Golden Girl (reader x Draco x Cedric)

♡ 18 | The Second Task

Cedric is terribly worried, not only because he knows that today, in the second task, he's not only battling for his own life but also for "what he'll sorely miss." Yet, he has spent the last two months working on the Bubble-Head Charm in line with the first part of the golden egg's clue: "Come seek us where our voices sound, We cannot sing above the ground," which clearly indicates that he will have to go underwater. But the last part took most of the work: "An hour long you'll have to look, And to recover what we took, But past an hour, the prospect's black, Too late, it's gone, it won't come back." The entire thing sends shudders down his spine.

As he waits for further indication along with Fleur and Krum on the banks of the black lake, Harry being terribly late, Cedric whispers to Fleur, "Delacour, have you seen Y/N this morning?"

"No," Fleur's nostrils flare slightly. "I'd have thought you'd know, seeing as all she does nowadays is hang around with you lot."

"That's not what she—" Cedric begins to defend you, but his words are cut short as Dumbledore announces, "Champions! We begin the Second Task! Wave, why don't you! Oh, Harry—Thank goodness, you are here at last, and you are muddy head to toe... No matter, the countdown begins!"

As Cedric pulls out his wand in preparation to cast the charm, the elusive and dreaded part of the golden egg's clue comes back to him. What he will miss most... It couldn't, no way could it be... Y/N Y/L/N?

The whistle echoes shrilly in the cold, breaking Cedric from his reverie. The stands erupt with cheers and applause. Without looking to see what the other champions are doing, Cedric casts the charm and, without checking if it worked, dives headfirst into the lake. The water is so cold he feels the skin on his legs searing as though it were fire, not icy water. Now the water is over his knees, and his rapidly numbing feet slip over silt and flat, slimy stones. But then, just as he expects his lungs to burst into flames, oxygen reaches him—a transparent, jelly-like membrane forming a helmet around his head. A bubble. The charm had worked!

Cedric blinks, now able to see underwater. His surroundings are dark, but clear enough to see. Cold, but bearable. Especially if Y/N is down there. He knows he loves her, and the egg was right... he couldn't risk losing her. No matter what. Even if the entire task was a ruse to provide motivation, he's not going to take that chance.

Cedric swims as fast as he can, further and further down, determined to find Y/N and bring her back safely.

Silence presses upon his ears as he soars over a strange, dark, foggy landscape. He can only see ten feet around him, so that as he speeds through the water, new scenes seem to loom suddenly out of the oncoming darkness: forests of rippling, tangled black weed, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones. He swims deeper and deeper, out toward the middle of the lake, his eyes wide, staring through the eerily gray-lit water around him to the shadows beyond, where the water becomes opaque.

Small fish flicker past him like silver darts. Once or twice he thinks he sees something larger moving ahead of him, but when he gets nearer, he discovers it to be nothing but a large, blackened log or a dense clump of weed. There is no sign of any of the other champions, merpeople, Y/N — nor, thankfully, the giant squid.

Light green weed stretches ahead of him as far as he can see, two feet deep, like a meadow of very overgrown grass. Cedric stares unblinkingly ahead of him, trying to discern shapes through the gloom . . . and then, without warning, something grabs hold of his ankle.

Cedric twists his body around and sees a grindylow, a small, horned water demon, poking out of the weed, its long fingers clutched tightly around Cedric's leg, its pointed fangs bared — Cedric sticks his hand quickly inside his swim trunks pocket for his wand. By the time he has grasped it, two more grindylows have risen out of the weed, have seized handfuls of Cedric's robes, and are attempting to drag him down.