Like nothing else in their life it is slow.
Since the beginning everything happened at once. Giant chess games and tournaments and prophecies and tents- at a certain point, it all seemed to run together. Seven years could’ve been one for all he knew.
But this. It’s as slow and as sure as a ticking clock.
She really is just a friend at first.
But, then.
Then she turns back time at the ripe age of thirteen and saves his godfather just so he can have some semblance of a family.
Then she spends hours in the library, dark circles finding their familiar home under her eyes, desperately trying to find a way for him to defeat a dragon.
Then she tries, with every relentless piece of her, to try to stop him from rushing into the Department of Mysteries, before sending a professor to what could have been death and rushing alongside him.
Then she fights a war with him.
Then she says I’ll go with you.
And then, even after the victory and the reconstruction and the dust settles under his hands- he still knows that anything he asked of her she would do. That anything he needed she would get without hesitance. And what can he do but fall?
But she is with Ron (until she isn’t) and he is with Ginny (until he isn’t) because that’s where they were supposed to belong all along.
But even then, after cleaning up the messes that were their first relationships with their first loves and everyone has moved on, still nothing.
He loves and he waits.
And, still- five years after I’ll go with you has ruined him- nothing.
It’s one thing for someone to love you. It’s altogether another to realize that person would do anything for you but love you.