Saving Him from Himself Ch. 00 - Prologue

Author's note: This is a prologue to the main story containing information about the background of the characters. There are no erotic happenings in this chapter, it simply sets the scene. If you want to get right into the action, I suggest you skip straight to chapter 01.

Charlie Hawthorne sat in his room one evening reflecting on his life and sighed. At 22 years old, he hadn't exactly reached his full potential. He didn't have a job, he was socially isolated, he couldn't even drive, he had never had a girlfriend, and he didn't have any real friends. Unless you counted his sisters.

He knew he had no right to complain of course. He was a Hawthorne, a member of one of the richest and most powerful families in the world. The family business, the Hawthorne corporation, had their fingers in many pies, from IT and computer manufacturing to information gathering and data brokering to who knew what else. He didn't have a job? He didn't need a job. His stepsister Melody provided him with a generous allowance so he could buy all the video games, movies, action figures and comics that he could ever possibly want.

But that was exactly the point. He was a man now, not a teenage boy. But their parents policy of isolationism had taken its toll. His stepparents Jack and Veronica Hawthorne had had one biological child, his sister Melody. But the birth had been terrible and the doctors warned his mother that another pregnancy and childbirth could be a threat to her life. Their mother had always wanted a large family though, so they had decided to adopt orphans, each from a different orphanage. His sisters Karen, Meiko, Lucy and then finally him. He was 10 years old at the time, living in an orphanage his whole life, always passed over by potential adopters. He had always been a loner and never got on with the staff or other children, he had no pleasant memories of his time there. But then he had been adopted and suddenly he had a family. His new parents had remained a bit distant but his new sisters had welcomed him warmly. He was the last one to be adopted so they had all forged a loving bond of sistership already and they were happy to add him to the mix and accepted him lovingly as their brother. Charlie smiled wistfully as he remembered childhood games of tag and hide and seek. They had all been thick as thieves once. But things had changed since then, he sighed.

Shortly after he had been adopted, there had been an incident with another extremely wealthy family. Some criminals had kidnapped their daughter, demanding a ransom in the millions. The family had paid them off but the kidnappers were paranoid, thinking the family were conspiring with the police and they made a break for it, taking the girl with them. There was no choice but to call the police now. The cops got into a car chase with them and they ended up in a hostage situation when the perps had holed up in an abandoned building. The criminals must have decided they had nothing left to lose so they started shooting at the police, who started shooting back. After the kidnappers were gunned down, the police warily entered the scene only to find the girl dead, either shot by the criminals or felled by one of the cops own bullets, they never determined which. The whole situation had been a complete and utter tragedy.

That little incident had made his parents incredibly paranoid and they swore nothing like that would ever happen to their family. They decided that it would be for the best if all of them were home schooled by their mother and that they should move to a safer place. So Charlie and his sisters had grown up in an opulent mansion in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town, surrounded by high walls and locked front gates. His father didn't trust any outsiders so there were no security guards, only high tech alarms and a sealed panic room with a phone line to the nearest police. The only time outsiders were allowed in was their regular food delivery and unavoidable things like maintenance men for repairs. There weren't any servants either, so Charlie and his sisters had to do a bit more cooking, cleaning and gardening than the average billionaires. Not that it was much of a chore though, with all of them chipping in. But looking back, the isolation had definitely affected all of them, socially stunting them and making them more immature.

Their parents had died in a car crash five years ago, when he was seventeen. He had never been close to them, so it had surprised him how much it had affected him as he cried along with his sisters at their funeral. However they had left the family business and fortune exclusively to Melody, their only biological child. He always knew they had favoured her over the rest of them, he wouldn't be surprised if their adoption had initially been a PR stunt. Adopting four different orphans from various orphanages probably went down well with potential customers. However he was close to Melody and the rest of his sisters and he loved them all dearly. Melody had just turned 18 at the time and she set up generous allowances for the rest of them so money was no problem. She had also taken charge of the family business, subtly influencing things at first and now she was CEO at the age of 25. She had always been an outspoken feminist, and now she was hailed as a feminist icon, the youngest female CEO ever. (The issue of nepotism was usually tactfully ignored.) She had even become something of a pinup in certain circles, there were a lot of men who found her pretty face, long auburn hair, piercing green eyes and curvy figure extremely attractive. Melody had definitely overcome their family difficulties the best of any of them.

As for his other sisters...well, Karen, at age 23, had also progressed in the family business, taking the role of a manager. She was still a lot more reclusive than Melody however, preferring to work from home a lot and conducting meetings over the internet. This was probably because she didn't get on well with her coworkers. She had always had a nasty temper, the fire of it matching her beautiful flame red hair, the stereotypical fiery redhead. Her temper had gotten gradually worse over the years since their parents died and sometimes she frightened Charlie. One or two times when he had been arguing with her he had briefly been worried that she might get physical. Still she was successful at her job and still left the house to attend the occasional meeting and had even made a few friends, so Charlie had hope that she would eventually shake off the damage of her upbringing and lead a somewhat normal life.

