xxxxxBorn the youngest of three to a family that liked to call themselves 'working class' so they didn't have to cop to 'poor', Taylor's life wouldn't have been easy even if he weren't born a tiny squidling. His dad couldn't handle the birth -- he walked out in Taylor's first few weeks of life, leaving Taylor's mom alone to raise the three children.
xxxxxWhich she did, and did with a fierce devotion. It wasn't easy -- in terms of finances, in terms of the strain it put on her from the world's reaction to her inhuman new baby, in terms of her own struggle with horror and shock and dismay that she had to come to terms with and learn to accept the baby for who he was. But. She made the decision and worked hard to follow through on it -- whether that meant working three jobs, moving school districts, fighting tooth and nail to get her youngest access to the same education her older daughter and son had.
xxxxxAll the working, though, means that while Taylor grew up knowing his mom loved him, it was his siblings who spent more time actually raising him. In school he was always in and out of trouble -- zero tolerance policies meant that fights other children started, he was punished for (often more harshly.) Often in detention, often suspended, he nevertheless kept more or less up with his grade by dint of his family spending a lot of time teaching him outside of class.
xxxxxAt least, until he was eleven. Things at his new school -- the latest of several -- had been rocky, to say the least. Things in their new neighborhood -- the latest of many -- had been even rockier. Coming home from school nearly every day for two weeks, other students waited -- some days only jeering but some days getting actually violent. His siblings waited to walk him home, for all it helped.
xxxxxWhen the vandalism started at their townhouse, his mom started looking for a new place to live again. Not quickly enough, unfortunately. One day when a neighbor showed up actually looking for violence, she got in an altercation with them to defend Taylor. Though she hadn't started the fight, one neighbor ended up dead, Taylor ended up in the hospital, and his mom ended up in jail.
xxxxxHe never made it back home from the hospital. Two surgeries later and he woke up, rather than in the hospital bed, in a lab.
xxxxxSomewhere back in California, his siblings were throwing a fit. It wasn't under Jax's team showed up half a year (and the onset of his telepathy) later that he was reunited with them. It was a short kind of reunion, though; with them in foster care and their mom still in jail, they all decided the school was the best place for him. He started middle school there, and has been at Xavier's till the present.
|