CHO CHANG'S EIGHTH YEAR

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 the wizarding world that Harry isn't aware of.

Rated: PG

Spoilers: Everything

xxx

11. Back to School

May Day was sunny and fair; the weather offered no hint of what was to come. Cho and her parents were preparing to open the shoppe for business as usual.

"Why haven't you ever closed on May Day?" Cho asked while refreshing a lovely display of spiderwort, which was just coming into flower.

"Never felt the need," her father said. "Nor do our goblin neighbours." Britain in 1998 observed May Day as a bank holiday, but Gringotts was far older than May Day, and the goblins who ran it were far more contrary than the spring weather. They kept their bank open for business even during the Blitz attacks of World War II. Of course, their shield charms were far stronger than any bombs.

"Oh, Cho," her mother said, "can you take a minute before we open? Madam Malkin was supposed to come by yesterday afternoon and pick up a packet of olive tree bark, but she never came. Could you run it down to her, please?"

"Of course, mummy." She saw a small brown paper bag on the counter by the door. "Will that be enough?"

"It'll have to do; that was all I could get. You know this wasn't a good winter."

"Right, then; I'll be back in a minute."

Cho seldom wore the tall conical hat that declared her a witch; she liked feeling the sun on her face and the breeze in her hair. It was the closest she could get to playing Quidditch. Even as she strolled down Diagon Alley toward Madam Malkin's she realized that it had been a year since she had been on a broom, being a Seeker. Some days, like this perfect Spring day, she missed it terribly: the smell of the grass, the feel of the wind, the muffled roaring and quaking earth…

WHAT?

She ran unsteadily toward a display table in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies and grabbed on to keep her balance. She had never been in an earthquake before and didn't know if she was still in danger. Then she heard the subterranean roar again. This wasn't part of any earthquake.

The roar sounded louder, and now competed with the groaning and creaking of the gigantic metal doors of the goblin bank. As Cho tried to keep her balance, she suddenly remembered where she had heard such roaring years before, at Hogwarts…

And just as the word occurred to her the doors of Gringotts were forced open from within by a dragon. Obviously this was one of the security dragons that lived under Gringotts; somehow it had gotten loose. But, even though this dragon was larger than any of the four Cho had seen in the Triwizard Tournament, she actually felt sorry for this one. It must have spent most of its life underground, for its eyes were pink and glazed over and its scales were pale and seemed to be peeling. When this dragon felt fresh air, it let out a great triumphal cry, and an arc of flame shot up higher than Gringotts. It spread its wings and shot up into the sky.

The ground had stopped shaking, of course, but Cho stayed rooted to her spot. At first she was afraid the rumbling might start up again; after all, nobody knew how many security dragons Gringotts had, or if another one might be getting loose. But she waited another minute because she had to be sure, it might have been a delusion or a wish or a fantasy but she was more and more certain that she had glimpsed, just for an instant, three people riding the dragon up into the sky.

All of them had familiar faces. One had a very familiar face.

xxx

"You're not serious!"

"Mummy, I know what I saw!"

"At that distance, riding a dragon? How can you be sure…"

"Because of those, those DAMNED POSTERS! Don't we see them every day; haven't we seen them all year: "Undesirable Number One"? And haven't I, haven't I told you that I remember Harry? That I've seen, I know, every hair, every shadow on those posters that's wrong?" Cho was crying again; she either didn't notice or didn't care. "Besides, who else do you know in the wizarding world who would attempt such a thing?"

Lotus silently studied her daughter for a minute; then she turned to her husband. "May as well close up; we won't have any business this morning." Then she turned to Cho. "The parlour; we have to talk."

Cho bit her lip, nodded and went into the parlour to wait for her mother. After a minute, she walked in, closed the doors and took a space on the settee next to Cho.

Lotus Chang looked at Cho, giving her the same half-smile Cho had worn all too often at Hogwarts—usually when receiving a mix of good news and bad news. Cho got in the first word: "I expect you're getting rather tired of these talks."

