Whoo -- my first Harry Potter fic! And a grim little piece of work it is, too.... ::half-grin:: Be prepared for angst. Lots of it. Oh yes. Beware....

Many thanks to Sam for the beta (yes, I'll go eat my chocolate now), and Monica for being so vehement about Percy that I knew I'd successfully struck a nerve! ;)

In the nightmare, he's young again, and beautiful.

She watches him skim over the sky, shielding her eyes against the unnatural glare, and follows him as he sets down lightly on the pitch, shaking loose hair out of his eyes. "Come to join me for a spin?" he calls.

She grips the handle of her broomstick so hard that even in the dream, she can feel her fingernails bite into the skin of her thumb.

"I would if I could," she says, shaking a little. "You know that."

"Ah, come on, Cho," he says gently, as he dismounts and steps closer. "It's not so bad."

She manages a wry laugh and looks around. The Hogwarts Quidditch pitch is deserted but for the two of them, its pennants flapping feebly in the stale wind. She can hear echoes in her memory of Lee Jordan's commentaries, but the booth stands empty, the microphone dead. The stands are vacant, covered with dust and cobwebs.

"You know what I'll see if I fly out there with you," she says.

He makes a face, briefly, then walks down the field. She follows despite herself. By rights, the late afternoon sunlight should be making his blond hair gleam, but everything, as bright as it is, seems dulled.

"It won't be a surprise, then," he says. "And you've got to get a better look sometime."

"Not like this...."

"What other way is there?" he says, almost angry, and turns back to stare at her. "What other way, but by the air? Or have you forgotten that, too?"

She bows her head, eyes stinging.

"Everyone's forgetting," Cedric says, staring off into some point in the distance. "The supreme sacrifice made, and all else fades away...."

"Stop it," she whispers.

"No more flying, now that the last season's over. No more real magic. Just a charm or two around the house, is that it? Such a Ravenclaw thing to do, those...."

"It's all I can manage," she says, the admission scraping in her throat. "And it's not just me...."

"No, I wouldn't think so," he says, and his voice is bitter.

His words are sounding, somehow, less like Cedric. But it's still his face, still his posture, still that voice she hasn't heard since Voldemort killed him years before. She'd thought, at the time of the great battles not long after, that it was a mercy he didn't have to be part of them. But in the dream, he still knows what occurred, after he was gone....

He knows everything, even the things she wishes no one did.

"Come on, Cho," he says, swinging one leg over the broom. She looks at his Hufflepuff robes, which for some reason have a stripe of maroon and gold down one side, and she freezes, realizing something's changing. "See if you've still got your Seeker skills."

She looks at her broom as if it's a foreign instrument. Nimbus, it's branded -- the finest model they made, before the bankruptcy....

"I haven't flown since --"

"Since the Harpies' last season," Cedric says. "I know."

"How could you?" she whispers. "You -- that was after you...."

"You can see anything, from up there," he says wearily, looking at the sky. And without another word, he launches into the sky, with complete ease.

Cho bites her lip, swings one leg over the broom, and kicks off.

She rises quickly, if unsteadily, and leans forward to catch up with Cedric. His robes flap wildly behind him, obscuring him, and his head, ducked low, is in shadow. She doesn't want to look at the ground, but suddenly she doesn't want to look at him, either.

What am I going to see.....

She grips the handle tighter as they fly over the pitch and begin a long, slow swing toward the castle grounds.

"I've been watching it," he says, the words spilling back to her in odd rhythms through the slipstream. They're deeper, somehow, paced unlike Cedric's usual speech.... "The whole place is changing."

Cho comes up beside him, refusing to turn her head, and finally takes a breath and glances below.

The ruins are immense. Stones are scattered everywhere she looks, in irregular piles of rubble, unrecognizable as the castle they once formed. Her throat clenches tight as her flight partner drops lower; she has to follow, even go faster, or she'll have to see him again, and she knows it's not something she can bear --

"The underbrush has been taking over. Even with all you can see here, most of it's under weeds by now. Nothing's left from the classrooms, of course. That all broke, died, burned away....."

