Hope

  for Lycan, always  

    Bruised and beaten, he lay on the ground with his eyes closed, breathing heavily. The dust clung to his lips. His left eye started to swell, and his ribs ached. 

    “Does anybody claim that defend?” asked the ringmaster for the third time. 

    Funny, he thought, everybody said before you died you saw your life flash before your eyes, and all he could see was the inside of his lids.

    But he felt, quite intensely. Against his better judgement, against his experience he felt what all doomed to die did feel. So It was, after all, he reflected with surprise in some faraway, detached part of his brain that took to observation, in a way true what everybody said: his life indeed flashed before his eyes, ran backwards and landed him in the realm of feelings he hadn’t experienced since he turned six. 

    He hoped that someone would come and rescue him. 

    „No?” The ringmaster looked around the crowd, and the watchers held their breaths in anticipation; some of them might hope, as he did, on the rescue coming in the last moment, but the majority wanted their spectacle to be finished in the right way: with death. „On the count of one, then. Three… Two…” 

    He drew what he knew was his last breath. On the count of one the ringmaster would lift his staff with the iron spike an the end, and then drive it through his skull. They were merciful for those who gave the good fight. He did. The best in his life, probably, if it weren't the worst as well. 

    „I do” the voice was low, rich, mellifluous and commanding. And when it sounded over the ring, in that instant when he got all he hoped for, he realized that there were fates worse than death.