Celestine's fics (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} celescribbles) wrote,@ 2007-11-20 20:04:00 |
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The Other Side of the World
Genre: Romance, Angst, Post-DH
Rating: PG-13
Story Summary: After breaking up with Michael, Cho travels abroad and makes an unexpected encounter. Part Two in a four-part series.
Notes: thanks to Anne for the beta.
Closing her eyes, turning over, opening them, fluffing the pillow: none of it is of any use. Cho can’t sleep.
It’s too hot - she keeps fanning herself to get a bit of air, but the very air boiling - but she feels it isn’t only that. It’s the plane trip, the food, and when she glances at her watch, she realises she hasn’t set it to local time. It’s only early afternoon in London.
London… it already feels a world away. It’s June over there and still mild, the flowerbeds are blooming prettily in the parks, the Thames is rolling, calm and steely, and the nights are cool. Here it feels like August. And Beijing is stuffy, dirty, endless.
But for all the inconveniences, Cho’s happy to be lying on this bed, in this cramped room, with her aunt snoring softly next door, lost in the midst of a huge, unfamiliar city. In Beijing she feels like a little insect, with her dark, bright eyes reflecting the light of the street lamp outside her window, scurrying about for sleep.
She smiles and for something to do, she slowly turns the hands of her watch. It’s not the beginning of the afternoon anywhere anymore. It’s midnight in Beijing.
*****************************
When Michael left, Cho cried, and her tears seemed clumsy and grotesque to her. She buried her face in her hands and when she pulled back, she could see the wetness on her palms, and continued to stare at them, sobbing still, instead of looking at him, as he pulled his coat on, turning his back to her.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not that it wasn’t supposed to end at all – even after three years -- it wasn’t a surprise that their relationship should come to a finish. But not quietly, in such a stupid way, out the back door.
He didn’t want to move in with her. It was too early, he’d said. It was a step he wasn’t ready to take. And Cho had been annoyed and discontent, and whenever she thought of him the little daily frustrations seemed to overcome the kisses and the loving words. And it was amazing how rapidly, after all this time, it had gone awry.
There was someone else in his life, she was sure of it. He was cheating on her with another woman. She’d confront him and force him to tell the truth. Then when he did, she would scream at him and throw him out and cry for days.
But the sad truth, the sadder truth, was that Michael wasn’t leaving her for someone else, but simply because he didn’t love her anymore, and under the layers of habit and comfort and nagging belief that everything could still be all right, she didn’t love him either. She just wanted him to stay because beyond him there was no one, but he was leaving her to be alone.
“You knew it couldn’t go on,” he’d told her before leaving. “Not after Hogwarts. You and I, we both want to be someone else now.”
And Cho cried. She hated herself for it. She’d cried when Cedric had died, she’d cried when Harry had slighted her, and now she was crying because a boy she didn’t even love was breaking off a relationship she wasn’t happy in. It seemed to her that her tears had become more and more futile over the years, insignificant and abundant like tap water. Perhaps she was crying for that too.
*****************************
During the day, her aunt Jia works at the Meihui Healing Temple and leaves her alone to explore. Not that she knows exactly what she should visit first. The Great Wall, the Forbidden City. The Hidden Pavilion of Na-Han the Mage. She decides to start with this, as Chinese wizards might be a little less intimidating than Chinese Muggles.
It’s morning in Beijing and the sidewalks are crowded, the bicycles are rattling by steadily, and dozens of small restaurants and barber shops are lined up on the sidewalk – in Beijing, you can get your hair cut at any time of the day or night. She idly wonders what it would be like to walk into a barbershop at three in the morning and walk out with a new haircut half an hour later, just for the heck of it. She’s always liked her hair long – all the Ravenclaw girls admired it, were jealous even – but she feels she’s ready for a change.
“Short hair just makes your face look chubby.” That’s what Marietta would say, and Cho can picture her freckled nose and wry expression as if she were in front of her. Then again, she hasn’t heard Marietta say anything to her in quite awhile.
When she arrives at the place where the Hidden Pavilion of Na-Han the Mage should be, there’s just an old street musician playing a sort of elongated guitar.
“A coin for an old beggar?” he asks her in Mandarin. “It’s the song of Na-Han the Magnificent.”
