a p p l i c a t i o n #2

[infomodder]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Cyn
AGE: Over 18
JOURNAL: N/A
IM / EMAIL: smuggering@gmail.com
PLURK: N/A
RETURNING: New here!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Will Graham | Wolf Trap
CHARACTER AGE: Not stated, but probably mid-late thirties. I just go with 38.
SERIES: Hannibal (NBC)
CHRONOLOGY: Near the end of Savoureux (last episode season 1), just after falling asleep in the car on the way to Minnesota.
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Housed randomly with other roommates, please! In all honesty, since his home is in Virginia, I could see him moving to De Chima pretty quickly, but forced socialization due to random placement would be stellar.

BACKGROUND:

The world of Hannibal is the same as the world we know, though with an eponymous villain that would be quite terrible to have in reality.

Will Graham grew up in the South, poor, with a mother who left when he was young and a father who worked in boat yards. He followed his father and his work throughout Mississippi and Louisiana, never staying in the same place for very long. As such, he changed schools frequently, all so they could remain afloat monetarily. He worked as a homicide detective for some time, during which he was stabbed, and eventually left it behind. He works with the FBI as a teacher at their Academy and is given the title of Special Investigator whenever he goes into the field, not quite filling out the criteria needed for the title of Special Agent Will Graham.

(Please see more on Will’s career in the final notes section!)

Because of Will’s “empathy disorder” that lets him see things through the minds and eyes of serial killers, he gets called out into the field. Since he hasn’t quite passed the psychological criteria for being a certified agent, the man who calls him out into it needs something to make sure he can sleep soundly with Will out there, and thus Will ends up meeting Hannibal Lecter. Not only is he a reputable doctor in his field, he’s also friends with Alana Bloom (who calls Will her own friend), and he would be better suited for Will. No personal bias or friendship to tie them together and make things more difficult, strictly unofficial doctor and patient.

At least, that’s how it started.

The first killer Will was sent to track down and investigate after staying in the classroom was one going by the name of the Minnesota Shrike who had been killing young women who had a similar look. He’s not on the case very long before he happens across the Shrike, Hannibal Lecter in tow behind him, and not long after he’d found a young woman’s body set up to look like the Shrike had done it. He finds the Garret Jacob Hobbs holding a knife to his daughter’s throat after having left Mrs. Hobbs on the porch (her throat slit, she had bled to death with nothing that could stop it), and shoots him dead as soon as he drags the knife across Abigail’s throat, too. He didn’t just shoot him once or twice, but until the cartridge is completely empty. Panicking, he sees Hobbs talking to him despite being quite dead already, and attempts to stifle the bleeding coming from Abigail’s neck. He’s in too poor a state to do the job well, and so Hannibal Lecter comes in to stifle the bleeding and save her life.

Just like that, Will and Hannibal go from unofficial doctor and patient to two men bound by a series of unfortunate events and simultaneously come away with “a surrogate daughter.”

Hannibal stamps Will as stable enough for field work to set Jack Crawford’s mind at ease so he and Will can “have conversations” and not worry about anything else. Will’s against it, claims that therapy won’t work on him, is told that it won’t work because he won’t let it work, but eventually Hannibal becomes something other than his unofficial therapist. He becomes the person Will can rely on no matter what, for advice or a meal or whatever else he might need. Hannibal begins to use the word “friend” about how he thinks of Will, and though he never returns it, it seems that Hannibal is the closest thing to a friend Will is ever going to get.

Alana Bloom insists that she is Will’s friend, but he’d like her to be more than that. She says she has feelings for him, but considering the way he works and the way she works, it wouldn’t be good for either of them. He attempts to dismiss that, but she’s firm in it and explains it as kindly as she can (as kindly as telling anyone that the other party likes them in that way but can’t be with them however badly they might want to ever could). He thinks of her highly, and when he finds out that an escaped serial killer probably has made his way to her house, he goes there on his own with a gun to take care of it. He doesn’t just go on his own, but he goes sick and fevered and just after having a seizure. Alana and he may not be compatible romantically, and they may disagree on points of that, but he still cares for her deeply and cannot stand the idea that anyone might do her harm.

