She extracts false memories because she's sick of the real ones.
I.
"You're sure you don't want to wear…red, is it? For your culture?"
Cho shakes her head politely, not bothering to get angry. She can never tell whether Molly Weasley is genuinely trying to be helpful or whether everything she says to Cho is layered with the bitter distrust that comes from thinking your son has been stolen from you.
Cho's mother is not too keen on the idea, either. "I'm not a celebrity mother-in-law," she clucks. But then, Cho's a celebrity now, too, or will be.
Harry is almost unbelievably oblivious—oblivious of his surrogate family's less than warm reception of his future bride, unaware of what it might mean for his own image that his future children will not be white.
She will teach him.
It rains green on their wedding day and her dress is soaked with it, stained with it.
At night, she grinds her teeth and he rolls over.
II.
Harry Potter's war was really a children's war: fought, won, and felt most deeply by heroes barely out of adolescence.
Cedric dreams in guilt. She hears him mutter that he should have won the tournament [like there was a winner in the end] should have been there for Harry, who, after all, died so young. Never got to see.
Cho does not soothe him, because in the morning he says, "Pass the jam," like nothing ever happened. But thick red vines have sprouted from the jar and she must replace it.
She wonders what Harry would have thought of his friends dying for him, in the end.
Or perhaps they don't see it that way. There were hundreds at that battle, hundreds who fought and tens who claimed the ultimate victory. The idea of a lone soldier emerging from the wreck, defeating evil just in the nick of time, was a fairytale.
Cho was tired of magic, and Cedric was predictably horrified by this sentiment. When she left, she did her best to become a muggle. To forget.
III.
Marietta wants to run away.
"We've officially been watching too many old muggle movies," says Cho, who still cries throughout most of the Children's Hour. (The only Hepburn film they won't watch is Breakfast at Tiffany's, for obvious reasons.)
But Marietta wants to go to Ireland, wants to stay in real muggle cottages and see the Irish countryside. She insists it's going to be different than Scotland.
She says that if they don't start being romantic it's all been for nothing.
Cho's lost people too, of course, but not her own mother. Not to the fallen ministry. Since Cedric, the closest she's come is when she thought Marietta herself had died at the Battle of Hogwarts.
But Cho saved her.
They do go to Galway. Just for a week, but still. When they stand by the seaside and Marietta beams at Cho, Cho swears that for a minute she doesn't see a single scar.
One day Cho's heart flies right out of her chest and Marietta catches it and holds it, blue, against her own.
IV.
Her husband calls her a doctor, and Cho supposes she's as good as. He's so proud of her, imagines she performs twelve-hour open heart surgeries and delivers healthy babies and cures cancer.
She doesn't have the heart to tell him magic doesn't work like that, or else she likes the praise too much.
St. Mungo's has never been the same since Voldemort's defeat. They all thought it would be so much easier, that people would be so much happier, that there would be less sickness, less death.
But patients are herded in, day after day, minds either lost to torture or to watching their families die or to syndromes like PTSD that seem so foreign, so muggle, to the staff. There are too many babies born out of grief or worse, with no homes or futures.
But Cho knows what war is, never had any grandiose notions. The lives she saves have a place in her penesive, now, because she can't seem to forget a single one.
The ones she couldn't or can't save live in her bones, white as death.