Chapter one: Bloods and Bluebell Petals

Hermione could feel him staring at her, ever since their project for the week was announced days prior. She wasn't naive. She knew he fancied himself in love, and she knew most people expected her to return those feelings, but they obviously didn't know him the way she did. Nor did they know her if they thought she would tolerate his bad attitude in any way other than friendship. Over the years, she, Harry, and Ron had become famous as the Golden Trio- she and Ron by association of Harry. She never cared about that. She only cared about Harry, whom she regarded as a brother. But Ron, well, most times she only put up with him for Harry.

Luckily, or unluckily depending on who you asked, she'd been able to squeeze her cauldron between Lavender and Neville- the latter of which was on his seventh new cauldron and they were only nearing the end of February. He shot her forlorn looks from between Harry and Seamus, trying and failing not to be seen staring. Even Neville leaned over and whispered,

"Why is Ron staring at you?"

That made her smile.

"Now," Professor Snape said, pacing through the aisles of simmering cauldrons in his trademarked glide, "your yarrow tonic should have transitioned into a silvery white color. Now, can anyone tell me why we've used the petals as opposed to the more commonly used yarrow root?"

He very obviously wasn't too thrilled about the lesson, but according to rumors, Professor Dumbledore had requested he teach the potion to 'lift spirits and open the path for love'. Professor Snape was using the lesson for every class, fourth year and above, though he looked as though he would rather do anything else. She debated on raising her hand to answer the question, but knew he would either ignore her or make a snide remark about her answer- making Harry add a rude comment in a spot of misguided bravery- and really, she just wanted to brew.

"No one?" He drawled, raising an eyebrow at her as he passed.

Luckily, Lavender raised her hand in a moment of rare participation on her part. Professor Snape nodded for her to answer. "Because the flower is prettier and no one wants an ugly soulmate?"

Snape stopped his pacing and sighed, closing his eyes and bowing his head. "Anyone with an intelligence quotient higher than their age?"

Hermione smirked at that comment and did in fact raise her hand this time. Snape didn't even make a snide remark, obviously wanting to move on as well. "Because this potion is all about the meaning of things, rather than actual use. Yarrow petals represent everlasting love, where the root can be used as common treatment for hay fever, colds, and other issues. Some people use it to make a tea to soothe their ailments."

"Almost textbook," he sneered, "how wonderful to know that the lack of being able to think for yourself can count for something."

Well, she thought he wanted to move on. As expected, Harry defended her the way he did to anyone that wasn't Ron and had points taken without Snape so much as having to take a new breath to do so. Hermione rewarded Harry with a half smile, earning her friend a glare from Ron.

"As Miss Granger so graciously recited for us," Professor Snape said, commanding their attention again, "everything in the art of potion-making has a meaning- past being pretty."

Lavender pursed her lips and looked at her cauldron.

"So I hope you've chosen your ingredients wisely, as this is the furthest I can help you with doing so. Mate Animae Meae is a potion designed to help one find their soulmate," he said the word with a tone of disgust and hatred, glaring at nothing and seeming to be grinding his teeth. Before he could continue, Seamus interrupted.

"Does that mean you have a soulmate?" The boy asked with a mocking tone to his Irish brogue. Hermione closed her eyes and sighed in pity for him. A few brave students, no one ever said the house of courage had an over abundance of tact or intelligence, laughed with him as Seamus nudged Ron with his elbow.

Professor Snape stopped in front of Seamus, his back to Hermione where she couldn't see what was happening- but if Harry's glare was anything to go by he was being true to his character. "I want you to look into my eyes, Mr. Finnegan. What do you see?"

"I-it's c-cold. And dark."

"That's your future," the man said quietly. "You will hold your tongue or I will cut it out for you so that it won't be an issue anymore, and the next time you feel the need to be amusing and say something? I suggest you don't."

When he moved, Seamus was pale with a drawn face as he stared into the air that Snape had previously occupied. "Add your florals," the professor told them.

"Crushed bittersweet," she said with a small smile, "for truth."

She'd researched many things, and had briefly debated about using fern for sincerity, but she much preferred truth to sincerity. She'd known too many sincere liars.