Cho smiles and drops a silver Daiyu in his hat. Before her eyes, a beautiful, multicoloured pagoda appears. Its roofs are gilded, and the old musician gives a little laugh. Cho wipes her forehead, bunches her hair up in a ponytail to bare her neck, and walks towards the Pavilion, in front of which a throng of wizards in silk embroidered robes are taking pictures.
*****************************
“I think you should try to get him back.”
Marietta stirred her coffee slowly, while glancing out the window. It seemed she had spent that entire hour glancing out the window and not at Cho, as if after all these years she no longer needed to look at the face across from hers, a face she knew by heart.
Where had it gone, everything that had seemed familiar? Had it disappeared with the war, or just now, on that cold blue morning in the cramped coffee shop?
“I mean, don’t you miss him, after all this time?”
“I do. I do miss him – and it’s awful to come home to an empty flat every night, but I don’t think I should. It just wasn’t working out, Marietta. It really wasn’t. I’m so busy with the paper, and… I don’t know, there wasn’t any spark left, you know?”
“Oh Cho, we’re not teenagers anymore, for Merlin’s sake. If you keep looking for that little tug in your stomach like when you fancied some bloke in school, you’re bound to end up unhappy.”
Cho frowned. She didn’t like what Marietta was implying – that her time with Cedric had been nothing more than a meaningless fling. At the time, it had been all she knew of love - love in its own way. And who said love had to stay the same your whole life?
“Well, in any case, I can’t stay with a bloke who I have no feelings left for except some sort of… affection.”
“All right. But Michael is handsome, he’s got a position, a nice flat, he’s laid-back and funny…”
“Yeah, so what? If you like him so much, why don’t you bloody date him?”
She was annoyed and frustrated by now. How long had it been since Marietta and she had stopped looking at the world in a similar way? And how was it that she had not noticed amidst the tranquil recollections of tiny memories, and silly gossip, and bland little pieces of news…
“I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll Floo you.”
Cho looked at her - her curly auburn ringlets, her pretty face - with the sinking feeling that whatever had driven Michael away would also eventually turn Marietta into nothing more than a bland little piece of news, overheard by chance from someone else and received with a nod and a smile.
*****************************
It’s windy on the Great Wall, windy and hot and immense. It’s good to feel so tiny, to feel time shrink all of a sudden. Cho is delighted to line up with Muggles to buy souvenirs, to use real Muggle Huans. There are wizards there, too, just as amazed as the Muggles by the colossal, seemingly endless brick construction that slithers away into the distant mountains, and suffocating just the same under the sun.
Cho checks her watch and realises the next Portkey won’t be for another hour. She looks around for a Muggle bus, squinting at the signs, and feels a swooping feeling of pride when she finally finds the one that will take her back to Beijing.
Waiting at the stop next to her is a Muggle tourist, biting his lip and glancing nervously at the sign, then flipping furiously through his travel guide. He’s young, with a tanned, reddened face and short blond hair. There’s a smile making its way to her lips but she tries to push it back so he won’t think she’s laughing at him.
Finally, he looks her way, and starts speaking very slowly with a strong Scottish accent. “Excuse me… can you… tell me if… this bus… goes to Beijing?”
Cho giggles – she can’t hold it in anymore - and for a moment he looks slightly alarmed, but then she says, “I speak English. I’m from England, actually. But to answer your question, yes, this bus is headed for Beijing.”
“Oh.” He laughs as well now, still a bit nervous. “I’m sorry, miss, I thought you were a – I mean, that you – well -”
“I’m visiting a relative here,” she explains. The wind ruffles her hair, blowing off the wall, a compact, comforting presence behind them. She stretches out her hand, amused by the situation, and he shakes it. “I’m Cho.”
“Derek.”
The bus arrives and he stands aside to let her climb aboard, and then follows close behind.
*****************************
“All right, so you’re visiting your aunt, but why, exactly, is it that you should be seeing all the sights alone?”
Derek is struggling to pick up of a piece of chicken with his chopsticks, and she laughs – it seems she’s been bubbling to the brim with laughter ever since they met, and now it’s late in the evening, in a tiny little restaurant.
