AN: You may notice from my other works on my account that I'm quite slow to update, so enjoy at your own risk. I just happened across this in a folder (likely waiting for me to finish the rest to spare readers the agony) and thought it was quite nice. I expect it to be in 3-4 parts and ultimately loop back around to fit with 19 Years Later.
Harry hadn't really expected to end up here, flying over a quidditch pitch in rural Scotland, searching for a snitch in the light of the sunrise.
He had planned to join the aurors. He even gave it a go for a while, training with Ron both at work and in the flat they shared after hours until Hermione would demand that they kindly stop playing around if they ever wanted to eat dinner again after narrowly missing some hex or charm or another. But auror training wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Preferential treatment was given to Harry for almost his entire life in the wizarding world, and that had hardly stopped with the fall of Voldemort. It just happened to be significantly more annoying without Hogwarts as a barrier against it. At least at school, people didn't assume he knew everything and offer to let him skip classes or tests. Auror classes and tests, however, turned out to be quite boring.
It wasn't that Harry craved adventure (well maybe a little, he admitted), but he had never really cared much for school. He had liked Defense Against the Dark Arts largely because you spent so much time actually using spells. He wouldn't say that he was better than his auror classmates at this, but he also chose to ignore the looks thrown at him by other aurors in the department when they heard about his almost daily routine of knocking a lead trainer of his feet across the room with the force of a spell. He was still awful at potions, which he was surprised to learn aurors regularly had to make. In this case, he wasn't immune to the cracks by older aurors that maybe the Savior wasn't so perfect after all. His charms and transfiguration spells were all right, but again he could never claim to have to applied himself in those classes, not that they taught much in that area in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. And honestly, he was certain that he would have been ready to drown himself in the bath if he had read another case about a Muggle object that was partially transfigured into a lion or bear or whatever rampaging about the countryside and eating unsuspecting Muggle tourists. They did a lot of case studies.
Ron passed his auror test with flying colors and went on to become a full-fledged auror. Harry would never admit it to him or Hermione, but that had a lot more to do with Harry's celebrity than Ron's abilities. Though Harry had left the ministry, he did keep in regular touch with Kingsley Shacklebolt, one of those responsible for training new crops of aurors. Ron had aced the application portion of the test, but, true to his school record, performed dismally on the written exam. Harry might have hated the amount of attention thrown at him, but he knew how to use it when he wanted to. It was amazing the effect a letter of praise rife with personal anecdotes and a few dropped names could have on the Head of Magical Law Enforcement.
Harry, on the other hand, dropped out within the first three months, not making it to halfway mark or even the quarter way mark. He was somewhat aimless for a while. He helped Hermione with the Department of Relations to Magical Peoples, something she had campaigned tirelessly to create with Harry's backing. (He was quite glad that Hermione was clever enough to use his name without him actually having had to do anything; he still felt a bit guilty about Ron from time to time.) Weekly meetings with rogue centaur leaders or less than friendly giantesses, however, were also not his cup of tea.
Hermione loved it, though, and good for her. Though she was originally the only person in the department, she now had eight others working under her as well as a secretary. When Minister Elphias Doge appointed her first employee, a secretary, Harry was sure she smiled for a month. "He recognizes how important our work is, Harry," she had said with a contented sigh.
By the time he left the aurors, it had gotten to the point that Harry felt a bit awkward about sharing a flat with Hermione and Ron and had moved back to Grimmuald Place. There was a lot of sitting around and some attempting to brighten the place up with mixed results. (Mrs. Black still refused to come down, but Harry had managed to turn her hair purple and her skin a vivid shade of green, which made her tirades somewhat more tolerable. Kreacher was mortified.)
He spent a few months working with George at Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, or W3 as it had become known of late. Ginny had started working with her brother after she finished Hogwarts, and Harry left the store shortly after George caught him making out with the youngest Weasley in the stock room. He knew George loved him like a brother, but he started to feel a bit awkward at George's lewd jokes. At least George, like Ron, seemed to be okay with Harry and Ginny's indefinite relationship. The older Weasleys were constantly dropping hints about Ginny's apparently impending engagement, much to Harry (and Ginny's) horror.
