/Text/ Spirit to Host

/Text/ Host to Spirit

Chapter 45: Discovery

Friday

After taking Yami's wise advice and completely silencing his phone before bed, Yugi slept through the night without any cryptic interruptions, and woke the following morning to a new message, and he couldn't be happier that it was from a recognizable name rather than the mysterious 'Unknown Sender'.

[Mokuba]: The servers were fixed! I got to talk with Seto today, so sorry for making you worry! :D

Yugi frowned. /Well, Mokuba at least feels better. Wish I did./

/I'm not sure what happened before,/ said Yami. /But now it seems that Kaiba is keeping up usual pretenses. Despite whatever it is he's doing holed up in the Room of Requirement, he's still remembering to keep contact with Mokuba./

/Or, he is now, because Mokuba panicked. Mokuba knows his brother better than anyone, and I'm even more concerned if Kaiba's managed to fool him into believing everything being alright, because something is definitely wrong./

/I agree. But until Hermione manages to look through Kaiba's notes, all we can do is speculate./

Yugi sighed and readied for the day. /I wish we knew what Kaiba was up to. Harry tried sneaking into the Room almost all day yesterday, and nothing. He hasn't come out since Monday, and no one has been in there with him. And Ron and Bakura checked in on the Kitchens yesterday – he hasn't asked after Dobby or any of the other elves for anything./

/I imagine Kaiba is using the Room to sustain himself and keep up the illusion he is out of the school./

Yugi grabbed his bag and left the dormitory. /Unless he really is out of the school. He lied and said he was in New York, but what if he masked the trace on his tech?/

/Do you really believe he would go that far?/

Yugi couldn't help but shrug, and a passing Hufflepuff gave him an odd look in the corridor. /He's done all this, hasn't he? We assume he's in there because every time that Malfoy has gone up there, he's been shooed away. But until he comes out we won't know for certain./

Yami crossed his arms. /Where else would he have gone? And alternatively, if Malfoy's been shut out by someone else in the Room of Requirement, then it begs the question to who is actually in there./

"I can't begin to guess," said Harry, when Yugi brought it up at breakfast. "I looked all over the Map the last time Malfoy tried getting in yesterday. I'm not saying I remember every name in the school, but all the Professors were at least accounted for, and there haven't been any visitors to Hogwarts since your friends."

Hermione joined them not long after, looking incredibly weary. She dropped her bag beside her onto the bench, and Ryou raised an eyebrow.

"Are you okay?"

"I was up late trying to look at those papers," said Hermione, "I checked out one of the books he had been using from the Magical Law section, and I went through it all night, but I don't think it was the right one, so I'm heading back to the Library after Charms to take out the rest of them."

"Won't Seto get suspicious if he goes back to the Library and all the books are gone?" asked Ron.

"Well he's not here, remember?" said Harry, "As far as anyone is concerned, he's in another country."

"And besides," said Hermione, he's usually gone for what, a week or so at a time? I don't expect him to show up until at least Sunday. I can always have them returned by then."

Yugi's eyes widened. "Are you sure? If these are the same ones Kaiba had out in the beginning of term, that's… a lot of books. How do you expect to get through them all before he gets back?"

"By spending every moment outside of class going through them, of course," said Hermione. "I may not need all of them. I just need to find the ones that matched the notes he took so I can read the sections properly."

"And if you don't finish before he gets back?"

"Then that's where you come in," said Hermione.

Harry and Yugi exchanged confused glances, and Yugi lowered the fork halfway to his mouth. "Uh, what?"

"If Seto wants to go back to the Library, and I still have everything, I'll need you to distract him," said Hermione, "I don't think he will, but just as a precaution."

"What, so are we supposed to stick to him like glue?" Ron snorted. "That won't look suspicious at all."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "No, not like that. Offer him a game of Duel Monsters."

"What makes you think he'd fall for that?" asked Harry.

"Because if it came from me, Kaiba would never turn it down," said Yugi. "I can always tell him I've been itching for a redo since Umbridge fouled up the original match. Though between the two of us, there's only one dueling emitter, and I've never seen him go for a tabletop game."

"A challenge is still a challenge," said Ryou, "I don't think he would purposely turn it down just because the holograms couldn't come out. And if you did it out in the common room, it would better. With a bunch of witnesses around, it would be a lot harder for him to weasel out of it."

He turned to Yugi. "Especially for a tabletop game – include the God cards. You know he won't resist a match against them if it means he might have a chance to beat them properly."

