My Konstantine

Prologue

Things were never easy, no matter how much he wanted them to be. He learned this the hard way, in a wave of passion and love coupled with vibrant colors he had never even dared to imagine before her. He had been gray before he met her, his days full of monotony that even he, with his personality molded from sugarless sweets and tasteless fantasies, had begun to find dull and unsatisfying.

That was before he had walked into Number 12 Grimmauld Place to see his mother for the first time in over a year. As he stepped into the rundown mansion, his dragonhide boot making a hollow thud against the ancient wooden floor, the first thing he noticed was the musty smell of the dark foyer. It smelled of dust and fog, and he frowned as long, finger-like tendrils pulled at the very back of his memory, reminding him of a place he had long since forgotten and couldn't name for his life. He felt as if he were haunting, a ghost in the bleak and miserably lonely world that was his own.

Even though he was loathe to admit it, that wasn't very far from the truth.

She wasn't the second thing he noticed, either. Instead, that position went to the redheaded blur that was the ample and matriarchal body of his mother, who came running through the foyer and hit him with such force that he felt the air being knocked out of him in a way that hadn't happened since flying lessons in his first year at Hogwarts.

When he looked back on it, he realized he had known her then. They had been in Gryffindor together, and she had been a seventh year when he was a fifth year. He had noticed her then; it was impossible not to, with her incredible energy and the charisma that emanated from her even as she walked across the Common Room, from one friend to the next. He didn't know it then, but he would have given up his Prefect badge to know her, to be able to look up and see her willowy figure sashaying toward him instead of a faceless figure curled up on a couch pushed back into a corner.

He would have given anything to kiss her, but he didn't know it then.

Now, as he stood in the middle of the dark and dusty foyer slowly choking to death from the grip his mother had on him, he looked up to see her standing on the balcony. He wasn't expecting her then; he never expected her, even when he would later learn her quirks and come to memorize her daily schedule. She wasn't the type to be expected, and he knew the moment he did, she would be gone.

"Percy!" his mother exclaimed tearfully as she clung to him. He wordlessly returned her embrace, his glasses pushed askew by the top of his mother's head.

She was shorter than he remembered.

Slowly, she descended the stairway until she was standing only a few feet away, her pixie features full of questions and her sparkling eyes full of recognition and mirth.

Mirth. It was the one thing she had that he didn't, the one thing that kept him separated from a reality he craved so badly that he was willing to kill to have it. As he looked into her eyes---blue that day, with her hair long and blonde as it fell down to her waist---a glimmer of an unnamable feeling tightened around his heart until he felt it would burst.

"Percy," she finally said in acknowledgment, her voice rich and dancing around his own motionless figure. It was the first time she had said his name, and even then he felt a chill shoot through his nerves. Later, she would whisper his name, murmur his name, and scream his name as loud as she could whilst he pounded into her with all of the passion that he had kept bottled up inside of him for so long.

But that would come later.

"Hello, Nymphadora," he murmured bewilderedly, returning her greeting with one that could never even compare.

The corners of her lips twitched into a smile that would have floored him, had his mother not been still crushing him in her Weasley-sized embrace. She extended a hand, and Percy managed to work his own right hand free to take hers. Her skin was smooth, pale, and deliciously cool against his own warm and sweaty palm, and when their fingers intertwined for the first time, he felt a jolt of something run down his spine.

"It's Tonks," she insisted, shaking his hand firmly. "Only a person with a death wish calls me Nymphadora."

Percy gave her a crooked smile. He would have died for her without a second thought.