WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Cable #12, on sale now from Marvel.
More than any of the other X-Men, Cable's life has been more dramatically impacted by the complications of traveling through alternate timelines. Naturally, this has led to some rather confusing plot twists over the years.
Recently, a teenage version of Cable has been part of the X-Men, protecting the new mutant nation of Krakoa. Despite all he did for them, his teammates and even his family never trusted him, as was revealed in Cable #12 by Gerry Duggan, Phil Noto & VC's Joe Sabino.
Born in the modern day as Nathan Summers, Cable was the son of Cyclops and his ex, Madelyne Pryor. Even as an infant, Cable was a powerful telepath and telekinetic mutant. While he was still just a baby, he was taken to a dystopian future and cloned. This clone eventually grew up to become Cable's greatest enemy, the villain Stryfe, as Cable also grew to become one of Marvel's most powerful mutants. However, he never stopped running around different timelines and spent most of his life in various post-apocalyptic or dystopian futures.
More recently, a younger version of Cable has been living with the rest of the Summers family. He has also been dating Esme Cuckoos, one of the five-in-one telepathic hive-mind comprised of teenage clones of Emma Frost.
Things recently took a dark twist when Cable learned that his evil clone Stryfe was back and kidnapping mutant babies. Even as Cable prepared to battle Stryfe, the Cuckoos dumped him. Feeling completely overwhelmed, Teen Cable resurrected his older self through Krakoa's resurrection process. Both the older adult Cable and the younger teen Cable teamed up to fight Stryfe, helped by their closest friends and family. The group traveled to a demon-filled dimension that Stryfe was using as a base, determined to stop him and rescue the mutant babies.
In the middle of battle, Esme used her telepathy to read Stryfe's mind, bearing witness to the long conflict between the two versions of Nathaniel Summers that stretched across time. Moved by this revelation, she ran to the teen Cable and told him she finally understood how his past actions that had come between them in their relationship.
As it turned out, Jean Grey and Scott Summers thought the return of their recently de-aged son was just "too good to be true." They suspected that he was really Stryfe, concealing his true identity. Since Cable has always been one of Marvel's strongest telepaths (and once even overpowered Jean Grey) it is definitely possible that his clone could potentially hide such an identity. On top of that, the teen Cable had actually killed his adult self when he first arrived, which definitely cast him in a suspicious light. Esme and the rest of the Cuckoos were supposed to spy on him when he was not with Scott and Jean. However, they developed genuine feelings for him after just one date.
This young Cable never felt like he was fully accepted by the other X-Men. Even though he was established as part of the main team in the first issue of the X-Men series by Jonathan Hickman and Leinil Francis Yu, he almost never went on missions in either that title or his own series without being accompanied by a family member. He was also not present for many major missions, such as when the X-Men fought the Brood in space. By contrast, the adult version of Cable was almost always accepted by the other mutants, because of their battle-tested dedication to each other.
While this story doesn't let Kid Cable achieve that same level of trust with the entire team. it ends with the young Cable being sent into the future where he'll grow into the leader and warrior he was always meant to be.
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