“Oh, I came here on my own – just needed to get away from the old routine, you know what I mean?”
“And how – sod it.” He chuckles at his plate, where the piece of chicken is still eluding him. “I’ve been saving up for months for this. But it’s not really a holiday.”
Cho picks up a noodle, deftly, and they both grin and she shakes her shoulders a bit, as if she wants to show off. And she does, but not to spite him, just so he’ll still be thinking about it later, if only for a moment.
“Are you here for work?”
“Yes. It’s a sort of culinary experience for me. I’m a food critic. A food writer. And for the life of me, I’ve never been able to get the hang of using these, so that actually makes me a very poor food writer.”
Cho buries her face in her hands and the laughs come out like water rippling over stone, unstoppable, deliciously refreshing. It brings tears to her eyes and she tries to catch her breath.
“A food writer – wow, this is the first time I’ve ever met one. You’re not going to be able to write about anything,” she says, motioning towards his chopsticks.
“Well, since I’m footing the bill, I was hoping that you could repay me by giving me some lessons. It would be a terrible shame to go home empty-handed.”
*****************************
“Some time off, huh?”
Lee was sitting on the edge of his desk and Dean was looking at her, his pencil stuck behind his ear and his drawing pad on his knees.
“All right, listen - I really… can’t stand being in London right now, to be honest,” Cho said, then bit her lip. “But I’ve been thinking on how to make this profitable for the paper – I could write a column about the way Chinese wizards live, or something like that. ‘The Great Wizarding Sites of China’, that’s catchy.”
“Do you think it would work? People read the Phoenix for news the Prophet won’t publish…”
“But think about it – isn’t that just the point of our paper? To open the minds of our readers to what’s beyond wizarding Britain and their little lives?”
Dean nodded, and Cho smiled at him gratefully. “She’s right, Lee. We could use a bit of the exotic around here.”
“And how are we supposed to make the paper work with only two people manning the office and our third staff member running off to the other side of the world?”
“Here, we got this in the post today,” Dean said, pulling out an envelope. “Dennis Creevey. Just passed his OWLs and wants a summer job. Word has it he’s as good with a camera as his brother was.”
Lee sighed and looked at Cho. “You got yourself a deal. But don’t you get any funny ideas of not coming back just because Corner acted like an arse.”
*****************************
“You didn’t tell me which paper you worked for.”
Derek and Cho are sitting on a bench, lost in the middle of the business district, looking at the glimmering sky scrapers that all look at if they shot out of the ground overnight.
They’ve seen the Temple of Heaven, Tian’anmen Square, the Forbidden City. They’ve dined in all the smallest, most unassuming food stalls they could find. Derek paid. Cho forgot to exchange her Daiyus and Zhus for Muggle money.
They’ve talked as if they’d just found each other after looking a long, long time. And now, in this wonderful moment where he’s holding her hand, she doesn’t know what to say. The Phoenix – it doesn’t exist for him. It never will.
“It’s – it’s just this little newspaper me and some friends founded after we got out of school to…” She clears her throat. “We’re trying to take a new approach on… things.”
“Oh, kind of an underground thing.”
She nodded. “You won’t have heard of it.”
“Well, aren’t you the rebel,” he says with a grin that makes her heart beat faster. “And which column do you write?”
“I’m writing… I’m writing a travel piece.”
Why do the words feel like a lie as soon as she speaks them? It’s the truth – but not the whole truth. She wants to go on, explain things to him, but she can’t, so she simply looks at him, and all of a sudden Derek doesn’t care about hearing any more of the subject. When he slips his hand over her damp neck, it’s to set her hair lose against his fingers.
*****************************
Midnight, midnight, midnight in Beijing. The days and nights have passed in a wonderful blur, and when she goes to sleep, Cho curls up against Derek’s strong, solid body, lulled to sleep by the sounds of the city outside.
“Does he know?” her aunt Jia asked her in a whisper the other evening, when they were fixing coffee in the kitchen. Jia couldn’t speak English, and Derek couldn’t speak Mandarin, but he’d cooked for them with what he could find, and it was delicious.
“No, not yet. I’ll tell him eventually, if - when we get back.”
Jia and Cho’s mother are Muggle-born. Her aunt understands these things. She smiled and nodded and said nothing.
