#but the whole ''kill it with fire'' sentiment i see directed towards australia is just. can you not | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sammysdewysensitiveeyes · 5 years ago

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Do you have any hcs about Dom and Pyro's family backgrounds, how they got their powers, etc? Any shipping dynamic headcanons? No reason, I just figured you might and I'd like to hear them!

You have opened Pandora’s box, my friend, because I have so, so many head-canons.

I’m afraid this is basically all Pyro. He’s the character that I really obsess over in that ship. Avalanche is cool, too, but I’m all about Pyro. Maybe someday I’ll do Avalanche head-canons after I think more about his background. But for now, I’m going to rant about Pyro in ridiculous detail.

Background:

Pyro’s Marvel bio only mentions an unnamed grandmother under relatives, so I head-canon that he was raised by his grandmother. His parents were both teens that quickly abandoned him – his dad before he was born, and his mother a few months afterwards. Adult St. John doesn’t really feel any resentment or angst about it. Since they abandoned him as a baby, he doesn’t take it personally – they just didn’t want to be parents, and he can understand that. (He sure as fuck doesn’t want to raise any kids, either). His grandmother was strict, and he got yelled at a lot, but it didn’t really cross the line into abusive. Little St. John often felt like he was being punished for someone else’s crimes, but he also grew up feeling fairly secure that “Gran” loved him and would take care of him. He was born in Sydney (according to his bio), but he grew up out in the countryside north of Sydney. They were lower middle-class, sometimes dipping down into poverty if Gran didn’t get enough hours at her job, but not dirt-poor.

St. John wasn’t especially interested in fire until his powers began to develop in adolescence, then he couldn’t help but be drawn to it. He could, on some level, “feel” it in a way he could never quite describe. Gran banned candles from the house because St. John couldn’t resist reaching out to touch the flame, marveling at how he’d never get burned. He eventually discovered that he could make fire actually DO things – leap off the wick and fly around, form into shapes. Despite being a fairly outgoing, impulsive kid, he keeps this as a “fun” little secret. For a while he was convinced that he was a fairy changeling, and that Gran was secretly a witch, and he’d get pulled off on some kind of magical adventure. Until he first saw a news report that used the word “mutant.”

I’d like to give St. John a good relationship with his grandmother into adulthood, but my mind automatically jumped to an angsty head-canon, and I had to run with that. When St. John was about 16, their house was threatened by a massive wildfire. They were late to evacuate, mostly because St. John had been off in the bush fucking around like a dumb teenage boy, wanting to get close to the fire. When he gets back, Gran is frantically trying to drag him into the car, and he is arguing with her that they can stay. He’s confident that he can use his powers to direct the fire around their house so they won’t lose everything, but only if he stays. So he finally shows his grandmother his powers. It’s the first time he’s told anyone. His grandmother is already in full-blown panic mode, she’s been trying to track down her grandson all day, terrified that they are going to burn to death, and now suddenly he’s not her grandson anymore. He’s a creature. He’s one of those unnatural creatures that she heard about on the news, and she just can’t handle it. So she does something that she later never forgives herself for. She gets into the car and drives away, leaving St. John behind. After driving for about 30 minutes, she snaps out of it, and realizes what she is doing. She tries to go back, but the roads are clogged with people evacuating, and the police aren’t letting anyone go towards the fire, even on foot.

Back at the house, St. John gathers a few sentimental possessions, and a few valuable items to sell (anything he can fit into a backpack), and then spitefully lets the house burn. He tries to sit right in the middle of it while it goes up in flames (for maximum teenage drama), but realizes quickly that even if flames won’t hurt him, he can’t breathe smoke. He also sends the fire towards neighboring houses, really enjoying how powerful he feels, and reveling in the destruction. He doesn’t kill anyone, and he doesn’t want to (he’s not in that mindset yet), he’s confident that everyone has evacuated. Eventually he sets a barn on fire, and hears the horses that were left behind screaming in terror. That’s enough to snap him out of it, and he just wanders around for a while, stealing any cash or valuables he finds in abandoned houses until he makes his way to the coast. Then he jumps on a cargo ship that needs extra deck hands, and works his way around Oceania, pretending to be older than he is, having adventures, and generally being an annoying little dumbass that the crew tolerates because he works hard and is brave in a pinch. A few years later he comes back to Australia and is annoyed to discover that he’s been declared dead, and has to jump through a bunch of administrative hoops to be “alive” again. He never seeks out his grandmother, nor has any desire to see or speak to her again. He can forgive his parents, but her abandonment really was a personal rejection of him, and it hurts deeply. It largely sets his views that humans are not to be trusted, and that they will turn on him in an instant if they find out what he is. (Not that Gran is responsible for his many crimes later. She’s not. He makes his own choices.)

