The Von-Bosse family has been a presence in science fields for generations — nine generations now, to be exact, as Edward is the most recent product of the family interests. Once traders and financial leaders, then war time money makers, the family learned to make repentance for past would-be crimes by devoting themselves to new causes; several Nobel Prizes later, they have done all they could to become a pillar of morality in their communities. Edward, the now-last Von-Bosse of his bloodline, is now the only remaining vestige of a lineage of research and development of the human body and he tends to shrug even that off; if not for raising his children on the family estate, he would not even be known well as a Von-Bosse these days.

Mostly, it has to do with Alphonse's death. For years it felt like a lie, a made up imaginary friend, and that was how the last of the Von-Bosse family had treated it — there was Only Edward and that was all. Alphonse was real, though, a young boy with the gift of illusion casting whose parents took to their superstitions and worries and let their son die. Edward never forgot it and all his life worked to develop studies into those with Gifts — Requited, as they would come to be known. This was what lead to his finding his children, Gabrielle and Miles, two youths in different homes who both walked with the aura of those who were meant for something more.

It helped, without any doubts, that Benjamin Saint George was not a young man who cared much what kind or shape or creed of child he got, so long as he had children to love on and raise in luxury. With a Nobel Prize winning husband and an estate that thrived on its own ancient glory, Benjamin was sure both Gabrielle and Miles would find their lives full of love and celebration. Bin was an odd accident. A condom broke, a night went strange, and then nine months of aches and pains no one could afford. They would have had an abortion if they could have even spared that expense, but it was impossible. They could make it work, his parents figured, if they did more; their first child suffered for a while and his father worked two jobs with as many shifts as he could take, but it all came up naught. A month before he was due, Bin's father passed away; a sudden stroke at work and he was gone before anyone knew it. Money went from tight to gone and when Bin was born, his mother did the only thing she knew how to do — she gave him up to social services in the hospital and was done with it.

So all the boy named Moon Bin ever knew was Mr. and Mrs. Blevins and their children, Hunter and Jenna. Hunter was only two when Moon Bin was brought into their care — one of thirteen children they took care of over Bin's time in the Blevin home. Jenna was eight years older and less around than anyone but Hunter, he was always there. Bin was a bright child, the kind of boy to pick up a book at three and read it aloud, even as he stumbled over words too big for kids even ten years older than he was. The Blevins did what they could, really, to try and keep the boy content but it didn't work. A few years into it and they were having to give him up to an orphanage in hopes that they could raise him into the light of a child someone would adopt. Knowing the family home, it was a good thing, a shelter Bin held onto before the torture began.

Saint Catherine's did what it could. Kind volunteers, specialized requests for sheets and even some toys, it should have been a lovely thing. But the children of the orphanage were anything but kind. Lost, abandoned, hateful, some were gentle and bonded but others... Bin never fit in. Not well, at least. Bean, Trash Bin, whatever other names they could muster came together. He did his best to ignore them, of course, but it didn't always work. And in the end, there was no ignoring someone who demanded a reaction. The first time it happened, Bin was asleep. Andrew and Neil were two of the older boys in the orphanage, almost on their way out, training to join the military one day. The strength of Andrew's arm stayed around Bin' neck as the blood dripped and Bin' disappeared from it all; his body stayed there listening to their vulgarity, to their need and hunger and be a good boy remarks while a strong metallic arm held Bin' and showed him other places.

The Ritual began. It lasted, for longer than Bin has ever wanted to admit to, and only got worse when Andrew was adopted and it was only Neil left; that was when he started to wake up in the morning with bruises and cuts and no memories of having earned them. Gabrielle Saint-Bosse had a gift of empathic soul searching and when her adoptive parents brought her through the orphanage to find a possible brother she could bond with, it was Bin's aura that glowed the best for her. There was more good than bad, she said, almost like two heroes when others only sometimes had one. It was more than enough for Edward and Benjamin who both approached Bin with kindness and brought him home. Eight years old and moving again, two years of torture was over with as he found a home; it was no surprise to anyone with the kindness of his parents that he was taking on their name not a year later, Miles Saint-Bosse. In the past stayed everything: stayed a temporary family, stayed terror and fright and, for a while, even Kano; an imaginary friend, they'd been sure, because of the trauma of imagining that family was temporary instead of permanent.

For a couple of years, it was all that had to matter. The stability of a family, no night time visits with Kano, waking up terrified only once in a while and even more rarely not being able to calm himself down before someone heard his crying. With the best schools, the best learning, the best books he could ever want for Miles flourished anyway and grew away from it. Until September 18th, 2009. The other students were all in school as Gabi and Miles should have been but a few of the Saint-Bosse children were home sick with a stomach flu. The burgalaries were a little more frequent at the time, those big old homes in New Rochelle mostly empty all of the time, so no one had expected to break into the old Trade House to find a man with his two children of different races. The shock set the first gun shot off and the children screaming and crying; Miles remembered the singe of the smell that hit his nose before he blanked out, the way he'd done so many times as a child.

It was the fire that made Miles snap back to reality; Benjamin shaking both his children, terrified and unaware of what to do, trying to run them out of the house. The flames died down as Gabi fell to the floor and Miles, Miles' head became his own; the police questioned things later and watched back security tapes that let them know the answers. Ward figured out the rest, but it took a few weeks of trying to get Miles to understand what Had really happened. "Kano" had made himself known and used Miles' bursting requite to force both intruders into turning their pistols on one another. When they were dead on the ground the gore of it had set Gabi's requite off, the penance fire of their sins burning them and their gore to cinders against the house then going out completely. Requited: it'd come up under Ward's work a few times over but never made sense until he was bringing the children in with him to learn to ue their gifts, properly.

