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

Spoilers: Everything

xxx

53. Cho and the Champion

"Right; how did he do it?"

There can be no doubt what the topic of conversation was in the Ravenclaw Common Room on the night of 31 October, 1994. Harry Potter had done the seemingly impossible, and had his name chosen as the fourth Tri-Wizard Tournament Champion.

"First of all, Roger," Cho spoke up at once, "you have to rethink the question. We don't know that Harry necessarily DID anything!"

"How thick can you be?!" So said one of the Third-Years, a very defensive Muggle-born named Ronnie McGuffin. He didn't seem to realize that this was a serious insult, but kept on. "I mean, what night is this? The anniversary of the night that little Harry Potter stopped the Dark Lord. He must think that everyone's stealing his glory, so he trumps the only three people who are supposed to matter tonight."

"All well and good, Ronnie, but for one mistake," answered Sixth-Year Girls Prefect Belle Candlewort. "I've been here for all four of Potter's years, and he's tried to excel at Quidditch, but he's never put himself forward as the Boy Who Lived. I've never seen him chase after glory for that."

"Well, it seems to chase after him," Ronnie went on. "In his First Year, didn't he tangle with You Know Who again, even though he was attached to Professor Quirrell? Didn't he rescue a Weasley from the Chamber of Secrets the year after? And wasn't he supposed to be the target of an assassination attempt by Sirius Black the year after that? You think that was all just bad luck?"

"All I know is this," Cho said, raising her hand to draw everyone's attention. "I happened to be looking at Harry when Dumbledore called his name . . ."

"Exactly why was that?" Libby Foggly smirked.

"That's unimportant!" Cho said as seriously as she could, considering that she had started to blush. "The point is, he was just as surprised as the rest of us. It wasn't an act, I tell you; he looked like he'd been popped between the eyes with a Bludger. He didn't know where to go or what to do at first. If he HAD planned this, would he have been so hesitant?"

"Or it could be just more play-acting," Diana Fairweather said. "We may never know."

"In the meantime," Roger Davies interrupted, "let's get back to how it could have been done."

"I still think there was some kind of fraud," Terry Boot said. "Has anyone here not read 'Hogwarts-A History'"? There were some murmurs and general head-shaking. Apparently, no Ravenclaw would think of NOT reading the book. "In all the mentions of the Tournament, there's always been three Champions from three schools. Choosing a fourth Champion is just impossible!"

"Rowena's Rule!" a dozen voices shouted out.

"Since it's happened," Belle Candlewort smiled, "it obviously isn't impossible."

"Then the Goblet made the mistake," Ronnie continued; "but how?"

"Are we agreed that Potter couldn't have put in his own name?" asked Pablo Molina.

"He couldn't possibly have done it," Sally Fawcett said, "and I ought to know." She had put her own name in for a lark, but, after crossing Professor Dumbledore's Age Line, she sprouted a bushy white beard.

"What if the problem wasn't with the Goblet but with the Age Line?" suggested "Jinx" Jenkins. "I'm not saying anything against Dumbledore, but Potter does seem to be his pet, doesn't he?"

Padma Patil shook her head. "Even if, and I don't grant it but for the sake of argument, even if Dumbledore cast an Age Line that said, 'Keep out anyone under the age of seventeen except for Harry Potter', how would he know that Harry would try to enter his name anyway? We all heard the same warnings. Surely he would have thought that he'd end up with a beard or something."

"Not if he didn't step over the line!" said Terry Boot. "But what if he flew over it?"

"Oh, this is too much!" Cho laughed.

"Hear me out! Some say he's the best flier in the school-present company excepted-so why couldn't he get on his Firebolt in the dead of night, sail over the Age Line and drop his name in from above?"

"Because I know that Hector Bosch-Burkington tried to do exactly that!" Fawcett countered. Hector was a Fifth-Year Slytherin she'd been "seeing" lately. "He rode his broom into Hogwarts, and his beard grew the instant he passed over the line, before he even got near the Goblet. That's why he dared me to try it."

"No other reason, Sally?" Letitia Groondy smirked.

""This is about Potter, not each other," Roger warned. "All I know is this: to this day, nobody knows how Potter managed to fox the Dark Lord as a baby. Both his parents were dead, and they weren't especially brilliant, as far as any of their surviving friends could remember. Does it stretch things too much to suggest that anyone with that kind of power might be able to also fox both an Age Line and the Goblet?"

