Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Shattered

By: ChoCedric

As Cho Chang exchanges her wedding vows with Joseph, she knows she's making a huge mistake. After all this time, the man she loves is still Cedric Diggory. When the Minister tells Joseph to kiss his bride, Cho can feel his lips on hers, but instead of thinking of her now husband, she's thinking of her first love, his sweet kisses engulfing her. Tears are streaming down her face, but everyone at the church assumes they are tears of joy.

Why is she marrying Joseph? she thinks in despair. Well, it all started after the final battle. Cho had felt so unloved, so lonely for so long that she desperately needed the comfort of someone. She went to a nightclub one night, and met Joseph. What resulted was a one-night stand which caused her to get pregnant; neither one of them was careful. Her parents demanded that she marry Joseph, because they are very strict when it comes to marriage and pregnancy. Cho feels awful, and she knows Joseph doesn't really love her either. He knows about Cedric, for in her drunken state that night, she lay in his arms sobbing, telling him all about the real person who'd captured her heart all those years ago.

Instead of seeing Joseph's eyes looking down at her, which is what's truly happening, she can see Cedric's blank, lifeless ones as his prone form lies silently on the Quidditch pitch, everyone screaming "He's dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!" She will never get the image of his body being lowered into the ground out of her mind. She hates this shit, this life of living without him, of the endless waiting to see him again. Cedric was the only one for her, and she thinks fate was so cruel to snatch him away from her.

Well, she thinks viciously, I did what you assholes said, didn't I? I "got over it" and "moved on," or at least pretended to. Because under her facade, she hasn't moved on at all. She does everything she can now to run away from the magical world, because she can't bear the thought that a flash of green light, of magic, took the one person who completely understood her away. She remembers being in his arms at the Yule Ball, praying that the night would never end. She remembers looking into his gray eyes when they were filled with life, but she always flashes back to that moment when he arrived back with Harry after the fiasco in the graveyard.

She gets so angry with Harry sometimes. Why couldn't the bloody Boy-Who-Lived save her love? She'd give anything to have Harry's life traded for Cedric's, even though it is a horrible thing to think and she knows it. She'd rather be looking into Cedric's warm, gray eyes right now than Joseph's brown ones. Joseph, this ordinary Muggle, means nothing, nothing, nothing to her. Her parents don't seem to get it; they pressured the couple to marry and live out the rest of their lives together.

From then on, it is a monotonous routine. Cho gets up each morning, goes to work in her profession of healing, and then comes home to Joseph each night, as her baby grows inside of her. She falls asleep sobbing every night with Joseph's arms holding tightly to her, his face full of pain as he realizes he can never cheer her up. She wishes with everything she has in her that this could be her and Cedric's baby, a creation made out of their pure love for one another. She wishes it would be born with those warm, love-filled gray eyes like Cedric had. He was her soulmate, and his murder totally shattered Cho Chang's life. All her dreams are broken, all the joy she ever had was extinguished by one brilliant flash of sickly green light.

So all she can do is endlessly wait, knowing her heart will never reopen to let another love in. She tried with Harry Potter, but it just didn't work. Her world was torn asunder the day her knight in shining armor was killed, and no hugs and kisses from Joseph can ever change that. But she promises herself that she will do everything possible to give her baby a wonderful life when he or she is born, and she'll cherish and carry Cedric's memory wherever she goes. And she'll wait, endlessly, to be in his arms again.