A/N: My first foray into the world of fanfiction in an extremely long time! If you've found yourself here I'm surprised since it's a story by an unknown author with a fairly obscure pairing, but welcome nonetheless and I hope you enjoy!

The first two chapters are fluffy as hell. Chapter 3 and 4 cover Final Battle and after, and are therefore fairly angsty, but the story does end on a happy-ish note. There's some mild swearing.

I always liked Colin as a character, maybe because I was a talkative and annoying child myself. I set out to write this story from his perspective mostly, but Demelza was such an unexplored character she was the perfect person for me to dip my writing feet into. I discovered this ship in my fanfiction heydays and I always had a soft corner for the two of them together, in my headcanon they were definitely together for a while! I didn't expect to ever write a story on them, but this bug bit me a month ago out of the blue and it needed to be written.

This story is canon-compliant except for some minor details that might've slipped through the cracks, and I obviously don't own Harry Potter. Thank you for reading :)

Jun-21 edit: I apparently made some minor errors while copy pasting over the story, and some passages are repeated. So I've gone over and cleaned those up - my apologies if that made it a little difficult to read!

-xxxx-

The first girl he ever noticed was his next-door neighbour, when he was nine. He could hardly recall her name anymore, but he could just as hardly forget her hair, frizzy near-ringlets in an indeterminate brown that lit up like Fall when the sun hit them just right. He was captivated by the colours; and captivated even more by his need to preserve them.

He remembered straddling the fence with his dad's old camera, skinny arms trembling as he sought to hoist it up, keep it level and capture her grinning, wide-gapped smile along with the fleeting riot of colour atop her head. As expected, when the flash of the bulb went off, he damn-near fell off his perch, barely rescuing the camera from certain ruin, and the picture came out a blurry, murky haze. He cried for three days straight until his dad decided to teach him how to use it properly, and Colin fell in love.

(With the camera, that is. The girl moved away the following year, and Colin went off to Hogwarts the year after that, and then she ceased to matter except for being a short-lived muse that sparked something within him; and gave him a solution to a fear he'd had ever since his grandma started mixing him up for his father and then eventually died).

He was always a diminutive lad, but irrepressible, like an indiarubber ball. Other kids liked him, but at a distance, because he could chatter away a mile a minute and then suddenly dart off to take a picture of a wee little ladybug over there – a habit they found a little peculiar, a little disconcerting, and possibly even a little exhausting – Colin asked a lot of questions. Colin also always went where his inspiration did, and he didn't let anything stop him, not even when Geoffrey Brown attempted to pound him into the ground for trying to take a picture of that "brilliant scowl you've got going on on your face mate – like a thundercloud!" It is possible the magic saved him – he landed safely up in a tree in the school courtyard when Geoff went to punch him, and Colin got detention and a letter home about scaling trees being against school rules.

And for six months, he took pictures of every shade and nuance of next-door neighbour girl's hair while she swung on swings in her backyard, laughing with glee, telling him to put the camera down and join her, until he was satisfied, and had an album to press into her sticky little fingers when she told him that her father had gotten a new job and that they were moving.

His mum teased him about only wanting to take pictures of pretty girls, but it wasn't about that, Colin knew. He had an eye for beauty but he was fairly divorced from the source - the turn of a leaf, the ripple of a pond, the cheeky grin on a classmate's freckled face, the purplish bruises on Dennis's legs when he fell out of the Cherry tree for the sixth time in one summer… he wanted to take them, he wanted to hold them close; angles and shadows and lines and hues that made his breath hitch. He couldn't draw and the less said about his paintings the better; but he had an artist's eye and a niggling need to document and express everything he saw in the fear that it would pass him by; that he would forget, just like grandma did.

-xxxx-

His first year was kind of a disaster, since he spent a large chunk of it making a fool of himself following Harry Potter around – he knew he was being a bit of a pest, but Harry fascinated him. The entire story did, he was a bonafide Boy Wonder and they shared a House and a common room! He wanted that shade of emerald, and he knew if he ever did make it big as a photographer – what else would he be, anyway? – photos of Harry would be the highlight of his portfolio. Besides, Ron Weasley had some really beautiful hair, and Colin wanted that river of fire too, as well as the ink stains that permanently stained Hermione Granger's small, fine-boned hands.