After a year of doing odd work here and there, Harry was bored and somewhat annoyed with himself. All of his friends were gainfully employed. Even his cousin Dudley had managed to become an accountant (Harry wondered if a bit of magic had slipped into Dudley after all). Then there was Harry, puttering around an old house, typically no one to talk to but a senile house elf, without a job, and wasting the money from his Gringott's account. It was then he started seriously reading the mail he got.
Kreacher always sorted his mail for him, which Harry thought was nice of the old elf. Some days, Kreacher seemed to find it difficult to get out of bed and would do little beyond the mail; these days he was unusually nice and Harry felt a bit sorry for him. Other days, Harry was surprised that Kreacher didn't burn his mail out of spite. He had long stopped eating things from fan letters, so Kreacher just threw those out. Funny that spending a few hours pining for an 80-year-old woman you've never met will do that to you. He had the odd bill here or there. There was one stack, however, that he always flipped through before getting rid of. He was relatively certain that all of Wizarding London could be employed by the number of job offers he got.
After a few weeks, Harry came across a letter from the Edinburgh Kilts (they were none too pleased when Harry commented on their name; Wizards wore kilts, too, they'd said). That was how he became a semi-professional seeker. The Kilts lost many more games than they won. Harry was the first to admit he wasn't on level with pro quidditch seekers at first, but he sometimes though he might make a better keeper than their MacElroy. He tried to keep his teammates from getting too dejected when droves of fans suddenly began showing up with "I 3 Harry" and other such signs.
They say practice makes perfect; Harry was nowhere near perfect, but he got better. After six months in Edinburgh, Stephanie Harper, the captain of Scotland National, attended a game and took him out for a drink after to ask if he'd like to move up. Their seeker had taken a bludger to the back of the head in practice the week before, and she hadn't been quite herself since. The team, including the injured seeker, decided that the Kilts might be a better place for her. Harry, who had actually made an effort to start following more quidditch once he started playing it (to Ron's delight and Hermione's distress), told the captain that he could never replace a seeker as talented Amelia MacMurthy. Harp, as he would come to call her, grinned at him a bit sheepishly. She told him that the national team had noticed that he was improving and that they could really use the increased attendance that Edinburgh had gotten, if he didn't mind. She behaved so awkwardly about telling him that latter that Harry liked her more than he had initially; he wondered who had given her that reason. He laughed to put her at ease and told her he'd do it. She smiled genuinely in return and told him, "Good to hear, Potter! Practice at 7am sharp Monday through Friday this week. Trust me when I say, you need it."
Harry had been playing with them for almost a year now, and he hadn't stopped loving it. So much for that "saving people thing" Hermione claimed he had. (Drunken fans he caught falling from the stands didn't really count, right?) He felt like he meshed with Scotland National in a way he hadn't with Edinburgh. It also helped that the whole team appreciated the fans he drew; even if they came to see Harry, they were rooting for Scotland. His seeking skills were still getting better. He was hardly one of the best seekers in the European League, but he had seen a few quidditch reports that ranked him as one of the best up and comers. Harry really tried not to read about himself, but sometimes it was inevitable when he was checking out recent games and the stats of the teams he was up against. Ron and Hermione attended his games frequently, sometimes even practice, which always made him feel a bit nostalgic about their Hogwarts days. Every now and again, he would get tickets and have the entire Weasley family attend, as well as Teddy and Andromeda. At those games, he felt like he had accomplished everything he wanted in life.
As Harry soared down toward the pitch, thinking the snitch was perhaps hiding near the stands, he realized he was happy. He threw a vague wave in Harp's direction as he passed her; she had just arrived, and the rest of the team would be here soon for practice. There was only one thing (ever present rabid fans aside) that bugged him about this gig.
Said thing was currently standing next to the brown haired captain, looking somewhat fragile in contrast to her tall, broad shouldered frame. Some days Harry internally railed against the freedom that the European League allotted to journalists. "Oy, Potter, too good to practice with your team, now?" He couldn't remember exactly when he started, but he doubted he would ever stop hating Draco Malfoy.