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Cho was more than tired of university. She had thought it would be a good idea to go to muggle school after leaving Hogwarts—perhaps for the perspective it would bring. She wanted to work in Muggle Relations, after all. It would easily give her a competitive edge when applying after she graduated.
Her routine had gone horribly stagnant over the past year. She’d taken classes every time they were available, and it was starting to catch up with her. Every day, she would start with her morning classes. Lunch was usually a protein bar and a smoothie on her way to the tutoring office, where she gave lessons until two o’clock. After that, she went straight to Carmella’s Cafe right off campus to do homework before her evening classes. She could usually get two hours of solid work done there.
Most of the time, the cast of strangers in the cafe changed. London was a big city, with many different people with various schedules. But there was one man, around Cho’s age, who was there every day at the same time as she was. She had absolutely no time for any kind of entanglement, of course, but she liked to set up her things in such a way that she’d be able to look up and see him across the room. It was one of her mundane pleasures in a very stress-filled life.
She caught his name one afternoon in July, 1999. Dudley. She thought it was the cutest thing she had ever heard. The name made her picture a teddy bear with a wee bow tie. It quite matched the large, blonde man she stole looks at every day.
As the summer semester was coming to a close, Cho wondered if she’d finally have time for relationships—if she chose to ask Dudley on a date one of these days. It was coming up on her last semester of school, since she’d been working ahead for so long. Maybe it would be the change she was looking for. She’d known plenty of people who’d dated muggles, or friends who had one magical parent and one muggle parent. It could work.
—
Dudley knew ditching university to work for a theatre in London wouldn’t make him very popular with his parents, but he couldn’t say no to such an opportunity.
He’d been writing his whole life. When the expectations of his parents got too much for him, it was much easier to dive into a journal than really address anything with them. His father was a bully and his mother was a pushover to his father. No amount of love for them could blind Dudley from that. It made any kind of boundary-setting very difficult.
Now that he was writing plays for a living, he really felt free. A one-off writing contest in the paper had liberated him from a future working at a drill company and turning into his father. It had been great until his worst review.
Someone had said that his writing was ‘dry and not evoking of any particular feeling aside from indifference’. It was by far the harshest thing that had ever been said about his work. He knew better than to let it crush his spirits for the next project, but it was easier said than done.
He spent days after that writing and re-writing the first scene in his newest play. Every time he thought he’d gotten it, he just heard the critic’s words in his head and erased it again.
One light in the darkness was a woman who frequented the same cafe, Carmella’s. He and she always sat in the same places every day, positioned facing each other across the distance of the cafe. Her furrowed brow as she violently erased something in her notebook, or her small smile as she packed up her things, were little highlights in very long days for Dudley. He hoped that he’d have the guts to ask her out one day, but for now he continued to write different versions of the same fifteen lines every day.
—
This was it. Cho was finally going to ask out Dudley.
It was late November. She was nearing the end of the semester now, and there was no putting it off any longer. She didn’t know why she’d waited this long—she really had meant to ask him out as the beginning of the semester. She just hadn’t been able to work up the courage yet.
She had to stop talking herself out of it. She decided to do something possibly disastrous, definitely a bit out there, but potentially successful.
“Can you write something on the cup?” Cho asked the barista. She couldn’t even ask him out through a cup of coffee without blushing. She handed the woman a piece of paper with her desired message on it—The girl across the room wants to know if you’d like to be on the same side of the cafe for a change.
Cho obviously knew this was corny. To be fair, though, that was sort of her personality. The barista gave her a slight smile, but wrote the message on the paper coffee cup nonetheless. After she paid, Cho hurried back to her seat to watch the events unfold.
“Dudley!” the woman called out once she had finished making his drink. Dudley looked around the room as if there was another Dudley to pick up a coffee. When he found no one, the man got up and accepted the coffee. Cho held her breath as he brought it back to his seat, anxious for the moment he’d read the message. Once he did, Cho saw his eyes flicker with realization before his gaze met hers across the room. She gulped as he approached her table.
“I reckon this is from you?” he asked, a smile growing on his lips. Cho nodded, still nervous about his response. He hadn’t indicated one way or the other what he’d thought about the gesture. “Can I at least have your name?”
“Cho Chang,” she said quietly. He nodded, still smiling, and walked back to the other side of the cafe. Cho’s heart sank a little and started to pack her things, trying not to look in his direction. He’d rejected her. This was fine, she’d just have to find a new cafe—
“You didn’t think I’d left you, did you?” he asked, sitting across from her at her table. “It’s nice to meet you, Cho. I’m Dudley.”