He was most concerned with his two younger sisters, Meiko and Lucy. Meiko was a slim beautiful girl of Asian descent who was full of kindness. She was the one who worried over all their wellbeing, much more than their actual parents had. She had a thing for dolls and had a collection that took up an entire large room, which was an unusual interest for a twenty year old woman. She had the usual barbie dolls and porcelain dolls, but unfortunately she also had an obsession with those creepy ultra realistic reborn baby dolls that looked exactly like a newborn infant. Charlie shuddered. He hated those things. He didn't know what they resembled more, the actual corpse of a dead baby or a sex toy for a paedophile, and he didn't know which was worse to have a roomful of in your house. But Meiko loved them, several times he had caught her cradling one, crooning to it and singing lullabies like it was a real baby. Charlie sighed. Well if she wanted to be a mother she should stop being a recluse and get out there, make some friends and maybe meet the potential father. The doll collection might be a hindrance to that, when any boyfriend saw that for the first time and felt hundreds of glass eyed stares silently judging him it would probably be a bit offputting. Especially since she had them all over her bedroom as well, that would spoil the mood a bit to say the least.

Which left his youngest sister Lucy, who had just turned eighteen. Charlie sighed again. The isolation had probably affected her social development the worst. She was a cheerful friendly bubbly girl who could be incredibly funny sometimes, but my god was she immature. She could act much younger than her actual age, sometimes actually throwing tantrums when she didn't get her way, crying hysterically and stamping her foot. She had never outgrown her childhood fear of the dark and still insisted on sleeping with a night light. Her fashion sense seemed to be affected too, she almost always wore her gorgeous honey blonde hair in pigtails and had a predilection for wearing short pleated skirts. Charlie didn't think she would last a day in the real world, so maybe it was for the best for her to remain living here supported by Melody's generous allowance. But was that really living?

But there was another problem, one that had been building for years. Once he and his sisters had been incredibly close, doing everything together. But over the years a distance seemed to have grown between him and the four of them. Looking back, it seemed to have coincided with Melody developing an intense passion for feminism. She used to go on about the evils of the patriarchy for hours, lamenting how women had been oppressed by men for centuries. Charlie had rolled his eyes when she went on these tirades and had learned to tune them out over time. His other sisters had seemed equally annoyed by it, but yet it seemed to have affected them in some way. He had noticed occasional strange glances they were giving him when they thought he wasn't looking, and whispered conversations that suddenly stopped when he entered the room. They seemed to be treating him with less respect and were more demanding of him in certain ways. Charlie had never been one for confrontations, so he went along with it most of the time. He particularly didn't want to anger the fiery Karen, it was so much easier to just let her have her way and avoid her fury. He still loved them all dearly and he knew they all loved him, but something had changed between them. It was a shame that they seemed to have lost the close bond they once had.

But at least Melody's interest in female advancement had led to her becoming a successful CEO and a feminist icon, a hero to little girls everywhere who wanted to grow up to be just like her. He still felt incredibly proud when he saw her on the cover of magazines and, although he had never shown an interest in or really been aware of the family business before, he had started to do research into it on the internet so he could know exactly what his sister had accomplished. What he had found had made him very uneasy. The family business went back generations and for all that time there had been rumours swirling around about it and his family in general. He found people saying the company was corrupt, made shady deals, bribed politicians and police officials. There had been inquiries and investigations launched but they had all been wrapped up suspiciously quickly with official statements saying nothing had been found. There was no evidence, nobody could prove a thing. Some newspapers had printed some of the hearsay but the company lawyers had threatened to sue them for libel and they had immediately caved, printing groveling retractions and apologies in the next issue. There weren't any more newspaper articles after that.

The rumours had only gotten worse when Melody became CEO. Now there were mutterings about unfair hiring practices where female applicants were given priority over males and female employees being given the fast track up the company ladder at the expense of their male coworkers. There were rumours of top secret meetings and retreats exclusively for female executives who were made to sign non disclosure agreements that forbade them from even talking about what went on there. Most disturbingly, there were fearful whisperings about some kind of cult associated with the Hawthorne corporation. Some excitable MRA subreddits were talking about a feminist cult, with one user even insisting it was a female supremacist cult. Charlie knew there were a lot of crazy people on the internet. There were people who actually believed the earth was flat for Christ's sake, and that all evidence to the contrary was just part of a government conspiracy. He also knew that successful and powerful women like Melody had always had to suffer from rumours and gossip being spread about them. But still, what he had read had disturbed him.

Charlie sighed and started thinking about his own situation again. He had never had a girlfriend, so he was, of course, a virgin. Social isolation had done a lot of damage to him, but that was the one thing he was most ashamed of. Well, he did have an alternative, as poor a substitute as it was. Charlie went over to his bed, lay down, booted up pornhub on his phone, unzipped his fly and started taking care of business.

Lack of privacy is about to become a major issue in Charlie's life so let's just leave him there for now. Enjoying his last few moments of real happiness, blissfully unaware of the hell that is about to be unleashed upon him.