But they are going to go back. Cho tries not to think about it, tries to close her eyes and listen to Derek sleeping calmly beside her as the light of morning filters through the blinds. But the watch on her night table reminds her that somewhere else, the night is only starting. It’s midnight in London.
She sits up, weary, and pushes her tousled hair back from her face. When they go back to Britain – she never thought about what would happen. This is not a summer romance; she can feel it in her heart, her stomach, her bones, and surely he can feel it too, the way they fit together perfectly. Holidays, sunshine, these are not the fuel, and not her problem.
Cho stands up to open the blinds and finds that her vision of the street outside is blurred and her throat is tight. The tears are coming back – silly, stupid tears. But when she thinks that in three days, she’ll be on the plane, it feels like the end of the world.
“Cho…”
She doesn’t want Derek to see her cry, but the sobs are upon her already, and she makes a strangled hiccuping sound trying to hold them back.
“Cho, are you crying?”
She turns towards him, sits on the edge of the bed, feeling to heavy to stay standing. “I can’t help it… It’s just – it’s just that in three days…”
He places a hand on her hip, strokes it with his thumb. “I’ve been thinking about that. I could change my ticket to go back to Britain with you… I don’t want to stay in Beijing if you’re not here.”
It makes her cry even harder, fully realising what will happen after they get off the plane. At the airport, they won’t be two strangers anymore, lost together in a country the size of a continent, but a witch Apparating back to her flat and a Muggle taking the tube to the train station.
“Cho – come on. It was fate, us meeting here – we’ll make this work. Edinburgh and London aren’t so far from each other, are they? A couple of hours at most…” She chokes, thinking that it would take her seconds to Apparate that distance, and he goes on. “Do you really think that’ll keep us apart?”
He’s trying to sound happy, cheerful, but she can’t calm down.
“It’ll work, I swear it. There’s no reason to cry...”
“I’m crying because – because -” She presses her lips together and shakes her head. At that moment, it seems to her no one ever understood why she cried so much. And now more than ever, there’s no way to explain the reason behind her tears. “I’m crying because you’ll never read my newspaper.”
“What? I don’t understand -”
“And you’ll never see that – that bloody Hidden Pavillion. The Hidden Pavillion of Na-Han the Mage.” She gives another little sob, and brushes the tears from her cheeks. “And it’s really, really beautiful.”
They stay there awhile, not moving. Cho waits for Derek to ask for an explanation, to sit up, to express his confusion, but he just looks at her quietly until she finally turns towards him. He smiles.
“I see you.”
*****************************
“So, did you bring anything interesting back from Beijing?”
Cho looks up from the pack of pictures she’s been sifting through – pictures Stanley sent her. There’s the Great Wall, and Tian’anmen Square, lying on her cluttered desk. She’d like to publish them in the Phoenix, but according to Dennis, once they’ve been developed using Muggle methods, there’s no spell to make them move like wizard pictures. Dean leans over her shoulder to take a look at them.
“Muggle photos. I guess that answers part of my question.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” she tells him with a little smile. “It’s someone I met, but – well, he lives in Edinburgh. And yes, he’s a Muggle.”
Dean taps his pen against his leg, thoughtful. “Did you tell him?”
Cho lays the pictures down, stays silent for a moment. “No, I didn’t. I tried, but it all came and went so fast… I didn’t want to scare him.”
“It’d be an awful shame, though, to let it go just because of that,” Dean says. “And you have to give him a chance at the truth in any case, right? Muggle or not, if the man’s worth it, he’ll stick around.”
She nods. Dean told her and Lee all about his family, during the long, coffee-fuelled nights when they were wrapping up an edition. There’s no doubt he knows a lot more on the subject than she does.
“Yeah, you’re right… but I just don’t know how to break the news so that he’ll understand.”
“Cho, those columns on China that you wrote were a smash hit with the readers. I’d say it’s your most inspired work so far. Why don’t you let that do the talking?”
*****************************
Along with a copy of the Phoenix, she sent him a little note.
You’re not going to believe me, but there’s something you really have to know before you come to visit. And I hope you do, because I miss you.
She carefully consulted her Guide to Muggle England to know how many stamps to use. And when a few days passed without a reply, she started getting scared, until she read that the Muggle post usually took longer than owls.
