One Shining Moment (OPEN)

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

However long she had put up with being coated in vinegar to begin with, and however long it had taken her to wash it all off, Max had been reminded that, although she might never see Adrian again, she still had Elias to cheer on. For once, she had actually counted down the days, waiting. It was Elias's last chance to move up to second place; after how badly he had done in the maze, especially, it would take a miracle for him to stand a chance of winning it all.

When the day finally came, she had even painted her cheeks with stripes in the same deep red color as the Durmstrang robes. If one of the reporters there was going to exaggerate that she was abandoning her loyalty to Hogwarts to cheer on her half-brother, she didn't care.

Truly, by the time that she reached the exterior of the Quidditch pitch, Max was becoming more concerned with finding a place in the stands to begin with, since the line extended much farther than she had anticipated. Beginning to question if she had misread the time at which the task was supposed to start, she was sidetracked by the feeling that she was being watched. With so many other people around and the excitement so high, it wasn't just paranoia, though Max still managed to jump when she felt someone tap her on the shoulder.

OOC: Pre-Third Task. Open to multiple people. Get excited!

[Deleted]

He'd actually thought to entertain coming to the last task of the Triwizard Tournament even though he didn't particularly care for any of the chosen champions. The Greyback was a complete idiot and the Weasley girl was oddly annoying. The Beauxxbatons champion was the only one he'd actually even consider rooting for but even still he didn't want to. He was standing in the ridiculously long line somewhere near the middle of all of the chaos waiting to get into the stands before the start of the event. He contemplated just stepping out and walking to the front of it and chasing being barred from entering at all just to see if he could get in a little bit faster. There was an endless throng of people up ahead of him and he attempted to see over it to the front, noticing that it was still quite a distance away. They were moving little by little when he noticed, two people in front of him, the Greyback girl from his house was standing in line as well. She was probably there to root for the Durmstrang champion. He watched as the person in front of him tapped on her shoulder before stepping out of line. Stupid prank. The lowest of pranks actually. Now that the guy had stepped out of line he was technically standing behind her. He really hoped she didn't think he had been the one to tap her on the shoulder. He had no reason to speak with her. Luckily enough, she hadn't turned around just yet so he looked over her head at the front and waited for the line to move again

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

Turning around, Max saw immediately that the person behind her—presumably the person who had tapped her on the shoulder, as she had no reason to believe otherwise—was Zaire Shafiq. What was strange was that he was looking straight ahead as though he hadn't even noticed her, though. He must have been the one to tap her shoulder, she thought, in spite of his attempt to appear as though he hadn't.

Max took a deep breath in. Losing her patience with Zaire wouldn't help anything, not that they had anything in the way of a rapport. Still, if she got angry with him, she knew that he would be talking about her with Theodosia later. If for no other reason than to keep unnecessary conflict out of their dormitory, she was prepared to keep things civil.

“I haven't got the time or anything,” she offered him, not knowing what he wanted from her but taking a wild guess at what could have been a possibility.

@zaire

[Deleted]

She turned around, unfortunately, and the first thing he noticed about her from the corner of his eye was that she had her face painted. The color was a deep red so he had been right in his earlier assumption, she was there for cheer on her brother. At least he had enough sense not to cheer for anyone. She could had at least picked the Weasley girl, considering she was doing much better in the tournament than the Durmstrang champion. At this point, there was very little chance that the Greyback would come out at anything more than third place. Poor choice but he wasn't surprise. He noticed the moment she recognized him for who he was. He was trying to ignore her though, eyes still scanning over the top of the line to see if anyone was moving. He just wanted to get in, find a seat, and get this over with. She spoke then, saying that she didn't have the time. "I didn't ask you for the time, or anything else," he spoke clearly and concisely, not bothering to make eye contact with her though he continued to watch her. She wasn't much shorter than him so it was much easier than he wanted to see the expressions on her face. The line moved just a little bit forward and he waited expectantly for her to move up.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

“I didn't ask you for the time, or anything else,” Zaire told her. Max knew that he hadn't said a thing—so he was right; he hadn't actually “asked” her for anything—but she had nevertheless offered what she could. She didn't know what time it was exactly and had been trying to be polite to him.

“I didn't tap my own shoulder, Zaire,” she commented, guessing that he must have wanted something from her, even if he hadn't asked her a question. Most of the time, Zaire didn't want anything to do with her, so Max briefly considered if that was the reason for his fierce denial of choosing to interact with her.

Looking at the line in front of them, Max saw that people had begun to move forward by a few steps. She followed suit in order to close the gap that had formed, lest Zaire or anyone else behind her find fault with that.

Once stopped again, she turned back to face Zaire. “I don't know what your problem is,” she said, surprisingly not snapping at him, “but I don't actually bite.”

