Everything had been out of control lately. He´d slowly felt things slipping from his fingertips no matter how hard he tightened his hold. Before, things had always been easy. It had been soldier duty. There was no thought put into that—not as a grunt, anyway. That was probably the best word to be used to describe him, after all, even if he wouldn´t admit it. (Not fool, though. He was no fool.)

Sure, he´d been jailed and flogged a few times, but that was how things went when a person wasn´t brainwashed to always follow orders. He liked to think it wasn´t his drinking that had caused him to misbehave that particular day—he had better alcohol tolerance than that.

However, that had all been easy. It was sliding through life. After that, though, everything became a lot more difficult. He ended up working with the very man that had him jailed, and then it went on to starting a war, torturing and killing a man, buying a slave (loving a slave?), and providing the tyrant´s child in a less than orthodox manner.

That thought still disturbed him. Just slightly.

It had all come down to too much stress, he figured. When one of his only real friends turned his back on him (as discreetly and perhaps even unwittingly as he did so), everything began to spin away from him. He wasn´t sure what he was doing or why he was doing it. Turning back to the legion did him no good. He wasn´t wanted there. Just a veteran, now. Old news. He still didn´t understand that.

In the end, he was forced to justify in a way that didn´t require him to admit that he´d been left in the dust. And what was less explainable than love? Love made a person do crazy things.

Like beat a man´s head in.

The splatter of blood on his face had itched. That was his strongest memory. He´d wanted to reach up and smear it away, clean it off, but it hadn´t felt appropriate to do that. Not with the girl screaming like a banshee mere feet away.

Then, everything had come out. His confusion and his bitter feelings towards his—his friend. Or something like it. All of that was thrown into the air with a few badly spoken words. And the next thing he knew? He had hands—hands that were no longer as callused as they should have been—shoving him away, away, away.

Never come back here again.

For a while, he couldn´t will himself to move. A bit of it was a shock, staring at the stone where the blood was sloppily splattered. And some of it was that itching. He also had no idea where he was supposed to go. She was crying and screaming and he sure as hell had no chance anymore. But she had never really cared. She had only allowed him to fuck her because he was her “master.’

He just hadn´t realized that.

Fool. No. Not—not a fool.

Eventually his legs walked for him and he was staggering through the back alleys of Rome until he located his favorite hideaway.

He only had the energy and the coin to drink, however. But it was that tinge of alcohol that allowed him to consider being hired by the man that had wanted him—and, more importantly, Lucius—dead only a few days prior.

He´d claim it was the alcohol, anyway.

But a soldier and a murderer were different. Unfortunately, he still felt the itch of blood on his face, even though he´d washed it away.

He may have been a soldier before, but now—

Well, he wasn´t quite sure. Or perhaps he just wasn´t ready to believe it yet.