Playing It Straight

 

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"This year will be your most important at Hogwarts," Professor Flitwick said, "not just because you are all taking your N.E.W.T.s, but because you have all come of age and so have earned the right to be treated as adults."

 

"Even me, sir?" asked a boy with curly hair. His face broke into a roguish smile, and one of his friends guffawed beside him.

 

"Even you, Carmicheal," Professor Flitwick replied with a smile, and the rest of the Ravenclaw students laughed good-naturedly. Eddie Carmicheal laughed with them; a joker at any opportunity, he never considered anyone - even himself - above ridicule.

 

"Coming of age brings a great deal of privileges," Professor Flitwick continued, after his students had quietened, "but it also comes with more responsibilities. This year, your classes will be run a little differently. Your professors will not be responsible for planning what you focus on each lesson: that task is going to fall to you. You will all be given a list of areas to study and possible tasks required in your N.E.W.T. examination, and it will be up to you to decide how best to prepare yourselves. If you plan well and study hard, you'll all have no trouble passing your end-of-year examinations. If, however, you choose not to act responsibly..." He spread his tiny hands in front of him.

 

"Then we'll be back here with Eddie next year," said Roger Davies, and the seventh-years all laughed again (except Eddie, who first punched Roger in the shoulder and then smiled and ran a hand through his hair).

 

"Now, I'm not going to tell you how to go about your studies, but I am going to suggest something that many students of past years have found effective, and that's to find a friend or two whom you share most of your classes with, and plan your year together. I don't need to explain them importance of working well with others, do I?" All the students made some noise of assent: Cho Chang was among them, and as she did so, she felt an uncomfortable jolt twist through her stomach.

 

"Very good," said Professor Flitwick, and he clasped his hands together in the way he always did in classes when finishing an explanation. "Good luck to all of you." And with that, he went to leave down the hallway and away from the common room, a couple of students shuffling out of the way. Despite his diminutive size, Professor Flitwick managed to carry himself no differently to anyone else; Cho found herself wondering for a moment if she could do the same if she were his height, or if she'd just get lost amongst a sea of legs and robe-hems.

 

The cluster of students started to disperse, heading off in different directions; the first block of their timetable this week had been marked out for 'N.E.W.T. Orientation', but it had only taken a couple of minutes. Possibly the students were meant to use the rest of the time to begin organising themselves into study pairs and triads for the year. Marietta, who had been standing at Cho's side, hurried to ask Eddie if he was taking Muggle Studies all the way through. Cho watched her go, not moving from the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room, and then looked down at her class schedule. There were six classes planned out for the week on it, which was a heavy workload. Cho knew only a few other students that were taking six classes, and all of them had one of the softer classes in their week, like Muggle Studies or Divination. Hers were all business: Potions, Transfiguration, Herbology, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and Ancient Runes. This time last year, she had told Professor Flitwick that she would have no troubles with keeping up her grades and playing Quidditch too, but now... now she wasn't as sure as she had been then. Maybe she hadn't been all that sure last year, either - she just didn't know any better.

 

She turned to the imposing door to the common room, and the eagle mounted on it surprised her by springing to life and posing a riddle: "No sooner spoken, than broken." It must have assumed she was planning to go inside. Cho hadn't realised that was what she was planning; she hadn't felt like following after any of her classmates, but she found she didn't really want to go into the common room, either. She briefly considered giving the answer that had first come to her mind - 'Promises' - but realised she didn't have much reasoning to give to the door to say why that was her answer, and backed down a step.

 

"Sorry, never mind," she muttered, and turned away from the door, and it fell silent. Cho started walking away, thinking perhaps she would go to the Great Hall and possibly put up a notice to see if anyone had similar classes this year to her and if they wanted to partner up, but halfway there found herself heading towards the library instead, where she sat at a desk with the intention of planning some kind of timetable out for the year. Instead she just looked at her schedule, unformed thoughts milling in her head and the uncomfortable knot still sitting in her stomach.

 

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The first class of the year was Herbology. Cho was making her way to the greenhouses, looking at the big stone slabs that made up this section of the castle floor, when she ran into something. Or, perhaps it would be more correct to say something ran into her, and perhaps it would have been even more correct to say that someone ran into her, lost their balance, and went sprawling to the ground. It was Katie Bell, who Cho knew from the Gryffindor Quidditch team. She had been looking the other way while coming around the corner, waving to a girl who looked like she was going in the other direction, and hadn't noticed Cho at all. The other girl, as if this happened all the time, gave Katie an exaggerated shrug and sigh - an obvious 'whatever are we going to do with you?' gesture - and started walking down the corridor in the other direction.

 

"Oh! I'm sorry," Katie said, looking like she was trying not to laugh and not making much of an effort to stand back up. "I was just saying to Leanne that I'd try to not fall over my own feet this year. Typical. I guess I fell over someone else's feet, that's a start, right?" She extended her hand and Cho automatically offered hers to help Katie up; she had been so consumed in thought herself that she hadn't seen Katie coming, but was unsure if she should admit this or not.

 

"Hey, you dropped this." Cho's mind was awfully unfocused today: she hadn't even noticed she had dropped her timetable, or that Katie was offering it to her, until she spoke.

 

"Oh. Thankyou." She began to head to the greenhouses again, rechecking the piece of paper to see which of the greenhouses the lesson was in, when she noticed something wrong with the timetable. Herbology, Charms, Defence, Transfiguration... Divination? She wasn't taking Divination.

 

"Wait," she said, "this must be your timetable."

 

"Huh?" Katie glanced at the piece of paper she had been about to tuck into her robe pockets. "Oh! Good catch. You'll probably need this more than I will." They exchanged timetables, and began walking in the same direction, not intentionally together but not making a point of keeping a different pace, either.

 

Cho then realised something about what she had seen on Katie's timetable. "You don't have a partner for this year, do you?" she asked

 

"Hm?" Katie cocked her head to the side, and Cho realised how lacking in context that question must have seemed, and faltered a little when she explained.

 

"For studying for the N.E.W.T.s. Professor Flitwick said it might be a good idea for students with similar classes to pair up and work together..." Bet the Gryffindors don't do that, no wonder she looks confused. "...And we've got a few classes in common, so..." Katie's gaze was making her a little uncomfortable: she was looking at her a little like she might have if Cho had suddenly started speaking a different language and she was trying very hard to follow along. "I mean, if you've partnered up with someone then that's okay, I just-"

 

"No, I haven't," Katie said, and she paused for a moment as if considering. "What classes do we have together? Defence Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration... you don't take Divination, do you?"

 

"No."

 

"Didn't think so. But you're doing N.E.W.T. Herbology, right?"

 

Cho nodded. "And Charms. We're in Charms together, too."

 

"Right, right. Well, that covers everything I'm taking this year, what about you?"

 

"I'm taking Ancient Runes, too..."

 

"Mm-hm."

 

"...And Potions."

 

Katie whistled. "Guess that means you won't be playing Seeker this year, then."

 

"No, I..." Cho began, and then realised she didn't know what she was going to follow it with. She had never considered stopping playing Quidditch, even though the training took up a lot of free time and there had been more than a couple members of the Ravenclaw team that had stopped playing to focus on their classes during their last year. "That never occurred to me."

 

A broad grin crossed Katie's face. "Me either, you know? I'm not going to captain though, but I couldn't not play." She gave a short laugh, like she had thought what she had said was funny in some private way, and then added: "That works out pretty well, if we're both sticking with Quidditch."

 

"How come?"

 

"If we ever get too stuck with studying, we can go muck about on the Quidditch pitch a bit to clear our heads." She grinned broadly again, and Cho managed a smile, although she had never considered doing anything like this while studying: in her mind athletics and academics were quite separate areas.

 

Katie paused in mid-stride, and Cho stopped with her. Katie stuck out her hand, and Cho was again unsure of how to proceed, until Katie asked her, "So... partners?"

 

Oh. Cho took Katie's hand, and they shook. "Partners," she agreed, liking how the word felt. It was like they had both officiated something, like they had passed some crucial rite of passage on the path to being treated and trusted as adult, like Professor Flitwick had been talking about earlier. A good first decision in a year that would be full of important decisions.

 

Now, if only that knot in her stomach would loosen a little.

 

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"How was your summer?"

 

"Hm?" Cho had been deep in thoughts of her own, and for a moment thought Katie had said something about the sun, since they had just stepped outside.

 

"Summer holidays, how were they?"

 

"Oh. They were good, I guess."

 

"What did you do?"

 

What had she done? She had spent roughly equal amounts of time wishing the summer break would end so she could avoid her parents and wishing the summer break would not end so she didn't have to come back to school. It seemed like this had been all that had happened.

 

"Nothing much," Cho said, feeling this was about as truthful as she could be.

 

"Yeah, me too," Katie said. Her tone sounded bright, bright like the sunshine. Perhaps she wasn't listening. "I went to Fred and George's shop, though - you remember Fred and George, right?"

 

Cho nodded. The Weasley twins would have been difficult to forget even if she hadn't played against them in several Quidditch matches.

 

"Yeah, so, they have their joke shop open in Diagon Alley now, it's pretty cool. They must be working like fiends to keep their supplies up, it was like all the people that would have been in the closed shops all went there to buy stuff instead. I met Alicia and Angelia there, and Lee, and we stayed the whole day there, helped Fred and George a bit, mostly made fun of what they think looks like cool fashion. It was a bit like being back at school."

 

For a moment Cho didn't understand this comparison, but then she realised all the people Katie was talking about had been in the year above the two of them, and only Katie was still at Hogwarts. She also found it hard to imagine doing anything like this with her friends, since she had spoken with most of them less and less all through the last school year. She had only kept in contact with Marietta over the summer break, and even that was in the form of a couple of short letters.

 

"Have you seen what Diagon Alley's like now?" Katie asked, filling the silence.

 

Cho shook her head. She had opted out of going when her parents had insinuated they could buy her school supplies alone.

 

"Half the stores are closed. Some are boarded up, signs in the windows." Katie glanced about, as if watching for eavesdroppers who would want this information. "One was trashed."

 

"It's meant to be dangerous to be out alone," Cho said, thinking of headlines in the Prophet seen across the breakfast table, thinking of the D.A. last year.