As the series progresses, Will proves that he is not stable enough for field work. Each new killer and set of victims is absorbed like a sponge, his conversations with Hannibal grow more intense and personal, and he ends up being more than unstable. He has hallucinations, he has periods of time where he blacks out and doesn’t remember what he was doing or where he was, he has nightmares, fevers, and even seizures. He confesses that sometimes that he felt he was so close to Garret Jacob Hobbs they did the same things at the same time (brushing his teeth, eating, showering, normal things) despite him being very much dead. He sees Hobbs’ corpse as he shot him both waking and dreaming, watching him do his thing, in the hole of another victim, coming at him on the firing range. Hannibal says he cares about him as a friend and implies he’s worried that Will would lose time and hurt not only himself, but also wake up to see he’s done murders of his own and never would have had he not been pushed by Jack Crawford and refused to quit. He goes so far as to later implant that looking for something physically wrong with him is fine, but if it’s proved there is nothing happening in his body that would impact him so much, he must accept that he has mental illness and find a way to combat it.

For a man who collects the emotions and thoughts and fears of the deranged, that’s a terrifying thought.

While Will is struggling to keep his mind together, he and Hannibal both visit Abigail Hobbs as she stays in a psychiatric facility to help her cope with the horror of her father’s crimes, the loss of her parents, and what is going to be said about her role in it. Will tries to be helpful and someone she can rely on, but Hannibal is the one she becomes dependent on for very good reason. Will tries but grows sicker as time progresses, his attempts to relate or provide insight aren’t always done well, and compared to Hannibal? Everyone would pale as a pillar of support. He does want the best for her, but as he begins to lose control of himself, he can’t provide it. She runs to Hannibal when she leaves the hospital, shares secrets that never reach Will’s ears until it’s too late, and puts her trust in the wrong people.

The wrong people (other than Hannibal) being one journalist by the name of Freddie Lounds who writes on grizzly murders and the murderers behind them for her website, Tattlecrime.com. She latches onto Will’s unique way of working, insisting later that he can understand the way insane people think because he is insane himself. Ruthless in her desire for a juicy story, she makes no attempt to hide what she thinks of Will, calling him insane right in front of Abigail and reminding him that his own career attracts psychopaths in front of Jack Crawford and Alana Bloom. Even being threatened with incarceration doesn’t stop her from talking about Will. She goes so far as to say that she’s worked with serial killers long enough to know one when she sees one, and that she sees something in Will that gives them all away, which she says to Abigail when it’s just the two of them. Freddie wants to write a book about Abigail’s father, and although Will and Hannibal both protest it, it seems her surrogate fathers have little sway, Abigail going so far as to tell Will that just because he killed her father doesn’t mean he gets to be him.

Try as he might to be a good influence (or, at least, not a bad one), he fails horribly. He flies her out to her old house where she confesses that she was involved in her father’s murders, something Will had been arguing against with Jack Crawford. She confesses it, tells him that she told Hannibal, and he hallucinates himself picking her up and impaling her on the antlers of the Shrike’s cabin. It’s only a hallucination, but it rattles him so badly that his last words to Abigail are cruel, he loses time again, and comes back to on the plane.

He loses time, he loses Abigail, and he loses his freedom.

There wasn’t just one body found mimicking the Shrike, but another one after he died. They had never managed to catch whoever it was and had moved onto to other cases, but Will still remembered them, the two committed by who they called the Copycat. When Will is recommended a neurosurgeon by Hannibal (and one of Hannibal’s old friends), it’s found out that he has encephalitis, but the news never reaches anyone other than Hannibal. There’s not much time for him to confess, either, because Will soon finds said doctor dead in his office, head nearly dislocated at the jaw in a manner similar to the killer he’d been hunting, a young woman named Georgia Madchen. Suffering from her own mental afflictions, she’s found under his bed and put into an oxygen chamber to recover from her own injuries as a trial looms on the horizon, and it’s not long after Will visits her that said chamber turns from oxygen to fire and she’s burned alive. Will refuses to believe that she killed herself when a bit of a comb is found with her (a spark from her combing her hair would cause a fire accidentally), and connects her death and the death of his doctor back to the Copycat in ways he cannot explain and make sense to no one, especially not Jack Crawford. Hannibal tells him he’s venturing into the paranoid, Will refuses to believe him, and after he forgets his true last image of Abigail Hobbs is when it all comes together.