Her mother's smile broadened. "Tired? Not really. We haven't talked about this much, lately. And the only dodgy things we talk about have been Quidditch and boys."

"And lately I haven't had much to do with either of those. Mummy, tell me how you and father, y'know, realized you wanted to marry."

"I've told you before." Her eyes narrowed. "Don't tell me you're at that point…"

"No! Of course not. I just wanted to hear it again. It's been so long, and it just would give me something to think about."

"You remember where we met?"

Cho nodded. "Qing-dao. I keep thinking of it as the Beer Town," Cho smiled.

"Yes, and they still make that beer there. Before that?"

"Well, your mother, and her mother and her mother before her were a long line of shamans from a village near the Yangtze River. But your mum decided to look for witching work in a big city and met her husband in Zhengzhou. They had you and you grew up and went to Beer Town, where you met father."

Lotus nodded. "One thing I never told you," she said to Cho, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Your father's family were circus acrobats."

"Weren't they wizards?" Cho almost yelled in surprise.

"Of course they were! Keep your voice down. It's just that the government of China went through one of its 'we need to get rid of magic' stages. As acrobats they could hide in plain sight, so to speak."

"That's the where of your meeting. Tell me about the how."

"He was standing in the street in front of a steamship line office," Lotus smiled. "I'd been in Beer Town a few months by then but he was still the best-looking man I'd seen there. Still is, if I may say so, but don't tell him I said it," Lotus told Cho with a wink in a conspiratorial whisper. Cho almost giggled. "He was looking at a poster in the window advertising cheap passage to London. I tried to be as casual as I could as I told him that I was thinking of going to London myself; I know I tripped over my words a few times.

""Have you the fare?" I asked him. He pulls a few yuan notes out of his pocket, but in amongst them I saw a Galleon. I had one in my pocket that my grandmother gave me the last time I saw her; I took it out, made sure nobody was watching, and quickly showed it to him. Well, his face lit up like fireworks at a summer festival. We'd both found out that, whatever else big city life offered, it didn't have many chances for a wizard to find money, or friends.

"So we look at each other for a moment or two and then he says, "I'm hungry; do you want some noodles?" And there was a little noodle shop just up the street, where we met every day after that. We'd talk about going to London, and what we'd do there, and how much money we'd put aside for it. We couldn't just cloud-walk halfway around the world. I mean, we could, but the Muggles would surely see us somewhere. So we decided to travel by plane, and go through Customs. We had round-trip tickets and tourist visas. The same day we got through Heathrow, we sought out Diagon Alley, opened an account with our return tickets, which we cashed in as we needed, and the rest, as they say, is history."

"How did you learn about Diagon Alley?"

"Once we knew that we would be together, not just in going to London, we told our families. From then on it was as if we were one large family already. Your father's people knew our neighbours the Tans, who helped us find out feet when we got here. My mother's family made us a present of the tickets, knowing that we'd cash them in for money to live off of, for a start. And they all put together the most wonderful wedding!"

"You married in China?"

"Yes; one less thing to worry about." Lotus closed her eyes, remembering, and smiled. Then she looked at Cho, her expression more serious. "Of course, we never expected that you'd follow our lives; certainly not in every detail. Some of your choices, however…"

"Don't start, mummy, please!" Cho was afraid the conversation would turn back to the same old problems. "And we were having such a nice time."

"Fine, then. I'm going to ask you one question, and only one question. I don't mean anything by it other than to ask what I ask, so please don't read anything into it. Understood?" Cho nodded, wary of what was coming. "Your father and I understand how you feel about Harry Potter; you've made that very clear. What I want to know is this: When is the last time you spoke with him?"

"The last time…"

"I'm sure you remember it, but you know and I don't. What did you say and when did you say it?"

Before Cho could get out a single word, though, she completely lost her composure. Her face tightened up and she started crying like an abandoned child. Lotus reached out for her daughter's shoulder, and Cho completely went to pieces. She buried her face in her mother's robes, sobbing and howling. This was different, though, from her grieving over Cedric. Cho kept trying to speak, but could only manage odd sentences such as "He hates me!" and "I've ruined everything!"

