Pyro | St. John Allerdyce (Canon)

[Pyro]

Name St John Allerdyce

Codename Pyro

Mutation
Psionic Pyrokinesis. Simply put, fire manipulation. He cannot generate flame (and consequentially is never without a butane lighter) but can control the size, intensity, shape and direction of any flame on which he concentrates. The degree of concentration necessary is directly proportional to the size and power of the flame he wishes to control, and so far it’s only flames within his range of vision which he can manipulate, although given that (somewhat ironically for someone so determined not to be held back) he’s never really bothered developing his powers in any way which doesn’t enhance the visual impressiveness of playing with fire (yes, he’s a show off) this might just be a mark of how under-exploited the full range of what he could accomplish is now, and is likely to remain, rather than of any actual limit. He is invulnerable to fire under his mental control. It appears that fire he controls may be different in some way he doesn’t yet understand (possibly more ‘solid’ if that makes sense) to that which is not under his control, as it can, it seems, be given ‘substance’ (for example, to create a physical object composed of flame – this ‘substance’, as opposed to elemental quintessence, might account for how his flame, unlike normal fire, can be ‘frozen’).

Appearance
The first thing people always notice about him is his eyes. They always say how dark and captivating they are. How, with the general darkness of his features, they make him look exotic, and fascinating. They dance around the way that his even, dark eyed stare can freak out even the hardiest well wisher.

He glares with the intensity that laces his every movement and thought: there’s a reason that fire is his element. Nothing’s worth doing without passion, at least not in his world. Sadly the rest of existence doesn’t always agree and a strange mixture of passion and disappointment lurks behind his eyes. People can see it, and they make inane comments about how dark they are, saying that that this adds to the air of danger he unconsciously sends off. An air that while for now he is a slight teenage boy, he could end up something much bigger and more powerful.

Not that he cares. He not-cares vehemently.

He knows that he’s moderately attractive: dark hair, long, slicked back (ostensibly because he can’t stand it falling in his eyes. Really, he thinks it looks cool) and streaked with blonde flashes in various states of growing out dependent on whether peroxide has taken a back seat to butane in this week’s priorities. He doesn’t like how child like his rounded face makes him seem, but he figures he’s jaded enough to cancel it out. He’s perhaps a little vain - whatever.

He definitely doesn’t like being so short. He just stopped growing one day, and never resumed it. He stands at most people’s shoulders now, and it gives them a new, literal way of looking down on him. A flick of his zippo can usually solve that. He’d far rather they thought him dangerous - small, perhaps, but about to snap at any minute. Like fire: the smallest flames burn. A smouldering cigarette can bring down a building

Personality
St John, now going by the name ‘Pyro’, is what is called, at least in polite circles, cocky. The less quaint circles have other words, which are not as complimentary - none which bothers him in the slightest. He’s learnt the very hard way that relying on other people ends badly, and with him having to pick himself back up. So he’s apathetic, with a fiery passion.

Such introspection doesn’t suit him, so he focuses his attention on other things - pretty much anything that happens to be going on at the time. He amuses himself by clicking his Zippo just a little too loudly, saying something purposefully offensive, hitting on other people’s girlfriends. Rogue was always fun to hit on because they both understood it would never go anywhere, and it really pissed Bobby off. That game still has mileage of a sort, aided by a new sinister subtext which appeals to Pyro’s dark sense of humour. Hell, anything that pisses Bobby off still ranks pretty highly on his list of hobbies; Bobby pissed off is like an irritated puppy, and it’s far too entertaining.

Another description which could be bandied about with both ease and accuracy is ‘self reliant’, though that’s not really a strong or complex enough term for his complicated little relationship with trust and dependency. Part of him needs to be near strong personalities; they provide a sounding board for the intensities of his own character, which would drive him insane otherwise, and the security only people who’ve done the whole ‘loner, freak and target’ thing would ever appreciate. But Pyro knows full well that people are fallible, and therefore is more than a little reluctant to ever truly trust in, or rely on, anyone else, preferring to only have to deal with himself.

He’s a cynic by nature, though perhaps not a natural born one (his personality owing far more to experience than genetics). He can’t help it; he has to dissect other people’s imperfections, even when that means inventing some, because he’s always been afraid of finding something he’d regret losing. He needs things to be imperfect so he has an excuse to burn them down.