 

"It looked it. I thought the game I had tickets to might get called off, new security measures or something, but I guess the Ministry doesn't think Death Eaters care too much about Quidditch matches."

 

"Who did you see play?" Cho asked.

 

"The Harpies. They slaughtered the Wasps. Slaughtered."

 

"Gwenog Jones can be pretty vicious." Cho had made a point of keeping up with the national Quidditch league over the summer, since she could easily request the sports section of the Prophet and be assured of being left alone by her parents: Quidditch, and Cho's interest in it, perplexed them. Cho was thinking of a article she had seen about the Holyhead Harpies.

 

"She's the best. My brother came to the game with me, it's the first one he's been to, and I was really glad it was, y'know, an impressive one."

 

"How old is your brother?" Cho imagined a wide-eyed little boy pointing to the sky as the players zoomed past on their brooms.

 

Katie laughed. "Oh, he's older than me, he's just never been to a game before. I think he was a bit stuck for inspiration for his next big project, that's when he gets the most interested in, y'know, magic stuff."

 

It took Cho a moment to decipher this statement. "He's not a wizard?" she asked, her voice a little lower than normal.

 

"No, he's an artist. He paints, makes things out of wood sometimes. He's done a couple of paintings of magical things - he did a really great one of Diagon Alley, actually, like you were standing right in front of Gringotts - and he says they're the best for listening to people trying to understand what they mean. Like there's some deeper meaning to why there's owls out the front of the pet shop, when he's just been painting it from memory." Katie looked like she also might have found this concept funny.

 

"Is he allowed to do that?"

 

"Sure, why not? Muggles aren't ever going to recognise his paintings, and wizards only pay attention to art if it moves."

 

They had reached the greenhouses. Cho was considering what Katie had been talking about, but could not find anything meaningful to add before the lesson began and Professor Sprout launched into a speech about responsibility and being of age that sounded awfully like the one she had heard from Professor Flitwick earlier in the morning. Cho listened to the rest of the lecture attentively, and as she watched the demonstration of how to remove the toxins produced by a vibrantly-coloured and very deadly flower for potion-making without instantly becoming very ill she did not take notes but instead imagined a man who looked a lot like Katie Bell putting this flower on a canvas and smiling like he knew a secret that was both very funny and very private.

 

After Herbology was over, Cho said goodbye to Katie and walked to her Potions class. The way to the dungeons felt very quiet.

 

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Cho sat with Marietta for lunch. Across the Great Hall, Katie spotted her and gave an enthusiastic wave from the Gryffindor table. Cho waved back, and Katie went back to talking with her friend Leanne.

 

"Who's that?" asked Marietta.

 

"Katie. I've partnered with her for this year."

 

"Oh, okay." Marietta went on to talk through all of lunch about how she was going to be studying with Eddie Carmicheal. Cho barely heard any of it.

 

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Moving between classes took Cho across one of the high, open sections of Hogwarts Castle. Over the edge of the low wall (which had a specific name since it was part of a castle, but she couldn't think of it), she could see some students moving across the grounds. From up here they seemed very small. She watched them for a long time before moving on, thinking about what she would write back to her parents. They sent letters, signed 'Mr & Mrs Chang' at the bottom of each, at regular intervals during the year, encouraging her to do well in her classes, asking about things happening at Hogwarts they would have been able to read in the papers. Only once had the content of these letters changed. Cho had been forbidden to get involved with any juvenile student rebellion against a teacher last year in a curt letter that must have been written moments after her parents had received her letter about the D.A. and Dolores Umbridge. That was when she began lying to her parents in her letters home. She told them they were right, she would not be a part of the group, would not talk to Harry Potter, would concentrate on school.

 

Now she was thinking of a new set of lies to write home: that she was doing fine, that she knew she would make excellent grades this year, that she was happy being back this year. While she watched the ground in thought, nobody else came past.

 

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"The first thing we should do," Cho said, "is work out a study timetable. We can base it around our classes." She was thinking of comparing the free slots they had, to arrange times to meet out of class.

 

Katie stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth and made a visible show of thinking, and then clapped her hands together with a pop that made a couple of the other seventh-year students working in the library turn their heads in her direction. "Okay, how's this?" She ran her quill across the blank strip of parchment sat in front of her, dividing it into two sections, top and bottom. She then broke this line up into several divisions with quick vertical marks, and began labelling them across the top of the parchment: M, T, W, Th...

 

"Okay, so, here's the times we're in class every week," she said, and marked down five of the divisions in the top row with a big 'C'. "And these are evenings, and then there's the weekends, which we can split into morning and afternoon, instead of day and night. Yeah?"

 

"Okay," Cho agreed, although she wasn't completely sure what it was she was agreeing to yet.

 

"Yeah, I don't really want to be studying every Sunday night. Okay, so you've got six classes, right? So we'll put those in..." She filled in numbers across the bottom row of the timetable, and finished with putting six on Saturday morning. "...And I'll do my Divination work during one of those. Then there's a free space on Saturday, so we can use that like a sort of wildcard, yeah? That's when we can work on whatever study session we missed because of Quidditch practice."

 

Cho realised she had forgotten all about leaving a gap in any potential schedule she had been imagining for Quidditch. Then again, she hadn't imagined working together through the night so much, either. "What about Sundays?" she asked. "They're still blank."

 

"Well, they should be," said Katie in a matter-of-fact tone. "We can't study seven days a week the whole year, we'd go funny in the head." While Cho was considering this fact, Katie added, "Sunday should be for, like, mental rest. Taking a break. I was thinking we could just leave the free spaces during the week like that, too, for an hour or so here and there to not think about class. Maybe we could do that together sometimes. You know, since we've probably got some overlapping free spaces, and everyone else is going to be planning their extra studying around those times."

 

"I suppose. That's what I was thinking."

 

"This is better though, right?" Katie said, looking for approval from Cho. "I mean, we're going to end up working nights anyway, this just takes the place of doing homework all the time, so I thought we'd just do the bulk of the work then, when we've got more time to do things, instead of plan to study during the day, find out we're running out of time... Hey, you're okay with studying together at night, right? I should have asked about it."

 

"No, that's okay," said Cho. She was impressed by how quickly Katie had thought of all these things. Maybe it was more intuition, instead of a conscious weighing of options to find the best method. "I've done most of my studying at night, and like you said, it takes the place of homework, mostly."

 

"Great! Should we look at the class overviews now, make up a bit of a timetable for those?"

 

Planning for each class went mostly in the same fashion, with Katie proposing a thoroughly practical timetable. Cho had been planning to just draw up a timetable to work through the textbooks for each of her subjects, based on the length of each chapter. Katie, however, took the list of N.E.W.T. exam tasks and began crossing off things they had already covered the previous year (some, in the case of Defence Against the Dark Arts, from outside of class), then separated out the pure theory parts and said they should be left until last ("Because you don't need to know the history of a charm to be able to perform it, yeah, and it's probably better to have all the theory stuff fresh in your head closer to the exams anyway."), and grouped together the various practical elements seemingly at random to study through the year, and finished by adding 'Revision' on the end ("For going over stuff we might have forgotten, quizzing on the theory, you know."). Cho had mentioned that she would have to separate up her other two classes in the same way, and Katie had immediately started helping her do it right then: this took a little longer, since she was less familiar with the N.E.W.T. requirements for Potions and Ancient Runes, but by now Cho had discovered a kind of method to the grouping - it was based around avoiding clumping together several tasks that looked especially difficult or time-consuming - and so was able to take the lead. Later that night, in the common room, Cho would look over her (hers and Katie's, really) study plans for the year, and marvel a little over how simple organising it all had been. If only the rest of the year could be just like this.

 

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The Ravenclaw Quidditch trials were a far less hectic affair than the Gryffindor try-outs had been. Cho circled the pitch in long lazy rotations; she was meant to be observing the three potential Chasers to see which was the best, but it was clear who the rest of the team was going to vote in so instead she mock-dived for an invisible Snitch. The ground looked very far.

 

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"What do you want to do, when school's over?" Katie had a habit of suddenly leaping into a completely random topic. Cho was still trying to decide if she planned it, or if it was just a reflex to fill in gaps of conversation.

 

"I'm going to be a Healer," she replied without much thought.

 

"Really? Wow. But I guess I could have figured that out from your classes." Katie cocked her head and asked, "do you need Runes to be a Healer?"

 

"No, it's not required."

 

"Why'd you keep with it, then? I was taking it in third year, but I dropped it as soon as I could."

 

"It's..." But she couldn't find the right words to describe how it had never crossed her mind to stop taking the class. "I'm not sure."

 

"Oh."

 

"What are you going to do, after school?" Cho asked, shifting the subject away from her.

 

"Dunno." Katie laced her fingers behind her head and stretched her arms. "I thought maybe I could try out for one of the local Quidditch teams, but that's a bit silly because they don't really pick people that way. Oliver - you remember Oliver Wood, he used to be captain - he got scouted to play reserve for Puddlemere, but he's only been in like three games, and I thought he was really good, when he was in school. Maybe I could do something like Herbology. I like plants, I like being outdoors."

 

"I don't really like Herbology that much," Cho confessed.

 

"Leanne - my friend, Leanne - she didn't care for it too much either. She hated the dirt getting under her nails all the time."

 

"It's not that. I think the practical is okay, but there's too many things in the theory that are similar to Potions theory, but not quite. I found it really hard to keep them straight in my head, if I didn't concentrate."

 

"Maybe it's just how Snape and Professor Sprout taught differently."

 

"That could be."

 

"Hey, how's the new professor? Slughorn. He seems like a way more fun teacher than Snape. He never gave away cool stuff, just sort of glared at whoever added five-eighths of a teaspoon of powdered monkey knuckles when they should have added three-quarters."

 

Cho smiled a little at this. "He's a bit like Professor Snape's opposite. He smiles a lot and only ever says good things about the students he likes." This was as much as she dared to criticise a teacher who she had relatively positive first impressions of; she had even felt a little uncomfortable with speaking bad about Professor Umbridge.

 

"Not to mention he's short, fat, and red in the face all the time, where Snape's tall and gaunt and really needs to get a tan once in a while."

 

Cho clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. She had just imagined Professor Snape at the beach, wearing a hopelessly archaic swimming costume and Muggle sunglasses, holding a folding chair under one arm and a massive potions tome under the other.

