Author/Artist: Cybrokat
Recipient:BookofMoonRevel
Title: Hermione Granger and the Pure-Blooded Bastard
Rating: T – Cussing and Mild Adult Situations
Warnings: None
Genre: Rom/Com with a touch of Angst
Summary: Hermione is working on a project for the Ministry when she finds a long buried secret.
Author's Notes: Love to my alpha, beta and Brit-picker and to MoonRevel for such a fun prompt! This story is, of course, as always, complete! I'll be posting a chapter every few days. I actually have THREE stories I need to get posted, so here we go!

Chapter One

She would never forget the taste of his blood in her mouth. It covered her hands, her clothes, her face. Laboriously working over him, her hand absently swiped a piece of hair from her mouth, leaving the tang of copper and a level of intimacy Hermione Granger had never thought she would experience with her professor.

"Hermione!" she heard from a voice behind her. "We have to go!"

"He isn't breathing, Harry! I can't…I can't just leave him! Professor Snape is going to die!" And it wasn't his fault, her mind told her. None of this was his fault. She had been so blind. So blind. Not his fault. None of it. And here he was, going to die on the floor of this dusty and forgotten shack. Forgotten.

Her purse.

"Hermione, now."

Quick as lightening, she Accioed the vial, popped the stopper, and shoved all three bezoars and a bottle of Blood Replenishing potion down Professor Snape's throat. She couldn't remember offhand if there could be damage by consuming too many bezoars, but without them, he was as good as dead anyway.

She left the shack, never turning back.

~~~HGSS~~~

Hermione sat up with a gasp at the sound of her alarm wand. Swishing it off, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and tried to calm her heart. She hated that dream. That memory. The guilt had been with her every day since the defeat of Voldemort, a day so many others celebrated. And he hadn't even died.

No, Professor Snape was alive and as well as he ever was. But that wasn't what bothered her.

She had forgotten him, just like everyone else had.

Hermione never checked back on him after the victory. Between consoling the friends and family of the fallen and then toasting the triumphant Order of the Phoenix, she had never gone back to find out what happened to Severus Snape.

And it seemed he was never going to let her forget that she had forgotten.

Tying back her hair, she slid into the Great Hall before the majority of the castle inhabitants were even awake. Few eyes watched her progress, but his were always there. No matter what time she got up, he was always up before her, sitting immaculate in the chair next to hers, sipping his morning tea with a glare or a smirk on his face. A glare on the mornings she came in perky. A smirk on the days she was dragged in by Crookshanks.

Days like today.

"Good morning, Professor," she greeted him, sliding into her seat.

"Granger."

Hermione rolled her eyes. It had taken him a full three months of being colleagues to drop the "Miss." With a sigh, she pushed a few eggs around her plate and shot a glance at the man next to her. His presence wasn't helping her dismiss her dream, so she brought her eyes back to the center and thought about the day's work ahead of her. Classes, grading, research.

Snape watched her out of the corner of his carefully concealed eye. She was a strange one, Granger. Clearly not a morning person, he observed, as she poured another cup of tea. Lost in her own world, he was free to watch as her delicate hand brought the cup to her lips. As it was returned to its place, he looked away.

With a frown, Hermione looked over at him. He was awfully quiet this morning.

Snape, noticing her frown, took that as his cue to leave. No one should have to suffer his presence for long. Least of all her.

His mind flickered back. His blood spilled like his memories that night, and both made his recollection sparse. Her tears, hot on his face. Her voice, screaming and then murmuring.

"Why?" she had yelled. "…the whole time? Not possible…Dumbledore would have…Not right…"

And then she had left.

Snape's piercing gaze watched her leaving the Hall, messy chignon bouncing behind her after she had given up on breakfast. She could make small talk with him and tolerate her seat next to his, but he knew she had never forgotten his betrayal. She could never forget. Just one more regret he could add to the sea overflowing with them.

Hermione's step faltered just outside the door. Should she invite him to join her work? Two heads were better than one, and all that? No. He could barely manage two words to her. She was better off persevering alone.

~~HGSS~~

"DRAT!" echoed down the stone corridor, following "Sugar dates!" "Fudge!" and "Cheese and RICE!"

Snape heard the one-sided exchange from around two corners in his new office, slightly above the dungeons. Setting down his paper knife, he slid out of the door and leaned against the doorframe for the personal lab of one Hermione Granger, non-curser extraordinaire. She never used a foul word, but she certainly had a temper when things were not going her way. And whatever she was working on—he had no idea—was definitely not going her way.

A fuzzy brown halo bobbed to and fro amongst the vials, strange machines, and shimmering chalkboards. A few boards simply hovered in midair above her head, calculations written in her magical hand, one particularly long one scribbled out in red. Snape recognized a Muggle microscope and a rack of vials. After that, he was admittedly lost. Three tables were covered in her lab, and she was dancing in between them all.

Without turning around, she growled, "I don't want to hear it, Snape!"

"I've been listening to it all afternoon, I don't blame you."

Another growl was heard as she dumped a tray of…something into a rubbish bin.

"What are you working on?"

Hermione huffed a piece of hair out of her face as she turned to him. "Muggle science and silly wand waving. You wouldn't be interested."

"Don't I seem interested?" he asked.

"Not really."

"Hmm, probably because I'm not."

A drawn out sigh. "Why are you here, Snape? My last experiment was a complete failure. I can only modify a Shrinking spell so much, and it simply does not work on a cellular level, so I have no way of getting these stupid liposomes the correct size to pass through the pores in the nuclear membrane. I mean, what is magic good for anyway if you can't properly blend it with science? I don't care if I can turn my office walls pink until I can figure out how I am turning them pink! I just need some bloody penetration!"

Severus knew when he was out of his intellectual (and personal) comfort zone and felt no loss of pride admitting to himself he had no fucking clue what she was blabbering about. This was the most she had said to him at once since the first day she came on staff and nervously tittered her way through their first meal. His well pointed glare alerted her that he hadn't changed and didn't really care about her studies abroad or the Muggle Science class she was teaching.

But now a dam had opened in her frustration. Working alone obviously did not suit her long term, accustomed as she was to having the other halves of the Golden Trio or a partner in her University classes. Any port in a storm, as they say, and a storm was brewing indeed. "Forgive me if I have intruded. Next time I hear your caterwauling, I will simply assume the resident know-it-all doesn't actually and go back to my grading."

With a brief and graceful bow, he left the room. Hermione's tension came out in a whoosh as her guilt came flooding back, and she couldn't help but feel there was something she had missed.