Hannibal had been the Copycat (and doing other murders on the side because it’s important to stay busy) all along, had taken evidence from each victim and worked it in a way to frame Will, and had gone so far as to not only kill Abigail and put her blood on his hands, but to force one of her ears down his throat. All the time that Hannibal had been offering himself as someone Will could rely on (not just Will, but everyone else he had closer contact with), he’d been working towards an opportunity to put him behind bars. Will hadn’t done something to deserve it, hadn’t run over Hannibal’s dog or pissed in his cereal or anything of the sort. Will had simply been who he was and Hannibal had an overwhelming curiosity about what he would do in certain situations. Instead of throwing him into a ball pit at a kid’s playground, he thought it more appropriate to throw him into a hospital for the criminally insane with mounds of evidence that point to Will and only Will being the guilty party, just to see what he would do. To see what he do in reaction to the arrest, what he would do if/when he found out Hannibal was behind it, how to manipulate him into believing Hannibal was the innocent man everyone else thought he was…what else are friends for if not indulging each other’s murderous and life-ruining curiosities?

Right?

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 let himself 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 begins 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.

In order to save lives, Will has to let some go, too. To catch a killer, they end up provoking him, which means more innocent lives will be taken. Sometimes the evidence they have isn’t enough, and the only way to get more is for other people to die, often in terrible ways. He works to save lives but knows lives will be taken in the process, which is an unsettling thought. Sacrifice a few for the greater good isn’t something he likes, but it’s something that has to happen. Knowing it doesn’t make it any better, and when he comments on how they’ll find something more when another body drops, it’s clear that he’s not at all a fan of how it has to play out.

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.

By the time Will sees Hannibal as the monster he is (not fully, not just yet, but still a monster nonetheless), it’s too late. He’s put away for crimes Hannibal committed, but that cannot be the end. The idea that he could have “seen” Hannibal for what he was before is ridiculous, because part of Hannibal is a person suit stitched so tightly no one can see through it, not just Will. No one had suspicious about Hannibal before Will, and now he’s the only one who can really act on them, and he knows as much. Hannibal put him away; Will’s going to return the favor. 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 or the others he killed along the way. Even though he hasn’t yet realized that Hannibal is much worse than the Copycat, the Chesapeake Ripper, he’s still determined to see to him taken off the streets. He’ll do it because as long as Hannibal is out in the world, people are dying. As long as Will is locked away 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. The work he does causes damage and always has, but he has a spirit of determination to him that makes it impossible to stop. When asked if he’s broken, he counters it with the point that no one can do what he can, broken or not. Driven to the point where he wound up being considered insane, having watched his whole world fall apart, seeing all those people who were not quite friends but as close to it as he could believe him a killer while the real one is out there still chummy with them? That determination is much fiercer. He’s not broken. A mug turned up hot enough to break or shatter, definitely. He won’t, though, not in the way that he’s truly broken. That mug will end up chipped, with dents, maybe needing the handle glued back on, but Hannibal isn’t fooling him anymore.

Just like Hannibal once made sure that the man accused of being the Chesapeake Ripper wasn’t him and that everyone knew it, Will is not only going to make sure everyone knows he’s innocent. He’s going to make sure everyone knows Hannibal is the Ripper and faces punishment for it.

Hannibal once called him the mongoose he’d want under his house when the snakes slither by. Mongooses have the unique ability of being immune and resistant to snake venom and have great success with fighting and killing venomous snakes, most notably cobras. Will has been fighting snakes all along. Faced with the worst of them, a cobra that’s camouflaged himself to appear innocent and trustworthy?