Yeah, Yugi said to himself, and wondered if Kaiba still held onto the Pyramid of Light card, now that Anubis was gone. He did technically beat them once.

/He hasn't said so, I but I think Kaiba also agrees that that duel was inconclusive, much like the one on the Quidditch Pitch. Neither of them were proper rematches./

Harry looked back to the Marauders Map. It was a rather freeing last two days, where instead of receiving exasperated looks by his friends for trying to tail Malfoy on the Map, now he was encouraged to more or less keep his eyes glued to it.

And like yesterday, Malfoy wasn't allowed into the Room of Requirement. And there was no sign of Seto Kaiba.

Ron leaned forward towards the center of the table. "Okay, real talk for a second. You remember the first time Seto left for home, right? He came back on a Friday. There's a real chance that he might come out of there today, instead of the weekend. So…what do we do?"

Ryou blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Well…we know he holed up on the seventh floor, right? And we also know he's been acting weird so…"

Harry sat, pensive. "We don't do anything," he said, after a pause, as the morning mail arrived. "Let him think we bought his story. I mean – we would have if it weren't for that one phone call. Pretend like everything is fine and we don't suspect anything. If he thinks we don't know anything is wrong, maybe it'll help us figure out what is."

Sunday

"Looks like I win again," said Yugi, leaning back against the side of his bed. He sat on the floor in his dormitory, Ryou across from him, propped against his own bed, as they wrapped up a game of Duel Monsters.

"I could have told you that was going to happen before you even started," said Ron, "Don't see why you even bother."

Ryou mock-pouted. "Thanks for the encouragement."

"It never hurts to keep at it," said Yugi, "And if Hermione's going to need me to challenge Kaiba as a distraction, I ought to start dueling more often."

"It's not like he's really going to beat you," said Ron, "And if you're going to use those Egyptian God monsters, he really doesn't stand a chance, right?"

"I wouldn't be too sure of that," said Yugi. He gathered his cards from the floor and sat on his bed, dangling one leg over the side. "He's managed to defeat them before, and I have no idea if he still has the card he used to do it, or if he'd even play it again."

He shifted to the end of the bed and flopped over to reach into his trunk. There was still a few paragraphs left to finish on his Potions essay, and then he could enjoy the rest of his evening. The textbook was halfway out of the trunk when the phone on Yugi's bedside table jingled and everyone in the room groaned.

"Oh not again," Ron threw his head back and stared up at the ceiling. "How much you want to bet it's another run of that coded stuff?"

"I hope not," said Yugi. He didn't make a move to check. Homework first, he could worry about the cryptic stuff afterwards.

"Hey, Ryou, can I see that card?" Harry asked.

Ryou paused in the middle of picking up his cards. "Hm? This one? Sure."

Harry turned it around to show Ron The Dark Door. "I know it's just art, but doesn't the creature in the middle sort of look like Professor Lupin when he transformed?"

Ron squinted at it.

"…Yeah, sort of…"

"You two want to play a round?" asked Ryou, and winked. "I'll even let Yugi split the deck this time, so you know it'll be fair."

"Never gonna live that down, are you?" Yugi smirked from the bed.

"Apparently not, but it's alright," Ryou shrugged, and passed Yugi the rest of the deck. "I will accept it as my legacy."

Yugi chuckled and began shuffling the cards. "Oh, I'll need that one, Harry, that way the decks get split evenly."

Harry continued to stare at the card.

"Harry?"

"…I never noticed it before, but what's that?" Harry twisted around and held the card up to Yugi, pointing the very bottom left corner of the card. "I remember, when you first showed us how to play Duel Monsters, you went over what all the symbols meant, but what are those numbers?"

"Hm?" Yugi asked. "What numbers?" Yugi picked up the card and looked down where Harry was indicating.

30606547.

"Oh, that's the…card serial number, I suppose," said Yugi. "Every card has a different identifying number, so when, say, Kaiba Corporation or Industrial Illusions release a Duel Monsters-themed video game, we can input our own cards into play if we wanted."

Yami's brow furrowed from within their soul corridor. /I don't know how I didn't notice before…but that number for The Dark Door…/

Yugi raised an eyebrow. /Pharaoh?/

/It's the same number of digits as the ones you have been receiving in your texts./

/What?/ Yugi lunged across the bed and grabbed his phone, ignoring the notification on the screen, tapped into his messages, and scrolled back to get to the one on the very top.

