Alternate Ending- "Fire in the Night"
The scarlet train screeched and slowly pulled away. There was chaos and cacophony on the platform as parents waved and shouted goodbyes to their children, but Cho’s eyes were focused unwaveringly on a streak of bright red that shone through the cloud of steam. She didn’t glance at the tall man with unruly black hair and glasses who held the red-haired woman's hand, nor did she look at the small girl who stood next to them, unhappily waving to her older siblings as they were carried away from her. All that Cho saw was that tantalizing, beautiful woman whom she hadn’t seen in nineteen years.
The couple was turning, walking away from the empty tracks and toward where Cho stood. Her mind went haywire, all of her old fears and doubts rearing once more: will she hate me? what if I really do lose her?
“…Cho? Cho, is that really you?!” Harry had noticed her; it was too late now to change her mind. Her eyes met Ginny’s for a moment, and there was a faint spark, buried deep in her mind. She stood there, her eyes clouded and expression confused, as though she had Cho’s name on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t quite voice it. Cho took a deep breath and raised her wand.
“I’m very, very sorry, Harry, but I need to do this.”
“Hey! Cho, what are you-” Harry didn’t have time to finish; Ginny flinched; Lily cried out, not sure what was going on but knowing that something was wrong; but Cho ignored it all, quietly reciting the words she’d rehearsed thousands of times during nineteen years’ worth of traveling, searching for something, anything, until she realized that she'd been running away from the one thing she needed to find.
Ginny staggered, clapping one hand to her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut. Harry cried out, stepping toward his wife while keeping his wand pointed straight at Cho.
"What did you do, Cho? What did you do to her?!" he screamed, but Cho calmly ignored him and waited.
Ginny dropped her hand, raising her eyes to meet Cho’s.
Everything stopped. The world around them muted; Ginny looked straight into Cho’s cool, dark eyes. Waving Harry aside, she straightened, her wand hand hanging loosely at her side, her eyes wide and outraged.
“How… how dare you, after all this time! How dare you do this to me! Not one day has gone by that I haven’t felt some small nagging in my mind, something that told me that nothing was as it should be. And I waited, knowing that someday the answer would come, not knowing what it was or how I knew, I waited. And now, now you’ve come back, and I… you’re here, and… I…”
She stepped toward Cho, searching her tearstained face for some answer. Cold, salty teardrops slid miserably down her cheeks.
“Cho… Why?”
It was a quiet, hurt whisper that tore straight into Cho’s heart. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she tried to explain, but words failed and all she could do was meet Ginny’s gaze. Cho’s eyes, the bottomless pools of midnight sky, enveloped her. In them was terrible sadness and pain, nearly twenty years of agony and apologies.
Ginny understood.
She turned to Harry, poor Harry, and gazed hard at him.
Yes, she did love him. She’d been with him for two decades now, and after twenty years of life together she couldn’t deny that she loved him. As he stood there, his green eyes staring at her from under his impossible hair, she knew her answer.
She turned to Cho, and Cho’s black eyes swallowed her once more. They caressed her, held her close. In them she found bliss and peace, eternal and immense.
They rushed together, Ginny sweeping Cho into her arms and whirling around, crying and laughing together as everything else dissolved into a blur, leaving just the two of them to clutch tightly together.
“Dad? Dad, who is that? What’s Mummy doing?”
Harry couldn’t answer. He stood, bewildered and silent, as the two women spun and laughed with abandon; all he knew was that he had clearly missed something rather important.