ghost games

Author's note: this is basically just an excuse for me to indulge in my recent obsession with the elijah wood prank interview with dom monaghan by somehow incorporating it into a piece of writing. if you haven't watched it, please search it up on youtube and watch it because it is an absolute masterpiece - the whole thing, not just the "do you wear wigs" part :-)

also, i sort of realized that jk rowling never actually explores how cho and cedric get to know each other and start dating (other than going to the yule ball together), so i thought i'd try - albeit through a very au take! enjoy!

—

For the first time in her life, Cho's late to class.

It's not that she's a stickler for attendance or anything — it's just that lateness in general is a pet peeve of hers, and she prides herself in being a relatively good student in terms of grades and behavior, so naturally she arrives to her classes on time and does her best to ignore the daily desire she gets when her alarm goes off at 7am to stay wrapped up in bed and doze back off into blissful nothingness.

It's the first day of the term, for god's sake, she thinks to herself, gritting her teeth as she practically shoots through the door, backpack haphazardly thrown over her shoulder and dark hair half-brushed, the "Sorry!" from Marietta echoing behind her as she speeds for the stairs.

She knows that it's not Marietta's fault that her flat iron nearly set their dorm on fire this morning and that her roommate doesn't know how to operate a fire extinguisher, but Cho kind of really needs this year to go well, and so far it's not looking too good.

As she weaves past hordes of clamoring students on campus, chewing on a mildly-disgusting protein bar and trying to ignore the distinct smell of smoke lingering on her shirt, she pulls up her schedule on her phone again, double-checking the room number for her Rhetorics class. The little numbers in the corner of the screen show that she's already 2 minutes late, but Google Maps says that she's still a 6 minute walk away from the classroom, a strange little discrepancy that has Cho glaring helplessly at the digits as though that can magically cause the number to decrease — to no avail, of course.

Luckily, nobody tries to rope her into a half-hearted conversation out of formality as she passes and sends friendly waves to people she recognizes — old classmates, friends of friends, acquaintances, those few people she's talked to once and has never again.

Now that she's officially entered her fourth year at Hogwarts University, it can't be helped — campus resembles more of a high school battlefield every single day as the index of people she meets grows in her head, and as much as she loves taking the time to stop and catch up with someone, a part of her really wants to just cruise through this last year as though she's surfing on a perpetual wave — smoothly, with nice grades, nice friends, and (she prays) a nice book deal.

See, Cho's major is literature.

It's a dream come true for her and an absolute horror to her traditional Chinese parents back home. She's long given up on trying to gain their approval over her career choice and prefers to just pretend she doesn't see the jabs her mother makes in the family group chat about her major or the Forbes articles about lucrative careers in tech her father sends her on WeChat.

Except it's her last year of university now, and she's beginning to give into that blind panic she knows nearly all graduating seniors experience, because Cho's not delusional — she knows that she loves writing, yeah, but a career in writing won't be sending her off on vacations to the Bahamas like one in computer science will.

So she sat down over the summer and wrote a book — as a way to bolster her personal project portfolio, and as a buffer for her to gain a sense of control over her achievements in a way. The manuscript, just short of 400 pages, is saved as a PDF on her laptop, and so far, she's sent it off to — what? Almost a hundred publishers? Or is it two hundred?