Heine Rammsteiner stood at the window of his crummy little apartment, the old window panes layered in the grime of the city. The only sounds were the electrical hum of the light bulbs in the loose fixtures and the sound of the storm outside. The thunder shook the building to it's very foundations, the lightning crackled angrily across the sky, the rain fell hard against the dirty streets. Against the dirty buildings. Dirty people. But it didn't feel refreshing, not in the world they lived in now. The rain was sticky, thick, rancid. It only added to the layer of filth that covered this metropolis and all who existed within it.

A weak smile played briefly at his lips before withering away, he remembered the first rain after having escaped the lab. It had been a wonderous thing, he was a teenager and he'd never seen rain before. He'd never felt it before, or heard the roll of thunder. He'd existed in a white laboratory, the only sounds besides his fellow experiments the dull hum of machines and during combat training the sounds of pain. The sounds a human body made when it was snapped, crushed, broken. Rain had been magical. Water falling from the sky? The way thunder growled, and lightning tore though the sky. During the first storm he'd just sat on the back stairs of the abandoned building he called his home. The way the rain looked against the weak orange street lights, in contrast to the grey haze that seemed to always been clinging to the city. It had been beautiful.

Not anymore. The rain was dirty, the water was foul, the city was so saturated with filth that even the rain was corrupt. He shook his head, red eyes shifting from the window as he moved, taking a seat on the foot of his bed. He exhaled slowly as he leaned forwards, head in his hands as he tired to ignore the throbbing in his neck. It was hard to ignore, Kerberos didn't like to be ignored. He wished there was a way to rip the collar from his neck, but he didn't dare try. He'd woken up with the metal fused to the back of his neck, and he knew it'd kill him to remove it, or even attempt it.

He hated the rain.

When he remembered his first storm the only place his mind went after was to the lab, and who he had left behind. Giovanni Rammsteiner. His brother. Giovanni had been too scared to leave (it made sense, it did. They only knew the lab… Giovanni had worried about if the outside world was worse than the lab). He'd gotten a way out. He'd received the leader spine, but he had lost control of it. His world had faded to black. He remembered nothing. Nothing between the pain as 'Mother' jammed the connection into his pine and waking him ontop of his sister's broken body. His arms were buried in what should have been her stomach, but they were resting against the ground. He could remember every sick little detail (Kerberos could too). He could remember how her spine had been snapped in half, her organs dragged from her body, her blood soaking through everything…Her voice…

"….Lily…."

He had killed her, and he couldn't even remember it, when he closed his eyes Kerberos would tell him stories. Stories of what he had forced heine to do. Logic told him it wasn't his fault. Kerberos was using his body. But his mind was telling him everything was his fault. It was his body, wasn't it? He should be able to keep control.

This was freedom. This was what he'd longed for. This shoddy little apartment. Abandoning his brother in a place where every day they were made to fight against monsters of children of the past who had morphed into massive disfigured beasts. To kill them the only choice was to dismember them and make them bleed out, and sometimes even that wouldn't work. He left his brother there. As a child Giovanni hadn't liked fighting, the boy was much more happy colouring. He'd abandoned him(was he dead? torn apart because his brother wasn't there to protect him)

selfish.

and brutally slaughtered his sister.

a monster.

For what?

For this?