In Absentia

As Professor McGonagall dismissed the class, Cho Chang absently thrust her Transfiguration textbook into her bag, stood, and slung the pack over her shoulder. She was aware of her classmates' eyes on her as she did so, but her consciousness of them ended with that awareness, and did not make itself felt as anything of significance. Her best friend, Daphne, held the door open for her and smiled as she passed through.

"Still managing alright, then?" Daphne asked quietly. Cho simply nodded and kept walking.

The fact that Hogwarts students were still expected to attend classes seemed to her absurd, like some kind of cruel joke being played by the faculty. As it was, the only modification to her schedule since that night was a free period which Defense against the Dark Arts had occupied before, and that was only because there was no one available to teach it. She found the teachers' motives in inflicting classes on her and the other bewildered students inscrutable; yet she did what was expected of her, and went through the motions. Possibly she could have gotten out of classes, if she had asked. But she hadn't. Too much the Ravenclaw, Cedric would have said. But it was only inertia that carried her through her classes now. "A body in motion tends to stay in motion," she recalled from grammar school. Studiousness had nothing to do with it. He would have been wrong.

Would have been. As she descended the winding staircase on her way to Potions, his voice came unbidden into her mind. She remembered it well, and could picture his face perfectly. But for how long? she wondered, against her will. Would his memory begin to degrade over time, his voice eventually taking on the timbre and cadence of some other boy's, until she misremembered it completely? His face blending into a generic mishmash of features as new acquaintances pushed him farther and farther into the darkest corridors of unaccessed memory?

She noticed with interest that her recollections of him prompted no emotional twinge: no pain, no grief. She wondered at it, but it did not alarm her--nothing, it seemed, had the power to do that just now.

Even the night that it had happened, somehow she had not felt alarmed. She remembered it vividly--seated next to the Diggorys, she had seen Cedric and Harry both approach the Triwizard Cup and then, obviously by some mutual agreement known only to the two of them, they had grabbed the Cup simultaneously. Then they disappeared. Mrs. Diggory had turned to Cho, and asked quietly, "Is this part of the contest, then?"

Cho simply stared blankly back, mouth slightly open, trying to formulate an answer. She didn't know, of course. But even if she had known the words to articulate in response, the noise from the crowd would have drowned them out. Instantly people were standing, whispering, and after a moment, shouting.

Mrs. Diggory didn't wait for Cho's response anyway. She stared back down at the spot where the Triwizard Cup had stood--now an empty platform, surrounded on all sides by thick hedges concealing, Cho was certain, all manner of dangerous magical creatures and spells. But it wasn't the maze that concerned her now.

Snatches of conversation floated past; she listened, but the fragments of half-enunciated thought raised more questions than they answered.

"--some kind of joke?"

"Maybe they did it on purpose, to--"

"Surely it's not another task?"

"--can't see what's happening!"

The butterflies in Cho's stomach began to meld into an anxious knot; if this was planned, apparently no one else knew about it, either.

Then she spotted the teachers.

Flitwick, McGonagall, Moody, and Hagrid, who had huddled around Professor Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge, swept off hurriedly. Even from a distance, Cho could see the anxiety on their faces. So, apparently, could the rest of the crowd.

Dumbledore had climbed the platform from which the Cup had disappeared. In a croaky voice, a man shouted, "What is this? What's happened?"

Dumbledore tried to quiet the crowd, to persuade them to remain calm, but clearly he knew no more than any of them.

They stood like this for an hour, the volume of the crowd's rumblings growing in a great crescendo, until almost nothing could be understood, and Cho feared a riot would break out. She had stood up, as had the Diggorys, and everyone else in the stands. The tall couple in front of her was craning their necks, as if a better view would give them a clue as to what was happening. Even as she mentally noted of their foolishness, Cho stepped up on top of her seat, and craned her neck as well.

All at once, after what seemed like an eternity, they reappeared. What she saw then was burnt indelibly into her mind--the image that would haunt her through corridors, during classes, in sleep. Clutching the Cup, Harry Potter. And in his other arm, Cedric.

Instantly, she knew: it was in the way his eyes stared, but did not move. There was no laughter in them, no intelligence--no life.

Now, as she strode gingerly over the trick step, she wondered whether she really could have seen all that from her perch in the stands. She had been so far away. Maybe her mind had taken the whispers from the crowd, and the knowledge of what came after, and formulated the memory after the fact. Maybe she had never really seen death in Cedric's eyes.

It was wishful thinking, she concluded. She wished she hadn't seen it. She wished she didn't see it even now, on the second floor landing. She wished she hadn't dreamt about it last night.

In the end, she could not deny the memory of the utter numbness that had seized her heart in that moment. For a split second, she had wanted to cry out, wanted to scream. But only for a second; then, nothing. She knew that something was desperately wrong. She knew that she should be afraid. And she knew that she wasn't.

