Guilt or Love: A Difficult Question

Before Peeves could spread word of their nighttime excursion throughout the school, however, another bombshell landed on the students' breakfast tables.

Cho Chang was dating Michael Corner.

Clara heard the news from Rowle at breakfast the next morning.

Oh, someone was dating. What was so surprising about that?

Wait, no, who was dating?

Cho Chang???

Merlin! Cho Chang was dating someone???

Michael Corner from Ravenclaw???

Then... what about Cedric?

Clara's fork hung suspended in midair, a piece of pumpkin pie lodged in her throat, impossible to swallow or spit out.

She whipped her head around to look at Rowle, trying to find some sign of a prank on her utterly placid face. But Rowle merely shrugged and continued stuffing fried sausages into her mouth, as though she had just announced that someone had put on a new pair of socks.

"Are you sure?" Clara kept her voice very low.

"All of Ravenclaw's talking about it," Rowle replied indistinctly. "Someone saw them walking in the garden behind the library, and Michael even held her hand. Cersei just went to congratulate them, so I'd say it's confirmed."

Clara instinctively looked across several long tables, her gaze passing through the bustling crowd to land precisely on the Ravenclaw table.

Cho Chang was sitting there, her long black hair cascading over her shoulders. She was smiling as she accepted the congratulations of those around her.

She was clearly very happy.

Then, almost instinctively, Clara turned in the other direction, toward the Hufflepuff table.

Cedric sat near the front, his head turned as he listened to Ernie. A plate of barely touched scrambled eggs sat in front of him.

His expression was calm, his usual gentle smile on his lips. He nodded when Ernie reached some exciting part of what he was saying, then picked up his teacup and took a sip.

She didn't know whether he'd heard.

Surely he had. Ernie knew everything that went on in Hufflepuff.

"Lyla? Are you all right? Your pumpkin pie's about to fall." Rowle waved a hand beside her.

Clara came back to herself and shoved the now-cold piece of pumpkin pie from her fork into her mouth. She chewed twice and swallowed without tasting it at all.

"I'm fine. Just a little surprised."

Rowle gave her a look that said, "You can't fool me," but, unexpectedly, didn't press her. She simply put another pancake on Clara's plate.

Clara looked down and cut her pancake, her knife scraping softly against the plate.

Would Cedric be upset?

Probably. After all, he'd liked Cho so much in the previous timeline.

She still remembered standing on the stairs outside the Owlery as Cedric excitedly told her that Cho had agreed to be his date for the Yule Ball.

She also remembered biting him with a book over the Gabriel Amulet, the way his face had turned red the moment Cho appeared, and how he'd asked Cho to help bandage him.

She could tell that he'd really liked her back then, just as she had liked him.

Now, when she looked back on those memories, they no longer carried a sharp sting. They were more like an old book, its pages yellowed, but still carefully treasured by her.

She knew all too well what it felt like to like someone, so she also knew all too well how difficult the first few seconds of losing someone could be.

But from Cedric's face, she really couldn't tell how he felt.

He continued to smile gently as he ate his breakfast. He didn't even spare a glance for the Ravenclaw table.

He finished breakfast and walked out of the Entrance Hall alongside Ernie. As he passed the two girls, he greeted them.

As soon as he left, quiet conversations broke out around them, and Clara caught Cedric's name.

"To be honest, I always thought Cho would end up with Diggory."

"Yeah, when the Quidditch House Cup was awarded last year, a lot of us thought they looked great together."

"I never expected it to be Corner. Corner's handsome too, but Diggory's a Triwizard Tournament Champion!"

Clara frowned.

She didn't like hearing those things.

It wasn't because they reminded her of Cedric standing beside Cho in the previous timeline. In fact, she had already accepted that those scenes were merely part of her own memories and had nothing to do with anyone else. Cho, in particular, knew nothing about them.

What she disliked was how those people talked about Cho as though they were evaluating a transaction: Cho should have chosen Cedric because he was a Champion, because he was the most popular boy in Hufflepuff, because he seemed more "worthwhile" than Michael Corner.

That kind of talk made her stomach tighten. Feelings weren't arithmetic. You didn't need a reason to like someone, and you certainly didn't need one not to.

Tying feelings to titles was disrespectful in three ways: to Cho's true feelings, to Corner's sincerity, and to Cedric himself.

She was certain that Cho's feelings for Cedric in the previous timeline had had nothing to do with whether he was a Champion.

They were both good people; time simply hadn't given them a chance.

In this timeline, Cedric hadn't grown close to Cho again as he had before, while Michael had evidently seized the opportunity and won Cho over with his sincerity somewhere none of them knew about.

Clara stuffed the last piece of pancake into her mouth, stood up, and picked up her plate.

Rowle looked up at her, half a sausage still in her mouth, and asked in surprise, "Where are you going? The Restricted Section? It's Saturday!"

"First I'm returning some books, then I'm going to the Owlery to send my parents a letter. There's training tonight too," Clara explained, turning to Rowle as she struggled a little to step out from the bench.

