "Oh good, a corner room." The second was appreciation that it was clearly close to Diagon Alley; he could see the closed down bookshop that served as its muggle entrance through the window. "You sure know how to pick a good hotel."

Aoife snorted. "I would hope so, given the amount of time I spend arranging them."

Alex frowned, digging a wooden matchbox out of his backpack and placing it on the floor beside the windows. He tapped it twice with his wand to revert it to a wooden crate the size of a school trunk and slid the lid open. "They don't use you as a Frontline?"

She shook her head. "I'm too secret of a weapon and I'm too useful doing things like this. Besides, it'd tip off the Aurors and they'd get involved over Statute of Secrecy violations." She opened the kitchenette cabinet and pulled out a plate, upon which five rats were laid out, tails towards the center, which she laid on the floor beside the crate, kneeling on the floor. "You always talked about getting a familiar, how long have you had him?" 

~"Come on out, there's warm food here."~ He hissed into the crate. "Five years now, I had someone else before him."

A chocolate brown head flicking a long, black, forked tongue poked its head out of the box. ~"We're finally here? Fucking finally, it felt like forever.~" it hissed before flowing out of the box and straight for the mice. 

Alex scritched his fingers down the snake's neck, the hood flaring out slightly in response. ~"Don't complain, it's been less than a week.~"

"What is he? Does he have a name?" Aoife asked, leaning up against him and stretching her hand out to run her fingers along its spine. 

"Ramses, he's a mozambique spitting cobra." He stood up and fished the little cotton bag full of weapons out of his backpack. "May as well get the ugly part out of the way. Plenty of ammo, plenty of weapons. Your boys will be equipped for years. FALs, M16s, AKs, even a few RPKs, and RPGs. Better in your hands than the commies in Zimbabwe as they're calling it now." Alex sneered, rolling his eyes. 

She tossed him a stack of banknotes in return. "We can't pay you in full all at once, there's twenty thousand pounds, and a personal guarantee for another eighty over the next four years. Twenty thousand pounds, once a year, for five years. That's something we can swing. "

"And if they can't?" 

"Then they'll have me to answer to, won't they?" She grinned. "They want guns, they better treat you right for them."

"You just want me to come back more often, hey? You want to keep an eye on me." He returned with a smile. 

"Yeah. I do." She pulled a wooden box about the size and style of a shoebox out of her bag in the corner, opened it, and put the little cotton bag inside it before closing the shoebox and tucking it back in the bag. 

"Message box?" He asked. "We should get a pair while we're in Diagon." 

"As long as you don't use it as an excuse not to visit." She held out her hand. "Lunch?" 

"You could always visit me." Alex retorted, taking her hand and letting her lead him out the door. ~You know what to do, don't overstuff yourself~

~Yeah, yeah. Spit in their eyes and bite 'em if they aren't you.~

………..

As good as the Leaky's shepherd's pie was, it may as well have been ash in his mouth after hearing what happened to most of his old friends.

Frank was a vegetable in the Janus Thickey Ward, along with his wife and Lily's friend, Alice Fortescue. Fabian and Gideon Prewett were dead, killed by their old friend Antonin Dolohov. Ethan Bones was dead, though his cousin was now head of the Aurors. Alfred Weasley and Jake Edgecombe were dead. Sev, the kid who'd been the closest thing he'd had to a little brother, was dead, predictably killed defending his wife and Alex's nephew.  

"What happened?" He asked dully, the sweetness of the butterbeer tasting thick like paint. 

"The official story is that they heard that You-Know-Who was targeting them from a spy, who has yet to be identified, and went into hiding. D'you remember Lucy Hartford?"

"Yeah, really good friend of Lily's the year below us. " Alex recalled. 

"D'you remember that group of kids that used to give Sev absolute hell? The Marauders or whatever?" Aoife continued. Alex nodded. 

