Set during OotP, and includes minor spoilers – nothing so great as the major themes or Who Dies, but certainly small details. Begins on the first Friday of the term, ends sometime in the spring. Cho/Katie, with a little bit of justification for why the horribly pathetic Cho/Harry happened. And Katie/Alicia. Rated PG-13.
Dedicated to paranoidkitten.
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Think about it, she said, the last time she kissed her, the last time she took the small tanned hand in hers before she threw an apologetic glance over her shoulder, where Alicia Spinnet was waiting with a patient smile and her sleek maple-coloured broom in hand. Just think about what you want.
What I want – Cho started to say, but Katie cut her off before she could finish, before she could say something quick and rash that she might regret, that both of them might have to try to forget. One last squeeze, thin pale fingers against tawny gold, and then Katie was off with Alicia for the Gryffindor changing rooms – Quidditch practice, Katie had said, just to get our skills tuned up for this season, I'm sorry I don't have long.
Quidditch practice, Cho thought resentfully. She wanted to say other things, like Really, I didn't see in anything in Quidditch Through the Ages about games played with no clothes on, and Well I'm certain that you could help Alicia with her skills, and You don't have to be sorry. And she actually said the last one, but it came out soft and understanding, the way her voice always did when she talked to Katie, instead of bitter and facetious the way she meant it to be. And Katie left, a single glance directed at Cho this time, and Cho was quite certain that she knew, but she left with Alicia, and Cho stood at the edge of the corridor wondering what was happening behind cool tiled walls.
She'd stood with Katie in that room, on slick marble floors and a wide porcelain bathtub that glowed silver when you were appropriately clean and neat after a long, muddy practice. The bathtub was nearly always silver when they lay together, giggling and bubbly in warm water that turned slowly clear as the foam and suds filtered away.
She tried not to think of silvery bathtubs and Katie and Alicia, who should surely by now be changed and out on the field, but when Cho walked by the window, the only blurs of fast-moving robes against a bright blue sky were green and silver.
She tried hard not to think about what Katie had said, wondering instead what she meant, why she had said it. I'm not sure we should do this anymore. You need to think about what you want, what is best for you. I understand how you feel, but things have changed a lot …
Well spotted, Bell, Cho wanted to scream. You're a quick study, aren't you, to notice that oh yes, he's dead, he's dead, he's not coming back. She wanted to hit Katie, she wanted to hit Alicia, with her understanding smiles and hidden smirks, even more. She wanted to tie Katie to a chair and murder her best friend, and then she'd see exactly how rotten how Cho felt, and then maybe she would truly understand and they could kiss and talk and kiss while they talked about all they had in common, all they wanted to share, and some of the things they didn't have in common, they way they used to.
But instead she nodded mutely, and tried not to burst into hysterical tears, and nodded again, which Katie took – perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not – to mean yes.
Why? Cho wondered again, fiercely. Why would Katie say that? She had never tried to be so annoyingly protective before, it wasn't like her to start suggesting that maybe they "shouldn't do this anymore" because, well, Cho, honey, you know, you might still be straight.
Too bad Cedric was dead. Not that he would be any help at all in decoding the female psyche, but he would always offer to start a violent physical row with Katie or Alicia, his misplaced sense of chivalry making her grin. Cho would never take him up on the half-serious offer; proud as a display of physical strength would make his father, Cedric wouldn't know what to do with his fists in a fist-fight if his life depended on it.
It scared her, that she was becoming occasionally cavalier about his death. She shook her head abruptly. His life had depended on something, and he wasn't able to save himself then.
So beating up Katie, or Alicia, was out, and anyway she had promised Katie that she'd think about it. In a way she knew that Katie was right, that Katie was asking her more than whether or not she was straight.
Cho didn't sleep well that night; her own tossing and turning and bending her spine into strange contortions woke her at half-two in the morning, and she fumbled for her wand and put first a locking, then a silencing spell on her curtains so as not to disturb her roommates with her sleep-cries. Several times she had to scoot to the side of the bed in the small darkened box to smooth her tangled covers, but always when she lay back down she pictured brown and blonde hair swirling together in the sea of a shining silver bathtub, and her clenched fingers drew the wrinkles right back in the blue sheets.
