Robert Brankovic was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the middle of the summer of '56. His parents were both Holocaust survivors from Yugoslavia who had seen the horrors of the camps, saw themselves through until the Allied liberation, and then emigrated to the United States to escape the unpleasant realities of World War II that still had Europe reeling. His father, a scientist, had suffered the war in Mauthausen. His mother had nightmares of Jasenovac and Auschwitz. Consequently, Robert was drilled about the importance of equality and tolerance until he could barely stand it any more, and as a young boy he participated in civil rights rallies beside his parents, who were vocal activists for equality. When he was seven years old he was carried along for the ride when they joined the March on Washington in 1963, and other family vacations during the 60s included such uplifting journeys as a trip to the relatively recently erected sites of Yad Vashem and the memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau, both of which had his parents in tears within minutes.
Despite being the absolute apple of his parents' eyes Robert was doomed to a childhood of excessive education and dullness, his mother and father shunning such luxuries as television and radio in favor of being absolutely frugal, giving their son books and endless streams of questions on the latest scientific journals (which his father expected him to read) and on his daily life at school (which his mother expected him to recount in detail at dinner every evening). The strange behavior of the Brankovics had a marked effect on their son, whose only desire was to spend his childhood as the otherwise typical American kid that he was. Thanks to his parents' constant drilling and encouragement Robert did quite well in school, though he had to suffer the indignity of being harassed by some of his fellow students who insisted on misidentifying him as a Russian and calling him a communist. Thanks to these ignorant individuals he was able to make only a few close friends, but they were friendships that have thus far managed to last his entire lifetime.
He passed through the New York Public School system with honors and was accepted to Princeton University in the late wake of the Watergate scandal. In Robert's eyes, his high school graduation in 1975 meant more than a measurable display of his academic success: it meant the advent of his rebirth as a person whose life and choices wouldn't be defined by his parents. He trotted off to Princeton to receive honors as a student there as well, excelling in the sciences and doing quite well in his other required subjects. The end of his undergrad years came in 1979, where he bowed to his mother's insistence that he "do something useful" with his life and entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University's Medical Center. Four years and many sleepless nights later he had his MD, and a three-person party was had back at his parents' cramped apartment in Brooklyn that lasted as long as it took for Robert's father to demand what his next career step would be. Though he left that little gathering in a huff Robert had been looking to the future, and he began his post-doctoral research training with one of his mentors who specialized in genetics in 1983, the same year Ronald Reagan proposed the Star Wars project.
Three years later Robert was ready to strike out into the wide world of medical research. He found employment at a cutting-edge research lab run by St. Luke's Hospital and began looking into genetic diseases, specifically those affecting children and adolescents; over the next couple of years he developed several successful treatment patterns with the aid of other doctors who worked at his side. Out of the blue, his aging mother called to tell him in early 1992 that his father was dying of lung cancer. Stunned and utterly unprepared for the news, Robert took an indefinite leave of absence from his work and temporarily moved back in with his parents in order to help care for them both. Now into his seventies, it didn't take long for Luka Brankovic to succumb to his disease and he passed away in mid-April of that year. Robert's mother followed several months later. The experience lit a fire in Robert, who began changing his work focus from atypical inheritable diseases to cancer just in time for the 1993 release of Chandra Suresh's masterwork, Activating Evolution.
Like the rest of the medical community Robert laughed at Suresh and his findings, considering the man idealistically deluded at best and a potentially dangerous lunatic at worst. The entire theory was absurd, and the copy that Robert bought and read soon found its way to the unenviable task of propping up a table leg in the good doctor's living room, a conversation piece that never failed to get a laugh out of his fellow medical professionals. In the new millennium Robert began looking into cancer treatments involving gene therapy, a new technology pioneered in the early 90s. But unfortunately for Robert it turned out that Suresh's insane theory was a lot more grounded in reality than previously expected. Even more unfortunately Robert was one of the Evolved humans that Chandra Suresh was talking about, and since fate was apparently unwilling to let the happy stream of unluckiness go dry so soon, Robert found out about his ability in the worst possible way.
Driving on the BQE to work one morning in late 2005, Robert started experiencing something that he could only describe as weird. Moments later the cars adjacent to his were pulled off course and into all four sides of Robert's ancient station wagon, causing a tremendously damaging and deadly accident that killed four people and saw him into a hospital bed at Columbia Presbyterian with extensive injuries. While lying in casts and agony for the next few months the out-of-commission doctor put his time to good use, experimenting with his power when the nurses were gone and questioning anything and everything about his life and career. By the time he was released from the hospital Robert was extremely disturbed by the fact that Chandra Suresh, the biggest loony to hit the scientific world in years, was right, and even more disturbed by his own complicit role in proving it, even if he only proved it to himself and not the world at large.
Robert quit his job. He sulked in his apartment, turning the truth of reality over and over again in his head, rapidly turning into a sullen recluse whose main form of entertainment was treating his ability like a science experiment, and in no time at all his living space was littered with the twisted remains of various metal appliances. He was in his apartment when, months later, the bomb went off. His building, located at the edge of the bomb's destruction zone in Midtown East, was partially mangled by the explosion and trapped many of its inhabitants inside. Robert responded by clearing debris from the stairways and twisting aside barriers like they were the lids of sardine cans, clearing the way for his escape from the building - and the escape of his neighbors, though that was incidental and not a deliberate intention. He spent the aftermath of the bomb's detonation moving from shelter to shelter, suffering from the effects of radiation and aiding in cleanups whenever convenient.
And then Nathan Petrelli spilled the beans on Sylar and the Evolved. The following witch hunts were disturbingly reminiscent of the stories Robert's parents saturated his childhood with, and on more than one occasion he witnessed people who were accused of being evolved being beaten to death in the streets. As the slow recovery of New York continued Robert saw only one viable alternative for himself to keep from drawing unwanted attention, and that was to adopt the lifestyle of New York's least noticed demographic - the Linderman Act only reassured him of his decision. He didn't return to his home when the news came down that it was safe. Instead he stayed on the streets and became more or less invisible amongst the crowds of other displaced people. Since then he's been living off the grid - paying no taxes, taking no regulated jobs, and ignoring the rare offers for help from kind Samaritans.