ᴀᴘʀɪʟ's ʜᴜsʙᴀɴᴅ (
infomodder) wrote2014-04-30 09:58 am
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a p p l i c a t i o n #1

OOC Information;
Name; Cyn
Personal Journal; I don’t really use one. Will’s journal (infomodder) would be perfectly fine to use for private messages!
Contact; smuggering@gmail.com
Other Characters; None.
IC Information;
Character Name; Will Graham
Canon; NBC’s Hannibal
Official site
Wiki
Official Tumblr (you read that right, the creators have a tumblr)
Canon Point; Near the end of Savoureux (Episode 13, the finale) — he’s still in the hospital being treated before he’ll end up in a hospital for the criminally insane.
Age; Mid-late 30s
House; Sigyn.
Power; Healing.
Personality; Will Graham is a very unique man who is, as a result of this, very much alone.
Capable of seeing horrifying murders through the eyes (and, therefore, minds) of those who killed them, capable of empathizing with them completely, Will’s mind isn’t exactly one a person would be willing to jump into. It’s an encyclopedia of killers and how they killed, a look behind the crime scenes that is so personal and intense even the strongest of stomachs would end up turning. Where most people working on the cases come into work to find a plethora of gruesome photographs and bodies to be dealt with, Will’s fifteen steps ahead of that. Not only has he seen the photographs already, he’s seen them in private, alone, has seen the victims as they lived and breathed through the viewpoint of the person who killed them. Seeing how the victims were brutalized is bad enough, but knowing why a killer did it, how they did it, and the reasoning behind each choice, each cut and bruise and broken bone? It takes a toll on Will in every way possible.
This ability to “see” doesn’t extend only to his work with investigations. Will does not do well with people in the slightest. He’s overly observant to the point where he makes it a habit to purposefully not look someone in the eye, claiming that eyes allow him to see too much without seeing enough at the exact same time. He’ll end up wondering about the shape of them or the color (do they have jaundice?) which is really not what most people want the other party in their idle chitchat to be thinking about. He avoids all social situations whenever he possibly can, saying that his job as a teacher for the FBI isn’t really social because he’s not doing much in the way of interaction. He’s passing on information, nothing more. He doesn’t get involved with the lives of his students outside the classroom. When he starts working for the FBI in a more hands on (or eyes on, his talk of “seeing” taken into account) capacity, he doesn’t seek out his coworkers for drinks after a long day or going out to a movie or anything else. Will deals with people as he has to and makes a habit to do what he can to not deal with them elsewhere.
Will doesn’t really understand friendship, though that might be because the only person that he, at first, seems to consider a “friend” works with the mind for a living. Alana Bloom can’t shut off her thinking to be what Will wants her to be—his girlfriend/lover—and so opts to spend time with him in places where they aren’t fully alone. The way Will’s mind works (described by one character as a “cocktail of neuroses”) would be of great professional interest to her, and that’s not something she could handle in a relationship. She would always be analyzing him, and he would end up resenting her not being able to shut down that line of thought. She makes the claim that it would be good for neither of them, so Will’s one real friend? Is one that has to maintain a healthy distance, even when the both of them have confessed feeling something more for the other. The only other person who he could ever begin to consider a friend at the beginning of the series is his boss, Jack Crawford. Even though they talk about personal things, they don’t go out for coffee. Will never comes over for a meal with Jack and his wife. They are friendly, but they aren’t friends.
By the time Hannibal Lecter comes into his life, Will’s rather accepted that he’ll be as alone in the world as he possibly can be.
Will does what he does, looking into the minds of the terrible and the depraved, in order to catch them and make sure it doesn’t happen again. At his core, Will is a humanitarian helping people in the only way he can. Unfortunately, this desire to put evil behind bars has taken its toll on him, and he starts to lose who he thinks he is and what he knows to be true of himself the longer it carries on. In the face of sleepless nights and raging fevers, he still insists that he can work. He still carries on, even if he’s showing up to the crime lab sweating and hot and looking for all the world like he needs a hot bath, some cough medicine, and a few days in bed. Because everyone he works with is so used to Will being “different,” no one fusses over it. He’s left alone despite looking like pure and utter shit because that’s just Will Graham.
And who would want that at their party? Who would want that in their life?
It’s once commented on that Will being “different” is a good technique to keep people at a distance. No one is going to ask him if he’s okay because his version of okay is, in all likelihood, drastically different from the normal idea of okay. Will is alone in the way he thinks and how he works, and he makes sure he stays that way, because underneath his shaggy hair and stubbly jaw and clothes worn obviously for comfort is a man motivated by a great deal of fear.
