Disclaimer: Integral JK Rowling dt = 11 books, 8 movies, and a whole lot of money, none of it mine.

Chapter 12

"You actually managed to prank Fred and George Weasley?" Alicia Spinnet said. The Arithmancy study group was laughing as loudly as Madam Pince would let them get away with as Hermione recounted the story.

"Uh huh. It worked even better than I expected," she said happily. "It was pure luck that they got swarmed by gypsy moths up there."

"Hermione, I take back everything I said about mapping the castle being a silly idea," Roger said. "That is awesome."

"I know," Alicia added. "Most of us have been dreaming of pulling one over on them for the past two years."

"I bet a lot of the teachers have been thinking it, too, even if they won't admit it," Roger added.

Hermione smirked at that. She was reasonably sure Professor McGonagall secretly wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine, but that wouldn't fit her stern teacher image. "Thanks. I just thought I needed to assert myself a little more. Now they know I can get them back."

"Well, it's good to have our Hermione back," Roger said. "We, uh, might not have shown it that well, but we were all starting to worry about you, even before…you know, Halloween. You seemed pretty out of it last week."

That certainly surprised Hermione. Roger had always seemed like the most distant of the three of them. She couldn't help feeling a twinge of guilt, too. She still felt like most of her problems were self-inflicted, but she tried to force the feeling down.

"Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't think to look for you. I guess I got distracted with the feast and all." said Cedric. Alicia and Roger quickly registered their agreement. "I would've thought the prefects would have kept track of everyone," he added.

Alicia let out a low whistle. "They should've. Percy Weasley got a real hiding from McGonagall for not noticing that three of his first years were missing."

Hermione remembered that. It was the first time she'd heard Professor McGonagall shouting. Percy had been depressed all weekend and had since become so uptight that even she thought he was annoying.

"Is it true that you beat the troll with a Levitation Charm?" Cedric asked.

"Well, sort of. It took all three of us to lift its club and drop it, and I don't know if it would have worked if Professor Vector hadn't frozen it."

"Okay, that makes more sense," said Roger. "Some people were trying to say that you started swinging its club back at it."

Hermione and Alicia both rolled their eyes. Hermione supposed she should consider herself lucky that the rumours had only gone that far.

"How did you come up with the idea to use combined Levitation Charms, though?" Cedric asked. "People rarely do anything like that."

"It wasn't that hard," she insisted. "I just saw that one spell partially deflected it, so I thought three might be able to lift it."

"Well, we're all glad you got out of there," Alicia said. "We wouldn't want to see you get hurt, especially with the rough time you've been having."

"Thanks." Hermione smiled meekly.

"Anyway, we'd better get to work," she continued, looking down at their exercises on proportions. "I don't think I'll be able to make it on Wednesday. Wood's scheduled a bunch of extra practises."

"I know. Harry's getting really nervous about the match," Hermione said. "He's already under a lot of pressure with the whole Boy-Who-Lived thing and being the youngest player this century. And I guess it doesn't help that he's especially important being a Seeker in the Hogwarts league."

"What do you mean?" asked Alicia.

"Well, since the Seeker almost always wins the game, having the Snitch only really makes sense in a tournament context where there are a lot of games and the actual scores matter. But in the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup, each House only plays three games per year, which makes the whole thing extremely Seeker-dominated."

The others stared at her, open mouthed.

"What, isn't that obvious?"

Cedric cleared his throat. "Um, sorry, Hermione, it's just that we didn't think you even liked Quidditch, and for a minute there, you sounded like a sports writer or something."

"Well, honestly, I don't that much," she admitted sheepishly. "I don't think it's very well balanced, and I don't enjoy flying all that much. But most of my friends love it, including you, and it's not hard to figure the numbers, so I might as well have fun with it."

"It's nice of you to get into it, then," Cedric said. "I guess I've always thought it was a little silly that we play so few games here. When you only play each house once, you never really get a chance to develop a strategy. We could easily play each house twice like in the professional league without disrupting classes."

"Yeah, that would be nice," Roger said wistfully. "My grandpa says they used to do that in the old days."

"Maybe you should start a petition," Hermione suggested.

The others all chuckled at that. "Yeah, maybe we should," Roger replied. "So can you use maths to figure out who's gonna to win on Saturday? And don't worry about offending Alicia."

"Hey!"

"Well, that's difficult with three new starting players on the Gryffindor team," Hermione said as she thought over the numbers. "Based on last year's statistics—percentage of Chaser shots made and so forth—I'd say Gryffindor has a slight advantage on the Chaser side, but, of course, the wild card will be Harry. I've only seen him fly the one time, but if he's as good as everyone says, I think I give Gryffindor a seventy-five percent chance of winning."

