Chapter Text
Interlude I
He was an orphan who had few memories of his biological parents. What he remembered most was the dim little house in the slums where they had lived—the damp walls, the perpetually cold rooms, and the silence that settled between the man and woman he had been taught to call “Father” and “Mother.”
His mother sometimes gripped him by the hair and ordered him to smile.
Sometimes, he obeyed. A smile was a small price to pay for avoiding a beating.
But as the years passed, something inside him went numb. Eventually, he simply stopped obeying. He would stare at her with the same blank expression no matter how hard she pulled, and punishment would inevitably follow.
He learned very young that he was unwanted.
He never understood why his parents had kept him at all, why they bothered to keep him alive when they seemed to resent his very existence. They were constantly fighting—over money, food, debts, and things the boy was still too young to understand. More often than not, they forgot to feed him. Sometimes they forgot he was in the house entirely.
So he learned to fend for himself.
For a child, he was remarkably clever. When his parents refused to feed him, he learned where his father kept his wallet. When stealing from it became too risky, he begged scraps from sympathetic neighbours. When begging failed, he stole from the little shops scattered through the narrow streets of the slums. Food first. Then clothes. Anything else was a luxury.
No one seemed to notice.
No one came looking for the neglected child who wandered the streets alone.
His parents never bothered sending him to school, either. He vaguely remembered attending primary school for a short while, long enough to discover that he liked books and that letters could be made to reveal secrets. Then his parents decided school was “too expensive,” and that was the end of it.
The boy did not complain. He had already learned that complaining changed nothing.
It was not long before his parents decided that he, too, was “too expensive” and “too troublesome.”
One evening, they took him to an orphanage.
There was no tearful farewell. No last embrace. No unreal promise that they would return for him.
His mother barely looked at him, his father simply signed the papers.
The last thing the boy remembered was the unmistakable relief on their faces as they walked away, as though they had finally rid themselves of a burden. He watched them disappear through the iron gates without crying.
Perhaps some part of him had already known they would never come back.
Life in the orphanage was hardly kind, but compared with his old home, it was almost an improvement. At least there were some poorly prepared but regular meals. At least there were rules, however harsh. And, most importantly, they were required to attend classes.
There, something unexpected happened.
The boy excelled.
He learned frighteningly quickly, devouring lessons with an intensity that surprised his teachers. Reading came naturally to him, numbers even more so. Before long, his test scores were among the highest in the orphanage.
One teacher, intrigued by his unusual aptitude, gave him permission to spend as much time as he wished in the orphanage's small, shabby library—as long as he finished his chores first.
The library became his sanctuary; the books did not shout at him. They did not strike him.
They did not demand that he smiled, or acted like "a normal child". Only God knew if he acted and behaved like a normal boy around his parents, he would have been long dead.
The books simply waited for him to turn their pages.
He never made many friends among the other children. He kept to himself, and they eventually learned to leave him alone. He was too quiet, too aloof, and somehow seemed older than the rest of them.
Then, one grey afternoon, a gentleman arrived at the orphanage.
He was dressed far too elegantly for the neighbourhood, wearing a long dark coat and gloves despite the mild weather. There was something peculiar about him—something that made the matrons speak more quietly whenever he passed.
Several children were selected and cleaned up for the occasion.
They were told to smile, they were told to be polite. They were told that the gentleman was looking for a child to take home.
For the orphans, it was the stuff of dreams.
A home.
A family.
Someone to choose them.
The boy expected nothing.
When his turn came, he stood before the gentleman with his hands at his sides and his expression utterly blank.
The gentleman studied the list of names, then the unsmiling boy himself. It didn't take long for the man to notice the boy, despite his young age and the greyish uniform he wore, was in fact, outstandingly good looking with a fine-boned feature.
“Why aren't you smiling?”
The boy said nothing.
“Are you frightened?”
“No.”
“Do you want to be chosen?”
The boy considered the question.
“I don't know.”
For the first time, something like amusement flickered across the gentleman's face.
He looked over the boy's records—his exceptional grades, his perfect memory and understanding of logic, his disciplinary reports, his lack of friendships, his peculiar habit of spending every spare hour buried in books.
Then he looked at the boy again.
“This one,” he said.
And just like that, the boy was chosen.
The other children stared at him with envy.
Being adopted and taken away from the orphanage was the dream of nearly every child there.
For the boy, however, it was far from a dream come true.
Because the moment he stepped into the gentleman's waiting vehicle, he caught sight of the darkness gathered beyond the windows. The shadows seemed to move against the glass.
And for the first time in years, the boy felt something other than hunger and numbness.
He felt that he had just been claimed by something far more dangerous than the people who had abandoned him.
-to be continued-