OR DIE TRYING: THE STORY OF CHO CHANG
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms.
Rated: PG-13, maybe even a soft R (The contents of this chapter may be considered unsuitable by some persons)
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
18. Home for the Holidays (2)
The Chang family had a fairly subdued Christmas, brightened for Cho only by the arrival of a very large owl with a very large bundle. Within it, Cho found her Quidditch robes-now altered to be a perfect fit. The attached note read: "These robes are like your broom: used before by others, but never used better than by you. Happy Christmas!" and was signed by Madam Hooch and everyone on the Ravenclaw team.
Cho wore her Quidditch robes for the rest of the day, and would have worn them out the next day, when her mother took her to Madam Malkin's. At the last minute, she changed into her everyday robes and winter cloak. Winds were whipping ice up and down Diagon Alley, and even the short walk to Madam Malkin's left them with stinging cheeks, freezing limbs and watery eyes.
"Compliments of the season, ladies! What can I do for you?"
Before Cho could say a word, her mother had grabbed Madam Malkin's elbow and pulled her to the other side of the shoppe. She spoke to the seamstress-witch in a rapid-fire whisper.
All that Cho could do to protest was to yell, "MOTHER!" But no sooner was the word out of her mouth than Madam Malkin descended on Cho. "Well, this is a special day for you, then. Just scoot into the next room and I'll take care of everything. Missus, you're welcome to sit out here with a cup of tea. Or if you'd like to toddle off to the Leaky ."
"But my daughter!" Lotus interrupted.
"Is in the best of hands for the next hour. Don't worry; I've done this for hundreds of young ladies." With that, she walked into the back as if Lotus Chang wasn't even there.
Cho was about to speak to Madam Malkin when she heard her mother loudly slam the shoppe door. She couldn't help but giggle as she said, "Thank you."
"Well, I know how mothers can be sometimes. Now, if you'd please disrobe."
Cho removed her winter cloak and her robes.
"No, dear, I mean everything."
"Everything?!"
"No need to be embarrassed; we are fitting you out for undergarments, after all, and you have nothing I haven't seen before. Quick smart, before your mother comes back."
Cho felt very strange removing garment after garment until she was standing on a stool before Madam Malkin, completely nude. It was only now, as she glanced downward at herself, that she realized that her breasts had actually grown since the last time she'd seen them; grown very little, but grown nonetheless.
"Just had another Hogwarts girl in the other day," Madam Malkin prattled on as her tape measure buzzed around Cho like a hummingbird. "Strange girl; would not take the scarf off of her head for anything. Didn't really matter to me, but ."
"Was her name Raina?" Cho interrupted.
"Might have been," the seamstress nodded, "but I'm afraid I had already started celebrating a wee bit, and I really wasn't paying much attention."
Cho actually felt relieved. It looked like most of her dorm would be going through the same thing at the same time. It made her feel less confused, somehow, just knowing that she was part of another team.
An hour later, Cho was just putting on her robes when her mother stormed back into the shoppe. She seemed to bring the winter storm in with her. "Are you there?"
Cho walked out of the back room with a paper-wrapped parcel. Madam Malkin opened an old-fashioned cash box; the kind the Muggles used in Victorian times. "Everything taken care of," she beamed at Mrs. Chang, who didn't beam back, but studied the scroll the seamstress had handed her.
"You'll find everything is in order," Madam Malkin said, trying to nudge Mrs. Chang into paying the bill.
Mrs. Chang seemed to sniff at the scroll instead. "These prices are accurate?"
"With the trade in silk being what it is these days, mum, I wish I could take a bit off the price. And these all have the Hygiene Charms built right in, Growth Compensation Spells."
"Fine, fine," Mrs. Chang muttered, digging a coin pouch from the pocket of her robes and placing a small pile of Galleons on the counter. Her change came to four Sickles, but she didn't budge from the spot until they were in her hand. "Come along, Cho," she said as she turned to the door.
"Let me know how they suit you, dearie," Cho heard the seamstress-witch call out as she left the shop. "Always like to know my customers are satisfied!"