There won’t be any mercy.


POWER: Will has no powers in canon, so any would be because of the City.

Breathing Underwater: Exactly what it sounds like. As soon as he’s submerged in water above his nose, gills sprout on his neck so he can absorb oxygen and stay in it as long as he needs or wants to. There’s a little pain that comes with them opening, akin to paper cuts, but no bleeding.

Night Vision: His night vision is superior, not something that would come from binoculars or anything man-made to help see in the dark, but because of an extra layer of tissue in the eye that humans don’t have (tapetum lucidum). It’s on par with an animal that primarily hunts at night. It’s not something he can hide, same as those animals—if someone were to shine a light on him in the dark, he’d get what’s known as eyeshine, where the eyes light up and glow very noticeably.

Cup Repair: Is a wine glass or teacup broken? Something made to hold a beverage that’s not in a plastic or glass bottle? Did that WORLD’S BEST BOSS coffee mug fall out and hit the floor? Will can fix it! Anything designed to hold a beverage that’s not a plastic or glass bottle (like a beer or cream soda bottle) and ends up destroyed is in good hands with Will. All he has to do is pick it up and focus, and bam. All those shards go flying right back into place and it’s like brand new again. Just the first time, because the next time it breaks, he can’t salvage it completely. There will be a chip or two. The third time, it’ll have another one. A fourth time, it’ll be unfit to use. He tried.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

The idea of breathing underwater was one Will had thought about before. How could he not? He grew up around boats, water, spent his time properly fly fishing. Few things were better than a sunny day with a cool breeze over a quiet, calm creek he could wade right into and stay as long as there was enough light. That was impossible. Or, more accurately, it was where he came from.

Nightmares of him bursting into water and enormous waves threatening to overtake him weren’t enough to keep him away from fishing and the relief and serenity it gave him. Hallucinating it flowing in the crime lab was horrifying, but it wasn’t going to taint one of the few things in his life he could always count on to give him something like peace, however short it might have lasted. He’d thought of leaving the FBI behind to work on boats, to live in a house filled with dogs he’d rescued and would never hurt, and nothing would make that comfortable-seeming life smeared and unappealing.

It was a far cry from a body of water, but it would have to do. He had privacy to test it out and grow familiar with it, which was just what he wanted. He had no reason to come out of with dripping wet clothes. That would come later if he ever had real motivation to use it, but this first time? It was just him and potentially learning about another side of him that he’d never thought possible. No clothes, no glasses, not even a watch, nothing more than Will Graham and a tub filled just enough for his purposes. He didn’t need to go overboard with it and find the floor sopping wet.

There was no fear about it, no hesitation, just Will lowering himself until he was completely submerged and waiting to see what would happen, to feel it. If it wasn’t true, then he’d just pop back out. That wasn’t necessary, because the moment water hit his nose and he wouldn’t be able to take in his own air, he felt a pain on both sides of his neck, sharp enough to make him cringe but quickly dulling into nothing. Gills. Gills like those fish he caught and cooked and ate, alone in his house with those dogs that never asked how his day was or pressed him to do something he didn’t want to do, be someone he wasn’t. Ten, fifteen, thirty seconds passed where he had no need to surface for air, and then he couldn’t remember how long he’d been in the tub. He opened his eyes when he realized the water had finally become cold, and a rare smile that wasn’t at all a grimace crossed his face.

Until a thought crossed his mind: if Will had ever in his life felt like it was too much and decided to end it all, what way would be more peaceful to him than drowning? He didn’t have those urges, didn’t want those urges, and yet there it was. He sat up immediately, ran his hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes, held his breath long enough to feel those gills retreat and take a deep breath.

That would happen, wouldn’t it? One thing that was a miracle and seemed tailored just to him came with a sting of insult to it, and Will noticed it just as he thought of it as a good thing.

The sound of a dog barking broke him out of it. There was that, at least, that one good thing that could never be ruined.

Perhaps a man’s truest companion would always be a dog.