And now here it is, a thick, brown envelope addressed to her. And inside, a magazine, Cooking with Class, and a bright little sticky note.
My train arrives Saturday at three. As long as you’re with me, I don’t mind travelling to the other side of the world again.
It’s too hot - she keeps fanning herself to get a bit of air, but the very air boiling - but she feels it isn’t only that. It’s the plane trip, the food, and when she glances at her watch, she realises she hasn’t set it to local time. It’s only early afternoon in London.
London… it already feels a world away. It’s June over there and still mild, the flowerbeds are blooming prettily in the parks, the Thames is rolling, calm and steely, and the nights are cool. Here it feels like August. And Beijing is stuffy, dirty, endless.
But for all the inconveniences, Cho’s happy to be lying on this bed, in this cramped room, with her aunt snoring softly next door, lost in the midst of a huge, unfamiliar city. In Beijing she feels like a little insect, with her dark, bright eyes reflecting the light of the street lamp outside her window, scurrying about for sleep.
She smiles and for something to do, she slowly turns the hands of her watch. It’s not the beginning of the afternoon anywhere anymore. It’s midnight in Beijing.
When Michael left, Cho cried, and her tears seemed clumsy and grotesque to her. She buried her face in her hands and when she pulled back, she could see the wetness on her palms, and continued to stare at them, sobbing still, instead of looking at him, as he pulled his coat on, turning his back to her.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not that it wasn’t supposed to end at all – even after three years -- it wasn’t a surprise that their relationship should come to a finish. But not quietly, in such a stupid way, out the back door.
He didn’t want to move in with her. It was too early, he’d said. It was a step he wasn’t ready to take. And Cho had been annoyed and discontent, and whenever she thought of him the little daily frustrations seemed to overcome the kisses and the loving words. And it was amazing how rapidly, after all this time, it had gone awry.
There was someone else in his life, she was sure of it. He was cheating on her with another woman. She’d confront him and force him to tell the truth. Then when he did, she would scream at him and throw him out and cry for days.
But the sad truth, the sadder truth, was that Michael wasn’t leaving her for someone else, but simply because he didn’t love her anymore, and under the layers of habit and comfort and nagging belief that everything could still be all right, she didn’t love him either. She just wanted him to stay because beyond him there was no one, but he was leaving her to be alone.
“You knew it couldn’t go on,” he’d told her before leaving. “Not after Hogwarts. You and I, we both want to be someone else now.”
And Cho cried. She hated herself for it. She’d cried when Cedric had died, she’d cried when Harry had slighted her, and now she was crying because a boy she didn’t even love was breaking off a relationship she wasn’t happy in. It seemed to her that her tears had become more and more futile over the years, insignificant and abundant like tap water. Perhaps she was crying for that too.
During the day, her aunt Jia works at the Meihui Healing Temple and leaves her alone to explore. Not that she knows exactly what she should visit first. The Great Wall, the Forbidden City. The Hidden Pavilion of Na-Han the Mage. She decides to start with this, as Chinese wizards might be a little less intimidating than Chinese Muggles.
It’s morning in Beijing and the sidewalks are crowded, the bicycles are rattling by steadily, and dozens of small restaurants and barber shops are lined up on the sidewalk – in Beijing, you can get your hair cut at any time of the day or night. She idly wonders what it would be like to walk into a barbershop at three in the morning and walk out with a new haircut half an hour later, just for the heck of it. She’s always liked her hair long – all the Ravenclaw girls admired it, were jealous even – but she feels she’s ready for a change.
“Short hair just makes your face look chubby.” That’s what Marietta would say, and Cho can picture her freckled nose and wry expression as if she were in front of her. Then again, she hasn’t heard Marietta say anything to her in quite awhile.
When she arrives at the place where the Hidden Pavilion of Na-Han the Mage should be, there’s just an old street musician playing a sort of elongated guitar.
“A coin for an old beggar?” he asks her in Mandarin. “It’s the song of Na-Han the Magnificent.”
