Cho Chang and the Goblet of Fire: An Alternate Fanfic
By monkeymouse
Based on writings by JK Rowling
Part One: 24 June, 1995
xxx
"Kill the spare."
Harry Potter was kneeling on the ground, his head feeling as if it were about to burst open from pain. He couldn't fix on anything but Cedric's shoes, and even that much attention away from the pain took an effort.
He thought he sensed a wand being drawn by the robed figure they'd met in the churchyard. He heard a high voice screeching: "Avada--"
"WAIT!"
This voice, the one he'd heard before, was also high-pitched, but oddly thin, as if spoken by someone who couldn't draw breath. He'd heard it before--
He felt himself being pulled upright, but not by any human hands. He was Spelled to his feet, his face pressed to a headstone in the ruined old churchyard. He also felt ropes binding him to the spot--him and Cedric Diggory, who at least was struggling to get loose.
"Save your strength, laddie," came the thin, high voice, "and don't give me any resistance. I merely want to know what brought you here. I had made quite certain that Harry Potter, and only Harry Potter, would win the Third Task, and yet here you are. Look at you: the fair-haired, square-jawed Saxon mother's son. I am curious: what sort of a lad would do such a thing?"
The pain in Harry's head began to ease a bit. He turned his head to look at Cedric, whose eyes had begun to glaze over. "Cedric, don't! Don't let him--"
The pain returned, stronger than ever. Harry felt as if he was going to vomit up all the food he'd ever eaten.
"Ah, yes; a Hufflepuff," the thin voice said. "Your House has always had its reputation for, shall we say, earnestness without real effect. The Diggory family? Certainly Pureblood enough, but somehow your parents never saw fit to join me. A pity. They insisted on following the Ministry's lead, although Merlin knows it never did much for them. Is that your girl, then?"
Now, despite the pain, Harry started to struggle; he knew that this thing was sorting through Cedric's thoughts and memories about Cho Chang. Cedric had asked her to the Yule Ball; Cedric had rescued her from the bottom of the lake in the Second Task; the two of them had been almost inseparable since Christmas, and it tore at Harry's heart. The first girl, the only girl, he had ever been in love with, and Cedric-- He didn't want to resent Cedric, but at times he couldn't stop himself.
"A pretty enough little thing," the voice was saying; "she'll just have to get on without you.
"And now for the star of the evening," the voice continued, moving closer to Harry. "The Boy Who Lived; that's what they call you, isn't it? Don't worry, Potter; I have to keep you alive, at least long enough to come back into the world in a new and healthy body. Better than the one you deprived me of thirteen Halloweens ago."
Harry felt sick, and grew sicker when he turned his head toward the voice. A wizard was holding a bundle of rags; the voice came from the bundle. But Harry knew the face of the wizard holding the bundle: knew it all too well.
Peter Pettigrew. The wizard who had betrayed his parents to Voldemort and brought about their deaths. Before he could say anything, Harry felt and tasted a foul rag of black cloth being shoved into his mouth.
xxx
Cho wasn't the only person in the audience up in the Quidditch stadium stands, looking down into the maze, who was completely baffled. This shouldn't be happening, she kept telling herself; this isn't supposed to be happening.
Nobody else seemed to know anything, either. Once Potter and Diggory touched the Cup and they both disappeared, she understood one thing clearly enough: the cup was a Portkey. It had behaved like one, anyway, and sent the two Hogwarts Champions off--but where?
Dumbledore and McGonagall, Flitwick and Hagrid, and Mad-Eye Moody and even Snape were all dashing about the perimeter of the maze, trying to find out what had happened. But nobody was telling the audience anything, not even Ludo Bagman, the apparent master of ceremonies.
Cho tried to keep down her rising sense of panic. Not both of them, she kept saying to herself; don't let me lose them both at once.
xxx
Death Eaters had been arriving since the unholy thing that had been placed in the cauldron--along with a bone from the grave of Voldemort's Muggle father, Tom Riddle, with the severed arm of Peter Pettigrew, and with blood from the wounded leg of Harry Potter--emerged as Lord Voldemort. The Dark Lord stretched himself, like a cat after a nap, getting used to having a body again, before turning to Harry.
"The moment has come ... to pay back in kind the boy who stopped my rise to power." He stood before Harry, whose leg was throbbing dully now but still could not support his weight.
"What about it, boy?" Voldemort whispered an inch from Harry's face. "Where are your last thoughts now? With your parents, both dead in a noble but futile gesture? With that fool Dumbledore? Or do you have some little girlfriend of your own?"
Harry couldn't help it; his mind jumped back to images of Cho Chang. The first time he ever saw her, over a year ago on the Quidditch pitch ... the thrill of touching her fingertips with his own as she handed back his quill ... the sight of her tied to the underwater statue in the Second Task ... the vision of her attending the Yule Ball--on Cedric's arm ...
Harry suddenly realized that Voldemort had stopped talking; instead, he seemed to be listening to Harry's thoughts. There was no other way to put it: with each image of Cho in his mind, Voldemort reacted to it. Finally, Harry tried to think of something else, anything else--but it was too late. Voldemort was laughing: a cold, dry, joyless laugh.
"Priceless," the Dark Lord said as he paced around the tombstone where Harry was securely tied. "Absolutely priceless."
"What are you going to do to him?"
Voldemort turned in amazement. Cedric Diggory, largely ignored once he too had been tied to a monument, had worked the gag out of his mouth.
"Very resourceful, boy, but you'll get no more freedom than that. Wormtail."
Pettigrew dashed forward, his new metallic arm shining in the moonlight, to put the gag back in Cedric's mouth. Before he could do so, Cedric managed to shout, "What are you doing to him?!"