To clarify – contrary to popular belief, Colin never had a crush on Harry Potter. It made him roll his eyes whenever someone asked him that, which they usually did, either good-naturedly or otherwise. When, some years later, he would tell his future friends that he liked girls and boys and everything and nothing in between, that was a question he would invariably get. There really was only one person who had never asked him that question… but to talk about that would be getting ahead of himself a tad.

Predictably, his first crush was Ginny Weasley, because she had the same river of fire as her brother running wild on her head, and while she didn't talk to him much, she didn't seem inclined to slam a door in his face either. Ginny was soft, and quiet, and withdrawn – all of which seemed highly incongruous with her appearance and mad brothers, but Colin supposed there was always one, in every family – at least until he took a magical photo of her laughing and saw a then-absent spark flicker momentarily and die in her eye. He was obsessed with that flicker, he wanted to bring it back out, and the mystery of Ginny Weasley captured both his mind and his heart until he used up an entire roll of film trying to understand her better. But Ginny rarely smiled, or laughed, and then he got petrified trying to take a picture of a goddamn Basilisk running wild in the school, and he didn't remember anything at all after that.

When he woke up, Ginny made him a quiet, tearful apology, and he gave her a hug and told her there was nothing to forgive. He understood loneliness – a year into Hogwarts, and he didn't really have any friends. Sloper, Ritchie and Kirke were nice, but they were markedly different from him, and Dennis, who had always been his best friend, was so very far away. He leaned forward to clumsily press his lips against her cheek – nothing ventured, nothing gained – and was momentarily discomfited at how little he felt when his dry lips brushed her soft skin. Those movies his mum was so fond of really didn't know what they were on about.

-xxxx-

He later came to the conclusion that it wasn't the movies, it was Ginny Weasley. The mystery was solved when she got on the train laughing and lively like the rest of her brothers, and, combined with the distance over the summer, he found that his feelings for her had faded. She went on to win his respect and he hers, when she hexed him on the train ride back for asking too many questions about Harry, and he laughed, apologized, slung an arm around her and promised to be less annoying with the questions. It was the first time someone had just told him to quit it instead of tolerating him at a distance, and he liked the fact that she was willing to call him out on his shit. She introduced him to Luna Lovegood, who floated in and out of the cabin in a most disconcerting way, and he introduced her to Sloper and Kirke, though they didn't stay in the cabin long either, and Ritchie came by and sat with them for a bit too, and then eventually the cabin door opened and in walked a new first year, Demelza Robins, and they invited her to stay and she promptly beat them both in a rousing game of Gobstones, and Colin documented every inch of that ride in a myriad of images, and finally, finally Colin felt at home at Hogwarts in a way he really hadn't been able to the entirety of his first year.

Ginny went off to meet others she knew, and Colin spent most of the ride getting to know Demelza, who was alternatingly quiet and devastatingly sassy, and the hours slipped by during what was already shaping up to be an excellent semester. Even the Dementors didn't faze him much, though it got all dark and cold and when Ginny returned from visiting her brother she was pale and trembling and held an echo of the frightened little girl from the previous year. He took a picture of her white face against the blackness out of the window because the contrast was so evocative it made him ache, but he put the camera away when she didn't even glare at him – clearly, this was serious, and after his first year, he was learning.

That was the year he really found friends, true friends, in Ginny and in Demelza, who he promptly dubbed Demmy, and that name stuck. Demmy was a bit of a paradox – like steel coated with silence (a terrible metaphor, but hey, he was twelve). He also sensed that she was lonely, lonelier than he'd been in his first year, a kind of deeper loneliness that he didn't completely understand but he still felt a sort of need to alleviate. Ginny had her brothers and Luna, but Demmy and he didn't really have anybody (at least at school), so they sort of banded together, and he figured out early on that she was really cool, but also really guarded, and he didn't really know why but he wanted to bring those walls down.

-xxxx-

His third year though – that was quite the year. Dennis was sorted into Gryffindor and Colin's happiness knew no bounds – Dennis was here, with him! He spent a month documenting Dennis in all his favourite spots in the castle, though Colin's favourites were usually rather mundane (behind a suit of armour next to a stained-glass painting of King Arthurian legend was one such place that had Dennis's tiny eyebrow reaching his hairline, but he was much too good natured to refuse his brother anything). He also took a picture of Dennis next to the Black Lake for posterity, and the Squid even raised a tentacle in hello. Demmy joined him most days, initially hesitant to encroach on his time with his brother, but Colin wanted her there and he told her as much. She still drew him in, not just because she was intriguing but also because he just plain liked her company, and it didn't hurt that she was the only person in his life outside of his family who liked his incessant need to talk. Besides, Dennis grew even more excitable at the thought of spending time with one of his brother's closest friends; so everyone was happy.