Cho smiles and drops a silver Daiyu in his hat. Before her eyes, a beautiful, multicoloured pagoda appears. Its roofs are gilded, and the old musician gives a little laugh. Cho wipes her forehead, bunches her hair up in a ponytail to bare her neck, and walks towards the Pavilion, in front of which a throng of wizards in silk embroidered robes are taking pictures.
“I think you should try to get him back.”
Marietta stirred her coffee slowly, while glancing out the window. It seemed she had spent that entire hour glancing out the window and not at Cho, as if after all these years she no longer needed to look at the face across from hers, a face she knew by heart.
Where had it gone, everything that had seemed familiar? Had it disappeared with the war, or just now, on that cold blue morning in the cramped coffee shop?
“I mean, don’t you miss him, after all this time?”
“I do. I do miss him – and it’s awful to come home to an empty flat every night, but I don’t think I should. It just wasn’t working out, Marietta. It really wasn’t. I’m so busy with the paper, and… I don’t know, there wasn’t any spark left, you know?”
“Oh Cho, we’re not teenagers anymore, for Merlin’s sake. If you keep looking for that little tug in your stomach like when you fancied some bloke in school, you’re bound to end up unhappy.”
Cho frowned. She didn’t like what Marietta was implying – that her time with Cedric had been nothing more than a meaningless fling. At the time, it had been all she knew of love - love in its own way. And who said love had to stay the same your whole life?
“Well, in any case, I can’t stay with a bloke who I have no feelings left for except some sort of… affection.”
“All right. But Michael is handsome, he’s got a position, a nice flat, he’s laid-back and funny…”
“Yeah, so what? If you like him so much, why don’t you bloody date him?”
She was annoyed and frustrated by now. How long had it been since Marietta and she had stopped looking at the world in a similar way? And how was it that she had not noticed amidst the tranquil recollections of tiny memories, and silly gossip, and bland little pieces of news…
“I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll Floo you.”
Cho looked at her - her curly auburn ringlets, her pretty face - with the sinking feeling that whatever had driven Michael away would also eventually turn Marietta into nothing more than a bland little piece of news, overheard by chance from someone else and received with a nod and a smile.
It’s windy on the Great Wall, windy and hot and immense. It’s good to feel so tiny, to feel time shrink all of a sudden. Cho is delighted to line up with Muggles to buy souvenirs, to use real Muggle Huans. There are wizards there, too, just as amazed as the Muggles by the colossal, seemingly endless brick construction that slithers away into the distant mountains, and suffocating just the same under the sun.
Cho checks her watch and realises the next Portkey won’t be for another hour. She looks around for a Muggle bus, squinting at the signs, and feels a swooping feeling of pride when she finally finds the one that will take her back to Beijing.
Waiting at the stop next to her is a Muggle tourist, biting his lip and glancing nervously at the sign, then flipping furiously through his travel guide. He’s young, with a tanned, reddened face and short blond hair. There’s a smile making its way to her lips but she tries to push it back so he won’t think she’s laughing at him.
Finally, he looks her way, and starts speaking very slowly with a strong Scottish accent. “Excuse me… can you… tell me if… this bus… goes to Beijing?”
Cho giggles – she can’t hold it in anymore - and for a moment he looks slightly alarmed, but then she says, “I speak English. I’m from England, actually. But to answer your question, yes, this bus is headed for Beijing.”
“Oh.” He laughs as well now, still a bit nervous. “I’m sorry, miss, I thought you were a – I mean, that you – well -”
“I’m visiting a relative here,” she explains. The wind ruffles her hair, blowing off the wall, a compact, comforting presence behind them. She stretches out her hand, amused by the situation, and he shakes it. “I’m Cho.”
“Derek.”
The bus arrives and he stands aside to let her climb aboard, and then follows close behind.
“All right, so you’re visiting your aunt, but why, exactly, is it that you should be seeing all the sights alone?”
Derek is struggling to pick up of a piece of chicken with his chopsticks, and she laughs – it seems she’s been bubbling to the brim with laughter ever since they met, and now it’s late in the evening, in a tiny little restaurant.
“Oh, I came here on my own – just needed to get away from the old routine, you know what I mean?”
“And how – sod it.” He chuckles at his plate, where the piece of chicken is still eluding him. “I’ve been saving up for months for this. But it’s not really a holiday.”
