Octopus' Garden

Notes: Thanks to Lily_Evans55, Fated-Twist, and QuickQuotesQuill for the lovely and last-minute betas! Oh, and the story title belongs to the Beatles.

Octopus' Garden

"Non." It was a single word, and Fleur spat it. "Non, they cannot do this! They cannot, they cannot!"

"They will," Madame Maxime replied evenly.

"They will steal Gabrielle, take her away from home to a foreign country and throw her to the bottom of a freezing-cold lake?" Fleur screeched.

"Calm yourself!" Madame Maxime ordered. "All the champions will have someone taken. You are the only one with a sister. The others kidnapped will be students here, friends and girlfriends."

But Fleur did not care about the other champions. They were going to kidnap her sister--sweet, innocent Gabrielle who had never been outside France--and use her as bait? For a silly tournament?

"No, they cannot! I will not let them!"

"Fleur, my dear, you have no choice."

It was the sympathy in Madame Maxime's voice that broke her; Fleur bit back her tears and her tirade, and looked her headmistress in the eye.

"What must I do?"

* * *

Fleur looked out through her Bubble-Head Charm at the lake bottom. Sweeping her head from side to side, she could see sand and seaweed but not much else. The charm slightly curved her vision, making things at the periphery much smaller than they were.

So she didn't see the grindylows until they had surrounded her.

With a scream that reverberated around her bubble, Fleur tried to shake her legs free of the wretched creatures, but they were holding on far too tight. She tried the charms Madame Maxime had taught her, but they didn't work under the water, or perhaps they were the wrong ones.

Fleur had been calm up until the very moment of diving into the lake. Until then, she had been reassured by Madame Maxime's promises of her sister's safety; but now, in the eerie green light, she was not so certain, and she was panicking. Her spells bounced off the grindylows, doing nothing.

And then things went from bad to worse.

A huge tentacle appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Fleur around the middle. With one swipe, it carried her at least fifty feet away from where she'd been. And while she was no longer under threat from the grindylows, she was now the captive of a giant squid.

Fantastic.

Fleur let out another healthy scream. Her overwrought mind was filled with visions from childhood nightmares, where tentacled monsters kidnap young women and do horrible things to them until the hero rescues them -- except that there was no hero here, and her own status as heroine had vanished long ago. The three boys who were also in the lake with her would be only too glad to let her die in the clutches of a giant squid. This was a tournament.

All this thinking took only a fraction of a second. In the next fraction, Fleur's well-trained reflexes pulled her wand out, and she was sending sparks, curses, hexes, whatever she could think of, at the tentacle that was clutching her waist.

A shower of what must have been boiling water shot from her wand and left blisters on the tentacle, which finally released her. But then a great, bubbly roar came from somewhere behind her, and she turned to see the bulk of the horrid creature, five times larger than anything her imagination could have mustered.

Fleur's wand arm fell. Little particles of enchanted snow fell around her face as her last curse mangled itself and died.

"I'm going to die," she thought. "I'm going to die, under the lake, killed by a giant squid."

The thing was huge, absolutely huge. It was coloured green and orange, with a bit of purple splotching here and there for good measure. The single eye she could see was inky black, and on each tentacle were thousands of little sucker pods. It must have been a hundred feet long at least.

And it was twenty feet away from her, all its tentacles outspread, prepared to attack.

For a good five seconds nothing happened. She gazed at the squid, and the squid gazed back at her.

A tentacle moved slowly towards her. Fleur eyed it warily, ready to shoot more boiling water at it.

Suddenly Fleur heard, through the water, a murky chitter. She looked behind and saw, to her dismay, more grindylows coming up behind her. At least her mind was clear now: she knew which spells would work and which wouldn't. But as she turned, and raised her wand to strike, one of the squid's tentacles appeared from behind her and swept the grindylows away with a single blow. Then the same tentacle grasped her around the middle and hauled her away again.

An odd thought popped into Fleur's head: could the creature be on her side?

It wasn't squeezing her, or smothering her, or trying to harm her in any way. It had, in fact, rescued her from the grindylows -- twice now. All it was doing now was swimming, carrying her towards the shallows.

But Fleur didn't want to go towards the shallows, she wanted to go rescue her sister! She pushed against the tentacle that still held her, straining to get free and go rescue her sister. But the tentacle held her tight, and another one approached her trembling hands and rested against them, preventing her from moving.

"Merde," she muttered. "Shit. Gabrielle!" she cried, as if calling to her sister would somehow empower her. Once more she pushed at the tentacles, straining with all her might against the creature, but she was completely incapacitated. She could not reach her wand, she could not escape.

Defeated at last, Fleur collapsed against the rubbery tentacle, miserable and depressed. She'd failed. She'd failed, and her sister was left at the bottom of the lake, alone and unconscious, with no one caring enough about her to rescue her.

And, thirty seconds later, Fleur was back on the shore, crying into Madame Maxime's shoulder, praying that Gabrielle would be all right.

~fin~