Mother and daughter didn't speak on the walk home because they couldn't; the wind was, if anything, fiercer than before. When they reached the door to the Changs's apothecary shoppe, Cho ran to the back and up the flight of stairs, stopping only to leave her cloak in the hall. She then ran to her room, closed the door, tore open the wrapped package and spread everything out on the bed: three brassieres of varying design (including one so daring that Cho immediately hid it in her suitcase), six panties, three chemises and two slips. She sat on the bed and felt the fine silk material under her fingers. No sooner did she do so than Chairman Miao came out from under the bed and bounded into Cho's lap. Cho gave a surprised laugh and started scratching behind the cat's ears.
"Are you all right in there?" Cho heard her mother call through the door. Cho didn't answer. "Aren't you having lunch?"
"I'll be down in a little while, mummy," Cho called. Her mother seemed satisfied by that and went away.
Cho kept scratching the purring cat's head, trying hard to keep from thinking about her mother.
xxx
The next day, she was out the door early, taking only two bites of toast for breakfast and telling her parents that she had "research". She grabbed her cloak and her school book-bag (with her wand inside it) and was out the door.
Stepping out onto Diagon Alley, she could tell that yesterday's storm had died down. The wind was less harsh, the cold was less intense. She walked through the Leaky Cauldron and onto the streets of Muggle London, knowing exactly where to go.
Her father, known among non-Chinese as James Arthur Chang, was a great believer in education. It was the basis for all success, in society and in one's personal life; that was his belief, based on the ideas of Confucius, and he never tired of pushing the need for education. But he went further. From an early age, he made sure that his daughter had memberships in the Reading Room of the British Museum, the University of London Library in Senate House, and other research collections around London. He expected Cho to take education seriously, and (so far, at any rate) she had lived up to his expectations.
She had started the day at Senate House, and, as the afternoon deepened into night, she was at the Reading Room of the British Museum. She'd taken copious notes from a dozen books whose titles included the word "puberty", and from another dozen sources on "adolescent sexuality". She was trying to read her own future as well as answer questions in her mind about the past-especially about that dream with Hooch and Eunice Murray .
She looked at her watch: 5:00 p.m. The Museum would close in another thirty minutes. She put on her cloak and picked up her book-bag, then decided to duck back into the stacks; there was time for one more source.
She walked down to her aisle, in a corner of the Reading Room that was almost empty now, when she realized that someone else was in the space between the stacks. At first, he looked like just another college student- someone who would fit into the surroundings. But at second glance, Cho got nervous about the young man. She could smell him, even a couple of yards away; he had the odour of the deranged Muggles who stopped washing and stopped caring about it. There was also, now that she was close enough to see it, a mad gleam in his eyes.
"Bit young to be here by yourself, ain't yeh?"
Cho turned to go down the other end of the aisle, but someone-probably this young man-had stacked chairs at the end. It would be enough to stop her.
"Leave me alone, please," she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.
"I'm just doing this fer yer benefit. Yeh know what they say about all work an' no play."
Cho backed away, keeping at least five feet between them. "I'm warning you!"
The man grabbed a book at random off the nearest shelf and threw it at Cho; she ducked just in time. "Yeh see, this can be a lot of fun if yeh don't get me mad."
Was self-defense acceptable if she broke the rule about Underage Magic Users? She felt into her book-bag, pulled out her wand and pointed it at him.
He didn't seem impressed. "Got somethin' longer than that for yeh, darlin'." He took another step toward Cho.
Cho was backed up against the stacked chairs now; there was nowhere to go. Rules about Underage Magic be damned! "Petrificus temporus!"
The man stopped in his tracks. The only part of him moving were his eyes, growing wider and wider with a growing sense of panic.
Cho smiled, feeling that she was totally in control of the situation. She walked right up to the man, standing within an inch of his face, although his odour made her back off.
"This is just temporary," she told him in a whisper. "You'll be free of it in about an hour-unless you're discovered by the guard first." She slowly walked around him, as if he were a statue in a garden. By now, the shock and the adrenaline had left her feeling giddy, almost foolhardy.