"If he's so powerful," Padma Patil countered, "why doesn't he use that power for something useful, like foxing the teachers? Parvati says his marks are pretty much average in all his subjects, and they always have been."

"Let's just wait and see how this develops," Pablo said. "Potter may not even last until the First Task."

xxx

Pablo's words seemed odd, but soon Cho realized that they were accurate. Between Halloween and November 24, Cho saw what special pressures Harry was being subjected to by virtue of being the Fourth Champion. If her heart hadn't gone out to him before, it did now.

Harry was becoming a pariah. Slytherin never liked Harry anyway, so there was no change there, but Cho hadn't realized until the discussion on Halloween night that there was such an undercurrent of resentment against Harry among some of the students in Ravenclaw. The Hufflepuffs were openly bitter about Harry upstaging Cedric Diggory, although Cedric never said or did anything to indicate that he was bitter. Even some of the students at Gryffindor, his own House, were turning against him.

Cho watched as students made a point of avoiding Harry in the halls. After less than two weeks, badges started appearing at Hogwarts declaring Cedric Diggory "the real Hogwarts champion" in glowing red letters. But the badges were rigged with a second message, in green letters: "Potter Stinks".

This truly upset Cho, so much so that, when she found herself anywhere near Cedric, she deliberately snubbed him. He has to know about those badges, she reasoned; if he didn't have them made, he at least tolerates them, and that's just wrong. If he doesn't say something, then he apparently approves. Fine, then; if those are his true colours, he doesn't deserve to be Champion.

Unfortunately, she could only get a few others in Ravenclaw to see this. Some of them-none of the girls in her year, fortunately-wore the badges, but she very deliberately did not.

On Friday 13 November, the day the badges appeared, Cho-who had already made up her mind about them-was in the library researching an assignment in Muggle Studies for Professor Idylwyld, when she heard a voice: "How do you like not flying, Chang?"

She didn't have to turn around; she knew exactly who was sneering at her. "How do you like not losing, Malfoy?"

Draco Malfoy, with Pansy Parkinson on his arm, walked into Cho's line of sight. "Have you seen these?" He flashed the badge from red to green and back.

"You invented those, didn't you?"

"How could you tell?"

"It's rude, it's embarrassing, and it's green, so naturally I thought of you," Cho smiled.

Both the Slytherins' eyes caught fire, but Madam Pince was just a couple of tables away, so they couldn't do more than glare and leave. Cho felt pleased and proud that she'd struck a blow for Harry.

xxx

But things got worse the next day, when the morning owls brought the Daily Prophet, with an article about Harry Potter. It was long, it was grotesque, it made Harry talk like no living Hogwarts student had ever talked.

And from the first hour, everyone believed it.

Cho had been reading the Daily Prophet for enough years to know which reporters to trust, and Rita Skeeter wasn't one of them. She played games with the facts, leaving some out and inventing others, writing in favor of one position one week only to turn around and condemn it the next. She had heard her parents talk about employees of the Ministry of Magic whose stars rise or fell according to her pen. She made heroes, then tore them down, and to Cho it seemed she did so only to prove that she had the power. Nobody benefited from any of this, except Rita Skeeter.

So Cho read the massive article about Harry in the 14 November issue with more than the usual interest. Skeeter's version of Harry was like nothing that had ever been seen in Hogwarts. In the article, which stated at the end that the other Champions were "Victor Crumb" and "Flure DeLancourt" with no mention of Cedric, Harry sounded like the poor but noble hero of some novel by Dickens (for Muggles) or Prangboller (for wizards). Orphaned at infancy, he'd spent the rest of his life trying to keep his spirits up against overwhelming odds. The article claimed that Harry was in love with Hermione Granger (although Jan pronounced that there was "no Glow between those two, nary a bit"), that he was friends with the young camera fanatic Colin Creevey (although she'd seen Harry run from the Great Hall when Colin and his infernal camera came in), and that his rebellious streak led him to enter the Tournament (although Cho convinced herself, if not others, that Harry could not and did not enter).

