The world was spinning when Rock woke up in stages. Waves of consciousness rolled over him until he became aware enough of his surroundings. It became apparent that the bed he was in, was not his own or whatever part of Kain's mansion, he'd be dumped in. Maybe it was a new infirmary for him to heal up in. Either way, he remained where he was, involuntarily piecing together the events of the night.

Again.

Like clockwork it was; being used as a lure, getting hurt, getting abused, his body splitting apart a little more. Sticky between his legs, sick with disorientation. Dazed with involuntary drug use. He had been saved – maybe. He didn't know, honestly. His mind was still swimming and the numbness that filled the void in his heart made itself known. Rock had long since stopped wishing for death. He had long since stopped wishing for anything.

Now, he only lay and trembled, shuddering like on the night of his mother's death. A headache throbbed against his temples, his breath reeked to high heaven, and he could do well with a shower. Instead, Rock just let his eyes fall to a close and felt hot tears sear their way through the lids.

It hurt to think. He was tired of thinking. It just hurt.

Sounds around Rock caught his attention but he remained where he was, too spent to fight back, too alone to bother. Left and discarded in some gutter of the world. Bruised, bloodied, raped, useless. He pulled his knees against his chest, breath hitching on quiet sobs under his breastbone. It was a bad night. It was a particularly bad night. The really terrible ones that made him think of the first time, he harmed himself.

He'd like to wound his own body again.

"You awake?" a familiar voice cut through his thoughts like a blade. Momentarily crystallized with fear, Rock then slowly opened his eyes to stare at the source, unable to see Yamazaki properly for tears.

He sat on the coffee table right in front of Rock, leaned forward, head resting on his left hand, right hand in his pocket. "Looks like you reached the cooldown. Welcome to the real world, kid."

Rock thought nothing of it, keeping quiet and sinking further into the cushions, sinking into a bliss beyond this world, and for most of however many days passed, he spent his time just like that. His body was busted enough to get away with it. Whenever he was awake in shards of time, he'd just lay and stare at the wall or take a single phone call with Kain to confirm that he was alive.

No words of affirmation; Rock didn't deserve those. Not sure, he deserved to be taken care of either.

There was a chance that he'd forever feel odd by the way, the reality that, Yamazaki was taking care of him. The man did so in his own uncomforting way. He was around some of the time; Rock could hear him when he puttered about. And when he was present, he'd leave him alone to recover after checking for pulses and signs of life. No one had been around Rock after whatever ailments he had contracted due to selling his body for nothing of value.

Rock's lack of self-worth must have been radioactive to others but Yamazaki. Such a strange conclusion but one he accepted one evening when he became more functional. He pulled his body to sit upright, just as Yamazaki came back with a plastic bag in his hand. A savory aroma filled the room, but Rock's appetite was a little finicky tonight.

Even as Yamazaki came to sit on the coffee table with the bag, bringing the scent closer. Strands of his hair had gone loose and the blonde top was a shade darker than normal, as if he had just taken a shower. Upon further awareness, it became apparent that it was raining outside.

"Eat up, kid," he gestured to one of the bags.

"I'm not hungry."

Yamazaki rolled his eyes and reached into the bag. He opened it and pulled out a set of chopsticks alongside some box of fried rice, then pointed a piece of tempura shrimp at Rock. "You've been in and out of reality for days. You might keel over if you don't eat. And your uncle dearest paid me to babysit you."

So that was what it came down to?

Rock couldn't even find it within himself to be upset at that. It didn't matter anyway. Still, he reached for the other box in the bag and opened it to see noodles and stir-fried vegetables. He shifted his gaze a bit, into the intense leering from Yamazaki and almost decided not to eat. Still, out of stubbornness, he nibbled on a few pieces.

They ate in silence and Rock found himself situated between poking at the duck and chewing his carrots so much they ended up as tasteless mush in his mouth. He ate only about one-third before he curled into him and let his entire body drop onto the couch again.

Yamazaki stared at the half-empty box with an expression that wasn't clear but he said nothing. Just sat there calmly. It was a weird sight but not unfamiliar. He had been calm most nights. Placid when he gathered the boxes in the back and left the room.

He wasn't always like that.

The contrast between Yamazaki's two personas only worked if you had seen him in the throes of combat - apparently. Rock had only heard rumors of his wild side but never had a chance to see the truth for himself, although he did recall picking up on Kain's underlings talking about how it was like working with two different people. A dragon with two contrasting heads. But this dragon was not nice. He was a scoundrel. Not one to take care of others either.

So where did this third head come from? Probably from some mysterious realm like the blanket, that was put over Rock.

