Drarry One Shots

Wingman Won-Won

Ron grimaced to himself. He wished he'd paid more attention to Mione over the past seven years about applying himself, not that he'd ever let her know that, but it just seemed like such a bloody uphill struggle now that he'd agreed to come back and redo his seventh year. The amount of work he had to do was absolutely barmy.

He hadn't really wanted to come back. He would have quite happily accepted Kingsley Shacklebolt's offer to join the Auror team immediately. However, at heart, he knew that was the lazy option. He also got Mione's argument that the other Aurors might not accept him and Harry if they skipped passing their N.E.W.T.s and just sallied forth into the bloody department without so much as an iota of formal training or actual qualifications to their names, no matter how many ultimate Dark Lords they'd vanquished. He got it, it was about trust, how would the other Aurors ever trust Ron or Harry if they didn't know how to work as part of the team, or didn't know how things were run, or if it hadn't been drilled into them how to watch each other's backs so it was second nature. So, the truth was that being an Auror could wait a little while, no matter how bloody much he wanted to become one. If it was truly his destination then waiting just another year wasn't really such a long time. And he knew that it was his destination - a path carved out from him in which he was no longer overshadowed by his brothers; whether Bill's practical intelligence, Charlie's charm, Percy's academic cleverness, George's humour ... he sighed. He still wasn't used to the bloody awful fact that Fred was no longer with them.

In all actuality, that wasn't really the reason he came back to Hogwarts, and he told Mione as much. The reason he came back was for Harry. He wasn't so convinced these days that Harry really wanted to be an Auror, that he should even be an Auror. He looked across at his best friend on the sofa opposite him, his head bent over his charms book but his eyes glazed and not taking in a single word on the page. He quietly harrumphed to himself - he understood that look too bloody well. No, the reason he came back was to give Harry time, postponing Auror training by a year gave Harry a year to decide what he actually did and didn't want.

Ron's brow furrowed as he studied his best friend. Harry had changed since the war. Well, okay, they all had, and that was bound to happen considering what they'd all been through. But Harry, well, Ron couldn't quite place a finger on it: he wasn't depressed as such, and was he looking after himself, he was certainly not withdrawn when the mood took him to socialise, he was patient with the people that crowded him, he worked hard (ignoring the current state of affairs), it's just something was missing. There was no fight left. There was no drive. He just did. The best way Ron could describe it was that Harry was not engaged with life. Ron thought he probably needed someone to provide him with some sort of emotive stimulation. He supposed Voldemort had done that, in a bloody perverted kind of way, maybe even the animosity with Malfoy and Snape had provided some sort of emotional engagement or fight during the last seven years, and now that focus, that attention, was gone.

Life's a funny old thing, he thought to himself, in fact, it's bloody bonkers. Here he was after seven years of messing around and suddenly the most driven he'd ever been in his life. He knew what he wanted now, and now he was ready to conquer it. Maybe it was after that stupid moment when he deserted Harry and Mione and he suddenly knew it was his friends he had fight for. Or maybe it was because he'd found himself in Mione, that things were so grounded between them that he felt settled in who he was. Maybe it was because it was highly unlikely that he was actually going to bloody die within the next year. Previously, homework and revision had seemed trivial compared to the life-threatening situations which stalked him because he was best friends with Harry Potter. Sure, he might die early if he chased bad guys for a bloody profession, but at least he was going to prove to everyone that he deserved the moniker of 'Auror'. No, life was funny, because for the last seven years he just drifted along in Harry's wake and yet here he was, finding his own way quite quietly while his best friend, Saviour of the Wizarding World, Chosen One, and all that guff, appeared to be floundering after being so determined in the first eighteen years of his life.