"We've a problem, mates," Seamus announced to the boys' dorm room one night after they'd been back from winter holidays for over a month.
"Another attack?" Harry asked. The castle had been remarkably coma-free since they'd returned, though part of that had to do with strict curfews after dark, everyone using the buddy system to get around even in daylight hours, and the professors turning the place upside down trying to find the snake ghost. Dumbledore had concurred with Hermione's suggestion that it could be a Nidhogg serpent loose in the school.
"Worse," Seamus shook his head. "The girls learned o' Valentine's Day."
"What's that?" Ron asked.
"Day where you send mushy cards to the friends in your class," Dean answered, slightly flippantly.
"Doesn't sound so bad," Neville added.
"Tha's prim'ry school," Seamus shook his head at them not getting it. "For teen's it's about who ye fancy, innit?"
"It's about being fancy?" Dean was confused.
"No, who ye fancy, ye idjit. Like datin' an' snoggin' an' such!"
At times, the language barrier even though they all technically spoke English was a lot, and Harry finally worked out, "I think he means that the girls are going to expect us to tell them whether we think of them as girlfriends, not just friends who are girls."
"Exactly!" Seamus agreed.
"Well obviously Harry and Hermione," Ron stated.
"Why does everyone think that!?" Harry asked. "Why don't you assume, 'Obviously Dean and Hermione?'"
Ron got a calculating look, "So you're not already together with Hermione? And don't want to be?"
"Remember I'm the youngest one in the room," Harry shook his head. "I'm not sure I'm thinking about anyone like that yet. Hormones haven't kicked in. Bunch of guys in my class the last year of school on Midgard started trying to 'go' with girls, but they were just trying to seem like grownups. It's silly to worry about it until you have to."
"Man has a point," Dean said. "But if we were planning which girls we liked…"
"Just as an academic exercise?" Neville suggested.
"Exactly," Dean agreed. "Do we consider dating just to see what it's like? Should we date outside Gryffindor in case it goes bad? Should we think about who's probably going back to Earth after they graduate?"
Harry rolled his eyes, "None of you are seriously into girls yet, and you want to pick a life partner?"
"Just as an academic exercise," Dean grinned. "I think I should get to pick first. After all, I need a girl that's going to want to live on Earth and is okay dating a black guy."
"Wait," Ron latched onto something he'd said. "Going back to Midgard?"
"Yeah, man," Dean explained. "I'm joining the Masters. Harry probably too, right?" Harry nodded. "We might still come visit, but we're not going to buy a house here and settle down."
"I ain't decided yet," Seamus allowed. "Me family's all in Ireland now."
That looked like it was blowing Ron's mind. "But… heroes together forever."
"You could probably come to Earth and learn magic there?" Harry offered. "But that's still nearly six years away. That's basically forever. Dumb to plan that far ahead. And getting married and stuff is even further than that. My aunt isn't married yet and she's nearly forty."
"Yeah, but she's hung up on Tony," Dean countered.
"Fair," Harry agreed, glad that he wasn't the only one that noticed it after spending time with her. "Still, even my parents didn't start dating until their seventh year here, and they were, like, the picture of young love."
"But they got married right after, yeah?" Ron checked. "I think that's pretty common around here, getting married right after Hogwarts. My parents did too. Nev?"
Neville waited a beat, like he didn't want to answer, but finally admitted, "Yeah."
"S'what I'm sayin'," Seamus agreed. "Gotta make a move now, or no options by the time ye're ready."
"Which of the girls do you want to date, then?" Harry asked him.
"None o' 'em," he shook his head. "Pretty sure I'm inta blokes. Though I guess ye're right that I might no' know fer suire 'til puberty kicks in." He gave it a beat and added, "None o' ye, o'course. Be like datin' yuir brother."
Everyone nodded, but didn't make a big deal of it. They'd suspected for months, anyway. Harry asked, "Did you bring up Valentine's Day just to come out to us, man?"
"Well…" Seamus admitted, "Only partly. I really did hear 'em gigglin' 'bout it."
"We could just ignore it," Harry figured. "It's not like there's a Valentine's Day tradition on Vanaheim that they'd expect anything. We didn't do anything about it last year, not even the upper years."
The very picture of "spoke too soon," the next morning at breakfast, Fandral hit his goblet with his spoon to get everyone's attention, and announced, "I've been reminded of an excellent little Midgardian tradition, St. Valentine's Day, due to all the lovely cards I've already received. Thank you very much to all of you for the wonderful thoughts. Midgard's courtly romance was a tradition of valor that we appreciated even on Asgard, and I think it might lighten spirits in these times to see it revived.