"You needn't be so concerned, boy," Voldemort said smoothly as Cedric was being gagged again. "I'm only going to give Harry Potter exactly what he wants..."
xxx
The time ticked away. Forty minutes since the Hogwarts Champions had disappeared. Teachers were still scuttling around and into the maze; wizards--Cho assumed that they were from the Ministry--showed up, examining, offering opinions. Professor Moody circled the maze, only stopping once to hear from one of the Ministry wizards as he whispered something in his ear. Had they found the boys? What was happening??
With a flash and a loud crack, the Goblet of Fire suddenly reappeared. Clutching it was Cedric Diggory, who immediately dropped to his knees, then fainted dead away.
There was no sign of Harry Potter.
Cedric's sudden appearance unleashed a kind of madness. Everyone started screaming, or running, or doing both. Professor Snape was trying to hold back Cedric's parents, Amos and Celia Diggory, as they pushed through the mob toward their son. Cedric, meanwhile, had been Locomotored out of the stadium.
Cho Chang was one of the shortest witches in her Year, and couldn't fight against the mob of panicked spectators. But she was not without resources. She drew her wand.
"Accio Comet!"
Taking a page from what Harry Potter had done in the First Task, she'd Summoned her Quidditch broom. She quickly mounted it and flew above the heads of the spectators--then had to fly higher as scores of owls began carrying messages to and from Hogwarts, telling the news of what had happened, offering theories of what might have happened.
Cho wasn't interested in what they had to say. She went straight to the source.
She flew in the window of her dormitory room in Ravenclaw, left her broom on her bed, and dashed downstairs to the hospital wing. Others were crowding the corridors already, but here, unlike in the stadium, her diminutive size worked to her advantage. She was able to slip along walls and between people until she got to the heavy wooden doors of the hospital wing. They were closed; she pounded on them with both fists.
"CEDRIC!"
No sooner had she started pounding than the door opened, and Madame Sprout, the Head of Hufflepuff House, stepped into the corridor. Everyone started shouting questions at her; she raised her hands and called for silence.
"Listen to me please! I've been sent with a message from Madame Pomfrey and the Headmaster!" She had to repeat this two or three times, but gradually the crowd quieted down.
"Cedric Diggory is still unconscious, but apart from that he seems unharmed. We have no way of knowing where he's been, nor what, if anything, happened to Harry Potter, until he is awake." Pomfrey was interrupted by a high-pitched little sob. Cho turned to see; it was Ginny Weasley, sobbing into the shoulder of Hermione Granger, whose eyes also shone with tears. Ginny's three brothers stood around her like a military guard.
Madam Pomfrey began again, her voice a bit less steady than before. "An announcement will be made to the school the instant we've learned anything. In the meanwhile, there is nothing to learn. The Headmaster hopes that none of you will spend time fretting yourselves over guesses and wild rumours. As hard as it may be, he asks you to have patience, so that wizards in authority can solve this problem. Now, everyone, please go back to your Houses. And please clear a path so that Cedric's parents can come in."
The crowd parted for the two. Cho was standing next to the door, and didn't move an inch as Amos and Celia Diggory made their way through the mass of students to the hospital wing. Cho had only just met Cedric's parents that day for the first time, and they seemed not to know what to make of Cho, nor of their son's attraction to her. Celia Diggory's eyes were still red from crying, although her face showed relief more than any other emotion; Amos Diggory, his hands on his wife's shoulders, turned his head briefly to glare at Cho, as if she were somehow the cause of all this, before they were ushered inside the hospital wing and the door slammed shut.
The mob began to thin out as students went back to their Houses, but about half of the students stayed in front of the door, as if it might tell them something else. Cho was one of those students. She looked at the door, reached up, and touched the wood of the door with both hands. Then she slowly sank to her knees on the cold stone floor, her hands still on the door, and began to cry.
Her friend and dorm-mate Marietta Edgecombe, who was also still there, rushed forward to help Cho to her feet. Professor Flitwick was also there, and he took one of Cho's hands in his own. "You mustn't worry, my dear," the tiny professor said; "the Ministry is doing everything it can. And at least Mister Diggory seems to be well."
But Cho couldn't explain the emotions churning in her like the contents of a boiling cauldron. She'd had the great joy of falling in love--with Harry Potter. She'd seen him arrive at Hogwarts: the legendary Harry Potter, the infant who stopped the death and destruction caused by Voldemort and his Death Eaters, only to vanish into obscurity for a decade. Cho, who aspired to be a Seeker herself, watched as Harry was almost immediately placed on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, demonstrating very powerful talent, if still a bit raw. Almost a year earlier was the first time they'd played Quidditch against each other. But he was in a different House, and a different Year, and--in spite of the legends that had grown up around him--seemed to be just as shy about approaching girls as Cho was about approaching him. She would see him in passing in the corridors, but do no more than wave to him. It wasn't until just before the First Task that they had actually blundered into a conversation, but it was at least a start, and Cho hoped that it would lead to Harry asking her to the Yule Ball...
but Cedric Diggory had asked first. And, from the moment she found herself in his arms on the dance floor, the tall and handsome Hufflepuff Seeker filled her thoughts. They spent almost every spare moment together in the six months between the Ball and the Third Task, and Cho had learned the intoxicating confusion of a kiss from Cedric...
even as a tiny corner of her heart also carried her love for Harry. They say one never forgets one's first love; certainly, Cho could not. Cho did not.
And, like Amos Diggory, Cho blamed herself for whatever was happening. Somehow, in some way nobody could know, this had happened because (whether she could help it or not) she loved two boys at once, and somehow both boys and Cho were being punished for it.
xxx
continued in part 2: 25 June, 1995