 

Katie smiled and tucked some of her hair behind her ear, and made to go back to the section she was reading in her textbook. This made Cho remember something she had meant to ask about, but had forgotten.

 

"There is something I don't like about Herbology," she said after a moment's pause. Katie looked back up from her textbook. "I always find something in my hair, whenever I've been in the greenhouses, like some dirt or a dry leaf or something. And the other day I saw you do this thing with your hair..."

 

"What?" Katie asked, pulling her wand from her robes. She bunched her hair in one hand and tapped somewhere on the back of her head with her wand, and her hair wrapped itself into a messy coil at the base of her neck. "This?"

 

Cho nodded. "Could you show me how...?"

 

"Oh, sure! It's real easy, you just hold your hair back and make like a bit of a turn with your wand, like this, and then tap lightly just under your hand." She demonstrated with her wand in the air, but Cho wasn't completely sure this would be all the guidance she would need. Nevertheless, she held her hair back and pulled out her wand.

 

"Like this?" Just a bit of a turn, and then tap lightly under the hand... She could feel her hair bunch up and draw tight at the back of her neck, and she took her hands away, a little stunned she had managed to get it right. This feeling quickly disappeared when she felt the tight knot of hair go slack and then drop, spilling over her shoulders. Katie laughed, and Cho joined her after a second, closing her eyes and finding that, although she felt a little foolish, she didn't mind all that much.

 

"Well... almost," Katie said with a smile. She let her own hair down with her wand and held it back again, and turned her head purposely to the side so Cho could see what she was doing. "There's a bit of a trick to it, you've got to tap your wand in just the right spot..."

 

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In her next Potions lesson, Cho found not having her hair distracting her made it a lot easier to prepare ingredients.

 

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"I don't think you're allowed to have tea in the library," Cho said, eyeing the teapot that had been a battered thermos a second ago.

 

"This isn't tea," Katie said, pouring out what was clearly tea into two freshly-transfigured teacups. She was grinning.

 

"It's not?"

 

"No, it's a study aid. I'm revising different methods of fortune-reading that might come up in my exams. I'm going to read your leaves."

 

"Then what's that cup for?" Cho asked, a little mischievously.

 

"For me to drink my tea out of."

 

Cho shook her head and went back to her rune translation. She knew Katie actually was revising something to do with Divination, but that it had very little to do with reading tea leaves. Still, it was nice to have the tea; her hands got very cold when reading for a long time, and she would occasionally take moments away from her textbook to warm her hands on the over-large teacups that Katie created.

 

The pair studied in quiet for a length of time. Cho broke the silence when she was more than halfway through her cup of tea, asking, "How do you like Divination?"

 

Katie shrugged. "It's good because it's a different sort of class. Less theory and more sort of just... thinking about stuff, you know? I don't know if I've got much of an Inner Eye, but if you just remember which stuff is supposed to symbolise what, it doesn't even really feel like schoolwork. It's more like telling a story."

 

"I don't think that's how Professor Trelawney sees things."

 

"Well, she just likes her stories to be a little morbid. I think she thinks more people will pay attention that way, focus on the doom and gloom and all. Firenze isn't like that, though. He's barely like a professor at all."

 

"What is he like?"

 

"Very into the heavy workings of the universe, and how we can't really change the big things the universe wants to do. Deep stuff. I'm glad he's taking the seventh-year class, his lessons are very cool. Did you ever see his classroom?"

 

Cho shook her head. Someone might even have described it to her once, when Firenze was first appointed to Divination, but she had most likely been occupied with other thoughts at that time.

 

"It looks just like outside, with grass and trees and the night sky and everything, and everyone just sits on the ground and looks up at the sky and he walks about the room and talks about the movement of the planets and how all the stories they tell are centuries long and both incredibly complex and incredibly simple. I wish I could have all my classes like that, a bit - everyone with their shoes off sitting around and not being, y'know, pressured to remember all this stuff."

 

Cho murmured an agreement. "It sounds very pleasant," she said.

 

"Of course," Katie continued, "there are some girls who spend more time looking at the professor than the sky, in my Divination class."

 

Cho felt her eyes go wide. "Really?"

 

Katie nodded. "Yeah."

 

"Why?"

 

"They're into horses. I guess lots of girls are, and Firenze, he's a bit like the best parts of a horse and a man."

 

"But that's..." Cho looked around, like she was physically searching for the right word in the library stacks. "Silly. He's a centaur, he's not a horse or a man."

 

Katie smiled. "I knew it."

 

Cho blinked. "Knew what?"

 

"That you weren't like that."

 

"That I wasn't like what?"

 

"Like the girls that had all these fantasies of riding horses everywhere all the time when they grew up."

 

Cho found herself laughing: Katie's tone had made her statements seem a lot more serious. She shook her head and said, "No, I guess I'm not."

 

They lapsed back into quiet study, and it was Katie who broke it after a few moments. When she spoke, it was unlike how she normally began conversations; slow, a little hesitant.

 

She asked, "Hey, Cho... what's it like, having a boyfriend?"

 

Cho took a long drink of her tea, almost emptying the cup. If she drank from it again, she would have to be careful not to swallow any of the dregs. "You've never had a boyfriend?"

 

Katie shook her head. "Lee kissed me once. But we sort of agreed we were better as friends." She was looking into her own teacup as she said this.

 

"Oh..." She could feel a heat spread across her face; it must have been the tea. "I don't know, really."

 

"If you don't want to talk about it..."

 

"No, it's okay. I just... don't really know what to say, you know? There's been some boys and I called them my boyfriend and we held hands and kissed and went on dates and things. That's what you do with boyfriends, isn't it?"

 

"Well, and be in love with them, I guess."

 

"I guess. But how do you know if you are in love with someone? Really in love with them, I mean."

 

"That's right," Katie said, holding Cho's eyes with her own, "how do you really know?"

 

Cho had some half-formed answers in her mind, but it was only after a moment that she realised she hadn't spoken any of them. She was still looking at Katie, Katie still looking at her.

 

"You finished your tea," Katie said, and this statement was so disconnected, so far from where her mind was, that Cho was sure for a moment that she had misheard Katie, but she remembered the teacup she held between her hands and fell back into the moment. She slid the teacup across the table.

 

"Will I find a...?" she began to ask, but Katie waved her off as she examined the bottom of the cup. This was the Katie she was more familiar with, the one whose internal energy seemed to burst out of her through her hands and her smile if she sat still too long.

 

"There's a shape here that looks a bit like a bell - that means you're going to do well in school, getting eight N.E.W.T.s, as well as winning the House Cup. Ravenclaw is also going to lead by a thousand House points by the end of the year."

 

"I think you may be making some of this up." Katie looked up from the teacup and grinned. Cho smiled back at her.

 

"I would never! The ancient art of interpreting the Inner Eye is..." She trailed off at Cho rolling her eyes. "Well, yes, but mostly Divination is storytelling and making up a bit what the other person wants to hear. But, look." She turned the cup around on the table so it faced the other direction. "If you don't like that fortune, you get a second one in every cup. Now the bell looks more like a cup, so..."

 

"I don't think you're supposed to do that, turn the cup around."

 

"Shh, I'm viewing with my Inner Eye here."

 

"I think it may need glasses." She craned her neck to see inside the teacup. "That doesn't look much like a cup."

 

"Who's had four years of Divination, you or me?"

 

"Or a bell. I think they just look like tea leaves."

 

"You're making fun of me, aren't you?"

 

"I would never," said Cho, copying Katie's tone from before as best she could, and sitting back down in her seat.

 

------------------

 

Cho was in the common room by one of the windows with her Potions textbook propped in her lap when Marietta came through. She noticed Cho and took a slight double-take; they hadn't really spoken properly in the past fortnight.

 

"Oh! Hi, Cho."

 

"Hi Marietta," she said, looking up from the textbook. "How's studying with Eddie?"

 

"It's good," she said, nodding and giving a knowing smile. "I was just getting something I'd left in my trunk, so..."

 

"Sure. Have fun studying." She went back to the textbook.

 

"Hey, Cho..."

 

"Mm?"

 

"You look good, with your hair like that." With that, Marietta disappeared up the stairs to the dormitories.

 

Cho touched her hand to the back of her neck, realising she had left her hair charmed in place from Potions. It took her several moments to find the place in her textbook where she had stopped reading.

 

------------------

 

"The rules are really simple," Katie said, "because it's not really much of a game." She was mounting her broom as she spoke. "I'll try to tag you on the back of your broom, and then when I do you try and tag me, and then we switch back. You'll know when you get tagged, there's a little bit of a wobble to how you fly, but it's nothing that's, you know, dangerous. It's maybe better practise with three people, but I think we can manage with two."

 

Cho and Katie had come down to the Quidditch pitch because they had picked up on each other's restlessness - the grey weather that came with the onset of winter had broken for a moment, and outside was too appealing in the crisp twilight. They were also further ahead in their studies than either had imagined, and so the decision had been made to take a night off. Flying wouldn't even be such a waste of time, either, since Gryffindor would be playing against the Slytherins in the first Quidditch match of the year in a few weeks.

 

"Isn't that a little unfair? I have a faster broom than you." Cho's Comet was showing its age a little, but Katie had been positive during a discussion of their respective brooms that it would easily overtake her Silver Arrow at top speeds, since she was beginning to think some of the charms on it were failing.

 

"Maybe, but my broom corners better, so I think it's about even for just tag." She kicked off into the air, saying with a huge smile, "Besides, I'm a better flier than you!"

 

Cho's made her eyes go wide in mock scandal. "You are not!" she called, mounting her own broom.

 

"Come prove it!"

 

Katie's broom was indeed better at cornering, and she took full advantage of it, throwing her weight into making turns right up against the edges of the stands that Cho would have found impossible. She skimmed close enough to the ground to touch the grass of the pitch and darted among the goal hoops, until Cho was able to read her feints correctly, and put on a burst of speed to tap the bristles of Katie's broom as she hooked around the centre goal. Katie wasted no time in turning her broom about to pursue Cho. Now the nature of the game changed, with Cho rising higher and higher from the ground to have less obstacles to avoid. Cho glanced back to see Katie only a short distance behind her, and then realised they had risen above the height of the stands, and she could see out for miles - the expanse of trees that was the Forbidden Forest, the still water of the lake, the little knot of lights far in the distance that was Hogsmeade. Without really thinking about what she was doing, Cho urged her broom onward in the direction of the lake, away from the Quidditch pitch.

