Epilogue

It was a beautiful dress.

It shimmered like starlight, the cheap cubic zirconias glinting from the neat arrangement woven into the delicate silver fabric. It flowed to my knees, cut so that layers of fabric overlapped each other like leaves around my legs.

I was having some trouble with the zipper owing to my bandaged hand. It turned out I'd dislocated two fingers; funny, it hadn't felt like it at the time.

I looked in the mirror. Yeah. I looked good for someone who had been almost killed.

It was Wednesday night and here I was, trying to salvage my appearance. I'd done okay, I thought. If anything, the dress was what would catch Nick's attention. He'd said to dress to the nines, so I'd pulled out all the stops. The dress had a low-cut V-neck, fake diamonds – matching those woven into a pattern on the dress – rested on my collarbone. Basically the only real diamonds I was wearing were the studs in my ears, 1-carat, a gift from my mother last Christmas.

Fed up with looking at my miserable self, I turned away from the mirror. Fido was sitting on the floor, looking at me.

"Do I look okay?" I said, doing a little twirl. The dress fanned out around me and settled as I came to a stop. Fido walked away contemptuously. "That bad, huh?" I sighed.

There was a knock on the door. "This is it!" I squealed half-heartedly into the empty air, grabbing my clutch purse from the table. I hurried out of my room, struggling a bit. It had been a while since I had worn three-inch heels, being rather fond of sneakers myself.

I opened the door and there stood Nick Stokes. He wore a blue dress shirt, black dress pants, and shoes so shiny I could see my reflection in them. He held one arm behind his back. I smiled nervously at him, just hoping my lip wouldn't split open and gush blood everywhere.

He gaped at me. I frowned. "What? It's the hair, isn't it," I said miserably, patting it. "It went all curly even when I tried to straighten it so I figured-"

"No," said Nick. "It's not the hair. The hair looks great." He gave me an extremely slow once-over, gaze lingering below my collarbone. I grinned. "You look great. Really great."

I resisted the urge to do a little dance. "So do you," I said. Nick smiled. He brought his arm out from behind his back. When his hand came into sight, it was holding a bunch of roses. Two yellow, two white, and two red.

"I didn't know what your favourite flower was," he explained. "So I decided to go with roses. But I didn't know what colour of rose you liked, so I got two of each."

"I'm allergic to flowers, Nick," I said. Nick's face fell. I couldn't help but laugh. "I'm kidding! They're beautiful." I took the roses from him and retreated back into the house, heading to the kitchen. Nick followed after me.

I was, for once, happy to let him traipse around in my now-clean abode. He made an impressed noise at the clean state of the kitchen as I found a vase, filled it with water and arranged the roses carefully on the counter.

"So, shall we go?" I said to Nick, walking around the counter to join him standing there. He offered a crooked arm to me and I smiled, sliding my arm through his.

"Sure, cupcake," he crooned. I laughed at his exaggerated Texan drawl.

Nick Stokes grinned his familiar, good old shit-eating grin, looking down at me.

"Let's go."

A/N: Well, as Sadie said earlier, it's over! For her and Nick, though, it's just the beginning. I'm not ruling out the chance of a sequel. Anything's possible, right?

I hope you all enjoyed reading it – even if Sadie is an annoying character. P I had fun writing it, at least.

Many thanks to all my reviewers. became my best friend while I was writing this. So, thanks!

And lastly, I'd like to thank the Academy for this prestigious honour; my Mum for always standing by me, and the directors and fellow actors of this movie who—

Oops. Wrong speech. :D

Keep on ficcing, people. And don't forget about world peace, Nick Stokes with no shirt on, and other extremely important things I can't remember right now.

-runs away-