starfishstar

Fandom: Harry Potter

Summary: Cho Chang flees the wreckage of the war, and learns to make a new life for herself in California.

Characters: Cho Chang, mentions of others

Words: 1,200

Notes: This is the first of four fics in the series More Than This World Can Contain. Each of the four stands alone, and they don't need to be read in order; but the linking theme is that each one-shot catches up with a different character in the years beyond the end of the war. My thanks to

emily_in_the_glass for thoughtful beta feedback and great discussions of story and character!

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Cho loved California from her very first day.

Not because of the ocean that spread like a sparkling banner at the feet of the steep city. Not because of the sea air, or the palm trees, or the parks where people laughed and played music and made anarcho-socialist collaborative art projects – although all of those things were wonderful in their own ways.

What Cho loved was how, in San Francisco, she simply blended into the crowd. So many people here looked like her (unlike Hogwarts, so very much unlike Hogwarts). And more importantly, no one here knew her. If Cho stood out at all, amongst these American Muggles, it was only when she opened her mouth and revealed her accent: an accent Americans effusively described as “gorgeous” and “charming” and – inexplicably – “sexy.”

In California, no one knew her. She wasn’t “that girl who was dating Cedric Diggory when he died.” She wasn’t “the girl who had a chance with Harry Potter, can you believe she messed that up?” She wasn’t a member of Dumbledore’s Army, a survivor of the final battle, a Hogwarts student from Those Infamous Years. In California, no one even knew she was a witch, for the simple reason that she didn’t tell them.

Cho hadn’t realised how claustrophobic the British wizarding world was, until she got herself free.

That first summer after the battle, Cho found a job waiting tables at a tiny Mexican bistro perched atop a precariously steep street. Every day before starting her shift, she took a last moment to stand on the pavement outside the restaurant, gazing down the hill and over this world that was her new life.

Marietta had begged her to stay in the UK. They could get a flat together in London, somewhere close by Diagon Alley, and they could both work for the Ministry. Even after everything, Marietta still wanted that dream.

Cho knew Marietta had lost people, too. It wasn’t fair to think, as she sometimes caught herself thinking, that Marietta hadn’t been changed by the war, that she hadn’t been hurt. The war had come for all of them, one way or another. But Marietta was still willing to put her head back up and dare the wizarding world to think of her whatever it would think. And Cho…wasn’t.

It wasn’t out of cowardice. Cho wasn’t afraid of anything anybody might have to say. It was more a kind of exhaustion. A weary resignation that had grown to encompass an entire people, an entire nation. There was nothing the wizarding world could offer anymore that Cho Chang could imagine wanting.

Her boss at the restaurant was so impressed with Cho’s progress, from clueless novice to competent server in mere weeks, that by July he was begging her – only half in jest – to stay on and work for him full time, instead of returning to university when autumn came.

It was only by him saying this, that she realised it was even a possibility: Cho could, if she chose, attend a Muggle university here in America. Step into the normal college life her boss assumed she already had.

She got a scholarship, and a second part-time job to fund what the scholarship didn’t cover. And sooner than she would have imagined, Cho was an educated woman with a degree in business administration, and then a good job, and then a better one. Her parents gave up trying to convince her to move home, and instead started trying to convince her to settle down with someone, even if it did mean staying in America.

Back home, Harry Potter married Ginny Weasley. Amos Diggory erected a monument. And the British wizarding community, at its usual painfully slow pace of progress, grappled with its torn-apart past and struggled its way towards a future that might be a little bit better.

Loyal Marietta still wrote letters by long-distance petrel post, and Cho was happy to hear of her successful career at the Ministry. But there was no part of her that wanted that for herself. She would rather live out all her days in anonymity than give herself back to that world, a world that had sent a whole generation of children to die for its prejudices.

Cho wasn’t bitter; that wasn’t it exactly. But she’d been burned once, and she knew better than to venture near the fire again.

She first met Grant at a friend’s after-work barbeque. It was one of those perfect early October evenings: the air was mild and free of fog, and laughter seemed to ring freer than at any other time of year. Summers in San Francisco hardly lived up to their name, but the autumns were a dream.

Grant was the vice president of an environmental start-up; he’d founded it together with three friends straight out of university and was now a millionaire, at least according to the excited whispers of Cho’s friends.

It wasn’t the money that impressed her, though; it was the determination of a boy from Indiana who’d had a dream and crossed the country to make it happen. As a war-traumatised witch who’d remade herself at age 18, Cho could relate to that.

They’d been dating half a year before she finally gritted her teeth, sat Grant down and said, “There’s something I have to tell you.” Statute of Secrecy or no, if she was serious about this guy she couldn’t spend the rest of her life lying to him.

To her amazement, he received the revelation that his girlfriend was a real-life witch with enthusiasm. He wanted to know if he could meet her family, if they could do spells, if she could do spells, if she would show him one. But then he saw her face and asked, with the gentle compassion she loved so much about him, “Or is it something you’d rather not talk about?”

Cho, to her own surprise, found she didn’t mind talking about it. Telling Grant about magic wasn’t painful. He didn’t have any part in the history of it or in everything she had lost. He was just excited and sweet and eager to share this part of her life. She’d forgotten it was even possible to find magic beautiful.

So she went to the false panel behind the bookshelf and took out her old wand, its weight and shape so familiar even now, years after she’d last wielded it. Grant’s eyes grew wide as he watched her, and she didn’t need to think of a happy memory to work the spell – all she needed was Grant right there in front of her, with all his kindness in his eyes.

“Expectro Patronum,” Cho said. The silvery shape that glided out from the tip of her wand was her same old swan, the same strong and graceful form she’d learned to produce in DA lessons with Harry all those years ago.

Tears prickled at her eyes. Had she missed magic all this time, and hadn’t known it?

She went and sat down next to Grant, where he was perched on the edge of her bed, and took his hand.

“Let me tell you how I first learned to cast that spell,” she said.

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End notes:

This chapter was inspired by a discussion about Cho on hp_diversity and particularly by the following comments there:

– "JKR's comment that Cho married a Muggle always made me wonder if Cho might have felt disillusioned about the wizarding world after the events of the war. She lost Cedric, she almost certainly lost other friends... Maybe the Muggle world felt like a safer place after those experiences." (by pauraque)

– "I think Cho might have married a Muggle because she didn't feel safe and comfortable in the Wizarding World anymore. I'm guessing it must be exhausting to always wonder if people see you as "That girl who dated the boy who got killed", "The Boy-Who-Lived's 5th year sweetheart"... I think it might have been easier for Cho to find someone who saw her for who she was, rather than who she has been." (by nearlyconscious)

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(Continue to the second fic in the series, about Viktor: OLD FRIENDS)