His shark head and its keen senses helped him to detect sea creatures and take swift measures to avoid them, reducing the number of obstacles he had to face. Still, it did nothing to improve his mediocre swimming ability. He was used to the cold and had been taking frequent trips down into the lake's depths over the past few weeks to practice swimming and to accustom himself to the shark's sharper arsenal of senses. However, while cramming so many practices into such a short period of time had certainly developed his technique and stamina, he was still nowhere near as strong a swimmer as he would have liked to have been. It was therefore a great relief when he first caught sight of the merpeople. They weren't creatures he particularly wanted to cross, especially in their home environment, but he was used to interacting with temperamental team mascots and so had become partially desensitised to such danger. Besides, he had been trained by the best Dark Arts and duelling professors available, and had a healthy serving of confidence in his own magical abilities. His specific shark senses, such as the ability to detect the direction of sounds and water vibrations, not to mention his teeth, would also give him an advantage. The fact that he had only undergone a partial Transfiguration meant that he had a much shorter lateral line than normal sharks, so his senses weren't as refined as they could have been. Regardless, they would still aid him should it come down to a fight. While he had no chance of overcoming the colony by himself, he would be able to hold them back for a while if needed, hopefully buying himself enough time to get a somewhat decent head start. Although he didn't envision needing to. No; one of the most useful things the Bulgarian Seeker had learned from his career was not to piss off dangerous magical creatures.
He'd seen a competitor lose his hand, and almost his career, to a leprechaun during a particularly heated post-game argument. The brawl had started when Rosenberg accused one of the Irish Chasers of using banned spells and treatments to bolster his broom's performance and give him an unfair edge over his competition. After the referee's diagnostic spell had come back negative for such actions and play recommenced, Rosenberg started targeting the Chaser in question, causing a vicious argument to break out between the two players. Neither the teams nor their mascots had taken the insults lightly, and a fight of ramming and yelling had ensued on the field as a group of leprechauns snuck through the bedlam to enact their own revenge. The leprechauns in question had been banned from any future involvement in the Quidditch World Cup, but the damage had well and truly been done. Fortunately for Israel, Rosenberg had been determined to return to the team once he had healed, and had worked tirelessly to retain his position of being the best Beater in the world. Regardless of his perseverance, however, it had taught the other players to never truly annoy another team's cheer squad.
Viktor nodded at one respectfully as he passed her. Her face contorted into the merpeople's version of a polite social smile, which, ironically, looked more like a hair-raising snarl to most humans. The only time merpeople looked attractive to humans was when they ventured above water to lure someone under; in that moment, they more than made up for their erstwhile hostility, possessing an ethereal beauty that almost always drove all thoughts of their deadly nature from their prey's mind. That was rather the problem, really; humans were terrified of them when they were just being nice, but then blinded by their allure when they were being everything but. As neither race were particularly interested in spending more time getting to know the other, the problem had persisted over the years and was likely to continue doing so.
Respect thus conveyed, he focused on the pier he was steadily approaching. Four posts rose up from it, two of which held figures bound as if ready for a sacrificial offering or public execution. The scene seemed to resemble a sort of underwater witch trial, with the condemned individuals fastened in place while the village people jostled for the best view of the upcoming carnage. For a brief moment, he wondered whether that was the intention, and what the merpeople thought of the fact that they were being portrayed as the villains of the piece. But none of it, however imposing or eerie it might be, surprised him. Karkaroff had, after all, warned him of the miniature of the task, just like he was certain Maxime and Dumbledore had done for their students. He'd known what he was to face and whom he was to retrieve and had merely been left to work out how to best overcome the obstacles in order to retrieve her.
It had been a relief to hear that she was going to be his hostage, given how unreceptive everybody had been to their relationship. When he'd first told them he was going to the ball with her, his friends had been incredulous; they'd understood the allure of foreign girls, but they hadn't understood how that particular girl had caught his fancy. They had insisted that she was too young, too inexperienced, and far too plain. One classmate had even claimed that it was just a phase. He'd insisted that it made sense that Viktor wanted a break from fangirls throwing themselves at the persona they'd built up for him, but that he'd soon grow tired of it and of her. Their protests had died away after they'd seen them together at the Yule Ball, after they'd realised how intelligent and gorgeous she was and how happy her company made him. They had been replaced, however, with Karkaroff's obvious disapproval and the Slytherins' objections about her blood status. Not even her best friends had accepted it, if what she'd said and he'd observed gave any indication of their feelings on the matter. Then that Skeeter woman had just magnified matters by displaying and sensationalising their relationship for her readership's entertainment. All in all, he thought it was a good thing that the organising committee had agreed to select Hermione as his hostage. It might have been his optimism shining through, but he rather hoped it would help to sway the public's opinion, even if it had no hope of eliminating their intrusive nosiness.
With that hope firmly in mind, his gaze flicked between the figures, looking for the familiar head of bushy brown hair that had fascinated him ever since the first time he saw it.
It found only red and blonde.