Cho picks up a noodle, deftly, and they both grin and she shakes her shoulders a bit, as if she wants to show off. And she does, but not to spite him, just so he’ll still be thinking about it later, if only for a moment.
“Are you here for work?”
“Yes. It’s a sort of culinary experience for me. I’m a food critic. A food writer. And for the life of me, I’ve never been able to get the hang of using these, so that actually makes me a very poor food writer.”
Cho buries her face in her hands and the laughs come out like water rippling over stone, unstoppable, deliciously refreshing. It brings tears to her eyes and she tries to catch her breath.
“A food writer – wow, this is the first time I’ve ever met one. You’re not going to be able to write about anything,” she says, motioning towards his chopsticks.
“Well, since I’m footing the bill, I was hoping that you could repay me by giving me some lessons. It would be a terrible shame to go home empty-handed.”
“Some time off, huh?”
Lee was sitting on the edge of his desk and Dean was looking at her, his pencil stuck behind his ear and his drawing pad on his knees.
“All right, listen - I really… can’t stand being in London right now, to be honest,” Cho said, then bit her lip. “But I’ve been thinking on how to make this profitable for the paper – I could write a column about the way Chinese wizards live, or something like that. ‘The Great Wizarding Sites of China’, that’s catchy.”
“Do you think it would work? People read the Phoenix for news the Prophet won’t publish…”
“But think about it – isn’t that just the point of our paper? To open the minds of our readers to what’s beyond wizarding Britain and their little lives?”
Dean nodded, and Cho smiled at him gratefully. “She’s right, Lee. We could use a bit of the exotic around here.”
“And how are we supposed to make the paper work with only two people manning the office and our third staff member running off to the other side of the world?”
“Here, we got this in the post today,” Dean said, pulling out an envelope. “Dennis Creevey. Just passed his OWLs and wants a summer job. Word has it he’s as good with a camera as his brother was.”
Lee sighed and looked at Cho. “You got yourself a deal. But don’t you get any funny ideas of not coming back just because Corner acted like an arse.”
“You didn’t tell me which paper you worked for.”
Derek and Cho are sitting on a bench, lost in the middle of the business district, looking at the glimmering sky scrapers that all look at if they shot out of the ground overnight.
They’ve seen the Temple of Heaven, Tian’anmen Square, the Forbidden City. They’ve dined in all the smallest, most unassuming food stalls they could find. Derek paid. Cho forgot to exchange her Daiyus and Zhus for Muggle money.
They’ve talked as if they’d just found each other after looking a long, long time. And now, in this wonderful moment where he’s holding her hand, she doesn’t know what to say. The Phoenix – it doesn’t exist for him. It never will.
“It’s – it’s just this little newspaper me and some friends founded after we got out of school to…” She clears her throat. “We’re trying to take a new approach on… things.”
“Oh, kind of an underground thing.”
She nodded. “You won’t have heard of it.”
“Well, aren’t you the rebel,” he says with a grin that makes her heart beat faster. “And which column do you write?”
“I’m writing… I’m writing a travel piece.”
Why do the words feel like a lie as soon as she speaks them? It’s the truth – but not the whole truth. She wants to go on, explain things to him, but she can’t, so she simply looks at him, and all of a sudden Derek doesn’t care about hearing any more of the subject. When he slips his hand over her damp neck, it’s to set her hair lose against his fingers.
Midnight, midnight, midnight in Beijing. The days and nights have passed in a wonderful blur, and when she goes to sleep, Cho curls up against Derek’s strong, solid body, lulled to sleep by the sounds of the city outside.
“Does he know?” her aunt Jia asked her in a whisper the other evening, when they were fixing coffee in the kitchen. Jia couldn’t speak English, and Derek couldn’t speak Mandarin, but he’d cooked for them with what he could find, and it was delicious.
“No, not yet. I’ll tell him eventually, if - when we get back.”
Jia and Cho’s mother are Muggle-born. Her aunt understands these things. She smiled and nodded and said nothing.
But they are going to go back. Cho tries not to think about it, tries to close her eyes and listen to Derek sleeping calmly beside her as the light of morning filters through the blinds. But the watch on her night table reminds her that somewhere else, the night is only starting. It’s midnight in London.
