app / drift fleet

[versusnurture]

“ ‏Cᴀᴘᴛᴏʀ ʙᴏɴᴅɪɴɢ. Yᴏᴜ ʙᴏɴᴅ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴀᴘᴛᴏʀ, ʏᴏᴜ sᴜʀᴠɪᴠᴇ. Yᴏᴜ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ, ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʙʀᴇᴀᴋғᴀsᴛ. ”



content warning; cannibalism, brainwashing, suicide, torture

OUT OF CHARACTER:
Name/Handle: Anne
Contact: porphyrogene
Reference: me. it me.
Other characters: Maladicta, Caesar Zeppeli

IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Abigail Hobbs
Character journal: versusnurture
Series name: NBC's Hannibal
Canon notes: At the end of 1x12 (Relevés), Abigail was brought to the Barge (lastvoyages), where she was imprisoned as an inmate for just over a year. Then she was canon updated to the end of 2x13 (Mizumono), her canon death scene, and she stayed on the Barge for nine more months until she graduated in May of 2015. After this, she went back to her home world in order to kill Hannibal Lecter, then began to settle into a semi-normal life. It is one year after her graduation that I'd like to pull her to the Fleet.

Species: Baseline human!

History: Canon history! But let's break it down a little bit.

➵ HANNIBAL ( SEASON ONE ) ➵

At the beginning of Hannibal, Abigail Hobbs was the 18-year-old daughter of Garret Jacob Hobbs, a serial killer with the public moniker of the Minnesota Shrike with a penchant for killing young girls who looked very similar to his daughter. He took Abigail with him on his "hunting trips", targeting girls on tours of college campuses and using Abigail as bait to get information about their homes, habits, and patterns of behavior, so that he could later kill them, eat them, and use all parts of their body as utensils, pillow stuffing, who knows what else.

Hobbs was eventually apprehended by the crack team of Will Graham, a nervous kind of dude, and Hannibal Lecter, a pristine gentleman cannibal. In the process, Hobbs killed his wife by cutting her throat and also cut Abigail's throat, although not fatally. Then Will shot the mess out of him. Abigail lay in a coma for a few days, and then, once she woke, was placed under the guardianship of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter and the psychological care of Dr. Alana Bloom. She was placed in the Port Haven Psychiatric Facility, a facility that must have had the worst security of any psychiatric hospital in the world ever, because she escaped with alarming frequency. At one point, because she was a suspected accomplice in her father's crimes, she was brought back to her home in Minnesota to see if she could remember anything. During this trip, she was accosted twice by the brother of a suspected victim, Nicholas Boyle. The second time she encountered him, she gutted him hip to sternum, and he absolutely and immediately died. She was found in shock by Hannibal Lecter, who encouraged her to hide the body and keep the murder a secret between the two of them. It was shortly after this that Abigail began to unravel Hannibal's secrets and, in turn, share her own with him. Which was a terrible idea, because he was grooming her to be his surrogate murder daughter, and really, how many cannibal dads do you need?

After a lot of brainwashing and a lot of manipulation by a lot of adults who really should have known better, Abigail was brought by Will back to the cabin in Minnesota where her father killed and butchered his victims. Will put the pieces together that Abigail was her father's accomplice; this knowledge sent him into an encephalitic attack (causing hallucinations) and allowed Abigail to escape to her parents' home . . . where Hannibal was waiting for her. Abigail realized what Hannibal was, and he confessed to being Crazy Cannibal Dad #2 . . . and that was the last we saw of Abigail in season one, except for a bloody swathe across her kitchen floor and a severed ear Will spit up in the sink.

➵ THE LAST VOYAGES ( JULY 2013 - JULY 2014 ) ➵

Abigail arrived on the intergalactic space prison known simply as the Barge on July 22, 2013, having been pulled from her near-death experience (or, as she assumed it to be, her death) to serve as an inmate until her redemption and subsequent graduation to warden status and the ability to leave the Barge. For the first period of her stay on board, Abigail pretended to be very vulnerable and frightened, gathering nurturing adults (especially men, especially paternal surrogates) to act on her behalf. During this time, Hannibal Lecter also arrived on board as an inmate, and she began a ruse that he encouraged, calling him her father, Garret Jacob Hobbs.

