Final Dance

Luna knew this was the moment. She had painted the portrait in her mind so many times... so many times... He was her "lion" - as he had called himself so many times, with so much love in his voice, as he reached for the bottle that would transform his love into anger, his words of comfort into shouts of frustration, and his tender caresses into -

She dared not say it. Not even to herself. Every day, she used the makeup to hide the marks and the cuts and the bruises and the scabs and the scars. She became the happy wife that everyone expected; the lucky woman that everyone envied.

The woman who had tamed the lion.

Tonight, however, there would be no makeup. Luna would put on the dress that she was wearing that first day they met, and once again present herself to a lion. This lion was a rock formation - it's cold, hard exterior reminiscent of what had become of her lion. She took off the dress and lied on the sand for a moment, letting this lion see all that her beauty had become after being slowly mauled by her lion for so many years.

Luna got up and laid the dress along the sand, and poured the gasoline over it. The smell briefly overwhelmed her and she pulled away, before forcing herself back to experience it. "You have put up with worse," she told herself, and then decided those would be fitting for her last unspoken words.

Final Dance

After the fumes had died down, Luna slowly put on the dress and climbed the rock. She started to dance that same steps that she was dancing in the club, just before she first met her lion. She had rocketed back through time, and this lion in the rock would see her as beautiful as she was when the other lion first saw her. But neither would ever be able to hurt her again. No lion would be able to rob her of her beauty or her youth or this moment under the stars. She kept dancing as she lit the match, refusing to look the lion in the eye.