#weather wizard

Pets:

• When Mark Mardon was a kid, his brother, Clyde, had a dog named Thunder. In most families, the dog would have belonged to both children, but Mark’s parents made it pretty clear that the dog only belonged to their golden child. 
• Mick Rory’s family owned three cows, two Clydesdale horses, a donkey, a mule, two dogs (Spot and Rover), four cats (Fluffy, Stripey, Mouser, and Mr. Tuxedo), nine sheep, six goats, six to ten pigs (at any given time) and many, many chickens, ducks, and turkeys. They also raised bees. 
• Digger didn’t have any pets growing up, but his family did raise a LOT of sheep. His legal father (Ian Harkness) also had a dog named Fang, who liked Digger about as much as Ian did. Digger speculates that Fang was at least part dingo. 
• Roscoe Dillon’s mother, Rosa, owned a Persian named Priscilla (an anniversary gift from her wealthy husband). Unfortunately for Rosa, Priscilla was even less fond of being hugged than Roscoe was. Roscoe, by contrast, got along splendidly with the cat. Both hated crowds, loud noises, and being touched. Roscoe remembers Priscilla fondly as his most understanding family member. 
• Neither Sam nor Evan had any pets as kids. Sam’s apartment didn’t allow pets; Miss McCulloch would’ve loved for her kids to be able to have pets but didn’t have enough room for them in the orphanage. 
• Hartley’s parents owned a number of thoroughbred horses, several show dogs and show cats, and a wall-sized aquarium full of exotic fish. Most of these were more for show than anything else; Hartley wasn’t supposed to touch any of them without explicit permission. On the one and only occasion a rat made it inside the Rathaway estate, he befriended it…only for his mother to promptly have it killed when she discovered it. Now, of course, Hartley is the proud owner of at least six rats. 
• James Jesse didn’t exactly have pets growing up…but since he got to spend time with lions, tigers, elephants, camels, bears, monkeys, and horses in the circus, he didn’t really care all that much. Putting your head in a lion’s mouth is cooler than having a puppy any day. 
• Leonard and Lisa Snart once made the mistake of bringing home a kitten from a neighbor. Lisa named it Gabriela and was thrilled with her new pet….but when Larry Snart came home and saw the kitten, he promptly drowned it in front of his children. A few years later, Larry brought home a pit bull puppy…and predictably abused it until it was the nightmarish guard dog he wanted. The dog didn’t have a proper name (Larry just called it “you mutt”), but the neighborhood nicknamed it the Hellhound. It lived for a few years before Larry tripped over it whilst drunk and killed it in a rage (although not before the dog did a number on him). This dog is also the reason that both Leonard and Lisa are scared of large dogs. 
• Barry Allen owned a cat named Fluffernutter and a dog named Streak the Wonder Dog (after Green Lantern Alan Scott’s dog).

School headcanons: 

• Mark and Clyde Mardon both ended up being placed into a Spanish I class in their Freshman year of high school (one of Clyde’s classes was cancelled abruptly shortly before the start of the school year, and Mark hadn’t been able to decide what electives he wanted to take). This was the only high school course Mark ever earned an A in, mainly because, unbeknownst to the school, both he and Clyde were bilingual and could speak Spanish better than their Spanish teacher. The only downside was that both of them spent a lot of time being bored out of their minds. 
• The one and only time Barry Allen got detention was due entirely to the fact that he got a tardy slip every day for three months. Once the school caught on to the fact that Barry never missed out on any work, they eventually stopped giving him tardy slips at all, instead simply accepting that Barry being late to everything was a fact of nature. 
• Wally West once got detention for using his super speed to leave the school grounds in order to get Indian food…from India. 
• Leonard Snart never once passed a course (he slept through or outright skipped almost every class), but he was never held back a year. This was because most of the faculty wrote him off as a lost cause by the time he was seven years old. This is why Len can barely read and write and knows almost nothing about literature or history. That being said, Len doesn’t have any particular animosity towards the school system. It did give him and his sister free food, after all. (This free food also resulted in Len having a nearly perfect attendance record before he dropped out. He might not have learned anything, but he wasn’t going to miss out on lunch.) 
• If Sam Scudder had gone to a better school, he probably would’ve been put in either a gifted program of some sort or have been skipped a few grades ahead; he is and always has been extremely intelligent. As it was, he went through all of school (until he dropped out) believing that he was just reasonably clever and kind of a nerd; he still doesn’t really realize how intelligent he actually is. 
• Roscoe was likewise very intelligent, although the fact that he was on the autism spectrum before it was widely recognized meant that he often got himself into trouble at school. When he had teachers who liked him and were understanding of his quirks, he did very well in school, but most of his teachers were demanding and critical. As a result, he didn’t always perform as well as he would have been able to under optimal conditions. Also not helping matters was the fact that his father would denigrate his son for any grade less than an A (no matter the context). He still did well enough to graduate high school with a strong GPA and be accepted into college, but it wasn’t until college that he ever felt comfortable in school. He graduated college (a year early, due to his desire to please his father) with a B.S. in engineering…only for his father to criticize him for not having a high enough college GPA, for not graduating at the top of his class, and for having changed his major from business school (which he had hated) to engineering. Shortly afterwards, Roscoe fell into a particularly bad manic episode, which in turn was a major influence in his decision to become the Top. 