Finally, Cho calmed down enough to string sentences together, and Lotus heard for the first time the full story about Dumbledore's Army, the Galleon signal, the training in the Room of Requirement, the time under the mistletoe with Harry Potter and all the times after that—everything. Finally, she worked her way up to the betrayal of the Army by Marietta Edgecombe, her appeals to Harry to undo the curse and the argument that developed.

"I've only seen him once or twice since then," Cho sniffled, "and he gives me this look, as if I were the traitor. It kills me, but I can't get over him. Believe me, I can't."

"Once again, Cho: how long since you two have spoken?"

Cho hesitated, not because she needed time to do the maths, but because she was embarrassed to admit it: "Just over … two years now."

Lotus used the sleeve of her robes to wipe Cho's face, smiling gently as she did so. "It's time, then, isn't it?"

"Not today! Harry…"

"Harry Potter has been in hiding for a year now; the object of the most intense search since Sirius Black got out of Azkaban, and not even a hint of his whereabouts. Yet you see him here, in Diagon Alley."

"You believe me?"

"Little Horse, the notion is so entirely mad that I have to believe it. Either he is putting himself back in your way, or the gods are putting him there, but there he is. You'll hear of him again, one way or another. You'll meet him again, face to face. This time, listen to what he says, and see him for who he is. You'll know if you're meant to be together. If you're not, well, you'll know that too, and you can walk away with no regrets. Either way, in victory or defeat, remember that you are a Chang."

xxx

Cho went back to her room before going downstairs again. Her talk with her mother had solved nothing, but it did confirm her suspicion—no, her hope—that her world was shifting back toward Harry. And if that was the case, then she had to be ready.

She went to the foot of her bed where her trunk sat, with a few items from her school days that somehow never got taken out or put up: the lengthy scroll her Potions class had been assigned to write about Tristan and Iseult and love potions; a comb she had gotten from a Christmas cracker when she stayed at Hogwarts her first year; a picture of Cedric she wanted to avoid; and a Galleon. This Galleon didn't contain the year it was minted, since it wasn't a real Galleon; the date stamped upon it was 20 June, 1997. That was the day Headmaster Albus Dumbledore was hit by a Killing Curse from Potions Master Severus Snape. It was the last time Dumbledore's Army had been mobilized, and Cho had missed it.

That would never happen again.

She Transfigured an old child's necklace from her jewel case—just an old trinket she used to make believe was the Quidditch Cup—into a metal band that now framed the Galleon, hanging from a strong yet delicate golden chain. She clasped it around her neck, then put coin and chain inside her robes. The Galleon rested cool against her chest, just below her neck.

There, she thought. No guesswork this time. If the Army is summoned again, I shall know it!

She went down to the shoppe as her parents were preparing to reopen the shoppe. Of course the incident at Gringotts was the talk of every customer who came in. It was unprecedented for the goblins to lose control of their own bank, and in such dramatic fashion.

In mid-afternoon Madam Malkin came to the shoppe, having only just remembered her request for olive tree bark but (Cho suspected) really making the rounds of the merchants in the Alley to see what they may have heard. As soon as Madam Malkin mentioned it, Cho remembered that the bag of bark had been forgotten in the excitement. She went back out, found that it was still sitting on the table in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies, and brought it back for Madam Malkin.

"I would have been here sooner," Madam Malkin was saying, "but the shock of it all! I thought my heart would explode, I was so frightened. I really ought to take a few days to rest my nerves…"

Just as Cho put the bag on the counter, the door opened and (everyone in Diagon Alley knew the signs by now) two Ministry wizards walked in. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder behind Madam Malkin, making a show of listening to her. It had gotten to the point that they wanted everyone to know that the Ministry was keeping track of everything.

"The summer robes are just arriving, though, and with five weddings, no less, to prepare for next month, well, I can barely take a second to breathe, can I?"