"With that in mind, I have here a dwarf-crafted charm said to protect the wearer from afflictions of the heart," he held up something golden that was on a shiny chain, but which no one could really make out from across the great hall. "What say we make it a contest? At the end of Horning, which is pretty close to the date of the celebration on Midgard, I'll award this for the greatest example of public and courtly romance. It could be a poem. It could be a piece of art. It could be a public declaration of love. The winner may then have this charm to gift to their paramour."
The excited gossiping swept through the hall about three seconds after he finished speaking.
Over the next week, the Valentine's Day competition led to three massive headaches for Harry.
First, Fandral took to reading anonymous poetry and declarations of love at breakfast, from those who wanted a chance at the contest but didn't feel up to public speaking themselves. Harry was the object of more of these secret love poems than he'd expected, and Draco became an even bigger pest attempting to mock him about each one that he received. Far and away was the one that compared his eyes to pickled toads. He honestly wondered if someone who didn't like him had submitted that one just to be funny. It couldn't be the Weasley twins, because they were banned for their own prank poems after the first day (and their friends, submitting them for the twins, by the next morning).
Second, the girls of the study group started very precisely not saying anything about how the Gryffindor boys hadn't yet publicly given them Valentines contest entries. They said it so silently they might as well have been screaming. Finally, the boys spent a productive evening in their room with Dean's art supplies making a bunch of clearly-just-friends Valentine's cards for each of the girls, with nothing to differentiate any of them from the others other than the names signed on them. They gave them out to Hermione, Parvati, Padma, Lavender, Luna, and Ginny. While the girls seemed vaguely disappointed that none of them had received public declarations of undying love, they at least seemed to appreciate the effort and the screaming silences finally ceased.
Third, there was the problem of Myrtle. Harry wasn't even sure how she was finding him, but she'd wander out of walls as he moved between periods to say hello, poke her head out the wall in classes where the professor wouldn't immediately yell at her just to stare at him, and even once scared the hell out of him by poking her head through the stall while he was using one of the downstairs bathrooms.
"Just give her one of those Valentine cards," Ron suggested, when they were getting ready for quidditch practice after dinner a couple of days before Fandral's arbitrary deadline. Ron was still basically the only alternate on the team, but got to play a fair amount during practices as Wood let him play keeper while inspecting the rest of the team's maneuvers from different angles. "You can drop it on the way down to the pitch."
"Don't you think that will give her the wrong impression?" Harry checked.
"It worked on the other girls," Neville added. "Anyway, I'm heading to the library."
Harry nodded, "Alright. I think we had a couple extras. I can fill one out. Don't forget to take a buddy, Nev." They were still trying to avoid anyone going out in the school alone, especially later in the day, though they'd gotten lax about it with no attacks for two months.
"I'm a pureblood, but okay," Neville shrugged, heading out with his satchel. "I usually go with Ginny, but I haven't seen her around today. I'll see if anyone else wants to go."
Harry and Ron left the room a little while later, Valentine card for Myrtle in hand. The ghost's bathroom was still a convenient stop on the way down the great stair, and Harry knocked on the door just in case a living girl was using it. He'd heard that was pretty uncommon since Myrtle had moved back in. Her voyeurism was even worse if you were in her own domain.
A faint sobbing paused and he announced, "It's Harry Potter. Can I come in?"
"Are you going to throw a book at my head too?" she asked.
Harry gave Ron a look, and the taller boy met Harry's eyes with his blue ones and shrugged, mouthing, "She's crazy. I'll stay out here."
"Gee, thanks," Harry mouthed back, rolling his eyes. "I'm coming in, okay?" he said, pushing into the room. The place looked about like the boys' bathrooms, all slightly-alien fixtures from a culture that had figured out magically-powered flowing water and waste disposal centuries—maybe millennia—earlier than Earth, and had haphazardly adapted their bathroom standards when someone mentioned a good idea from other planets. It was very big on brass fittings, of all things. He could hear Myrtle's quiet sobbing from the stall at the end, and asked, "Someone threw a book at your head?"
"I didn't see who it was," she answered. "I bet it's one of those mean girls that doesn't like sharing the bathroom with me. It's Olive Hornsby all over again. You know I was in here crying about things she'd said to me when I died?"
"No, I had no idea," Harry said. "I'm sorry they're so mean to you." He didn't think he'd earn any points with the ghost that she might have more friends if she kept her head out of the stall when people were trying to use the toilet. "I just came by to bring you a Valentine's card?"