I was the perfect son-the scholar, the athlete, the All-American boy. In me, my parents found their ticket to being accepted. When they had a brilliant scientist for a son, it mattered less that they were immigrants, that they were brown, that they spoke with the heavy Guatemalan accent that they could never quite shake. They put me on a pedestal, and shoved my brother, Marco, into the shadows. And I quickly wearied of being the golden child; wearied of watching them turn on my younger brother when he dared to be average. Because we couldn’t be average. Any failure wasn’t a sign of immaturity or personal foibles, it was a reflection on our entire people and on the culture from whence we came. Mark wasn’t the at the head of his class or the captain of the football and baseball teams like I was. No matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t successful, so he had to be pushed to the sidelines. If they wasn’t, what would the neighbors say? They would say that it was only what they expected. Mark wasn’t special, and he was brown; if he had been their only son, he would have been used as proof of why the country was letting in too many “foreigners”. Never mind that my parents spent thousands of dollars and worked through endless bureaucratic red tape just to get to the country, then worked hard to pay for and pass their citizenship tests. Never mind that my parents knew more about American history than all their neighbors. We were Hispanic immigrants; we couldn’t be “real” Americans unless we did something great.

Because of this, Mark was berated; treated like an embarrassment. My parents hardly noticed him except to criticize him for not being perfect; for not being me. In the end, they drove him away; he dropped out of school and ran away from home. And part of me wished that I’d had the courage to do what he had done. My parents had attached all of their hopes and dreams onto me, and the weight was exhausting. But because I was afraid of disappointing them, I stayed. I graduated high school as the valedictorian and made it through college in only two years. I had a degree in meteorology, and I was expected to change the world.

While I was in college, I had dreamed up the idea of a device that could control the weather in a localized area. Most people dismissed me as a dreamer at first, but within only a few months of college, the academic community was hailing me as a genius; and so by the time I graduated, I was easily able to get funding for my project. I worked alone in a small cabin off of Big Water Lake for the next three years, utterly consumed by my work. I seemed to be on top of the world; my brother, meanwhile, was floundering. As a runaway and high school dropout, he was unable to find much work; worse, he soon picked up a gambling habit and lost most of the money he had taken with him when he had disappeared. As a result, he soon fell into a bad crowd and fell into a life of drinking and petty crime. I was extremely frustrated by this, because I knew that my brother had the potential to be so much more than that, but there was little that I could do to stop him. Little did I know that his poor choices would become my salvation.

Just as my project, which I had nicknamed the Weather Wand in a moment of fancy, was nearing completion, my primary sponsor, LexCorp, informed me that they planned to use the Wand as a weapon for war. I, who had intended it for humanitarian aid, was furious, and I told them that I would not allow them anywhere near my invention. The corporation responded by cutting all of my funding and getting me blacklisted; worse, they used my status as an immigrant to do so (conveniently ignoring the fact that I had come to America at two years old). Worse still, since they had funded all of my earlier work on the Weather Wand, they planned to claim it for themselves. Determined to do something to stop this, I contacted my younger brother, Mark, and together we concocted a plan. He was to show up at my laboratory and claim that he was running from the police, a story that would hold some weight since he had twice been arrested and sent to jail for burglary. We would fake a fight, and then I would give him the Weather Wand and disappear; leaving the assumption that I had died in the scuffle.

The plan went off without a hitch. With the Wand now safely in the hands of a supposedly dangerous criminal, LexCorp would be unable to steal it and use it as a weapon, and since I was “dead”, they wouldn’t be looking for me in the hopes of forcing me to make another one. What’s more, since everyone thought I was dead, I could finally escape the pressure of being the perfect son, and my brother, by taking on the moniker of the Weather Wizard, was able to finally get the attention that he craved.

I just wish that he hadn’t decided to wear a green leotard to do it.

David Singh
[ David hears it. And he kneels over and spots Marco. And he gives him an ice cold stare. ]

…Weather Wizard.

weather wizard.
[ nervous smiling emoji ]

how’s the honeymoon?

pied piper
we haven’t had time for a honeymoon yet.

[ hartley says, as if nothing is wrong. ]

David Singh
We’re still in the planning stages. Will you come out from under the desk?

weather wizard.
i’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.

David Singh
Come out from the desk.

weather wizard.
would it help if i stole shit?

David Singh
NO!

weather wizard.
you know, to make it look less like he’s cavorting with the enemy.

David Singh
It would NOT help one bit!
I can’t believe out of EVERYTHING you could say to me, you’d suggest MORE CRIME!

weather wizard.
it’s all i got, boss.