"Well, she married that kid Peter Pettigrew, and together they folded like a house of wet cards at the first sign of trouble. The thing was, Peter being a dirty rat had led to the Prewetts getting killed the year before, and Sirius Black and that Evan Rosier kid ripped 'em both apart. Only thing left was a finger and thirteen dead muggles when a stray curse ignited a gas line and blew the whole feckin' street to pieces." 

She slurped on her milkshake. "Iason and Penelope Greengrass are still alive, if that helps. She's married and even has two kids now." 

"Who's got my nephew?" 

"Petunia, well, probably. His address isn't public, but I was able to track where Petunia lives, she's married with a kid of her own by the way, and the school near where she lives has a Harry Evans around the right age. It's not like they had many other people capable of looking after him." She offered. "It's possible they could have stuck him with someone else in Dumbledore's Order, but as hard as it was to get that hunch that he's with Petunia, well, they wanted to hide him good, and I don't blame them. He's a celebrity, a war hero, an orphan, and he's only seven years old. His location was one of the things the Lestranges were trying to get out of Frank and Alice." She shuddered. 

"I shouldn't have left-"

She squeezed his hand in sympathy. "I don't know. On the one hand, by the end of the war, the Ministry didn't care how you got them as long as people kept handing them corpses of known Death Eaters or ones with the dark mark on them. On the other, when we graduated, they didn't care if you just had your house attacked by Death Eaters, if the spell was Dark, you were headed for Azkaban, and it wasn't until Amelia was in charge when they started looking a little more closely into letting people out and being more reasonable about things." 

Well, that had been the reason he left in the first place.

"I hear Harry can block the Killing Curse with his face. What's the story about that?" 

She shrugged. "Well, unless Lily and You-Know-Who come back and do interviews, we'll never know. Dumbledore's theory is that it was an instinctive blood sacrifice protection, and dressed it all up to be politically correct, and he was one of the first on scene, apparently. So that's the best guess we have right now. You want to go comb the place over before we head back?" 

Alex paused to think about it. After six years there'd be hardly any trace of anything. But perhaps there might be something everyone else had missed. "Yes." He put a fifty pound note on the table, more than enough to cover the bill, and Tom didn't mind converting muggle money to gold. He stretched his hands out for her to take. "Where did they settle?" 

She took his hands. "They stayed in Cokeworth." 

The last thought that went through his head before she apparated was, "How did he get them then?"

………

The back and roof of the Snape townhouse looked like a bomb went off inside.

Alex stood there looking at it for what felt like an hour. "Why?" He looked back at Aoife, "Why in the hell would they stay here, though? I warded our house right on the other side of town! I gave Petunia really specific instructions to give it to Lils if she wanted to move out. Even if they didn't want to live there when they graduated, it was the perfect safehouse as long as they didn't sell it."

He shook his head. "I'll be right back. I'm going to visit the house. If Pet still owns it I won't be able to get inside, if someone else lives there, I'll find out what happened."

He vanished with a crack. 

Number eighteen Willow Road looked a little different than how he'd left the place. There was a new coat of sky blue paint on the outside where it used to be white, and someone had put an actual swear to God white picket fence out front and while he wasn't expecting the car in the driveway to be his Father's old Hillman Minx, that had been burned to nothing during the wreck, he wasn't expecting a brand new red Ford Sierra. To cap it all off there were two children under ten, and a border collie playing in the front yard. 

What the fuck. 

He walked up to the fence and knocked on the gate. "Hey kids, your parents home?" Wide eyes and silence, fantastic. 

The front door opened to reveal a blonde woman in her late thirties. "We're not interested in buying anything."

"That's not why I'm here." Alex responded. "My name's Alexander Evans, I used to live here about ten years ago, and I just got back in country and I wanted some information about how you came to own the place, if you do, that is."

"We do." She confirmed. "We bought it about eight years ago from a young woman who had lost her parents and was getting married and didn't want to keep the place."

"Was the woman red haired like me, or blondish? What time of year was it?" He asked, masking the anger building up inside him. 

"Around May, she was blonde. I'm guessing she was your sister?"