That willingness to invent faults is perhaps more key to his personality than he’d ever let on, his relationship with the truth is what would euphemistically be called ‘flexible’. Reality and truth aren’t the same thing, after all; if you believe hard enough then reality can be forced wherever you want or need it to go to stop circumstance from driving you insane, and the best part of belief is always going to be lie, isn’t it?

All in all, he’s one big tangle of contradictions underlying the apparent cliché with which people are tempted to sum him up. There’s just a little too much intelligence, a little too much complexity and ‘spark’, for him to sink properly into ‘Evil’… and a little too much pride and obstinacy to skulk back to ‘Good’. ‘Bad boy’ is always going to be just a little too simple to explain the whole package, but he’s resigned himself to the label because it means people don’t feel the need to look any deeper.

[Pyro]

The only autobiography he’s ever going to write.
Spelled out in cigarette smoke, neon light and cheap perfume.

“What in the hell kind of name is Pyro?” she giggles. “Not your real name, surely… unless your parents were really screwed up…”

“Not sure I have a real name….” The way those words are slurred gives away why he’s dispensing with the customary abrasive enigma; he hasn’t eaten anything substantial in what feels more like a week than it should, and the alcohol is taking more effect than he’d anticipated. Whatever. Caution to the wind and all that jazz. It’s not the answer that she – Mindy? Cindy? Mandy? Something like that, coyote ugly of course, but an easy lay because of it, and willing to offer him a bed for the night which is something he can’t afford to just turn down right now – was expecting, perhaps, but he doesn’t really care. There’s a dangerous glint in his eyes, the one that usually means he’s playing with fire, and in a way he is, just of a different sort. Seeing what she makes of the whole sordid fucking tale might turn out to be a new sort of high, who knows?

He grins darkly, seeing the concern in her eyes as he swallows more of the dark liquor (he’s stopped asking what it is, just drinks whatever the poor losers he picks up in these kinds of places are willing to buy him, appreciating the slow burn more than the taste itself). It does make for one hell of a sob story, dependent on how he wants to spin it… but that’s never been his game and anyway, it would be a lie to pretend that the whole ‘foundling’ thing was the precursor to the sort of angst florid fiction would have her naturally assuming.

Flashback One, 7 years previous
So much for being brave.

He’s 12, and he’s still got a lot of living to do, so maybe there’s a little room for fear, though he’s not planning on making a habit out of it. The taster he’s got recently has sort of turned him off all that. It’s easier if he lumps the fear in with the hate, because that he knows how to deal with. So he hates. He hates flying, and only distracted himself on the plane over by thinking about how he’d dropped the St. and could now re-invent himself, which was sort of cool. He hates how reality isn’t living up to any of the reinventions he imagined on deciding to head to America, because America isn’t anything like how it looks on TV. He hates having the buildings looming up either side of him, and how there’s nowhere left to be alone except in the dull dark of the nights when he’d far rather be back home than trying to make it on his own.

Most of all, though, the dark eyed kid hates the guy in the front seat. The one who’s taken away his lighter. Twice.

His name is Charles, but John gets the impression he’s meant to call him Mr. Xavier. Hell, maybe even Professor. He seems the type. John’s run away from him once – he’s getting quite good at that now, having discovered the talent soon after his as-good-as-adoptive-parents found out about his other gift – but it seems that he and the rest of the staff at the Xavier School for Talented Gifted Youngsters aren’t quite as keen on letting him drop off radar as the family they’re so desperate to replace. And considering that he’s in a wheelchair, the guy’s pretty damn good at tracking him down.

He’s told himself he’s not going to cry, least of all over a pathetic little scrap of metal, but given how every other comfortable certainty has broken down recently he’s got attached to the thing. It was his first requisition – first one he managed to pull off without anyone noticing, at least, pick-pocketing being another one of these things which is completely different in reality - and while he’s never gone in for sentiment much it’s his, and he wants it back. Wants to play with it. Not to burn anything, really. Just to have it there.

His companion – jailer, as John sees it - must have seen the pre-tear gleam in the rear-view mirror, noticed how he’s wringing his hands because he can’t not fidget and the mean man has taken away his favourite toy. It’s his tone that’s the most irritating thing, John decides, though it’s hard to pick one facet out of such a choice package - just the right blend of patronising, fake-nice and know-it-all to put him in mind of nails on a blackboard. Plus – and there’s no way he’s ever going to get used to this - it’s like he’s not really listening to the words, like somehow they just end up inside his head. “You don’t need to worry. We’re going somewhere safe, somewhere with people like you. You’ll fit in just fine.”

