Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JKR, of course. Just puttering about in her world.

"In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."

― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

For someone who had lived a life of glimpsing the chaos that lurked outside the careful order of people's lives, the scene in the Great Hall after the final battle was chaos personified. The Hall held so many extremes of emotion.

Some wailed their grief over lost loved ones with loud, anguished cries, giving voice to an unbearable ache too overwhelming to be contained in their fragile, mortal frames. Others shed near-silent tears, from pain no less soul-wrenching than those who were vocal in their mourning, but unable to howl out in the same fashion.

At the opposite spectrum of those overcome with pain were those whose relief at being reunited with loved ones led them to guilty smiles and carefully hushed laughter. Most of those clutched at each other with a disbelieving sort of desperation, as if afraid letting go would mean the ones they embraced would vanish in a puff of uncatchable smoke.

There were many emotions spread between joy and loss, and of those, the young woman could understand numbness the most. Their world lay in flux, with its greatest terror gone, yet so much of the world destroyed in the process. Wrapping one's mind around the massive task of recovery was a bit beyond anyone who sheltered under the fractured ceiling that no longer displayed the outside sky.

Hidden in a corner, few saw her as she held to the shadows to slip out of the Hall. She had no family here to clutch her to them in joyful relief, and those she loved as friends were otherwise occupied in mourning the bright lives taken from them today. She was not saddened by the fact on this particular day, because it meant that she could set about the task she'd set herself more easily without anyone to assist her, or worse, try to stop her.

Her feet tread so softly in the deserted corridors that she wondered briefly if this was like being a ghost, and she actually pinched herself just as a reminder that she did still draw breath. The silliness of the action made her smile sadly for a time when such little things were the province of children, before she and so many of the other children of Hogwarts had grown up too fast and too harshly in a world gone dark with war and terror.

She paused at the bottom of the spiral staircase to the Headmaster's office to run a hand over the half-destroyed gargoyle that no longer had enough of his magical life to do his duty. He'd be repaired in time, she knew, but for now, the too-still staircase must be climbed like any sort of stairs. For the first time, she worried about what she might find at the top.

It turned out to be a needless worry. However the gargoyle had taken damage, it hadn't been for anyone to ransack the office that held the portraits of those who'd led Hogwarts through the years. Giving a relieved little sigh, she looked for the most recent portrait, meeting the familiar blue gaze without hesitation. He seemed about to speak, but she shook her head. In time, she'd want to speak to Dumbledore, but not on this day, when two men he'd sent to their deaths in the name of his Greater Good were prominent in her mind. He didn't deserve to know that Harry lived.

With a flick of her wand, all the portraits were covered with gauzy draperies, obscuring the view of the men and women so they could not gossip about her task in their domain. Only one portrait remained uncovered; its painted occupant not yet moving. By now, the ebony-haired man should have come to portrait-life to take his place among the painted leaders of Hogwarts. The fact that he remained still and unmoving told her that the dreams that had plagued her last autumn were far closer to becoming true than she's thought they would.

All the variables to save Severus Snape had been peeled away as he marched knowingly toward the fate set for him in his lifelong effort to redeem him for a tragic teenage mistake. Everyone else assumed he was dead, beyond hope or help, but from beyond the chaos flickering into the world, there remained one last possibility. She placed a hand against the cool stone of the castle wall beside the unmoving portrait and made her request, feeling the warmth that was Hogwarts answer in her own fashion. In the space of a blink, the portrait was gone, hidden into whatever nook the castle deemed appropriate for as long as necessary.

Dumbledore's second chances were full of pain and heartache. Hogwarts would do her lost boy a better turn at that.

Pale fingers searched the drawers of the Headmaster's desk, as she hoped she'd find the needful item here the same as it had been in those determined, repetitive dreams. A smile closer to the dreamy ones of her girlhood crossed her face when her fingers closed around the golden chain of the Time Turner. That secured, she slipped into the private quarters and acting on instinct, gathered and shrunk items that would not be missed, but would be important for the man she was determined to save.

Her tasks done, she checked her other supplies, both medical and more mystical, and then tugged a silvery cloak from her satchel. Harry hadn't thought twice when she'd asked to borrow it, trusting her implicitly with one of his greatest treasures. She figured if he knew what task she'd be putting it to, he'd find it worthwhile.

Her trip back through the corridors was even more ghostly than the first, covered under the fabric that had served Harry so faithfully for so long that it retained some of his scent. It made her think of rainstorms and chocolate, with perhaps a bit of broom polish thrown in for good measure.

The tunnel still held up, unprotected now due to damage to the Whomping Willow, and Luna hoped on one else had discovered the professor before she got there. Granted, she had the Time Turner, but it'd be harder to do what she needed to be done if a friend or foe was in the picture. They might not approve of the visions she'd been given from beyond chaos on how to fix this significant tragedy of the war.

But luck held with her, perhaps finally deciding to grace the dark man with something other than pain or sorrow. She fell to her knees beside him, wand out to run medical scans to tell her just how much had to be healed and how much could be left to the obscure potion from her family's grimoire.

