Ezekiel was born to David Schmidt and Martha Solus. His father was the son of jewish engineers from germany that moved to the US with their parents during WW2. He met Martha in college - she was the star student and daughter of a bank CEO and he was on the verge of being expelled. She fell in love with his simple honesty, and he fell in love with her uncompromising ambitiousness. They moved together to a poor area, rebelling against both of their parents in the name of freedom of choice - David's mother was ready to disown him for not going to a university, and Martha's father had no other future planned for her than being a successor to his work.
When their son was born, living in the slums became harder and harder for Martha. David was a car mechanic in a nearby shop, with no prospect for advancement since it took him very long to learn something new and apply it. She tried her luck as a teacher but was quickly defeated by the neighborhood kids' tendency towards drugs and crime. Every day she would struggle against her parents' offer of help, which required them to move to a richer part of the country and change their entire lives, but her 2nd pregnancy defeated her. After a lengthy argument that took almost a year, she left, taking her newborn daughter with her and leaving her firstborn with David, "since he's a knucklehead just like you". In truth, she wanted at least one of their kids to live in freedom, and Ezekiel seemed tough enough to do it.
School was not kind on Ezekiel. He was fat and dumb, and his father wasn't much of a help, being fat and dumb himself. Eventually, at the age of 13, he started helping his father in the shop, and tried to be there as much as he could, since homework reminded him of school. However, he quickly found out the noise was borderline painful, so he would take breaks often.
In time, fat became muscle, and dumb became determined. He started skipping school to come early to the shop, or coming late because there was something urgent there in the morning. His large, rugged appearance drew the attention of a local high-school gang, who decided to remove him as a threat to reassess their dominance. They caught him one evening, on the way home from closing the shop, with castets and baseball bats. He was never good with words, so their wish to scare him quickly turned into an all-out brawl. One hit him on the arm so hard his bat broke, and another hit him square in the jaw with a brass knuckle. He fell like an oval tree, with dramatic slowness. Brass Knuckle came closer for a kick in the ribs, winced, and stopped.
His hand was bleeding. One of his fingers was broken. The brass knuckle was bent inward as if he punched a wall - a rather unfortunate fact due to it being a cheap knockoff that snaps under any impact. He screamed, turning his pain into rage, and went for a knife in his jacket, but one of the gang members who was high on the uptake grabbed him and ran.
They met him a week later, on the same spot. His arm was broken. His face looked fine. They tossed him the bent brass knuckle, now cut apart by the firefighters' hydraulic tools to save Brass Knuckle's fingers. They asked what the hell. He asked what the hell. One of them withdrew a plastic mannequin's hand with another brass knuckle on it and slapped him across the face. The hand exploded and the weapon rolled off, with no apparent harm to Ezekiel's face.
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, the gang trying not to piss themselves, Ezekiel thinking about all the times a hammer or a screwdriver fell on his head without anything happening to it. Why wasn't the hammer ruined then? He slowly lifted the mangled weapon from the floor, and tried to bend it. It felt like lead in his hands, bending with only a slight effort. One of the gang members had an aluminium baseball bat this time. He approached him, took the bat out of his unresisting fingers, and grunted as his good hand forced it into a circular shape. His muscles felt fine, but he was suddenly really tired. He dropped the bat and ran. They did not follow.
When his arm healed, Ezekiel decided to test the extent of his power on larger things. He left school and started working in construction. The other workers recognized delinquency-ready-to-happen almost immediately, and enrolled him into various professional courses, to ensure his future. During the day, he would build walls or other structures. In the evening, he would learn plumbing, fixing electricity, driving. At night, he would go back to the piles of mangled steel on the construction site and train his ability. It did not work at day, because the construction machinery's noise was somehow interfering with it, just like the noise of his father's shop. Without noticing, he would take a bite out of a steel wire once in a while. For a few years, all was well.
They found him at night, at the construction site, after carefully following him for a few days. The leaders of the gang have changed, and they were now a collection of drunks, thieves and druggies. The new leader's nickname was knuckle, due to a mangled right hand, and he was the kind of person to take nicknames seriously and personally. In short, he was back for revenge. Ezekiel barely noticed his hand close around a bundle of steel cable clippings which he promptly shoved in his mouth.
The men who surrounded Ezekiel wore rags, looking homeless and underfed, but had a strange, determined kind of depression about them. Two tried to jump him, but were shaken off using brute strength and some moves Ezekiel saw on TV. Then, suddenly, from the back of the crowd, two men taller and stronger than him lunged forward and grabbed him from both sides. Knuckle, once an evil-eyed kid, now a mangy-haired, somewhat muscular hobo with an awful smile on his face, waved a gun at Ezekiel's nose. He just wanted him to understand his place, he said. He was doing him a favor. But Ezekiel was never good with words. After it was over, Ezekiel noticed he pissed himself. His left arm was not working - there was a hole just under his shoulder. The gang was gone. Knuckle was lying in an uncomfortable position on the floor - The pistol's handle was buried all the way to the trigger in the side of his head. For a good hour he could not move, frozen solid by fear, fatigue, and a feeling of his body being full of dry, reinforced concrete. The police found him standing over Knuckle's corpse, after the image had plenty of time to burn itself in his mind.
The trial was short and quiet. It was obvious no one was really interested in the outcome. After all, the story was always the same - some kids fighting over drugs, some getting hurt and others dying. His father was too poor to hire a real lawyer, and the state-assigned one didn't have any motivation whatsoever. In the end, he was accused of manslaugher, and sent away to be jailed. Nobody realized how much this affected Ezekiel personally. He was a murderer now, wasn't he?
He was clay in the hands of the guard who led him away.
Family: Father: David Schmidt, car mechanic, alive
Mother: Martha Solus, teacher, unknown
Sister: Rachel Solus, unknown, unknown