Glancing out of the window to avoid eye contact, automatically scanning for places where he might spend the night if he doesn’t go back to this place and finding the situation pretty bleak, John decides two things. Once he gets his lighter back off him – which he will, he’ll make sure of it, can raise hell just as well, if less impressively, without it – he’s never letting it out of his grip again. And against all his better judgement he’s just about willing to give this place a chance. Maybe…It’s a bed for the night, and maybe a hot meal, and it doesn’t look like John will have to do any of the shit other people expect from a not-unattractive little boy with no parents to worry about and just about the right balance between debauched and innocent shining in his dark eyes in return for those things, which is too good a chance to turn down.

[/i][/blockquote]The girl baulks, all trace of the alcoholic blur in her features erased by the sharpness attendant on genuine shock. Only a fool, or a dreamer (same thing, really) would claim that things are better post-Alcatraz, McCoy making a cute fuzzy poster-boy but little real difference. Outside the glittering arenas, here in the dirt, ‘mutant’ is still pretty much the only truly dirty word left. Nice Girls Don’t, and she’s seriously considering whether she can pull off being a ‘nice girl’. “I’d better…”

“Don’t stop now” He cuts her short, setting up another shot for them both, she accepting hers warily. The glint is intensifying, the spark which means he’s found something worthy of destruction rendered all the more terrifying since that ‘thing’ is himself – or at least the ‘self’ he’s spent the evening building up. “I’d hate you miss the good part”

Flashback 2 – Alkali Lake
It’s not the epitaph he would have chosen – Left all that kids’ table shit, and died – but up until the screaming which is tearing his brain to shreds finally and unexpectedly dies away it doesn’t look like he’s going to have a chance to come up with any better last words than that final remark – “Do you always do what you’re told?” - tossed back over his shoulder at his so-called friends.

Not even much of a final shot, really, because there’s only ever going to be one answer. Bobby’s too safe, too stable and sedate, to ever consider that there might be another option (the amount of venom in that escalates to overly-showy levels even though it’s just the inside of his mind which listens, as if he has to prove to himself that he’s always thought that a very bad thing, rather than a mildly irritating idiosyncrasy) and Rogue’s so bloody besotted with the fool she’s convinced herself that’s how she thinks. Is it arrogance to presume that having him sharing headspace (Bobby’s let that slip – though she never would – one of the few details in his constant stream of ‘first love’ angsting which sunk into the best- and only-mate on the receiving end despite his best efforts not to listen) might have something to do with that one? Probably, though he can’t help thinking she’s been making more of a show of her nauseating infatuation post-Boston.

Yeah… that would be the B-word. The word they’ve all been avoiding. When it is mentioned they try to force it back further than yesterday, back into something like distant history. He still can’t see what their problem is. Logan’s said something about how he shouldn’t have enjoyed it, but that’s bull, isn’t it? What, they’d rather he was ashamed of his powers? Fucking hypocrites, the lot of them, talking about a place where it’s safe to be yourself. Unless you’re John, of course, when you’re not allowed, because your gift isn’t ‘convenient’. Isn’t ‘nice’. Won’t win mutants any fans when it makes the headlines. When he points out that they’ve been telling him from day one it’s not about winning or losing anything, just about accepting, he’s told he’s not old enough to understand, that he’ll grow into their way of thinking in time… Shooting back that he wasn’t planning on turning out senile, and wanted to be shot long before he reached that stage anyway, did not go down well.

Whatever. Like he cares what they think.

He still doesn’t know what he was planning on achieving, walking out of the jet. Some vague notion had formed, sure – go do something, go ‘help’ – but he can’t pretend that had more to do with actually giving a damn what happened to the others than his inability to sit on the sidelines. It’s always been there, this ‘flaw’ (though he can’t see it as such despite years of having people try to train him out of it), labelled first hyperactivity, then a desire to show off, and now a morbid fascination with destruction, all the while ignoring the fact that none of those labels sum it up as neatly as just saying that’s how he is. Now that problem’s been taken away, he’s got a whole other issue to deal with; what he’s supposed to do now. Bobby and Rogue haven’t come rushing out to check he’s okay, though he’s unsure what to infer into that, and he can’t just skulk back inside.