"As long as you're here, I'll let you in on a little secret as to why you can't move. I'm a witch. Honestly. There are thousands of us all over England; millions of us all over the world. You've been walking past us on the street all your life and never knew it. And once you're back on the street, you'll never know whom you'll be standing next to.
"I'm telling you this, of course, because nobody will ever believe you. But you'll know this is true for the rest of your days. So I wouldn't bother young girls in the future, if I were you; some of them may not like it. And some of them may not be as charitable as I."
She tucked the wand back into her backpack and half-ran, half-skipped down the corridor toward the door, her silvery laughter echoing back to the paralyzed man. By the time she reached the shoppe, she looked as though nothing unusual had happened.
Her father was just closing the shoppe when she came in. "Did you have a good day, then?"
"Yes, I, I found what I needed to find."
xxx
Rough weather moved back into London, and Cho hardly left home for the rest of the holiday. Just as well; she was determined to solve the mystery of the book or books that were still Charmed out of sight in the library.
She could only devote an hour or so a day to trying to unravel the puzzle. She needed a time when her parents would be busy in the shoppe, but the weather assured that there would be few customers. This cut into Cho's available time, because one parent or another would always be coming back upstairs.
Her mother would come up on the flimsiest excuses, looking for a second sweater one time, checking the cat's food bowl another. She always sought out Cho on these occasions, as if she were watching her, perhaps trying to get up the nerve to say something-- No, Cho decided, she was just being snoopy.
She tried every Charm she knew to open the secret place, then went back to her textbooks to look for other Charms that would cause the spot to be blocked off. The more she failed, the more determined she became to succeed.
Finally, on 3 January-two days before her return to Hogwarts-she read about the Camera Oscura, or Hidden Room, Charm. At first it didn't seem to apply: wizards usually used it to shut themselves away in a private place, rather than to hide something. Still, she tried the Countercharm-and it worked! The box seemed to vanish, revealing several old, valuable-looking volumes. She picked one up. It was clearly hundreds of years old, printed in Chinese, with the title "The Spring Palace". It claimed to have been written by Chao Tzu-Ang during the Han Dynasty, which would make the book almost two thousand years old!
No wonder it's kept hidden, Cho thought; a valuable antique like this. Father probably got this as an investment. She thought to put the book back on the shelf and re-impose the Camera Oscura Charm. However, her curiosity about the book got the better of her. She opened it.
It was a collection of Muggle drawings that didn't move, with commentaries on each scene. One picture, for example, was titled "Queen Bee Making Honey"; another, "Hungry Steed Gallops to His Food". But these pictures had nothing to do with bees or horses. Rather, they were about two people playing what the text called "the wind-and-moon game". Even though Cho had spent part of the holidays reading about sexual matters, this was the first time in her life she had ever seen it.
She was-incredulous. "I'm supposed to LET someone put THAT inside me?! I don't think so!" Even though the accompanying text described (as if such descriptions were necessary) the lovers as feeling various degrees of ecstasy, Cho had serious doubts that they were feeling any such thing. It all looked rather uncomfortable, even contrived. But then, it was an old book.
She put it back on the shelf and performed the Camera Oscura Charm, hiding the books and scrolls, presumably all dealing with the same topic, back on their corner of the shelf. As far as she was concerned, that was the end of that.
She had a dream, however, that night. She dreamed that she was in one of the pictures; specifically, the one titled "Queen Bee Making Honey". As in the picture, the two people in her dream merely held a pose, unmoving and quite naked. She was on her back, her legs raised in a wide V, and between them she could see the man in the picture-except that this man's face bore a bit of a resemblance to-Roger Davies.
Cho awoke with a start, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. She grabbed her pillow and began pounding it with her fist, each punch accompanied by a word she shouted in her mind: "I-DID-NOT-WANT-TO-SEE-THAT!!" She tried to get back to sleep but couldn't; only by replaying Quidditch matches over and over in her thoughts did she drift off at last into a dreamless sleep.
xxx
to be continued in part 19, wherein Cho starts to see the Gryffindor Seeker in a totally new light...
A/N: The description of the "Spring Palace" and its pictures comes from a Chinese erotic novel of the 17th Century, "The Flesh Prayer-Mat" by Li Yü.
