FIT: Origins in loss
FIT: Origins in Loss

There was something wrong.  Something about the situation was not as it usually was.  He knew it as soon as he saw that the door was open.  His door was never open.  He was the kind of man who kept his door closed and locked at all times.  There were dangers in the world that he needed to keep his family safe from, keep his children, his two lovely boys, safe from.

He made his way to the door, carefully, keeping a lookout for burglars or other threats and pushed it open.  It swung forward dutifully, as you would expect a door to react to being pushed.  This door was doing as it was told.  He took comfort in that fact.  He was being obeyed, something in the world was right.

“Karen?”  He called out tentatively as he stepped through the door, “Dominic?  Alastair?”  .  There was no answer.  The feeling of unease intensified.  She always answered him.  The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.  Suddenly, the last sound that he had wanted to hear ripped through the air of the house, a snarling growl.

His heart rushed to his mouth and his mind raced.  He wasn't a religious man, heck, he believed in nothing but the power of his own two hands, but at that point he called out to anyone and anything that could hear to please let the noise he was hearing be fake, a figment of his imagination, overwork and stress finally getting to him, anything but what he thought it was.  Even so, he reached into the cupboard by the door and pulled out one of his golf clubs, holding it tightly in shaking hands.  He took a deep breath and moved forward again, closer to the source of the growling, to the living room.  The door was close and he hesitated a moment, girding himself for what he would find when he got there, before taking a deep breath and entering the room.

He only just held back the scream that threatened to escape him as he entered.  Two young lions were circling each other in the middle of his living room, glaring and growling savagely at one another.  On one side the television set lay on the floor, a crack across the middle.  He almost cursed despite himself, knowing how much that television had cost.  He looked across from it at a football trophy lying mangled on the floor.  Dominic has won it when he was seven, player of the match, he'd never been so proud.  A vase lay smashed by the window, the remains of the flowers that had been bought for mother's day lay trampled on the floor, water and glass littering the carpet.

A weak moan beside him distracted him from his inventory of the room.  He looked down and gave a barely stifled cry, checking that the lions hadn't heard him, he bent down to the woman lying ashen faced on the floor.

“Karen?  Karen?  What's wrong?” he lifted her, cradling her against him, holding on tightly, as if there was nothing else in the world.  She opened her beautiful blue eyes, he'd always loved her eyes, and smiled faintly at him.

“Looks like the boys take after my brother after all,” she murmured bitterly, her eyes on the lions, no fear present, just sadness at the way things had turned out.

“I'm sorry that I didn't do a better job with them.  I could've…” She coughed gingerly and shifted the hand that lay across her stomach, revealing a shard of what looked like part of the sofa sticking out, just underneath her heart.  Blood flowed easily from the wound, soaking her and the carpet and his hands.  Her breathing was laboured as she held weakly onto his shirt.  He pulled her closer, clinging with all his might to his last lifeline.

“Love you,” she murmured, closing her eyes.  Sobs rose in his throat as he choked out his reply, hoping and praying that she could hear it.  She blinked once up at him, smiling serenely, before taking in a single gasping breath and falling limply against him.

She looked so peaceful that all he could do for a moment was sit there, stunned beyond action.  Finally, a growl alerted him to the danger.  He quickly pulled the woman back out into the hall, refusing to acknowledge the tears pouring from his eyes and trickling down his cheeks.  He placed his hands on her chest and began trying to resuscitate her, desperation pushing him onwards even though he knew that there was nothing to be done, that she was already gone.  On and on he pushed, tears falling all the while, a wailing filling the room that he did not realise was coming from his own lungs.  His hands were shaking, his legs numb when a scream from the other room brought him back to himself, a man crying over the body of his late wife.  He got up, vision clouded with tears and golf club gripped in his hand, stumbling through into the other room, not caring what the lion was going to do, only to be confronted with two boys, 12 years old, his sons, his twins, bleeding on the floor, soft moans of pain and misery emanating from them.

His hands shook as he slammed the door of the room.  They kept shaking as he fumbled through his medicine cabinet.  They shook as he mixed the pills with lemonade to hide the taste, as he made his way back to the room, passing the corpse of his murdered wife, as he reassured his sons that everything was going to be alright, tasting the lie as plainly as the boys tasted the drugs in their lemonade.  They shook and he held his sons close, knowing that this was for the best, that it would save their memories, that they were not truly his sons any longer.  They shook as he called the police, reporting a theri attack on their premises, three killed and the theri escaped.

His hands did not stop shaking as he made his promise, to the memory of his wife and sons, that this would not happen to any other family, as he promised that he would do all in his power to find a cure for therianthropy, or to remove theris from places where they could hurt their families when they transformed.

And so, with shaking hands and a mind blinded by grief, Dr. Gordon Matthews set up the corporation that would one day be called FIT and allowed himself to withdraw into a shell of cold, cruel anger and blind hatred of all those that called themselves therianthropes.