It took a full day before Rock could function a little more, though he'd often wish he didn't. Sleep seemed to be his one and only escape from everything. The best time came when it was a dreamless slumber. But he wasn't sleeping now. He spent the day taking a shower, sitting on the couch in his birthday suit with nothing but a blanket around his body while his clothes went through the washer.

The apartment, or motel room as it actually was, felt cooler, almost like a freezer and he clenched his knees into his chest to the point of his joints aching. The door to the outside world went open and Yamazaki walked in with a black cloth in his hand. His left hand.

"Get dressed. I'm not looking at your pale ass any more than needed," he told Rock, and it was still biting like that night. Sharp but empty.

Rock froze up a bit, eyes flicking to the bundle that got tossed to the empty spot of the couch. It became bit of a waiting game before his natural suspicion wore off to the point where he could sufficiently move, reaching for the t-shirt. The blanket covered his crotch, so he slipped it on first, finding it mildly oversized.

He wasn't that much shorter than Yamazaki or anything (by what, five inches, maybe?), but he was twice as thin. So, it was anyone's guess as to how those shorts would fit. Rock put his leg onto the floor, reached for those shorts, and fumbled with getting them past his ankles. He had to lift himself briefly to cover that ass Yamazaki was so worried about.

And for someone so peeved by that, he had no qualms with standing there and gawking. Not much he could see either with the blanket. Nothing would be particularly alarming about an accidental flash considering what had happened so far. Rock had long since stopped feeling shame, but he was careful for a reason, not entirely certain he wouldn't get mauled.

Fully dressed, he stood up with a deep sigh, like he had accomplished some annoying task. And yes, the shorts sat a notch loose. Yeah, he had probably lost a good amount of weight lately with how little he ate generally. He adjusted the shirt a bit and noticed how long his nails were becoming. His hair too when he thought about it.

He had just about given up caring about himself, huh?

"Good. Now I can stand to look at you a little more without feeling weird," Yamazaki commented, both hands now stuck in the pockets of his slacks. No smiling. He hadn't done so since…well, since the last time Rock saw him smashing some gangster's face in during the last mission.

"Only a little?" Rock asked rhetorically. It occurred to him that he never had thanked Yamazaki for the help – probably because it didn't come from good faith. Not that he had been asked in the first place but fuck that really.

Rock continued with a wary huff. "Oh well, no one asked you to do it anyway."

Yamazaki smirked wanly, still standing where he was. "No but your uncle paid well for it. Don't expect it to happen again unless he pays me more. Otherwise, you'd be sleeping with the rats. Preferable to whatever whorehouse, you get thrown in next week, huh?"

Rock frowned, shuffling awkwardly on his feet at the mention of his future. At the reminder that this disruption was just temporary. He wasn't going to miss Yamazaki, fuck him and fuck his insults. But he'd take the discomfort over the pain, the monotony of hopelessness. He thought of himself as a glass vase with a crack in it, thought of the way everyone would look at it while it split into pieces.

"Why are you working for Kain anyway? And don't tell me it's just because of the money."

"Sorry, but it is, kid. A certain someone has been busy and hasn't summoned me so I might as well entertain myself elsewhere for good cash," Yamazaki clarified, meeting Rock with a look of deadly seriousness. Just for a second, his eyes shifted to the side like there was another thought crossing his mind. "Although I sure ain't loving the jobs your uncle is handing out. Might move on when you get the fuck outta here."

Rock faintly remembered a rant about standards from the last mission. Suppose this was it; the disgust of watching him be an absolute trash fire of a human being. He stared down at his hands again, at his long, girlish nails, then lifted his gaze to Yamazaki, still fucking standing here.

He really didn't look like he fit into this domestic scene at all.

Well, he did cut a striking figure in an outfit of the deepest black, a gold chain around his left wrists, and a silver belt bucket. Never one for color. He tilted his head back a bit, really rubbing it in that he was taller and looking down figuratively and metaphorically at the mentally fucked up blondie in his motel room.

"My clothes may be done in the dryer soon so…" Rock shrugged, dejection hitting him like a wave. He began to pick at his nails because he grew out of biting them thanks to Terry.

"There might come a time where you're not really able to be a fleshlight for your uncle. Then what?" Yamazaki asked him, smile fading away completely.

Shit. Fuck. Rock's chest seized in a tight grip, and he looked down at his feet, then aimlessly began to flutter about the room, though he found he lacked any real energy to pace properly, exhaustion creeping up on him. Why was he getting interrogated? What did that asshole care for someone like him? Once he stopped outside the window, he stared down at the street and the rain that pattered on the glass.

"Die," Rock heard himself utter before he thought it through. "I guess."

That flurry of bad things in his brain he sometimes could stave off came returning full force. His head hurt. From his peripheral, he saw Yamazaki come slinking up next to him, leaning his back against the other end of the window.

"You could just leave. Stop fuckin' putting up with it. It's not that hard."

