Eileen Ruskin's parents were never married, and while growing up in the family's London flat with her older brother Nicholas, she often wondered if they even loved each other; Sophia Ruskin worked as a nurse at St. Mary's hospital while her domestic partner and the man who called himself Eileen's father — a cabbie named Gregory York who Sophia had been seeing on and off since the early eighties — contributed to the household by driving taxis for the Black Cab company during graveyard shifts and very rarely saw his children except on weekends. Their relationship was a series of ups and downs with euphoric highs and miserable lows that culminated in regular infidelity on Gregory's part and violent moodswings on Sophia's, though it wasn't until the mid-nineties that Mr. York left his girlfriend for good. Eileen was six.
Things got progressively worse for the Ruskin children after their father's departure from their lives. Although Sophia had been an alcoholic for as long as Eileen could remember, Gregory kept much of her self-destructive behavior in check; without someone to tell her when she'd had too much or take away the bottle when she did, their mother began a downward spiral, hitting rock bottom in 1997 when she was suspended from her job for being frequently intoxicated on hospital grounds. The first time Sophia hit her children with anything other than the open palm of her hand, it was Nicholas in retaliation for taking a package of her cigarettes to school and selling them to his classmates for 25 p. each. Over the next few months Sophia turned punishment into a game that involved baths of ice cold water, hitting his hands and neck with a broom handle, and once, forcing ammonia down his throat for telling his headmaster that she'd once struck him. At first, Eileen was spared similar treatment, but as the situation worsened and Sophia became even more dependent on bizarre methods of discipline for controlling her children, she too found herself with bruises and welts on her body and no way to explain to her teachers or friends how they got there.
After six months of probation, St. Mary's allowed Sophia to return to the hospital and for a time the situation at the Ruskin home improved. The frequency of the abuse decreased, and there were long periods where Eileen and Nicholas would go for weeks without being punished for their mistakes or perceived slights against their mother. On the rare occasions when they were punished, the savageness of the beatings inflicted by Sophia was worse than it had ever been — one incident found the police on the doorstep after Eileen's bawling attracted the attention of concerned neighbors when she tried to burn Nicholas' hands on the coils of the kitchen stove.
Years passed in this way. With his wild and rebellious behaviour, Nicholas almost always bore the brunt of Sophia's anger and did not fare as well as Eileen, who had begun taking extracurricular violin lessons at the insistence of a concerned music teacher at school. When they were in their early teens, he in turn began abusing her when Sophia wasn't home, threatening to tell their mother that she was sleeping with boys in her class if she refused to comply with his demands. Afraid to resist him and even more frightened of what might happen if he did go to Sophia, Eileen kept her mouth shut. In her fifteenth year, shortly after Nicholas started pressuring her into performing sexual acts on his friends, she decided the only alternative was to simply walk away.
She did.
In the wake of her departure, the headmaster at school notified the police of what he and the children's teachers suspected was going on at the Ruskin home, causing Nicholas to be removed and placed in foster care while Sophia faced criminal charges and was named a person of interest in her daughter's disappearance.
As it turned out, life as a missing person in London wasn't much better than life under Sophia's regime. Utterly failing to locate her father and convince him to take her in, Eileen found herself falling back on the life lessons her brother had inadvertently taught her. Sex became a tool to express and secure love and affection, first from other youths her age, then from older men who promised her protection in exchange for it, and although Eileen knew very well what prostitution was, the arrangement was presented to her in such a way that she believed that it was safer than returning home. By the time drugs entered the equation, her dependency on the different street families she seesawed between was so fierce that her friends assumed she'd reached the breaking point and was simply seeking attention when her ability manifested in 2005. Who, after all, in their right mind truly believed the birds were talking to them?
It began as simple images projected into her mind — the best places to scrounge for crumbs, the safest roosts in the area — but as time passed Eileen became more adept and discovered she could share the same things with them, even going so far as to unconsciously plant suggestions in their minds. She eventually learned that the Tower of London was home to a flock of ravens which she began to gravitate toward instead, finding corvids to be much cleaner, more intelligent company than the London pigeons to which had become accustomed. Like the Yeomen Warders who clipped their wings, the ravens came to view Eileen as a benefactor rather than something to feel trepidation about, and for the next few months she spent most of her free time around the Tower so she could be near them.
That winter, when Eileen was still getting a handle on her ability, her fledgling relationship with the ravens put her directly in the path of Amato Salucci. Salucci struck up a casual friendship with her and, gently, pressed until she confided in him. In return, he revealed that not only did he also have a gift, but he and his traveling companion — Kazimir Volken — might even be able to provide her with steady work and a permanent place to stay if she was willing to kick her heroin habit and leave the country with them. They introduced her to Ethan Holden, a man she would eventually come to view as a father figure in Gregory's absence, and the other members of their organization, the Vanguard: Elias de Luca, a "reformed" hitman who used to work for the Linderman Group, Zhang Wu-Long from China, Rico Velasquez, Jensen Raith and many others who came and went over the years following the 2006 explosion in New York City. Amato explained to Eileen that he and Kazimir intended to bring about a new world order, an idea the young woman readily found herself agreeing with even if she didn't fully understand the implications at the time.
Fall of 2008 found the Vanguard in New York City. Spring of 2009 found the organization utterly destroyed and in shambles. Eileen does not talk about what happened during the months between October and January, but grieves freely for the lives lost and openly celebrated the friendships forged during that cold, dark time. For several months, she worked in the Rookery neighborhood of Staten Island as an assistant to Dr. Constantine Filatov while keeping an eye on an amnesic Sylar and volunteering her free time at Brian Fulk's halfway house for runaway and orphaned children a few miles away. She was forced to abandon her post following a long and sordid series of not-so-polite negotiations with business partners James Muldoon and John Logan over the kidnapping of Abigail Beauchamp, which eventually culminated in a vicious beating at the hands of Logan that led Filatov and her friend Teodoro Laudani to spread rumours of her death as a way of protecting her.
After her recovery, Eileen agreed to help Phoenix retrieve several of its operatives from Moab Federal Penitentiary and assisted Catherine Chesterfield and Diego Smith in holding the exercise yard while other, more combat ready allies raided the facility's notorious "Red Level" where Peter Petrelli and Helena Dean were being held. Although the raid was largely a failure and resulted in a disastrous hijacking of the time-space continuum, Eileen returned to New York City relatively unscathed and delivered a group of former inmates, including Julian Kuhr, to a Ferrymen safehouse as part of her penance for her involvement with the Vanguard. The price she paid instead was an encounter with John Doe while in the company of Kuhr, which led to the loss of her original ability and the manifestation of a new one, allowing her to degenerate human flesh with a touch. Initially, she tried to keep the incident and its repercussions a secret from her Ferrymen allies, fearing that she might be viewed as a monster, but after attacking Felix Ivanov and later Sylar, they put two and two together.
In late June, Arthur Petrelli relieved Eileen of Kuhr's power. In early August, shortly after a raid on Pinehearst in which Eileen, Teodoro, Flint Deckard and remnants of the Vanguard retrieved Sylar's body from the facility's laboratory, Delphine Kuhr restored her original ability.
Updates coming soon.