Author's Note: Hello! Welcome to my take on a Time-Turner fic. I hope this version hasn't quite been done before. I honestly haven't read very many of them. I am PURPOSELY messing with the time line. I don't care who perished in which order originally, because this is my version. I had to fix it. :( Many thanks to the lovely adelarchersnape for beta-reading and brit-picking for me. (you're the best!)

Warnings do apply, of course: character death (not SS or HG, I promise), implied character death, violence, self-harm um... I really do hope you enjoy the tale. I promise it will end happily.

Chapter 1: Hermione's Decision

Hermione's hands were shaking as she ducked down a corner, clutching Harry's invisibility cloak. He was so wrapped up with the Weasleys and the overall victory that he hadn't see her take it. Her heart was pounding. Everything was wrong. So wrong. This wasn't supposed to happen. The world, her world, was off-kilter. It was bad enough that Fred was gone. Tonks and Remus... but for some reason what had torn her heart open and had her rummaging through her bag was what had happened to Snape.

She kept hearing herself tell Harry it was going to be okay. That Dumbledore trusted Snape. That 'evil' was a strong word. And now she was right and he was gone. Something in her heart was screaming at her to go back, to fix it, to fix it now... so here she was, trying to locate the Time-Turner she had filched from the wreckage of the Ministry's collection.

So many times during the last year had she nearly used it...but no time that its use would have been needed could she have used it safely. Driving Harry or Ron accidentally into madness or being hexed or cursed because she was a 'Hermione double' was most definitely not on her to-do list. But now...

Fingers closing around cold, round metal, Hermione bit her lip. She should have enough time, if she hurried. She could save them. She could make a difference. Rubble shook, fell again from the ceiling as people moved about the castle looking for survivors, and she ducked it as she threw the chain around her neck. She heard Harry calling for her and hid.

Panting, she pressed against a wall. Where to start, though?

Hermione glanced at her watch. If she hurried, she could make it. Time Turners could only go back so far... Mind made up, she raced to the Infirmary. She would need potions. Lots of them. Then to the dungeons, to see what she could find there to fulfill her plan.

Hermione threw the cloak around her shoulders and ducked into an abandoned classroom. She fumbled with the Time-Turner, twisting it to about the time when the battle had begun in earnest. The world spun past silently, encapsulated as she was in her own little bubble.

When she was done, the grave silence of post-battle was broken by screaming, the floor shaking and quivering under her feet. She pulled the Invisibility Cloak on properly and took a deep breath, her hand on the door handle. Hermione tried to remember who had been where, and when. How many could she save? She tried to recall who had been narrowly missed, in case it had been her now-interference that caused it.

Ready, Hermione placed a Silencing Charm over herself and ran into the fray.

Immediately, she had to duck a jet of sizzling red aimed at a fifth-year Slytherin fighting back-to-back with a Hufflepuff she recognised vaguely from Arithmancy last year. Hermione cast a shield charm around them and hurried off, fairly certain they could handle themselves, while she had to try to intervene with those who could not.

Ducking and weaving invisibly through the battle, Hermione found her heart racing just as much as it had the first time. She was terrified, her hands shaking as she uncorked the bottle she held. She had to be quick, had to be perfect, or he was dead, dead for real, dead forever...

Hermione grabbed Fred's sleeve as the spell was fired; it splashed harmlessly into the wall, and the falling rocks blocked the other Weasley's view of him. As quickly as she could, she Stunned him so he fell heavily to the ground. George cried out, his voice full of pain, and she fumbled the vial, nearly spilling it.

Just a drop, just need a drop, she told herself, managing to the get the Draught of Living Death in his mouth. She moved back just in time; Percy checked Fred's pulse, or lack thereof, and Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. But she couldn't change things, couldn't make him live now... he was out of the way, she had the Wiggenweld's to wake him with later.

She couldn't stay to watch them suffer Fred's loss. Their grief was a real thing, tangible to her aching heartstrings, but she couldn't stay.

Hermione hurried through the castle, casting jinxes at Death Eaters, the occasional Rennervate on students or Order members, and sometimes a Shield Charm to give them a moment's respite. At one she saw Neville grimly tossing a potted Devil's Snare at someone's back as she ran past. The pot shattered and the vines quickly constricted their target. Hermione shuddered: she still had the occasional bad dream about that particular plant.

It took a great deal of running, her lungs burning, before she found Remus and Tonks. And then she had another terrible problem. Hermione froze. They were too far apart. This was something she had not considered, that she couldn't save them both. Her mouth ran dry and tears gathered, stinging and burning. Why couldn't she save them both? Why did she have to choose?

For a brief half-moment, she contemplated letting them both go, but then she remembered they had a child, one who couldn't grow up all alone without parents, and the tears fell.

