Chapter Text
Harry was seven when Mr. Maurice moved into the handsome home at #8 Privet Drive. Mr. Maurice was a retired chemistry professor whose wife had passed recently, and he was about as boring as they came. He had grey hair, grey eyes, and simple brown suits with red pocket squares.
He agreed to watch Harry when the Dursleys wanted to go to the cinema and Mrs. Figg was away visiting a sister or cousin or something. Harry decided that he liked Mr. Maurice a great deal more than he liked the cat lady.
Mr. Maurice was old, it was true, but he smelled of softsoap instead of cabbage, and he poured Harry delicious black tea while he talked ad nauseam about his chemistry paper on the properties of ammonium and different liquids.
Harry, normally forced to pretend stupidity to avoid the wrath of his relatives, absorbed everything. He watched with rapt attention as Mr. Maurice went and retrieved books, showed Harry diagrams, and lectured for four hours (and over two cups of tea!) all about elements and their uses and their reactions to one another.
When the Dursleys came to pick him up, Mr. Maurice said that Harry was welcome any time. The invitation was not extended to Petunia, Vernon, or Dudley, all of whom had been admiring the blatant normalcy of Mr. Maurice’s upper-middle-class home.
From then on, Harry was sent to Mr. Maurice whenever the Dursleys wanted to go and do almost anything, or when they got fed up with him.
Mr. Maurice would feed Harry mediocre microwave meals, fresh fruit, and chocolate chips, and then discuss and lecture all about his chosen field and the breakthroughs he made when he was employed. To any other sort of child, this would have been terribly dull. But to Harry, who had never been given anything resembling the kind of attention and focus Mr. Maurice gave him in those lessons, and who had never been permitted to do anything with his growing mind, the talks were the most engaging part of his week.
Mrs. Figg began asking about Harry, and saying she missed him, but being far less normal than Mr. Maurice and far smellier, the Dursleys ignored her. At one point, she began talking to Harry over the garden wall and Petunia got so upset, she threatened a restraining order.
That night in the cupboard, Harry overheard Vernon and Petunia talking about Mrs. Figg’s interest in Harry and how it was “not right,” and, “we should keep Dudders far away from her.”
The next day, Harry was invited to sit in the living room for the first time in his life and he and Dudley were given the “Stranger Danger” speech and told all about the red flags to warn about child predators.
Dudley and Harry gave Mrs. Figg’s house a wide berth after that lesson.
Harry began spending most afternoons with Mr. Maurice. It would be a long time until Harry would be able to do any kind of Chemistry in school, but he was looking forward to it all the same.
Mr. Maurice also seemed to one day suddenly realize that Harry was not studying chemistry in school just yet, and that the fact the boy knew how to stabilize almost any volatile reaction was not useful at the moment.
He proceeded to take immense interest in Harry’s schoolwork and demanded to know why the young boy refused to put in his full effort.
When Harry revealed in stumbling blocks of words and incomplete phrases that it was due to his relatives disliking him when he outperformed Dudley, Mr. Maurice took a deep breath and said, “Well I’m not your relatives and I should very much like to feel proud of you.”
So Harry and Mr. Maurice (call me Blake, we’re close enough for that now, aren’t we Harry?) worked on his assignments and his reading and his maths, and then Harry was quite suddenly at the top of his class. And while Dudley chased Harry around during school for a bit, and hit him loads (Mr. Maurice got vibrantly angry when Harry said he fell, gave him a hug! icepacks, and a whole treacle tart), the teachers had suddenly taken quite a shine to Harry and forced Dudley to knock it off and made all the boys attend an anti-bullying seminar.
And Vernon and Petunia were angry, and did lock Harry in the cupboard, and were upset right until Harry’s teacher complimented them one Friday at the supermarket for doing, “such a good job with Harry. Poor thing lost his parents, but you are so very kind and doing so well by him. Bless you both.”
Word spread like fire throughout the neighborhood of the supposed “sainthood,” of the Dursleys and their well-to-do orphan, and it was so romantic an image, people decided that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, and even though the Dursleys seemed quite disagreeable, it was really that sensitivity lies deep in the British soul.
So the Dursleys allowed Harry to keep doing well in school, meeting with Mr. Maurice, and getting new clothing from the elder gentleman which fit Harry better than Dudley’s cast-offs because it made him look very well taken care of indeed, and that was something necessary to the upkeep of their image as blessed members of the community.
When Harry was nine it was recommended he be enrolled in a school for gifted children, and the Dursleys initially refused. Mr. Maurice bullied them into it, saying in an even tone, “Just imagine how impressed people will be with you for raising a gifted child.”
Vernon and Petunia both side-eyed Dudley, too large for his size and remarkable only in that they loved him so very much, and relented.
Harry went to school for the first time away from the Dursley's influence, and Mr. Maurice was kind enough to drive him to and from the classes, which were located all the way near Hampstead. It was an hour's drive.
He made a great friend, a girl named Hermione who was far smarter than he could ever hope to be. But even though Hermione was far better than him at humanities, he still excelled in their science courses.
They would sit together underneath a great big tree during break and exchange ideas on all they learned. Hermione confessed to him that she’d been moved into the school when she was just six, and people hadn’t really talked with her much until Harry came along. He confessed that he’d never had a friend before because his cousin scared them all away.
