Webs Unseen

Seven months.

That's how long it's been since I stepped through the rust-flecked gates of Wool's Orphanage.

After they decided Wool's was to be my new home, I packed everything I owned: the battered box of death certificates and photographs, the chain heavy with family rings, Papa's and Nonno's medals, Grandad's cap, my small stack of books, and the carefully hoarded coins in my System. I made my quiet farewells to the neighbours. Mrs. Kemp cried into her apron. Cecilia hugged me so tight I thought she might crack my ribs. Even Luca came by the morning I left, trying to grin through his glassy eyes.

I said all the right words. Promised to write. Promised to visit, though part of me knew I wouldn't. Then I stepped through Wool's iron gate with every scrap of my old life stuffed in a satchel.

I arrived in late October of '43. London still shivered from the worst of the air raids, though the sirens hadn't yet fallen silent for good. When I walked up those steps, the sky was a washed-out blue, and somewhere a bell was tolling, for a funeral, or ration hour, or simply out of habit. Hard to tell.

Mrs. Cole met me in her cramped office, spectacles perched low on her nose, hands folded over a worn ledger like she might keep my entire future pressed flat between its pages. Martha stood by the door, sleeves rolled past the elbows, her forearms pink and raw from scrubbing. She squinted at me like she was deciding whether I might be more trouble than I was worth.

My name went down in the book. So did the thin lines that accounted for my family, all struck through now, as good as dead ink. Then Martha led me up two flights of narrow stairs to a cold room lined with narrow beds. "This one's yours," she grunted, jabbing a finger at the corner mattress. I nodded, set down my satchel, and that was that.

The other boys watched me from under their blankets, wide-eyed or smirking, whispering behind half-hidden hands. Not a single one spoke to me directly. That suited me fine. I wasn't there to make fast friends.

The first week, I did little but observe. I kept to my cot, except to scrub floors or stand silent at the long tables during mealtimes. I answered questions, when forced, with clipped nods or a short "yes" or "no." I gave them nothing extra.

It wasn't fear that had me keeping quiet. It was calculation. Wool's was overcrowded and drafty, smelling perpetually of old cabbage and cheap lye. The children were a mixed bag, from sniffling toddlers who still wet their pants to big-shouldered near-teens who liked to flick ears when Mrs. Cole's back was turned.

So I learned. Who hoarded crusts and who shared them. Who kicked smaller boys under the table. How Mrs. Cole's mood soured with certain letters from the council, and how Martha's sharp tongue was quickest when she was counting laundry.

By November, I decided to shape my part here more deliberately.

The story they'd already written over me was simple: poor boy, all alone, family swallowed by the war and sickness. I leaned into it, but I added something sharper, a hint of grit under the sorrow. I offered help lacing shoes. I fetched the mop before being asked. When Charlie Fielding ripped his only good shirt, I borrowed a needle from one of the older girls and stitched it up myself. She looked at me like I'd grown another head.

Slowly, it paid off. The little ones started trailing after me in hopeful clumps. The older boys stopped treating me like a ghost and instead began nodding to me across the courtyard. Mrs. Cole noticed, too. "Good with the littluns, aren't you, Richard?" she remarked one afternoon, watching me untangle a squalling toddler's hair from a broken comb. I only shrugged, gave her a tired half-smile. Inside, I filed it away. Approval was as precious as gold.

But Wool's was more than just an ordinary orphanage. It had its own dark legend pacing quietly through its halls, a story still very much alive.

Tom Riddle.

I knew exactly who he was, or would become. Voldemort. The name hadn't yet twisted itself into terror for this world, but I carried the memory of it all the same, like a live coal tucked beneath my ribs.

Here, though, he was just a rumour in the dormitories. The older boys swapped stories with sly, uneasy smiles. The younger ones shivered when his name was whispered near the hearth.

"He's off at some posh private school now, isn't he?" Danny said one evening, voice pitched low as we knelt over our supper. "Got himself a rich patron. Eton or one of those."

"Not Eton, you dolt," piped up Lottie from nearby, threading cheap beads into a string. "It's a special place for very special boys. Mrs. Cole says he'll be back by the end of June again."

"He's brilliant, though," breathed a girl with a sigh. "So polite. So... proper. He helped me with my reading once."

"Helped you?" snorted George, twisting his mouth. "He made my ears ring for a week. I don't care what you lot say, there's something wrong with him."

"That was Lewis, not Tom," Martha cut in as she passed. But she didn't sound convinced.

I kept quiet through all of it, hiding the cold calculation flickering behind my eyes. Tom Riddle was both cruel and charming, cunning enough to make them love him even as he sharpened his knives. A paradox that could bend people like reeds in the wind. And he was living proof that a boy from Wool's could claw his way up to something more. Or something far worse.

Winter dragged on. Pipes burst, windows frosted over so thick you could trace shapes into them. I stuck to my harsh routines. I woke before dawn to scrub at the icy basin until my skin burned. I did push-ups on creaking floorboards, squats until my legs trembled, all while the dormitory still slept.

At first, they watched from their bunks, baffled. Then two boys tried to copy me, giggling as they collapsed in breathless heaps. It didn't matter. They'd seen enough to start calling me steady. Reliable. Even admirable. Exactly what I needed.

I still practised magic in hidden nooks, behind the sheds, down by the coal chute. After realising I had found myself in Harry Potter, I had taken a more specific approach to my magic. I would sit on my bed with my hands under the covers, with my Mum's death certificate at the end of the bed, focusing all my willpower on the image of it in my hands.