"Well, I guess it's up to us to make sure it's a hundred percent," Alicia quipped.

"Wow," Cedric said. "Hermione, have you ever considered a career as a Quidditch analyst."

"Not really," she said flatly. "I'd rather do something that has more advanced maths in it."

"Yeah, I hate to admit it, but your brains would be wasted on that," Alicia said. "I'm sure you're gonna be inventing spells that aren't supposed to be possible someday."

Hermione smiled nervously. That seemed like an awful lot of pressure, even if they were just joking around. "Well, I try," she finally said, trying to lighten up a bit as they really got to work. She had to admit she was still a little distracted, though, for other reasons, for as they worked, she found her thoughts wandering back to the letter she was writing to her parents, which now stood at four pages and counting. It was hard work, and she was sure she still wouldn't be able to finish tonight, but she would get there eventually.

Daniel and Emma Granger had been a little concerned when no owl arrived Monday with a letter from their daughter, especially after last week's distressed note. Still, she might just have been revising for an exam or something.

When Monday stretched into Tuesday, and Tuesday stretched into Wednesday, they became more concerned. They wanted to say perhaps Hermione had just missed a week, but it was hard to say it, knowing how hard a time she was having.

Finally, on Thursday morning, they got a shock when not one, but two owls showed up at their kitchen window. One was carrying a small letter in an official Hogwarts envelope and addressed in emerald-green ink, but Emma set that one aside for a moment because she was more interested in the second letter, addressed with "Mum and Dad" in their daughter's neat handwriting.

But this was by far the fattest envelope Hermione had sent them, and when Emma opened in on the kitchen table, pages and pages of parchment spilt out, obviously written over several days and at least as many moods. Some of them were her written in her usual tidy script, while others were roughly scribbled and tear-stained and everywhere in between.

"Oh my," she exclaimed.

"Whoa, what happened?" Dan asked.

"I don't know. This is either a really good sign or a really bad sign." She organised the pages to find the top one, and started to read with growing apprehension:

Dear Mum and Dad,

I'm sorry I didn't get this letter to you on time. This is going to be really hard for me to write, and I know it's going to be hard for you to read, too. You're going to want to sit down for this and maybe make an extra-strong cup of tea.

I was really afraid to tell you all this stuff because I know how you'll react. I was going to just hide it and pretend it didn't happen. I really wanted to, but Professor Vector told me how she'd seen muggle-borns keep things from their families back in the war and grow apart from them and lose all contact with them, and how much it hurt them, and I don't want that. I don't think I could bear it without you there to support me. So please, just hear me out. I know it's going to sound bad, but it turned out better than I ever could have hoped. It turns out I was all wrong about Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. Actually, I was all wrong about a lot of things. You know, they say when times get rough, you learn who your real friends are, but even I'm surprised that I've got so many.

Sorry, I know I'm rambling. It's just so hard to think in a straight line right now. So, anyway, what happened was…

Dan and Emma held each other close and took turns reading each time one of their voices gave out as they saw their daughter's trials and tribulations unfold over the next ten pages. It was clear that she hadn't told them half of what was going on, and they could understand why, as it got darker and darker. If the length of this letter was any indication, though, she wasn't holding back anymore.

She told them about how she was being bullied and called racial slurs by that pureblood Malfoy. How the Weasley Twins messed around and caused her trouble and generally made her nervous. How creepy the Divination teacher was. How she was feeling like she couldn't relate to her classmates. About how she had withdrawn into herself and made things that much worse for herself. How she couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, and felt like everything was slowly crumbling out from under her. And finally how Ron's words on Halloween had been her breaking point, and she spent the entire day crying in the bathroom.

All of that was bad enough, but that was just the opening act before her letter took a turn to the plot of a horror film. Dan and Emma staggered out to the living room and collapsed on the sofa together as they read the news that their daughter had very nearly died that day.

More than that: she told them in graphic detail just what a mountain troll looked like (and smelled like), followed by a blow-by-blow account of being cornered by it in the bathroom, being saved by Harry and Ron, whom she hadn't been getting along with at all, and by Professor Vector, whom she made sound like some kind of mythical warrior, and a little clever spellwork on her own part, and, finally, being mobbed by all the worried friends she had been ignoring when she got back to safety.

And then, just as an afterthought, she mentioned that the school was keeping a giant three-headed dog on the third floor to guard something, but she didn't think that was such a big deal anymore.