She sits up, weary, and pushes her tousled hair back from her face. When they go back to Britain – she never thought about what would happen. This is not a summer romance; she can feel it in her heart, her stomach, her bones, and surely he can feel it too, the way they fit together perfectly. Holidays, sunshine, these are not the fuel, and not her problem.
Cho stands up to open the blinds and finds that her vision of the street outside is blurred and her throat is tight. The tears are coming back – silly, stupid tears. But when she thinks that in three days, she’ll be on the plane, it feels like the end of the world.
“Cho…”
She doesn’t want Derek to see her cry, but the sobs are upon her already, and she makes a strangled hiccuping sound trying to hold them back.
“Cho, are you crying?”
She turns towards him, sits on the edge of the bed, feeling to heavy to stay standing. “I can’t help it… It’s just – it’s just that in three days…”
He places a hand on her hip, strokes it with his thumb. “I’ve been thinking about that. I could change my ticket to go back to Britain with you… I don’t want to stay in Beijing if you’re not here.”
It makes her cry even harder, fully realising what will happen after they get off the plane. At the airport, they won’t be two strangers anymore, lost together in a country the size of a continent, but a witch Apparating back to her flat and a Muggle taking the tube to the train station.
“Cho – come on. It was fate, us meeting here – we’ll make this work. Edinburgh and London aren’t so far from each other, are they? A couple of hours at most…” She chokes, thinking that it would take her seconds to Apparate that distance, and he goes on. “Do you really think that’ll keep us apart?”
He’s trying to sound happy, cheerful, but she can’t calm down.
“It’ll work, I swear it. There’s no reason to cry...”
“I’m crying because – because -” She presses her lips together and shakes her head. At that moment, it seems to her no one ever understood why she cried so much. And now more than ever, there’s no way to explain the reason behind her tears. “I’m crying because you’ll never read my newspaper.”
“What? I don’t understand -”
“And you’ll never see that – that bloody Hidden Pavillion. The Hidden Pavillion of Na-Han the Mage.” She gives another little sob, and brushes the tears from her cheeks. “And it’s really, really beautiful.”
They stay there awhile, not moving. Cho waits for Derek to ask for an explanation, to sit up, to express his confusion, but he just looks at her quietly until she finally turns towards him. He smiles.
“I see you.”
“So, did you bring anything interesting back from Beijing?”
Cho looks up from the pack of pictures she’s been sifting through – pictures Stanley sent her. There’s the Great Wall, and Tian’anmen Square, lying on her cluttered desk. She’d like to publish them in the Phoenix, but according to Dennis, once they’ve been developed using Muggle methods, there’s no spell to make them move like wizard pictures. Dean leans over her shoulder to take a look at them.
“Muggle photos. I guess that answers part of my question.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” she tells him with a little smile. “It’s someone I met, but – well, he lives in Edinburgh. And yes, he’s a Muggle.”
Dean taps his pen against his leg, thoughtful. “Did you tell him?”
Cho lays the pictures down, stays silent for a moment. “No, I didn’t. I tried, but it all came and went so fast… I didn’t want to scare him.”
“It’d be an awful shame, though, to let it go just because of that,” Dean says. “And you have to give him a chance at the truth in any case, right? Muggle or not, if the man’s worth it, he’ll stick around.”
She nods. Dean told her and Lee all about his family, during the long, coffee-fuelled nights when they were wrapping up an edition. There’s no doubt he knows a lot more on the subject than she does.
“Yeah, you’re right… but I just don’t know how to break the news so that he’ll understand.”
“Cho, those columns on China that you wrote were a smash hit with the readers. I’d say it’s your most inspired work so far. Why don’t you let that do the talking?”
Along with a copy of the Phoenix, she sent him a little note.
You’re not going to believe me, but there’s something you really have to know before you come to visit. And I hope you do, because I miss you.
She carefully consulted her Guide to Muggle England to know how many stamps to use. And when a few days passed without a reply, she started getting scared, until she read that the Muggle post usually took longer than owls.
And now here it is, a thick, brown envelope addressed to her. And inside, a magazine, Cooking with Class, and a bright little sticky note.
My train arrives Saturday at three. As long as you’re with me, I don’t mind travelling to the other side of the world again.