When he sees the helicopter, it all makes perfect sense. Moving on has always been the only thing that really took, and he’s nowhere near noble enough for the ‘God among insects’ speech not to have made an impact. He might not have the faith, but he can fake that until he’s convinced it’s what he really believes, and in any case it’s not belief in any intangible ideal which really matters. When it comes down to it, seeing the approval in those icy eyes gleaming beneath the dorky helmet, he has all the faith he needs – faith that this’ll turn out something near enough to okay for him to accept.

[/i][/blockquote]“So… you just skipped out on them? First your family, and then your friends, the people that understood you?”

She’s all wide-eyed and disbelieving; he’s unsure whether that’s irritating or entertaining, settles for meeting it with his usual apathy, shrugging. “Not like my family” – that word alone is spat, the venom bubbling over beneath the casualness lacing everything else – “left me any choice. And the crap about the Institute understanding me? Don’t make me laugh”

He does, though, darkly, a way no one as young as he’s pretending to be, and certainly not as young as he actually is, should be able to laugh. “I mean, fuck, I don’t understand me. I wouldn’t want to understand me…” She’s just realised she’s seducing a psycho, he can see the fear in her. It’s pathetic, but also sort of intoxicating. “And yes, I ran. Running is what I do, I guess.” He shrugs again. The comment doesn’t make much sense, really, because the liquor’s doing all his philosophising now, but whatever. The momentum of the story – his own ceaseless forward momentum, never looking back, never retracing his steps, and never letting himself regret a single moment – carries him forward. He’s careful not to give anything specific, just vague references, but he might as well have spelt it out in 6 foot high letters of flame, because it’s pretty damn obvious what happened next given how he’s already let his allegiance slip.

Flashback 3 – From Alcatraz….
Pain.

It’s the pain that wakes him. John, or Pyro, or whoever (he could really care less about his identity, and the personal and political mindframe that’s come to symbolise, right now, figuring out what the hell is going on being so much more important) has always been a light sleeper, and it seems unconsciousness is little different; he shifts in the dark and the stab of pain jolts him back into the light.

That first shock is gone too fast to pinpoint its source with any great accuracy beyond being a general outcry at finding he’s not dead and still has something like a complete and functioning body to not be dead in. All the same, he cringes away from it, eyes squeezed, tense and motionless for a moment, his stifled gasp of pain frozen throughout his every inch. His right hand is the first thing to move, tentatively seeking childish comfort and security in the form of cool metal…

His lighter. Where the hell is his lighter?

He bolts upright, and pain seizes its chance. His hands go to his head as he winces, only to find that they too hurt. More than hurt. Frostbite’s never been fun, and this time he can’t see himself forgiving Bobby..

Bobby. Crap. That would explain it…

“Why didn’t you stay?” she cuts in.

“What?”

“Stay. At the Institute. They took you back, after everything. Hell, if I had friends like that, I wouldn’t skip out on them… sounds a hell of a lot like making the same mistake twice.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not me.”

Flashback 3 continued - …. to the Middle of Nowhere
It started flooding back right about then. The whole bloody stupid debacle that was the Battle of Alcatraz, as the papers he scavengers when the voracious reader he was as a ‘norm’ resurfaces are calling it – though he only got the full story later, catching snatches on screens in shop windows, on the radio in cafes he lingers in until someone asks whether he’s planning on ordering anything, or just in conversations overheard as people talk around him the way they do around those who are rendered invisible by falling through the cracks, Taking to a life in the urban underworld is as easy as adopting the role of ‘corrupted innocent’ turned out to be. He didn’t feel the need to correct her delusion that Bobby had taken him back, because it worked better than the truth; that they’d handed him in. Bastards.

Whatever. It wasn’t exactly hard to convince people that he was a good guy deep down – one of the many advantages of having a hugely powerful but recently deceased telepath on the team being that you could claim she messed with your mind – or that he’d been ‘cured’, there being nothing to mark him out as anything other than human and down on his luck provided he resisted the urge to play with his lighter. Bobby’s one small mercy (which he hated him for, because it made it even harder to cast him as the villain in John Allerdyce’s private Melodrama) being not telling the authorities exactly who it was he’d dished up for them. At first he couldn’t help but panic, thinking that once word got out he’d given them the slip someone would try and track him down, but it soon became apparent that as per normal no one was wasting time worrying about him. It’s easy to drop off radar, far easier than he had anticipated, and now he doesn’t have to think to pass unnoticed and un-noteworthy amongst the insects. They have their trophy in the fallen Magneto. At least he hasn’t fallen that far, he consoles himself, realising how much of a living hell that would be, though sometimes it’s hard to see exactly how this end of the deal is less raw.

