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Written in Blood	By : Corinna Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Snape/Hermione Views: 20663 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Written in Blood

By Brightsong k�Treva

Disclaimer: I don�t own them, blah, blah, blah. If you don�t know that, I don�t recommend reading this, or any other story, as you are simply too gullible. If you want to sue, however, go ahead, take my debts. They�re all I have!

Many thanks to Auror Borealis, whose stories made me go "Huh�Snape and Hermione�NOT loathsome?????!!!!!!!!!"

Thank you for that!

Enjoy, if you please, the story (which I hope isn�t as trite as it sounds)!

"Settle down, settle down," Snape intoned, voice as monotonous as the rest of his life seemed to have become. "I will not give you a list of ingredients, nor will I give you instructions. And nor, I assure you, will I grade easily any potion which does not meet with the highest standards. If you are incapable of preparing a simple Draught of the Waking Sleep without guidance by this time in your N.E.W.T year, there is no reason you should be here, and you may feel free to leave immediately. On the table in front of you, you will find every ingredient you need, and many you do not. I will be checking your work in forty-five minutes. You should be able to function without me by then. Begin."

With no more explanation than that, Snape left his seventh years with mouths ajar and minds befuddled, as he swept menacingly out of the room. Hermione looked about at the other students, including Draco Malfoy, Ernie Macmillan, Padma Patil, and Harry Potter (who only managed from his fierce desire to be an Auror, and a lot of help from his friend. "Well," she hissed to Harry, "get to work! You know this one!" She immediately dragged him to the large rectangular table upon which various ingredients such as powdered horn of a unicorn, ground bezoar, diced (not minced) murtlap tentacles, essence of a venomous tentacula, and knarl quills were arrayed in seemingly no particular order. However, after seven years with Snape (every one of which Harry loa loathed), they were used to his ordered, yet eclectic style. Hastily trying to remember everything he knew about the obscure potion, he began tossing substances into his cauldron.

In his quarters, Severus Snape glowered at the portrait of his mother. "Crazy old bat," he muttered. Visit him? Visit him? At Hogwarts? Granted, there were people he would be less pleased to see---however, he had a difficult time thinking of any besides his father, back from the grave, and Voldemort, back from wherever the Potter boy had sent him late in his sixth year. The portrait scowled right back, reminding him unfortunately where he had gotten his hooked nose and sallow skin. "Thanks, mum," he grumbled. He had only his father to blame for the hair, which never seemed to come quite clean no matter how he scrubbed.

He had thought they had an arrangement---he wouldn�t turn her in to Dumbledore as a Voldemort supporter if she wouldn�t try and contact him. She wasn�t, precisely, a Voldemort supporter, but that mattered little if at all. With the amount of Dark Arts supplies in her house, he could get her convicted for life. He pondered the idea for a few moments, eventually rejecting it as he always did. Sending his mother to Azkaban was an enticing prospect, but the curses she was sure to throw at him somewhat negated the temptation. It is an odd fact of magic that no curse is as effective as the one thrown by the one who bore you. Snarling, he turned away from the portrait, turning his attention back to the letter that still hovered ominously above his desk. Why would she charm it to do that, he wondered? It had resoly rey refused to allow him to even touch the parchment with his fingers, instead opening itself in front of him to let him read it. He wondered, but he knew the answer. It was because she knew he would throw it away if he could lay hands on it, and claim he never received it. It would indeed be a convenient excuse for not having anywhere to put her, and he wished for the millionth time that his mother didn�t know him so well. "What could she possibly want," he growled to the darkness, "with me at Hogwarts that couldn�t wait?" But the walls held no answer for him. He sighed as he headed back to his classroom. He would just have to wait and see.

He did not have long to wait. Selima Snape arrived promptly on the Hogwarts Express the neay, ay, bringing with her, her son�s stomach dropped to see, a large trunk. Lovely, she plans to stay, he thought sourly. He forced a smile, although he was sure it came out as more of a grimace, and offered to help her c her her luggage. "Thank you, dear, but I don�t trust you," she told him, as kind as she�d ever been to him. Glad he had had practice, he masterfully repressed a sneer. He merely held doors open for her and ushered students gawking at the wild-looking old lady wearing what looked like a giant snake atop her head out of her way, and responded, "Of course, Mother," the endearment sticking on his tongue.

"Mother?!" He heard from behindorneorner, followed by an unmistakable "Ron, hush!" Weasley would pay later, he vowed.

When they were safely ensconced in his chambers, he dropped his pretense of politeness immediately, spinning on her. "What do you want?"

She pretended to be hurt, he saw with a flicker of contempt. "Why, Sev, can�t an old, helpless woman come to see her son once in a while? Her pride and joy in her old age?"

