Disclaimer: Nothing is mine; everything is J K Rowling's.

I know you half of you hate the Fleur chapters, but without them her interactions with Harry are going to look like ridiculous jumps and they're important for when the reader needs to know more than the character about what is happening.

Anyway here's the next chapter.

Chapter 30

'Are all the champions here yet, Ludo?' A rather terse sounding, and increasingly fierce looking Mr Crouch demanded. He was a far cry from the thin, tired sounding man Harry had seen rambling on to Percy at the World Cup. He wasn't getting his assistant's name wrong anymore either.

'Not yet, Barty,' Bagman grinned. He seemed only more cheerful that there was a champion missing.

'Well we aren't waiting, tell these three about the task.'

'Right then,' Bagman boomed, clapping his hands together loudly. 'Welcome to the second task of the Triwizard Tournament.'

'Actually, Ludo,' Crouch decided, cutting in, 'if you don't mind, I'll explain.'

Bagman looked quite disappointed and even, dare Harry believe it, angry. He'd never seen the so overtly good-humoured man with such a violent glint in his eye.

'The second task,' the soon to be former head of the Department of International Cooperation began crisply, 'is upon you. I hope you have discovered the secret of your golden egg or you will be woefully unprepared for what is to come.'

None of the two other champions present looked particularly nervous and Harry wasn't either. He was going to win.

'As the clue states we have taken from you something that you will sorely miss, to clarify, we have taken a hostage that you must recover.' Cedric stiffened, visibly angry, and Harry caught him mouthing his girlfriend's name under his breath. 'To alleviate confusion,' Crouch continued, uncaring, 'as some of you may know the hostages of other champions, Ludo will tell you who your hostage is, you are not to interfere with the hostages of the other champions while they are being kept hostage, or afterwards.'

Harry nodded. That rule made sense. An unscrupulous rival might kill, or injure the hostage of another champion to ensure they failed the task. He was, however, more principally concerned with who had been chosen for him.

Bagman returned to the fore, accompanied by a stern looking Professor McGonagall and the all three headteachers.

He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the arrival of Fleur Delacour, who skidded to a halt amongst her rivals. She looked ever so slightly panicked.

Good, Harry thought, if she is distracted, she will be easier to beat.

He ruthlessly stamped down on the feelings that suggested he ask why, or do something to assist her. Fleur Delacour's concerns were not his, this worked in his advantage.

'My apologies,' she breathed, still gasping from running, 'I was unable to find my sister to say goodbye this morning.'

Gabrielle is her hostage, Harry concluded.

It made perfect sense, she had mentioned her family's arrival, and given the pre-arranged nature of the tournament he doubted their timing was a coincidence. It struck him as slightly cruel, Fleur loved her sister more than anything else, even more, Harry imagined, than her pride.

It's more than slightly cruel.

He smiled, choosing to side with the vengeful grin that had threatened to spread across his face than the twist of pity he felt underneath.

It did rather make him wonder who they'd chosen for him. He couldn't have been arranged for in advance and there weren't really any people he'd sorely miss that they could take.

'Well,' Bagman announced slightly less jovially than before, 'now that we are all here I shall inform you each who you're hostage is.' He seemed rather less cheerful now Fleur had arrived. Harry suspected, from his offer of help and his attitude towards the other champions that Bagman had some kind of personal stake in his success. The man was known as a gambler and it would hardly surprise Harry were he to learn the former beater was trying to make the most of the long odds he had been offered at the tournaments beginning.

Harry smirked. He imagined those odds were a little shorter now.

The french witch, meanwhile, had made the same deduction as Harry had about her sister. There was a distinctly avian feel to her features and Harry was rather glad she had come to a halt on the far side of the group.

'Miss Delacour, as you might have gathered your hostage is your younger sister, Gabrielle. Mr Diggory, you are searching for your girlfriend, Miss Chang. Mr Krum was originally going to be looking for a friend and quidditch teammate, but he has taken ill and so you will be going after Miss Granger instead.' Harry raised an eyebrow, but Viktor Krum only grunted his understanding. 'Mr Potter,' Bagman grinned, his good humour restored, 'your hostage is Miss Bell.'

Harry attempted to stifle a laugh without complete success.

'He is being serious, Mr Potter,' McGonagall snapped. 'Miss Bell was the only one willing to risk herself being your hostage in this task, without her, you would have been unable to compete and fallen far behind.'

It wasn't like I was going to refuse to save her, he fumed.