@zaire

[Deleted]

"And you're under the assumption that I did?" his tone was bored when he responded to her comment, snarky as it was her attitude behind it was weak. He knew with just a look she would cringe away from him. That or snap. He just really didn't want to be bothered with the situation and once again contemplated skipping the line and his chances of getting in that way. He had never particularly cared for the Greyback girl; she wasn't interesting. From waht he knew the werewolf gene had skipped her and that would have made her ten times more interesting than the wraith that stood before him. She had only really come on his radar at one point because Theodosia had saved her life without any logical reason. Theodosia had been freaking out, thinking that she was starting to become less selective with her attentions, lowering herself to blood traitor status. He knew her better than that and all of that nonsense was definitely in the past. He hadn't had any reason to pay attention to the Greyback girl since then. She moved up to close the people in front of them had created and he thought that would be the end of it until she turned around once again, talking about the fact that she didn't bite. "I hear that little gift missed you so I guess not," he snorted humorlessly. Another look to the front and he noticed a couple arguing with the person controlling the line. This was going to take much longer than he wanted.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

“And you're under the assumption that I did?”

Well, in short, Max thought, she was under that assumption. He was the person standing directly behind her in the queue, for one thing; for another, no one could tap her shoulder from in front of her, could they? That left Zaire.

“Yes,” Max replied to him impatiently, crossing her arms in front of her chest. (Why did he have to be so aggravating?) She didn’t even care what he wanted anymore; it was more frustrating that he wouldn’t admit to having touched her on the shoulder. They were going in circles, of course, but he—at least to Maxima’s knowledge—had been the one to instigate it.

She should have anticipated that her comment would lead to some snide remark on Zaire’s part about lycanthropy, and he delivered. “I hear that little gift missed you,” he said, “so I guess not.”

The line came to another standstill. This time, however, it was due in part to a couple that had begun to argue with someone who looked to be a Ministry worker in charge of getting everyone seated in some sort of an orderly fashion. Max rolled her eyes, realizing that she and Zaire must have looked something like that—minus any sort of implied romance. Even if he were the last person on earth, she didn’t think she’d want to entertain that possibility.

Since they were doomed to be standing there for a while, Max thought that it might be nice of her to engage in some pleasant conversation. Mainly, she was doing it to avoid hexing Zaire and causing even more problems. “So,” she began, clearly unamused at the likelihood that they would wind up sitting next to one another for the duration of the task unless one or the other of them could break away or bribe someone else to switch places, “Hogwarts, Durmstrang, or Beauxbatons?” Max hadn’t had to look far for something to say; it was the question of the hour.

@zaire

[Deleted]

The girl was getting frustrated with him now; she continued to insist that he'd been the one to tap her on the shoulder and she had her arms crossed now as if that was supposed to get him to admit to it. He barely liked touching people at all. Her thinking that he would touch her or ask anything of her, of all people, was absurd and just short of comical. "Games are not my cup of tea. As I said, I didn't ask you for anything, therefore I did not touch you," the boredom remained in his tone as he spoke and he still did not look at her. He was more interested in the couple that was arguing with Ministry official up ahead. She didn't respond to his comment on her not being a werewolf and he didn't blame her. There wasn't anything she could say. She proceeded to attempt to change the direction of the conversation, if you could call it that, by asking him who he was rooting for. He wondered why it was she felt the need to be so boring in her attempt. "Neither. Doesn't really change how the competition's going to end regardless," he did look at her now, eyeing the stripes on her cheeks a moment before looking back over the crowd. With that he realized he may have opened himself up for more conversation. She would probably wonder why he was there if he didn't have any particular leanings toward a champion. Regardless of how he felt about who was in the competition, it still was the Triwizard Tournament. He was curious about the final task. It was usually the most dangerous and the one that was worth watching.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

Zaire continued to maintain that he hadn't touched her. Although still fully believing that he had, Max was willing to give it a rest for as long as he did. Posing the question of whom he thought the winner would be, Max hadn't expected Zaire to say that he was cheering on Elias—especially since Elias was her half-brother—but she had expected his coming to a decision.

“Neither,” said Zaire, despite her having given him three different options. It meant that he was either indifferent to the tournament's winner or was set on appearing that way. If he really didn't care who emerged victorious at the end of it all, then it seemed pointless to Max that he would be queuing up for boredom. The Triwizard Tournament was ending, as Zaire himself had pointed out, but that was the point.

Everything that had happened all year had led up to this day. It was the final chance for one school to receive international glory, and then the Beauxbatons students would fly away in their carriage, and the Durmstrang students would sail away on their ship. It would be over—all of it—just like that. Max wanted to think that she would feel that nostalgia. She was sure that she would miss Elias, but there was something awfully nice about the idea of letting Hogwarts be Hogwarts again.

