Disclaimer: I Do Not Own Harry Potter.
A massive thank you to my beta Isabellatrixxx who made this a hundred times better.
Prologue: Here We Go Again
His head throbs as it hovers over the toilet. He shouldn't have drunk so much last night, that much was clear as he gripped the edge of the bowl while his stomach spasmed painfully. But if anyone deserved to drink, it was him.
He should be dead. But he isn't. He's alive. Except not in his own time. No, he has to wake up in the past- and the real kicker to it is that it's two days after Lily died.
He's too late. Again. Too late to save the woman he loved, but early enough to get front row seats to watch everything go to hell. Except he wasn't going to let that happen like it did last time. No. This time, he wasn't going to let Dumbledore and Voldemort use people to fight for them.
He, Severus Snape, was going to change it all. He raises his head proudly, determination glinting in his eyes until the world begins to swim before them and he has to grab the bowl with one hand to keep from falling.
He blinks his blurry vision into focus and tries to first thing to happen was the Lestranges' imprisonment and Alice and Frank being tortured into insanity. Bile rises suddenly in his throat and he takes a deep, calming breath.
If he could only change that, then there shouldn't be any reason he couldn't change everything else. Right?
He had a plan. It was actually quite a good one, considering he'd thought of it blinding drunk.
He had to give Bellatrix the thing that she wanted more than anything else and he already had the perfect child picked out for her: Hermione Granger. A mudblood. A ghost of a smile passes across his unshaven, haggard face at the thought of tricking the Death Eater into caring for the very thing she sought to destroy.
He planned to erase her real parents' memories of her and then take her to Bellatrix. He'd tell Bellatrix that the girl's father was Regulus Black and her mother a Pureblood whore who wasn't fit to raise the child. Convince her that the Dark Lord's last orders to him were to give Hermione to Bellatrix to raise as her own. With a child to raise Bellatrix wouldn't persuade Rodolphus, Rabastan and Barty to go after the Longbottoms. She wouldn't. She couldn't possibly.
The Lestranges would lie like every other Death Eater to save their own skin- shamelessly. Sure, he felt guilty of robbing the Grangers of their daughter- but the girl was better off with a magical family, even if that family were the Lestranges.
Everything he was going to do was to save lives on both sides and avoid another war.