After getting a degree (his bio actually lists college level education), he starts working as a journalist and traveling around Oceania again, and banging out romance novels on the side. He uses his powers only in emergencies, generally to save his own skin, but occasionally to help others, if he thinks he can get away with it. He probably starts a few fires as well, mostly by accident. He tries not to be too obvious, but still winds up associated with enough strange fire-related phenomena that Mystique eventually tracks him down and makes him an offer. He’s not really a “true believer” in mutant supremacy, but he thinks that humans will turn on mutantkind eventually, and he’d rather “get them” first. Especially since it’s getting harder and harder to hide his powers. Mostly, though, he’s in the Brotherhood for money and adventure, his two favorite things.

Sexuality: Because of the whole “Byrne imagined Pyro as gay” thing, I absolutely head-canon him as gay. I don’t care if he sleeps with dozens of women and declares himself straight in Marauders, he’s gay as fuck. He’s also deeply closeted – not in denial or self-loathing, just very private about it. Since he appeared as an adult in the 80’s, I imagine he grew up in a time when “gay” wasn’t something that could ever be openly discussed (ignoring Marvel’s sliding time-scale here). It would easily get him fired or ruin his career, and with the rough crowds he hung out with, it could even get him killed. He tends to have anonymous one-night stands, or short affairs, old habit from when gay relationships could not be open. He has no qualms about sleeping with married men, since back in the day there was no chance they’d ever leave their wives (and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right?). I’m afraid I’m making him sound like a negative gay stereotype here, but basically Pyro is a selfish jerk, and he’d have no qualms about sleeping with married women if he were straight or bi. He does occasionally sleep with women, just to keep up an appearance of straightness, but he spends way more time flirting and then making excuses to not take them home. He wound up channeling a lot of his feelings into his novels – giving the female main characters the kind of grandiose romances that he could never have. He’d never admit to this, though, he’ll claim that he just writes trashy romance because it sells well and it’s easy. Avalanche knows and completely accepts him, although they never discuss it openly. The rest of the Brotherhood/Freedom Force have a vague idea, no matter how much Pyro might try to perform heterosexuality. It’s generally a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation with them. As long as he’s not open about it, they’ll pretend not to notice. (And as times change, I think most of them just don’t care).

With Avalanche – honestly, I can enjoy their relationship as platonic best buddies, or as a couple. If they are buddies, I imagine Pyro kinda pines a bit for his straight friend who put him in the “mate zone,” but mostly just enjoys his company. If they are a couple, then Avalanche is definitely bi (he has a wife in his bio), and was largely in denial about it until he got dragged out of the closet by his good-looking, chatty, obnoxious Australian team-mate. Avalanche tends to be the quiet, reserved one, while Pyro drags him out to bars and keeps up this constant patter that just becomes pleasant background noise. Dominic pretends that he finds it annoying, but he really likes the companionship, and having someone lavish so much attention on him. (He misses it desperately after Pyro dies.) Pyro is a huge flirt, and is also the one most likely to cheat. But mostly, he just enjoys driving Dominic wild with jealousy, then taking him home for intense make-up sex. After years of basically being the secret “fling on the side,” Pyro actually really enjoys Dominic being openly possessive of him. Dominic probably didn’t realize he had feelings for St. John beyond “good buddy” until he was dying (or possibly until he was dead, if you want maximum angst.)

As a writer – St. John is a good writer, sometimes even a great writer. He’s not a literary genius, but he doesn’t really want to be. He just wants to have fun. If the books sell, he’s reasonably happy, although he hates it when he feels like a book isn’t up to par. Even writing trashy romance, he had to bend to publisher demands and couldn’t stray too far from the formulas designed to sell. In a fit of frustration, he once wrote a parody of his own work, with all the insane plot twists that he was forbidden from publishing, and then posted it online as fan-fic under the pen-name “Firebrand.” It’s the most popular fan-fic in his small online fandom, but no one has figured out yet that he actually wrote it. He’ll always claim that he writes to make money, but he truly loves it, and can’t really stop. He’s been writing stories since he was a child, an activity that Gran encouraged since it kept him quiet and out of trouble. He enjoys reading other romance authors, but he absolutely despises Nicholas Sparks, because Sparks (in his mind) is a pretentious wanker who thinks he’s too good for the romance genre.