"Yes, thanks. I'll leave you alone now. Have a nice day." He excused himself with a lying smile. "Petunia you fucking bitch." He turned on his heel and was about to leave when he remembered. 

"Do you mind if I take a look in the shed? I hid some things in there before I left and obviously haven't had the chance to retrieve any of it." He asked. 

The woman nodded, and opened the gate. "I'm guessing she sold it out from under you?" 

"Something like that."

During World War One the original owner of the house had paid to put in a bomb shelter in the northwest corner of the back garden. Most of the houses and townhouses in Cokeworth did. Cokeworth was, or at least had been, a major industrial town, and therefore, was a potential target of Axis bombing. An unlikely target, as far north as it was, but a target. After the second world war, his father, Richard Evans, spent his saved up wages from the Army on a nice middle class house, a nice middle class car, and marrying their mother. Neither of them liked the look of the bunker, so they put a garden shed on top of it and as a child and then Hogwarts student, Alex had found the idea of concealing the entrance to what became his lair and summer potions lab to be far too appealing to abandon and up until the car crash, it became a mutual project between Alex and his father.

At one time, the fact that it had been warded against Petunia had been both safety measure and childish annoyance at a younger sibling, but as that had been where he had kept everything magical or valuable that he couldn't or didn't want to take to Rhodesia, it was turning out to be a wise investment. 

 The entrance was hidden via a part of the plywood flooring, cleverly hinged on the inside of the door and locked by a small, burned in Egyptian thumbprint rune. A mere touch of the right wizard's hand on the outside of the door could render it unlocked and once unlocked, the rune could be removed at any time. 

"Your sister didn't say anything about this!" The woman, Emily, exclaimed as he opened it, and subtly scratched off the rune. 

"She probably forgot. It used to be a bomb shelter." He explained, climbing down the ladder. "You should probably stay up there with your kids, I'll let you know when I'm leaving." 

Fortunately, everything was still untouched, every potions ingredient held wonderfully in stasis, every forbidden book he'd smuggled home categorized by topic, then author and title. Like he'd never even left.

A half hour later he stalked back down the street to the apparition point, dragging two trunks behind him to maintain appearances with a third already shrunk in his pocket. 

"Pet got married and sold the house two fuckin years after I left, just in time for Lily to graduate and be left homeless except for this hovel." He explained to Aoife, staring at the commemorative sign honoring the death that ended the war against You-Know-Who. "She sold it in May. Less than a full month before they would have graduated."

She nodded. "So you ward up the house, exiling yourself to power it, and Petunia almost immediately renders it a moot point, stealing the money and purposefully fucking over Lily and Severus in the process and forcing them to live with his drunken asshat of a father."

"Well, I killed Tobias before I left. He's 'buried' over by the river."

"Your sister is a bitch." 

"I can't let her raise Harry. If she's that spiteful, she'll just throw him out of the house once he's got his Hogwarts letter." Alex decided, swiftly breaking the enchantment that sealed the house from entry with a few runes and a trick he'd been shown by an Angolan early on, pushing magic through his wand like a knife.

The lower floor of the townhouse was littered with the evidence of a ferocious duel. Furniture broken and thrown everywhere, patches of the floor broken up from transfiguration, burns, gouges and holes on every surface from spellfire. The magic that would have clung to the marks had long since dissolved into nothing. He had been expecting that. There wasn't much of personal value left anywhere. Everything not destroyed, he imagined, had probably been consolidated in their vault. But there was enough left behind to console him with the thought that the two had made the best of their situation and fixed the place up and made it as much of a home as it was ever going to be. Far more, at least, than it had been for the first portion of Sev's life. And the typical bomb shelter in the back garden was still untouched and full of their, but mainly Sev's, Dark Arts texts as expected. Fortunately. 