…Look, I know that right now, you're going to be completely freaking out and probably looking for the literature from Beauxbatons to transfer me right away, but please don't. I've only just now realised how many friends I have and how much I love it here, ridiculous non-Euclidean geometry and stupid pureblood politics and all, and I don't want to go. After everything that happened, I think all I really needed was to get more sleep and lighten up a bit and quit being so hard on myself about everything.

Even Harry and Ron are a lot better than I thought now that I've really talked to them. Ron apologised on his own for what he said, and he even tried to turn down the points for saving me. He's still kind of a git, but he usually comes around before too long. And Harry—well, I'm not quite sure what's going on with Harry. It sounds like he's had a rough time at home, but he usually gets along with the other Gryffindors pretty well.

Hogwarts really isn't that dangerous, either. All the professors have been saying dangerous creatures almost never get into the castle, and no student has died here since 1943, and I did the math, and that's probably better than most muggle schools—I wrote it out on the back. It's not like an evil psychopath sneaks in and tries to kill somebody every year or something.

I'm sorry for scaring you like this, but I was really worried about what to say to you, and after I talked to Professor Vector, I just had to get it all down. I hope you can understand how I'm feeling. I really do want to stay here, so please give Hogwarts another chance.

Love from Hermione

They turned the last page of the letter over to see that, sure enough, Hermione had used her limited actuarial knowledge and some algebra to try to prove that living in Hogwarts was safer than living in the muggle world. Dan and Emma gave a pair of tight smiles to see that a near-death experience hadn't blunted their little numberphile's wits.

"I can't…I can't believe…" Emma whispered tearily.

"It's a lot to take in," Dan said, shaking his head. "I'm almost not sure whether to be more worried about her being…attacked by a…by a troll—or her reaction to being attacked by a troll."

"Well, it's good she's made so many friends—it's amazing, really, but…" Emma shook her own head frantically. What was she saying? Her daughter had nearly been killed, and she started liking the place more? She'd gone mad! The whole world had gone mad!

"Emma, where's the other letter?"

She closed her eyes and remembered. "Still in the kitchen. You think it's related?"

"Why wouldn't it be? I'll go get it." He squeezed her shoulders gently and slowly lifted himself off the sofa.

Returning a moment later with the official-looking envelope, he opened it and began to read:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Granger,

I would like to let you know that I have every reason to believe that everything your daughter wrote in her letter is true and more or less complete. I wanted to inform you of what I know of the situation.

On Halloween night, a mountain troll from the colony that lives to the north of the grounds got into the passages under the school from the ravine due to a mistake on the part of the Defence Professor, Quirinus Quirrell. Professor Quirrell discovered his mistake and alerted the school during the Halloween Feast. I knew that Hermione had missed class that day, and I did not see her at the feast, so I immediately found out where she was from her roommates and went to find her. I believe her classmates, Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley, did save Hermione from the troll, if ineptly. When I arrived at the scene, I got all three of them out of harm's way as quickly as possible. (While first-years would not be able to handle one, it is relatively simple to stop a troll long enough to escape it.)

I want to assure you that your daughter is safe and whole, and in as good of spirits as can be expected under these circumstances. Indeed, I had noticed her growing self-isolation myself in recent weeks, and the outpouring of concern and support she has received from her classmates has lifted her spirits greatly.

I also want to assure you that these events are definitely not usual for Hogwarts. There has only been one other occasion in which a troll has got into the castle in my twenty years of teaching, and other dangerous creatures are very rarely sighted. In the past fifty years, there has been only one fatal attack at Hogwarts, a tragic incident in which a student was killed by an acromantula—a creature which has since been carefully confined to the forbidden forest. This rate of attacks is, in fact, slightly better than at other schools because there are fewer large, dangerous magical creatures in Britain than on the Continent. We are also reviewing our safety procedures to prevent another such incident from occurring.

As such, I strongly urge you to respect Hermione's wishes to remain at Hogwarts, as I can honestly say I believe she will be happiest staying here. She has been very worried about your reaction to her ordeal. However, I advised her of the difficulty that muggle-born students have in staying connected with their families, and she expressed a strong resolve to keep close to you and to be fully honest with you in response. I have seen the damage done to families of muggle-borns who chose to hide the danger of the war from their parents a decade ago. Because the divide between the magical and muggle worlds is so deep, it is a tempting choice to make, and for Hermione to be so open with you about this shows and incredible degree of trust on her part. Keeping a family together across that divide is not easy, but I believe she has shown a commitment to doing that, and that she would do so is a great credit to you as her parents.