Examining them again, this time forcing himself to slow down, he focused on their faces. One was freckled and distinctly masculine, the red hair surrounding it like trailing blood. He looked somewhat familiar, although Viktor wasn't sure why. But that was an uncomfortably normal sensation for him, given how regularly he was approached by fans who he might or might not have once had a playdate with, so he quickly discarded the thought. Surrounded by a hanging coil of pure gold, the other face was young and angelic. The resemblance to her sister was obvious and frankly rather uncanny, as if she were merely a shrunken version of the Beauxbatons champion. However, her allure had not yet turned sexual, instead invoking protective instincts that he hadn't ever had reason to exercise and that were only heightened by its juxtaposition against their dangerous surrounds.
Neither of them was someone he knew personally, and neither of them was Hermione Granger.
It was possible that Hermione had simply refused to participate. It didn't seem like her; while she had refused to retell her adventures in any sort of detail in case he deduced some kind of underlying strategy that would give him an advantage over Harry, her propensity for bravery had shone through in what little she had shared, and he had heard plenty of stories about their yearly escapades from other students. Still, he supposed that it was conceivable. When telling him about the task and, grudgingly, that he was angling for Hermione Granger to be his hostage, Karkaroff had mentioned that they hadn't yet approached any of the potential hostages. The rationale had been to prevent the kids from leaking the information to their champions; it was more about the appearance of competitive integrity than the genuine encouragement of it, but it had been deemed important nonetheless. However, he would have then expected to have seen her before the task started and to have found one of his teammates or school friends in her place. Neither of the remaining hostages was someone Karkaroff would have chosen as a last-minute placement.
His sharp eyes, trained to detect small objects normally and now further enhanced by the partial Transfiguration, spotted a tuft of curly brown hair floating in the water nearby, one end tenuously attached to one of the vacated posts. It was around about where that hostage's head would have rested, as if it had gotten tangled in the wood and then been ripped out of the scalp when the unconscious form had been pulled away. He swam forward, raising his hand until the clump of hair floated within its grasp.
It looked familiar and, besides, it didn't belong to Cedric's date for the ball; it had to be Hermione's.
He glanced at the watchful merpeople and noticed that their smile-snarls seemed more pronounced, more intense, than before. They were amused at this, those sods. Hermione had been down here after all, and somebody else had taken her to the surface, and they were enjoying his confusion, waiting for the fallout. In hindsight, he wondered whether the first merperson had been smiling at him out of politeness or out of thinly-veiled anticipation. Were they hoping he'd throw a tantrum for their amusement?
If they were, they were going to be disappointed. There was no way he was going to pander to their little game. And, even as he finally recognised the red-haired boy as Hermione Granger's other best friend, he knew that there was no question as to whom he was taking back up with him.
He was well aware that his sullenness and resentment at being placed in such a bothersome position were influencing his decision, but he hardly cared. Although he knew that Fleur Delacour would never have left her sister behind for someone else and so that he should, technically, take the boy, he wasn't in the mood to make his decision on the basis of preserving the integrity of the task. It might mess up the system even further, but he didn't see the point of protecting the unstable remnants of an equilibrium that had already been sent careening wildly off balance. Someone had messed up before him, and his job wasn't to find a way to fix or minimise their mistake. His only role was to determine whom out of the two before him he'd most miss were they to die or disappear, and then to get that person out of there.
On a metaphorical level, Viktor Krum would miss little girls more than he would miss teenage boys. It wasn't entirely fair, given that he and his schoolmates were all teenage boys themselves, and he certainly wouldn't want teenage boys to disappear either, but there was no point denying it. He didn't have many friends who would be culled by the decision, given how his closest friends tended to be similarly career-oriented and so usually older than him, whereas he found young children adorable and endlessly amusing and full of symbolism about noble things like the promising future of wizardkind. Besides, he – extremely secretly, for the fangirls would have descended upon him with even greater force of will if they ever caught word of it – dreamed of fathering and raising daughters one day, and the young Delacour girl reminded him of that secret wish.
On a practical level, it was even simpler; in his opinion, as a matter of honour, you never leave little girls behind to die.
A/N: Thanks again to everyone who has followed, favourited or reviewed this, and to my lovely brother for beta reading this. Also, Happy Mother's Day to all of the mothers and grandmothers and godmothers and mother figures out there! You're all awesome :).
To the first guest reviewer: Thanks! Good point. I would have totally panicked too. Most of it was supposed to be going through her mind fairly quickly, though, before she really realised the peril of her situation.
To the second guest reviewer: Fair enough. Me too, but I don't think it's realistic for him to be able to get two hostages out of there if the merpeople don't want him to. I suppose they could just be messing with the Ministry, but there's a difference between letting someone take the wrong hostage (and then claiming that all humans look alike to you anyway) and blatantly disrespecting the rules by letting someone take two hostages. Harry put a lot of faith in Dumbledore at that stage, though, so I think that the mere realisation that Dumbledore knew what was going on and was alright with it would have cut through a lot of the panic and helped him to look at things more rationally.
To Guest the best: Haha, love your name! There aren't actually any non-canonical pairings in this; as the story is confined to the time immediately surrounding the task, there wouldn't be enough time to realistically develop any relationship that wasn't already established in the books. There are a few changes that would, I think, have implications for the future of different relationships later on, which I can mention in the A/N of the final chapter if people would be interested in that, but that won't be explored in any real depth in the story proper.