The first week feels more than raw. He hostels when he can, survives when he can’t, slowly relearning what the streets taught him in the first few days after he came over from Australia way back when. He learns that backpacking and hitchhiking aren’t as glamorous or exotic as half-joking post-graduation plans had made them sound (though whether that ‘edge’ was down to how he wasn’t alone in those plans was a question he didn’t fancy addressing), that interesting names aren’t the best means of navigating between easy pickings, and that, when in comes down to it, all sorts of places are the same, just slightly unique. The fact that everything now seems so insanely complicated makes it all simple – if he keeps too busy to think, then he doesn’t remember, and if doesn’t remember doing things then he can’t regret them. Selective amnesia, he finds out (around the same time life reminds him just how fucked up people really are, though he’d the last person who needs that pointed out), is far better at preserving your sanity than telling yourself I had no choice, I needed to survive

“So that’s it. The real me”

He’s fairly sure he’s wrecked his chances of finding some way into a bed for the night, and if by some miracle she’s still willing to furnish him with that she’ll be sleeping with one eye open. No chance, therefore, that he can do his usual trick, always having been a light sleeper, of getting up while she’s lying drunkly comatose to make some small requisitions she’s unlikely to miss until she’s forgotten his face. Whatever. Like he’d ever do anything with bridges other than watch them burn.

Is it real? The only reality he knows is what he tells himself – the same reality where he genuinely believed Magneto’s dream could work, where he’d like nothing better than Bobby dead, Marie stone cold, the whole bloody Mansion and everyone in it disintegrated. Painfully. It might not be the whole truth, but his relationship with the truth has always been flexible.

[Pyro]

The simplified (i.e. non-fic) version of John's backstory up to and including Alcatraz[/u][/b]
St. John’s early upbringing in Fairfield, a suburb in Sydney, wasn’t exactly conventional, or comfortable. Having started life as accidental fallout from mommy’s ingenious lil’ scheme for getting her next fix, he was born into a strange extended family of those who fall through the cracks. Mum didn’t exactly contribute much other than giving him that ridiculous name (it’s pronounced sinjin; she thought it sounded sophisticated and exotic, the sort of name you found in the romance novels that were her one escape), and he was raised (if you can call it that) by a succession of ‘aunties’ who thought having a kid in tow might win them some sympathy and from whom he scraped his early learning until he was old enough to continue it on his own, and ‘uncles’ who taught him two lessons that he’s never forgotten - love is a weapon with a short sell-by date, and trust is setting yourself up for a fall.

By the time little SinJin turned seven, mum was pretty much burned out, and he was a little too old and not quite cute enough (having perfected an early version of his now practically permanent scowl) to be of much use to anyone else. So he found himself foisted off on the nearest mission. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this was the cue for any sort of angst ridden “St. John, the orphanage years’; for the most part, he survived them in unspectacular mediocrity, passing for normal, if slightly on the quiet and serious side and preferring to associate with older children and adults than his own age group.

The first couple of fostering-s didn’t work out – people found it hard to *click* with someone so determined not to have any stand-out qualities they could fall in love with when they were looking for a wide-eyed adorable orphan they could save – but eventually he found a place with the Allerdyces, a *respectable* family for whom the fact that he was docile and blended into the background when not pointed out was something of a bonus. The pair were fairly old, without being quite elderly yet, and had given up on having their own kids; John was a big fish in a small pond kinda guy, distant (not a ‘nasty’ sort of unemotional, but ‘cuddly’ just wasn’t something he did) and, for SJ (or ‘Junior’ – while the couple kept the St, and the pretentious pronunciation, John Senior was fairly big on the idea of having a ‘John Junior’) fairly imposing, while Edie would have been his complete opposite if she wasn’t so dead set on fulfilling his expectations (and therefore muting a lot of her more romantic side) so he could boast about his picture-perfect little family along with his other achievements, and somewhere between the pair of them SJ grew up from a melancholy rugrat who crayoned on wallpaper and trailed after the older kids to a still-serious almost-teenager who followed current affairs while graffiti’ing on the photos in broadsheets and could usually be found behind whatever book he could get his hands on…

