“_Red is such a ghastly color,_” I think as I look upon the scene before me, crimson flooding every corner of the room. The brightly painted walls even make the flickering candlight bleed with the shade, almost as badly as the woman strewn across the bed. Her prone form saturates the room with the stench of death in a way that even I as a soldier cannot seem to get used to. “No one should have to get used to this,” I whisper, my colleague Aelius Horatius looking at me from the corner of his eye, asking what it was I just said.

I shake my head replying with a curt, “Never mind,” as my fist clenches around my helmet and I begin to turn away from the scene; the odor is starting to get to me. I make my way outside the small room, leaning against the outside of the building for some sense of support and take shallow breaths through my nostrils in order to fill my lungs with fresh air and eradicate the smell of rotting flesh.

“Domitius Caelius!”

I barely register my name on the lips of my fellow Centurion as he too exits the house, careful not to stumble into me.

“What was that about?” Aelius asks, his words heavy with his breathing.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I try to repress my own emotion back down into my chest where it belongs.

Aelius gives me a look with his striking green eyes, a look that I had gotten used to from our years of service to Caesar and our government. His stance doesn’t change, but his gaze is piercing and says everything that he doesn’t dare put into words despite our friendship and identical rank.

I sigh deeply, allowing some of my walls to break around my tightly clenched feelings. “I should be used to this kind of thing by now,” I reply, looking up at the cloud speckled sky.

“No one should have to get used to death. We may be soldiers but we’re no less human Domitius,” he says, his words bringing little encouragement like I know he was attempting to do. “Besides, it’s clear to anyone that this isn’t just another random murder. This was intentional,”

I give him a skeptical look as he voices what I had been thinking as soon as we walked into that room.

“That woman was silenced and her body is a warning to all those who would try to object the _real_ power in this city,” He nods towards the temple that can vaguely be seen in the distance.

“The Pharisees,” I dare to breath the word out.

Aelius nods once. “Exactly,”

“But how can you be so sure?” I ask, still skeptical.

He taps a finger against the helmet under my arm making it “ting!” Under his knuckle.

“Use that detecting mind of your’s,” he says with a slight smile. “She was a follower of the Nazarene,” Something about how he says “Nazarene” instead of Jesus makes me a little uneasy.

“She was?” I ask, startled at the revelation.

Aelius nods yet again. “She was well, let’s just say _undesirable_ type of lady. That’s why her body was staged the way it was to make people believe that she had returned to her former way of living and that one of her previous suitors may have done this to her. Those of us with half a brain can see passed that though. She was never as prominent as say, the disciples or some of the other women who followed Him, but enough that her death will send the right message,”

They both knew what that message was; stop believing in this so-called Jesus’ “miraculous” rising from the dead. More importantly, stop following him.

I shake my head trying to get that gruesome image of that poor bloodsoaked woman from my mind and another prone form makes it way to my memory unbidden. His body ravaged with streaks of blood that looked like they would never heal and wounds so deep in his hands and feet that I could almost feel the pain myself as I pounded the nails in myself. I blinked away the recurring nightmare.

“Aelius,” I ask, his hum the only response he gives as he inspects his own helmet.

“How do you deal with it? The blood?” I know that if anyone could help me, it would be the man who had been beside me while we carried out our governments orders.

He sighs, looking weary. “I don’t. Not really,”

That’s not exactly the answer I was looking for.

“But I remember the look on His face as He lay dying, a look that told me He forgave everything that I had ever done and everything I will do,”

I never heard such words of reverence pass my friend’s lips. He looked at me then, his normally battle worn face filled with a brightness I had never known.

“I can live with the color red, because it brought me new life from the loss of His,”

I watched my friend as he walked away, his helmet glistening in the sun as he placed it atop his head and his words ringing true as I now realize that he has been changing a little bit at a time over the last while and I’ve just now started to see it.

“Perhaps red doesn’t have to be such a gruesome color after all,”