T;horne; grew up as an only child. Both his parents were heavily involved in the US army, his mother as a field nurse and his father as commander. Thus it was a given that their son would be trained to be a strong, able soldier and expected to rise through the ranks, which is exactly what he did. The good reputation of his father might have helped, but at no point did the father pull any strings to get his son ahead of the game. It all came from pure determination, leadership and skill.

At the early age of 30 he had risen to the rank of captain and was commanding an investigation of a village suspected of hosting a rebels leader deep in the Vietnam jungle. What should have been an easy assignment turned on Thorne when they met fierce resistance. They were all locked down in battle for a few hours, unable to get close to the village due to the pure firepower there, and unable to leave as Thorne got repeated orders to stay put and make sure the rebel leader did not escape.

Then something happened. A message was delivered into Thorne's head, an instantaneous and undeniable realisation from above that he had to get out of there. That there was something very wrong with the whole situation, and that he just needed to get out! In the same way he knew there was no time to try and argue with anyone about leaving with him. Without hesitation he ran over to a jeep, jumped in and drove as fast as he could away from the scene. He got a kilometer away before he heard a great explosion from the village. An ammunition depot had been hit, a chain reaction had started, resulting in the ammunition exploding, tearing apart the large amount of nerve toxin containers and dispersing the gas. The effect was almost instant, as all of the rebels and all of Thorne's former friends and army colleagues died.

Thorne went unconscious and woke up in custody by the US army, held for questioning. The legal process that followed was a farce. Thorne's commander, RichardDennison, had received intelligence of the nerve toxin, but took the risk, hoping to be able to catch the rebel leader. When now a little over 100 people had died, the greatest single loss in the war, Richard knew that he needed to blame someone else. So he said that he had commanded Thorne to pull out, but that Thorne had refused to follow order. No one believed Thorne's story that he had been told to stay, especially since when asked why he had been found on a safe distance from the tragedy, his answer was than an angel had told him to run.

Thorne received 10 years in prison and was stripped of all his ranks. His family stopped talking to him, the shame of having a son who had caused such damages to the army to great.

But prison and family issued was not Thorne's worst problems at this time. The nerve toxin had struck him too, but in smaller doses, leaving him with nerve damages, but alive. His condition was a rare one. A numbing of certain receptors resulted in Thorne losing all but the most basic feeling of touch. Pain, cold, heat; nothing made any slightest affect on Thorne. He could still feel a numbed sensation of pressure, such as holding a glass or leaning against a wall, but no detailed information like the texture of a wall could be felt. It was not until this ever-present sensation was gone that Thorne appreciated just how important this ambient sensory input really was, and how eerie his world had become with it gone. A sense of being detached from the world entered his life.

In prison, Thorne came in contact with a priest who did some charity work for the inmates, mostly trying to ease their pain and tell them about Jesus, at least to the ones who cared to hear it. Thorne was one of them, and during his time there, he became a devout Christian. This even rubbed of on Thorne's cellmate, RodrigueZ, a Venezuelan young guy who had been convicted of raping his teacher. The weight of guilt that he felt from this, and the promise of being forgiven, helped a lot in his letting go of both anger and pain, and he is now as devout of a christian as Thorne.

Due to Thorne's almost none-existing sensory input, he often hurts himself. Scars cover his body and he frequently had to visit the prison nurse, Rose. This wasn't something he minded. He actually looked forward to these meetings. There was something about her that he just couldn't get enough of. Sure, she was attractive, funny, smart, caring. But he had met many of those before. Had Thorne been a trained psychologist, he might have understood that Rose reminded him sub-consciously of his mother, being a nurse in a hard masculine world (prison vs. army) and she soothed a longing for his mother he would not admit to have, even to himself. But now Thorne wasn't a trained psychologist, but rather a born-again Christan, and he recognized love when he saw it. The feeling was mutual. Rose stood no chance. The mix of strength and vulnerability in Thorne perfectly reflected her soft spot in men (which, if we'll speak of subconscious motivations, is why she had become a nurse in a prison). Furthermore, the frequency of his visits, the care he needed from her, the fiery passion for her in his eyes and the disciplined and respectful way he tempered that passion and treated her in a almost old-fashioned chevalier way swept her of her feet. They got married the day he was released from prison. Rodriguez of course made jokes of Thorne just switching prisons.

Well out in the free world, now 38 years old (he got two years off for excellent behaviour) he settled down with a life in the church. Due to his nerve damages he was eligible for benefits, so he doesn't work. Instead he does whatever needs doing around the church he has joined and where Thorne believs he has finally found salvation.