She was quickly paired with Ben, a transgenic and former inmate-turned-warden, whose experiences with brainwashing made him a good match to deal with some of her more serious psychological issues. She resisted his authority for a brief period, but they quickly settled into a close and trusting relationship in which Ben gave her the space to make mistakes and learn from them. However, her close proximity to Hannibal quickly started causing problems, especially since no one but she and Ben knew exactly what he was. Hannibal gained access to the Barge kitchens and eventually killed several people and fed them to the Barge in secret; he also fed Abigail the same dishes, with her knowledge and coerced consent. After this, Hannibal reintroduced himself as himself, and Abigail was shocked at the community's support of her even though she played a role in his crimes. She began to create a support network of both wardens and inmates, including Harvey Dent, Elena Gilbert, Arkin O'Brien, and others.

It was shortly after Hannibal's killing spree that Abigail began talking to Harvey, among others, about becoming her own person - neither the innocent that her father and Will Graham pictured her as, nor the superhuman monster that Hannibal wanted to create in his image. She gradually came to the conclusion that she would like to try being a human monster, not Hannibal's emotionless and superior killer, but a killer motivation by emotion and human feeling. So she conducted an experiment in which she killed one man (who, not coincidentally, reminded her very much of Will Graham) and attempted to kill another. She was, of course, caught and punished, but was very surprised not only by Ben's continued support and defense of her but by her own shocked and pained response to her own actions. Further, Hannibal confronted her about her choice to kill surrogates instead of him, and she was forced to face the fact that she was still highly psychologically dependent on him despite her desire to be independent and create herself as a new being.

Abigail continued to make gradual, steady progress, learning to trust people slowly without manipulating them. Her greatest allies remained Ben, Elena, and Harvey, although she slowly began to depend on others as well, in particular Dillon Cole and Derek Powers. She also began to reach out for help from the Barge community at large. She tried to declare independence from Hannibal in fits and starts, but was often drawn back into his orbit despite her best efforts.

One crucial Barge event during this period was the intrusion of the Mirror Barge into the standard-flavor Barge's reality. The Mirror Barge was a version of the Barge in which wardens were corrupting influences on inmates, who could only graduate once they became capable of evil acts. On this version of the Barge, Abigail was still paired with Ben, but Ben was a religious fanatic serial killer who regularly allowed other wardens to hurt Abigail in an effort to push her towards graduation. At the end of this event, Abigail requested that another character kill her in an effort to get away from the pain both of the regular Barge and the Mirror Barge. However, she later regrets this choice after being revived on the regular Barge, because her near-death at Hannibal's hands was, by her perception, an intimate and loving experience, which her assisted suicide was not. In the wake of this, she sought Hannibal out again, looking for his insight on death and his support in her grief.

One of Abigail's most crucial areas of growth on the Barge was her increasing tendency not to hide her scars, physical or metaphorical. Her increasing willingness to discuss her traumatic experiences was mirrored by her deliberate display of the scar at her neck and, after her canon update, of her missing ear. However, as she was beginning to blossom and trust herself on the Barge, she disappeared for a really godawful canon update.

➵ HANNIBAL ( SEASON TWO ) ➵

Abigail's whereabouts and activities during Season Two of Hannibal are unfortunately poorly-documented by the show. The facts we know, however, are these: Hannibal did not kill Abigail at the end of Season One. Instead, he cut off her ear in a (successful) effort to frame Will Graham for her murder and then faked her death. Then he spirited her away to an unknown location for several months.

Here is what is implied to have happened: Abigail was kept in isolation and sensory deprivation for a period of weeks, in order to complete the brainwashing process. Then Hannibal moved her to his house (possibly his basement - there is an implication that Beverly Katz may have seen her before her death). Hannibal trained Abigail for the eventuality that he, she, and Will Graham would escape the country together for Europe, where presumably they could all commit as many murders as they liked unapprehended (because police don't exist in Europe? Okay, Hannibal).

In the season finale, Abigail is revealed during the climactic showdown, coming out of the shadows ready to push Alana Bloom, her former psychiatrist, out a window to her near-death. She then rejoins Hannibal and Will in the kitchen, revealing to Will that she "didn't know what to do, so [she] did what [Hannibal] told [her]," an obvious reference to Hannibal's brainwashing. Will rejects Hannibal's proposal of escape, and so Hannibal cuts Abigail's throat. At no point does Abigail show any sign of struggle.

