Young Conrad Turner had very little use for the Harry Potter series. Apparently someone somewhere had made a rule that, of course, all children should read the Harry Potter series and apparently were supposed to like it.
Conrad read it, the entire series, when he was seven. He was not impressed. Harry was an idiot. Voldemort was just dumb. And the less said about that manipulative geezer Dumbledore the better. Most of the problems the characters faced would have been solved rather more quickly if they had used muggle science and practicality instead of magic.
He would have traded his legal guardians for Vernon and Petunia Dursley in a minute. Mostly because Conrad knew he could have gotten away from the Dursleys. Forced to live in a closet, wear substandard oversized hand me down clothes, being treated like a servant instead a child? A scornful little Conrad already knew he could work that in a reason to be taken away from someone like the Dursleys if brought to the right people’s attention, and get Dudley taken away to boot, which would have served the brat right.
But Conrad had a nice large room to himself, and the only rule was to keep it tidy, the legals didn’t want any messes in their nice neat condo. Conrad considered the rule silly since he liked things to be tidy anyway. He had nice clothes. He had good food.
He had a good education. One that kept him very busy with studies, after school activities, with tutors and out of his legals’ hair. Once in a blue moon he might actually talk to them.
And that was never a good thing. They always looked at him as if he was weird and strange and there was something wrong with him, and asked him if he even knew how to behave like normal boy. Or have friends like one.
He liked being alone. And it wasn’t his fault other children just…just didn’t like him. It wasn’t really. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. He just couldn’t figure out how to…how to… It was like there was a transparent wall between him and other children; and where was a wall there had to be a door, and if there was a door, there had to be a key. Somewhere. He could find it. He knew he could find it. He had to find it.
(He never found it. He had found some windows though, small as they were, but he could at least talk to people who seemed to understand, who seemed to be friends.)
(But the windows shut themselves after Mars. And as hard as he tried opening, breaking, them from his side, no one on the other side seem to want to bother themselves with helping him. Maybe they weren’t friends after all.)
But what truly irritated Conrad about the Harry Potter series was that Harry didn’t even have to work to make his escape from the Dursleys. An owl dropped off a letter and whoops! Off Harry went to wizard school. Easy.
Conrad had had to find his own way to escape. He had to figure the whole business of getting himself the status of a legally emancipated minor, how to get the legals to relinquish control over the moneys his parents had left him (well, that was one similarity between him and Harry Potter he hadn’t minded) and how to get himself back over to the United Kingdom from the United States.
But he had done it and he had done it mostly on his own.
He’d said that once to Captain Scarlet, when the other man had made a passing comparison between Conrad’s childhood and Harry Potter’s. And since he liked Paul Metcalfe he hadn’t thrown something heavy at him, tempting as it was, just drily commented:
“Don’t be an ass, Paul, I escaped my cousins on my own. No owl required.”
Mysteron Agent Captain Black wouldn’t mind an owl now.
Author’s Notes:
I headcannon Captain Black as an introvert and definite somewhere on the autism spectrum (like I, myself, am) and that means he has all the benefits and drawbacks that come with it. I also headcannon that after his parents died he was placed with his mother's American second cousin (his only living relative) and his wife who had already decided they were never having children and frankly didn't like them. So they certainly were not happy to be handed a seven month old who grew into a very, very scarily intelligent and, by their standards, weird little kid. Not a good combination.