Prologue
Sometimes you can just tell when a moment is going to change the rest of your life.
Despite his young age, Harry Potter had already had many of these moments…A Halloween night some 22 years ago. Meeting an eleven year-old Ron Weasley on the Hogwarts Express. The death of his godfather, Sirius Black, in his fifth year of school. A long-foretold prophecy in the Department of Mysteries. Kissing Ginny Weasley, the only woman that there would ever be for him, in the middle of the Gryffindor common room. The death of Albus Dumbledore.
These had been the moments that had really mattered, more so than any failed exam or quidditch win. These were the moments that he would carry with him all the days of his life, however much longer that it would last.
As he walked through the familiar, overgrown fields of his youth with the sun radiating down upon him, however, it became apparent to him that the following moments would be the most important of his life. All thoughts of Voldemort and prophecies went out the window as he realized that he had been placed on the earth not to be the savior of the wizarding world, but to be walking in this field towards his destiny, whatever it would be.
In the distance, a flash of red caught his eye and he felt his breath catch in his throat. Without thinking, he felt his pace quicken in the direction of the whirling ball of energy in the distance. As he neared, he watched the small figure stop and watch his approach. Despite the fact that he was a stranger, the child seemed to view him with unabashed curiosity and absolutely no fear.
As Harry stopped in front of her, he gazed upon the small girl who was looking defiantly up at him, wearing dirty, slightly too big jeans, a fading Chudley Cannons t-shirt, and a look that said "Approach at your own risk!" His heart clenched at the sight of the smattering of freckles on her face, the same freckles that he'd spent many hours in bed memorizing, as well as at the bright red hair that seemed to want to be anywhere but in the messy ponytail on top of her head. He smiled faintly, thinking of all the times he wished he could become lost in it, in her. Although the girl in front of him was not that same girl, he knew without a doubt that this small girl would one day become her.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a warning sounded, yelling at him to turn around and run as fast as he could away from this girl in front of him, the girl who would be his future. If he ran now he could still save her.
Save her from loving him.
He thought briefly of said woman, who was probably waiting at home for him at this very moment, unsure of when or even if he would return. Knowing that she would wait forever for him as she told him every time he was whisked away from her against his will caused him to feel both great love and pain. If she even knew that he was considering sparing her the pain of always losing him and of loving him, she would probably shake her head and walk away, muttering something about his ever-present hero complex, because they both knew how silly it was.
"How could I even think of living a life separate from you, Harry?" she had asked him once. "Life without you isn't life. I've loved you for so long that I don't know—don't want to know—who I am without you. Your love is what keeps me here in this world just as my love for you keeps you coming home to it."
"Hello. My name is Ginny Weasley," the child spoke, startling him out of his thoughts. "If you're here to see my daddy, he's at work right now. He works at the Migistry of Majet." He almost laughed at her mistake, but stopped before he did. He didn't want to insult his future wife the first time that they met.
Instead, he kneeled down on one knee to look her in the eye. "I'm actually not here to see your father. I'm here to meet you." He held out his hand for her smaller one to shake.
"My name is Harry Potter."
If you would ask anyone, they would say that Ginny Weasley fell in love with Harry Potter the moment she saw him on Platform 9 and 3/4 when dropping her brother Ron off to begin his first year at Hogwarts. Only Ginny knew that it had happened long before then, on a warm summer day when she was playing alone in the fields surrounding the Burrow and she noticed a tall, dark-haired figure walking towards her. At that same moment in a cupboard under the stairs elsewhere in England, a young Harry Potter was sitting silently, longingly listening to the happy sounds of the family he was excluded from eating supper, completely unaware of how his life was changing at that moment without him.
Even at the age of six, Ginny knew that the man walking towards her would be important. Although he was not coming to save her from the cruelties of her older brothers as she imagined he was doing, he was there to change her life. As she looked into the green eyes of the stranger, she knew with absolute certainty that the arrival of this man was not an accident.
Although almost 15 years later Ginny knew that this was not the moment she had first truly fallen in love with Harry Potter, she did know that that was the moment when she began to have eyes for no one but him…that there could never be anyone but him.
Sometimes when she was sitting alone in the small one-bedroom apartment that she shared with Harry, waiting for him like she had been her entire life and like she would be for the rest of it, she would think about this moment and how it had changed her life in the past, waiting for when it would affect her life in the present. So as she sat at the kitchen table staring at the clock on the wall, she waited for Harry's hand to move from 'traveling', where it seemed to stay most of the time, back to 'home', back to her, who always seemed to be waiting for him.