Contrary to popular belief, Stephen Hart wasn't just some good-looking berk that just so happened to have decent aim and a knack for tracking things. It always frustrated him, the way that people assumed just because he was well fit and a good shot that he had nothing else going for him. He was eternally caught between a rock and a hard place: he was too sciencey to be strictly be an outdoors man or what have you, but he was also too physical to advance much further in the scientific world. Sometimes it nearly drove him up a wall.
There were a lot of things that people didn't know about him, actually, mainly because they never asked. What girlfriends there were had never asked anything about him, except maybe where he was from or what he did for a living. That was about the extent of their interest. Never a question about his parents or if he had siblings. Nothing. It cultivated the idea that he was a secretive person, which he really wasn't. He'd tell the truth if anyone asked, but he wasn't just going to go on and spill the details of his life for no reason. The only real bright light that he had in his life was his dæmon, Thalia. Another thing that people misunderstood about dæmons was that they were inherently narcissistic, and simply because one had a permanent companion did not mean one was never lonely or longed for new company. Stephen might not have been alone, but they were. They were, however, used to being alone.
Stephen had only a vague, distant memory of his father. Jamison Hart had died when his son was three years old, killed when a drunk driver ran his car off the road into a ravine. If he really thought about it, Stephen could call up a vague memory of smiling blue eyes the same shade as his and a laughing voice. His mother, though... Sometimes, he wished he could forget his mother.
Kitty Hart, formerly Kitty Dunne, was an Olympian, tennis and archery, that might've made Worlds had it not been for her getting pregnant. Stephen had never seen her play in person, but he'd watched the videos of her matches when he was younger. She hadn't gotten the name Kitty "the Hammer" Hart for no reason. Her dæmon was an arrow-sleek greyhound by name of Aeris, just as sleek and athletic and beautiful as she was. She'd retired from the sport when Stephen was born, though she was always well-fit, and there was no doubt that she'd loved Jamison. Whenever he and his dæmon, a playful otter, Nyema, came into the room, Kitty would go all soft-eyed and Aeris's tail would wag vigorously. Which is why when he died, it utterly destroyed her.
Stephen still remembered how she would come home staggering drunk, with Aeris tripping along behind her, and would totter to her room to pass out cold on the bed she and Jamison once shared. Sometimes she didn't even get that far and would end up on the floor of the corridor or on the couch in the living room. Most of the time, she didn't even bother calling someone to watch him, so it was usually just him and Thalia, sitting alone in the house. By the time he was five, he'd learnt how to make his own food and work the washing machine so he'd have clean clothes to wear, though the first time he tried, all his thermals came out grey and his jumper shrunk two sizes.
Thalia would always become something small and innocuous whenever his mother got sloshed like that, usually a mouse or a sparrow, trying to hide from Aeris, who would growl her way whenever he staggered past, sometimes even snap at her with all intention to bite if he could see straight enough to catch her. Kitty never once hit him, though sometimes she looked at him with an expression of sorrow, longing, and hatred; Stephen didn't realise just how much he looked like his father until he found one of the few photos that Kitty hadn't burnt. He had inherited Jamison's unkempt hair and storm-blue eyes, even his smile. No wonder his mother had despised him sometimes, having to see a daily reminder of the man she'd loved so much and lost. At night, he would curl up in bed with Thalia huddled in his arms, wondering what he'd done to make her hate him and convincing himself that he wasn't crying when he went to sleep.
It wasn't until he was seven that one of his teachers puzzled out that something wasn't quite right with little Stephen Hart, the quietest boy in class. By then Kitty had eased off the bottle, but she was also coming home wired with manic energy, glassy eyed and sporting small bruises and pinprick marks in the creases of each elbow. Thalia had clung to his back in the form of a sloth as a social worker packed up all his clothes in a suitcase and another sat at the table with Kitty, having his mother fill out paperwork that signed over legal guardianship of him to his grandparents, Kitty's parents.
It took a week of living with Horace and Alisa Dunne for Stephen to wish desperately that he still lived with an alcoholic junkie.
His grandparents never raised a hand to him, but sometimes he wished they would, just do something to show they even registered his existence. His mother might've looked at him with something very close to hatred, but at least she looked at him. Horace and Alisa ignored him. Even their dæmons, a porcupine and an Irish setter just as bitter and cold as their people, ignored Thalia as if she was no more than a fly buzzing around their ears. They blamed him for what had happened to their precious daughter. If it wasn't for him, Kitty would still be an Olympian with medals around her neck instead of an addict always scrabbling for her next fix. He might have had clean clothes every day and food that he didn't have to make himself, but he didn't get hugs or bedtime stories. There weren't any holidays, no Christmas presents or fireworks on New Year's. Stephen actually forgot that most people celebrate their birthdays, especially kids, with things like cake and presents and friends over for games.
It was then that his fascination with hunting and tracking really started. The only respite he had from the frigidity of being in the Dunne home was the library two blocks down. He'd read books about Africa and the Americas and Asia and Europe, saw pictures of grasslands and forests and savannahs and mountains, of lions and tigers and giraffes and elephants, animals of all size and shape. He'd told Thalia that one day, they'd go places like that, far away, and see all sorts of things, when they were older and could look after themselves. There'd be no drunken Kitty and growling Aeris, no frosty-eyed Horace and disdainful Clarissa, no indifferent Alisa and bristling Mikhail. It'd be just them, Stephen and Thalia.
The year after that, when he was twelve, his dæmon settled into her permanent form. Thalia had a very strange form by the standards of most people. Stephen had seen the proper animal first in a book he'd found in the library and then in real life on an expedition in Africa. They weren't so big, maybe 36 kilos and about 110 centimetres, but he'd seen a group of them drag a fully-grown wildebeest.
She was an African wild dog. The Latin name, Lycaon pictus, meant "painted wolf" and her name, Thalia, was Greek and meant "festive," which was quite fitting, as her fur was mottled in irregular patterns of brown, black, white, and yellow, like a tortoiseshell cat without the style. It wasn't just that she had a strange form, it was that her form actually looked odd. Aside from the colouring, she had a lean, sleek body and long legs like a greyhound, though her tail was surprisingly fluffy considering the rest of her fur was quite short, and comically large, rounded ears that were almost as big as her head. It made her look scruffy, and no amount of baths and brushing could change that. According to one of the swots on his secondary school's rugby team, Thalia looked like someone had "taken a greyhound, dumped half a paint set on her, tacked on a feather duster for a tail, and gave her a pair of Mickey Mouse ears to boot."
If anything, Thalia's form made his grandparents dislike him even more. It was bad enough they had to take care of a child they never wanted and didn't even care about, he had to have the weird dæmon as well. But Stephen didn't care. He loved his Thalia, and he liked to think that she had settled in that form because they were going to go places far away, that they were hunters, explorers.
He moved out of the Dunne house the day he turned 18, and thanks to a trust fund set up by Jamison before his death, Stephen had the money to travel all the places he'd dreamt of and read about. His sharpshooting skill grew as did his competency in tracking and hunting, fitting right into it as though he was born to. But it wasn't quite enough. As exciting as it all was, he also had pursuits in science, in microbiology and evolution, so when he was 23, he and Thalia returned to London. They were as lonely there as they were as children. There were girlfriends, but they went as soon as they'd come, and any mates he had were really just drinking partners in the pub on match days. That aching place that housed the never-ending loneliness in his chest didn't go away.
At least, not until he got into Central Metropolitan University and met the infamous teaching duo there, Professors Nick and Helen Cutter.