"Why are you showing me this?" she whispers.

"Someone has to see it." His voice is hard. "Someone has to remember."

Cho realizes she's crying. "Why can't it be someone else?"

"Because I trust you. Because you're my only link left to the world. Because I lo--"

"Don't say it."

"Why? Because you know as soon as I say the word, it won't be in Cedric's voice? Because you still wish it was him, after all this time?"

Hot tears spill down her cheeks, staining her robes in huge, dark blotches. She can't look up, and that just means she has to look down, down at the destroyed school, the crumbling, decaying memories....

"After all I did," he says, "all I gave, this is what it comes to -- a pile of rubble and a lover who won't look at me..."

"Please --"

There's a rush of air, and he's flown around in a sharp half-circle, coming around to stare her full in the face. She cries out -- cries at the dark hair, the broken glasses, the livid scar. "Harry," she sobs, nearly losing her balance.

It's him, as he was the last time she saw him, before he dashed up those stairs and the world began to fall apart....

"Was all this for nothing?" he shouts. "Did we bring down Voldemort to watch him still destroy everything we are?"

She can't speak, only stare. Her memory had given her Cedric unharmed, but Harry wounded, bleeding and blazing with anger, just as he was before the final strike, the one that forced Voldemort to do all this with his dying breath....

"I was brave enough to face him down," he says. "I was a Gryffindor to the last. You, with all your Ravenclaw cleverness, can't save a little of the knowledge to keep us from fading away?"

She looks helplessly at the school. "There's not much left...."

"There's got to be enough."

"I've -- I've tried -- but...."

Cho's voice trails off as she thinks of the search for the books, for anything they could find and salvage out of the wreckage. The surviving professors had compiled what little they had. She'd spent hours with Snape, piecing together fragments, watching him try to splice charred pages back together and then shout out in frustration, hurling the useless book across the room.

And then he left somewhere, no one was quite sure where. Madam Sprout had avoided the worst of it, and retired to Wales. She'd heard from Lupin once; he'd made it to the Americas, and then vanished quietly.

Between then and now, almost everyone else has done the same.

The memories spin in her head for a moment, then fade, and Harry watches her, his expression at first impassive, then accusing. "That's it, then? 'I tried, it didn't work, that's all'?"

It takes all her strength to say, "Harry, I wish I could do better, but there's just nothing I can do."

"That is not enough!"

And something in her snaps --

"Just because you failed -- because you couldn't stop him from destroying everything -- doesn't mean it all has to fall on me!" she shrieks.

His eyes blink once behind the shattered lenses. She chokes back a cry as a drop of blood slides down one cheek.

"That's really what you think?" he asks, his voice colder than anything she's ever heard.

She swallows hard. "It's what I said," she tells him.

"Then I won't bother keeping you here," he says.

And the wind drops out from beneath her.

Cho gasps, then screams, as the broom lurches downward. She tries to twist it back up, but it doesn't help -- all at once she's plummeting downward, spinning helplessly, toward the rubble of Hogwarts below.

"Harry!" she cries out, as she tumbles off the broom, upside down, and sees him for one last horrible moment. He just stares at her as she flails uselessly, and the ground rushes up to impale her on crushed stone....



She screams once as she wakes.

The sound shatters the air above her, then she slaps a hand to her mouth, trying to stifle it. She's shaking fiercely with the effort of remaining quiet. Her eyes are huge, staring vacantly at the ceiling, as she tries to convince herself it's there, that the house is real, that it's not that huge, horrible, empty sky above the ruins of her past....

"Mrmph," something says beside her.

Cho slowly wraps her mind around the reality of the moment and turns partway, seeing a shape that ought to look familiar, but only slowly clicks together with the word "husband." He rolls over, fumbling for her hand in the dark. "What is it?" he says muzzily.