 

"Hey! You can't do that," Katie called.

 

Cho glanced over her shoulder again. Katie looked like she was keeping pace with her, conviction her broom was getting old proving false. "Who says I can't?" she called back.

 

She turned back and looked out across the lake, any thoughts about watching for a small wobble in the course of her broom far from her mind. She closed her eyes, feeling the wind above the water cool on her face and catching and whipping her hair. In this moment, she cared only about going fast, faster, fastest.

 

Cho opened her eyes and saw Katie had drawn level with her. Some surprise must have shown on her face, because Katie started laughing, and Cho joined her. She decided she didn't care about the game any longer. Evidently Katie didn't either, as she guided her broom up into the night sky, and Cho followed her. It became a kind of follow-the-leader like the flight of a flock of birds, but with only two members; who led and who followed at any given time was difficult to say. It was a form of communication without words, the sharing of laughter and the simple joy of flying. Below them, the calm black lake was impossible to tell from the cloudless night sky.

 

As they walked away from the Quidditch pitch later that night, Katie said, "Hey, there's a Hogsmeade weekend tomorrow."

 

"I hadn't realised."

 

"Maybe, ah..." She paused to catch her breath. "Maybe I'll see you there. If you're going. Because I was thinking of going."

 

Cho hadn't been planning to go - how could she, if she hadn't known it was this weekend? - but suddenly the strip of stores and cafés seemed more appealing than going over her Ancient Runes notes, and she said, "Sure. I'll look for you."

 

Katie smiled. Her face was still flushed from flying. "Great."

 

------------------

 

In the morning, Cho ran into Marietta and Eddie in the common room. Eddie asked if she wanted to tag along with them to Hogsmeade.

 

Through the day, Cho kept glancing through windows at the street and at opening doors. She never saw who she was looking for.

 

In the afternoon, Cho heard there was a commotion in the main street. Something had happened to a girl there.

 

Before dinner, Cho confronted Leanne. She relayed the whole story of what had happened while leaving Hogsmeade while Cho listened, silent, unsure how she should react.

 

After dinner, Cho came by the Hospital wing. She was chased away by Madam Pomfrey, who told her Professor Snape needed to concentrate.

 

That night, Cho sat in the common room, her Transfiguration textbook closed on her lap. She turned away from looking out of one of the large windows, and began writing a letter that would go to St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

 

------------------

 

An owl dropped a letter at Cho's place at the Ravenclaw table during breakfast while she was picking listlessly at her toast. It was in a bright green envelope and sealed shut with an insignia bearing the crossed wand and bone. She tore the envelope open in one swift movement. Inside was a very brief note in a font that looked less like a letter and more like the typesetting found in books.

 

We regret to inform you, read the letter, that due to new regulations, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries will be suspending the delivery of all letters, parcels, packages, and other sundry items to any patients in a critical and/or non-conscious state. Your letter/parcel/package will be held until the intended recipient is not longer in a critical or non-conscious state, at which point your letter/parcel/package will be delivered. You as the sender will not receive any notification of this having occurred, nor can we provide you with an accurate estimation of when your letter/parcel/package will be delivered. We at St Mungo's apologise for any inconvenience, and wish you the best of health and the intended recipient a speedy recovery.

 

Cho read the letter through a second time, then set her jaw. She pulled her wand from her robes and used it to wipe the note free of ink, forcing the ink to sit in a little bubble in the corner of the now-empty note, then summoned a quill that lay on the table beside her bed in Ravenclaw Tower. When it landed in her raised hand a moment later, she dipped it into the ink bubble and began writing.

 

------------------

 

The following morning another owl came for Cho bearing a similar envelope. Inside was a similar letter.

 

We regret to inform you that due to new regulations, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries is unable to release details about any injuries, hexes, jinxes, enchantments, or any other magical effects Katie Bell (the name was written by hand) may have incurred, or the treatment thereof, to anyone other than immediate family members. We at St Mungo's apologise for any inconvenience.

 

Cho spent her first spare lesson writing a letter addressed to Andrew Bell. She spent the rest of the day unable to concentrate on her classes, an uncomfortable knot writhing in her stomach.

 

------------------

 

The next morning, an owl came with a letter that was not from Andrew Bell, nor his sister, nor St Mungo's, but from Cho's parents. She opened the letter and folded it up again without absorbing a single word written on the parchment. She would have to reply to this. She had no idea how, nor did she feel like thinking about it, when the many things that she imagined stopping a reply from Katie's brother weighed so heavily on her mind. Maybe the owl had delivered the letter and left, leaving him no means with which to reply. Maybe letters sent through owl post didn't work properly, if written by a Squib. Maybe Andrew couldn't get in contact with St Mungo's either. Maybe. Maybe.

 

Cho pushed her plate away from her. Marietta said from her side, "Hey, aren't you going to eat anything?"

 

"I'm not hungry," Cho replied, and she left the table.

 

------------------

 

The next letter that came for Cho caused her to pause. For a moment she considered that it might be for some other student who would snag it in a second but was too busy with a mouthful of eggs at the moment, until she saw her name clearly written on the envelope. She opened it and read through it once very quickly, and then a second time where she looked at every word instead of every third one. The letter had not come from Katie's brother, but her mother.

 

Dear Cho, it read,

 

First let me tell you that Katie is okay and you don't have to worry about her. The Healers have told us she'll be awake within the week. She will have to spend some time recovering at St Mungo's though, and they also say she's very lucky not to have been hurt more than she was. That's our Katie, though - she's always been very unlucky with accidents but very lucky with how much damage they actually do to her.

 

It's so wonderful to know Katie has such a good friend at Hogwarts - most of her friends finished last year and I was a little worried she might be lonely (but don't tell her I told you that). I'm sure she'll write back to you as soon as she can, she hates having to stay in bed and I'm sure she'll complain to as many people as she can.

 

Write back if there's anything further you need. Andrew says he would appreciate getting another letter through owl post, as he's quite taken with being known as the Birdman of Lancaster.

 

Peace and Love,

Maggie Bell

 

As she read the letter, Cho felt something nagging at her, but she dismissed it since whatever it was could wait. After she had refolded the letter she realised she had not taken anything for breakfast yet, and it was the smell coming from a pile of sausages reminding her about it.

 

------------------

 

That night, Cho wrote her response to her parents' letter that had arrived a couple of days ago. She wrote about her classes, her progression with her studies for the year, her continued place on the Quidditch team. It felt like she was simply acknowledging each individual line without giving out any real information. She did not mention Katie at all.

 

------------------

 

Even if I take a break from studying, Cho thought to herself, I can't get away from books.

 

She had intended just to clean her broom and maybe clip it a little, but halfway through had remembered she had seen the Hover Charm used on brooms in an example in her Charms textbook, and the current chapter she had been taking a break from was on strengthening existing charms already in place. Cho had intended to fetch her textbook and experiment a little with the technique, practically, but quickly realised she would have to actually practise the Hover Charm on something other than her broom to get a feel for it first. So, she was sitting in the Ravenclaw common room with textbooks and scribbled diagrams spread out in front of her, her broom propped against the chair she was sitting in, a couple of sticks gathered from the grounds just near the Forbidden Forest, and a determined look on her face.

 

It was some time in the small hours of the morning before Cho managed to get the Hover Charm to work right, and it took a few more practice applications before she was ready to try the charm on her broom. She went to bed not exhausted and thinking she had wasted the night, but excited, anticipating testing out a broom that she was, in part, responsible for how well it flew.

 

------------------

 

The morning of Halloween, another letter came for Cho from St Mungo's. It was not the same bright shade of green the previous two had been. Cho hastily swallowed the rest of her juice, and opened the envelope. She recognised Katie's handwriting, messy and somewhat boyish, right away.

 

It's like Christmas already here, I woke up and there was all this stuff waiting for me. Some of it was even presents, too - Fred and George sent me one of every new thing they've made since they opened their shop, I think.

 

I feel fine, by the way. You sounded so worried in your letter! It'll take more than some old Dark junk to stop me, haha. The Healers say I'm going to be in here for a while though, because there's some potion I have to keep taking and they want to make sure they didn't miss anything, something like that. They sound like they're being too careful. As soon as I can walk around - and it's nothing serious, I'm just sore everywhere - I'll really start on getting them to let me come back to school.

 

You, however, are still at school, so there is something you have to do for me. Something incredibly important, possibly the absolute most important thing ever. On Saturday, Gryffindor is going to be playing Slytherin, and not only am I not going to be playing, I can't even go and watch the game. It's very very very important that you go to the game, take notes, and write me back about Slytherin losing by 300 points and how the new commentator isn't a patch on Lee, and also go and hit Harry for me if he's replaced me with anyone dreadful. That last part is the most important of all.

 

I'm going to open my presents now. It's almost enough to make me want to go to the hospital more often!

 

Katie

 

Cho folded up the letter and tucked it into a pocket. Marietta looked over at her, and asked, "Who have you been writing to?"

 

"Katie," Cho said, "in St Mungo's. She's not hurt, but she's going to be away from school for a while."

 

"Oh, okay. Well, that's good. That she's not hurt, I mean." Marietta dropped her voice, like she was worried about being overheard. "It's a bit scary, isn't it? All this stuff that's going on."

 

"A little," Cho said. Not so much, any more, she thought.

While the great mass of students in the stands were still filing out of the Quidditch pitch, Cho already had a quill in hand, beginning her letter among the cheers of the crowd.

 

------------------

 

When Cho read the first line of Katie's reply ("Dean? Dean THOMAS? Dean Thomas who I know doesn't own a broom of his own? That's it, we're doomed!"), she had to put her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing too hard. She could picture Katie's face as easily as if she had been right there with her instead of in a hospital bed.

 

Marietta watched Cho as she read her letter, and said after she had finished reading, "You know, I don't think you're really writing to Katie Bell. I think there's some mysterious boy you don't want to tell me about from far-off lands you're exchanging letters with."