If he was honest with himself he did feel slightly guilty for laughing. It what McGonagall had said was true then she might have just saved him from failing. It was a little unfair that he could have been penalised so harshly for not having anyone willing to descend into a lake and risk drowning for him, but he was more than slightly grateful she had.

He turned away from his head of house and looked out over the lake instead. The water was every bit as dark and uninviting as the icy pool in the Chamber of Secrets. The Black Lake was also rather too large for him to warm with a heating charm.

'This is going to be unpleasant,' he remarked, dipping a toe into the water to judge the temperature.

Fleur smiled, Cedric's mouth spasmed somewhere between humour and concern, and Krum chuckled.

'First to get caught by the squid wins,' he suggested in his Bulgarian accent, offering a hand to Harry.

'Or the Grindylows,' Harry reminded him, clasping Viktor's hand in his own.

'On my whistle,' Mr Crouch commanded and the champions divested themselves of their robes. He seemed a little happier than normal with the show of friendship, but it was hard to tell when his face was carved with permanent frown lines.

The whistle went not a second later.

Fleur was gone first, she pulled a slim veil up over her mouth and nose, tied it tightly, and dove gracefully into the lake. He did his best to ignore how good she looked in her swimwear. Harry pressed his wand against his chest, visualising the piece of transfiguration he was about to complete successfully for the fourth time. Cedric went next, dropping feet first into the water, his face and neck enclosed within a vibrating bubble. Harry hope he had done something to address the weakness of prolonged use of the Bubble-Head Charm, or he was going to get a horrible surprise the first time something punctured it. Pretty-boy Diggory wouldn't be half so attractive once the explosion of pressure caved in his skull.

Harry abruptly lost the ability to breath and staggered towards the edge, tucking his wand back into the waist band of the shorts he was wearing.

Next to him Krum was undergoing a similar process, his head halfway between human and shark. Harry took a moment to admire the rather advanced piece of transfiguration before leaping resignedly into the water himself.

It was even colder than he had anticipated, but he could breathe again.

A few tentative inhales reassured him that his piece of self-transfiguration was working as intended, even if seeing his chest undulate in such a fashion was every bit as weird as the comforting rush of water into his lungs.

A temporary sticking charm fixed his glasses more firmly upon his nose and he began to win down towards the bottom of the lake and out into its centre where Salazar remembered the Merpeople to be.

He passed over long light-green weeds that rose up at least several metres from the lake bed. Harry stayed well above the plants; he remembered from last year that Grindylows like to ambush their prey from such places and he was fairly sure he'd glimpsed the occasional tentacle and horn amongst the weeds.

Nobody in their right mind would risk swimming through there when the open water was so much obviously safer.

Eventually the green weeds gave way to thick-looking, black mud and Harry was sure, as he passed the sunken wreckage of a ship, that he glimpsed the giant squid. It's bulbous form was lying in the gap between the two halves of the broken vessel, with its tentacles trailing out across the lake bed. Harry thought it looked rather harmless, but he wasn't particularly eager to win his bet with Viktor.

A pale figure appeared in the distance, drifting at a slower pace than Harry in the same direction he was headed. He drew his wand. Most spells still worked underwater, albeit slower and so sometimes less effectively. Transfiguration, fortunately, was not affected in the slightest.

'Myrtle,' he burbled into the water.

'Harry,' he voice was unaffected by the medium. 'You look better now, much happier, are you searching for the Merpeople too?'

He nodded, unsure if the ghostly girl would actually be able to understand him if he spoke.

'Cedric was too, they're that way,' she waved one arm in the direction Salazar had suggested. 'Good luck.' It seemed she had no intent on accompanying him, so Harry smiled and waved his thanks before swimming on.

The mud had turned to rock. Dark, grey columns loomed up over the lake bed, monolithic, and decidedly unnatural looking. Listening hard he caught faint snatches of Merpeople singing, but couldn't make out the words. Either way, he was definitely close.

The columns grew smaller as the song grew louder. Harry could understand it now. Half the time was gone, and if the other half slipped by then Katie would not be leaving the lake.

I won't let that happen.

She must have known what she had been risking by agreeing to be his hostage. Understanding had been implicit in Professor Mcgonagall's vehement response to his laughter. For that, Harry decided, he could forgive her. He would have failed without her help. He doubted that they'd be back to holding hands anytime soon, though.

There was a loud explosion from in front of him and a wave of pressurised water made his ears pop.

Shaking his head to throw off the sensation Harry peered suspiciously around him. He wasn't sure if that had been an offensive spell cast in his direction, but he did know that Cedric must be around somewhere. Nowhere in the rules of the task did it say that he champions couldn't eliminate their rivals themselves.