[Unknown Sender]: A/05818798 D.

Yugi handed Ryou's entire deck to Harry. "Here, it's fine," he murmured and picked up his own cards. What the letters meant, he wasn't exactly sure, but if it was meant to be a card number…maybe there was a matching serial number in his own deck.

He began rifling through his cards, and Harry and Ron sat up from their places on the floor a bit straighter, peaked by his sudden disinterest in their game.

"What is it?" asked Ryou.

"The texts…I think…I think I know what the numbers are," said Yugi. It wasn't Dark Magician. Not Alpha the Magnet Warrior. Not Kuriboh….

He flipped to the next one and froze.

Gazelle, the King of Mythical Beasts. 05818798.

"Look here," Yugi said, turning the phone around to the others. "The first text, it matches the serial number for Gazelle."

Ron got up to get a better look. "…What about the letters? The 'A' and the 'D'?"

Yugi stared at them thoughtfully. "I'm not quite sure yet. But…"

He pulled the stopper out of his ink bottle, grabbed a spare piece of parchment, and started copying the texts down. He stared at the eight lines, tapping the feather end of his quill absentmindedly against his cheek before making notes along the sides.

The cards were consulted again, shuffled around again as the serial numbers were given brief glances and compared to the parchment. Another card pulled from the deck and set beside Gazelle. And then one more…two more….

/You're making some good headway,/ Yami said. /If I didn't know better…this looks almost like a duel./

Yugi tilted his head at the parchment. /I'm starting to think that way too…but I can only make out a few of these numbers. Only five of these cards are mine. And they're ones that we've used in…almost every duel!/

Looking through Yugi's eyes, Yami stared down at the numbers that didn't have card names associated with them. /This one is used three times./

"Yugi?" said Harry, "What did you figure out?"

Yugi looked up at him. "I think this is a duel. I don't know why it looks quite like this, but check this out:

"I think the A-B thing are different turns. 'A' must be the first duelist, and 'B' the second," he mused, "I think I'm actually 'Player A', because aside from one set of numbers, I have all of those cards. First is Gazelle, the King of Mythical Beasts, and if I had to guess, the 'D' means defensive mode."

He shuffled back through the cards and pulled another from the pile on his bed so they could see the numbers in the bottom corner. "On my next turn is Big Shield Gardna, and again, in defense mode. Then I set Spellbinding Circle, and play Kuriboh…and it looks like the last card that I recognize playing is Exchange."

"So…someone sent you a turn-by-turn of a duel you played," said Ron, "Are you able to figure out which one?"

Yugi exhaled noisily. "That's…the problem," he said, "I use almost all of these cards in every duel. The only one I can't place is the one right after Exchange. It's whatever card I took from my opponent. And none of these moves were incredibly unique. I didn't play, say, one of the Egyptian God monsters, or…even Dark Paladin, I haven't summoned that one nearly as much as some other cards…."

He reached for his phone as it jingled again, expecting another turn to the duel, but it was just a follow-up message to the one he ignored earlier.

[Roland: For Emergencies Only]: Mr. Wheeler showed me the texts you have been receiving.

[Roland: For Emergencies Only]: You were sent code from the Kaiba Corporation dueling database, which logs every match played and checks for illegal gameplay in real time during tournaments.

"…The dueling database," Yugi murmured. "So I was right, it was a duel!"

Ryou leaned forward as Yugi started tapping a message back.

"What are you asking him?" asked Ron.

"I want to know what duel it is, and why someone would send me that. It can't possibly be some weird glitch, I've gotten too many of them for it to be that."

"Well those numbers are card serial numbers, aren't they?" asked Harry. "If they're common cards, can't you just…I dunno, look them up somewhere? If they're in some sort of database at Seto's company, surely you can look them up yourself too, right?"

Yugi tilted his head. "Yeah…you know, I think you're right. Let me try that."

"If it came from Kaiba Corp…then does that mean…Kaiba sent them?" asked Ryou.

"You know, at this point, I'd believe it," said Yugi. "Nothing else he's done recently has made any sense."

He was halfway through typing in one of the unknown strings of numbers into an Internet search when a new text appeared across the top of his screen.

[Roland: For Emergencies Only]: Mr. Kaiba was the last to access the database within hours of the timestamp on the first text. They were sent from his laptop.