Demmy and him had been close the previous year as well, but she was opening up to him more this year, after a solid year of effort on his part. She had layers, he mused, kind of like an onion. He supposed it wasn't the most flattering of observations, but true to form, she rolled her eyes, called him a prat, but also said thank you – she really was very good at deciphering what he was trying to say even when the words didn't come out right. She then added that he probably should take lessons on complimenting a bird before he ever got himself a girlfriend or he was liable to get hexed.

But the biggest surprise Colin had in his third year was his first kiss – an entirely unexpected event, which saw him taking Andrea Barnes to Hogsmeade on Valentine's Day and having her lean over and press her lips to his mid-ramble. He wasn't sure how it had happened – it was probably the hair, he really was a sucker for beautiful hair in general, and Andrea had pretty blonde waves that she usually kept tied on the nape of her neck with her golden yellow school-tie and thick glasses permanently perched on her nose. Except one sunny day in January, her hair was down as she sat under a tree and Colin couldn't help himself and took a picture of that silky blonde curtain as it hid her face from his view. She looked up at him quizzically as the click of the camera shattered the silence around them, and Colin couldn't help the explosion of word vomit that erupted from his mouth as he looked at her (also, no hexing involved, Demmy, see, he wasn't a complete idiot!). And as he kept talking – and somehow asked her to Hogsmeade for the next possible weekend – she smiled and said alright, and it was only as he was escorting her there, chattering the whole way, that he realised it was Valentine's Day. So he bought her some chocolate frogs and they split a Butterbeer, and as he was walking her back she leaned over and kissed him. She still tasted like chocolate, Colin thought, a little dazed, and while he never actually asked her to be his girlfriend, she sat beside him at mealtimes once a week and snogged him occasionally (though a bit more often than the shared dinners) until the end of the school year at which she told him it was fun, and he experienced his very first breakup at the hands of a girl he wasn't aware he was actually dating. Demmy (and Ginny) laughed at him the entire train ride back home, and after a few puzzled moments, he joined in with them.

-xxxx-

His fourth year was a rollercoaster. Umbridge was a holy terror systematically dismantling everything he loved and held dear about Hogwarts, and, as much as he may have fleetingly wanted, he couldn't ignore it in all good conscience. His fourth year was also the year he decided he needed to grow up a bit, and stop documenting only the beautiful – he needed to capture the ugly, too, to keep it accountable. As Umbridge's sadism grew, so did the bloody lines etched on the backs of students' hands, and Colin collected them all. He was particularly proud of the picture of "I must not celebrate liars" etched upon his skin which he'd taken one-handed, and added to his collection of DA memories, a collage of hands dark and fair bearing their own personal brands. Ever the dramatic teenager, he made a scrapbook, and featured four hands the most prominently of all: Harry, the leader; Ginny, the spitfire; Demmy, his… well, his; and Dennis, the youngest in the DA. It broke his heart that Dennis had had his innocence stolen by Umbridge that year, but then again, Dennis was as irrepressible as Colin himself had been. He knew he'd be alright.

As far as his personal life went, Demmy started dating Andrew Kirke, and likewise Ginny and Michael Corner, and so Colin spent a lot of his time in the first half of the school year with Dennis and the rest of the DA since his two friends were otherwise occupied, and Kirke wasn't even involved with the DA so Demmy usually had to invent some creative stories to explain away her absences to him. This was probably how he had the time to fall into a quasi-relationship with Anthony Goldstein, a Ravenclaw boy a year ahead of him who he had had half an eye on from the very first meeting. Anthony was tall and blonde and quiet, and Colin was short and brown-haired and very, very excitable; but he was also incredibly charming when he wanted to be, and this was the first time Colin felt something in his stomach when he felt soft lips upon his and a tongue in his mouth. He left the corridor with a giddy see you soon and went straight back to the Common Room to talk to Demmy, and when he saw her sitting with Ginny, decided to spill to the both of them. And while Ginny peppered him with questions about his sexual orientation and teased him about whether he too had had a crush on Harry Potter in his first year, Demmy sat back, with an inscrutable look in her dark eyes and a small smile on her lips. He was seized with a desire to know what that look in her eyes had meant – and that desire shook him a little. He was also seized with a desire to track Anthony down again – and that desire was a lot easier to understand. It was all very confusing and exciting and frankly, Colin didn't know what to do about any of it, but he couldn't wait to find out.