And on a personal note, I would be very sorry to see Hermione leave. Your daughter is easily the most intelligent student in her year and the most intelligent I have ever had the pleasure to meet in the field of arithmancy. She is a joy to have in class and has been a great help to the other members of her study group. With training, I believe she has the potential to make advances in the theory of magic that we can't even imagine yet, and I hope that you will continue to give her the opportunity to do that at Hogwarts.

Sincerely,

Septima Vector

Professor of Arithmancy

Dan and Emma sat on the sofa in silence, wondering how the second letter had managed to completely floor them again.

"She's really something, isn't she," Dan whispered. "She practically has the whole thing worked out."

"She's growing up, Dan," Emma sighed. "She's starting to make her own decisions now."

"I know. It's just—it was always going to be hard. It's a lot harder with this mess. I wish we could've had a few more years with her around."

"She still needs us, you know," Emma said as she tried in vain to wipe away her tears. "She's trusting us to support her. She's wanting so much to be able to rely on us—We can't pull her out now. We couldn't do that to her after all she's been through. We're so lucky she wants to keep us close."

"We certainly are, Dear. And…I guess Hogwarts doesn't sound that dangerous normally. And she already worked out the maths for us, so we know it's right," Dan said with a slight grin.

Emma grinned back. "No stopping her, is there?"

"She wouldn't be our Hermione otherwise."

"Mmm…"

They sat there in each other's arms on the sofa for a while as they started to come to terms with what was happening. "We'll have to reply before too long," Emma said after a while. "She'll need closure with this—I need closure with this…We just need to figure out what to say."

Dan helped her rise to her feet and planted a soft kiss on her lips. "Well, we'd better get started, then."

Dear Hermione,

…Wow, this is hard, isn't it. We hardly know what to say after your last letter. It was probably the most terrifying thing we've ever read in our lives—and saddening and disturbing and confusing and somehow wonderful all at the same time. We couldn't have imagined anything like a troll attack happening in a school, or even some of the other things you mentioned. You know, you never really told us about all of your friends at school, and it sounds like you didn't really see things clearly yourself until now. We can't say how proud we are that you're fitting it so well at Hogwarts, even though we wish you could have realised it under less dangerous circumstances.

Professor Vector sent us a letter explaining things. She understandably made the whole incident sound a lot more cut-and-dried than you did. When we read your version of the story, it was like seeing a side of magic that we'd never seen before. Be sure to thank her for us for saving you. We don't know if she told you what she wrote, but she speaks very highly of you. She obviously has a lot of respect for you not just as a student, but as a person, and we can tell that she will be a good mentor for you in school and beyond.

It disturbed us a little to see you getting so much more enthusiastic about Hogwarts after what happened. And you were right, our first instinct was to get you out of there—that's just one of the rules of being a parent. But thinking it over, we realised that you were right about the rest, too: it was just a freak accident, and there's really nothing especially dangerous about Hogwarts. Professor Vector also confirmed this and explained what the school is doing to make sure it doesn't happen again.

To be honest, though, now that we have a better handle on your safety, we're a little more concerned with your emotional well-being. You've gone off into these little episodes before, but never like this. It hurts to see how difficult things have got for you, and it worries us not having you here where we can help you out or comfort you or bug you about your homework—and yes, we know you always get it done. It's really good to see that your friends and at least Professor Vector are supporting you. That was a good idea asking them to help you stay on track and remember to sleep. Still, we were getting worried about how detached your letters sounded, and now we have a whole new set of things to worry about.

Now, we know you said things are getting better, but these kinds of things take time to recover from. Please go to your friends and teachers for help before you let things get that bad again, and don't take on too much right away. Take it easy and relax when you can. You know we're going to worry about you even more now until we're sure you're back on your feet. We wish we could keep you closer to us at home. After all this, we're hardly going to be able to wait to see you at Christmas.

As much as it pains us, though, we know that we need to let you start being your own person and make your own decisions. We know it must have been hard for you to trust us enough to tell us all of this, and if you can do that, then we can trust you to make a rational decision about where you'll go to school. It's wonderful to see you growing into such a strong, thoughtful, and brilliant young woman, and we know you'll find the right path for yourself as long as you surround yourself with people who truly care about you. Just keep trying your best, try not to let things get to you, and be sure to get enough sleep. We'll see you at Christmas.

Love,

Mum and Dad

Harry wore an obvious look of concern as Hermione set down her letter, and he saw her tear-stricken face.

"Hey, Hermione, is something wrong?" he asked tentatively.

"No," she squeaked, smiling wistfully. "Nothing is wrong. Nothing at all."