Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter.
A/N: This fic really came out of nowhere since I personally never planned to write another Cho Chang story. If it has to go to someone it would be to Noktalune who left a wonderful with review, many moons ago, that included the line: It is always so much better to be in love than in like when someone dies. Cho's PoV, post GoF, pre HBP, mad spoilers for GoF and OotP if you truly have no idea what happened in the book. Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
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He kissed for the first time after the Yule Ball. The band was still warbling something soft and the hall had been emptying for a good half hour but they were still dancing in uncoordinated circles. He smelled like sweat and butterbeer and snow and something that must of him distinctly him—she never thought to ask—and he just sort of leaned down and pressed his lips right next to hers. No one around them said anything, not that they could have really noticed, it was so slight, the tip of his head, but she felt her skin tighten at the contact.
There had been kisses before his, Roger Davies in library and Matt Murdock by the lake, but there was something giddy to Cedric's mouth that made her stomach flutter.
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She couldn't stop crying when he died.
Everyone expected from her, no one ever just told her not to. Sally Philips hugged her for the first time since first year the morning of his memorial service and Jennifer Moore told her the tears were for the best. People felt sorry for her, as sorry as they felt for Cedric—because he was so young, because he would always be so young—She cried and cried and no one ever told her not to.
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He used to pull on her ear when he snuck up behind her in the hallways and it always annoyed her. His fingers were rough, rougher than her own( she doubted he ever bothered to apply Madam Urbane's Hand Lotion after practices and games), and they chafed the skin at her earlobes, made it angry and red and she would have to pull her hair down so no one would see them.
He never noticed.
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She spent the summer after Cedric locked in her room with her cat, Hephaestus. She didn't bother with homework and she didn't send back owls. Her mother came in once, combed her hair and told her it would pass.
"I know you loved him darling, but he would want you to be happy." Then she left and Cho didn't stop her, didn't call her back and say she wasn't sure she did. Love him that is, because he was wonderful and sweet and kind, he'd made her warm and giddy—warm jelly in her veins and cotton battling for organs—but she didn't think that was love. Not really.
But she couldn't say any of that because it seemed wrong, disrespectful somehow, so soon after. "You don't really know." She told herself, "Maybe you did."
Maybe.
Maybe was worse than no so she settled for yes.
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Cedric used to repeat himself whenever he was serious. It was his way of making a point. It could be cute when it was about something silly like why the Tornados were the better team but it could be irritating when he started going on about the assigned text.
Sometimes it was neither.
"I like you." He said, and his eyebrows were knotting together in the middle and his face was just a little bit pink, but his voice was confident. "You know that right? I like you a lot." (He was never half as eloquent as everyone supposed he ought to be and she remembers that it only bothered her sometimes).
"I like you too." She said with an easy smile, the pretty one she put on so readily for him. Later her memories would run together and she would remind herself there never was a confession of love.
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She cried when she kissed Harry (Harry-sodding-Potter, who had obviously never kissed a girl, who was beet red and wide-eyed as she pressed her mouth against his). She'd never kissed a boy first, but she had gotten tired of waiting, tired of him looking at her and doing nothing.
Maybe she was tired of crying too, but she couldn't be sure.
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He asked her once what she wanted to do once she got out of school. She told him she wasn't sure.
The conversation ended there and it was the closest they got to talking about the future.
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Ally Prufrock had yelped when Cho told her who she was going to Hogsmeade with. "You two are going to have the most beautiful children." She gushed and Cho just laughed at her enthusiasm.
A year passed and he was gone and she was stalking back from the village on a slurry valentine's day and the words popped up in her memory for no apparent reason. "You two are going to have the most beautiful children." But they wouldn't. Not that she had considered it at the time (she had never been a forever-ever girl), but she was considering it then, wondering for a second if they would have lasted.
Maybe. Maybe he would have lived and left school. Maybe he would have gotten a job and done what he always wanted to do (she never thought to ask what that was either) and waited for her to finish up as well. Maybe he would have picked her up from the train station the last time she stepped off and they could have eloped and been happy (because Cho didn't remember ever being quite so sad with him, which meant he must have made her happy).
Maybe.
But there was that uncertainty she could not stand, that idea that she was wasting time, her time—because Cedric's time had been up for a while now—so she pushed all of it way and kept walking. Wondering was the true waste of time.
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There were the things she couldn't forget about him: he was tall, and handsome and kind. He was left handed and a lousy keeper and a bottomless pit in that weird way all boys are at the age of seventeen. He liked muggle fiction and dogs (he had two beagles and a basset hound named Homer back home). He told some genuinely god awful jokes that somehow made her laugh and he could be extremely smug after kissing.
There were the things she couldn't remember about him: if he ever bit his quills. What his hair looked like after flying. Did he always quirk just one side of his mouth when he was pleased with himself or was it just that once? Whether he was religious, whether he believed in anything at all. Was it tea or coffee in the mornings? Was it peaches or plums he was allergic to? What he wanted to do after school. Had he really told her he was scared before going down to the maze or had that been a dream? What he sounded like.
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Some days she would miss him because it felt like she ought to miss him. Because Charms was his favorite class or because he would have liked this particular move on the Quidditch field or because the Tornados were going to the semi-finals.
Some days she didn't think about him at all, and those were easier.
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People felt sorry for her long after they stopped feeling sorry for Cedric—because Cedric had been so young, he would always be so young—but she wouldn't.
And they thought she didn't know it.
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The End
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