Catching Zaire's staring at her painted cheeks, Max was ready to call him out, though he was already looking at the queue again. “If you don't care about the tournament,” she wondered aloud, “why bother queuing up for the task?” It wasn't mandatory, so he could have just as well gone back inside the castle instead of subjecting himself to boredom or misery.

@zaire

[Deleted]

As if she was a robot, words of the fashion he'd expected tumbled out of her mouth. She asked why he even bothered with attending the task if he didn't care about the tournament. That was the question of the hour, wasn't it, though she'd gotten it slightly wrong. And just because he almost went for the shock factor and told her something along the lines of wondering if anyone would get close enough to death to rethink the direction of their life. That was a little morbid though, even if it was the reason plenty of people did show up to the tournament at all."The tournament is interesting. The people competing are not. Me wanting to see the third task, versus me wanting to see a champion win the third task," he explained to her slowly, as if she was an infant, and his eyes skimmed over the crowd once again to see that the couple had been dismissed and was walking along the side of the line. Up ahead he saw small spaces appear between the people, indicating that it was moving again. There were still too many people in front of him, including her. If it were up to him, there would be no champion just based on the principle that they all had agreed to participate in that horror of a second task. A gap appeared between her and the person in front of her and he waited expectantly for her to move up and close it.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

"The tournament is interesting. The people competing are not. Me wanting to see the third task, versus me wanting to see a champion win the third task,” Zaire explained, though Max had her doubts—and his patronizing tone might have had something to do with it—that he would have been pleased by anyone. Granted, there was no question about why he wasn't there for Anna; Elias, again, was guilty by association with her (in combination with his lack of success in the previous two tasks), and Max was willing to give Zaire enough credit to bet that he could see just as well as she could that Émile Chevalier was only in it for the attention.

The Ministry had put together some incredibly difficult challenges for the three, though Max imagined that no one would have found the year at all interesting if they hadn't done everything possible. She knew from her mother that the organization of the Triwizard Tournament was a combined effort by a number of departments within the Ministry, plus the three schools involved, and that didn't even include the specialist knowledge that was needed for some of what they had already pulled off—the handling of magical creatures, for instance.

Max supposed that the structure of how things would go on the Quidditch pitch that day was compelling enough to want to stay and watch what would happen. There was thought put into it—hours upon hours of it, no doubt—and probably a considerable amount of money, as well. “Any ideas?” she asked Zaire as she stepped forward in the queue, all the while keeping her fingers crossed that he wasn't going to speak to her like he would a child. “The maze, then the thing with the creatures,” whatever the proper name for that had been. They hadn't used the Black Lake, like they had years before, and holding the final task at the Quidditch pitch almost ensured that whatever would be happening wouldn't be based solely in the water.

@zaire

[Deleted]

The Greyback girl was trying desperately to keep the conversation between them alive, for a reason that was unknown to him. She'd asked him if he had any idea on what the task would be. He hadn't actually thought about it, what the final task would consist of. He was hoping that it would be just as interesting or even better than tasks that had taken place in the tournament in previous years that he'd heard about. The only thing he really wished for was that the task didn't involve the harm of any more magical creatures. When she mentioned the second task, he sneered. She didn't know how to describe it, referring to it as 'the thing with the creatures'. "Don't bring up that barbaric excuse for an activity that the ministry devised," he snapped quickly. He didn't really care if she reacted negatively to his reaction. The fact that she even spoke of the task without a hint of the disgust he felt for it meant that she hadn't cared about the well-being of the animals involved in it like many others hadn't. He took a deep breath, trying and failing to calm himself. It was moments like this that reminded him of why he kept mostly to himself.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

If Zaire had ever positioned himself as an animal—or magical creature—rights activist, that was certainly news to Max, yet he was the one who had referred to the more recent of the two tasks as being “barbaric” in its nature and who had questioned why the Ministry had decided to go through with it—probably in spite of the fact, she guessed, that the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures was also part of the Ministry. Max knew that her eyes must have gone wider at the unexpected comment. From her perspective, there was danger to the Champions, too, and not just the creatures that happened to have been involved in the tasks alongside them.

Still, somehow, Max understood what Zaire meant. (Was that what it felt like to be in agreement with someone whose views she had thought couldn't have been further from her own?) “Yeah,” she nodded. Some of what the Ministry did might not have been too well-advised at times; it was true. No other countries had gone and placed sanctions against Britain for the event—at least from what she knew—so that was possibly positive.

Admittedly, Max had to say—to herself and not to Zaire—that she had never really questioned the Triwizard Tournament or how problematic it was. After all of the attacks, it just felt like a nice break from reality, more than anything. The competition might have had a history of going wrong, but nothing had happened so far that year, and it probably didn't seem like much to most of the adults involved. Most Ministry higher-ups, given their ranks, were probably about middle age, meaning that they had already lived through a war once. The adults were likely numb to it, while any of the students younger than they were were likely too naïve to think much of it. To them, Max thought, it wasn't anything more than sport.

