Strokes of Luck

"Harry Potter was lucky and unlucky in a multitude of ways. He wasn't smart. He wasn't like his parents - he didn't get Lily's brain, but he got Lily's heart. Maybe that would be enough. The Wizarding World wanted a savior, but they never expected him to be 'slow', - the artistic world begs to differ as a certain millionaire takes an interest in the portrait of a crumple-horned snorkack, " - Summary

Artistic!Harry, LearningDifficulty!Harry, Slash! VERY Alternate Universy and totally twists how the cannon played out even if the events still happened. YAOI/FutureLemon! Crossover! Post-War. - How things would have been if Harry wasn't very smart - border slow and thus shattered what everyone expected him to be.

- VERY FORREST GUMP INSPIRED (and if you've never seen it, go do it, it's a great film based on a great book) -

Quote of the Chapter: 1:Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

- Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh and Harry Potter are not my property-

PROLOGUE

THOUGH THE ILLUSIONS MAY BREAK

He was always doing what he was supposed to do but never necessarily doing it right. That's the problem with Harry Potter. Back when he was little and the muggle teachers gave him homework - he'd do it without fail but almost never correctly. It took him a long time to understand that two plus two was not twenty-two and was in fact, four. That just because things looked a certain way didn't mean they were as they appeared. Magic helped that lesson sink in. Harry learned a lot of things - but old habits died hard. He fulfilled his role in the prophecy, but every literary piece that had a grain of honesty to it's name, despite painting out a hero - knew for a fact that Harry pretty much blundered through the war as cluelessly as he did in life. It resulted in a lot of death, and would have resulted in a lot more had it not been for the people around him coaching him in the right direction. Everything he understood about life came from Dumbledore, Hogwarts and Hermione - always what other people were telling him, everything he knows had to come through those filters. Harry wasn't a moron though, he could grasp new concepts, but he struggled. Hermione called it a learning difficulty, Harry just called himself normal. The Dursleys never thought so, they always said he was stupid and a freak but magic taught him that maybe they were only half-right because we may see things one way, but that doesn't mean they are that way. Like how two plus two wasn't necessarily twenty-two.

So Harry Potter won the war, but not with his wand and not with the help that he depended on for a lot of things in his life. He looked down on Voldemort, who's wand snapped beneath his boot - and it was the cold steel of the gun that Uncle Vernon brought after Hagrid destroyed the family firearm, that brought Tom Riddle's end.

"I was never good at counter spells," said Harry, as blood jutted out of Voldemort's chest as his body writhed.

"You think muggles are stupid don't you?" asked Harry softly, as Voldemort struggled on the ground from the bullet wounds, rapidly losing blood with nobody around for miles to assist.

"People think I'm stupid," said Harry conversationally, as if the Dark Lord was not dying at his feet.

"But that's when I learned that just because things look a certain way, doesn't mean they are that way," said Harry.

"I bet you never thought you'd get shot by anything except a killing curse, right?" Voldemort's pupils seemed to dilate, or something - Harry didn't need to look deeply at the Dark Lord's body to know what was happening. Tom Riddle could not respond, but only smile at the sad, bitter irony, that not only was the world's savior not half as intelligent as he, but that he was bested at the hands of something besides a wand. Something a wizard - with - a wand could have stopped with laughable ease - a muggle tool. Luck sat on that fool's shoulders and caused the fall of the Dark Lord by bullets to the chest. Something nobody saw coming.

But Harry had done as he'd always done - doing his duty but not necessarily correctly. This was when Harry learned that sometimes, you could get away with things like that.

The question then begged, where did he go from here? This was when he'd ask Hermione.

He knew he frustrated Hermione sometimes when he asked her to explain things when she'd rather spend time with Ron. Harry wished he was smart sometimes. He was never good with his reading or his writing for that matter, so things that weren't specific practicals at Hogwarts were immensely difficult for him and often dragged his grades down. This in mind, he didn't have many prospects ahead of him and he couldn't follow Hermione like a lost puppy forever. She was a woman now, a woman in love, who wanted to marry Ron, start a family. Harry - stupid as he perceieved himself to be, was fully aware of what Hermione thought of him. He was a responsibility, a deadweight, a friend out of obligation - she had not grown to love and respect him over the years, and he couldn't blame her. For how could someone so smart, learn to respect someone so stupid?

He wasn't good with reading or writing, even as a kid - it took so long to grasp the ABCs that they kept him on picture books for as long as they could. Harry then began trying to replicate the pictures on paper because he never had toys, Dudley always had those.

The Dursleys scoffed and always said he'd never get anywhere with his colors and his drawings. That the arts in all their forms - especially "pansy-ass painting," was stupid (according to Vernon) and they were always saying Harry was stupid. Peas in a pod really, it was a natural mental association for him to make at this point.

So, Harry figured that stupid things were for stupid people, and incidentally that's how Harry Potter became an artist. After the war, he went back to his paintings, with Luna Lovegood's encouragement. He wasn't so good at magical ones, he couldn't paint with their spelled brushes because his pictures never stilled and they ruined anything that wasn't photorealistic, so that ruled out surrealism and all the fun things about art. So Harry went to muggle art surprisingly, and left the pro-Quidditch teams begging (as he resolved he wouldn't fly after a painful splinter-in-the-butt incident and a mentally scarring Whomping Willow). At best he was an accidental artist, with Luna pushing him to display his work at open-gallery events, Hermione encouraging it too - for Harry to flourish and grow up as a person by marketing off his talent.

A millionaire dressed in reds, sipping fine french wine from an antique glass set, peered at a beautiful surreal still of a creature he could never have thought of painting - being an artist himself in his spare time. At the UK's biggest international art gala, Maximillion Pegasus paid up to £4,500 pounds for a painting labelled "The Crumple-Horned Snorkack" and almost up to a million for the entire artist's gallery, and then thusly demanding the prescence of the recluse painter themself - a Mister Harry James Potter.

And that's how Harry Potter, the accidental artist, became skyrocketed into muggle fame.