She lets out a long, shuddering breath. "Bad dream."

"Again?"

She doesn't quite dare shut her eyes, although she wants to. "I'll just be a minute," she says instead, and gets up from the bed.

She forgets to slide her feet into the slippers, and so the hardwood floor is shockingly cold as she moves alone through the dark house.

There -- that's the telephone, Cho says, in a silent, private litany of the usual. There's the lamp, and the electrical cord. There's the door to the computer room, where Daniel keeps his laptop and stereo. There's the technology. Muggle items. All of them.

She rubs a hand over her eyes, trying to make herself believe that some of them are hers.

I like television, she thinks. It's not so bad that our photos don't move and that we use a microwave instead of hiring house-elves. I can get by this way.

So why do I feel like I'm betraying everything I am by thinking so?

Because Harry's there, in my head, reminding me of what we've all lost....

She pauses by the door of her son's bedroom.

He's eleven, now. She's thirty-seven. She should be a proud mother, sending James off to wizarding school. But not a child here has received an owl since her generation -- at least, not one from Hogwarts. Durmstrang started taking transfer students straight off. Even Beauxbatons got over their snobbery and said they'd accept any qualified students, until another school could be built here. But it's been years now, and everyone has realized that the wizards of England have conceded the loss.

Besides, her son hasn't shown any signs of magic, and won't be receiving any invitations regardless of their source. Cho still tells herself it's just as well, but she'd felt such a horrible pang when she realized her magic was truly going to end with her.

And what magic was left to her, really?

Just a few charms, he'd said. He was right. That, and what's in that little box....

Again, as she's done almost every night this month, she walks to the end of the hall, opens the walk-in linen closet, and shuts the door behind her.

It's pitch-black, until she tugs at the hanging chain above her, and one bare lightbulb snaps alight. She has to shield her eyes again against the unnatural glare, and the irony of the parallel moment makes her laugh and sob out all at once.

Then she fumbles past the sheets to a panel in the back wall, which clicks under her fingers.

Cho shoves everything out of her way and pulls open the hidden door, then tugs something out of the compartment. It's a simple wooden box -- maybe a foot long, six inches wide, four inches deep. It contains the last few treasures from her wizarding life, before she, like almost everyone else from her class, slipped away into a "normal" existence.

She sits down with her back braced against the door, and opens the lid.

On top is a letter from Hermione Granger, which came last year. Cho has read it so many times she's had it memorized since the first day, but she opens it up anyway. Hermione's neat handwriting tells of her new job -- well, new then -- after retiring from the resurrected Ministry of Magic, which they tried to reform after the traitors were expelled or killed. It didn't last long -- the few members mostly squabbled uselessly amongst themselves when they realized there wasn't much left to govern. Hermione, sensing her talents could better be used elsewhere, went off as a private teacher. "It's not much," the letter says, "but it gives me a chance to help the kids who wouldn't be found anymore, otherwise. And I can set the schedule, which helps, since I go visit Ginny every week. She still takes it hard, being the only one left. I can't blame her."

Cho thinks of poor Ginny, watching her family being killed by her own brother, and only being saved from Percy at the last moment by, of all things, Draco's intervention -- and she puts the letter away.

Underneath it is a copy of the Daily Prophet, its pages gone brown with age and its pictures sepia. It's the first issue they printed after Harry brought down Voldemort for good. The front page photo, of course, shows the smoldering wreck of the school, and proclaims it -- well, she knows what it says. She flips past it quickly.

Under that is a program. She takes it out and smoothes down the paper with shaky fingers. It's for her Quidditch team, the Holyhead Harpies. Everyone's faces, including hers, look up at her with somewhat wistful smiles, and Rhona manages to twiddle her fingers in a wave.

She can't help but remember Oliver Wood, who tracked down Cho a couple years after the final battle, when the last vestiges of the old guard got back together to try to revive some fun and games again. "I've just been named Captain of Puddlemere United," he'd said, his voice sounding odd to her somehow over the telephone line. "You really ought to try out for a team -- I'd be glad to have you. I know you'd feel better if you got on a broomstick again."