The poison had nearly left his system. She saw no signs of a bezoar and could only surmise that he'd exposed himself to the snake's venom periodically enough to develop a sort of immunity. He was one of the strongest wizards of their time, even if few were honest enough to acknowledge the depths he held. With her first concern mostly settled, she set to casting sing-song little healing spells she'd also memorized from her family grimoire. The tearing damage at his throat and collarbones was too much even for the rare spells, and she tucked her wand behind her ear with a sigh.

"Well, professor, it seems we do have to go to that one final plan, and should you ever remember what I've done, or someone tell you, I hope that you know that I do this in faith that no one should ever have been asked to give absolutely everything to save our world. Even Harry carried a lighter load than you do." She kissed the man's forehead, disregarding the filth and blood, and then brought out a crystal vial that held the blood potion which would give Severus Snape a true second chance.

It took some maneuvering due to the wounds to his neck, but she managed to get the unconscious, mostly comatose man to swallow her concoction. Retrieving her wand, she drew a ritual circle around them that she'd seen only in the dusty tome of her family's magic. But she knew she was taking the right steps to rectify wrongs. As the circle's completion threw a band of golden light around them, Luna hummed softly, caught somewhere between spell singing and general happiness that what she foresaw was coming to pass. Her voice rose in spell song at last, words not in the dry Latin or bastardized English taught for spells at Hogwarts, but a language of her ancestors, who hadn't been entirely human despite the pureblood status of her family.

As the final note was sung, she pressed a gentle kiss over each of Snape's closed eyes and finished with one to his too-cold lips. Light sparked from them both at that final contact, swirling around them in a whirlwind of golden motes and joyful noise that did not come from a human throat.

Luna knew her plea had been heard, that the ritual was successful, when the man before her began to slowly become younger. First the silver disappeared from his dark locks, followed quickly by the lines that had prematurely aged his face. The reintroduction of youth to the man flowed over him like water until soon he was losing height and weight, his face reverting to what Luna thought he might have looked like when he was her age. She'd have caressed that teenage face that hadn't yet made all the bad mistakes, but she knew there was yet more to come.

Smaller and smaller Severus Snape became, regressing through a thin, half-starved childhood into a toddlerhood and finally to a delicate infancy that made the blonde woman want to cry. When the ritual stopped at last, she saw the man as he'd entered the world, and her heart ached anew. Even being born hadn't been on his side, as it was immediately obvious the man had been a sickly, premature baby.

But already some of the ritual's effects were showing. The baby's skin was no longer sallow, nor his nose showing any signs of becoming the prominent hook it had always been. Her blood had been part of the ritual, and she'd given of her essence to craft the potion that had begun the ritual.

Taking a soft bundling cloth from her satchel, she gently cleaned the newborn and wrapped him tightly. He made no sound other than to breath unevenly. A softly spoken charm caused her to giggle slightly as it took effect, and just in time at that. The ebony-haired baby gave a mewling cry, and without a second thought, Luna unlaced her blouse and guided the baby to nurse.

Humming as she nursed the baby once known as Voldemort's right hand man and yet the Order's most valuable spy, Luna began to make plans on how she was going to make sure that this time, the man who'd sacrificed everything grew up happy and loved.

Sounds from the tunnel caused her to cast a silencing spell and draw the Invisibility Cloak over them. There were very few who needed to know what she'd done today, especially since the blood magic had been either illegal or so very close to it that she'd have likely ended up on the cell next to her father in Azkaban if found out by the wrong sort.

But the visitor from the tunnel wasn't the wrong sort at all, and Luna watched unseen as Harry surveyed the empty room with its bloodstained floor and dropped to his knees with a sob. "I can't even give you a proper burial," he choked out and the time for hiding was gone.

Luna drew aside the Cloak and smiled reassuringly as Harry took in the baby nursing at her breast.

"Is that him?" he asked. He stepped forward, two fingers tracing the baby's dark hair and pale skin as if he couldn't resist touching.

She nodded. "It's a permanent change. He's no longer the war hero we knew. But this way, he'll get the chance to have a true childhood and find happiness instead of living with all the dark deeds the world forced upon him.

"I'll help you," Harry declared, and she believed him. She had a feeling Harry would forsake his own happiness to ensure this child grew up properly this time, so it didn't surprise her when he declared, "he'll need a father and a mother, Luna."

"That would be the ideal, Harry, but I don't give up much to become his mother. You have your Ginny and the Weasleys."

Harry shook his head. "Ginny and I are near strangers to each other after this past year. And I can't stay away from this, so you're stuck with me."

She gave him one of her dreamiest smiles, not seeing his declaration as one of couple hood, but rather co-parenting. "Alright. We need to get him far away from here, Harry, if we're going to make him our child in the eyes of the world and no one question that."

"I'll take you both to Grimmauld Place. Kreacher's loyal to me now, and he'll help me tighten the wards to make you both safe."

Luna nodded in assent and left him to tidy the room of any evidence of her ritual, leaving behind only the debris of the attack and that Voldemort himself had briefly headquartered himself there.

They almost made a clean getaway from the Shrieking Shack, Luna and baby mostly hidden under the Invisibility Cloak, when another crawled out of the tunnel and they found themselves staring into the shocked face of Draco Malfoy.