AN: As I have said, for the LJ challenge community 10 letters. The prompt here is 'irritation' which I hope is an undercurrent in this letter from Hermione to her parents. This is just something I imagine she would have written at some point. You can decide whether they ever received it or not. ^_^

June 20th 1997

Dear mum and dad

I don't know if I will ever allow you to read this letter but I think , for myself, I need to write it anyway.

I haven't been totally honest with you all these years at Hogwarts. I kept secrets and omitted details I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have because now I don't think you could begin to understand what's happening or why and what I have to do about it. I was terrified that if you knew I wouldn't be allowed to go back to school. Hogwarts is the only place where I have ever felt like I fitted in and even then I was on the outside.

I hope that one day you will understand why. I can only break each year down and explain every event. Tell you everything in this letter that I should have told you before.

I said I got on with the other girl's in my dorm but I lied. When I first arrived at Hogwarts I was afraid I might be sent home if I wasn't the best or didn't follow all the rules so I followed every rule to a tee and if anyone broke them I told a teacher. People hated me for it and I had no friends, no one to talk to. People thought I was just a bushy haired know-it-all. Then Halloween came. That was the first big incident of my magical life and I didn't tell you. I was so afraid. A teacher who was working for the Dark Lord let a troll into the castle and it ended up trapping me in the bathroom. I was terrified and I thought I was going to die. Then Harry and Ron came, just as it was about to crush me with it's club. They distracted it but I couldn't move. Harry jumped on it and Ron ended up knocking it out with it's own club in the end. That was one of the best and worse moments of my life. I saw my life flash before my eyes for the first time but I also made my first real friends. I just never realised how much more was to come.

Later that year Harry, Ron and I had to get passed a three headed dog, killer plants, deadly potions and Harry had to face the Dark Lord again who wanted to kill him. He barely survived and was in a coma for days. I told you the story of the boy who lived before I went to school but could you honestly say that if I told you how close he came to dying that you would of let me speak to him again? To return to Hogwarts when you knew about the other schools? I couldn't risk it!

So many times over that summer I thought about telling you but you could never understand! To you trolls are just something that little children are scared of. Characters in fairy tails and nothing that could harm you, not something that could have killed me a month into the school terms. If I told you about the Dark Lord you would have said that I should have told an adult and would not have understood that we tried. It was so infuriating because at twelve years old I was hiding half of who I was. I am a know-it-all, I know it and so does everyone else but I am so much more than that. I'm fighting a war and by second year, perhaps I should have realised that the evil was coming.

You never knew about what happened that year. The year of the chamber of secrets. I lost months of my life to that chamber, to the Dark Lord and came so close to death that it gave me nightmares all summer but still I refused to tell you, even more afraid of the consequences than before. While writing this I think that I'm only telling you know because I'm in too deep for you to do anything about it. The chamber of secrets was a Hogwarts legend. No one truly believed it existed and if they did, they never believe it would be found.

The short version is that the chamber could only be opened by someone who could speak a rare language that passed through a bloodline to the Dark Lord and because of old magic, Harry. The Dark Lord possessed a student and used them to open the chamber and unleash a giant snake that can kill if you look directly into it's eyes and completely paralyse you if you see it's gaze in a reflection. I was paralysed. Harry went to the chamber, saved the student by killing the thirty feet snake and destroying the link between the Dark Lord and the student but I was unconscious for months. Because I have non-magical parents they didn't tell you any of this but I think that, you have to know. I need to tell you because, their may not be a later for me to say.

Sirius escaped the summer before third year and that was one of the most terrifying years of my school life. We thought he betrayed Harry's parents and caused their deaths. We lived in fear that he would try to kill Harry. We lived with soul sucking creatures guarding the school that could make you feel like you could never be happy again. It was torture. I ran myself ragged by using a device that allowed me to go back in time each and every day to take every class offered and I came so close to destroying myself but I never said anything. I nearly lost my friends because of it but I still didn't talk to you. By then, how could I possibly confess?