The thing with Anthony fizzled out a few weeks later, but his attention was slowly drawn more and more to Demmy these days anyway, and at some point in that year, even before Anthony and him called it quits, Colin had a dream about Demmy, where he was holding her and kissing her and drowning in her strawberry sweetness. And he woke up from that dream out of breath and trembling, and with a sudden sick feeling in the pit of his stomach he realised that he'd fallen for her in the background almost without realising it – and she was in a relationship with his roommate, while he was… possibly in a relationship of his own too, they'd never really discussed it, which worsened the guilt. So he withdrew from everyone and everything, and then the DA broke up and Umbridge took over and Anthony faded away even more than he had before their 'break-up' – was it even a break-up when an unacknowledged thing ceased to continue with no fanfare involved? - and none of it really mattered except for the guilt and longing in his stomach whenever he got a glimpse of Demmy, so he pulled away even more and resolutely decided he was going to just take nature photographs this year because people were too confusing for him.

Ginny had been growing increasingly distant from them all year anyway, what with Quidditch practice and her boyfriend (to say nothing of the long disappearances over the Christmas holidays without as much as a note, but we're getting ahead of ourselves), but Colin was in enough of a quandary over his best friend to not even notice. Demmy was the only person in the entire school (excepting Dennis) who truly understood him, and he had obviously always loved her, but - the fact that she was brilliant and beautiful and far too good for Kirke (and for him!) had clearly snuck up on him. He'd resolved to stay away from her until his stomach stopped playing leapfrog with his intestines upon catching a glimpse of her, but that didn't last – she tracked him down one sunset when he was frustratedly trying to get the glint on the iced-over lake just right and sat down next to him, and he could feel her luminous eyes burning a hole in him even when she was looking at a copy of Which Broomstick in her lap. His ears felt hot, and there was an echo of a tremble in his arms that he hadn't felt since he was nine and fell off the fence for the first time. 'Oh, to hell with this!' he thought – or possibly exclaimed, since she cocked an eyebrow at him – and spun around.

"Can you – I just – it needs more," he said, gesticulating at the lake behind him.

Demelza put the magazine down and looked at him composedly. "You're going to have to use your words, Col, I'm not sure what you want me to do."

"Just… look out that way, Dee, please?" He wanted to go on about colours and shadows and snowfall and the juxtaposition of her inky hair against the riotous sunset, but his throat felt tight, and for the first time in his life Colin felt at a loss for words. He half expected her to call him out on his taciturnity, but she didn't say anything – Dee (since when was she Dee? But Demmy was for everyone, and that moment was for him) always had been a girl of few words anyway. He wondered if he was fancying the same inscrutable look in her eyes from earlier in the year, but then she looked away, and her face softened, and the lump in Colin's throat just grew and he couldn't stop clicking.

"All done," he said hoarsely sometime later, lips suddenly dry, and made to sit next to her, asking himself if he had imagined the flash in Dee's cinnamon eyes as they sat quietly, hip to hip, under the shadow of the oak with the rapidly darkening sky in the background.

And then Dee broke up with Andrew Kirke, and Colin's already hyperactive insides went into overdrive.

He was spending more and more time with her, all intentions to pull himself away forgotten and abandoned like his nature photography project – Colin liked people, and he definitely liked Dee. He took pictures of her when she went flying in the evenings and felt his heart hurt almost when he saw her laugh and whoop, over and over, as she whizzed past over his head. He was unaware if even Ginny knew, or if this was just one of Dee's surprisingly plentiful secrets, that she shared only with him, and the thought made him feel warmer than even Butterbeer could manage. She braided her hair into tight coils most days now, when she flew, always when the pitch was empty and no one else could see, and he felt his fingers itch as he contemplated undoing the braids and watching her jet-black hair tumble past her shoulders. He spent time with the Demmy side of her too, of course, losing every game of Wizard's Chess to her for a whole week, even the one time Ginny and him teamed up against her, heroically trying to take notes for the two of them in History of Magic while she let out soft snores, taking an entire album's worth of pictures of the Weasley Twins' great escape while Demmy and Ginny whooped and cheered along with the rest of the student body (though that last one happened after and not before, but he was getting ahead of himself again). He wasn't sure what it was that made him ask her to be his newest photography subject one day – he could admit, a little shamefacedly, that he hadn't really asked people before if he could take pictures – but he approached the project with all the seriousness that Da Vinci had approached the Mona Lisa (and if that was a little overdramatic, he was fourteen, so screw that, he was allowed).