"Oh?" she sniffled, poking her head out of the stall and threatening to break into a grin, eyes brightening in her excitement to a nearly-glowing blue against the general monochrome translucency of her. "For me?"
"I mean," he tried to figure out a tactful way to put it, holding up the card, "I've been giving them to all my really close friends who are girls, and I didn't want you to feel left out." Her eyes narrowed as she tried to work out whether to be mad about that, so he quickly said, "Do you want me to set it up in your stall?"
She finally nodded, admitting, "That would be very helpful, since I can't actually touch it. And you can remove that book, too, while you're in there."
"Yes, ma'am," he agreed, still pretty curious about what girl was mad enough at Myrtle to attempt to assault her in a bathroom with a thrown book. Unless it was a tome of exorcism, it wasn't going to do anything.
He gingerly pushed the stall door open (it wasn't like Myrtle could throw the latch when she was inside), and found himself very close up to the tittering ghost girl. "Oooh, Harry. Welcome to my humble abode," she told him.
He held up the card for her to see, and to ward her off a bit in the small space, "Just over here on the tank, do you think?" he said, setting the card on the metal surface of the tank for the toilet. They worked fairly similarly to Earth toilets, for all that the water to fill the tank was conjured and the waste it washed away was automatically destroyed by magic.
"Oooh, those are pretty drawings of flowers. Thank you, Harry. It's good to know someone cares," she said, leaning over to appreciate the card.
"I bet it's hard," he agreed. "Are there any other ghosts you can talk to, or do too many of them speak Old English?"
"And they died old, too," she agreed. "Professor Binns is about the only one I can understand. Well, there's one more, but he won't talk to me. Almost makes me want to go back to Niflheim."
"I'm sure it will all work out. Just give people time to get to know you," he told her. "That the book?" he asked, spotting a small black tome face-down in the back corner of the stall.
"Yes. Please take it away. And thanks for talking to me, Harry," she said.
"Sure thing," he nodded, bending over and trying to ignore Myrtle's tittering and the faint cold of her hand touching his butt as he reached for the book. It was probably good that she was incorporeal, because she'd be even more problematic as a physical entity.
As he stepped back out of the stall, he took a look at the book in the magical light of the bathroom, noticing that it was a fairly soft binding in black leather with no obvious markings except for the small yellow gemstone set in the center of the front cover. The whole thing could probably easily fit in a large pocket, for all that it was about an inch thick.
And that was about as much inspection as he got done before the assault on his mind began.
The yellow stone began to shine brilliant light, and his hands without his conscious control flipped open the book, page after page of densely-worded text flipping by quickly. It was almost like machine code in printed form, the occasional English words like, "Obey," "Serve," "Mission," and "Father," legible against seas of alien glyphs and programmatic punctuation. It felt less like something reaching into his head, and more like it was going straight to his heart…
…where it met an orange light. Harry Potter had already been claimed.
Now his head started to hurt, as the energy of the Soul Stone once more leaked from the famous scar on his forehead, though only Myrtle was there to see it. Harry felt a mother's love tinged with rebellion—the one thing he'd directly asked the first stone he'd held was to help another throw off mental conditioning. It might still have not been enough, had a living intelligence been trying to compel him with the stone, but with only the textual programming of the book to battle, the orange light beginning to suffuse his skin gradually pushed the yellow light away, back into the book, and away from his hands.
He used them to slam the book shut and drop it.
"What the hell was that?" he asked the ghost in the room.
"Well I don't think it did that to me," she said, though suddenly Harry wasn't so certain. Could you mind control a ghost?
This had to be related to the attacks. Harry withdrew his invisibility cloak from his pocket and, treating it like touching a live electrical wire, he put the cloak down, quickly kicked the book onto it with his foot, and then bundled the whole thing up, hanging onto it by the end like a garbage bag that was only partially visible. "I've got to get this to the headmaster," he said to himself as much as Myrtle. "Um, Happy Valentine's," he remembered to tell her, before leaving the bathroom.
And where was Ron Weasley, who should have been waiting outside?
No time for figuring out why Ron had left without him, and suddenly feeling exposed in the empty classroom levels, Harry rushed out onto the grand stairway, and began running upwards toward the headmaster's office. He certainly didn't want to try to hang onto the book himself, or risk it touching another student. Unfortunately, he was so fixated on where he was going that he lost track of his surroundings, and didn't see the spell that hit him, just as he was cresting the fourth-floor landing.