 

Cho looked at her with the utmost of seriousness and said, "Maybe I am."

 

Marietta's smile fell. It was clear she couldn't tell if Cho was making a joke or not. "Really?" Her eyes grew wide.

 

"How's things with you and Eddie?" Cho asked, making a very calculated grin.

 

"Shh! Not so loud!" Marietta protested, for Eddie was sitting on her other side. Through the general noise of the Great Hall, he seemed to have missed the conversation going on next to him.

 

------------------

 

It was halfway through writing another letter to Katie describing Ravenclaw's victory over Hufflepuff when Cho realised just how far they were both falling behind with their study plan. When they were working together, quickly looking up some information from their textbooks that they needed to continue with their practical work was a quick process, but Cho had found that glancing down and re-checking the exact instructions for an incantation and then performing said incantation was a much more difficult process when alone. Katie had reported back that reading chapters of theory took much longer because she had nobody to discuss the theory with immediately after. Neither of them would be able to catch up and be ready for their N.E.W.T.s if Katie stayed in St Mungo's for much longer, and it looked like the Healers planned to keep her there until past Christmas, so it was clear something had to change.

 

Cho thought about what they could do for the rest of the day, and had a plan formed by the next morning. Before she put it into action, though, she would have to speak with two of the professors.

 

------------------

 

"Are you sure this is what you want to do?" asked Professor Flitwick again, lowering his head as he looked at Cho. It was like he was peering over a pair of invisible glasses. "As I remember, you were quite set in your plans of becoming a Healer when you selected your classes for the N.E.W.T.s."

 

"I'm quite sure, Professor," she replied.

 

"Very well," he said, "I'll inform Professor Slughorn that you will no longer be attending his classes."

 

------------------

 

Cho waited until she was certain the last of the students had left the classroom before knocking on the door. "Professor Firenze?" she asked into the classroom.

 

"Enter," came the centaur's voice. His classroom was as Katie had said it was. It was an odd feeling of unreality, going outside from inside, from the middle of the day to twilight, but one more interesting than unsettling.

 

"Professor," she began, "do you have any copies of the overview for N.E.W.T. Divination left? The kind that was given out at the beginning of the year."

 

Firenze regarded her for a moment. "I do not believe you are one of my students," he said, "or you would know I don't require being called 'Professor'." His voice, like his expression, was unreadable, impassive.

 

"Oh, it's not for me, it's for Katie Bell. She's in St Mungo's, and-"

 

"Ah, yes. A terrible thing, what happened to that girl." He turned from her and began tending to one of the trees standing in the classroom: an easy feat, because of his height.

 

"I was working together with Katie this year, studying for our N.E.W.T.s, and I wanted to work out a better study plan for both of us since she's going to be in the hospital for a while, but I don't really know what's required in..." She trailed off, as any further explanation seemed unnecessary: Firenze had taken a length of parchment, contained and possibly concealed, from the branches of the tree, and was offering it to Cho. She took it and gave her thanks.

 

"These are dark times we are living in," Firenze told her, "and perhaps darker times ahead. It is often our connections to others that stop us from falling into the darkness. Good luck with your study, child."

 

------------------

 

It was Marietta who found Cho asleep in the common room, rolls of parchment spread out on the table in front of her, a half-finished cup of cold tea set off to the side. Cho jumped awake at the disturbance in the room and rubbed her eyes, and then yawned loudly.

 

"Have... have you been here all night?" Marietta asked.

 

"Mm-hm." Cho nodded indistinctly and started rolling up some of the pieces of parchment.

 

"What were you doing? It looks like you tried to get all the year's homework out of the way in one go."

 

"Hm? No, I-" She broke off in another long yawn. "-I was working on a new timetable for my classwork, and I was checking it through and I just stopped for a moment to rest my eyes."

 

"Oh." Marietta considered for a moment, then asked, "A whole night? You're usually a bit quicker about stuff like this."

 

"I was trying a different way of planning my classes," Cho said, tying together a her collection of scrolls with a length of ribbon, "and I had to make a second copy, too."

 

"What, in case you lost the first one?"

 

"No, to send to Katie. She's still in school, even if she's not, you know, still in the school."

 

------------------

 

The sign-up sheet for students planning on going home over the Christmas break hung on a noticeboard outside of the Great Hall between two large wreaths. Cho was passing this noticeboard between classes when she had an idea, and without bothering to take the time to examine this idea, to think upon it twice or to check it for potential problems, acted and added her name to the list without any intention of telling her parents she had done so.

 

------------------

 

After hugging Marietta goodbye and watching her vanish from sight with a pop just outside the gates to Hogwarts, somehow less threatening when covered in bright white snow, Cho fixed the image in her head of the place she would Apparate to. It was not just outside of her home.

 

------------------

 

She stepped inside the Leaky Cauldron, unprepared that it would be as drastically changed as the street outside. Somehow, she had expected it would always be the same as the first time she had been here as a child: a warm, happy place filled with the noise of people and lots of flickering candle-light. Now it was silent and empty, save for the bald innkeeper who stood behind the bar idly cleaning with an old rag. He looked surprised to see Cho and eyed her with some suspicion as she approached him.

 

"I'd like a room, please," she said with confidence.

 

"For how long?" asked the innkeeper, his hand that held the rag still moving in slow circles over the bar.

 

"Over Christmas. But," she added hastily, "I haven't got a lot of money with me at the moment, so I can't pay anything up-front. But as soon as I can, I'll go to Gringotts, and-"

 

"Haven't you heard?"

 

"Heard what?"

 

"The goblins have Gringotts locked down even tighter because of new security measures. They're lucky to see fifteen people a day, from what I hear. You'll be waiting until well past Christmas to get any money out, if you think you're just going to go in there and get it."

 

"Oh," Cho said. Her eyes fell away to the floor. She looked back up and had been planning to asked the innkeeper something, but stopped because of the way he was watching her.

 

"Practically all the rooms I've got upstairs are empty," he said after a long moment's silence, "and at Christmas I've usually never got empty rooms. People are scared, like if they hang around Diagon Alley too long they'll get nabbed off the street. Because of that, the last girl I had working tables here cleared off, said she was going to go visit her aunt up country." He stowed the rag somewhere behind the bar, and rested both his hands on top of the counter. "I'll make you a deal: you can have one of those empty rooms upstairs free of charge, if you help out a bit around here in the evenings when I've actually got customers. Deal?"

 

Cho wasted very little time in considering before she said, "It's a deal," and extended her hand. The innkeeper gave her a crooked smile and they shook, briefly, and Cho thought a little of the old warmth she remembered in the Leaky Cauldron.

 

------------------

 

Cho stood a little outside the open door in St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, running through her mind different ways to step through it. She finally decided the best way - the one that would quickest solve the lump of nerves writhing in her stomach - would to just go in and see what happened.

 

In the room were several beds, but only one was occupied. Beside the occupied bed was a pile of brightly-coloured objects, boxes, and boxed objects - Cho assumed these were products from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Sitting on a little table, along with a lamp with a pale green shade over it, was an assortment of cards, some expressing get-well sentiments, others Christmas wishes. In the bed, propped up by a pillow, was Katie, open textbook in her lap. She looked up, and for a moment looked like she was having trouble believing what she was seeing.

 

"Cho?"

 

"Hi, Katie," she said.

 

"You... you never told me you were coming!" Whether Katie was trying to sound accusatory, Cho never knew; the smile she gave would have made it impossible for her to seem negative about anything she had said.

 

"Surprise," Cho said meekly. She could feel a smile blooming of her own.

 

Katie snapped her book shut and gestured frantically for Cho to come closer, and she enveloped her in a fierce hug that was almost enough to make Cho lose her balance and topple her onto the bed. "Tell me everything! How did you get here? How long have you been planning this? This is why you never said anything about what you were doing for Christmas in your letters, isn't it? How long are you here for? Have you always been this good at keeping secrets? What else don't I know?"

 

Cho laughed and squeezed Katie a little tighter. She pulled a chair that sat beside one of the empty beds closer and sat, and she and Katie began talking, and it was like they had never been separated.

 

------------------

 

And so it went. Cho would catch up on schoolwork with Katie during the day and clean and wait tables in the Leaky Cauldron in the evenings, and each night she would go fall into bed both mentally and physically exhausted, but feeling a real sense of accomplishment that was only a pale comparison to things like a perfect score on an exam or grabbing the tiny fluttering Snitch out of the air. Each night she would fall asleep thinking she was having the best Christmas ever.

 

------------------

 

"If they keep me here much longer," Katie said, lifting her eyes from her textbook and glancing at Cho, "I'm going to put in a request for you to be my Healer. You'd get on with things way faster than anyone here."

 

"Hm?" Cho marked the page she had been reading and closed her own book.

 

"You know, because there's a lot of training to be a Healer. Implying I would be here for another couple of years. Because I was making a joke."

 

"Oh." Cho smiled, though it felt forced. She had been avoiding telling Katie what she was about to say; she was unsure exactly why. "I don't think I'm going to be a Healer any more. I dropped Potions, when I reworked our study schedule."

 

"Oh." Katie sounded surprised. Not disappointed, or upset. Just surprised. "What do you want to do instead?"

 

"I'm not sure."

 

"Hey, you should fix brooms!"

 

Katie's outburst was so sudden, so bright - so Katie - that Cho laughed aloud before she was able to respond.

 

"What? Be serious."

 

"I am!" And she was, under the excitement, Cho saw, and she felt a more genuine smile forming on her face. "You sent me a letter with a page and a half on the entire process of strengthening your Comet's braking Charm, you never cared that much when a potion turned out right."

 

"I suppose, but... broom repair? Really?"

 

"Think about it," Katie said, and went to open her textbook again. She traced along the page with her finger for a moment, and then asked, "Did you have to drop Potions to make the timetable work?"

 

Cho thought about this for a moment. "In part," she answered. "It made things a lot easier if I had one less class. A lighter workload meant we could keep studying the way we had been."

 

A smile came across Katie's face that was quite different to her usual one. "Oh," she said. It seemed like the smile had surprised her, somehow.