The top floor, three cramped bedrooms and a single bathroom, had been left alone to stasis and dust, but the back bedroom had been blown out. He could see the river and the playground from the doorway, the back wall and roof were gone, and the remaining interior walls were charred black and cracked, with the faintest hint of unease and the wrongness of what had to be bad soul magic clinging to it. "Six years later and it still feels faintly of something wrong. Like a favorite coffee mug cracked in a microwave." He muttered, swiping his fingers against the residue on the wall and sinking his magic and awareness into it before pulling away. 

He bent down to inspect the splintered floor the same way. "Like chai tea and burned salt, and melted nylon and blood."

"A ritual." Aoife guessed. 

"Yes, but pre-set, not the night of. They wouldn't have had the time. But it was activated the night of. Like a trap."

"So they pre-set a protective ritual circle, hide it with a cheap carpet, and when You-Know-Who comes in and kills Lily, the Ritual is activated, and when he tries to kill Harry, the backlash blows his brains out in proportion to the spell he used."

"And possibly part of his soul. But it's too old to tell anything more specific." 

She frowned, and crouched beside him. "This kind of detective work isn't my strong suit, and neither is soul magic, but surely one hit like this shouldn't be leaving dark soul residue all over the room like this. Right?"

Alex shrugged. "It depends. It depends on whose soul it is, it depends on what the ritual was, what exactly the ritual was targeting when it lashed out. It depends if the act of killing Lily activated Sev's Death Curse if he had time to cast one. It depends on the state of You-Know-Who's soul. The act of killing is a natural part of life, every living thing does it, for self defense, for food, access to mates, for personal gain, elimination of rivals. Cold Blooded Murder doesn't always split the soul the way people say it does, not even in species like humans which have something of an evolutionary revulsion to killing each other." He stood back up, dusting his jeans off with his hands. "It's too old to tell anything else. You say Harry has a curse scar on his head?" 

"Like a lightning bolt." 

"I'll have it looked at by an expert in Egypt. That'll tell me more. I've seen enough. Let's pack up the books and get back to Ramses." 

…………..

Ramses was snoozing on the warm, sunny window sill in the way that snakes do when they've had a large meal, the skin between the scales slightly stretched out. He lazily raised his head at the sound of the door opening and, recognizing Alex, went back to sleep with a hissed~All clear boss~

He received hood scratches in thanks. ~Good job~

The Cokeworth trunks were shrunk and concealed in the backpack and dinner, leftover shepherd's pie, was shared sitting on the floor, backs against the bed, watching some TV program he wasn't familiar with. 

"We should go get Harry tomorrow. It'll be his birthday soon." Alex pointed out. 

"You sure you want to raise him in Africa? Do you even have a house there? A steady job? You can't just drag him all over the continent getting into shootouts every other week." Aoife asked after a moment of quiet. "You could get set up in Wales, or Liverpool, set up a business in Runes or Defense or something, give Harry something stable while he grows up."

"I agree with trying to keep Harry hidden, and down there, he'll just be another white boy in Africa. I have a friend in Tanzania who's promised me a job as a ranger at a game preserve if I ever want to settle down. It'll be safe and stable enough there." He objected, taking her hand. "I like it down there, there's no Aurors trying to poke through your belongings, no one cares who you are, only what you can or can't do for them and how much it's going to cost them. It's warm. For the most part, the farther out in the bush you get, the less you have to hide who you are and the more that people want you around. The Statute of Secrecy basically doesn't even exist as long as you're not around a city." He paused. "It's been ten years. You may free Northern Ireland, but I'll never be able to step foot on Irish soil. No Parselmouth will, not in our lifetime, most likely never again. You could always come with me though. Just because you're not up there, doesn't mean you can't support them in other ways." He said gently. 

She shook her head. "I can't. Not permanently, not yet. I still have to get you all your money, remember? Give me until then?"

"I've given you until now haven't I? Don't think I'm patient enough or something?" He joked. 

She stood up and turned off the television and dragged him to his feet as well. "If we're getting Harry tomorrow, then we'd better take advantage of the time we have."

She pushed him back on the bed. 

………..

