Quidditch League: Ballycastle Bats Keeper: Familial Relationship – Neville Longbottom and Bellatrix Lestrange [1068 words]

Dear Lady-With-The-Insane-Laugh,

I think I'll just call you 'Miss' in the future. The other name sounds a bit rude. I don't even know if you'll get this letter, but I'd like to think you will, and you'll read it.

You probably don't know me. Or maybe you've forgotten me, but I remember you. I remember your cackle, and ...

This is really strange, but I just wanted you to know.

I just-I remember your cackle more clearly than my own parents' voices. You're more familiar than the people my grandmother shows me in her Penseive.

I don't even know if I'll actually end up sending this, but... I hope I do. I don't know who you are, but you're my oldest memory, and I can't seem to forget your laughter.

I guess that's all I wanted to say.

N

Dear Miss,

I don't think you expected to hear from me again, and you haven't replied to the last letter, so I guess either you didn't receive it, or you don't mind me sending you these.

I hope for the latter, even if you never reply and I never find out who you really are. I like the idea of there being someone out there that won't judge – someone who would simply listen.

You could consider me troubled again, I guess, but I haven't had any accidental magic yet, and I'm-I'm old enough that I should have shown something.

My family have, understandably, I guess, grown impatient waiting for my magic. They've been trying everything to get a little bit of magic out of me. It's really difficult having to watch my back all the time, especially from people I consider my family.

Would you enchant a snake, and I am terrified of snakes, to follow a child around just to force them to perform accidental magic? Would you hold them by their toes out of a building for the same reason? I don't think you would... but they do. They're happy with my terror as long as they get what they want, what they expect.

I'm not a squib, even if everyone else thinks I am, but sometimes... sometimes I wish I was.

...I probably shouldn't have said that. Sorry.

I'm going to send this before anyone here is able to read my thoughts.

N

Dear Miss,

I've finally proven to them that I have magic. I know it's been nearly a year, but they're finally not pushing me down stairs and hanging me me from windows – because my uncle actually managed to drop me from one.

It wasn't on purpose. He'd just let go by mistake. I think he'd gotten too used to hanging me off the balcony that he stopped thinking about it. I had to sit there while they celebrated my magic, as they reminded me how long it had taken, how much effort they had put in, to finally coax my magic out.

But they also told me something else. They told me I was old enough to understand why my parents were trapped in their minds, unaware of their surroundings – why I remember you more than my parents.

You-you're Bellatrix Lestrange, aren't you? Or you would be if the owl found the right person. I should hate you for everything you've done to my parents, to my family, to me because of your actions.

You're the notorious Death Eater who came into our home with your husband and his brother and tortured my parents into the state they are in today, and you didn't regret it. You laughed as the Aurors captured you, and it's that laugh that I remember.

I should hate that laugh.

But I can't.

I can't hate the laugh that was all I relied on for the past year – the laugh that reminded me that I could be stronger than the situation. Somehow, I think I believed you had been helping my parents, standing up to whoever had put them in the state they're in, but now that I know the truth...

The truth doesn't change what I had always believed that laugh to be. The truth doesn't change the strength and the ability that was required to laugh as victoriously as you did.

I want to be like that. I want to be strong enough to laugh at the face of difficulties and terror.

So, I guess... I guess I'm thanking you.

N.L.

Bellatrix Lestrange,

This will be either the first letter you receive from me, or the last, but it has been a little under a decade since I last send a letter to you.

I know that you're free now, wandering and torturing the Wizarding World with your laughter, so this letter will definitely reach you. Whether you read it or not makes no difference to me any more.

I still remember your cackles to this day.

That is the only thing that remained unchanged. I'm older now, and stronger than I was in those harsh years of childhood. The child who clung to your laughter has grown into a man who is driven by it. When we meet again, seventeen years later, I will be ready for you.

As much as I still wish things could have been different, that you truly were the hero I had imagined as a child, you are not. It is the eve of the war, and I know I will see you on the other side of the battlefield.

You will be killing more people that I care for, and I will stop you, because the strong defeat the weak. That is what you taught me.

That is who I've become.

Neville Longbottom

The last letter fluttered into the fire like all of Neville's prior letters, but the words had long since etched themselves into her mind. Neville had grown into a strong man, somehow she had managed to have a hand in that.

Bellatrix couldn't suppress her pride. She imagined the feeling she was experiencing to be something like what she would feel had Neville been her own.

Like it would have felt if she had taken Neville and apparated out of the Longbottom house without Rabastan and Rodolphus seventeen years ago, but there would have been no guarantee of her staying out of Azkaban. Narcissa would have raised Neville to be as soft and spoilt as Draco was.

Bellatrix cackled as she imagined Neville's expression when he found his Lestrange Lordship.