He certainly felt the floor, as the full body-bind spell wrapped him in its turquoise energy and sent him crashing down, face first, narrowly avoiding smashing his brains open on the next step.
Unable to do more than grunt angrily, head turned so he couldn't even see his attacker, he felt someone's hands pawing at his robe before noticing the bag made of the cloak. Fortunately, his hands were frozen holding onto it, so whoever had petrified him couldn't steal the Potter relic, but they were able to quickly and quietly work the folds open to take the book back. There was a long moment of the assailant thinking of what to do about him, before they seemed to decide to just leave with the book, light footfalls disappearing off back down the fourth floor corridor.
And there was Harry Potts, paralyzed like an idiot, victory snatched from him because he hadn't been paying attention, angrily waiting for the spell to wear off or someone to come along.
Strangely, it turned out not to be that powerful, and started to wear off on its own only about half a minute after he heard the footfalls running away. When they'd practiced that spell in class, Hermione had been able to get him with one that was strong enough to last at least a minute before Flitwick had dispelled it from him. Either the person casting it hadn't meant it to last, lost a lot of power casting it without yelling the mnemonic, or was another younger student. The spell worked almost like a physical binding, for all that it mimicked paralysis, and once he could start moving his limbs, he was able to use some of the escapology Mordo had taught him to quickly throw off the spell, regaining full mobility in an instant.
"Oh, good," a young man's voice said, with the familiar echo of a ghost. Harry rolled over drawing his wand, to see an unconcerned apparition walking up the stairs. It looked like a dark-haired young man in his late teens or early twenties, wearing robes cut similarly to Myrtle's, if there was any kind of fashion to such things. The boy's voice had an English accent, and he explained, "I was about to go find help, but it seems you're okay."
"Don't suppose you saw who cast the spell?" Harry asked, surreptitiously stowing his cloak in a pocket and trying to look for other assailants without losing track of the strange new ghost.
"Sorry, no," the speaker said, moving closer so that Harry could see that he was probably quite handsome when he was alive, marred somewhat by the large vertical puncture in his chest as if he'd been stabbed through the heart by a very wide sword, or maybe a helicopter blade. "Say, are you Harry Potter? I've heard about you."
"I don't think I've seen you around," Harry said, trying to size up the new visitor but having a hard time picking up anything from his face but interested concern.
"Mort," the boy introduced himself. "Mortimer Dol Vola. I just came back last Halloween and have been finding my feet. I loved this place when I was a student, but it's a lot different when you're a ghost."
"I bet," Harry agreed. "Sorry, but I need to get to the headmaster."
"I'll walk you. I know the students aren't supposed to be out this late alone," Mort said, strolling along as Harry began to climb the steps to get the rest of the way up to Dumbledore's office.
"I'm surprised the ghosts are out," Harry said, still wary of the unknown specter. "Can't the giant snake fully eat you?"
"Could be," Mort admitted. "You lose a lot of fear of death after you actually die, though." He gestured to the oversized death wound on his chest. "Can't really feel fear the same way, either. No blood to pump or chemicals for your brain to release. Funny thing is, I survived the last time it was in the castle."
"Yeah? You weren't the student it killed?" Harry asked. He supposed the hole in his chest could have been a giant snake fang wound.
"No, that was Myrtle," he explained, and Harry filed that fact away. "I died a few years later. Imagine my surprise, though, when I came back to find that the boy they said unleashed it is now the school's gamekeeper."
"Hagrid didn't kill anyone," Harry shook his head.
"Maybe not," Mort said, agreeably. "But if he didn't, who could it be? And if Hagrid doesn't know, you'd almost have to ask the snake itself. Not that there are too many people that can talk to snakes around, right?"
"What'd you say your last name was again?" Harry asked, shrewdly. "Mortimer del Volo?"
"Dol Vola," Mort corrected. "It's Welsh." He smiled faintly and said, "Well, it was good meeting you, Harry Potter. I think this is your stop." He gestured to the gargoyle guarding the headmaster's office and walked away through a wall before Harry could get another word in.
He'd need paper or some Scrabble tiles to be sure, but Harry was fairly certain that Mortimer Dol Volo was another anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle. He frowned and told the gargoyle, "I need to talk to Headmaster Dumbledore. It's an emergency."
Someone had just tried to mind control him with a book, and the ghost of Tom Riddle was wandering around and just happened to show up. Harry didn't really understand how it was all connected, but hopefully Dumbledore would have some ideas.
The annoying thing was that he hadn't even tried to go investigating, and all of the danger was finding him anyway.