Snape was beginning to get unsettled by the honeyed tones she was employing. This did not sound like his mother. He sighed, already tired of her company. "Pride and joy? Mother, you don�t like me, and I certainly don�t like you. Fortunately," he snapped, striding toward the door, "I have a job to do, so I do not have to sit around and attempt to make small talk with an evil aging hag while you�" But that was as far as he got, before she hit him with the full-body bind. Helpless old woman, my arse, he thought malevolently. She hobbled over to him, still looking like she had crawled out of some degenerate cave thirty years behind the times where people existed solely to hex vermin and plot mayhem. She crooned in what he could only imagine she thought was a soothing voice, "Now, Sev, don�t you want to hear what I traveled a hundred miles in the company of revolting Muggles to say?" She didn�t pause for an answer. "Of course you do. Now, I will remove the curse if you promise to sit still and listen to me. Have we a bargain?"

He hoped she could see the hatred in his eyes. "Good. I�m glad we�re agreed." With that, she removed the curse on her son, allowing him to sit up and glare at her once more. He had already opened his mouth to order her out of his chambers, school, and life when she shocked him worse than he had ever expected since receiving her letter. "You must get married."

"P-p-pardon?" he stammered, completely disconcerted. If it wasn�t the last thing he had expected to hear come out of her mouth, it was pretty damn close.

"Don�t play the fool with me, boy," she snapped, sounding at once a hundred times more alike the mother he had known as a boy. Small comfort, that. "You heard what I said. Now, if you do not marry and produce an heir by your fortieth birthday, I will be forced to kill you."

"Er�may I perchance ask why?" He wasn�t bothered by her threat, exactly. It was more the matter-of-fact way she uttered it that disturbed him far more than her usual threats to kill him. For one thing, it wasn�t followed by her usual promises to feed his tainted flesh to carrion birds and sell his bones to try and buy back her dignity (and people wondered where Snape got so nasty�).

His mother tottered over to the massive trunk she had lugged in. She muttered a spell, and the lid magically flew open, revealing a number of scrolls of parchment. She rootled through the mess for a moment, finally unearthing one far more ancient-looking, yet less tattered than the others. From the looks of it, it was likely it was at least seven feet long, and covered in red signatures. Selima whipped out her wand, pointed at the scroll, and it immediately unrolled itself, suspended in midair. "The descent of the House of Snape," she breathed, sounding thrilled, "back to the times of Merlin. Every one of the descendants of Sacheverell Snape has been recorded here, on this piece of parchment."

"Except me, you mean. Is this why you will be killing me, Mother?" He knew he was being cavalier in the face of such an ancient bit of history, but he couldn�t see what all this had to do with him. Aside from his lineage, of course.

His mother glared at him, her attention wrested from her beloved catalogue. "Of course not," she snarled. "You�re right there, beneath your father."

Peering closer, he saw that his name indeed was recorded on the antiquated document, in what appeared to be red ink. His mother leaned over his shoulder, hissing in his ear, "That paper is not merely a record, fool, it is a binding magical contract. The signing of your name to that paper bound you to produce a legal heir, and sign their name to the parchment before forty years have passed since your name appeared on it."

Snape was now totally dumbfounded. "But�I never even signed that paper! How can it hold me to an obscure marriage agreement if I didn�t even sign it?"

"I signed it for you, of course. Oh, don�t look at me like I betrayed you or forged your signature, this happened at your birth. The ink used to sign the parchment must be the blood issuing from the birth of the first son in the direct line of descent." Realizing what his mother meant, Severus hastily retreated from the parchment, feeling a new loathing for what he�d been born into.

His mother waved her wand again, and the parchment rolled itself back up, and packed itself back into the trunk. At another wave of her wand, several other scrolls flew out of the trunk and landed on Snape�s bed. "Those are for your marriage contract, dear. Don�t take too long deciding---awful things happen when you wait until a month before the deadline. Happened to my uncle." Uncharacteristically, she smiled brightly. "That�s why you�re the rightful heir, and not any children he might have had. Of course," she mused, "part of that was the fact that I had him cursed and murdered to put you in the line of descent. Still�" she trailed off, then favored him with a withering glare. "You haven�t been sleeping around with any half-breed girls, have you? Because you�re much more fertile, the closer you get to the deadline. In the last month, no contraception potion will even work. Even barren women can bring forth a child then. It�s part of the deal. Get to work, and don�t bring me an illegitimate child! If you do�" she inched very close to her shocked offspring�s face. "I will kill it, make no mistake about it. And I will force you and your whore to watch while I do. Keep that in mind, dear," she finished, surprisingly cheerfully, patting his cheek in an infuriating manner, as she hadn�t done since he was seven. With no more than that, she spelled her trunk to follow her, leaving the contract for him presumably to brood over, and swept out the door, leaving her son stunned and gaping.
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Written in Blood