Graeme Aiden Cormac (born Graeme Aiden Fionn) was born on March 17, 1979, in Buffalo, NY, in an underserved city hospital. Two days later, his mother left him on a chair in the hospital lobby near to the end of visiting hours, and walked out. With no father on record and no known way to contact his mother, Graeme soon became a ward of the state.
His early childhood was spent in group homes, often moving from one group home to another. His memories of that period are vague at best, but as always, the older boys picked on him, and he often picked on the ones younger then himself. The pecking order was pretty much a rigid thing that Graeme came to accept as a fact of life, but eventually no other group home wanted to take him, and he was placed with a series of families in foster care. The last of these, Liam and Jessamyn Cormac, applied to adopt him. The adoption papers went through in time for his tenth birthday.
When Graeme was 11, they moved to NYC in order to be closer to Jessamyn's aging parents, moving into the upper floor of the brownstone. Life was comfortable. Graeme attended a rather prestigious boy's secondary school, and skated through school the same way many intelligent children do, making decent enough grades and getting into some trouble on the side.
He did, however, apply himself to sports, participating in many of them. Around the end of high school, during his senior year, he found that he was able to keep going, participate in several sports a day, things which he didn't think that other guys his age could do. Originally, Graeme's parents and teachers just attributed it to puberty, but by the time of graduation, it became rather clear that it was different. An ability. He did his best to hide his ability behind his reputation from high school for being a daredevil, though, and on Jessamyn's urging, promised that he would stay out of the spotlight in college.
Graeme was accepted at a private, all-mens college in New Mexico, where he found himself majoring in sociology. He had somewhat of a desire to find out as much as he could about other people with abilities, about what society thought of them, and quietly pursued this as well as the main courses required for his Bachelor's Degree. Despite his promise to his mother, he did end up taking advantage of his ability, pulling long 'study' sessions with some of his friends, partying, and participating in his college's soccer team all without it affecting his actual grades. He graduated with his bachelor's degree a year early, in the beginning of 2002, and took a job coaching soccer (as the junior coach) for the spring semester at a high school near to the college he had went to.
With the job coaching soccer, and retaining a job that he had gotten in college as a bouncer at a local nightclub, Graeme began to pursue his Master's degree, part time. Life was good, and his ability didn't come into question often, and he had friends in New Mexico. He kept in reasonable touch with his parents in NYC, and didn't really think about things much.
That is, until the bomb went off. Jessamyn was on a trip to England, but there was very little question in the matter that Liam was in his Midtown office the day of the explosion. Graeme was devastated, lost, sentiments shared by so much of the rest of the country. This affected his performance at his job, and his principal kindly suggested he take the rest of the fall semester off. He did, and in that time he insisted that Jessamyn move to New Mexico, rather than stay in New York City. Upon his return to work, he funneled all of his frustration into coaching, into work, and into taking additional classes towards his Master's degree, classes that might allow him to take a full faculty member's position at his school.
And then the revelation of the Evolved happened. With growing anti-evolved sentiments in the small city he lived in, Graeme found himself losing the job he'd held as a part time bouncer. The owner of the nightclub had long known about Graeme's ability, but didn't want to be seen taking the chance. Didn't want to be seen to take sides, lest he lose patrons.
In general, the revelation of the Evolved threw Graeme for a loop. While he had long known that there were others with abilities, it had been a matter of private conscience, and it was now coming to be a matter of public record, especially once the Linderman act was passed. The increased scrutiny eventually prompted Graeme to abandon his studies and focus full time on coaching, on being a positive role model for his students, several of whom also found out that they were Evolved. He knew, on some level, that the high schoolers needed a role model who was also Evolved, someone who would understand the troubles they were going through.
Jessamyn had a stroke in late 2009, dying soon thereafter. Those who knew Graeme will point out that the result of this was him taking risks. Extreme sports, getting into fights when he was out at the bar for no reason other than getting into fights. His colleagues worried about him, though he did hide most of it from his students. The only thing he wasn't able to hide from his students was the fact that the soccer team was losing funding, and that spring '10 was going to be their last season.
After Jessamyn had died, Graeme had begun to search for his birth mother, of whom he knew only a city and a name that was on his birth certificate. Without the soccer team to tie him to New Mexico, he began to search a little harder. Finding her was a process that took nearly a year, overall, though Graeme had thought that in the age of digital information, it would be easier to find someone. No such luck. In late 2010, Graeme set out for Buffalo with the intention of meeting up with the woman he had found, the woman who was, apparently, his birth mother.
The resulting encounter nearly came to blows. But from Deirdra, he got the name of a half-sister, one Keira, and the fact that she was supposedly somewhere in New York City last his mother had known. Graeme wasn't sure that finding Keira was going to lead to any answers, but nonetheless, it was something he needed to do.
Traveling, Graeme has been drawing on his savings, and he doesn't know how much longer he is going to be able to do that. Additionally, coming back to New York City, the city that he still identifies somewhat as home, has been a major shock for him. He hasn't yet been able to truly reconcile his memories of New York from before he went off to college with the partially ruined city he has returned to.