Cautiously he continued swimming forwards, drawing his wand as he did.

Floating above him, lying very still, too still to be conscious or alive, was the original Hogwarts champion, scattering away beneath him were a horde of very battered looking Grindylows.

One of them must have somehow punctured the bubble.

The remnants of Cedric's Bubble-Head Charm still clung to his nose and mouth, but the stream of air rising above him was a clear indicator that it would not last much longer.

Clearly he had reduced the effects of the compression bursting, but apparently not enough to do much more than to temporarily save his life from the explosion, as he was now on the verge of drowning.

'Homenum revelio,' he said into the water. The words came out in a garbled mess, but Cedric's body lit up red and, in the distance, Harry glimpsed two more red figures. One far off to his right and the other closer and directly in front of him.

He was alive. Harry swam closer and tried to wrap an arm around the unconscious Hufflepuff only to find he had a great deal more width than normal.

Cho Chang was strapped to his side, but she was out for the count too.

Harry mulled things over, but the quickly approaching red dot on his right, and the oddly still one in front of him urged him to hurry. One of his rivals had already reached the village and been caught leaving and it seemed another might have found it too.

A weakly powered blasting curse sent both Cho and Cedric shooting up through the water. They'd be noticed, and likely rescued, as soon as they burst out of the water.

His conscience appeased, Harry swiftly swam on towards the source of the singing. He was sure he could see the outline of buildings in the distance.

The village of the Merpeople was empty, the stone and seaweed dwellings were silent, but a crowd of them had gathered around the ring of standing stones that had been raised just beyond the edge of their huts.

Harry swam quickly, but warily through the village. Merpeople were intelligent, but not overly friendly if what Salazar had told him was true.

In fact what Salazar had really told him was that Godric had needed to be healed by Helga after being impaled by tridents, twice. Negotiations of mutual co-existence with the aquatic creatures had been slow to start and Slytherin, who had told Godric not to just dive down and try to reason with them, had found the results rather amusing.

There were twelve towering, black monoliths and the furthest three bore human figures, enshrouded in the fading red glow of Harry's failing revealing charm, upon them.

Viktor Krum had already arrived, his head and neck transfigured into that of a shark. His self-transfiguration had not gifted him particularly good vision, however, something Harry felt a slight sympathy for, and he was struggling to sever the ropes that bound Hermione to her stone.

Harry weighed up his options. He could take Katie and leave, but that risked turning his back on Durmstrangs' champion and Fleur was still behind him too. If they let him pass, something Harry thought unlikely, Krum had reached here first and was likely the better swimmer of the two of them.

Sorry, Harry mentally apologised to the surly Bulgarian. The surly seeker wasn't so bad once you spoke to him a little, but he was competitive. Neither attribute was going to save him from Harry's conjured ropes, however.

The thick, black bindings shot from the tip of his wand, but, slowed by the water, they failed to wrap around the Bulgarian and only loosely entangled his legs and arms.

He was free in seconds of a well applied cutting charm and Krum swiftly retaliated with what looked like the blasting curse.

The jets of water sped towards Harry at far greater speed than his ropes had managed to travel and though they appeared to be weak enough not to harm him too badly Harry had no plans to wait around and find out. He dived down beneath them, taking cover behind one of the monoliths.

Viktor abandoned his attempts to free Hermione and swam up above Harry to render his cover useless, casting several more hexes as he did so. They impacted harmlessly on the other side of the monolith or drifted off into the lake behind Harry.

Taking advantage of the moment Harry discretely used the Cutting Charm to free Katie from the rock; it would speed things up later.

Viktor turned and unleashed another trio of reductos down at Harry. They hammered into the monolith, chipping pieces off the top and filling Harry's view with dust-clouded water.

Damn.

Harry was forced to abandon his cover to take offensive action, there was no way to effectively defend himself and Katie from Krum with so much open water to cross to the finish and he couldn't duel blinded by rock dust.

With a slight smirk he cast every single one of the childish, school corridor jinxes that he knew in a swift barrage and watched with some amusement as the jelly legs jinx and the dancing jinx struck him on the side.

For a moment Krum's limbs swayed bonelessly, then he ended both jinxes and raised his wand in reply.

The retaliation shattered the monolith completely. Evidently Krum did not find the result quite as funny as Harry did and had stopped pulling his punches.

A slight shiver traced its way down Harry's spine. Things were much more serious now.

