The Spider's Thread
She was a muggle.
Yes, a fucking muggle.
He had noticed that even before she opened her big mouth. And he had noticed that when he was crawling out of ruins and worshipping the Horcrux he had invested in a year ago.
She didn’t have the fresh magic rolling out of her soul like his peers had, though their magic was a questionable topic on its own.
No, her soul was bland. Tasteless and utterly irrelevant. Compared to him, which magic resided in his noble blood, throbbing powerfully, she was as useless as a slug.
But then she did something completely unpredictable.
And how dare she? The day was already a shit show and now she was acting all insane.
Inviting a stranger into her home?
Stupid.
Inviting him into her home?
Even a sand molecule’s IQ is higher.
And when she gave him a room that was the same size as that disgusting orphanage’s whole building.
Utterly deranged.
What a weird creature.
Cleaning and cooking took most of her time at home, which was already so little as she went to “work” every day from 8 to 7.
“Work” meant designing airplanes, ‘an aerospace engineer’ the little brat called Lale had informed him.
Apparently, muggles now wanted to make flying in a metal box a part of their daily life.
Psychopaths, all of them.
And what the fuck was an “engineer”?
He had snooped around one evening when she was drawing with her sister, the muggle had an impressive office. With plenty of tall bookshelves surrounding the wooden desk that sat in the middle of the room, it was Victorian and elegant. One Tom could only dream of having, but the muggle had insisted on him reading and perusing around the room for anything of interest.
“Seeing as you’re a fellow reader,” She had started one morning while they were eating breakfast. It was unusual for them to cross paths on mornings as she had work and he had an ick for muggles. “I have a few English books you might like. And the office is a perfect place for studying.” She had reached for the strawberry jam then, spreading it on her bread.
She wasn’t lying, she never was, the office overlooked a vibrant cherry tree. Summer had brought little birds singing on the branches, watching Tom studying Transfiguration. It was calming, he had to admit. Hogwarts had its charms with tolls of bookshelves and sounds of quills scratching on parchment hastily as students rushed to cram their homework.
But perhaps he could get used to this room with its sakura scent and serene atmosphere. After all, Tom could appreciate a study place, couldn’t he?
Even if it was the design of a muggle…
Speaking of the muggle, although her intelligence was used on stupid aspirations such as aircraft, she seemed smart. Her desk had neat stacks of papers filled with complicated calculations and professional designs of “airplanes”.
She used an awful lot of calculations similar to transfiguration, “Physics” she had said. “I’ve always loved it.” Tom wouldn’t know, he never had the displeasure of attending a muggle high school. But he was an academic, a good one at that, and could never resist the idea of intellectual exchange.
So he bit his lip shamefully just the right angle, averted his eyes sadly with just the right amount of moisture, and said: “They never allowed me to attend school, they thought I was more useful washing the dishes.”
The woman had gasped then and had rested her hand on top of his, he could just squeeze it and break the bones-, “How utterly backwards.” she had stated, angrily. Her bushy eyebrows frowned, and her dark eyes took an angry hue. “Our true mentor in life is science. It is certain that a nation that will rise to a high level in national education will also increase all its material and spiritual powers in the struggle for life. It is education that makes a nation live as a free, independent, glorious, high community; or leave it in captivity and misery.”*
After that day, she came home with a thick physics textbook, translated into English.
Education was everything to him. It was a way out of the disgusting muggle orphanage, it was an opportunity for him to prove his power to the world and not be like his pathetic excuse of parents. One dies for “love”, other is fooled by “love”. Whatever the fuck love was.
He was above that unreal notion of love everyone seemed to have a deep understanding of, but he never had. That was why he was beyond everyone, undoubtedly better than them.
He had heard the word “love” thrown around a lot in this muggle household. The two siblings had expressed their care for each other almost every day. As they went to sleep and as they left the household and as Lale had accomplished something remotely unremarkable, her big sister would congratulate her: “I’m so proud of you, I love you so much.” Or if the little girl did something uncouth that would lead to a beating in the orphanage, her big sister would smile compassionately at her and right her wrongs and then say that pathetic word again “Oh it’s okay, I love you nonetheless.”
Love, love, love- he was going to barf.
But, this creative teaching method seemed to work as after that compassionate telling-off, Lale stopped the behavior. Until something similar happened, Nergis gently taught her the best way, and Lale, again, stopped it. He had pondered on why this was effective for days. Why would three simple words lead someone to change their behavior?
He had decided to be a teacher, after all, teaching had to be something he did great.
After the incident of dying from a muggle war, and being reincarnated by his horcrux, he had a new realization. He had to be delicate in bringing change into the wizarding world. War left people scared, and scared people never seemed to function properly. He knew this personally as he couldn’t write for a week after the bombing as his hand shook pathetically and he woke up every night, sweating and utterly useless in the face of his fragile humanity.
And deranged people were useless for his cause of changing the wizarding world the way he deemed fit.
“Unless a nation’s life faces peril, war is murder.”* the woman had said one evening while Lale was dozing off and the two were left alone in the living room. “Extinction can't just belong to the army on the battlefield. In fact, the nation to which the military belongs suffers disastrous consequences.”
She had said as if it was an ongoing thought in her mind. “History is full of such disastrous consequences for invading armies and invading nations, which have become the toys of their rulers and ambitious politicians.”
He had seen her reading constantly, every night and every morning. He had watched her moves carefully, trying to decipher her intentions. As she checked if Lale was sleeping (and she thought he was too), she would first make her breakfast hurriedly and then pick up a book. She read it as she ate her eggs and sipped her tea.
Her reading choice was similar to his but only in the genre. He read The Prince by Machiavelli while she devoured Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. He read Despair by Vladimir Nabakov, she read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. He read Dead Souls by Gogol while she stared at him strangely when she noticed the book in his hand and continued reading Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
They also had books they both liked to read, he had noticed, especially Japanese literature. The Spider's Thread by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was one of those. Their tastes also met with Turkish literature as they both liked to read Mai ve Siyah by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, but this could be because this was the only Turkish book that had been translated into English in her library.
But she still sometimes stared at him with wild eyes when he silently read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, and The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Well, he didn’t judge her vile taste in romance books so she had no right, really.
Nonetheless, it was somewhat… fun to analyze her. Her house, her routine, her questions and her relationships, her friendships, and the things she had said to him. But this could only be linked to a scientist examining the wilderness of the forest carefully, nothing more and nothing less.
After all, she was a muggle,
ew.
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The sentences marked with * are quotes by Ataturk. His ideals will be a running theme in this story.
The Spider's Thread is an exquisite allegory about good, evil, and redemption. Kandata, the wicked criminal sent to Hell for his sins, is given a chance to save himself, thanks to the Buddha remembering that he had once spared the life of a little spider but loses it through his selfishness.