"You know, your flowers aren't very pretty," Lavender said beside her.

Hermione scoffed, rolling her eyes. "If you'd been paying attention, we're meant to have chosen things based on what we want in our mate. What our hearts each desire, and not what our eyes find appeasing."

"Well," the other girl said in a somewhat snobby voice. "I found the prettiest purple flowers. I think they're called hyanths or something."

"Purple hyacinths?" Hermione questioned, rolling her eyes again at Lavender's enthusiastic and pleased nod. "They represent sorrow, forgiveness, and regret. How very appropriate."

That seemed to do the trick as Hermione was left to grind her bluebell petals in peace and added them. "Bluebell," she recited from her noted, not having to consult them as she glanced to Ron, "for humility. And a lotus flower in full bloom, for patience."

When she'd added the bluebells, the potion had brightened to a soft blue, but the lotus seemed to change the potion completely- a burst of sweet scent wafting from her cauldron and the color turned to a deep gold. It was beautiful, and she felt a sense of pride swell in her heart as she looked at the swirling liquid.

"Now your herbs or otherwise not floral plant ingredients," she heard Professor Snape say, "Weasley, those are not for eating!"

She didn't glance up to see what Ron was being scolded for, stirring her potion with an oak stirring rod that she'd collected herself- as well as most of the ingredients to her potion. Oak, for strength. When writing her ingredients, Hermione hadn't been sure if she was looking for strength in relationship or strength of character, but while stirring she was positive she needed both. Perhaps both. When she added the sprig of thyme, for courage, the smell changed into something she couldn't describe, but belonged in a forest.

Neville was doing well on his own for once, though that might have had something to do with Snape keeping his distance from their table- either by coincidence or design she wasn't sure. The Mate Animae Meae potion was to help you discover your soul mate, and the majority of its ingredients were unique to each individual. They had each researched their ingredients and chosen carefully, though some were obviously not as careful as they were supposed to be, and now they were to be brewing it. If brewed correctly, the drinker should see a glow around their soulmate. Though failure could be disastrous, it would not be fatal as the potion was made from the purest parts of each person. And Hermione was determined to get hers right, having gone as far as collecting her ingredients herself, the ones she could, venturing into the Forbidden Forest to do so- if only to prove there was more to her future than marrying Ronald Weasley.

Professor Snape's wandering had lead him back to the front of the room at his desk and he spun on his heel to face the class. "Your personal pieces next."

Yes, the parts of themselves. Much like many potions, Polyjuice being the first to come to mind, it required something of a person. Hermione watched students around the classroom pluck strands of their hair from their heads to toss into their cauldrons, or Merlin forbid, spit into the potions, but Hermione had thought long and hard before deciding that she would do neither. She would use what very few people would ever consider, something that was only legal by tradition and a technicality. Hermione glanced around to be sure no one was watching before grabbing her knife- that she'd sterilized more than once to prepare for this- and made a quick cut to the meaty side of her hand. She held the cut over her potion, still glancing around, and let three drops fall into it.

"Hermione!" Neville hissed quietly at her, his eyes widening at her cut as she hid it in her robes. "What were you thinking?"

"Neville, I-"

"Problems?" A shadow appeared behind them and they turned to see Professor Snape sneering at them, his hands behind his back and his eyes peering over his hooked nose at them.

Neville shot a glance at Hermione and then back to Snape. "N-no, sir."

"Something wrong with your hand, Miss Granger?"

Hermione resisted the urge to tense and flex the hand in question, a slight sting serving to remind her why she shouldn't. "Of course not, sir."

He obviously didn't believe her, and opened his mouth to say so, when he had to shield his face from Neville's cauldron exploding. Hermione gasped in surprise, throwing her hand up to guard her own face from the cloud of gas rising from the now melted cauldron. But... Hermione had been watching his potion out of the corner of her eye. It had been perfect, she'd been so proud...

"What did you do?" Snape growled at him, patting a flame out of his sleeve and leaving it singed.