… and things would have been fine, had he not turned out to have that pesky X-gene. It would be a lie to say finding out he was *special* wasn't all sorts of exciting, but after that, it became… less fun. Some combination of finding out he was a dangerous gene-freak, reading headlines about the mutant crisis and more radical proposed suggestions to it, and an overactive imagination fed on books like Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence panicked him enough that running away seemed the best solution; looking back it seems mad, but at the time he was convinced that the authorities would take him away and his parents would get into trouble and be *tainted*. It made more sense to run before anyone found out, so everyone could make a new start… right? So he took enough to get a one-way ticket from Sydney to New York and ran. He hated flying, and only distracted himself on the plane over by thinking about how he'd dropped the St. and could now re-invent himself, which was sort of cool.

If there was anything poetic or beautiful about the period that followed, it would be tempting to make some grand artistic statement about how life had gone full circle; as it was, he learnt that backpacking and hitchhiking aren't glamorous or exotic, that interesting names aren't the best means of navigating between easy pickings, and that, when in comes down to it, all sorts of places are the same, just slightly unique. He learnt that America isn't anything like how it looks on TV, and hated having the buildings looming up either side of him, and how there was nowhere left to be alone except in the dull dark of the nights when he'd far rather have been back home than trying to make it on his own. The hardest lesson, and the one he took most to heart, was that he learnt exactly what people expect from a not-unattractive little boy with no parents to worry about and just about the right balance between debauched and innocent shining in his dark eyes in return for what seems like help at the time.

Somewhere along the line ‘now just John’ attracted the attention of one Charles Xavier. John ran away from him as well, at first, but it seemed that he and the rest of the staff at “Xavier’s Freak Circus”, or whatever the hell he was calling his menagerie, weren’t quite as keen on letting him drop off radar as the family they were so desperate to replace. And considering that he was in a wheelchair, the guy was pretty damn good at tracking him down. So John decided to give the place a shot.

Xavier’s wasn’t exactly home, but it came close; John settled fairly quickly into the role of resident ‘Bad Boy’, because it was what people expected. He scared off a few room mates and more than one *counsellor*. The last roomie proved a little harder to shift, mainly because setting fire to his bed didn’t have such an effect when he could just freeze the flames and the source of them, and by the fourth time John’d thawed out Sharky he grudgingly accepted that Bobby Drake was here to stay. By the fourth time Iceman proved that he had other uses beyond negating his powers they’d become firm friends.

… and then Rogue arrived, and she and Bobby started dating, and the three of them somehow smacked 2 plus 2 into some weird sort of triangle which… sort of worked but was hardly perfect. He and Bob were still almost-brothers, and the way Rogue always seemed to have a psychic instinct making sure she was around whenever he was awake and bored - though that may have had more to do with how he never slept, and how she had more than enough nightmares to keep her awake, than anything else; nightmares she sort of revealed, but made clear that he wasn’t not allowed to know anything about… at least, not when Bobby or Logan were around - left them more than just friends-by-association (and got him over losing out to a frickin’ ice rose, of all things).

‘Course like all good things it couldn’t last. The wrecking ball would have come sooner or later – the problems of a relationship without physical intimacy (which… ick. John never could understand it, because holding back from playing with the untouchable just… didn’t make sense), frustration at just being Bob’s latest *projects* (because he always did have to play the hero and try and fix the unfixable) or whatever – but when it did arrive it came in the form of William Stryker and his invasion of the Institute, which left the trio fleeing to Bobby’s family in Boston. What happened there does not need to be documented, but suffice to say it was simultaneously John’s greatest moment and hardly his proudest (he still can’t quite see what their problem was; Logan said something about how he shouldn’t have enjoyed it, but that’s bull, isn’t it? What, they’d rather he was ashamed of his powers? He was, after all, only trying to save his friends, so it seems all sorts of screwed to be painted as a villain for it).