Little Whinging, Surrey, Alex decided as Aoife led him from the apparition point behind a restaurant towards Petunia's house, was the blandest, most boring place he had ever stepped foot in. Plain, biscuit cutter, two story, red brick houses with the same small green lawns and fenced in gardens out back as far as his eyes could see. The only variation was the choice of flowers out front and the shiny, proudly displayed cars in the driveways.

Occasionally the monotony was broken up by a park and a playground or some other community building. They were the best parts of the whole neighborhood in Alex's opinion. 

Basic spatial awareness aside, the cataloging of his current environment was serving a much more important role than just keeping him from stepping into the pathway of an oncoming lorry. 

It was keeping him from focusing on his anger at his sister. It didn't come as a surprise that Petunia was resentful and jealous of the gift of magic bestowed on Lily and himself. He knew that when he left. He just didn't think she was so spiteful as to attempt to leave their younger sister homeless over it. Frankly, he hadn't thought she had the spine to take action like that. 

Number Four Privet Drive was just like every other house in the neighborhood. The roses were pruned, the car freshly washed, and the grass was cut within a half inch of everyone else's. The only difference was the small, dirty, young boy in oversized clothes weeding the flower bed.

Aoife shot him a look. 

"Hey kid, is this Petunia's house?" He asked, cataloging his black hair and the tan color of a person born with a pale complexion that spent a lot of time in the sun. 

The boy whipped around, wincing as he scratched himself on the thorns. "Yes sir, but if you're selling something she's going to turn you away."

"Oh, I imagine she'll try." Alex agreed, crouching down to the kid's level. He stuck his hand out. "I'm Alexander Evans, her brother. I'm guessing you're Harry Evans?"

Bright green eyes widened with wary recognition at the match in Alex's own face and Harry slowly shook his hand. 

"You look like your mom. You know that? You just have your dad's hair, although you keep it shorter." Alex pointed out. 

Resentment flashed across his face. "Aunt Petunia keeps cutting it." 

"It doesn't look too terrible on you. She did go a bit short though. Speaking of cuts, why aren't you wearing gloves?"  

"Aunt Petunia doesn't have any in my size. I'll just grow out of them anyway." 

"I'm guessing she thinks the same thing about your clothes." Alex noted, keeping his mounting anger under wraps by fishing his backpack off and digging around for his pair of inside out leather gloves. He handed them over. "Put those on." 

Harry did, frowning in confusion at how the surface of the leather that was normally inside most pairs of gloves was on the outside and vice versa. "Why are they inside out?" 

Alex tapped the gloves with his wand to shrink them down, to Harry's absolute shock, before tucking it back in the holster under his shirt. He tapped his finger to his lips in the universal 'stay quiet' sign. "It makes them last longer, and the smooth side feels nicer. I'm going to go talk to your Aunt, when you finish this up, come on inside." 

Harry's drowned-man-rescued expression stayed locked on his back until he and Aoife walked up to the front door, before he attacked the weeds with the vengeance of a trapped man given a chance at freedom. 

Alex braced himself and knocked.

Another young boy, blonde as dry grass, and fat enough to be cruelly, but accurately, compared to a young hippo, answered the door. Like Harry, his blue eyes widened in recognition. Unlike Harry, it wasn't about their familial similarity. "You were in Soldier of Fortune Magazine!" He exclaimed. "Three Times!"

Aoife burst out laughing, the traitor, and Alex briefly wondered what kind of parents let a kid this young read Soldier of Fortune Magazine. 

"Uh, yeah, listen, could you tell your mum that her brother is at the door."

The boy nodded, his triple chins wobbling, and ran inside yelling, "Mummy, you didn't say Fox Evans was my uncle!"

Since the door was wide open, he didn't see a reason not to enter, so he did, motioning Aoife, still bent over laughing herself sick, to follow him in and shut the door behind them. 

Petunia turned the corner, pale as a ghost. "You-you said you couldn't come back!" She protested, shrill and harsh like when they were children. "You can't be here!"