Miraculously, Dumbledore had found them. He moved the three of them away, out of the center of the churning mass, to the edge of the maze. It was there, under the shadow the massive hedge, that he told the Diggorys that their son was dead.

And me, she reminded herself. He told me, too. She had nearly forgotten. She had already known that Cedric was dead, so to her, Dumbledore's announcement had been inconsequential.

Mrs. Diggory began wailing and sobbing, while Mr. Diggory only stood woodenly and watched Dumbledore as he retreated to the center of the maze, glancing about. Probably looking for Harry. Was Harry alright? Cho had wondered.

Presently, Cornelius Fudge had found his way to them, tried to usher them back to the castle. It was no use--Mrs. Diggory insisted on seeing her son.

Cho felt something then. She recalled it with some difficulty; it presented itself to her conscious mind only vaguely, like a dream she had half-forgotten. It was, she realized, a feeling of dread. She didn't want to see Cedric, not like this. She was not curious--she knew with a cold certainty the fact of Cedric's death, and that was the only thing that mattered. She was not ready to face the details of it. Not up close.

Still, Mrs. Diggory would not be deterred. In the end, she led them to the platform, ripping a path through the crowd. The faces around them were panicked, but they were nothing to Mrs. Diggory. Cho followed. At one point, not hearing Mr. Diggory's footsteps behind her, she turned around to see Fudge attempting to coach him along. Without a word, Cho reached back and grabbed Mr. Diggory's hand. He looked down at her hand for a moment, then looked her in the eye, and let her lead him.

"Miss Chang. The bell has rung. Please find your seat." Cho looked up, and found that she was standing in the dungeon Potions classroom, facing Professor Snape. She registered his words slowly, weighed them, and sat. His black gaze lingered on her only a moment longer before he turned back to the blackboard, and began to write the recipe for the day's potion.

Funny, Cho thought. I used to be afraid of him. Now I hardly notice him.

At another time, this development might have felt liberating. But, just as she didn't feel afraid, neither did she feel liberated. She simply didn't feel. For the past week, since the end of the Tournament, she had walked around like this, dazed. More than once she had come to her senses to find herself standing in a remote corner of some rarely-used corridor, and had had to forcibly recall where she was headed. Once she had even walked into a boys' restroom inadvertently. Thankfully, however, five years of travelling the staircases had so thoroughly ingrained the locations of all the trick steps in her mind from that she hadn't yet got stuck on one.

The ironic thing about her state was that she noticed it just as she noticed everything else--with indifference. At any other time, it would have concerned her. It was a mark of how profoundly numb she was that she didn't even care that she couldn't recall any of the material she had copiously studied for her end-of-term exams.

After Potions--during which she had followed Snape's instructions so mechanically that she could not recall even the type of potion she had made--she climbed the steps to the Ravenclaw common room. It was lunchtime, but she wasn't hungry, and didn't want to sit with the rest of the students as they stared at her and whispered, or else shifted their gaze to avoid her. Dumbledore had announced to the school the morning after that Harry Potter was not to be bothered. He must have forgotten to mention her.

Harry Potter. Of course, he had survived the events of that night. After all, wasn't that who he was? The Boy Who Lived?

Cho had felt sorry for Harry before the Tournament--she had recognized his isolation long before his fourth year, but the rumors of his illegally entering the Tournament had turned practically the entire school against him. Unjustly, she thought. On the night of the third task, however, she would have gladly traded Harry's life for Cedric's: the boy who meant nothing to her for the boy who meant everything; the boy who lived for the boy who died.

As she approached the tapestry that hid the entrance to the common room, a voice called out to her from behind.

"Miss Chang. Might I have a word?"

She turned around to see Dumbledore staring at her. For a surreal moment, prompted by some vestigial sense of guilt, she wondered whether her thoughts had conjured him to come and chasten her. At once she realized the absurdity of the idea. She nodded. "Yes, sir."

She followed him and vaguely registered his actions as he stopped before a stone gargoyle and distinctly pronounced the phrase, "chocolate mousse." The gargoyle leapt aside, and Dumbledore led her up a funny kind of moving staircase, and into a circular room.

She had never seen this room before. Slowly, methodically, she looked around, and observed the phoenix preening himself on a stand near the door. She saw the headmasters and headmistresses sleeping in their frames, the beautiful carved oak desk at the far end of the room, the fire crackling just to her left.

"Please have a seat." Dumbledore gestured to an armchair in front of the fire and walked to his desk. Wordlessly, she sat down. Then she looked into the fire, forgetting the Headmaster's presence until he spoke again.

"Miss Chang."

He was standing before her now, so close that she wondered why she hadn't noticed him approaching. He stared at her with an expression of what she detachedly supposed to be deep compassion--and held out a leatherbound volume.

"What's this?" Judging from the roughness of her voice, they must have been the first words she had spoken all day. He didn't seem to notice. He crouched until he was at eye level with her, and leaned back on his haunches. He was rather spry for such an old man, she thought.

