alexsunmners:

Musician!Warren Headcanons

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Warren’s relationship with music and how it plays a role in his life, so I figured it was about time I wrote it all down. @kurtwxgners I need you to suffer with me/share your thoughts

• His parents made him take piano lessons for a while when he was young, citing a well-rounded education as the reason behind it, and he knew that meant that because of his mutation, he had to work extra hard to be worth their time and effort, but he enjoyed the lessons regardless.
  
• Something in the music and the way he could coax beautiful things from the instrument felt uniquely redemptive and pure to him somehow
• His dad tried to make him hate his wings, hate himself, and it worked because he does hate himself, but the soaring motifs and phrases felt like flying to him, and sometimes in the middle of the night he would go down to the piano and play only for himself, grieving for everything he’d lost, everything he couldn’t be.
• Flash forwards several years, and he still hates himself, and now he hates his dad too, but he still loves the music
  
• He doesn’t really play piano anymore, and he never plays classical music. Too many painful memories and old scars.
• He taught himself guitar on a shitty, beat up six string he stole from an op shop, because he couldn’t bring himself to stop playing entirely, and he found himself in the fast, anguished riffs of hard rock music and the raw, furious lyrics that accompany the driving beat of the songs.
• The music thrums through his veins, racing the vodka in his blood and drowning out the pain anger he feels. Mostly.
• He doesn’t get to play much of anything anymore, though. His hands are battered and heavy from fighting, and the alcohol clouds his mind, and he feels too toxic to try and mimic the soaring melodies he loved then or the urgent, desperate tempos he loves now. He doesn’t want to damage the last good thing left in his life.
• He meets you in a bar after a particularly brutal fight, and you’re beautiful and you patch him up without him asking you to, and you hum idly to the Metallica song blaring through the speakers as you work and your lilting voice matches the guitar riffs exactly, but it calls him back to the older music he used to love, and when he leaves the bar that night, his mind is full of Debussy and Mozart and Beethoven and you.
  
• The next day he finds a small, run down music shop in the city and asks to use a piano, and he plays and plays and plays for hours on end, the music pouring out of him and across the keys.
  
• It doesn’t come as easily as it did when he was younger, but the music still feels redemptive and pure and good, and when he gets back to his apartment that night, he cries, because he had tried desperately to cut himself off from who he was as a child, but it had left him hollow and angry, and he’s still angry, but he doesn’t feel quite so much like a lost cause as he did before.
• He still finds himself in rock; still feels an unerring tie to the sheer, unapologetic torment in it. But he sees his past in classical music and who he might have been if his family had been different.
• He sees you at the bar again the next night he goes back, and you’re still beautiful, and he hadn’t been fighting, so he spends the night at your side, and you feel like an indescribable blend of classical and contemporary music, and it’s utterly bewitching to him. 
  
• The more time he spends with you, the more he goes back to the tiny, dingy music store to play the piano, and the music is therapeutic for him. He isn’t quite happy, but it’s the closest he’s been in a long damn time, and he forgets about his anguish when he’s with you
  
• He still plays his six string, picking out the intricate riffs of Led Zeppelin, or the grating, forceful chords of Metallica, and he still feels like this is the music that expresses how he feels and who he is, but he relates to it differently now.
• He saves money till he can buy the cheapest, shittiest second hand keyboard the store has, lugging it to his apartment, and even if he didn’t love the music, the way your face lights up when you spot it in the corner would’ve justified him buying a goddamn Steinway.
  
• You push him towards the tiny instrument, and he reluctantly begins to play, his fingers trailing over the keys with increasing speed and assurance, and you’re sitting on the edge of the bench beside him, your chin propped on his shoulder.
• The small, gentle smile you’re wearing as you watch him play is so inexplicably knowing that he wonders how you knew that this was what he needed, how you managed to push him towards it without saying a damn thing about his past, or his relationship to the music, or even mentioning that he might be missing something at all.
• He doesn’t say anything, can’t find the words to say what he’s feeling, so he leans over and presses a soft kiss to your temple, and you don’t say anything in return, you just tuck yourself closer against his side as he continues to play.
• The music under his fingertips changes without him really noticing. It’s not something he’s played before and it’s not music he’s heard before. It’s entirely his own, and it’s not angry or damaged or heavy with old memories. It’s something new and delicate and hopeful, and he thinks maybe he’s not as permanently broken as he thought he was.