"I couldn't come back to our house as long as you or Lily owned it." Alex corrected lightly.

His sister was followed by an enormous walrus masquerading as a human being. "Who the hell are you and why are you in our house!?"

Alex strode forward and extended his hand. "I'm Petunia's older brother, Alexander Evans. This is Aoife Collins, a friend of mine from school." 

The walrus squinted at him and shook his hand. He turned to his wife. "You didn't say you had a brother." 

"I thought you were dead." She spat. "You were supposed to have gone off to Africa and died!"

The larger man seemed to experience a brief moment of surprise at the exclamation before his attention refocused on Alex, "Vernon Dursley. Why didn't you call first? Dudley called you 'Fox?'"

"My middle name, Foxglove. Dad's side of the family names all their kids after royalty, mum's side names all theirs after plants. I've been in sub-saharan africa for the past ten years, I just got back and I didn't know anyone's number." Alex answered, hiding his steadily growing rage. "Petunia, we need to talk."

"No." She argued, "There's nothing to talk about. You're going to get out of my house and go back to wherever you crawled out of and take Lily's freak with-" her eyes seemed to cross as the tip of Alex's thirteen and a half inch ash and dragon heartstring wand pointed between her eyes.

"Tell your boy Dudley to go play outside until sundown, I think there's a lot for us to talk about." He countered quietly. 

"I already did." Petunia said, her entire attention fixed on the length of ash just a centimeter from her eyes.

Vernon attempted to step forward in defense of his wife and was instantly brought to the ground with a thud that shook the entire house by Aoife's Body Bind. "Listen, Vernon, this is a bit bigger than you and I. You're going to want to just lay there and listen." 

"This is my house! You can't do this!" Vernon objected, struggling furiously against his magical restraints and growing more cherry red with rage by the word.

Aoife silenced him with a tap of her wand.

Vernon went ballistic, silently. Petunia trembled in fear.

"Go make sure Dudley doesn't remember our names or call the bobbies please." Alex asked, as he backed Petunia into the kitchen. 

"You can't do this. You said there's laws, you said there's a ministry for people like you." 

"Oh we're people now? Not just freaks now that there's a wand in your face, sister mine?" Alex hissed. She didn't answer, her hands clenched together until her knuckles were white. He pointed at the kitchen table. "I've spent the past ten years breaking almost every law ever invented and they've never even known it happened. Sit. Now would you like to explain why you sold our house, just in time to leave Lily homeless when she graduated? Or should I just chalk that up to you thinking I'd just 'gone off to Africa and died' and would never live to hold you accountable for it?" 

"I didn't leave her homeless." She excused herself. "I knew that boy would take her in and you left the both of us money." 

"I explicitly told you the danger you were in, the protections I was leaving on the house and what would happen if you sold it, and that if you wanted to move out, to just leave the house for Lily. Do you realize that the Dark Lord could have stood outside that house watching your two children playing together in the front fucking garden and would have had to stand there like a jackass unable to do a fucking thing about it!?" 

Petunia stayed silent as the grave, her resentment showing clear through her expression. And that was his last straw. 

"NOT HAVING THAT HOUSE KILLED THEM! YOU KILLED OUR SISTER SELLING THAT HOUSE! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!" Alex roared.

"Why should I care about you freaks and your wars?" She shrieked, shrill and petulant. "It's none of my business whether you lot go and get yourselves blown up."

"You told me they died drunk in a car accident." said a voice in the hallway. 

Alex flicked his eyes over to Harry. "Finished the roses pretty quick, didn't you?" He noted before turning his attention back to the harpy his sister became. "You told him his parents died for the reason ours died?! You couldn't even say it was a home invasion gone wrong?! What was the fucking point of that, to make him ashamed of his parents?!" 

The look on Petunia's face told everything he needed to know.

"You're going to go get everything they gave you of Lily's, and if you call the bobbies, I'm going to burn your house down with you and your family trapped inside, because you clearly don't think we're family, so I'm going to treat you like it. Do you understand?" 