"Of course," Yugi muttered, and switched back to his search. Referencing the parchment again, he typed in the only number he couldn't decipher from his set of turns.

74677422.

Red Eyes Black Dragon.

/Red Eyes?/ Yami said uneasily. /That's Joey's card./

/Yeah…/ Yugi wrinkled his nose; his stomach felt like it was starting to churn. /And we had it during Battle City. And I can only think of two instances when we used it. Against Joey…and against Kaiba./

/Both of them were important for different reasons. But if this is only our fourth turn, we did not play Red Eyes Black Dragon that early in the match against Kaiba. We were both too busy trying to summon our God cards./

"…Yugi?" asked Ryou. "What are you and the Pharaoh talking about?"

"Yeah, don't hold back and space out, share with the rest of us," said Ron.

Yugi blinked suddenly and looked down at his phone. "It's the duel at the docks," he said quietly. "Kaiba sent me part of the duel at the docks…."

"Why would he send you that? And why leave it all coded so you couldn't figure it out?"

"Kaiba's clearly not himself," said Yugi, "And whatever is going on with him, he's trying to tell me something, and is using this duel to do it."

"Well what happened during that duel?" asked Ron.

"Duel at the docks…." Harry murmured, and then looked at Ron. "Wait…isn't that the duel that Joey was telling us about on the tour?"

"You guys went to the docks?" asked Yugi.

"Yeah, we were searching out one of the food trucks or something, and wandered out that way."

"Well, what happened during that duel?" asked Ryou.

"You don't know?" asked Harry.

"I wasn't present for it," said Ryou, "The Spirit of the Ring was too busy conspiring with Marik at the time. I was…probably in the hospital."

"Why would Kaiba send me this duel…" Yugi said quietly, "I didn't play against him, it was Joey…."

He looked from Ryou to Harry and then to Ron. "I almost lost my best friend that day. Marik had brainwashed Joey into fighting me for the Millennium Puzzle and Slifer the Sky Dragon. We were each chained to an anchor hanging above the pier. Only the victor of the duel would get the key to free themselves, and the loser would be dragged into the ocean when the anchor dropped."

"So why didn't you just…refuse to duel?"

"There was a thirty-minute bomb timer connected to it. If no one won, the anchor would drop anyway, and then we both would have gone with it. But I had to fight anyway. I had to save Joey, because Marik had brainwashed him to fight me."

Ryou tilted his head. "You said Kaiba was there too?"

"Yeah. Marik had kidnapped my friends, and Kaiba used the tracker on Joey's duel disk to find him, and then we used one of his helicopters to fly out to the pier."

Anything else Yugi had planned on saying was cut short as they all jumped, startled, as the dormitory door suddenly swung open.

"…Well, what a surprise," Seto's cold voice muttered as he stepped into the room. "A million empty rooms in this castle and the herd still congregates here."

"Welcome back, Kaiba," said Yugi, as he shuffled his cards back into a neat pile. "How was New York?" He then looked up and his next words died down in his throat.

For lack of better words, Kaiba looked awful. He seemed pale enough to look almost sickly and there were dark circles under his tired eyes – eyes that seemed almost lifeless. His movement across the room to get to his bed was stiff. It almost made his time in the Hospital Wing, even at the worst point of his recovery, look like nothing in comparison.

Seto dropped the slim briefcase onto his bed with a resounding thump, took out the laptop and set it on the chair beside his bed. "Exhausting." He slipped out of his jacket, and then moved to the foot of his bed, towards his trunk.

Ron inhaled sharply and then caught a nervous glance with Harry. Hermione still had all of his notes. Would he notice that they were missing?

To his immense relief, Seto either didn't notice or didn't say anything, and merely pulled out his shower kit. Harry watched him then go to the wardrobe and tug out his bathrobe, and then he had to quietly sigh himself – the suit he pulled out when they were investigating the tracking pin was at the front of the wardrobe, not the back where he had originally found it, but it seemed like Seto didn't notice that either.

Two immense strokes of good luck.

Seto swept a frigid glare over the group as he stopped at the bathroom door. Yugi had his cards out, but there were at least two textbooks out among the others. Not that it mattered what they were up to; their little study session needed to go. "I'm going to bed," he said flatly. "And I expect you all to be gone by the time I get back."

The door slammed shut after him.

"Bucket of sunshine, that one," Ron snorted and then turned to Yugi and Ryou. "He really just kick you two out? It's your room too."