One paragraph talked about Harry missing his parents, and had him saying "sometimes at night I still cry about them, I'm not ashamed to admit it." Cho suspected that he was very much ashamed that it got into print, because it was true. It was true last year, at any rate, when Cho had sneaked into the hospital wing to look in on Harry after the disastrous rainstorm when he'd fallen off his broom. She saw him tossing and turning, crying out at the memory of the murder of his mother by Lord Voldemort. Cho had suddenly become self-conscious, not wanting Harry to know that she knew something so intimate about him-and now that cow Skeeter has splashed it all over the Prophet for all the world to see!

Steady, Cho told herself. It's a terrible article, because of the way it mixes fact and fancy and makes you think it's all true when it's NOT! But just wait. It's Harry's article, after all, and he should have the last say.

However, as the week progressed, it grew harder and harder for Cho to hold her tongue. Cho was brought up in a Chinese household that religiously read the works of Confucius. She grew up with the belief that men are governed poorly if a government relies on laws and force; the best way is to teach virtue and morality, so that men may govern themselves, without brutality and litigation. She was taught that the best way to teach others was to live a proper life and to hold one's tongue. Of course, this is hard for anyone at any time, but it's much harder if you're a girl born in the Year of the Horse.

Cho tried for a week to ignore the "Potter Stinks" badges, the Daily Prophet article, the suspicious looks and talk from all quarters of the school. At last, though, on the Friday before the First Task, she lost her patience. Dark Arts had just ended, in which Professor Moody had taken great joy in describing some of the acts of sabotage committed in previous Tri-Wizard Tournaments. As they left the dungeon classroom to return to Ravenclaw, Cho had a quill in one hand, with the other balancing her book- bag as a writing-desk, while she copied the names of two student wizard Champions who laid waste with fireballs and hailstorms to a quarter of Breton France in 1397 before they were reined in.

She finished writing, looked up, and froze as the Boy Who Lived passed by in the corridor, his Potions class with Snape and the Slytherins over. His brilliant green eyes stared straight ahead, not even seeing her.

Cho knew that he must have just gotten out of the worst 90 minutes of the week. She knew the Slytherins would tease him mercilessly about the article, and that Snape would let them get away with it. In fact, it seemed to Cho that most of the school was against Harry, for one reason or another. It was up to her to even the odds.

Only one problem, Cho realized. She had never had a conversation with Harry. Never.

A sudden attack of nerves left her rooted to the step where she was standing. She saw Harry's black disordered hair vanishing up the steps. Act now, Cho, she told herself; it's your only chance!

Before he took two more steps, Cho called up the courage to shout: "Hey! Harry!"

As soon as she did so, Harry Potter stopped on the step, his body stiff as a board. He seemed to look up at the vaulted ceiling, and then he SCREAMED: "Yeah! That's right!" Others started moving away from him; he seemed to be throwing a fit. "I've just been crying my eyes out over my dead mum, and I'm just off to do a bit more . . ."

Harry turned as he said these last words. When his eyes met Cho's, he stopped, a look of absolute terror on his face.

Cho, meanwhile, had a look of absolute terror on her face, as she thought, He knows! He knows I saw him! Her mind quickly recovered, saying, No, it's just Skeeter's article; get hold of yourself, Cho! She tried to speak, tried to think of something to say, and all that came out was, "No - it was just . . ." She saw the quill still in her hand and reached it out to Harry. "You dropped your quill."

Dropped your quill?! Cho screamed at herself. How idiotic! But Cho, who was sure her face was turning red, watched in amazement as Harry Potter, his own face turning red, reached out toward her.

"Oh, right. Sorry."

She handed her quill to Harry, her fingertips brushing against his. He's going to leave! Cho's mind shouted; say something! Say what you want to say!

"Er, good luck on Tuesday." Is that the best you can do?! "I really hope you do well."

Harry looked into her eyes, although he had been trying to avoid them since he shouted at her. Muttering a "Thanks" that she could barely hear, he turned and walked up the corridor.

Part of Cho's brain felt extremely stupid; you dropped your quill and good luck? Is that the best you can do? But this was a very small part of Cho's brain that didn't make itself heard until much later. At the moment, Cho Chang was happier than she'd been in months, happier than she'd been since Quidditch had been cancelled.

Finally, FINALLY, she had had a conversation with Harry Potter!

xxx

to be continued in part 54, wherein Cho sends her parents details about the First Task.