Harry Potter was coming to Hogwarts. He was coming soon: only a few pages away by the self-updating potions calendar on the wall of Severus Snape's laboratory.
Snape would have the rest of July, when he would brew Poppy's list for the infirmary. He would have August, his last blessed month of freedom to finish his private projects before the arrival of the dunderheads. Then the latest scion of that rotten stock would be swaggering through the halls of what had been to Snape both haven and prison for so many quiet years.
He glared at the calendar, resenting it. With nightmare clarity he pictured James Potter, snitch in hand, lording it over a new generation, smirking at him from the back row of the student desks, waiting for the chance to humiliate him once more. Living through the misery of his student years had been bad enough: now he would have to relive them, day by miserable day. It had been seven years of hell. He had raised the possibility of a sabbatical with Albus, and had been refused with a smile and a dozen good reasons.
Restless, he shut down the current potion, and put it in stasis. He was too distracted to work well at the moment. Harry Potter was coming to Hogwarts, and Snape might as well try to command the tides as prevent the imminent catastrophe.
Everyone else was astir with excitement. Whispers about The Boy-Who- Lived rustled through the halls. Not just his colleagues, either: even the ghosts gossiped discreetly. The very portraits were uncommonly active, awaiting the young hero.
Climbing a staircase and stalking quickly down a hall, Snape scowled at the worst offenders, a gaggle of shrill voiced witches forever celebrating Beltane. One of them, the sultry, buxom one with flaming tresses, always made eyes at him when he passed. Today she blew him a sympathetic kiss. He did not respond, and felt like lashing out as they commented on his weakness for red hair.
Minerva was working on the Hogwarts letters today. She had said as much at breakfast. Like himself, she did not spend the whole of the summer at the school, but was back and forth as her duties demanded. Not like Sprout, engrossed in her gardens for the entire time. No, Minerva had just returned for the letters.
She had worked out a system that had served her well for years. Obviously, she did not write each letter herself, but had the Hogwarts Quill produce them en masse from a template. All the birds of the owlery hovered nearby, ready to deliver the letters throughout Magical Britain.
For all that, he thought she looked harassed, after he knocked and was invited in to her office. Meticulous as she was, the letters resisted organization: Parchment flew about, folding itself, flying past the seal. Green ink and purple wax puddled on the floor, despite her efforts and those of the house elves.
She gave him a sharp glance. "Come to make yourself useful?"
"I certainly hope not," he grunted. "I've had all I care for of making myself useful in the dungeons today. I'm about to grow bonespurs from all the Skele-Gro I've brewed."
"Puir wee laddie," she said, utterly without sympathy, catching the latest parchment escaping from the Quill, and waving it off in the proper direction. "Wayward things. I sometimes wonder if the Quill wants these children here at all."
Snape slumped into a chair. "I can think of one of the little buggers I'd prefer not to see."
She pressed her lips together reprovingly. "Pull yourself together, Severus. He's only a child."
"Only The Child-of-Destiny-Who-Lived-to-Rule-All-Hogwarts. Can you imagine how spoiled rotten he is?"
"I have met Draco Malfoy," she replied, peering over her glasses, brows raised.
Snape scoffed, watching the owls catch each whizzing letter in unfailing talons. "He's bound to be worse."
A letter fluttered by, and Snape was distracted by it.
Neville Longbottom
The Terribly Untidy Room with all the Plants
Longbottom Lodge
Lancs.
Minerva was quiet for a moment, letting another piece of parchment fly, and then remarked, "I'm not too sure of that. Who knows what those wretched muggles he lives with have done to him?"
"Lily's sister and her husband. I daresay they dote on him."
"Possibly. Possibly not. I told Albus—" she scowled and vanished another splotch of green. "—I told him that I had taken a look at them, and that they were the worst sort of muggle—smug and suburban and small-minded. Scarcely a book in the house, and the two of them slobbering over their own little boy in a very unhealthy way. It all gave me a very bad feeling."
"The idea of Harry Potter here gives me a very bad feeling. I daresay Albus had his reasons."
"Well, obviously the boy's godfather-" She paused, and a quick flash of misery spread over her stern face, and was just as quickly overcome.
"Quite," Snape replied after a moment of deep and holy satisfaction. The murderer Sirius Black was safely in Azkaban, where he belonged, and where he could threaten no one else. It had taken the lives of thirteen muggles and his friend Pettigrew to convince the wizarding world of what Snape had known for years: Black was a killer—a violent sociopath without any regard for the lives of others. If his homicidal tendencies had been nipped in the bud, back in those dreadful school years... Well, as far as he was concerned, those unnecessary deaths lay directly at the Headmaster's door. Dumbledore had viewed Black's attack on Snape's life as a merry prank gone wrong. Snape had known better then, and did not mind being proved to have been right all along.
Nonetheless, Black had been the Potter child's guardian, and with his incarceration, Albus had stepped in, and placed the child not with any of his eager wizarding relations, but with Lily Potter's muggle sister. No one had seen him since, other than a few pushing gawkers. No doubt it was intended to keep the boy safe, but Snape wondered, judging from his own experience, if life in the muggle world was really a good thing for any wizarding child.