By half-six she still couldn't close her eyes without wondering what Alicia's eyes looked like up close, and whether Katie found that stunning blue more attractive than her own brown, which was warm and even but really nothing special, and so she unlocked her curtains and threw on some clothes. She was pulling out a clean piece of parchment and a quill for the latest piece of her journal-scroll, when suddenly she remembered that it was her mum's birthday and she'd better post off a note to go with the copy of Gilderoy Lockhart's latest book, 'Membering at Mungo's: The Complete and Total Guide to Living With A Lost Memory that she had bought for Mum at Flourish and Blott's last week.
It was so early that she didn't expect to see anyone in the Owlery, but surprisingly, Harry Potter was already there, staring out the window as a small white speck sailed off in the distance. He looked both thoughtful and uncertain at the same time, especially when she told him that it was her mum's birthday and she was sending her a gift, and at first she wondered if she'd said something wrong – if she really looked that awful because she'd just rolled out of the safety of her bed, or if she simply sounded stupid, babbling about her mum's birthday.
And then he started talking about Quidditch, and they commiserated about Umbridge, and Filch came storming in accusing Harry of ordering Dungbombs, and after that it was easy to talk, to say that she'd see him around, to compliment and comment on all the things he had done and was doing once they started the D.A. Easy to maneuver him into asking her out, because after all, boys were so much easier to maneuver than girls, and to let him think that she was unendingly excited about their date, if you could even call it a date. Easy to pretend that she was insanely jealous of his "crush" on Hermione Granger, when she could certainly tell that he didn't have the slightest thing resembling a crush on Hermione Granger – thought it was pretty funny to turn the entire Three Broomsticks upside-down with her tears and lovers-quarrel shrieks.
Easy, if not entirely honest. Harry looked positively bewildered when Cho left the pub, and she couldn't help alternately giggling and sobbing, tears caused not by Harry's "crush" on Hermione, but tears because she wasn't sure where her own crush was going.
Because after all, Katie had asked her to think about it, and she hadn't done much thinking at all. Mostly she wondered what Katie was doing with Alicia, and if Alicia kissed better, or longer, if she played with Katie's fingers and earlobes and the way her breast curved more gently near the sternum, or if maybe she didn't do that and Katie liked that better. She wondered what they did after Quidditch practices, and if they shared showers and baths and victory parties, because since they were on the same team, their victories would be the same, wouldn't they? Not like Cho and Katie, who tended to avoid the topic of who won or lost, because after all, when they were playing against eachother, one of them had to win and the other had to lose.
So Cho thought a lot, except that she didn't think they were the kinds of thoughts that Katie had intended for her to think. She lay awake nights, through the fall of the D.A. and the Gryffindor Quidditch team's miserable losses, and she was distracted during her N.E.W.T Transfiguration and Charms classes and throughout Quidditch practices, when she missed the Snitch six times in a row, until finally the only thing she had decided was that she didn't need to decide anything else.
She snuck out of bed that night, moving quietly from the Ravenclaw dorms the way she used to sometimes when Cedric was alive, and the memory of Cedric and being alive choked her up as she made her way to Gryffindor tower. She didn't know the password, but Harry Potter or one of his gang must have been on one of their many midnight adventures, because the Fat Lady's portrait was hanging open barely a millimeter, and she shoved her way inside as quietly as she could.
The Gryffindor girls' dorm is nearly as familiar to her as her own, and it isn't unfamiliarity with the layout that keeps her hesitating in the doorway. She watches the heavy red curtains move soundlessly in the light spring breeze and tries to screw up her courage to walk over there and push them apart. Finally she does, and the strangely-shaped beams of moonlight spill across Katie's blanket-rolled body, and she wakes her with moonshadows and kisses and the tears that she cried on Valentine's Day.
The expression on Katie's face is nothing short of fear – shock and fear and a little bit of amazement – when she wakes fully, and she looks like she's going to ask a question with those perfectly shaped, wind-chapped lips. Cho kisses her before she can say anything, and in the midst of touches and caresses and nibbles and licks, the only thing she tells Katie is, I thought about it.
finis