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms.
Rated: PG-13, maybe even a soft R (The contents of this chapter may be considered unsuitable by some persons)
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
18. Home for the Holidays (2)
The Chang family had a fairly subdued Christmas, brightened for Cho only by the arrival of a very large owl with a very large bundle. Within it, Cho found her Quidditch robes-now altered to be a perfect fit. The attached note read: "These robes are like your broom: used before by others, but never used better than by you. Happy Christmas!" and was signed by Madam Hooch and everyone on the Ravenclaw team.
Cho wore her Quidditch robes for the rest of the day, and would have worn them out the next day, when her mother took her to Madam Malkin's. At the last minute, she changed into her everyday robes and winter cloak. Winds were whipping ice up and down Diagon Alley, and even the short walk to Madam Malkin's left them with stinging cheeks, freezing limbs and watery eyes.
"Compliments of the season, ladies! What can I do for you?"
Before Cho could say a word, her mother had grabbed Madam Malkin's elbow and pulled her to the other side of the shoppe. She spoke to the seamstress-witch in a rapid-fire whisper.
All that Cho could do to protest was to yell, "MOTHER!" But no sooner was the word out of her mouth than Madam Malkin descended on Cho. "Well, this is a special day for you, then. Just scoot into the next room and I'll take care of everything. Missus, you're welcome to sit out here with a cup of tea. Or if you'd like to toddle off to the Leaky ."
"But my daughter!" Lotus interrupted.
"Is in the best of hands for the next hour. Don't worry; I've done this for hundreds of young ladies." With that, she walked into the back as if Lotus Chang wasn't even there.
Cho was about to speak to Madam Malkin when she heard her mother loudly slam the shoppe door. She couldn't help but giggle as she said, "Thank you."
"Well, I know how mothers can be sometimes. Now, if you'd please disrobe."
Cho removed her winter cloak and her robes.
"No, dear, I mean everything."
"Everything?!"
"No need to be embarrassed; we are fitting you out for undergarments, after all, and you have nothing I haven't seen before. Quick smart, before your mother comes back."
Cho felt very strange removing garment after garment until she was standing on a stool before Madam Malkin, completely nude. It was only now, as she glanced downward at herself, that she realized that her breasts had actually grown since the last time she'd seen them; grown very little, but grown nonetheless.
"Just had another Hogwarts girl in the other day," Madam Malkin prattled on as her tape measure buzzed around Cho like a hummingbird. "Strange girl; would not take the scarf off of her head for anything. Didn't really matter to me, but ."
"Was her name Raina?" Cho interrupted.
"Might have been," the seamstress nodded, "but I'm afraid I had already started celebrating a wee bit, and I really wasn't paying much attention."
Cho actually felt relieved. It looked like most of her dorm would be going through the same thing at the same time. It made her feel less confused, somehow, just knowing that she was part of another team.
An hour later, Cho was just putting on her robes when her mother stormed back into the shoppe. She seemed to bring the winter storm in with her. "Are you there?"
Cho walked out of the back room with a paper-wrapped parcel. Madam Malkin opened an old-fashioned cash box; the kind the Muggles used in Victorian times. "Everything taken care of," she beamed at Mrs. Chang, who didn't beam back, but studied the scroll the seamstress had handed her.
"You'll find everything is in order," Madam Malkin said, trying to nudge Mrs. Chang into paying the bill.
Mrs. Chang seemed to sniff at the scroll instead. "These prices are accurate?"
"With the trade in silk being what it is these days, mum, I wish I could take a bit off the price. And these all have the Hygiene Charms built right in, Growth Compensation Spells."
"Fine, fine," Mrs. Chang muttered, digging a coin pouch from the pocket of her robes and placing a small pile of Galleons on the counter. Her change came to four Sickles, but she didn't budge from the spot until they were in her hand. "Come along, Cho," she said as she turned to the door.
"Let me know how they suit you, dearie," Cho heard the seamstress-witch call out as she left the shop. "Always like to know my customers are satisfied!"
