Eh, me is back, and thirsting for more reviews. (: I'm still on the lookout for the beta, and also wondering if I should continue the story.

Thanks to mikki105 for reviewing and adding this story to the Next Generation community thingamawhatsahoozit! You have no idea how much it meant to me :-D

Disclaimer~ Why the hell would I be on Fanfiction if I owned this?

*Warning, I don't feel like revising this, so if there's mistakes, feel free to point out the flaws and laugh (: Oh, and sorry it's short... I would elongate it by adding more adjectives, but you'd get bored with it. xD

A month has passed since that cursed night. Dominique was walking through Hogsmeade, one of her hands fiddling with her necklace absentmindedly. The pendant was a shard of ice from that ice sculpture, charmed into never melting. Quickly, Dominique had made a habit of messing around with it rather often.

"Dom, are you alright?" An friend from school, Catherine Finnigan, asked Dominique worriedly as she passed by Dominique. Through a single month, Dominique had gone from a regal and confident woman to a lesser shade of her former self. Dominique had taken her long, luscious locks and hacked them short. The edge of her hair was uneven, and her eyes no longer shone with a bright energy. She was gaunt, merely skin and bones. Instead of the flamboyant colors that clad her body before, Dominique wore only black. Every single day, there never failed to be a black rose twined into her outfit.

"I'm completely and totally amazing, Catherine, why wouldn't I be?" Dominique replied, her face impassive as a stone.

"Oh yeah, do you still have my book?" The brunette asked eagerly, the moment of indecision gone. She turned towards Dominique, her brown eyes wide and innocent. "The one about vampires, I mean."

"Yes, it's at my flat. Do you want it back?"

"Er, yeah, it turns out that my mum wanted to read it…"

"Oh, okay, just come on then." Dominique offered her arm to her petite friend, and they Disapparated from in front of the Hog's Head.

The pair had found themselves on a bright and sunny beach, the white sand warm beneath their feet. The light waves lapped against the shore merrily, and the few clouds drifted lazily across an otherwise empty blue sky. "Dom? Dom, I think you overshot your Apparating." Catherine said in confusion, turning around her freckled face this way and that. "You don't live anywhere near a beach. You're in a flat in Diagon Alley, remember?"

"Accio wand." An icy tone greeted her question, and Catherine's ebony wand zoomed towards Dominique, as she calmly snatched it out of the air. Twirling the ebony and unicorn wand in her left hand, Dominique smirked at Catherine's panicked expression. "Tell me something Catherine, how much do you love me now?" Laughing quietly, Dominique leveled the wand at Catherine. "Avada kedavra." A flash of green light burst from the wand, and Catherine dropped lifeless to the sand beneath her. Dominique strode over to Catherine confidently, taking a glass phial and extracting some of Catherine's blood. She then levitated the carcass into the sea and set it adrift.

Back at home, Dominique took the phial filled with the rose red blood of her former friend, and using a simple color changing spell to turn it into a thick black, a black like a moonless sky. Taking the blood, Dominique proceeded to tattoo it into her skin on her left ankle an image of a black, thorny rose.

If you got the book I was drawing inspiration from at the end, then I freaking love you xD :D

~ psylocke13