On Christmas the year he turned ten, Mr. Maurice gifted Harry a crystal-making set. Dudley saw it and took it from him, but then realized he couldn’t grow the rocks and gave it back to Harry half-used.
Harry spent all of Christmas day in his cupboard, making the crystals from the light of a single flickering bulb.
The next morning, Dudley took the completed project and displayed it as his own, leading to much coo-ing and excitement from Marge and his parents. (“Our boy’s a genius,” they crowed.)
Harry managed to slip away and go to Mr. Maurice’s house on the twenty-eighth, told the old man all about how he’d made the crystals but lost them, and Mr. Maurice had said he’d thought something like that would happen and had gotten Harry a second (better) set.
Harry had hugged the old man tight around his middle, and said, for the first time to anyone really, “I love you.”
He’d turned bright red and tried to pull away, but Mr. Maurice (Seriously Harry, call me Blake already!) wasn’t having any of it.
He’d kissed the top of Harry’s head and said, “Oh I assure you, it’s very much mutual. Come see where I’ve left your new set.”
And how could Harry doubt that he was loved by someone when he saw the little science kit atop a brand new bed in a bedroom with two windows and a sign on the door that said, “Harry’s Room”?
So Harry began to spend weekends with Blake, (Finally, thank you for calling me my name,) making rock candy with bunsen burners and explosions with mentos and coke.
And then it happened that he started sleeping at Blake’s house more than he did in his cupboard. The Dursleys allowed it graciously because they didn’t care for him at all, and considered it good riddance. By the time Harry was halfway into being ten, he never went back to the Dursleys once during the week.
It was a quiet trip to the courthouse and then Mr. Maurice ( Blake , sorry yes I know what to call you) was Harry’s official guardian and the Dursleys could do nothing about it even if they wanted to, which they did not.
The neighbors of Privet drive seemed to forget with every passing day that Harry had ever belonged to the Dursleys at all -- the bright green-eyed gifted child was so clearly the grandchild of Mr. Maurice -- it was inconceivable that the slip of a thing had come from the dull and gargantuan Dursleys. He was so very unlike Dudley.
And even more than the sainthood they’d been given for raising the boy, the Dursleys adored having absolutely no ties whatsoever to Harry Potter.
So when a letter came addressed to a “Mr. H. Potter,” it was not addressed to the “cupboard under the stairs,” but to “#8 Privet Drive, eastern facing bedroom.”
There was no boarding of windows to avoid the letters, no midnight journey to a hut in the middle of a lake, no breaking down the door and introduction to magic by a large man holding an Umbrella.
Blake (call me Granda, we’re that close, aren’t we?) simply looked at the letter and said, “huh,” because it all made sense. Harry had always been a bit too impatient to wait for certain reactions to run their course, and they always seemed to speed up just for him.
And he’d managed to discover geodes at an alarming rate, given that there should never have been any, let alone the sixteen he’d managed to find in their simple backyard.
“Magic,” Blake decided, “is the most logical explanation.”
It felt like something at the edge of his memory began to stir. Blake almost felt like he’d once wanted, desperately, to get a letter like Harry’s. He shook that feeling off. This was not a day about him. This was a day for Harry.
(Harry and Blake would never realize they’d missed a frankly necessary muggle-born visit from a professor due to Harry’s half-blood status and the assumption Petunia would have told him all about the magical world. In an effort to save face, Mrs. Figg reported Harry was doing quite well with his relatives and no one really ever bothered to check.)
It was far more surprising when Blake and Harry stumbled their way through Diagon Alley and found Hermione and her dentist parents equally confused and slack-jawed with amazement.
So then the two families (Granda Blake asserting, “because that’s what we are now, Harry, you and me are family”) went through the shopping list together, the children getting stuck in one corner of Flourish and Bott’s and reading the afternoon into oblivion.
They gasped as they read over the same part of a book, and Harry said, “Crikey, I’m famous.”
Hermione and Harry then decided they needed to know everything they could about the wizarding world and its most recent war, and to see if Harry had any money in his Gringotts vault, (because he felt bad about Granda Blake paying for everything even though he didn’t have to,) and left the store with several tons of tomes.
It turned out Harry did have money in Gringotts, and the goblins were all rather confused by the muggle accompanying him (What is the relation between you two?) (Oh, me? I’m his granda by choice. Best decision I’ve made since choosing Cambridge for my P.h.D) (It feels like we’ve seen you before many years ago. Do you think you might be from a prominent wizarding house? A squib, maybe?) (A what and a who? )
It would not be the last time, Harry was certain, someone would ask about him and Blake Maurice. But it was the first time, Harry thought, looking around at a colorful world with fantasy flying all around him, that he felt like he could begin to see his future.
Because when he left the alley after having gotten dinner with Hermione and her family, (no desserts, they’ll rot your teeth,) he and Granda went back to their quiet house and cuddled on the couch and talked about the world of magic over handfuls of chocolate chips.
And he knew that even when he went to Hogwarts, he could always write to Granda all the things he learned and all the things he’d done, and then… for summers and winters and if he ever decided the wizarding world wasn’t all that great… he could always come home.
Home, after all, is a powerful thing.