He was born crying.
Not like most babies—loud, hungry, seeking warmth. Nathaniel Cross came into the world weeping. The nurses thought it was sweet at first, how he sobbed even when nothing was wrong. Then the headaches started. Then the seizures. Then the fear.
By five, Nathaniel could feel when people were lying.
By seven, he could taste guilt in the back of his throat.
By ten, he learned to stop telling the truth, because every time he did, his father called him a freak.
Abuse followed. Brutal, quiet, like a family disease. His mother drank. His father hit. His sister disappeared. All the while, Nathaniel absorbed it—every scream, slap, whimper, lie. Like static in his blood. They never knew he could feel them more than himself.
That was the mutation.
Hypersensual Empathy.
Not just emotional awareness—he experienced others. Visions, sensations, intrusive waves of memories. If someone around him mourned, he mourned harder. If they were in agony, he was already on fire. His brain didn't separate "me" from "you."
SHIELD found him when he was thirteen, after a school shooting left him comatose in the hallway. He hadn't been shot. He'd just felt everyone else die. SHIELD called him a "biological empathic node"—a rare type of mutant who could anchor pain. They didn't want a weapon. They wanted a sponge. And Nathaniel, desperate to be anything other than broken, agreed.
He spent the next decade helping others—becoming the only grief counselor who could cry with his patients and mean it. He helped heroes process trauma. He comforted widows and veterans. He was the invisible net between the broken and the abyss.
But pain leaves residue.
And hope... always runs out.
It was the Day the World Ended (For Him).
It was supposed to be a minor incident—SHIELD and WayneTech testing emotional memory stabilization in real time. The tech fed pain through neural links to Nathaniel's mind for cataloging and neutralization.
Then everything went wrong.
A villain alliance—Red Hood gang defectors, rogue A.I.M. members, and a meta-human black market group called Painjar—attacked the facility. The memory conduits overloaded. Reality tore open inside his mind. Every death. Every scream. Every trauma. Every regret.
Over two hundred people died that day.
So did Nathaniel Cross.
They found his body slumped in a containment chamber, eyes burnt pitch black from inside out, tear tracks scorched into his cheeks. Officially: "Mutant neural feedback failure."
He was tagged. Bagged. Placed in SHIELD's New York morgue.
But something stirred on that steel table.
Emotion doesn't die. It changes.
And grief—true grief—transforms.
His body twitched first. Then his fingers curled, slow and deliberate, as if time remembered him again. The fluorescent lights flickered. All around the morgue, machines flatlined… then screamed.
He awoke in silence, blinking into the darkness, lungs filled with the memory of two hundred final breaths.
His soul didn't come back.
But everything else did.
He wandered through trauma-echoes in the burning corridors of his own psyche—the same corridors the machine had once mapped. Faces blinked in and out of existence. Agony danced like firelight. And there, in a corner too cold for time, he saw his younger self.
Eight years old. Bruised knees. Tear-streaked face. A child begging not to be different.
Nox knelt, still smoldering from the resurrection. "You were never wrong," he whispered, voice laced with every scream he had ever heard. "You were just alone."
He touched the child's shoulder.
The child vanished.
So did any trace of Nathaniel Cross, the man.
Only Nox remained.
The Dead Man.
Not bound by logic. Not guided by heroism. Just raw emotion, with nowhere to go but forward.
That night, the morgue doors shattered inward.
Security footage failed. Witnesses stammered about shadows and sobbing laughter. Nothing showed up on camera—except for a single image:
A barefoot man in torn black clothing, soaked in blood and tears, walking into the rain.
And smiling.