"He wanted you to have this," he said quietly.

With a deliberate slowness, she reached out and took the book from his hands. She ran her hands over the cover. At first she saw nothing stamped upon it, until her eyes happened to catch three letters at the bottom right hand corner: CAD.

A spark of recognition fired off in her mind, as she recalled the joke: of course, Cedric's middle name was Amos, after his father. "Cad" had been his initials, and her nickname for him--what made it funny was that, out of all the words in the English language, "cad" was probably the least descriptive of Cedric. The beginnings of a smile played about the edges of her lips.

She ran an index finger over the letters, then grasped the edge of the cover and pulled it open. Inside, faces smiled up at her. His face, and her own. It was a picture album.

"He knew the Tournament was dangerous," Dumbledore was saying. "He left a note, identifying a few prize possessions and their recipients should anything--unfortunate--happen."

Without looking up, she nodded. That was Cedric, alright--he was the planner, the organized one. No matter how unpleasant the task, if it needed to be done, he did it. Even if it didn't need to be done... She doubted that any of the other champions had gone to the trouble to designate who should inherit their prize possessions if they should be seriously hurt or killed during the course of the Tournament. Only Cedric.

Cho flipped the pages, taking in the beaming smiles and familiar scenes. Cedric with his parents. Cedric and her at the Yule Ball. Cedric and her, wet and shivering, after the second task. Cedric ...

For the first time since he had died, tears stung the corners of her eyes. She dropped her head down onto the open book, and felt the edge of the plastic page cut into her forehead. A sudden, inexorable wave of grief welled up, doubling her over helplessly in great, heaving sobs. It was a sorrow so great that she felt she was too small contain it, and wondered whether it might crush her from the inside out.

As she cried, she spoke words that she would not remember later. The exact words were unintelligible to both of them, but their meaning was clear. She murmured fragments of memories; of hopes, now dashed; of plans made, and now destroyed. It was the peculiar language of irreparable grief.

When she could cry no more, she looked up and saw her own tear stained visage mirrored in his half-moon glasses. He was no longer crouching; while she cried, he had sat in the armchair next to her. Without a word, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. She took it and dried her eyes.

Having tapped a flood of raw emotion, she found that could not contain herself any longer. "Losing him hurts so much--I don't know if I'll recover. But, Professor, I don't want to forget him," she whispered. "He was real. I don't want him to just fade away, like he was only a story in the first place. It would be like losing him again."

He said nothing for a long while, and she ran over the words in her mind, wondering whether they had made sense. They were certainly awkward, but she didn't know what else to say. She had just decided that he wasn't going to answer, when he spoke again.

"Miss Chang." His voice was so quiet, it was almost a whisper. As he continued, though, it resumed its usual tone. "At the risk of appearing to be a meddling old dunce, allow me to offer you a bit of--" he stopped himself, as though changing his mind about which word to use-- "information. You see, having been in a situation very similar to your own, I feel compelled to give you the benefit of my knowledge--gained neither by intellect, nor by talent, but merely by experience."

She nodded.

"Miss Chang, I want to tell you something: that the people we love are never truly forgotten if we remember the difference they made to us. I have no doubt that knowing Cedric changed your life for the better in some way--" at this, she felt the tears welling up again, but pushed them back - "and if that's true, then he will never be forgotten. Not really. He'll never be completely gone, as long as you live. Because he is a part of you, just as he's a part of every person whose life he touched."

She listened, taking in his words carefully, recording them for future reference. She could not use them now--but later, perhaps. At the moment, they were cold comfort.

"Is there anything else?" He asked her this in earnest, not dismissively.

She thought for a moment, then gazed at him levelly. "Yes, there is. I'd like to know what happened."

Dumbledore sighed, folded his hands, and began to recount the story.

***

Of course, no house colors festooned the walls of the Great Hall on the occasion of the Leaving Feast this year. In their place were black hangings, visible manifestations of the gloom and fear that had festered in the corridors, common rooms, and dormitories unchecked since the night of the third task.

She was already seated at the Ravenclaw table when Harry Potter entered the hall. He looked stricken. Instantly she recognized the listless gaze, the lack of direction, the paralyzing numbness. It was the same look that she had worn for a week after Cedric's death.

In that moment she regretted ever resenting Harry Potter for surviving the attack that had killed Cedric. She wept; this time not for Cedric, nor for herself, but for the pain of the boy--still fourteen, yet a child--who had summoned the courage grown men had found elusive, granted Cedric his last request, and risked his life to bring him back. She wept because she knew that he had not even begun to accept what had happened, and because she knew, somehow, that he could not weep himself. And when Dumbledore raised his glass, she made a concerted effort to stand (though her friends told her to sit), raise her glass, and let hers be the loudest voice to raise a toast,

"To Harry Potter!"