➵ THE LAST VOYAGES ( AUGUST 2014 - MAY 2015 ) ➵

Abigail arrived on the Barge for the second time with temporary amnesia. She didn't remember the Barge at all, and in her panicked post-death state, her first act was to stab her warden in the gut when he tried to calm her down. Thankfully, transgenics are made of strong stuff and Ben was fine, but it took Abigail a good while to get re-acclimated to the Barge and to the presence of Will Graham, who had been taken on as an inmate. She was increasingly vulnerable to Hannibal in the wake of her more intensive brainwashing, but she was honest with a few people, including Ben, about what had happened while she was at home, and they did their best to bolster her and allow her to make her own choices while keeping her safe.

Slowly, she began engaging in recreational activities again, expanding her social circle despite Hannibal's presence. Will was only on board for a brief time, and she grieved when he left, but his disappearance also allowed her to begin to process her anger towards him, as a surrogate father figure, as her father's murderer, and as someone who failed to protect her from Hannibal.

In October of 2014, the Mirror Barge once again crossed paths with the other Barge. This time, Abigail was replaced by her mirror-warden counterpart, a gleeful murderer of men in the vein of Will Graham. In the aftermath of the Mirror Barge's destruction once and for all, Abigail came to the firm conclusion that she didn't want to be a monster, human or otherwise.

In November of 2014, Hannibal Lecter disappeared from the Barge. Abigail struggled with feelings both of relief and loss, but allowed herself to mourn at the same time as she began exploring what futures might be available to her in a life she might build after the Barge. It was at this time that she began meeting with Dr. Hugh Cambridge, a warden and psychiatrist on board, who helped her initiate the process of professionally unpacking her trauma.

After an accidental excursion into the haunted castle of Karazhan, a number of Barge passengers became affected by mysterious ailments. Abigail was infected with hallucinations and paranoia, and she began to see her father everywhere. By this point, she was equipped with the tools - from Ben, from Cambridge, and from the rest of her support system - that she was able to at least start thinking about the effect that her father had on her life, how he had attempted to keep her in childhood by holding her in his power, and what it might mean for her to grow past that control and become her own person.

On May 12, 2015, Abigail openly confronted an act of inmate abuse by a warden, and by taking control of her own voice and standing up in defense of another without using manipulation or violence, she graduated. Her graduation was triumphant, but also purposeful: she knew that her place wasn't to stay on the Barge and become a warden, but to return home and do the one thing that the police and the FBI and even Will Graham couldn't do.

She had to eliminate Hannibal Lecter.

➵ HANNIBAL ( DIVERGENT SEASON THREE ) ➵

With a bank account full of the proceeds from the sale of Arkin O'Brien's massive ruby, Abigail sailed into Season Three of Hannibal and proceeded to wreck continuity. She allied herself with Alana Bloom during the time she needed to plan her attack, and then took off for Italy, where Hannibal was hiding with Bedelia du Maurier. With her she took a book-sized file full of Hannibal Lecter's crimes; once she got to Italy, she bought a gun and went on the hunt.

The key was not to get caught up in the game. That was where she'd gotten hung up before, and where Hannibal was likely to get up. If it came down to a battle of wits, Abigail knew she would lose, simply because Hannibal wouldn't allow his emotion to get in the way of his plans. So instead of engaging - instead of speaking with him or even letting him know she was in town - she shot him through the window of his apartment, left the file and the gun outside, fled to the border, and bribed her way through customs into Switzerland. Her plan was to use the leftover money to flee back to America and reconstruct her identity there - but shortly after her arrival in Geneva, her bedroom turned into the Marsiva, and she figured, well, why the hell not, after all of this.

She doesn't know what she expected.

Personality:

➵ CANON. ➵

Abigail Hobbs is not actually a fractured person. She knows pretty well who she is and what her place in life was, at least up until the tumultuous death of her father, Garret Jacob Hobbs, also known as the Minnesota Shrike. However, she often seems frail, fractured, and weak. This is because she chooses to portray herself as weak to varying degrees - because, at her core, Abigail is just as manipulative as her father was, though for very different reasons.

Highly intelligent as well as highly manipulative, Abigail continues to use her father's training as a "lure" - bait for the girls he intended to kill - in order to put on various masks that fit each interpersonal relationship to her purposes. For example, she is sweet, frightened, and distant when she speaks to her assigned psychiatrist, Alana Bloom; intense but vulnerable with her father's killer, Will Graham; and crafty, testing, but mostly honest with her new father figure, Hannibal Lecter. She commits to these masks flawlessly, without a slip, and seems to delight in perplexing those she interacts with - how can one girl be so many different people at once?