There is no one who can do the work Will does like he does. There is no one with a higher success rate than Will Graham. If Will stops, people will die. They will die in unspeakable ways, and they will die because he gave up. They will die because Will Graham couldn’t put on his big boy pants and deal with going to the therapist he was assigned. They will die because he’d prefer to teach, go home, hang out with his dogs, and go fishing on the weekends. If Will gives up, the fear that killers will continue and people will suffer is the one that pricks at the back of his mind. The times he thinks about it, he realizes that’s exactly what will happen and so he doesn’t. He may not understand humanity on a socially graceful level, but he understands enough to know that people don’t deserve to meet their makers in the ways he’s seen during his time at the FBI. He may be getting to the breaking point—another thing he fears—but saving lives is more important than anything else. He fears the minds he forces himself to deal with on a frequent basis and the things that he’ll come away with because of it. He fears going to bed and having nightmares because he refuses to quit. By the time he’s getting fevers and “losing time” (he finds himself in places without knowing what happened the last few hours or people coming across him when he was awake but not aware of the when and where and how of his existence), he starts to fear himself. He beings to live in fear of not knowing who Will Graham is anymore because Will Graham? Is racking up things he certainly is not, wants and desires and emotions and, yes, fears of those who, when caught, will be put up in the newspapers and eventually true crime books for how terrible and cruel they are. He ends up fearing not just losing himself, but becoming something much worse. With a gentle, verbal nudge from Hannibal who had just declared himself Will’s friend, he begins to fear the idea of, one day, waking up from his lost time to find a terrible murder of his own making because he refused to quit his job.
He fears, essentially, becoming what he’s spent so much time tracking and chasing and catching to keep people from being killed. He fears that, eventually, he’ll lose himself so much that he’s using all that data about how to abuse a human body against innocent people as opposed to using it to help them.
One thing Will doesn’t fear and does, in fact, go out of his way to spend time with and be around? Dogs. He collects strays, bathes, feeds, dries, breaks, and loves them, and they’ve become the family he never had. Growing up without a mother and a father who worked boatyard to boatyard made him the perpetual new boy at school. No friends growing up, no siblings—not much changed in that way once he hit adulthood. But Will moved away and became a homeowner, and he decided to fill his home with what he loved and what could return love. People had never lasted long, so he ended up with dogs. Lots of dogs. When he’s arrested, they have to have a pet control vehicle come out to the Graham house because he has that many dogs. Unlike people, dogs don’t make promises. They don’t give him false hope. They don’t offer help. They don’t sit him down in a big office and try to pick apart his brain. They don’t call him in the middle of the night to come and tell them his take on a body found dissected and left in a hotel bathtub. He treats them well and they treat him well in return.
Other than dogs, he keeps things to make fishing lures and fixes up boat parts, and that is how Will likes to keep his house. Quiet and filled with a type of love that neither asks how his day is nor expects him to be anything but what he is, even if what he is isn’t something that anyone would really be proud of or readily understand. Surrounded by what little in the world he is absolutely sure of—how to make lures, how to fix things, his dogs—is one place where Will can relax as much as Will ever can.
And in the end, for Will, whatever makes him feel a bit more normal in his world is what he’ll take, even if other people might view it as pathetic and a waste. He’d just never be able to expect that the thing, the person, that makes him feel better about his life is, in fact, a cannibalistic serial killer who’s been taunting the people he knows and works with and evading capture for years.
That’s his bad, he knows. And he does take it as just that: his bad. But he’ll do what he can to make sure Hannibal is caught, and not just to clear his name. Not just to avenge the death of Abigail Hobbs, a “daughter” he picked up alongside Hannibal when they went out to look for another serial killer. He’ll do it because as long as Hannibal is out in the world, people are dying. As long as Will is locked away, completely alone, and mistrusted? Hannibal is out there, surrounded with the people in Will’s life he’s come to feel something for, and completely believed for being one of the most outstanding individuals one could ever hope to come across. The fear that Hannibal will kill one of them is real, yes. But Hannibal killing anyone else, be it someone Will knows or a random passerby? He can’t handle it.
So he’ll do what he has to in order to make sure Hannibal is locked away in order to spare the world from him, not completely out of vengeance, but because that is what Will does. He tracks the bad, locks them up, and moves onto the next one. Moving on from Hannibal may never happen, but it’s his job to protect the people, and by God is he going to do it, even if he’s stuck into a hospital for the criminally insane.