In our fourth year things got, if they could, even worse. A tournament was held at Hogwarts for three schools. The champions were supposed to be adults, capable and fully trained in magic but that wasn't what happened. Harry was a champion because a follower of the Dark Lord called a death eater bewitched the cup that chose the champions. A death eater was at Hogwarts. All year we were taught by a man impersonating another, a murderer. Ironically, he was fascinating and I think he was the best teacher we ever had. I found it hard to think that he was a killer. It took me a long time to get over.

In the end Harry won the tournament but there was a terrible price. A student, Cedric Diggory, was murdered. Murdered by the Dark Lord who used terrible, evil, dark magic to, the best way I can explain it is, bring himself back from the dead. Harry fought him and lived again, something only a handful of people have done, at fourteen years old. By this point, there was no way I could tell you. I couldn't explain what my world had become and I knew from then that you could never really understand.

Yet you must of realised how terrified I was. How could not have seen it? Did you pay that little attention to me that you couldn't see that I was slowly falling apart before your eyes? I told you I had to leave early. I explained to you that there was a danger and had to return to my world yet still you accused me of trying to escape a holiday! You can never understand just how much that hurt me! As my parents, I shouldn't have had to come to you, you should have known I needed you! It's your job!

My fifth year was quite possibly hell on earth. I can't speak of what happened that summer, safe to say people were moving against the Dark Lord but the ministry refused to believe he had returned. They imposed their will at the school and we hardly learned a thing in defensive magic. In the end Harry, at fifteen years old, was forced to teach us magic illegally. Harry had terrible visions of what the Dark Lord was doing and was made to believe that his godfather was being held captive by him at the ministry of magic. What choice did we have? We went to try save him and instead walked straight into a ambush. Six students against countless death eaters and in the end it was us that needed rescued. When it was over, Harry had fought him again but Sirius had been murdered by his own cousin. Just because one believed in blood purity and one did not. The exams didn't seem so important after that though I still worried over them to the point where I almost made myself ill.

I came home injured that year. I fought in a battle at sixteen and I nearly died. If I moved a second later, moved an inch in the wrong direction I was dead. I still have the scars. I was on potions for weeks but still you asked me nothing! It was like you just didn't care though I heard you at night, wondering what happened and talking things through when you thought I was asleep. What answers did you think you would find doing that?

By sixth year I had everything you wanted me to have, perfect grades. It was just that a war was brewing behind the scenes. By that point if you didn't realise it then you must have been blind. I could hardly spend any time with you at all before I was hidden behind wards and magical defences. I went to school thinking that the year couldn't possibly end in as bad a way as it had the year before. Nine months later, the headmaster is dead and here we are.

Again I can tell you nothing of what I have to do. There is a way to defeat the Dark Lord and break his hold over immortality but it's dangerous and it's deadly. I guess that's why I am finally confessing everything I can. I might not come home again. I could be dead next week. I am terrified, for myself, for you, my friends and my world but I can't sit back and do nothing! Not after everything I have been through. Not when the fact that I don't have magical parents is enough for the Dark Lord to want me dead. I'm not a coward and I refuse to run and hide. You didn't raise me that way.

To protect you I am going to do something I swore I would never do and that is use magic on you. I am going to alter your memories so that I can send to Australia and you can live happily, with no memory of Hermione Granger, without being in danger to yourself or anyone else.

Makes this letter a bit stupid because you won't understand it anyway! I didn't even write everything down anyway. There are so many more things that happened, so many things I can't tell you but want you to know. I hope that one day, one day soon I can come get you from Australia and tell you everything properly but until then.

I love you.

I love you but I heard you say that I never tell you anything.

Did you ever think to just ask?

I guess not but it's too late for any of that isn't it?

Your loving daughter,

Sincerely

Hermione Granger

***

Reviews are wonderful. I am trying to think who she can write to next.