This was the difference between Demmy and Dee, sometimes when they spent time together, just the two of them, she became much more prone to silence, and so did he, though it was always comfortable. It quietened his thoughts. She looked at him, really looked at him – he felt seen, and more nervous than he really should be, given the whole best friend asking for a reasonable favour thing - and then asked why. And there he was, stammering and tripping over his own words – God, he was being so obvious, she just had to know – and finally something in him compelled him to be honest and he had never been afraid to just say what he was thinking before, so he decided, again, to hell with it, and told her.

"I collect beauty, Dee. And moments to remember. And looking at you I see both, and I want it. I don't ever want to forget you and I don't want to forget this, sitting with you."

He both loved and hated that he was terrible at knowing what she was thinking when she looked at him with those searching eyes. They'd gone a caramel whiskey in the firelight, like the stuff his dad liked to drink once a week on the porch in the winter, watching the snow slowly drift to the ground.

"Why call me Dee?" she asked, in response.

"Because right now you're not Demmy." He replied, wondering if the sudden tension was just him and his newest companion, wishful thinking, again.

"Okay," she said, small smile on her lips, and he pulled out his ever-present camera before she changed her mind. It was late, Ginny had come and left, gone up to her bed after Quidditch practice, and there were very few people left in the Common Room. Kirke had given him a look when he'd walked past the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder, but then he'd shrugged in what looked like acceptance before going up the stairs. He didn't look particularly broken-hearted about the whole idea and Colin felt almost indignant on Dee's behalf, even as he thought, glumly, that there wasn't anything for Kirke to get broken-hearted over anyway.

Everything changed the next night, when he waited for the Common Room to clear out again, lightly touching her elbow to indicate that she should stay when Ginny started packing up to go upstairs and answering her unspoken question by telling her he had something to show her. She seemed to accept this, not asking why he hadn't done so when they'd worked on Transfiguration and Potions for the entire evening, despite the fact that Ginny had left them almost an hour earlier, after a not entirely convincing yawn (he figured he was in for an inquisition over breakfast the next day, since Demmy usually made it down less than ten minutes before class and Ginny and he were both early risers, but that was a problem for a different day).

He felt the air shift, and he knew he was going to do this now, even though they'd just spent an hour reading magazines and writing letters and not really talking about anything of substance other than classes and the news. Silently, he pulled out the picture he'd taken of her the previous evening, which he'd developed over his free period earlier in the day. Dee was sitting with her knees drawn up next to the fireplace, her dark hair pooled intimately in the nape of her neck, the light flickering in her eyes. They watched, together, as the Dee in the picture looked back at the camera, softly smiling, and then back in the light, a faint blush on her cheek; and as he looked over and saw the same blush beginning to creep over her face, he knew, with a sudden blinding clarity, that he was in love with her and that she felt the same even though he knew she wouldn't be ready to say it anytime soon (she had a funny hangup over the word and really, Colin, now was not the time to psychoanalyse the pretty girl), and since he'd never been very good at curbing his impulses: he leaned over, both their hands inches apart, fingers nearly touching, so close he could feel the warmth of her thigh burning against his, and kissed her.

She kissed him back, and oh boy was he screwed.

She pulled back, slightly, and he couldn't tell how long it had been since they'd been pressed together; it simultaneously felt like forever and no time at all. He could still feel the warmth of her breath dancing over his lip and the silence between them grew until it was roaring in his ears but, strangely enough, he wasn't nervous or disconcerted the way he'd been all year even though he had no intention of letting the silence continue forever. Dee was watching him, and he sensed that she was giving him time to make the first move, but if he didn't, she probably would. She just understood, instinctively, that he didn't want to be passive about this the way he had with Andrea and Anthony. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and…

"Those movies of mum's knew what they were on about after all," fell out instead of what he'd been planning to say. His cheeks flushed.

"What?" he had startled a laugh out of her, and the sparkle in her eyes made his liver do a backflip as if to say "hey, I'm here too!"

"Nothing. Just – ah fuck it. You've got me going loopy all year Dee – be my girlfriend?"

He supposed the flying tackle she gave him as she snogged him halfway into the cushions was a yes.