 

------------------

 

On Boxing Day, Katie had visitors beyond just Cho. When Cho arrived at St Mungo's, she found three other people in the room; a short woman with a wild shock of hair and heavy boots prominent at the bottom of her robes, and two men who could not have been anything but father and son. The elder had long greying hair tied back in a ponytail; the younger wore Muggle clothes and a shorter haircut. Cho saw something in the younger man's face that looked more like Katie than his father, and concluded immediately this must be Katie's parents and her brother Andrew.

 

They greeted Cho warmly, recognising her also as the friend that had been so worried about Katie, and Katie's mother Maggie conjured a chair for her to sit on and insisted she stay with them. Cho agreed but stayed mostly quiet, only answering questions that were posed directly to her. She found the interaction of Katie and her family fascinating. They were more like close friends, with a wealth of odd in-jokes they kept pausing the conversation for to explain for Cho's benefit. They laughed easily, joked with each other; they were all equals, Cho saw, and she understood this was how Katie had become so open and so fearless about speaking her mind, if these were the people she had grown up around. As the day went on, Cho found their good natures infectious, and towards the afternoon she found herself sharing some stories about her and Katie from school, laughing freely at jokes and even making a couple herself.

 

By a stroke of handy coincidence, the time Katie's family had to leave to make the train home and Cho was to begin her shift at the Leaky Cauldron came within minutes of each other. The four of them stood to leave together, and handshakes, hugs, and goodbyes were exchanged throughout the room.

 

In the hallway, Andrew hung back from his parents walking away, and stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked like he was waiting for Cho.

 

"Katie tells me you're staying in Diagon Alley," he said.

 

"I am." Cho was unsure where this conversation was headed, but Andrew's tone didn't indicate it was going somewhere pleasant.

 

"I hear it's dangerous in the Wizard world at the moment. I hope your parents are okay with you being out on your own like that."

 

Cho looked into his eyes and felt a strong urge to explain herself, to say something that would move away from this subject, but she knew anything she said would only help the impression she had been caught in a lie, and Andrew knew it. He seemed to study her for a long time before speaking again.

 

"You've been helping Katie with her schoolwork this year."

 

"We've been helping each other," Cho clarified.

 

"And you came here so you could study together."

 

"Yes."

 

"On your Christmas break."

 

"That's right."

 

Andrew's expression remained stony for a moment, and then broke into a wide smile similar to the one Cho had seen Katie use many times before. "That sounds like you're a pretty good friend, you know."

 

Cho found herself smiling back. "I guess so."

 

"Hey, what do you think your parents would say, if they knew what you were doing?" His entire presence had changed. Cho got the feeling that Andrew, due to his size and what Katie had told her was generally an easy-going nature, had little idea of how intimidating he was capable of being.

 

"I'm... not sure." She imagined the faces of her mother and father, if she had told them she had spent almost two weeks away from the protection of Hogwarts and Albus Dumbledore; outside it might be that nobody else would be able to see the change, but inside she knew they would be growing hard like stone, cold like ice.

 

"They pretty strict? Your parents."

 

Cho had never considered this much - her parents had always been part of that class of adults, along with the professors at school, to be respected and listened to - but on having been told over and over this year that she was to be treated as an adult and especially after meeting Katie's parents in person, she was beginning to have a somewhat different view on what made a person an adult.

 

"I suppose they are," she said at last.

 

Andrew nodded, although this gesture seemed mostly to be towards himself. "Thought they might be."

 

"How did you know that?"

 

"I've just got a pretty good read on people, most of the time." He smiled somewhat cryptically, and then said, "Hey, there's something I forgot to tell Katie. I'm going to go do that before my parents can decide to leave me here, alright?"

 

"Sure."

 

Andrew clapped Cho on the shoulder as he passed by her. "Stay a good friend to my sister," he said, his hand on the door to Katie's room.

 

"I'll try my best."

 

He nodded again to himself, and disappeared behind the door. Cho stood in the hallway of the hospital for a moment, unable to decide exactly how she should take Andrew Bell.

 

------------------

 

The last night she was to stay in Diagon Alley, Tom told Cho she wasn't needed in the pub tonight, although it was been no more or less busy than the other nights she had helped out. When she protested, Tom insisted. He had a look like he knew (or thought he knew) more than he let on, but Cho had seen him look this way many times in just two weeks, so she thought very little of it as she made the now-familiar walk through St Mungo's to Katie's room.

 

She found Katie in the middle of writing a letter, which she promptly folded in half and put on the table beside her bed as soon as Cho entered the room. Cho didn't plan on asking who it was to.

 

"Hey," Katie said, "didn't expect you back so soon." She said this with a smile, but it was different in a way Cho couldn't identify. Maybe she had surprised Katie more than she had expected.

 

"I've got a night off," she said, and sat on the chair next to Katie's bed.

 

"It's a good job you've got. The pay's terrible, but you get benefits like surprise holidays." Katie laughed a little at this, but it seemed to Cho like she was forcing herself to. Cho tried to think of what to say to this - to play along with the joke, to ask what was wrong, to talk to Katie about the things she had been thinking of as she walked up the stairs - but could find nothing that seemed fitting. The room suddenly seemed like it was very quiet.

 

"Cho, why did you come here?" Katie asked, and there was none of her usual energy in her voice. If this were a serious question - and it felt to Cho like it was an incredibly serious one - it was as if Katie felt she had to repress anything non-serious in her in order to ask it.

 

"Tonight? I just said, because Tom-"

 

"No, for Christmas." Katie was not looking at her.

 

"I didn't want you to fall behind," Cho said, not sure about the kind of answer she wanted to hear.

 

"And that's... that's all?" Katie was looking at her hands, twisting them in her lap, making her ugly injury move in and out of sight.

 

"No, I... you're my friend, too, I wanted to... what's wrong?" For she had realised that Katie was on the verge of tears.

 

"Nothing. Just something my stupid brother said."

 

"What was that?"

 

"It doesn't matter," she said, and sniffed.

 

After a long moment, Cho said, "It wasn't the same at school, without you. I missed you. I-" She had been about to say 'I wanted to come see you', but was unable to get out the words because Katie was leaning across, leaning into her, pressing her lips against hers, and kissing her. Cho could feel the heat from her face, the wetness from her tears, she could feel these things and not see them because her own eyes had closed. For a moment she thought of nothing, feeling like time had slowed, but then the thoughts came, the thoughts that told her this was wrong, asked her what she was doing, demanded she explain herself. Cho pulled back, pulled away, and she could not tell if it was surprise or hurt she saw in Katie's face.

 

"I..." she began, but found she couldn't find the words. They were all caught in her throat. She turned and left the room, not knowing where she would go, but knowing she couldn't stay here.

 

------------------

 

Cho paced back and forth in her rented room above the Leaky Cauldron. Usually, if she had to think about something, she would sit down and let her eyes focus on some irrelevant point in the distance, see all the pieces of the problem in her head, remain still. This didn't feel like a time to remain still.

 

The room was small, so she could only pace back and forth a couple of steps. It created a rhythm in her head. One two, turn, one two, turn, one two, turn. Katie, turn, Katie, turn, Katie. She liked Katie. She was a good friend. An amazing friend. Was still an amazing friend. But Cho didn't like her like that, did she? She had been in love with Cedric, hadn't she? She was sure about that, wasn't she? How do you know? How do you know? How do you...?

 

After a night of very little sleep, Cho was woken by the flutter of wings in her room. She sprang from her bed to read the letter. It was from Katie, and was very short.

 

Please, come see me today. I want to talk. Please.

 

------------------

 

A long moment passed between the time Cho entered Katie's room and when she spoke. During this time, both girls looked at each other, seeming unsure about who should speak first.

 

"Hi Katie," Cho said.

 

"Hey," she replied. Her hands were in her lap again. Cho could see her eyes were red. Maybe she had been crying. Maybe she hadn't been sleeping.

 

Cho took a tentative step forward just as Katie began to speak. "I'm sorry that that happened, I just... if you don't want to be friends with me any more, I'll understand-"

 

"What? No-"

 

"-and we can just pretend that it never-"

 

"No, I don't... no!" Katie broke off, looking stunned. "I don't want to stop being your friend," Cho managed, trying to keep her voice even.

 

"I thought..." Katie said in a very quiet voice, "I thought you might feel the same way."

 

"I don't know if I do or not," Cho said. She was staring at the floor as she spoke.

 

"But you ran, why would you-"

 

"I don't know!" She raised her voice a little louder than she would have believed she would be willing to raise it in the hospital. "I don't know," she said, and she could feel tears pricking at the sides of her eyes, "but I don't want to stop being your friend." She had been drawing closer and closer to Katie's bed with each outburst, and now she knelt beside it. Cho didn't feel like she could look directly at Katie without crying properly, so she kept her focus on Katie's hands. "I just... want to be with you. I like being with you."

 

"I like being with you, too," Katie said, her voice just above a whisper. Against her better judgement, Cho looked up, and saw that Katie was smiling, a small smile that seemed somehow very fragile on her tear-lined face.

 

"So what do we do now?" Cho asked.

 

"I don't know."

 

"Neither do I."

 

"I think," Katie said after a long pause, "we should keep writing."

 

Cho smiled. "I think I would like that."

 

"I think I would, too."

 

------------------

 

Cho stood outside the gates into Hogwarts with two other seventh-years - a Slytherin boy and Cormac McLaggen, who she had Potions with and secretly was a little disappointed that this year she had less opportunity to see Professor Snape tell him off. None of them spoke to each other, not during waiting for Professor Sprout to let them through the gates, nor along the walk up to the castle, nor anything about Filch and his sadistic joy at actually being allowed to enforce security. Cho had the very brief thought, while being scanned with a Secrecy Sensor, that everything she had done during Christmas would be discovered - her deceit in leaving the school, her staying in Diagon Alley, her kiss with Katie, all of it - and she would have to find some way of explaining it all, and found that she would not be able to.

 

To her immense relief, the Secrecy Sensor remained silent.

 

------------------

 

On the first day after classes began, a letter came from Cho's parents. It was only after she had sent her owl off with two letters, one bound for her home and one for a room in St Mungo's, that she realised she couldn't remember any of what she had written to her parents about.

