Maeve Aileen Doran was born in Creggan, a small village in Northern Ireland to a single mother barely out of her teens. Their family was deeply religious one, so when Caitlin Doran turned up pregnant and unmarried, tension in the family grew quickly. Maeve’s father was someone who had blown through town, or at least that’s all Caitlin would admit to her daughter about him. She grew up not knowing much else about it.
 
At the tender age of five, Maeve’s mother took her to the pediatrician for a checkup. A few things alerted the pediatrician to a potential problem with her progress since her last check up, and blood tests were ordered. A few years after she was diagnosed with an illness affecting her physical growth and maturity, her mother moved them both away from their small village to a slightly larger town, where her new pediatrician was better equipped to provide care. This new pediatrician, a woman, would one day become her step mother.
 
Maeve underwent several noninvasive treatments for her illness, and during that time the amount of time she and her mother spent with her Pediatrician, always bringing questions and concerns about the latest battery of tests or treatments to the other woman. They grew closer slowly, and by the time Maeve was 10, the two had fallen in love, though they kept their relationship primarily a secret outside of the home, and during that time, the American-born Dr. Meredith Patrick convinced Caitlin to immigrate to the US where Maeve would be closer to some of the world’s best experts on her illness.
 
When Caitlin came out to her family as gay, the family’s reaction was swift and severe. They staged an intervention, tried to convince her to give Maeve up to them and leave her with a “godly family” if she wouldn’t foreswear her sexual deviancy. They made moves to intervene legally, but Caitlin had prepared for such an eventuality, and before they could truly mobilize their solicitors to try to challenge her custody of Maeve, Caitlin and Maeve were considered dual citizens. They fled Ireland with Meredith and moved to New York City.
 
Their life was a comfortable, far more open one, and Meredith and Caitlin flourished even as Maeve’s treatments were moved to the US. Unbeknownst to her new doctors or her family, the old treatments had been as much a front for experimental procedures to try to negate her future mutation as anything else, and now in the US, she was lost from the program which had been performing them.
 
Eventually, Maeve largely aged out of her illness and became a normal teenager, her powers never manifesting. It seemed the experimental treatments had worked.
 
Weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she went missing while on her way home from school. Her mothers and sister believed she’d been kidnapped. The papered the city with missing ads, the police combed the burrows for anyone who had seen what happened to her, but it was as if she’d vanished without a trace.
It was pure chance that Maeve’s kidnappers happened to be an iteration of the program which had experimented on her as a child, and that the X-Men had been investigating them after several pre-teen and teenaged mutants had gone missing in and around NYC.