OR DIE TRYING: THE STORY OF CHO CHANG

By monkeymouse

NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms. And one of the great things about JKR telling the story from Harry's point of view is that stuff could be happening all over Hogwarts that Harry isn't aware of.

Rated: PG-13 (some material may not be deemed suitable-offstage slash)

Spoilers: Everything

xxx

22. Right or Wrong

Cho awoke on the first Sunday back at Hogwarts with a feeling of foreboding. Something had happened; she could feel it in the air. She had no idea what had happened, but something. Maybe she'd been woken out of sleep by the sound of whatever it was.

She listened; nothing. The dormitory was quiet, except for the breathing of the girls and the purring of one of the cats.

Still, she trusted her instincts. They'd gotten her through practice sessions where she'd dodged Bludgers she couldn't consciously have seen. She walked to the door and tried it.

Locked. From the outside.

This had never happened before. Cho tried the door again, and as soon as she did she heard a muffled voice from the stairs: "Hullo?"

"What's going on?" Cho asked.

"Is that you, Cho?"

"Penny!" Cho recognized the voice as Penelope Clearwater. "Why are we locked in?"

"Look," Penny said, in a clearly nervous voice, "there's been-something's happened. Stay put for a little while, and we'll tell you about it."

"About what?" But Cho already heard the steps running back down the stairs.

"Wha's all this then?" Jan asked sleepily.

"I don't know," Cho said. "We're locked in, and they won't say why."

"Locked in, eh?" smirked Libby Foggly, pulling her wand out from under her pillow. "Not bloody likely: Alohomora!"

The door stayed locked. She tried several times to open it, with no luck.

"You don't think there's another troll about," Letitia asked nervously.

"Not a chance," sniffed Diana Fairweather. "It would have to get into the castle, past the tapestry amd through the bookcase before it could get in here. Mark my words; whatever this is about, they're not worried about something getting in, but of something getting out."

Libby kept trying Charm after Charm, but nothing worked on the door. "They're really serious," she muttered after the Omnikey also proved futile.

About thirty minutes after Cho woke up, the door swung open to reveal Penny Clearwater, dressed in full robes and wearing her Prefects badge. As if she was speaking to a roomful of strangers, she said, "Please follow me to the Common Room", turned and walked down the stairs.

It seemed as if the entire House was squeezed into the Common Room. Cho and her dormitory-mates worked their way around to the bay window, where the others of her year were waiting. No sooner had they gotten there, though, than they heard a repeated chiming.

It was Professor Flitwick, Charms Master and Head of Ravenclaw House, who was using the Tintinabula Charm: striking the air with his wand but producing the sound of a bell. This quieted the students, as they all listened to what the Professor had to say.

"There has been a, well, an incident." Flitwick was so nervous he was almost shaking; nobody could remember seeing him like this. "Happens once every decade or so, but, well, better just say it. Two of our students, Gurney Ingletor and Francis MacGiver, are not here."

Cho looked around and couldn't see them. She tried to recall them; MacGiver was a fairly strong Herbology student and middling at everything else. Ingletor was from Dover and spent a lot of time by himself in the library.

"They are not here," Flitwick went on, "because theyhad committed a serious breach of the code of conduct here at Hogwarts. The particulars need not concern you. Suffice it to say that they are even now on their way back to their families, and what happens to them will be entirely up to their parents. I've called you all together because I've seen through experience that, unless I explain things, all sorts of wild rumours get started. Now you know what's happened, and that's all you need to know. Better get down to the Great Hall for breakfast."

And, just like that, he was gone.

Most of the Ravenclaws simply filed out of the Common Room. The Third- Years-their number now reduced by two-stayed by the bay window.

"Right, you lot," Jan said to the four boys, "wot's he on about?"

Vincent Krixlow seemed to be looking for minute imperfections in his fingernails.

"Not supposed to tell, are we?" Giulio Grimaldi added, with a wide and mocking smile on his face.

