Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter

Written for Round 6 of the Quidditch League Competition.

Chosen Prompts: 14. (word) freedom, 15. (word) willing & 6. (word) old

Set Neville's third year at Hogwarts.

To Bellatrix Lestrange,

I write to you knowing there is a chance that this letter will never reach you within the walls of Azkaban. But I write anyway to put my anger and hatred onto paper.

I fear that if I bottle up the way I feel about you, I'll become consumed by the same darkness that consumed you and was ultimately the cause of your loss of freedom.

You destroyed my parents. I know that you didn't act alone, but it was your idea to target them and it was you who wouldn't stop when their screams stopped being that of pain, but of insanity.

Everybody says that my parents were once strong proud people, but I find that hard to believe when I look at them now. They lay in bed trapped in their own heads with no way to escape.

I think they are no longer willing to try to become better.

I hate you. No, it's more than hate that I feel you, so much more that there isn't a word to describe it.

I will never know my mum and dad, since I was old enough to understand all I've ever heard were stories about them. But that's all they are, stories.

I don't like hating someone or wanting to see them suffer.

I don't want to have an enemy, but unfortunately for me and maybe even you, you're my enemy.

When the others at Hogwarts look me, I sometimes wonder if they had ever considered that I clumsy Neville Longbottom could even have enough hate to consider anybody an enemy.

Do you know what I hate about you the most?. Is that everybody tells me you didn't care about going to Azkaban, that you're just waiting for He-Who-Must-Not be Named to return.

The thought of you and the others not giving a damn about being punished, only your loyalty to a man who spread fear and death across the wizarding world, fills me with anger and disbelief.

I cannot grasp how you don't give a damn that you have ruined my parents, ruined my life and countless other peoples lives and families.

Are you too lost in your own hatred to notice how much others hate you?.

I wonder if this letter does reach your hands, if you feel just the tiniest spark of remorse.

The chances of that are probably similar to me feeling an ounce of pity for you being drained of happiness by Dementors.

There are Dementors here at Hogwarts, looking for your cousin Sirius. Just them being near Hogwarts fills me with fear. Is it like that for you Bellatrix? .

Is everyday filled with dread?. If so then good, that's how my parents felt. That's how everyone you ever hurt felt.

The thought of you feeling afraid everyday and every night, comforts me slightly when I have to stare into my parents blank and unresponsive eyes.

Then again you probably get some comfort that my parents are nothing, but empty shells.

Maybe one day you will be a shell of your former self, maybe you already are. Strangely the thought of you being a shell doesn't make me feel better.

I want you to be who you were when you tortured my parents, I want that person to suffer. I want you to suffer.

I don't like wanting it, but I do and I have to come to terms with hating someone.

It's like I am becoming obsessed with hating you and not wanting to.

Actually that's wrong I am not becoming obsessed, I am obsessed the fact that I've been sitting here writing for an hour to someone who's probably never going to read this letter.

I could have stopped writing and a screwed this letter up, but I haven't and I won't. This is years of contained anger and sadness.

Every word represents the things I have missed because of you. The bedtime stories that were never read, the family photos that will never exist.

The hugs that I'll never know, because of you and the others.

My anger for the others is both less and the same level that I feel you. That makes no sense I know, but then again things rarely ever make sense.

It makes no sense that you have done things you have done and yet you did them.

Sometimes when I walk around Hogwarts I cannot help wondering if when you walked the corridors, did know you what you'd become.

Even then did you dream the ways you'd people's lives. A part of me wants the answer to be yes and then I can take comfort that was nothing that the likes of Dumbledore could do to stop you. That you were always bad and mad.

Were you always this way Bellatrix?. Or did everybody around you make you like it?.

Are the people who look at me with pity just as equally as guilty for not trying to save you from the darkness? .

I almost feel pity if they didn't even attempt to save you, almost. I mainly feel sorry for the things I've lost and anger that I had to lose those things because they didn't try to help you.

That sounds kind of selfish, but at least I am being honest. I'm honest about hate for you. I'm honest about my anger.

Well I have said all the things I need or want to say.

Oh, if this letter has reached you and you have read this far then I hope it is because you have finally learned some remorse.

Neville Longbottom.