age unknown telepath/telekinetic
no citizenship independent agent
unmarried
I met Nate in New York. Elizabeth and Jean took me shopping, but it became clear fairly quickly that we had different interests, and I wandered off. I met Nate maybe three quarters of an hour into a very cold walk. He just dropped down beside me and fell into step. It was probably the most unnerving thing I'd ever had happen to me, not least because I was so sure I should know him. He was hauntingly familiar and almost entirely wrong, and he played that for everything it was worth.Though he didn't care to explain it to me until I'd bought him tea in a corner restaurant and spent another quarter of an hour just staring at him in confusion, Nate's a Summers. Scott and Jean's child, though born in a world parallel to ours rather than in this one. Our version of reality produced Cable.
You can see it. In the eyes, and the jaw, and the stubbornness, and the rarely-seen sense of humour.
When I asked Jean, she said that she and Scott do consider Nate to be theirs, but they haven't had much luck keeping him close. He wasn't raised by them, and by and largely the X-Men make him nervous, though he'll visit if there aren't too many people in the house.
Photographing him was a problem. There are no reliable indicators for Nate's age, other than his being post-adolescent. He hasn't got any idea when his birthday is, and he only has a vague idea of when he was born. Most people's guesses put him in his late teens, but it's not a certainty.
He did, eventually, convince me, though I photographed him on the condition that he keep his jeans on. And he had a point. None of the doctors who've examined Nate expect him to live beyond the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. Genetically engineered and unencumbered by Cable's techno organics, Nate's power exceeds the capacity of a human body. Everything about him is fragile in comparison to it.
Sinclair: How different is it? This world, I mean?
Nate: From mine? It's ... there are people in both of them. And mutants. Whoever you put in charge, the other ones suffer. And there are cities, here. I don't really get that.
Sinclair: Mmm?
Nate: I mean, it's like there's people everywhere. I don't think I ever saw more than a couple of hundred people at a time, before I came here. If you put more people than that together, it's too easy to hear them. They make this huge noise. And they hurt each other, and they do incredibly stupid things, and yell, and get mad at each other.
Sinclair: And yet you live in New York.
Nate: I'm gonna figure this one out if it kills me.
Sinclair: That's all?
Nate: No. There's all this stuff you can get at. I like the library. And they do the Shakespeare thing in the park.
Sinclair: You like Shakespeare?
Nate: Forge taught me to read out of his Complete Works.
Sinclair: What about the X-Men?
Nate: They probably have their own copies.
Sinclair: No, I mean. Damn. Have you ever thought about joining them?
Nate: Not seriously. I have this fantasy where a bunch of them start a small town somewhere and I come and, I don't know, paint the picket fences or something, but the fantasy keeps getting interrupted by monster attacks. I think my life's absurd enough without actually borrowing weirdness. And okay, I don't think I'd deal with the whole forces-of-good thing any better than Cable does.
Sinclair: Why?
Nate: Nobody's intentions are perfect. And the good guys have this stunning tendency to get killed.
Sinclair: Anybody ever tell you that you're disturbingly cynical?
Nate: I learned to read from Shakespeare. It's its own kind of education.