 

------------------

 

It was a halfway through the second week of the new term that Cho came to a conscious realisation of how much she was anticipating the mail each morning - she and Katie were now exchanging letters back and forth on a daily basis, and while their content had not changed significantly, the way Cho felt about them had. She felt happy about seeing a letter for her, without fail, and always gave what Katie wrote a lot of consideration on and off during the day. She enjoyed the time she purposely set aside each day to write her letter back, too, when she would make her way to Ravenclaw Tower and take a spot in the common room with the afternoon sun hanging low in the sky, and she didn't find she minded too much if she was a little late back from the Owlery and dinner had already begun.

 

Except, hadn't getting a letter from Katie always been like this? Hadn't she always felt the little bolt of excitement when an owl dropped something at her place, doubly so because she knew who it was from? Hadn't she always spent the spare moments in the day thinking about what she would write back? For that matter... maybe there was something a little different in the letters, too. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened on the last day she had been at St Mungo's, but neither had it really felt like it was being avoided. It was merely a thing that was just... there.

 

It was later that day during a moment of concentrating on a passage she was reading in her Charms textbook that she had held her hand to her face and furrowed her brow, and thought of Katie in her bed at St Mungo's, propped up with a pillow and reading possibly the same passage she herself was reading by pale-green lamp light, and she absently brushed a finger across her lips and realised with very little fanfare that she was absolutely, unmistakably, undeniably falling in love with Katie Bell.

 

------------------

 

Although Roger insisted on more intensive training sessions to prepare for the Ravenclaw's last match of the year after his team's loss to Slytherin, Cho felt she should have perhaps told him he needn't have been so hard on the rest of the team; she had flown poorly during that day owing to Zacharias Smith's snide commentary, and Draco Malfoy had been unusually aggressive in combing the sky for the Snitch, so she blamed nobody but herself for their loss. She had the impression that the rest of the team thought she was quite upset at herself over the loss, and this was the reason she was quiet and somewhat distant during practice, but the reality of things was that Cho was using this time to think about her feelings towards Katie. It was easy to swap letters back and forth comparing their study notes and day-to-day lives, and Cho found it was a lot more difficult to set her heart aside while on her broom than it was while she was reading one of her textbooks. Quidditch was something she and Katie had talked about - flying was something they had done together - but Katie's presence wasn't with her here, so being at the Quidditch pitch just made her feel lonely.

 

It was during one of these practice sessions in early February that Cho got an idea that made her smile. The more she thought about it, the better an idea it seemed, the more it made sense. She was the first to leave the pitch after practice, and as she did the rest of the Ravenclaw team all agreed amongst themselves that the old Cho was back and ready to go for their last game this year.

 

------------------

 

Cho Chang

Ravenclaw Tower

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

February 14th, 1997

Katie Bell

Fourth Floor - Spell Damage

St Mungo's Hospital of Magical Maladies and Injuries

 

Dear Katie,

 

I'm writing this letter so you can understand a bit a bit about how I've been feeling, and how I feel now. I'm not sure if I'll send it or not - it might just help me if I just write these things down - but it's going to get written down either way.

 

There was a time at school when I was really happy with my life, because I was doing well with my classes and I was part of the Quidditch team and I had a really great boyfriend. I thought that was what I wanted, with life. I don't know how far I was really thinking about things, I just knew that if I kept my grades good then I could go on to be a good Healer, and if I had a great boyfriend he could go on to be a good husband and we'd have a good family, and those were the things that I thought that I wanted, so I was happy.

 

But when Cedric died, all of that changed. I just couldn't make myself feel happy again, and I could see my grades starting to slip down, and I just kept thinking there had to be something wrong with me, that I couldn't be happy, and it made me feel worse and made my grades keep dropping. I thought Harry would understand some of that, but he already had a circle of his friends to get support from, and that made me realise I didn't have anything like that. I had what seemed like so many friends when I was feeling happy, but they all drifted away when I started getting more and more depressed, and I think the D.A. was the last straw for most of them. I thought the holidays from school would fix it all, that I could forget everything I had been feeling at school and come back fresh and clear and I'd be able to just concentrate on my grades and be happy again, but that didn't happen. Instead I just kept feeling more trapped, more and more cut off and alone from everything, like there was nobody I could talk to.

 

And then I met you, Katie. Everything about you was just light and brightness and warmth. It was like my whole life had been spent in this one tiny room, and the walls had been slowly getting closer and closer to me, but I had no idea because all the lights were out, and you, your light, you showed me not only how close the walls were coming but also the way out of that little room. You helped me more than I think that you know, just by being yourself, so free and open and ready to follow exactly what your heart wants. You showed me that what I so desperately wanted to be again wasn't making me happy, and that I could be happy in other ways. It was you the whole time that made me happy, I was just happy to be around you, to be with you. And the rest of those things, the perfect grades to be a Healer, being popular with lots of friends, having the perfect boyfriend, those things didn't seem to be so important any more, because you made me happy. Really, truly happy.

 

On Valentine's Day, people give each other things that look like hearts, because it represents their feelings for each other. This letter contains my feelings, all the emotions I've had. This letter is my heart, and I give it to you.

 

With my love,

Cho

 

------------------

 

The letter that came in response made Cho smile from the first line.

 

You should be the Gryffindor, not me, it read, because that's just about the bravest thing I've ever read. Now I feel a little bad that I didn't even realise what the day was today (this Cho forgave instantly, knowing how heavily Katie relied on the spell that produced the date and user's current location by tapping on a piece of parchment), but I will find a way to make it up to you, don't worry. Better yet, you won't know when it's coming, and I already owe you a surprise. But I'm just avoiding writing down what I really want to put in this letter, but I guess I should be a bit brave too, even if it feels strange to ask this in a letter (but I've never asked anyone in person either, so what do I know?)

 

Okay, enough procrastinating.

 

Cho Chang, bravest sweetest person that I know, would you be my girlfriend? Officially and seriously and all that comes with it. I think I know what it is you'll answer, but just so you know, I'll be waiting for it to come as soon as possible all the same.

 

Cho re-folded the letter and put it carefully in one of her pockets, then took an empty piece of parchment from her other pocket and quickly wrote her reply of yes, yes I will, you know that I will.

 

------------------

 

The next few weeks felt like they flew by very quickly. Cho could concentrate in her classes where before the lectures from her professors seemed like they dragged. She tore through her reading each night. She threw herself into Quidditch practice. She could almost physically feel her life righting itself, like she was a train that had come loose of its rails but slipped its wheels smoothly back onto the tracks. Marietta continued to accuse her of writing in secret to some foreign boy. Cho took great joy in playing along with her theories.

 

After finishing a lengthy written account of Gryffindor's latest and most embarrassing defeat - at which Cho knew Katie would first explain how it would not have occurred were she there to fly for Gryffindor, then berate Harry for his poor choice in players, then suggest Cormac McLaggen be on the receiving end of some nasty combination of hexes and jinxes - Cho paused a moment before setting off to the Owlery. She took another length of parchment and began writing a letter home to her parents. She wrote about how she had been feeling since the beginning of sixth year, how difficult school had been for her, about her friends, about Harry Potter, about Cedric. She wrote about Katie and how much she had helped her, about no longer taking N.E.W.T.-level Potions, about no longer wanting to be a Healer. She concluded the letter with the summation she and Katie had been having through their past couple of letters about what they would both do after Hogwarts, writing she would try and get an apprenticeship with a broom-maker: out of all her classes, she enjoyed Charms the most, and broom manufacture was very Charm-heavy, she'd be involved in some way with something else she always liked, Quidditch; she might even be able to design her own model of broom one day.

 

Cho sent this letter and felt no fear, no apprehension about the response it might provoke. None came the next day, or the next, or the day after that. A letter did come back from her parents, eventually. It was very short, and said that while her parents were disappointed Cho wasn't going to follow the dream she had for so many years of being a Healer, they were proud their daughter was setting high goals for herself, and knew she would achieve what she wanted.

 

Folding the letter up, Cho started thinking about names for a brand of racing brooms.

 

------------------

 

A letter came on a Saturday morning late in April that was much shorter than Katie's usual letters. This one only said that she would be unable to write for a couple of days, but that Cho should be awake early on the coming Tuesday. Cho folded the letter (more of a note than a letter, really) in two and ate her breakfast in quiet contemplation, wondering if she could manage to act surprised to see Katie back at school. Maybe, she thought as she glanced at the door to the Great Hall and felt the now-familiar flickery butterfly feeling in her stomach, she wouldn't have to.

 

------------------

 

The empty Great Hall around sunrise wasn't an unfamiliar sight to Cho, who had often been the first student present on weekends when the Ravenclaw Quidditch team scheduled a morning practice session, but it was always a sight she was unprepared for. The Great Hall was just supposed to have people in it, students eating, students talking, students listening to Professor Dumbledore, students gathered in pockets doing their homework. It was especially foreign when even the ghosts found somewhere else to be. Whenever it was empty, it seemed somehow both less and more than itself - less impressive but much larger, a big empty chamber for the echoes to live in. Any sound made seemed to never fade away, just bounce off the walls forever.

 

Like now, for example. The great door creaking open seemed amplified a hundredfold. Cho looked up from the spot on the floor she had been examining to see the figure who had pushed open the door, and all at once the Great Hall no longer felt empty and abandoned.

 

"Surprise," said Katie, beaming.

 

"I had no idea," Cho said, although her tone said otherwise. She pushed off from the foot of the Ravenclaw table and started walking towards Katie.

 

Katie made a face at her, but kept smiling all the same. "We can't all be masters of deception like you." She put her arms around Cho, and Cho hugged her back tightly. Her hair smelled faintly of shampoo.

 

------------------

 

"So how's being back?" Cho asked. She sat at the table, but didn't open any of her books.

 

"You know, it's funny. Everyone only wants to hear about what happened in Hogsmeade. I've started telling everyone I can't remember anything until a couple of weeks ago, it distracts them with wanting to tell me stuff that's happened." Katie's own books still sat in her bag, which lay on the floor at her feet.

 

"People are very sympathetic to amnesiacs," Cho said sagely.

 

"Nobody cares about my scar." Katie waved her hand with a flourish. It no longer looked like it was in the healing stages from a mauling by some savage animal, but a knot of scar tissue still ran along the side of her her hand and partway up her wrist. It still had the dark colour of a fresh bruise Cho had noticed during the Christmas holidays.

 

"It looks ghastly." Cho pretended to busy herself with finding the right chapter in her textbook.