"That's life, isn't it," Lotus said sympathetically. "So many things to do, and never enough time to do them all."

"Exactly. Take the Potter boy, for example. Undesirable Number One for, what, almost a year now, and no sign of him. I suppose the Ministry has better things to do. Gentlemen." Madam Malkin had turned to face the wizards behind her and, smiling, pushed them aside, walked between them and out of the shoppe.

They turned back to Lotus and Cho, scowling, but they had lost the moment of intimidation. Lotus simply looked at them coolly. "Buying or browsing, gentlemen?"

The two hesitated a minute, then left the shoppe. Cho could have sworn that one of them was blushing.

Lotus squeezed Cho's hand in her own.

xxx

"That was foolish," Xiemin told his wife over dinner.

Lotus nodded, then smiled. "But it was fun."

"After all the times you've lectured Cho?"

"Daddy, it's all right. I think there's more to it. Madam Malkin was even tweaking their noses a bit. Don't you feel something in the air?"

"Now that you mention it, after the business at the bank, I realized that something wasn't in the air."

"I don't follow."

"Ever since You Know Who returned, there's been a, I don't know, a darkness, an oppressive feeling in the air. Everyone felt it, even if they couldn't speak of it, and everyone we know in the Alley has had the same feeling. We felt the difference when Cho cast the Patronus."

"A dragon breaking out of Gringotts wouldn't have caused a change in all of that," Lotus said.

Cho set down her soup spoon. "No, mummy, I see what daddy's saying. That dragon couldn't have gotten loose unless something had changed. I don't know if You Know Who is somehow weakened, but he's clearly distracted. He's loosened his grip, if only for a day, but we all feel it. We can Stun things!"

"And what were you planning to Stun, dear?" Lotus asked.

Cho blushed deeply, looking down at her dinner plate. She didn't say anything for a minute. Then she said, barely loud enough to hear, "One time with Dumbledore's Army, the study group that Umbridge had forbidden, I, well, I told Harry he was a good teacher because I'd never been able to Stun anything before."

"Ah," her father said. "Forgive my asking, but was there anything else you hadn't done before?"

Lotus cut him off. "I don't know what you're suggesting, but we really don't need to get into that now."

Chang Xiemin stood up. "I'll be in the parlour." He turned and left.

Cho looked at her mother and started to say, "Thank you, mummy…"

Lotus stood up. "Cho, you told me. Now you have to tell him. He's your father; he deserves that much. And don't put it off too long." And Lotus left the room.

Cho ran to her room, almost slammed the door but stopped herself at the last second, closed it, then went to her bed and punched her pillow a half-dozen times. Damn damn DAMN! Why is this so difficult? I was close, so close to telling them about Harry and it all just fell apart. What's wrong with me? Why can't I—"OUCH!"

Cho cried out as she felt a hot burning on her chest. The Galleon!

She opened her robes and checked her skin first. The Galleon had felt white-hot, but she wasn't burned; the point of the charm on the Galleon was to get the user's attention. She checked the message:

Hog's Head Inn, Hogsmeade NOW

What? Not Hogwarts? This makes no sense, but it's real. The only thing to do is answer the summons and sort it out when I get there. And there's one quick way to go.

She went to the open door to the parlour, look in at her parents who were balancing the ledger, and said, "I'm turning in now; goodnight." Then she turned and left without waiting for a reply.

She went back to the bedroom door, opened it, then closed it again. She tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen, and went through it to the dining room. She went straight to the fireplace, took some Floo powder from the dish on the mantel, and tossed it in, saying "Hog's Head Inn, Hogsmeade."

Immediately a great green flame roared up in the fireplace. Cho stepped into the flame, and vanished.

xxx

To be continued in part 12, wherein Cho and her parents are part of the Battle of Hogwarts and various truths are confirmed …

A/N: Beer Town, which here is spelled Qing-dao, refers to a brew still marketed as Tsing-Tao.