"It's alright." Yugi quickly pocketed his cards. "We'll go down to the common room." He led them out of the dorm and down the steps. A few seventh-years were sitting in the armchairs around the fire, so they grabbed the table in the far corner near the bookshelves.

"Harry? Watch the Map, please."

"On it." He didn't need telling twice. Harry splayed it out over the table, and easily pointed out Gryffindor Tower, the four of them sitting around in the common room, Seto was still up in the dormitory, and it appeared that the other Bakura was up there with him.

"He's keeping an eye out," Ryou explained.

"He won't get caught?"

"Believe me, he's very good at slipping through shadows," said Ryou. "Apparently, when he was alive he snuck in and out of booby-trapped tombs undetected. If he doesn't want to be seen, he won't be."

Harry made a noncommittal noise. That fact didn't surprise him too much – it was probably the Spirit of the Ring who caught him snooping through their dorm at the beginning of the year.

Ron took a quick look around them, hearing the portrait hole swing open, to make sure none of the other Gryffindors were in earshot. "So…what was it you were going to say about the duel on the docks?"

"I pretty much covered everything, I think,' said Yugi, "I was fighting to save Joey, and –"

"There you are!" Hermione hissed, coming to a stop behind Harry. "I was looking all over for you."

"Sorry, we were up in my room," said Yugi.

"I thought you were shut into the girls' dormitory all weekend," said Harry.

"I just returned some books to the Library," said Hermione, and she sank down in the chair beside Harry. "Umbridge's essay took me longer than I thought to get through."

"I thought you were working on the notes we found," said Ryou.

"I was," Hermione said, and reached into her bag for them, "But I had my other work to get done too. I can't just ignore all of the essays we have to do and sit with Seto's papers the entire time."

"Well I hope you've figured them out," Ron said quickly, and gave the Map a quick peek to make sure Seto was still, in fact, in his room, "Because he's back."

Hermione's eyes could have bugged out of her head. "What? When?"

"About ten minutes ago," said Ryou, "Terribly moody too."

"Back to that in a minute," said Harry, and he looked back to Yugi. "What was it you were going to say?"

Yugi pressed his lips into a thin line. "Just that it took summoning Joey's favorite card and handing him the Millennium Puzzle to get him to fight through Marik's mind control. He didn't free himself until the very last turn, when I threw the match to save his life."

His mind whirring, Harry frowned down at the Marauders Map. "So…Seto sent you a duel that was about saving a friend…who was being controlled…"

"Uh huh."

"And he's been acting super weird, and out of character," said Harry. Just like Katie Bell in the beginning of the year. Didn't Leanne say she too had been acting cagey about taking the cursed necklace back up to the school?

In any case, Seto lying about his whereabouts, avoiding to talk to his own brother, and all the strange text messages – not to mention Ryou's telling of the strange voice Seto had been hearing could only lead him to one conclusion.

And it sure wasn't a good one.

"Seto's being controlled," Harry said with finality. "I'm certain of it."

Hermione visibly paled. "W-what?"

Harry looked at her and Ron. "You remember Moody's lessons on the Unforgiveable Curses. Shoot, Umbridge kept us on that chapter for over a week! The signs are all there – he's hearing a voice telling him to do things, and doing a lot of work in secret. You remember how Ginny acted back when the Chamber of Secrets was opened and she was taking orders from Riddle's diary. Is this really any different?"

"I don't think you would normally be able to question the person forcing the commands though," said Hermione.

"Why not? I could," said Harry, "Remember, the fake Moody cast the Imperius Curse on all of us. I was able to resist it in class. Who says Seto isn't as well?" He turned to Yugi. "Why else would he send you a discreet log of a duel where your best friend was being mind-controlled? I'll bet anything he's trying to tell you he's being possessed."

"Then who's possessing him?" asked Yugi. "The Shadow? He's been in Kaiba's mind a bunch of times. It wouldn't be much of a stretch, but he's never gone this far before."

"V-Voldemort," said Hermione, her voice barely above a whisper, and everyone turned to face her.

"You're certain?" asked Ryou.

"It makes sense," Hermione said, and pulled the rest of the papers from her bag. "Based on all this…"

Yugi leaned forward across the table. "Well, what do the notes say?"

"Nothing, specifically," Hermione said, and shuffled the parchment into its proper order. She folded up the portion of the Marauders Map depicting the Forbidden Forest and set them down in its place. "Everything is speculation. Most of them were just notes on passages from a bunch of the texts in Magical Law, and a couple in Defensive Enchantments."