"If you know," Letitia said, "tell us quick! Flitwick could be back looking for us!"

"Ask Pablo," Vincent smirked; "he discovered it."

Pablo Molina looked even more nervous than Flitwick. Making sure nobody was coming into the Common Room, he dropped his voice to a whisper. "I just got up around dawn. I was thirsty, and I wanted some water. So I start over to the lav, butI see one of the beds has its curtains open. And I look, and, well, I just run down here to the Common Room. I was in front of the fireplace, trying to figure out what to do, and then I remember what they said on our first day, about how the painting and the Grey Lady are connected somehow, and the next thing I know, Flitwick and the Prefects are coming down."

"Get on with it!" Libby snapped. "What did you see?"

"They were together!" Pablo didn't mean to raise his voice. Now he dropped it again. "They were in the one bed, and no pyjamas."

The Common Room was silent as this sank in. After a minute, Libby Foggly looked at the boys. "Did any of you know?"

"Not a bit of it!" George George Millethammer spoke up. "None of us suspected a thing!"

Vincent nodded. "Coulda been doing it for a week or three years; they kept it hidden."

Grimaldi smirked. "Helluva time to fall asleep on the job."

Letitia shot him a withering look. "Right. Well, Flitwick said that's the end of it, and that's good enough for me. I'm off to breakfast, and I'd advise you to do the same." She swept out without waiting for an argument.

Cho went back up to the dormitory to change; she'd worn her robes over her bedclothes. First, though, she sat on her bed and let her breath out in a large rush, as if she'd been holding it for an hour.

xxx

Cho avoided the rest of her House for the rest of the day, and it wasn't until that night, as she and the other girls were preparing for bed, that she spoke.

"Can I say something, everyone?" she asked. "I want to talk about it."

"Thank you," Diana Fairweather sighed. "Thought I'd burst at the seams unless somebody said SOMETHING!"

"Well, don' expec' me to say ennythin'," Jan grumbled. "It's disgustin' an' unnatural, an' that's all I got ter say."

"Well, then, let the rest of us have a turn," Letitia said.

So the girls sat, each on their own beds. Cho looked around the room, then down at her hands, folded in her lap.

"For years, my parents hated the idea of my playing Quidditch. It wasn't about breaking bones or anything like that. They just assumed that any girl who went out for sports, well, they, er, liked other girls." Cho could feel herself blushing. This was more difficult than she thought it would be. "The fact is, I can't imagine that. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about boys, actually. But I know how it feels to be suspected of carrying on, you know, like that. I can't imagine that those two wouldn't come back, and I intend to treat them the same way I did before all this."

Jan, scratching Coriander under her chin, glowered as she looked around the room, and didn't say a word.

Letitia, sitting up in her usual perfect posture, with the folds of her nightgown as perfectly arranged as if she were modelling for Witch Weekly, spoke up next. "Well, they certainly knew what they were getting into, and I won't fault them for that. But they certainly should have known that you have to keep up appearances. Especially when it comes to something like this, appearances are all that matters. They could have been keeping up a pretense for months or even years, but that was their business, of course."

"I don't believe you!" Diana Fairweather interrupted. "No thoughts at all about what they did, or whether they should have been expelled at all?"

"Rules are rules," Letitia replied, "and it makes no sense getting emotional about them. You might as well get emotional about a formula in Potions. It was entirely up to them if they wanted to, you know, do whatever they were doing. But it was their responsibility to keep up appearances."

Diana interrupted again. "By the way, does anybody know what part of the code of conduct was broken? I wasn't even aware we had one."

Cho realized that she had no idea either. "Probably buried somewhere in Hogwarts: A History," she guessed.

"Then it's lost forever," Libby chuckled. "Anyway, I don't think what they did was all that bad. I mean, some of the things I've read about the Dark Lord and his followers doing were much worse. Here there was no death and no destruction, so the school should have just let 'em be."