"I-I-"

There were three small white things on Neville's work area, where Hermione had been sure there were originally four. They were too far away from the cauldron for them to have fallen into it on accident. He'd done it on purpose, to distract Snape from seeing her hand. She didn't want to think about what he'd have said, any type of blood magic generally being automatically accepted as dark.

"Tentacula teeth?" Professor Snape asked incredulously. "You foolish boy! What are you doing with Venomous Tentacula teeth in my class?"

"Well," Neville said slowly, looking to Hermione for help.

"Professor Sprout's tentaculi are teething!" Hermione said quickly, vaguely remembering Neville mentioning it during a DA meeting. "And, I promised to help Neville figure how to reduce their teething time but I thought it might be best to have examples of their baby teeth first."

Neville looked at her in awe of how fast she came up with the story, and Professor Snape narrowed his eyes at her as if trying to decide if she was lying. But, even though he didn't like her, Hermione wasn't generally one to cause trouble and even he couldn't dispute that. So, still looking at her suspiciously, he straightened before turning back to Neville with a sneer. With a wave of his hand, Neville's botched potion was vanished and Snape swept away with a whipping movement from his robes.

Hermione sighed in relief and turned to Neville, who no longer had a soulmate potion. "Neville, I'm so sorry."

He shrugged and smiled. "You'd have come up with something for me, only difference is you would have found something much better than blowing up a potion."

"But your Glow-"

"Hopefully my Glow with be better at potions than I am and will tell me."

She smiled at him and glanced to her own cauldron. "I'll replace your cauldron."

"Don't worry about it. It's not the most cauldrons I've destroyed in a year. I went through twenty first year alone. I'm only up to eight and school's almost over!"

That was one way of looking at it, she supposed, as Professor Snape told them it was time for their words. She'd decided to do this differently as well, as she'd done with the blood from her hand in lieu of hair. The original words, roughly translated from the demanded Latin, were as follows: mate of my soul, love of my destiny, hear my call so that I might devote myself to you and belong to you.

Hermione knew what Ron thought of her, as his. It was in his forced smile whenever she and Harry were talking. It was in his voice when he defended her to any Slytherin. It was there at the Yule Ball when he'd condemned her for accepting Viktor Krum's invitation. She wasn't going to belong to anyone, soul mate or no. So she'd changed the words, recited the English words in her mind as she said the Latin translation. Mate of my soul, love of my destiny, hear my call so that I might devote myself to you and we shall belong to each other. And if Neville thought it strange that her words didn't echo with the rest of the class', he said nothing.

As her fingers hovered over the potion, the incantation still on her lips, there was a ripple on the surface of the potion and she thought she felt something; a tingling that began in her fingers and rose up her arm in a straight line to her heart. Professor Snape was still walking through the aisles, his eyes rolling at some peoples' choices in ingredients and insulting Harry under his breath. She glanced to find Harry adding last minute petals of alyssum, which she knew to represent worth beyond beauty.

"You may now test your potions," Snape told them. "Please spare me your ridiculous screeches of disappointment and excitement when or if you are successful. Mr. Finnegan! If you want your Glow to live to their fullest age, I suggest you step away from the rosemary."

Hermione carefully, with her hands shaking in anxiety, lifted a beaker of the golden potion to her lips. Despite the steam blowing from her cauldron, her potion was cool and tasted like blackberries. She felt her pulse thrum in her veins, but when she opened her eyes, there was no glow around any of the people that she could see. She stared hard at Ron for a few moments, to see if maybe the potion need to sink in more, but there was nothing at all.

Instead, there was a sort of squeal from Lavender Brown as she ran to the redhead and threw her arms around him gleefully. Ron looked both; disappointed it wasn't Hermione and she didn't seem to care, and happy at Lavender's enthusiasm. Hermione rather thought it a perfect match and sagged in relief that he wasn't hers.

"You okay?" Neville asked, examining his tentacula teeth.

"Never better," she grinned. "It's not Ron, I feel like shouting it from the Astronomy Tower."

He looked up startled, "Who would even think it would be? I would believe you and Harry before I believed you and Ron."

She glanced to her other friend, "Yes, well, thankfully it isn't him either."