He didn't recognise half the spells that Krum was casting at him, so he dodged as many as he could manage and was grateful to see his shield charm deflect the rest. He swept his wand across the pebbles underneath Krum's position, transfiguring them into a small school of snake-like fish.

Viktor vanished into the shoal for a moment and Harry grinned triumphantly. His arsenal of spells and abilities were quite limited underwater, but he was still giving as good as he got.

His grin was wiped off his face when he was suddenly grabbed from behind by a giant stone hand.

Transfiguration was Krum's solution too, he reminded himself, shattering the stone arm and sending the pieces flying towards his opponent. The moment Krum deflected them away he cast a handful more spells and then, in their shadow, followed up with a disarming charm.

Viktor was not deceived. He deflected the curses away and shot several angry yellow looking jets of water in Harry's direction. One of them grazed his shoulder, drawing blood, and he hissed in pain.

The other two drilled foot deep holes into the ground behind him and he looked incredulous up at the Bulgarian. Those spells were easily capable of killing.

The surly wizard stared back, a silent warning in his eyes that if this duel continued Harry might not survive.

He takes winning very seriously.

Harry grinned up at the Durmstrang student.

It's no fun beating someone who doesn't want to win.

Evidently Krum took his grin as defiance because he launched four more of the same curse at Harry in quick succession. His spells missed, carving another set of depressions into the ground.

Harry raised his wand in preparation to retaliate in kind, only to watch it fly from his hand across the lake bed. Viktor Krum looked confused for a second, then his eyes widened and he shield himself just in time to deflect another disarming charm.

Fleur, Harry realised.

Krum whirled around to throw spells off to Harry's right, so Harry launched himself after his wand, keeping an eye over his shoulder to where Durmstrang's champion was dodging colourless jets of water that came with surprising speed.

Grabbing his wand from where it lay Harry kicked round the edge of the monolith to give himself a clear view of the duel.

Fleur and Viktor were engaged in a dispute just as violent as Harry and Krum's had been. Watching it was almost comical, the spells seemed to travel very slowly, with the exception of whatever the clear curse was that Fleur would occasionally use, and their movements were exaggerated in the water.

Harry smiled at the hilarity of it all, then transfigured the lake bed beneath them both into towering spines of stone. The piece of transfiguration cost him a great deal of energy, but it caught both Fleur and Viktor by surprise.

Fleur shattered the spires beneath her and Krum with a very powerful blasting curse of her own, but using the spell so powerfully at close range threw her off balance and she was struck by one of Viktor's yellow curses directly in the face.

Harry froze, horrified.

Fleur drifted backwards through the water, her silver hair shrouding her face and what Harry knew must be a horrific and fatal injury. Both he and Krum were as still as the stones around them, neither had really wanted one of their rivals dead, even when throwing around potentially lethal spells.

Harry's chest tightened and the pinprick of ice he felt at watching her glide suddenly spread across his chest. The creature within the cold twisted violently, baring its teeth and demanding revenge. Harry's wand tip flicked up, a slight, but vivid, green spark visible there.

Fleur's hair floated away from her face and Harry was treated to a full view of where the curse had struck her.

There was nothing.

Harry couldn't even see a drop or wisp of blood in the water around her and although the french witch's lips were swelling, her chin was red and bruised, and she seemed furious, Fleur was unharmed. Her veil, however, hung in tatters around her neck, a small plume of bubbles rising from the edges of the fragments of cloth.

Fleur made ten metres towards the hostages before the bubbles stopped completely, then she shot Harry a look somewhere between utter hatred and desperate pleading, jabbed her wand upwards, and ascended out of sight.

When Harry looked back he found Krum was already disappearing out of sight, Hermione cradled underneath his transfigured maw.

He dived back down towards the monoliths, grabbing Katie's arm and pulling her into his chest. Cedric and Fleur would probably still have decent scores, since both reached the Merpeople, but if he finished outside of the time limit he might get nothing. Barty Crouch did not strike him as a lenient man.

Gabrielle Delacour bobbed against the final monolith.

She was Fleur's sister, the beloved younger sibling who he knew meant more to the french witch than almost anything. He understood the look she had given him, now he was looking at Gabrielle. It wasn't part of the tournament, but Fleur had asked anyway. She wanted him to save her sister as well as Katie and she knew, just like before, that he wouldn't be able to leave her behind, because Harry wasn't capable of it.

Damn her.