At first, nothing happened, but as the days went by, I was able to summon any object from a maximum of 7 meters. Not only that, but I've been able to produce a small flame at the tip of my finger.

I've also begun to explore Mind Arts, more specifically focusing intensively on my sleeping roommates with the sole purpose of trying to read their emotions. It was with little success, but I had begun to pick up different scents, although I had yet to fully understand what they all meant. 

The System's stats kept climbing, stone by stubborn stone. However, I showed no noticeable or drastic improvement.

When the lessons started, I seized every one like a starving hound. Arithmetic, geography, and old history that sometimes strayed too close to the world I truly sought. 

Mrs. Cole started having me tutor the smaller children on sums. That only burnished my new reputation further. Richard was the clever one. The one older boys asked to settle squabbles.

By February, something else began pressing at me harder than ever, the need for money. Real, lasting wealth that would free me from any future that sought to constrain me. I'd been carefully drafting some ideas, one of which was Velcro, fumbling together scrap models in secret. The invention was crude, yet promising.

However, in 1944, England didn't allow children to run companies. I was still only a boy. I needed someone older, someone the law would trust to stand in my place.

So through March and April, I spent every free afternoon haunting quiet lanes and war memorials, reading the sad listings of families hollowed by death. I was searching for men of good moral character, with both standing and loss. Men who might pity a clever orphan.

And that's how I found Rupert Anderson. A retired Lieutenant Colonel, shoulders still drawn taut by habit, eyes permanently weighted by the emptiness of a house with no wife and no son left to fill it.

We started meeting over chess in a dim tearoom. I let my bright thoughts spill out carefully, feeding him fragments of my life: the silent house, the ration books with too many crossed-out names, my mother's eyes when they'd gone glassy and dull. His pity was a door. I slipped through it inch by inch.

By mid-May, the final papers were signed. I was now Richard Anderson Russo, legally his ward, heir to a name that still felt like borrowed shoes. It meant I could place his name on company documents, on bank ledgers. It meant the future was finally cracking open in earnest.

It is late May now, and I am leaving Wool's Orphanage.

Not far, just a few streets and tram stops over, to Rupert Anderson's narrow townhouse with its stiff-backed furniture and the faint scent of pipe smoke sunk deep into the drapes. A house with space enough for me, papers that declare me legally under his roof, and most importantly, the freedom to start laying foundations that Wool's would have smothered with ledgers and rulebooks.

The morning I packed the last of my belongings, Martha tried to hide her relief behind a quick fuss over my collar. Mrs. Cole only offered a thin-lipped nod, though her eyes were sharper than usual. Although she was a tough nut, she did appreciate the order I brought to the children.

The younger boys gathered near the stair railings, feet scuffing at the threadbare carpet, uncertain. I let my hand rest on little Harry Cartwright's head for a heartbeat longer than needed, and that was enough to send the others stepping closer too, seeking comfort.

Although I was leaving Wool's, I wasn't leaving them.

The orphanage sat firmly in the patch of London I now considered my own hunting ground, close enough that I could stop by under some mild excuse, bringing a borrowed book back to Mrs. Cole, delivering leftover biscuits Rupert's housekeeper might have set aside. Close enough that the boys I'd watched over these seven months would remember me long after their knees stopped being knobby and their voices cracked into manhood.

I'd spent my time here carefully. Not just shaping my own image, but shaping them, with slight nods of approval, gentle corrections, and the subtle encouragement of the right boys to keep the younger ones in line when tempers frayed. I'd identified which of them followed loyalty like a warm fire, which ones craved rules, which ones would shy from violence unless cornered.

It was like planting a garden that would take years to show its proper shape. I'd tended it patiently, quietly, day after day. And when Tom Riddle returned for his summer holiday, that charming, cold-eyed snake who everyone described in contradictions, I wouldn't interfere. There was no need. My work was done. I'd built something that he wouldn't even care about if he found out.

He always had a superiority complex, even before entering the Wizarding World. After realising his talent, it was magnified by multiples.

I would still visit, of course. Still murmur gentle suggestions to the boys in corners of the yard, settle squabbles with a quiet word that carried more weight than a slap. I would be the ground under their feet, steady and patient.

And outside Wool's walls, my reach was already creeping further. In tearooms and chess halls, in quiet walks through London's stitched-up war wounds, I'd gathered names and faces, started sowing trust and mild debts with shopkeepers, with an experienced solicitor, with a widowed seamstress grateful for a boy who chased away rough lads loitering by her stoop.

Seven months. That's all it had taken to make myself semi-important to people who barely knew me.

Magic thrummed through my veins thicker now, coiling with possibilities. My body had hardened, my mind spun sharper than ever, but it was these small, careful threads of influence I found most satisfying. Because when the time came to pull them tight, there would be no struggle. Just a quiet, inexorable shift in my favour.

So I stepped out of Wool's that morning with my satchel on one shoulder, my knife hidden at my side, the necklace of family rings a cool weight against my chest. The gates didn't clang shut behind me like prison doors. They swung open as easily as a breath.

London stretched before me, grey, war-scarred, yet thick with hidden doors and careless secrets. And somewhere in that vast city lay the next piece of my design.

Because Wool's had taught me more than how to patch a shirt or calm a frightened boy, it had taught me exactly how small kindnesses could grow into loyal hands, how whispered reassurances could shape futures. How to slip unnoticed through the shadows of someone else's legend.

And now, with my own quiet empire beginning to take root, I intend to use every lesson.

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Hey readers. I have ideas of what I want things to be for his second task. Obvious, given the title, but I'm including this here in case any of you have ideas that you think would be well-suited. Again, just comment here.