Mother and daughter didn't speak on the walk home because they couldn't; the wind was, if anything, fiercer than before. When they reached the door to the Changs's apothecary shoppe, Cho ran to the back and up the flight of stairs, stopping only to leave her cloak in the hall. She then ran to her room, closed the door, tore open the wrapped package and spread everything out on the bed: three brassieres of varying design (including one so daring that Cho immediately hid it in her suitcase), six panties, three chemises and two slips. She sat on the bed and felt the fine silk material under her fingers. No sooner did she do so than Chairman Miao came out from under the bed and bounded into Cho's lap. Cho gave a surprised laugh and started scratching behind the cat's ears.
"Are you all right in there?" Cho heard her mother call through the door. Cho didn't answer. "Aren't you having lunch?"
"I'll be down in a little while, mummy," Cho called. Her mother seemed satisfied by that and went away.
Cho kept scratching the purring cat's head, trying hard to keep from thinking about her mother.
xxx
The next day, she was out the door early, taking only two bites of toast for breakfast and telling her parents that she had "research". She grabbed her cloak and her school book-bag (with her wand inside it) and was out the door.
Stepping out onto Diagon Alley, she could tell that yesterday's storm had died down. The wind was less harsh, the cold was less intense. She walked through the Leaky Cauldron and onto the streets of Muggle London, knowing exactly where to go.
Her father, known among non-Chinese as James Arthur Chang, was a great believer in education. It was the basis for all success, in society and in one's personal life; that was his belief, based on the ideas of Confucius, and he never tired of pushing the need for education. But he went further. From an early age, he made sure that his daughter had memberships in the Reading Room of the British Museum, the University of London Library in Senate House, and other research collections around London. He expected Cho to take education seriously, and (so far, at any rate) she had lived up to his expectations.
She had started the day at Senate House, and, as the afternoon deepened into night, she was at the Reading Room of the British Museum. She'd taken copious notes from a dozen books whose titles included the word "puberty", and from another dozen sources on "adolescent sexuality". She was trying to read her own future as well as answer questions in her mind about the past-especially about that dream with Hooch and Eunice Murray .
She looked at her watch: 5:00 p.m. The Museum would close in another thirty minutes. She put on her cloak and picked up her book-bag, then decided to duck back into the stacks; there was time for one more source.
She walked down to her aisle, in a corner of the Reading Room that was almost empty now, when she realized that someone else was in the space between the stacks. At first, he looked like just another college student- someone who would fit into the surroundings. But at second glance, Cho got nervous about the young man. She could smell him, even a couple of yards away; he had the odour of the deranged Muggles who stopped washing and stopped caring about it. There was also, now that she was close enough to see it, a mad gleam in his eyes.
"Bit young to be here by yourself, ain't yeh?"
Cho turned to go down the other end of the aisle, but someone-probably this young man-had stacked chairs at the end. It would be enough to stop her.
"Leave me alone, please," she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.
"I'm just doing this fer yer benefit. Yeh know what they say about all work an' no play."
Cho backed away, keeping at least five feet between them. "I'm warning you!"
The man grabbed a book at random off the nearest shelf and threw it at Cho; she ducked just in time. "Yeh see, this can be a lot of fun if yeh don't get me mad."
Was self-defense acceptable if she broke the rule about Underage Magic Users? She felt into her book-bag, pulled out her wand and pointed it at him.
He didn't seem impressed. "Got somethin' longer than that for yeh, darlin'." He took another step toward Cho.
Cho was backed up against the stacked chairs now; there was nowhere to go. Rules about Underage Magic be damned! "Petrificus temporus!"
The man stopped in his tracks. The only part of him moving were his eyes, growing wider and wider with a growing sense of panic.
Cho smiled, feeling that she was totally in control of the situation. She walked right up to the man, standing within an inch of his face, although his odour made her back off.
"This is just temporary," she told him in a whisper. "You'll be free of it in about an hour-unless you're discovered by the guard first." She slowly walked around him, as if he were a statue in a garden. By now, the shock and the adrenaline had left her feeling giddy, almost foolhardy.