Only two of the Saint-Bosse clan were Requited. It became a pretty known fact in their social circles: the children had murdered those men that tried to kidnap them. Assault them. Kill them! The stories changed from mouth to mouth, mind to mind, and as a child Miles found it difficult — almost impossible — to shut them out. When he would discuss the voices, his parents just thought it some other vehicle of imagination; telepathic children were vastly overachieving in their fantasies, weren't they? So, Miles ignored it, too, and worked on learning how to use his gift as his brothers and sisters learned to do their own things. Never without, even Gabi and Miles were able to join in on dance, martial arts, and even a few language trades over the years. There were distractions enough by the plenty before Miles ever figured out something was changing and it wasn't just his ability to learn. On the second anniversary of the breakin, September 18th, 2011, Benjamin and Edward gave the news about the move. It was too difficult, too much, and with Benjamin's work expanding further and father into films in Los Angeles, it just made sense.

Children after trauma fracture, at times. When Miles spoke up in a gruff voice about not going to fucking move any time soon, his parents tried to discipline him in understanding. When the boy collapsed after the voice was done, they took him to a therapist — a possible second personality just to cope with the anniversary and new stress, but it would fade. It wasn't until Miles was living in Baltimore with Chuku, Catherine and Edward that things pieced together. It was in April 2012 then, the third Saturday (21st) of the month and Edward was coming home from an operation in trying to help a patient whose gift was causing their flesh to bolster when their lightning ran through them. Not ever requite, Edward had said, was easy at first; most hurt the Requited and if he could figure out exactly what impulses in the body and nervous systems were reacting to them, he could help their bodies learn to fix it. But in the middle of the experiments their panic got the best of them and Edward's own assistant was lost. It was a tragic day for the Bosse International Institute for Neurosciences & Recovery and left Edward heavy.

He had gotten used to having to not explain himself to Miles, by then; what he wasn't used to was the way the boy's face shifted, his shoulders slouching down, his hair fading a little closer to blonde as he reached out to pat on Edward's shoulder. The assistant, almost in the flesh again, stood and shook his head. "It's okay, Doctor. Just don't give up. It's not your fault." The voice wasn't Miles own; the next day, Miles was inside of the Institute and trying to bring it out again. Instead of the assistant, a crimson butterfly flew from his mouth and moved through the walls, one last goodbye from the assistant announcing through the speaker system as Miles tried to figure it out. The help of the Safe Haven came in then, explaining away the trauma of Miles' life and how his mind swallowed up the linger of psyches to build outlets for all the memories and gifts he wasn't using at the time. It was a matter of water finding a way, no matter how many rocks they put down. It was close to true.

They came to find the truth, however, when news of suicide and an arrest caught up with Miles. The assault became more and more obvious until Miles ran away from home for a short time; his personalities were born of a Disassociative Identity Disorder which was only expanded upon by his Requite; where once Miles might have only had a few personalities ever to cope around he suddenly developed the potential for hundreds of thousands, each of them born with a new possibility in his ever expansive power and gift. As Miles' gift grew, so would his disorder. It became a battle, briefly, as Miles' mind — which could enslave a universe for his entire life span if he so pleased — grew and trickled out. He wound up in Houston, Texas, and finding a signature of soul that nearly matched his own. Finding his biological brother was both a blessing and a pain. Leonard told Miles everything he knew — it took some persuasion but Miles was good at that, subtle influence, even at his high vector of power. In one week's time they went from strangers to almost brothers, until Ryn took Miles over and distance became a factor again. Knowing he was incapable of hiding forever, Miles went home, exchanging information with Leonard after Ryn was released just so he could meet his family and face things down. He told them the truth, the rapes, the consistency of it all; Miles explained in earnest detail every agony of gift and splinter that had entered into his mind. It wasn't healing but it was a start.

In the way of everything came Miles' adaptive education; he could master a book in a few nights of reading, memorize every detail with absolute recollection. It catapulted his journey through education. When he ran away to meet Leonard he was already in university; he was waiting for friends to catch up everywhere he went and making friends with people much older than him in the meantime. It was as good a distraction as any as Miles ended up called into the case against Andrew; the terror didn't shatter Miles' psyche hardly as badly as he imagined it might've and instead, it drove him toward something new. As Miles' sat with the victims of other crimes, he realized that the measures and differences of their pain didn't matter hardly as much as the fact that it hurt. His interests, his devotion to healing people with connections, began from the thing that first broke his spirit and created all his strange.

As Miles moved on through education, so did life; he broke up with his first girlfriend so she could move to Maine and he could stay in Harvard. He started to study experimental psychology, started to build all the hope for the future he could imagine. A Rhodes' Scholarship later he was in Oxford, England, studying in another top university and making his life into a history — another young genius out to try and shape the world. He was hardly a genius, Miles always denied it, honest about the nature of his gift making it easier to recall everything instead. But it had been a gift they always thought normal, a benefit of being intelligent, so he made his way. Through university, through the beginnings of work, and he found where he deserved to be: treatment of those who benefit from coping, connection and relearning to love themselves. His practice was sporadic at first, a kind of working-through-centres until he moved to New York.

Rather than abandon those cases he'd become a positive tool for in Oxford, Miles started his own practice. Using a mixture of Skype calls, in-person visits and group sessions that are more and more frequent as word gets out, he's begun to lend himself to more than just a fractured mind; he is the place that broke so he could help others understand how to heal the bends. Intention to even use his gift to one day help curb the base impulses of psychotic criminals, Miles focuses on now on the building of a voice and self esteem that denies the compulsion of self and society. With a beautiful puppy at his side, he does his best to be nothing less than welcoming and loving — trusting, despite it all. back