He still doesn’t know what he was planning on achieving, walking out of the jet. Some vague notion had formed, sure – go do something, go ‘help’ – but he can’t pretend that had more to do with actually giving a damn what happened to the others than his inability to sit on the sidelines. (It’s always been there, this ‘flaw’ (though he can’t see it as such despite years of having people try to train him out of it), labelled first hyperactivity, then a desire to show off, and now a morbid fascination with destruction, all the while ignoring the fact that none of those labels sum it up as neatly as just saying that’s how he is). When he saw the helicopter, however, it all made perfect sense. Moving on had always been the only thing that really took, and he was nowhere near noble enough for the ‘God among insects’ speech not to have made an impact. He might not have had the faith, but he figured he could fake that until he convinced himself it was what he really believed, and in any case it wasn’t belief in any intangible ideal which really mattered. When it came down to it, seeing the approval in those icy eyes gleaming beneath the dorky helmet, he had all the faith he needed – faith that this would turn out something near enough to okay for him to accept.

Falling into the position of Magneto’s left hand man was easy enough; Buckethead kept him busy, making a special point of driving home the difference between here and Xavier’s, letting him exercise the powers he’d always been taught were something to be contained and controlled… and dammit, that was addictive and intoxicating. By the time the news of the Cure broke, he might have passed for maniacally devoted based on that alone, but the news seemed to confirm everything Magneto had prophesised, and Pyro (because he’d dropped his *slave name* by that point) had no qualms standing next to his leader at Alcatraz, all set – over eager, even - to bring down his one-time friend who’d been idiot enough to stand against them and betray his own kind…


Update
When Magneto made his triumphant return John was scrounging a living at Mimi’s, trading *favours* for board and lodging. He was the first of the old Brotherhood Buckethead sought out, and the first to return to the fold where he took up his old position at Magneto’s left hand, no questions asked, because that was how things worked…

Shortly after that he *tentatively re-established a relationship with Bobby* (read; fucked in the ashes of Mimi’s, threatening him with a knife, and arranged a second date via email). Somehow out of all that god awful mess came an actual semi-functional relationship...

… which he then screwed to all hell. Long story short, Magneto found out and demanded John bring him Bobby as a hostage. John Logic reasoned that if he didn’t comply Magneto would kill Bobby… and so he stuck him with a trank and handed him over (it turned out that sedatives were not the only content of the needle – Magneto had also dosed it with the cure, which has rendered Bobby powerless for the foreseeable future). In the chaos which followed he was told he’d proved himself incapable of working within the Brotherhood and effectively kicked out while being kept under house arrest because he’d *seen too much*, and staged a break-out on the night of the Second Alcatraz Siege once it became clear Magneto planned to kill Bobby, initially intending that they’d run away together. Now that John’s back at the Institute – they were picked up by a team comprising of Toni, Warren and Josh who were staging their own rescue attempt – the issue of what happens next is… complicated to say the least.


Personality Update – see also above, because it still holds good
The John skulking back into the X-Mansion now isn’t the same one who strode out the Blackbird to follow ‘some guy in a dorky looking helmet’ who said he could be a God rather than being ashamed of his powers… The months he spent as Buckethead’s third and then second in command have changed him, as have the weeks in the camps post Alcatraz and, possibly more than anything else, his *relationship* - if one can term this particular car-crash as such - with Bobby “Iceman” Drake.

That film he and Bobby ended up watching on their one and only proper *date* opens with Hugo Weaving commenting on the madness of asking a man in a mask who he is. John’s problem at the moment is that he’s got to answer that question and look behind the various masks circumstance has torn away… which means confronting the very real possibility that there isn’t actually anything there, that he’s managed to become “all mask”. What little has been seen of the *real John* isn’t particularly inspiring – it’s almost as if he hasn’t grown up at all since leaving Australia, and is basing most of his fledgling new personality of that kid’s insecurities. The core aspects of his various personality re-workings to date still hold good – he’s still a tangle of contradictions; totally conscious that everyone fails while desperately looking for someone who won’t, striking out first while unable to go anywhere without clear instructions, completely vulnerable and insecure while remaining untouchable. It’s just the details that are messing with his head. Minor things like how to justify all the shit he’s done in the name of a cause he’s now realized was total crap to begin with, what to do when you realise that your particular brand of logic – the one which until now has governed, and justified, every decision – doesn’t actually make any sense, or what exactly is going on with Bobby.

He’ll be okay eventually. He always is though it’s hard to see how he can be now. He’s done this before just not like this…

.... things are just... complicated, that's all.