Circles of Hell

Some old Muggle once said that there were nine circles of hell.

Severus Snape wasn't sure about the accuracy of that count, but he could personally attest to a quite a few circles of his own.

There was the Thank-You-Sir-May-I-Have-Another level that accompanied Voldemort and his Cruciatus Curses. There was the Slytherin-Losing-To-Bloody-Gryffindor level that had accompanied both Quidditch matches and the race for the House Cup with depressing regularity in the past few years.

The Potter boy, of course, was so bloody Potter that he couldn't even be content to occupy his own circle. Somehow he managed to trample all over even the boundaries in Snape's own head and take up residence on quite a few levels at once.

He was a starring attraction on the circle Snape was currently enduring, one that the old Muggle would have surely classified in close proximity to Lucifer.

It was time for the little shits to come back to Hogwarts.

There were a great many things that Snape needed to be doing, right now, to ready himself for this. He needed to prepare his dungeon for invasion by the children: check his ingredients stores, adjust the cooling charms to a level suitable for freezing any germs the buggers might bring in, set up the fireproofing charms in anticipation of Longbottom's first cauldron explosion...

Dumbledore, of course, understood none of this. Otherwise, he would not be carrying on with what was shaping up to be the mother of all staff meetings. Two hours they'd been here, and Snape would be hard pressed to recount anything useful that had been said.

He hadn't needed the leaflets thrust at him by Madam Pomfrey, reminding him that the children were inevitably a diseased lot. He didn't plan to be getting close enough to the cretins to recognize chizpurfles in their hair, thank you very much, and he definitely didn't need tips on how to sensitively break the news to an infested child and separate him from his peers.

He certainly hadn't needed Pince's pointed words about the importance of keeping library books away from dissolving potions. Sorry, but if the little brats couldn't figure that out on their own, he wasn't going to waste his breath telling them. The detention afterwards would be a much more powerful reminder, anyway.

Snape turned his attention to the head of the table, where Dumbledore was speaking again. "Now, before Mr. Filch reads his list of items banned on school grounds - over 500 items now, I hear - I wanted to mention that we will have a few new staff members joining us soon."

Wonderful. New incompetents. Or werewolves. Or minions of evil.

Dumbledore's next words were drowned out by the old bat seated on Snape's left. "Oh, dear Albus must have taken my advice, I am so pleased. Although, it saddens me to have seen the necessity. But my Inner Eye is never wrong, you know..."

Snape shot her a look that would have led others to lose the power of speech.

But the bat kept talking. "Grief counselors, I told him. Just the thing for the Potter boy's friends... Of course, if they had paid attention to me, they would have long ago accepted the fact that he is headed for an untimely end... Wouldn't have gotten so attached to him... But Potter and his friends never listen to anything they're told, do they?"

"You're absolutely right about that, Sybil!"

Dumbledore paused mid-sentence. The entire staff twisted and turned in their chairs to gape at this historical first, this moment that would never be forgotten: Severus Snape agreeing, loudly and proudly, with Sybil Trelawney.

It was the end of the world as he knew it.

It was a sign of the coming apocalypse.

It was a brand-new circle of hell.

And it was all the Potter boy's fault.