She actually wanted to go find Cedric too.

To comfort him? But she didn't know how to broach the subject.

Forget it. She'd wait until training at the Room of Requirement that evening.

Today's training, however, was clearly giving Clara a headache. Yesterday, in Dumbledore's office, she and Cedric had offered to have Harry join them at the Room of Requirement on Saturday evening for some early practice, so he could better avoid Professor Snape's snide remarks.

Cedric had even added, "Good idea. That way we can get used to working together in advance."

But now Clara stood in the middle of the Room of Requirement, watching a Disarming Charm that should have hit a target whistle past her ear, strike the wall, and rebound, nearly hitting her. She felt that those two were testing just how long her Shield Charm could hold out today.

"Harry, your wrist was off," she said, dodging the rebounding red light and waving her wand to dismiss the practice targets. "And when you cast the spell just now, you were looking at Cedric, not the target. He doesn't have scoring rings on his face. Staring at him won't earn you points!"

Harry took off his glasses and wiped them on the corner of his robe, a flicker of embarrassment crossing his face.

"Sorry, I got distracted. Let's try again."

"You've been distracted five times already." Clara lowered her wand. She glanced at Cedric—he was standing on the other side of the room, twirling his wand and staring at the moving practice targets on the wall, but his gaze was a little unfocused. Harry had stopped for quite a while before Cedric noticed.

"I really don't know what's wrong with you two today!" Clara took a deep breath. "Let's stop here for today."

She could actually guess at part of it: Harry was distracted because of Cho Chang. Though she thought bringing such pointless personal feelings into training was a very unwise choice, she still understood him.

As for Cedric, she couldn't tell that he was upset. He was simply distracted. That was very unlike him.

Harry and Cedric watched Clara storm out of the Room of Requirement, both a little awkward. Harry found a mat and sat down, scratching his head.

"Did we make her angry?"

"Obviously." Cedric sat down beside him, then lay back on the training mat.

What kind of person was Clara? She had been through so many regressions that she probably understood people who brought their emotions into training least of all, even if she had yet to recover her memories of all those previous regressions.

That seriousness about training, that insistence on meeting the standard with every spell she cast, had been etched into her body.

"I don't blame her." Harry was silent for a while, then took off his glasses and slowly wiped the lenses with the cuff of his school robe. "Cho's dating someone. Michael Corner, the Ravenclaw Chaser. I spent all of breakfast listening to the Gryffindor girls talking about it. They said she looked especially happy."

He put his glasses back on, the lenses reflecting the light of the magical lamps on the ceiling. "The truth is, I've barely even spoken to her. She probably only knows me as the Gryffindor whose name came out of the Goblet of Fire. So I don't know what I'm thinking either. Maybe it's because she's the first girl I started seriously noticing this term. Or maybe, after the whole Goblet of Fire thing, I thought this term was already awful, and then today I suddenly felt it could get a little worse."

Cedric lay beside him without speaking. He stared at the marks left on the ceiling by practice spells, quite a few of them his own handiwork from that evening.

"What about you?" Harry turned his head to look at him. "Cedric, why were you distracted too? Did you also..."

He didn't finish the question, but his meaning was clear enough.

Cedric shook his head.

"Quite the opposite. Actually, until today, I always thought I'd be upset."

"But when Ernie told me this morning, I wasn't upset at all. All I felt was happiness for the two of them, and a little sense of release."

Harry knew nothing about Cedric and Clara's regressions, or about Cedric's former feelings for Cho Chang.

Right now, he simply saw Cedric as a fellow sufferer whose unrequited crush had come to nothing.

"Would that distract you too?"

"That's not what distracted me. It's because..." Cedric suddenly stopped. He didn't know how to put it without making himself sound like a scumbag in front of Harry. "I was thinking about how I feel about Clara."

That morning, while everyone was talking about him, Cho Chang, and Michael, he had started wondering when he had begun looking for someone else first in a crowd instead of Cho.

Harry blinked, then slowly sat up straight. He had already placed himself and Cedric in the same category of unlucky sods and was about to pat him on the shoulder and say, "It's all right, mate, we've still got training." Then Cedric overturned all his assumptions with a single sentence.

He took quite a while to process it, then scratched his head. "So you were staring blankly at the target just now not because you were upset, but because you were thinking—you actually like Clara?"

Cedric shook his head again.

If only it were that simple.

He really wished Harry could suddenly share that part of his memories of the regressions and give him some advice.

"I don't know. I don't know either. My relationship with Clara is a little... complicated." He murmured to the ceiling, "Harry, if one day someone saved you, and she sacrificed a lot, could you tell gratitude and guilt apart from liking her?"

Harry hesitated for a while and tried to put himself in Cedric's place, but he didn't come up with an answer.

But Cedric hadn't expected an answer from him either. After all, when it came to something like this, unless someone had experienced the same thing, no one could give him an answer but himself.

"If I haven't even figured that out myself, then I think it would be a little too unfair to Clara for me to tell her I like her."