He wished that he was heartless enough to abandon the girl, but she looked too innocent, too pure for him to even want to do so. He couldn't be responsible for her death, if indeed the hostages were lost once the task ended, he couldn't live with that, Harry certainly couldn't do something so cruel to Fleur. He would, if he left Gabrielle, be ripping away the one person who meant most to her, and he simply couldn't.

Fleur knew that. Fleur knew that he knew that. She used it against him to make sure that her sister came back to her.

The worst part was that Harry could understand. He could hardly blame her. If there was someone so much more important than anyone else in his life there would not be much he would not do to keep them safe.

Resignedly he severed Gabrielle's bonds too.

The Merpeople appeared from nowhere, swarming around him in a shoal that bristled with tridents.

Harry narrowed his eyes and raised his wand, pulling the silver-haired girl into his embrace next to Katie.

The nearest of the Merpeople jabbed his trident at the girl and shook his head, raising a single finger.

'Only one,' it told him threateningly.

Harry brought out his coldest smile, and calmly transfigured the trident into another serpent-like fish. If they stood in his way then he would force them from it. Gabrielle Delacour was worth more to him than a few Merpeople, he wished it was not so, because he knew that her only value to him lay in how much she meant to Fleur, but it was. The french veela had somehow entranced him, with or without her allure, and now he could do nothing to stop her using it against him.

'You can try and stop me,' he warned them. The water twisted his words into something unintelligible, but his intent was clear. The Merpeople scattered back to the edges of their standing circle, eyeing the glowing tip of Harry's wand with fear.

Harry eyed it in surprise himself. He had not realised he was broadcasting his intent so strongly.

The tip was growing with bright green light.

AN: Please read and review, thanks to those of you who have.

I'm also announcing the end of my experiment with differing contractions between Harry and everyone, though I'm not going back to change things now. While it has seemed to create the feeling of distance I intended between Harry and his former friends, everyone seems more concerned with how unnatural it feels for a fourteen year old to speak formally rather than why he might be speaking with such distance to most people and then informally with the few he's close to.

Additionally I bothered to go and see if the review on DLP had been updated so that it was a bit more relevant. It hasn't, which is annoying since half of the points are either wrong or now irrelevant because I went back and rewrote the first 15 chapters to iron out a few of the misconceptions and errors. My main gripe is simply that it seems to notice less than half of the things I do, but when it does notice one, such as my experiment with contractions, it never considers why and just jumps to the conclusion it's a mistake. I'd be very interested to know what logic suggested I had accidentally reworked Harry's entire speech pattern from about chapter 8 onwards. A few other things that I found a bit odd were the tendency to abandon ship at the first sign of a cliché when I'm sure I've pointed out that I'm trying to use and make something new of them. It's hard to do that without them appearing in the first place. There was also the assumption that anything implied must immediately be true, no matter how weakly or strongly, and the complete skipping over of the fact that anything Ron and Hermione do is often seen through Harry's eyes, despite my writing style, and he is obviously going to have some bias.

I personally, and somewhat unsurprisingly, disagree with several points, for example Hermione is a girl who is very loyal to her friends, but why anyone expects her to remain so loyal to someone who has literally told her that they aren't friends confuses me. My main hate, however, is the idea that I somehow created a new 'super' wand for Harry in a day. Not only are there no hints in canon, which this is not regardless, of how wands are made, but it isn't even super, something I went out of my way to point out because I wasn't fond of giving him the Elder Wand Mark II. The whole purpose of the new wand was to convey with some not so subtle symbolism the change in Harry's direction, it's a bit vexing to see all that effort interpreted as 'super wand.' Some of that blame has to lie with me since I'm meant to be creating the impression, but if you're going to do a review I feel you should really consider things in more depth than just reading it through without analysis.

There are few points that were right, the key word in that phrase being were, but after I rewrote it so long ago to remove the very errors that were pointed you could at least do me the courtesy of updating your review, which is the whole point of this not so little note. I'd rather people weren't put off from reading this because your review is inaccurate, and it has become increasingly so. The summary is now quite obviously relevant, it is a summary of the fic, not the first handful of chapters, after all.

So, basically, update the damn thing because it's old and frustratingly obtuse in places, even if it is meant to be one-sided, and please try and think why something is there before dismissing it. I can personally guarantee that while this fic will include a lot of the clichés, they'll all be given a new twist, so don't see a portrait and assume basilisk eggs and neo-Slytherin or anything quite so ridiculous as that.

I'm not sure that's quite a rant, but it's now reached its end. Apologies to anyone who bothered to read that and discovered it's only really relevant to three people whose usernames aren't very hard to guess.