In that stolen bit of time, Hermione hated herself. She hated what she had done, what she did. How had Dumbledore done it? Manipulated and schemed and used them all? Feeling sick, she ran for Remus. She tried to be analytical about it; Tonks had fallen apart when Remus had rejected her, how could she handle his death? Remus, on the other hand, had survived the loss and betrayal of his friends, being a werewolf... he could survive this. He had his son, he had Harry... And if she was a teeny bit more honest with herself, Harry needed Remus, too.

She just hoped that the Draught of Living Death would make him 'dead' enough for Harry to call him with the Resurrection Stone.

Hermione reached his side as she saw the Avada cast, and yanked him down. His eyes widened, going to Tonks, as Hermione Stunned him. Sobbing silently, she dosed him with the Draught, too, and hurried on, leaving him crumpled, one hand flung out for his wife's.

When she reached a quiet corner, she fell to her knees, retching. How? How could she have done it? Just let Tonks die? Rationalise her way through it? A heaviness weighed down her heart and she felt dirty, filthy, beneath the layers of grime and battle, all the way to her soul. She allowed herself those precious precious moments of pain, of remorse, of grief, before rising unsteadily to her feet. Casting a charm to remove the taste of bile from her mouth, she moved outside of the castle.

Hermione dodged, ducking and weaving, exhausted. She was intervening as she could, but her strength was flagging. Panting, she stopped to catch her breath and check her watch, and she looked around. With a gasp she saw that Colin snuck back with some of the older students, and he was duelling poorly with a Death Eater. She lunged at the Death Eater's legs just as the spell went off, sending it high and wild. Hermione stunned Colin, then the Death Eater, and administered the Draught to the younger Gryffindor with a silent apology.

The clicking of pincers reached her and she turned, horrified, to see the Acromantula coming from the Forest. Harry and Ron had not been exaggerating their size.

She ran for the Whomping Willow, hoping that being invisible would hide her from the tree. No such luck: a branch whipped into her stomach, knocking her onto her back and the wind from her lungs as it broke her Silencing Charm. Pained, she lay there, gasping, before lurching to her feet. She didn't have time to be injured. Something was calling her, tugging her, demanding she get to Snape.

"Wingardium Leviosa," she whispered hoarsely, guiding a fallen stick to the knot at the Willow's base.

She resettled the Cloak around her and recast the charm to keep her silent. If she had it right, she should reach the Shack before Snape, before You-Know-Who, and if she was lucky she would find a place to hide out of the way.

The path to the Shack seemed longer than she remembered, or maybe it was her nerves, or the way her mind screamed at her to hurry, hurry, oh please hurry.

Hermione's eyes widened as she reached the Shack: You-Know-Who was already there. Even though she knew that in a few hours he would be dead, he was still a terrible figure to behold. Hermione prayed and pleaded to anyone and anything that would listen that he would not find her, that Nagini would remain blissfully ignorant about her nearness. As if it would help, Hermione stared out the grimy window, thinking about the scenery.

Time crawled by and she tried very hard not to worry about the people she could not save. It ate at her conscience, gnawing at her. But she was here, now, and couldn't get her feet to listen to her brain to go back even if she wanted to. Snape and her need to try to save him drew her here.

You-Know-Who—she dared not even think his name, not with the Taboo—was talking to someone-Malfoy?-and she heard Snape's name. It came out as a sibilant hiss, 'Sssseverusss', and she found she didn't like it very much at all that way.

When she had thought of her professor in the past—and indeed, she had fallen victim to a rather ferocious crush on him on more than one occasion before he did something completely horrid and drove it off a while longer—she had never thought of his name with such a vulgar tone to it.

Hermione held her breath as the floorboards creaked. His tread was familiar to her: she had crossed his path often on Prefect rounds, had been keenly aware of his position in the classroom, and she closed her eyes tightly. She didn't want to hear them speak again. She didn't want to hear that question in Snape's voice. The confusion.

Her teeth sank into her lip, tears spilling hotly down her cheeks at that horrible scream. Her hands trembled, and that pressing feeling of now, now, now, fix it, damn it, make it right, bring him back had returned, weighing heavily in her gut.

As soon as she, Ron, and Harry had left, Hermione leapt from her hiding place. The cloak caught on the clasp of the Time-Turner as she shrugged it off. The cloak puddled to her feet. "Rennervate," she said shakily, pointing her wand at Snape. He took a sudden breath, a gasp of pain.

His eyes blinked and sought hers. His words were garbled, but she heard him clearly: "There you are."

"Yes, I'm here." She offered him as kind a smile as she could and fell to her knees. Pain lanced through her knee and she ignored it, pouring potions into him, placing the bezoar in his mouth for him to swallow, and began casting all the healing spells she knew to repair his ruined throat. Hermione's hands trembled in relief as the skin began to knit together and the bleeding stopped. Then she paused: her hands were transparent with a soft glow to them. She looked down at her body: all of her was transparent, and the remnants of the Time-Turner lay crushed under her knee, her blood and his mingling.

"Oh no," she said, very faintly.

And then she was gone, ripped sideways through time.