She indicated the first set. "These are the ones that Seto first wrote, when he was trying to get his phone to work. I still don't understand some of it, but from the bit I gathered, he completely overhauled the power source of his technology – it's not just changing how the battery works, or allowing it alone to run on magic; he's weaved so many layers of spellwork together in this!"

"Fawn over it later," Harry said quickly, "What else did you get?"

Hermione bristled slightly and then referred to the second set. "They've very similar to each other, but this one is much more severe. Can you see it?"

"His writing isn't as neat, at least. It looks rushed," said Ryou, and he frowned. Wasn't the voice urging him to keep working all the time to the point it drove Kaiba mad?

"Well, there's that," said Hermione, "But these here? The new ones? They go much further into depth about the inner workings of magical wards. "

"Like the wards around Hogwarts?"

"Maybe," Hermione said, "the first set is not very specific."

She wrung her hands together in her lap. "But…you remember the problems his phone caused with him and Professor Umbridge in the beginning of the year, what she thought he had done."

"Yeah, she thought he broke the wards around the –"

Harry's voice died out and his jaw dropped open. "Oh."

So many more puzzle pieces seemed to click into place. Draco Malfoy was a Death Eater – he knew that much. And while it wasn't explicitly proven, he knew that Malfoy had given Katie the necklace for her to take to Dumbledore. Whatever Malfoy was doing in the Room of Requirement had to do with that task, whatever it was. Something important enough that Snape was now looking out for him.

Seto was brutally tortured during the week spent with Voldemort. If he really was possessed, and if Voldemort really was controlling him, what better opportunity was there to try and break through the castle?

Maybe it wasn't even a coincidence that his cellphone was transformed into the Portkey that brought him back to Hogwarts.

But, surely that couldn't be what was going on. Hogwarts was centuries old, the protective enchantments had to be just as ancient. There was no way they could be brought down so easily, or they might have been already, if not from Voldemort's return, but during the first war.

However, no one managed to do what Seto had within a month of learning magic, and even if Seto truly didn't come close to breaking down the barriers, he certainly would have come the closest.

"I think you're on to something," said Harry, "I don't know how strong Voldemort's control over Seto is, but he sent those texts in a way that Voldemort wouldn't be able to understand what they were. And even though we didn't either, we at least had a way to find out what they meant."

"And Kaiba knew how to fix his phone. He really didn't have any reason to research any of this stuff again," said Yugi.

"Rewind a second," said Ryou. "Did he actually do it? Find a way to tear down the walls around the school?"

Hermione looked uncertain. "I-I don't know. His first notes from last term had more information on crafting spells. But these? It's mostly just research."

"We have to assume he managed to do it. He lied to us about where he went for the last week. I'll bet you anything whoever is controlling him squirreled him away to the Room of Requirement so he would focus on just that, and that his resurfacing means that he finished," said Yugi. "…Or that he resisted enough to get out."

Ryou looked uncertain. "That begs the question – if he really figured out a way to get Voldemort into the school, and he can't stop himself, when's he going to act?"

Ron sagged against the back of the wooden chair and looked around the near-empty common room. Would they wake up in the morning to find Kaiba gone, and Death Eaters running about the school? Would he disappear back into the Room of Requirement for another week, and have all of the teachers fooled that he was out of the country for a second time?

And even if he didn't straight up disappear by morning, there was no good way to keep a close watch over him unless the Spirit of the Ring literally followed him everywhere from the shadows. If he stumbled upon Seto about to perform dangerous magic in secret, would he make it back to Ryou in time to warn them?

His gaze lingered on the bulletin board hanging on the wall behind Yugi. They had set eyes on the notices dozens of times, but one stood out to him in particular.

"Saturday," said Ron, his voice firm. "He's going to do it Saturday."

"What makes you say that?" asked Harry.

Ron pointed to the board. "Quidditch. Ravenclaw versus Hufflepuff next weekend. I dunno what sort of magic he might plan on doing, or where, but I can't think of a better distraction. The entire school is going to be down at the Pitch watching the game. The only people here are going to be a few stragglers, the House Elves, and the ghosts."

"You may be onto something. Because not only will the castle be cleared out, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't show interest in going," said Harry, "He went to the first game because you were playing." He nodded to Yugi, "But we all know he could care less about Quidditch. It wouldn't appear out of sorts for him to stay behind."