 

"I've never had any proper scars before. I think it's cool." Katie flexed her fingers and made a great deal of observing the effect on her hand.

 

Cho reached out and held Katie's wiggling fingers between her own hands in an effort to stop her marvelling at her injury, even though neither of them were as disgusted or fascinated with it as may have appeared to an outsider. Katie shifted in Cho's grasp so they were holding hands across the table. Cho smiled and dropped her gaze, like doing so would disguise the blush she felt creep across her cheeks. Katie gave a nervous little laugh and went to fetch her wand from her robe, dropping her hands.

 

"Hey, I wanted to show you something. Watch this, I've been working on it." Her face showed a deep concentration, and she waved her wand at a blank spot on the table. A squat copper kettle appeared, arriving on a folded hand-towel and accompanied by two broad teacups that looked better suited to coffee than tea.

 

"I can do it with a sugar pot, too, and a little milk jug. I haven't been able to get more than two cups at once, though." At this last, Katie looked a little disappointed.

 

"Two is enough," Cho reassured her. "That's really impressive." As she poured the tea, she added, "Bet everyone's going to be really surprised when you do so well in your N.E.W.T.s when you're meant to have been unconscious for... what, four months?"

 

"Well, of course I did, I had the best partner, didn't I?"

 

Cho scanned Katie's face for the tell-tale signs of of joke-making, but found none. Katie carefully set down the brass kettle and looked at Cho, and took a deep breath before she spoke.

 

"I'm serious about that. You could have found someone else to work with after I went to St Mungo's - you could have even just done the work on your own, you're smart enough - but you didn't. You... fought really hard to see I wouldn't fall behind. I've never had to fight for anything before, just sort of taken things as they came, but you changed that. You stay my partner, you work up a whole different study plan to work around me being in the hospital, you write pages and pages of notes and letters, you come and see me over Christmas. You made me want to fight for something like that." Katie took Cho's hands from across the table again, and looked into her eyes, her gaze intent and unswerving.

 

"And, I think," Katie said softly, "I've found something worth fighting for."

 

"Katie..." Cho breathed, unsure of what she could say next. The world suddenly seemed very small, at a size to just contain the two of them, their table, and the tea-set.

 

"You're a really special person, Cho. I just... yeah, thought you should know. You're very special to me."

 

Cho squeezed Katie's hands and felt her squeeze back. It felt like her smile was stopping her from being able to say anything. "Thankyou," she managed.

 

"I know it's not all formal and in writing and everything," Katie began, some of the seriousness falling from her face.

 

"It was perfect," Cho said. "It came right from the heart."

 

------------------

 

"You ready?"

 

"Mm-hm. You?"

 

"Oh yeah." Katie pulled the strap on her glove tight for the final time, and fastened it. "Nervous?"

 

"A little." Cho had no gloves, and was rubbing her hands together in short intense bursts. It was a gesture she had picked up from Katie.

 

"Me too," Katie said, and flexed her fingers, testing them. She looked up from her hands and smiled at Cho. "Hey, I'll be happy for you, if Ravenclaw wins."

 

Cho laughed, suddenly finding their situation of the two of them preparing together for a Quidditch match where they would play on opposite sides utterly surreal. "We should be going to the pitch," she said.

 

"Yeah." Katie stood, and Cho followed her. They walked to the Quidditch pitch together, drawing some glances from other students they passed; only natural, since their walking together and chatting went against the particularly fervent divide this match had created between the Houses.

 

"Good luck," Cho said when they had reached the point where they would have to head in opposite directions to the changing rooms. "Score a lot of points."

 

Katie chuckled. "Nice one. You too."

 

------------------

 

It was the first Quidditch match Cho had ever played where she hadn't kept focused on the scores, doing a quick count in her head whenever a goal was announced and checking it against the total points Ravenclaw had against the total points the other team had for the year and adjusting it for what the scores would be if either she or the other Seeker caught the Snitch right then. She hadn't scanned the reactions of the other players or the crowd for signs of the Snitch like she normally did, using them to notice what she alone might not have seen. She spent the entire match obstructing Ginny Weasley, cutting across her flightpath so she would have to quickly turn, mirroring the paths in the air she guided her broom on, feinting for invisible Snitches when she knew Ginny was watching her. When Ginny finally did catch the Snitch, taking her broom into a violent nosedive in the process, she shot Cho an angry look that said clearly So there! across the pitch, but Cho found she wasn't fazed by it. The game had been fun.

 

As she left the changing rooms to meet Katie, she realised she didn't even know what the final score had been.

 

------------------

 

"I'm not even sure we can do this," Cho protested. She glanced at the woman in the large painting she and Katie stood in front of, who seemed to be regarding her with some suspicion over a wine glass.

 

"Sure we can," Katie said, "just block your ears or something."

 

"Block... wait, what?"

 

"So you don't hear the password."

 

"Password?" The woman with the wine sighed.

 

"To the common room," Katie clarified. She turned to the portrait and asked, "That's okay, right?"

 

"Technically," the woman said. She looked like she would have preferred to have been able to say with authority that it was not okay.

 

"We don't have a password," Cho said.

 

"You don't? How do you keep people who aren't in your House out, then?"

 

"It's a secret," she said, and covered her ears. Katie pulled a face. Cho pulled one back and smiled at her. Katie then turned and gave the secret Gryffindor password to the woman in the portrait in what must have been a low voice, since Cho didn't hear it. The woman in the portrait sighed once more, and then the whole frame swung to the side to reveal the Gryffindor common room, filled with banners, red and gold streamers, and celebrating students. Several heads turned as Cho and Katie entered the room.

 

"Hey, you can't be in here!" came a voice. "Gryffindors only." It was Cormac McLaggen, who pushed his way past a couple of other students.

 

"Cormac, do you ever listen when anyone other than you speaks?" Katie asked, stepping forward to stand toe to toe with him. Although he was much taller and almost twice as broad as Katie was, he took half a step backwards. "Hasn't the Sorting Hat been making up these songs about House unity lately? I think Dumbledore might have mentioned something about it, too - you know who Dumbledore is, right Cormac?"

 

"Gryffindor still won the Cup," Cormac said.

 

"And now the game's over, we don't have to be hostile to the other team, right?"

 

Cho added, "I don't feel especially hostile."

 

"See?" Katie said. "No reason we can't celebrate that it was a good game."

 

"And that Slytherin's at the bottom of the ladder this year!" shouted a voice from the crowd, and this broke any tension that had been growing. Cormac still looked somewhat put out for a moment, but then made a show of noticing someone who was hailing him from the other side of the common room, although Cho suspected this had just been a way to leave and save face in front of Katie, lest she tell him off further.

 

Cho and Katie quickly found themselves in the company other members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team: Ginny, Dean, and younger members Jimmy and Demelza. Demelza in particular seemed very eager to recount every nuance of the match, and it was during one of her emphatic re-enactments, during which Jimmy's eyes never strayed away from her, that Dean excused himself from the conversation, giving a short backwards glance at Ginny as he walked away. Shortly after this, Demelza decided she needed to get something to drink, and Jimmy was quick to follow her. Ginny, who had done the least talking about the match, folded her arms and smiled after them.

 

"He is so sweet on her," she said. "Just like a Crup. It's the cutest thing." The three of them turned and watched Jimmy uncork a bottle of butterbeer for Demelza.

 

"I bet she hasn't noticed," said Katie. "He probably doesn't even know himself."

 

"He knows," Ginny said. "Some part of him does, anyway. Look at them. How could he not?"

 

Cho remembered something she had meant to do. "Hey," she said to Ginny, "good game today." She extended her hand, and Ginny shook it. "You flew well."

 

"You too, I couldn't tell when you had seen the Snitch and when you were faking. Did you actually ever go for it, during the game?"

 

It was at this time that a cluster of girls, apparently Ginny's friends, started hailing her with exaggerated waves. Ginny looked over at them.

 

"Guess you'll never know," Cho said, and Ginny excused herself to be with her friends, leaving Katie and Cho on their own.

 

"I think she was speaking a bit about herself there," said Katie after a moment. "With that stuff about Jimmy and Demelza."

 

"There's a boy that likes her?" Cho asked, and Katie shook her head.

 

"No, it's her that likes the boy."

 

"Does he know about it?"

 

"He might. But who really knows?" Katie looked at her. "Boys, right?"

 

"Yeah," Cho agreed, "boys."

 

They shared a significant look for a moment, and then both started laughing, sharing in something that wasn't quite a joke but was funny all the same.

 

------------------

 

The night wound on; the common room still buzzed over Harry Potter's dramatic entrance and similarly dramatic wordless exit hand-in-hand with Ginny Weasley. Cho and Katie were sat on one of the comfortable couches, and had been for some time. It must have been coming close to midnight, Cho supposed, but she didn't feel tired and the party didn't seem in danger of flagging any time soon. She would be happy for it to stay this way until the sun came up.

 

"I'm not even sure what the big deal was," Katie said with a wave of her hand. It was clear what she was talking about.

 

"No," Cho agreed, "it was just a kiss."

 

"Right," Katie said, "what's such a big deal about a kiss?"

 

"It's not a big deal at all," Cho said. She was watching Katie.

 

"Not at all," Katie agreed. She was now looking at Cho instead of gesturing off into the distance.

 

"It's a bit silly, how everyone's got so worked up over just a kiss." It didn't feel like they were having a conversation but instead were making moves back and forth in some game where they both only had a dim understanding of the rules.

 

"It is silly. It's just a kiss." Katie seemed very close.

 

"Just a kiss." Cho leaned a little closer to her.

 

"Not a big deal." Katie's voice was very low. Cho noticed her eyes were closed.

 

"Not a big deal."

 

Cho's lips brushed across Katie's, and while the rest of the room didn't disappear from existence, the universe didn't reduce itself to just the two of them, time did not slow to extend the moment to last forever, great swells of music did not begin to play and fireworks were not launched into the sky, Cho found this was unimportant. She didn't want the music and fireworks, didn't need the extra time, didn't care what anyone else might or might not think. Katie's leg was pressed against hers, Katie's hand held in hers, Katie's lips pressed against hers. She loved Katie; Katie loved her back. That was all she wanted. That was what was most important.

 

 

09-12-04