"But they broke the rules!" Jan jumped in, forgetting that she wasn't going to say anything.

"But that doesn't matter," Libby shook her head. "We've seen Snape enforce rules against everyone but Slytherin House. He's made up rules on the spot to punish some pupil or other. And look at Harry Potter; broken more rules than I can count, and nothing happens to him!"

"Nothin' yet, ennyway."

"At least I can understand that kind of rule-breaking," Diana Fairweather said. "I haven't, well, I don't think I've mentioned this to anyone, but I'm a half-and-half. My dad is a wizard who fell in love with a Muggle. I guess it usually works the other way round. Anyway, it hasn't been easy at all. We got prejudice from both sides; some of dad's wizarding friends wouldn't have anything to do with my mum, while some of mum's old friends were scared to death of magic. Had to go to four different schools before I came to Hogwarts; at first they thought I was a Squib, so they sent me to a Muggle school. Then, when I started levitating the canary cage one winter, they found a wizarding school for me. But my first day there-I don't know how they found out, but they emptied the cloakroom and threw things on my desk: always one mitten or one boot. Their way of saying I was only half a person."

"Kids can be cruel sometimes," Libby nodded.

"Not just kids." Everyone was surprised when Raina spoke; somehow they didn't think she'd say anything. "I-I live in a block of flats in the East End. I had a cousin, a girl my age, whose family lived in the next block. We grew up together; we were like sisters.

"It was summer, just days before I got my Hogwarts letter. My cousin was visiting me, and our mothers were visiting in another room. My cousin had an older sister who had just gotten married. We were in my room with the door closed, talking about it. Actually, we were laughing about it; making fun of the whole notion of love and romance, the way that girls will at that age. And after a while, we started teasing each other; you know, 'Do you have a boyfriend?' and 'Where would you go on a date?' And then we." Her voice caught, as she kept her gaze steadily on the floor. "We decided to kiss each other; 'practicing for boys', we said. We were laughing about it. And, as soon as our lips touched, my mother opens the door to see what we were laughing about. Only now she starts screaming at us. She uses words I never heard before. She grabs my cousin by the wrist, pulls her off the bed. My cousin and her mother were out of our house at once, and before a fortnight had passed the family had moved away. I never saw her again."

Raina looked up, and the other girls could see a deeper sorrow in her eyes than they had ever seen. "I don't know about those boys," she said quietly. "I don't even know what it means to punish the guilty. But I know how it feels when you punish the innocent."

The discussion ground to a halt after that. Cho realized that, even though she had been Sorted into Ravenclaw, this wasn't the kind of problem that could be worked out in one night-not even by Rowena Ravenclaw herself. She brushed out her hair, set down the brush, and simply sat at the table, not looking at anything in particular. After a few minutes, though, she took a deep breath, stood up and walked over to Jan Nugginbridge, who was writing in the margins of her Potions text.

"Jan, I just want to say this. I never set out to offend you, or anyone else. I just thought that we needed to talk about it."

Jan looked genuinely puzzled. "Wot d'yeh mean, offend?"

"Well, about those two boys."

Jan closed the book (holding the page with a finger) and smiled at Cho. "My folks tell me I've got a head o' granite, and once I get an idea there's no shiftin' it. An' I think ye're a great friend, and ye'll be a grand Seeker."

"So you didn't mind my talking about."

Jan snorted. "Takes more'n that to change my mind."

Cho went to bed that night more at ease, but also worried. She'd seen a darker side of Jan this day; just as she'd seen her own dark side during the summer. She realized that perhaps, perhaps, nobody was totally as they seemed to be; that everyone had a secret heart. All of a sudden, the world seemed a less comforting, more dangerous place.

And, whatever happened to Gurney Ingletor and Francis MacGiver, the fact remains that they were never again seen at Hogwarts.

xxx

to be continued in part 23, wherein Cho finally meets with Penny Clearwater, and finds out how she became Penelope.