Ron drummed his fingers along the edge of the table before he leaned forward and splayed his fingers out along the center of the Marauders Map. "Okay, I have a plan."

He turned to Ryou. "If you can have him manage it, see if your spirit can keep tabs on him through this week, see where he goes, what he does, the whole thing. In the meantime, we'll treat this as if nothing is going to happen. We'll go to class, play Exploding Snap, and we'll keep splitting Ryou's deck for games of Duel Monsters between homework assignments. We'll hang in the common room – or even on the floor in your dorm, just cuz we know it annoys him."

His gaze shifted to Harry. "Regardless of whether he still goes to classes with us, try to keep an eye on the Map, mate. Just in case he goes anywhere other than the Room of Requirement. The rest of us are really gonna play up the big game on Saturday; how much we're planning on watching after being shut in, or whatever.

"And then the day of the game, we're all going to pretend to leave with the rest of the school for the game – only we don't. We'll watch the Marauders Map, follow, and then confront him before he can do any damage to Hogwarts."

"That's all well and good," said Ryou, "But how do we actually stop him?"

Ron blinked, and then scowled after a few seconds of complete silence. "Okay, I came up with the rest of the plan. Can't expect me to have all the answers, right?"

"He told us how to help him," said Yugi. "In the texts."

"I thought it was just a bunch of Duel Monsters turns."

"It's so much more than that," said Yugi. He looked down and rested his hand gently along the top of the Puzzle, around the chain. He couldn't say he had the misfortune of being unwillingly possessed, but he remembered, while on his knees during a separate duel, it was Kaiba's words of encouragement that brought him around. Perhaps now, Kaiba needed a push of his own.

And if that failed…well, there was always a duel. Hermione proposed one as a distraction, but he might have to prepare for one regardless.

"So then what do we do?" asked Hermione. "If he's doing what we think, should we tell someone, like Professor Dumbledore?"

"Kaiba doesn't trust any of the adults around here, Dumbledore included, and I don't think we should include him unless it's absolutely necessary," said Ryou. "If Kaiba is truly under an Imperius Curse, the fact that he's able to send us that warning through the texts means he can still fight whatever it is he's being forced to do. If we can get through to him, maybe he can overcome Voldemort's hold."

"But he's still putting the entire school at risk," said Hermione, "Seto may not like him, but this is more than avoiding having a phone or a laptop confiscated. I want to help Seto as much as we can, but we still have to consider that perhaps our attempt to get him out of this won't work."

"I think…we'll have an idea how far this goes in the next day or so," said Yugi. He got up from the table. "The next most telling signal is whether or not he returns to class. Now that he's made an appearance, let's see how much effort he takes to keep it."

Hermione nodded and handed over the papers. "I don't think I need these anymore."

"I'll put them back into his trunk," said Yugi. "I'll see you all tomorrow."

He started to climb the steps and then stopped on the fourth-year's landing.

/I'm worried, Pharaoh./

/I am too./

/What if we can't do anything, if we can't free Kaiba?/

/Yugi,/ Yami said, his voice surprisingly calm. /I have every ounce of faith that we will be able to succeed. But I won't dare to think that it will be easy./

"I know," Yugi said under his breath, and then climbed the rest of the way up to his room and quietly slipped inside. None of the bedside lamps were lit, and through the light from the door he could make out the laptop on Kaiba's bedside chair, off and closed.

I guess he really did go to sleep then…

Like the night before Kaiba seemingly left for the United States, the curtains around his bed were left open.

In the four months of the first term that he had shared a room with his rival, Kaiba was always careful to sleep in privacy. The curtains were never left parted. Was this another subliminal message?

He closed the dormitory door and waited for his eyes to adjust in the dark. With the parchment clutched tightly in his hand, he crept closer.

Seto was on his side, facing away from him. The blankets were a tangled mess around his middle, and he had one hand fisted around one his pillows so tight Yugi was sure he was going to tear a hole into it. He inhaled sharply and shifted onto his back, shuddering. Every few seconds a face muscle would twitch. Was he having a nightmare? Or maybe the voice Kaiba claimed to have heard was bothering him again.

Yugi couldn't be sure.

Kaiba's eyes may be closed but his sleep looked anything but restful.

Sighing quietly, Yugi crossed back to his side of the room and readied for bed. With a final glance back to Kaiba, he slid under his blankets.

I'll get you out of this Kaiba. Just…hang in there.