"They didn't give me anything but him." She insisted, jerking her pointy nose over at Harry. "They just dropped him off at the front door in a box and blankets with a note saying what happened."

Alex leaned in. "Who is 'they?'" 

"That Headmaster of yours, Albus Dumbledore." 

"Harry. Go get your things. Feel free to take whatever you like from them too."

Harry immediately crossed the hall to the doorway underneath the stairs and yanked the door open, getting on all fours to start grabbing things inside. 

Alex saw the off white surface of a small mattress inside. "Harry, is that where you sleep?" 

"Yes sir, Dudley needs the other bedroom for the toys he doesn't want anymore." Harry paused, sitting on his knees with his ratty backpack.

"Well, go ransack his stuff for anything you think is cool. No electronics."

Harry dashed up the stairs like a kid on Christmas. 

"And Petunia and Vernon's. Grab anything expensive looking, jewelry, money, cool stuff, anything you want. Feel free to smash things up a bit too!" He yelled after him. 

Alex looked in his sister's pinched, spiteful face one last time. "I think one good turn deserves another."

Her eyes widened. 

"Petrificus totalus, silencio."

She fell, rigid and silent as a board, to the floor, petrified. 

Alex walked around to the kitchen cabinets to look for the knives and, selecting a long, broad, pointy chef's knife, stepped over Petunia and levitated Vernon into a standing position, hands outstretched and raised in front of him. "Sev went down fighting for his family, so I'll let people assume the same of you." He told them, raising the knife and raining cuts down on the man's arms, hands, head and shoulders before burying it three times under his ribs up to the hilt. Heart, left lung, left lung. He let Vernon fall, struggling to breathe. 

Alex turned to Petunia and raised her into a standing position as well, walking her into the kitchen by the sink. "We'll never know exactly how Lily died, but I want you to consider this. If you had died, like you're about to right now, how do you think Lily would have raised Dudley? Do you think she and Sev would have kept him in a cupboard under the stairs? Or would she have made sure to treat him as her own? You know, our kind have found out some pretty interesting things about the afterlife, specifically, that there is one in the first place. So I guess you can ask her yourself." He buried the knife in through her spine into her heart, into her right lung, and her right kidney. "You'll pass out in about thirty seconds. Dead in less than two minutes. I suggest you get right with whatever entitled mess you believe in." He explained, tapping the knife with his wand to clean it before replacing it in the drawer, and rifling through Vernon's wallet on the coffee table for the cash inside. 

And then Harry came down the stairs. He stopped, staring at the bodies and their associated growing pools of blood on the floor. 

Alex crossed the room and shook him by the shoulder to snap his attention back on himself, and turned his head towards him. "Did you get everything you wanted? I can expand that bag to be bigger on the inside. Take anything you want. If it's worth something we'll sell it and get you some spending money, if it's books, or toys or anything, you can have it as long as it's not some kind of electronics." 

Harry flicked his eyes towards the bodies again. 

Alex shook him gently again. "Hey, don't look at them, look at me, you understand? It's easier if you don't look at it." 

Harry nodded. "O-Okay, uh, there's some more stuff up there but I can't fit it in."

"Alright. Let's go up."

They were a few minutes into their raid of the upstairs bedrooms when Aoife came back in. "Dudley's…… feckin shit. Dudley's at the park, he'll be back in an hour, he doesn't know shit. You ready to go?" She snapped, coming up the stairs. 

"Then we have thirty minutes. Grab anything you want. We'll take the car and apparate out an hour down the road." 

Then they systematically stole every single thing of value in the house and broke everything else. Aoife even stole the marital rings off Vernon and Petunia.

The car keys were on a hook next to the door. There was a spare can of petrol in the shed for the garden tools to burn the car with. 

By the time the police arrived, Harry Evans was in London, eating the first slice of pizza he'd ever had, talking to the first snake he'd ever seen, wearing the first set of new clothes that actually fit that he'd ever owned.