“Yeah,” Max repeated, still in thought. She didn't want to see any harm come to the Champions. It was the final task in 1994-1995 that had proven disastrous, after all. “They had experts here, didn't they?” she considered. “Magizoologists?” Hopefully, they had known what they were doing.

Other than that, though, Max couldn't say that she would have subjected her cat or any of her family's other pets to that kind of danger willingly. Muggles had moved away from using animals for entertainment in circuses and things like that; it made sense that the magical community would begin to follow suit. That action didn't seem to be something that Britain would be leading anytime soon, but they probably hadn't had the time to discuss it. They hadn't been able to keep any one person as Minister for Magic for very long.

Come to think of it, the Triwizard Tournament was actually the only normalcy that they had had in some time. Professor Longbottom had fallen ill and had been replaced by Professor McGonagall, even, but, so far, nothing had happened to the competition.

Max's thoughts grew more melancholic, but she felt that she might have had a point. “It's like…” she hesitated, knowing that the terms in which she felt compelled to put her thoughts were quite dark. “We've been sacrificing the Champions so that the rest of us won't go mad.” She felt strange for wording it like that, especially when so many people in the queue were so upbeat, but it seemed true enough. Anna, Elias, and Émile were getting all of the trauma that would have been dispersed among the rest of them if the year had been as “normal”.

@zaire

[Deleted]

The conversation actually continued, she was making the effort and Zaire still didn't know why. Her eyes widened when he snapped, no fear in them but there was plenty of surprise there. He rolled his eyes in response; he could only imagine that she was surprised at the fact that he spoke out on the danger the animals had been put in. Clearly she didn't know him at all if she was surprised by the comment and there was no way he'd rather have it. Her not knowing him. Anyone that actually knew him, and that number was small, knew that he loved magical creatures and hated seeing them being treated in such a way. She nodded, and nodded again, seemingly processing the information he had just provided her with. She hadn't thought about it at all, the treatment of the creatures, as he'd expected. He exhaled sharply in annoyance, taking the time to look back over the crowd and noticing that the line was moving. They were a bit closer to the front now but not by much. He rolled his eyes once again at he question about there being magizoologists here during the second task. Naivety was unbecoming. "Please. Idiots, the lot of them. Money is a good reason to be quiet about anything, even if it's your job to know it's wrong." It was the only reason, and a clear reason, as to why none of the specialists they'd brought in for the tournament hadn't spoken up about the danger. They were paid to supervise the tournament and nothing else. The Ministry wanted to put on a show that they actually cared about the wellbeing of the creatures being used in the tournament. The next thing to come out of her mouth actually amused him. He didn't show it but amusement filled his mind. Her words were dark, speaking of how the Ministry used the children in the tournament to distract everyone. He took a deep breath, trying and failing to calm himself. Once again, he thought, naivety was unbecoming. "You sound surprised," he commented instead, still paying attention to the crowd up front rather than actually looking at her.

Tag: maxima ruqayyah greyback

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

“Please,” spoke Zaire, clearly finding it ridiculous that she thought that magizoologists were sufficient means of ensuring that the magical creatures used for the Tasks were in safe hands. “Idiots, the lot of them,” he added, as if his position hadn't been made crystalline. “Money is a good reason to be quiet about anything, even if it's your job to know it's wrong.”

That was… something, Max thought, especially coming from Zaire, a blood purist who had no shortage of Galleons. As far as she knew, neither of his parents worked for the Ministry, which probably permitted his distaste for the way it operated.

As for her own realization that the Champions were, essentially, pawns for their respective governments to prove that they could cooperate—when the need for international magical cooperation alone wasn't the most pressing matter—Zaire said that she sounded surprised.

It wasn't as though she hadn't been worrying about Elias's safety. (Given that what had happened to Cedric Diggory decades ago was still at the back of so many people's minds, she couldn't ignore the many dangers that he and the other Champions faced.) But Voldemort had returned then… Elaine? There was no telling where she had gone, unless the Ministry knew something that the public didn't.

“It doesn't matter,” Max decided firmly, a blatant lie. She had been more preoccupied with her own nearly dying than with the implications of the Tournament. “Never mind.”

She went back on her own words, though her position hadn't actually changed. “It worked,” she considered. “Didn't it?” Elaine hadn't come back. No one had been attacked. The Auror patrols, too, had been working, from what she could tell.

“But when she comes back,” when Elaine decided to resurface—probably with others in tow, if Voldemort's return was anything to go by—“it's going to be like none of this ever happened.” Everything that had been patched up by having the Triwizard Tournament would fall apart again, unless someone stepped in.

@zaire