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When he’s little there isn’t a lot Martin wants. No more than any other kid anyway, just time with family and toys and occasional vacations.
When Martin wants however, it is detrimental. His father looses his job from all the time off he takes to spend with him and they didn’t have a lot of money to start with because of the gifts.
And so, when his father leaves, it’s with no forewarning, in the middle of the night, so that Martin can’t know to want to come with him.
He wants and wants and wants for him to come back, but that’s not how it works. Wherever he is, he’s not close enough to have to listen anymore.
Sometimes, when he first gets home from school, he isn’t thinking about how home life is, his mother yells at him for pushing dad away, and he hates it, he feels so guilty because she’s right but he can’t help but want her to be nicer to him. He spends days not saying a word to try and avoid making her do anything, tries to stop having preferences and desires, but it doesn’t change anything because it doesn’t matter if he says it or if he knows he shouldn’t have it, because he WANTS it, so she wants it to.
It at least comes in useful when she gets sick, because the landlords are convinced they want them to live there, and cashiers that he paid for the food he took.
When he turns seventeen he can’t take it anymore. His mother asks him everyday what’s wrong, and he tells her to leave him alone but she doesn’t because he doesn’t actually want her too, and the guilt eats him up inside.
So he puts her into a home, where she isn’t stuck with him. The problem with this of course is that since he isn’t there he can’t make them allow her to stay, so he looks for a job. When he sees the Magnus institute is hiring he is so excited, because maybe they know what’s wrong with him, how to cure him.
And he falls in love a bit eventually. He wants to smack himself in the face for not immediately quitting because he knows he can’t have any relationships he can trust, anything where he can know for certain that they are willingly nice to him, but Jon is... he’s MEAN to Martin. Not when Martin is there usually because he can’t help wanting to be liked, but he listens to the tapes, hears him seething and it’s nice to have someone who he knows feels something about him because that’s just how they feel. He doesn’t know if he’s ever experienced that before.
So he does his best to change Jon’s opinion of him the natural way. He avoids him, and does the best work he can, and steals the tapes to listen if it’s changed anything.
It doesn’t, so he ups his efforts, which gets him trapped by Prentiss, and he’s to scared to get close to enough to want her to go away.