"As long as you're here, I'll let you in on a little secret as to why you can't move. I'm a witch. Honestly. There are thousands of us all over England; millions of us all over the world. You've been walking past us on the street all your life and never knew it. And once you're back on the street, you'll never know whom you'll be standing next to.
"I'm telling you this, of course, because nobody will ever believe you. But you'll know this is true for the rest of your days. So I wouldn't bother young girls in the future, if I were you; some of them may not like it. And some of them may not be as charitable as I."
She tucked the wand back into her backpack and half-ran, half-skipped down the corridor toward the door, her silvery laughter echoing back to the paralyzed man. By the time she reached the shoppe, she looked as though nothing unusual had happened.
Her father was just closing the shoppe when she came in. "Did you have a good day, then?"
"Yes, I, I found what I needed to find."
xxx
Rough weather moved back into London, and Cho hardly left home for the rest of the holiday. Just as well; she was determined to solve the mystery of the book or books that were still Charmed out of sight in the library.
She could only devote an hour or so a day to trying to unravel the puzzle. She needed a time when her parents would be busy in the shoppe, but the weather assured that there would be few customers. This cut into Cho's available time, because one parent or another would always be coming back upstairs.
Her mother would come up on the flimsiest excuses, looking for a second sweater one time, checking the cat's food bowl another. She always sought out Cho on these occasions, as if she were watching her, perhaps trying to get up the nerve to say something-- No, Cho decided, she was just being snoopy.
She tried every Charm she knew to open the secret place, then went back to her textbooks to look for other Charms that would cause the spot to be blocked off. The more she failed, the more determined she became to succeed.
Finally, on 3 January-two days before her return to Hogwarts-she read about the Camera Oscura, or Hidden Room, Charm. At first it didn't seem to apply: wizards usually used it to shut themselves away in a private place, rather than to hide something. Still, she tried the Countercharm-and it worked! The box seemed to vanish, revealing several old, valuable-looking volumes. She picked one up. It was clearly hundreds of years old, printed in Chinese, with the title "The Spring Palace". It claimed to have been written by Chao Tzu-Ang during the Han Dynasty, which would make the book almost two thousand years old!
No wonder it's kept hidden, Cho thought; a valuable antique like this. Father probably got this as an investment. She thought to put the book back on the shelf and re-impose the Camera Oscura Charm. However, her curiosity about the book got the better of her. She opened it.
It was a collection of Muggle drawings that didn't move, with commentaries on each scene. One picture, for example, was titled "Queen Bee Making Honey"; another, "Hungry Steed Gallops to His Food". But these pictures had nothing to do with bees or horses. Rather, they were about two people playing what the text called "the wind-and-moon game". Even though Cho had spent part of the holidays reading about sexual matters, this was the first time in her life she had ever seen it.
She was-incredulous. "I'm supposed to LET someone put THAT inside me?! I don't think so!" Even though the accompanying text described (as if such descriptions were necessary) the lovers as feeling various degrees of ecstasy, Cho had serious doubts that they were feeling any such thing. It all looked rather uncomfortable, even contrived. But then, it was an old book.
She put it back on the shelf and performed the Camera Oscura Charm, hiding the books and scrolls, presumably all dealing with the same topic, back on their corner of the shelf. As far as she was concerned, that was the end of that.
She had a dream, however, that night. She dreamed that she was in one of the pictures; specifically, the one titled "Queen Bee Making Honey". As in the picture, the two people in her dream merely held a pose, unmoving and quite naked. She was on her back, her legs raised in a wide V, and between them she could see the man in the picture-except that this man's face bore a bit of a resemblance to-Roger Davies.
Cho awoke with a start, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. She grabbed her pillow and began pounding it with her fist, each punch accompanied by a word she shouted in her mind: "I-DID-NOT-WANT-TO-SEE-THAT!!" She tried to get back to sleep but couldn't; only by replaying Quidditch matches over and over in her thoughts did she drift off at last into a dreamless sleep.
xxx
to be continued in part 19, wherein Cho starts to see the Gryffindor Seeker in a totally new light...
A/N: The description of the "Spring Palace" and its pictures comes from a Chinese erotic novel of the 17th Century, "The Flesh Prayer-Mat" by Li Yü.