Like he was being electrocuted, Rock jerked away from him, moving over the coffee table instead. He put his hands to his head, pressing their palms against his temples, closing his eyes, and overcome with a flood of just-he didn't-know-things, yeah, things from ages ago. Things from now. Things, the numbness couldn't dull.

"I know that. I fucking know that. B-but, I can't. I-I don't know what to do or where to go and-and-fuck, what do you want from me?"

Yamazaki kept his distance, hands still in his pockets. He stopped tilted his head back and shrugged his shoulders. "I want you to start making sense for one. And then tell me what the hell happened in South Town. I leave for a bit and suddenly this entire damn city has turned upside down when I get back. Something's fuckin' wrong."

He spoke like everything was that simple, like he wasn't the one whose chest was about to collapse in on itself. Fuck him. Fuck him. Whatever this shit, he got going on, fuck him. But it felt weird, strange even to be met with someone saying the word wrong like it was an invitation to just let the flood of everything wrong flow like a tsunami. It was the opposite of the lessons, Kain had tried to drill into Rock's head with mission after exploitative mission. Kinda like Terry.

But Yamazaki, probably not being sincere, wasn't Terry. Rock looked at him again, looked at how the man stared back at him with something resembling humanity, face creased in a way that was wholly uncharacteristic of him. Whatever it was, whatever was wrong, it came crashing into Rock to the point where he pressed his palms against his eyes. They burned but not from the pressure as he found out when he let them drop from his face. One clasped around his wrist and began to scratch excessively.

He sucked in a deep breath and opened his mouth – only to get interrupted by the shrill ringtone of a phone.

Outside the air was fragrant with the autumn spice and petrichor. There would still be a few months until the first snow fell. Still desperately unhappy, Rock inhaled greedily a few gulps of fresh air before he walked to the car waiting for him by the side of the street.

As he entered and looked at the old motel building, he felt that numbness set in again, closing the bleeding happening all over his body figuratively – but not literally as he looked down at his wrist. Long, red, bloody trails stretched vertically across his skin. It was a bad habit he had begun when Kain found out that it hurt him physically to use Rising Storm and Deadly Neo Rave.

The car drove many miles outside South Town, across the bridge that took them to the city's accompanying island. Out here, the tower was no longer an eyesore across the sky and as the car stopped in the hull of a certain mansion's parking garage, there was no feasible way of spotting it. But being here again sent a shot of discomfort through Rock's gut – that he quickly curbed again because emotions were a loser's game.

With his heart sinking to the bottom of his stomach, he hopped out and shuffled his feet to the elevator, moving like a zombie past hallways and foyers, past servants, and goons, past their stares and their whispers and their chuckles. It was pathetic, the way Rock had given up fighting tooth and nail for himself. But he couldn't because these people were the ones to save him when he'd inevitably be used again.

So, it didn't matter. Not at all.

As usual, he didn't knock before he entered Kain's quarters, getting the so-called joy of seeing his uncle partly naked with Grant in bed – again. There was a weird look on Grant's face – per usual. A little irritated, a little disturbed. Forcefully measured. Meanwhile, Kain made his way to Rock with brisk subtle strides until he stood in front of him, looking him over and staring him in the eye.

"I see you are alive. You've done well. Your mother would be pleased," he murmured as he reached up to fluff the collar of Rock's jacket, indifferent to the way the younger man flinched. "I hope Yamazaki wasn't too rough on you."

That…was hard to answer but Rock shook his head anyway, staring at the floor. "No, I think."

"I see," Kain answered with no emotion whatsoever. "Come, join us."

With his stomach in knots, Rock nodded and reached down to pull his shirt off. Kain's eyes burned a hole into him as he stood in nothing but boxers, face aflame, bile reacting.

Kain headed back to the bed and padded the mattress with something that didn't quite amount to a smile on his face. "You remind me so much of your mother."

"Yes. You do," Grant agreed, still visibly put off by this.

It did something horrible to Rock every time he had been told this as of late. It had been what they said before and after the…incident, so to speak. That happened to the largest part of his life which made Rock feel horrible shame. But he had learned the hard way that there was no escaping this fate of his. When the world wanted to, it'd take away his ability to control his own destiny.

Maybe he deserved this hell.

So!

1) Terry is not here. Don't worry, we'll learn more about it. It was established in Black Velvet that he skipped South Town so you can infer that he did so because of Andy dying. Now, he did come back and talk with Mai but...

2) Rock is horribly depressed over it and many, many things. Don't worry, we'll learn why when we bully him some more.

3) "What are you doing, step-Kain?" Bad joke aside, we'll learn why he's having threesomes with Rock and Grant despite the former not being into it and the latter being put off by it as well.

Next time? ACTION!