As much as she appreciated it, she couldn't quite handle playing for Harry's Quidditch guru. Instead, she tried out for the Harpies, got on the team, and, much to her surprise, started enjoying herself. But it only lasted three years. There wasn't the pool of talent there used to be, and Nimbus didn't have the money to sponsor the teams, and...

Cho snaps out of the memory, looks at the photo, and her younger self looks back, almost concerned, as Cho thinks suddenly of the dream -- plunging off her beloved Nimbus to the stones below --

She moves the program aside.

There's trinkets below it, little souvenirs; a friend's bracelet, a train ticket to Hogsmeade, a bag of hexed candy from Fred & George's shop, which had been taken over after their death by -- to her surprise -- Neville, who said he owed it to them and to Ron. And then, below that....

Cho wraps her fingers around her wand.

It was shattered in the fight, and she can still see hairline cracks all through the wood, but Harry... Harry had repaired it, stopped there on the steps to bind the pieces back together enough that she could get back to work.

She lifts it up, wondering, as always, if she'd delayed him those few critical seconds....

If I hadn't made him wait, she thinks, not for the first time, maybe he would have gotten to Voldemort sooner -- could have killed him cleanly, before Voldemort wrenched that last bit of strength out of Dumbledore and used it to destroy what the old wizard had worked so hard to create, so that Harry's final attack only served to seal the deal while the castle and the magic of England crumbled around them.

Maybe.

She'd told him in that dream, screamed at him, that she wouldn't take all this on her own shoulders -- but....

Did we bring down Voldemort to watch him still destroy everything we are? Harry's voice demands of her again.

Cho sits there silently, wand in hand, then stands up suddenly, pulls the lightbulb chain, and the little room flashes into darkness.

Can she still do this?

"Lumos," she whispers, and mentally crosses her fingers.

It's feeble, at first, but there it is. A slightly yellowish glow emanates from her wand, then strengthens. As Cho concentrates, the room fills with a vivid, clear light, so pure, so vibrant, that she has to shut her eyes against it for a moment. Then it eases, and she sinks down to her knees before the box, realizing there's only one item left, and now she can see it all too clearly.

It's a photo, of her and Harry.

They weren't more than children, then -- fifth years, caught by Colin in the hall after a stolen kiss. Cho's blushing and giggling, and Harry's lurching out to snatch away the camera. And then they both stop, and hug each other, and Cho fits so easily into his arms....

I did love you, you know, she thinks. No, not the same way I loved Cedric -- how could it be? I was too young then, and so saddened after, and how could it have been anything but bittersweet? But there were moments like these, moments when everything just seemed --

She sighed.

Magic.

No, I can't let that go.

But how, oh, how can it ever be put together again....

Maybe I can contact Hermione, she thinks. Get her together with some of the teachers from the other schools, find some like-minded souls, maybe even get Snape back, Lupin, some of the others... any of the others....

Right; like no one has tried this before.

She huddles up against the door, head on folded arms against her knees, still gripping the wand tightly in her right hand. What can I do, she thinks, that hasn't been done before? What do I have to offer the wizarding world....

...besides just the fact that I loved him?

Love him still?

You're not alone in that, she thinks. Find the others. And you might have a chance.

Maybe.

She blinks open her eyes, looking at the photo of her younger self, who's turned her face up to Harry's for a long, sweet kiss.

Cho watches for a long moment, trying to reconcile that with the Harry in her dream, who'd been so vehement, so angry -- so desperate for her to save what had faded away -- and in the face of just what she herself had lost, her trembling fingers drop the wand.

The light around her dies as surely as if she'd switched off the lightbulb overhead. It leaves her there in darkness, in that little corner of the Muggle house with the family she tries to love, and the hero she's lost and can't forget, to cry alone.