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If Cho had any sense, she wouldn’t be here. She would be at home, cooking dinner and smiling vacantly at Harry as he smiled vacantly back, both of their ears tuned in sharply to the radio as Lee Jordan announced another goal for the Harpies, because wow, Ginny Weasley was on fire today, wasn’t she. If Cho had any sense, she would be staring at the wall over her fiancee’s shoulder as Ginny Weasley came in, breathless, laughing, to the radio interview talking about her wife’s contributions to journalism and how they were planning a vacation when the season was over. If Cho had any sense, she wouldn’t have gotten into this damn situation in the first place, wouldn’t have felt the need to run, to keep running, because all she could see was Marietta’s face, frozen in one final look of shock as green light engulfed her, because all she could see was Lavender Brown, with her stupid Dumbledore’s Army patch on the breast of her student robes–oh god, they had been students, hadn’t they, young and carefree, not carefree, never carefree, but young and stupid and tiny, trying so hard to understand something incomprehensible, a war too big for their small universe minds.
If Cho had any sense, she would not have walked up to the altar that day, looking blankly at Harry Potter as he said his empty vows, as she said her empty vows, as they exchanged rings like shackles. She would have never gotten married to someone she couldn’t love, would never have had a child with him, would not have subjected her daughter to the loveless household that she had always been so afraid of replicating.
If Cho had any sense, she would have either run or stayed, not this crazy, in-between thing that terrified her. She wondered if Marietta, either of them, had ever wanted to run like she had, ever wanted to scream and break and rip through the skin over their backs as their sorrow sliced through bone and muscle like tissue paper. Did her daughter ever feel lonely, even though she had not grown up with war pounding through her veins instead of blood? Her friend had, but they had been together, until they weren’t. No, Cho decided, neither Marietta would ever know her crushing loneliness, here in Muggle London, 19 years after a war that should not have happened yet did.
Cho had no sense, she knew, as she slid into the booth of an old, crusty diner that had been last cleaned before the battle of Hogwarts. Harry wouldn’t question her absence, she knew, he never did, and she took a brief moment to hate him for that, hate him for the cracks in their marriage that had come from forcing two loveless people together to play house, the flint that came from banging themselves together so hard to create the imagination that they were happy.
Her grip was loose on her wand as the clock ticked, slow and steady, counting down the minutes until her companions arrived, as staggered as ever. Her coffee sat in front of her, the muggle waitress coming to top it off whenever she so much as took a sip, never getting below half-full. Cho glared at it, before giving up. There was nothing she could do about that turn of events, like so much else in her life.
The first to come was Oliver, sliding into the chair across from her. He smiled gently, pulling up the menu and saying nothing. She appreciated his lack of need to fill the space with meaningless small talk like so much of her life was filled, instead studying the menu with the single-mindedness that he was so good at. Marcus followed him not soon after, entering the diner with a clang before making his way to their table.
Katie, Alicia, and Angelina came in together, followed by George and Cormac, and suddenly the trickle was a tide, and everyone was there, everyone was talking and laughing and it was so different than her house, with it’s bland smiles and empty sentiments, these adults that had survived against all the odds, who had fought the war rushing through their bodies and won, who had looked at the darkness following them and had whispered, “not today.”
Not today. Never today. Tomorrow, they could lose, but not today.
If Cho had any sense, she would go back to change it all. Use one of those time turners, go back to herself at eleven and look herself in the eye and whisper, “you will be beautiful and terrible and nothing to everyone and no one. you will be a genius and a scholar and a vagrant. you will cry and you will laugh, but it will be your choice, in the end. choose well.” She would have made a choice, instead of spending years on the periphery, looking and cataloguing and wondering when she would finally know enough to do something.
She will never know enough. She knew that, finally, just like she knew that these people around her, their motley crew of not-quite-friends, with Adrian Pucey glaring across the table down at the other end, Katie Bell and Alicia Spinnet leaning into each other, George Weasley looking at Lee Jordan like he hung the sun, Oliver Wood trying to strangle Marcus Flint, would be with her no matter what, even if she never spoke a word to them in her life.
Angelina Johnson leaned over to her from where she was arm wrestling Roger Davies, smiling. “Tell him I’m right, Cho, you know I am.”
Cho had no idea what they were talking about, but she turned a strict look on Davies, anyway. “She’s right.”
He gasped dramatically, flinging a hand over his eyes, “I have been wronged–horribly wronged!” He then brightened, leaning over to Montague on his left to start a discussion, presumably about some Shakespeare play or other.
Angelina smiled at her, and if Cho had any sense, she would leave now, would go home to overcooked beans and a husband in love with another woman. If Cho had any sense, she would stop this and turn away and say no. She would think of her daughter and her job and all the other important, insignificant details of her life.
Cho has never claimed to have any sense.