Speaking of, and thinking of as well, Harry was glaring at his potion as though it had offended him. His face was a mixture of white and green, with a red tinge to his cheeks. He looked up and towards the Slytherin side, but she couldn't tell exactly who it was that he was looking at. Not Malfoy... they'd kill each other. She watched as Daphne Greengrass looked up, locking eyes with Harry as the two seemed to have a conversation with each other before Harry jerked his face away and Daphne calmly looked back to cleaning up her work station.

Hermione didn't know much about Daphne Greengrass, though she'd always been kind to Hermione in their shared Ancient Runes and Arithmancy classes. She was pure-blood, Hermione knew that, and had a younger sister that was in her third year. She wasn't a snob the way Malfoy or Pansy Parkinson were, but rather very quiet with a sort of ethereal beauty about her. She had blonde hair, perfectly clear blue eyes that were slightly too far apart, and an aristocratic face that suggested she should be wearing fabrics of pure gold with a crown resting on her head. The girl seemed to sense Hermione's eyes and looked up, and Hermione quickly went back to her cleaning.

"I expect your essays on which ingredients you chose for your potions and why," Professor Snape told the class, "handed in to me on Monday. And I'd better not see anything about the appearance of an ingredient in your reasoning or there will be cauldrons for the student waiting for them on Monday evening. Do I make myself clear, Miss Brown?"

"Yes, sir," Lavender mumbled, scratching notes out on her parchment. "Hermione, what is mint supposed to mean? Or roses?"

"What color?"

"Green."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Not the mint, the rose."

"Oh. Pink, then."

Hermione glanced over to the leftover chopped petals on Lavender's table. "Happiness. Mint means virtue. Whatever possessed you to choose mint?"

The other girl looked up in surprise at the question. "Well, I didn't want a soulmate that smelled bad, did I? Besides, Ron smells lovely."

Obviously, Lavender hadn't been around Ron after he went flying. Though, with all of his faults- and there were plenty to choose from to help the statement- Ron generally smelled nice. Like spearmint.

"Miss Granger," Professor Snape drawled as the students left the room, "stay."

Bark, Hermione thought sardonically, her feet planted mid-step at the command. Neville passed her on his way out with an expression that said he was obviously hesitant to leave her there. Harry and Ron were each too preoccupied, the former with thoughts of his soulmate no doubt, and the latter with the hands of his soulmate that Hermione couldn't tell which were his and which were not. But Hermione gave Neville a smile that she hoped conveyed that she was alright, and watched him leave- the door closing with a resounding whump!

"Come here," Snape said with a deadly calm voice- like an arctic fox might use to lull the lemming into a false sense of security. Or perhaps a parasite, whose host might be completely ignorant to the dangers of.

Hermione slowly stepped towards where Professor Snape stood beside his desk. Looking at his face, but avoiding straight eye contact for fear it might provoke or challenge him. True, he didn't generally treat her as awfully as he did Harry, but that might be because she went out of her way not to give him reason to. "Yes, sir?"

"Show me your hand."

She was tempted, very much so, to hold up only her right hand- but she knew why he was asking and pretending that she didn't know would only make things worse. It would only insult his intelligence, which she was not in the best sort of position to do at the moment. So she held out both hands, palm up so that he would see the angry looking pink cut on her left hand.

"Did you sterilize the blade properly beforehand?" He asked, looking at the cut.

"Twice."

"How?"

"I held it over a fire until the blade was red, and then I soaked it in boiling water for twenty minutes." She'd done the same thing when she and her muggle neighbor had decided to pierce their own ears, having seen her mother do it once.

He nodded, jerking her hand to examine it further when something whirred in his desk drawer. He released it immediately and went around to the other side of his desk as the door opened and Umbridge waltzed in uninvited. Her eyes squinted distrustfully at Hermione, her lips pursed in that infuriating way of hers, but she moved on to the dour man that stood across the desk.

"Severus," she said in a breathy way Hermione recognized from Lavender and Parvati as someone trying to be seductive, "I've come to request a favor. Might we speak in private?"