As a team-mate – Pyro is an absolute vicious, callous bastard if you face him in battle, and if you’re a bystander. He doesn’t hesitate to kill if that’s what the job calls for. But if you’re on his team, then you’re his “mate” (unless you give him a reason to dislike you), and he’ll be friendly, banter, drink with you, watch your back in battle and expect you to watch his. He has no problem working with the X-Men as a Marauder, because hey, they’re on the same team now! They’re all in the same boat, both literally and figuratively, so it doesn’t matter that they fought each other in the past. He may betray them at some point, or have his own agenda (I don’t know where the book is going with him), but in my head-canon, he’s just going with the flow. The X-Men are letting him basically be a pirate, so what the hell? He generally doesn’t like to think too much about what he’s doing when he’s on a team, whether the Brotherhood or Freedom Force. A job is a job, and he tries to turn his mind off about it. He’s pretty comfortable just being hired muscle, and has no desire to lead or be in charge of anything. He doesn’t mind following orders, as long as the leader treats him well enough. I’d like to imagine that all of the Marauders will eventually get tangled up in scheming and intrigue between the Hell-fire club factions – except Pyro, who has no idea what the fuck is going on, and no desire to know.

Marauders Pyro – I love him, he is a trashfire disaster. I think he is being a bit wilder than he has been in the past because he isn’t really over dying and coming back to life. He’s having, not a mid-life, but a post-death crisis. I mean, he literally got a skull tattooed onto his face. Which seems pretty significant when you think about how the Legacy Virus wore him down until he was basically looking at his own death every time he looked in the mirror. (But he’ll say he just did it because it looks cool.) I don’t think Pyro minds the idea of dying (he’s pretty upbeat about it in a Freedom Force mission when he thinks he and Mystique are about to get gunned down), but the Legacy Virus was hard on him, because it was so slow and inevitable. It was slow and agonizing and (in his mind) undignified, and he was basically staring down the barrel of it for years while his strength slowly failed - no longer able to control his powers, no longer able to be of any use to his team-mates. He hated it. He hated the idea of dying in a hospital bed. He wanted to get his head shot off on a battlefield somewhere, not die in bed. And now that he’s alive and healthy for the first time in years, he’s just reveling in it, and trying to live life the fullest.

Other random head-canons:

Pyro is terrible at video games. Terrible. Again, because he showed up as an adult in the 80’s, I imagine him growing up without them, but even with the sliding time-scale I don’t think he really got into video games as a child. He had a pretty low-tech house-hold with Gran. He’ll play Smash Brothers with the other Marauders just to hang out, but he has no idea what he’s doing. He just mashes buttons, and every now and then manages to knock someone off the stage with a lucky shot (which is infuriating to whoever gets knocked out). He routinely forgets which character he is. Once he “played” through a round with his controller unplugged and didn’t notice. (Kitty won $50 off Bobby in that bet.)

Keeping with the low-tech theme, he tends to write by hand in spiral-bound notebooks, old habit left from his journalist days. He’ll write an entire novel by hand, then edit as he types it up, a laborious process that often involves a lot of booze.

You can never offend Pyro with Australia jokes. He knows all the Australia jokes, and he’ll make them before you do. He sometimes uses obscure Australian slang to mess with people, and sometimes just completely makes shit up to see what he can get away with.

He doesn’t actually like Vegemite all that much, but it’s a very nostalgic taste and it’s hard to get outside of Australia, so sometimes he finds himself absolutely craving it. When Avalanche commented that Vegemite was disgusting, Pyro ate an entire jar with a spoon while staring him down the entire time. He was starting to feel really sick by the end of that, but he had a point to prove, damn it.

Pyro is smarter than he often acts. This doesn’t stop him from being an impulsive dumbass. He’s fairly literate, and can quote famous authors while also smashing an empty beer can against his forehead. He likes to read when he’s got downtime and nothing else to do. He’s especially fond of Jane Austen (because she’s witty) and Wuthering Heights, because it is a novel about horrible, dysfunctional people self-destructing and taking everyone else down with them, and he lives for that drama.

He secretly watches soap operas and dramas, they play up to his interest in romance. His deep dark secret is being a major fan of the 1960’s supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows. If ever caught watching it, he’ll flip it off and claim he was watching the most disgusting porn imaginable, because that is less embarrassing to him than watching Dark Shadows.

I think that’s it for now. I have too many thoughts about Pyro. Thank you for giving me a reason to write this all down. Bless you if you’ve actually read this far.

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