"Certainly, Dolores," he returned in a voice that Hermione knew to be loathing, though she reasoned that it might not sound so to someone unfamiliar with the man. "My office? Miss Granger, you will not leave this room until I return. Am I understood?"

"Yes, sir," Hermione said, trying not to make it obvious that she was suspicious of anything.

The two went through the door that led to his office, though she'd never had reason to enter it, but Professor Snape somehow left the door open a crack- just missing the latch. Hermione's forehead deepened, thinking to herself that he wasn't the sort of man to not close a door entirely if he meant for it to be. She waited a moment, fighting the part of her brain she blamed on Harry, before creeping towards the open door to eavesdrop.

"Veritaserum?" Snape's voice came, with only the slightest emphasis to suggest his curiosity and interest. Through the crack, she could see him and Umbridge's back. His eyes glanced to the crack of the door in a command that she be silent. And so she was.

"Yes, it is time that I find out what Potter and Dumbledore are up to. Will you cooperate? Or be part of the quandary?"

"Forgive me, Dolores, but you seem to be under the gross misguidance that I care for Potter one way or another." She noticed that he artfully left the headmaster out of that as he turned to a cabinet in the corner. She couldn't see what he was doing, though it sounded as though he were searching for something, and it didn't seem that Umbridge was any better off- obviously trying to get a peek.

He turned back around with a small bottle that he held out to her. "Three drops," he told her. "No more, no less, and I'd advise you be careful whose tea you tip it into. Your own, and you might give things away you don't want the headmaster knowing. Tip it into the headmaster's, and you're likely to be caught doing so."

She snatched it from him hungrily, and Hermione quickly rushed back to her previous position for when they came out- pretending to be very absorbed in writing what she hoped appeared to be homework. It didn't matter as Umbridge paid her no mind, but left in something of a gleeful hurry.

"The antidote is not something a Hogwarts student would be skilled enough to brew successfully, Miss Granger," Snape told her when the toad was gone- though she would never admit to calling Umbridge that in her mind as it might encourage Harry and Ron. "Not even you, despite your affinity with Polyjuice."

A warm pink mounted her cheeks and mantled her brow at the memory, and the new knowledge that he'd known about it all along. "Occlumency," she started, but he stopped her there.

"Potter hasn't the skill for it and likely never will," he said plainly and without his usual bite. "Much like Divination, you either have the natural affinity or you do not and despite the headmaster's best wishes- Potter lacks it. Warn him if you must, but tell no one else or it will be sure to get back to her."

She wasn't sure why he was telling her this, being helpful and at the same time civil without insult, but she supposed it was for Dumbledore and the Order. It made her feel as though there was a secret with the two of them and some sort of common ground that pleased her.

"Yes, sir."

"If I catch you using your own blood in a potion for my class again," he said, startling her with the sudden change to their conversation, "I will have you prepping scarab beetles until your fingers are numb. Do I make myself clear?"

"I was only trying to-"

"I didn't ask why you were doing it, I asked if I was clear that you were not to do it again."

And just like that, the common ground she had felt and- dare she think it- camaraderie, was gone. "Transparently so."

"Then you may leave."

So she did.

A/N: So, I'm taking a short break on my other stories to write this one- but I will not be abandoning them. I just twindled a bit on enthusiasm, but I still love Letters to No One and will be continuing it shortly. Just give me a week or two to chill. If I force it now, I'll lose all interest. Sort of what happened with Suscepit.

I really hope you like this. It's set during fifth year, right after Dumbledore saved Trelawney from being thrown out the castle. Literally, within the week that happened. I have quite a few of the pairings planned out, two or three of which I have especial pride for, but I'm open to suggestions for some of the more minor characters. And Remus. I don't know who to put with Remus because I do NOT like Tonks. I just don't, though I don't have a real good reason why. No Wolfstar. I have plans for Sirius... dun Dun DUN! Also, the face claim for Daphne Greengrass is a french actress by the name of Lea Seydoux- but only her from Beauty and the Beast (not the Disney version).

Let me know opinions, suggestions, and theories in the towel section down below. Dasvidanya, Mia.

Also, slight OOC for certain characters... Snape being one.