The answer is, because it's to her advantage, so she makes it happen. Abigail has three primary reasons for manipulating people in the way described above. First, she will sometimes manipulate people for manipulation's sake. She has an intense curiosity about people and what they will do when pushed in this or that specific way. Although this is to a much lesser extent than Hannibal, there is an unmistakable air of playful curiosity when she attempts to manipulate certain people, a sort of impish, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-this attitude.

Another reason she manipulates people is for self-defense. By her reasoning, if others can't tell which version of her is the "real" one, they can't hurt her. Admittedly this is both a faulty theory and one that has canonically been proven false (thanks Hannibal), but she still uses this kind of smoke-and-mirrors false-self act to confuse those around her and escape their scrutiny.

The third reason she manipulates people is to maintain control. In the course of her life, in particular the last six months, all control has been wrested from her hands. She can't exert control on other people physically, she's not quite clever enough to play the kinds of mindgames that Hannibal does, but she can change the way that others perceive her by making herself seem like someone she's not. For example, if she acts weak, she will be underestimated. This controls not only the other person's perceptions of her, but to some extent their actions.

Abigail's trauma history obviously affects her thoughts and actions in a major way. She has a history not only of emotional abuse and manipulation by her father and surrogate father figure, but her father forced her to lure in and butcher a slew of girls who looked just like her, then eat their flesh. Not only that, but she had to do so in the knowledge that they were stand-ins for her, that he was killing them so he wouldn't have to kill her. This experience was so damaging to her that she blocked out the majority of the related memories, which only returned in bits and pieces after her father's death. Her trauma was further manipulated by Hannibal, who knew an interesting psyche when he saw it and redirected her confused emotional attachment to her father to himself via psychic driving and hallucinogenics.

It should be noted that Abigail is entirely conflicted on the nature of family. She grieves her father, but she doesn't entirely blame Will for killing him; she thinks her father is an evil man, but loves him anyway and is automatically drawn to Hannibal, who is much like him in many way; she mourns her mother's death in an abstract way, but seems almost numb to the reality of it. It's safe to say that Abigail's existence as part of a murder family was normalized enough during Garret Jacob Hobbs's life that she's uncertain how to grieve for, think about, or move on from her family in an age- and situation-appropriate way.

Which, again, was a sweet opportunity for Hannibal. He was able to isolate her fear of family, expertly manipulate her so that she felt she could trust only him, and position himself deliberately as a father figure. While Abigail wanted in a major way to separate herself from the family that had been so damaging to her, she just couldn't entirely, and so just switch her emotional dependency and vulnerability from Garret Jacob Hobbs to Hannibal.

Abigail considers herself to be culpable for her father's crimes. Since she was an accomplice, she feels an incredible, inescapable, and haunting feeling of guilt - which is legitimate, except for the fact that she tries to either a) manipulate others by utilizing said guilt as a wepon or b) manipulate others by pretending not to feel guilty at all. Additionally, her guilt often shows itself as a paralyzing fear of getting caught (which, again, is exacerbated by Hannibal's influence). She wants to cover up any and all sins related to her father's crimes, to the extent that she'll hurt people who threaten to blow that cover. This paralyzing fear also causes her to make snap decisions, often violent and/or just really not good decisions, such as gutting Nicholas Boyle. While Boyle's death was at least partially self-defense, it was also based on intense fear of being vulnerable again, being forced to do things as bad as what her father used her for, or worse.

In sum: Abigail's greatest fear is being helpless and vulnerable, a fear that comes full circle when Hannibal proves himself not to be a support, but another great manipulator. This is the ultimate thing that Hannibal takes from her - not her life, but her power and her agency.

Which brings us to the fact that murder makes Abigail feel powerful. Although she does feel incredibly guilty about it, she was basically saving her own life in helping to kill all those girls, because if she didn't, her father would kill her. Therefore she associates murder, paradoxically, with self-defense and with life. Violence and even murder are ways in which Abigail can keep herself safe - one of the very few guaranteed ways she can keep herself safe. Because even if she's not the biggest or the strongest or the smartest or the meanest, if you kill someone? They don't fuck with you again.

➵ THE LAST VOYAGES. ➵

Abigail didn't change at her core during her time on the Barge. Less than being transformed, she was given an opportunity to heal, to take space away from the damaging environment and the manipulative people waiting for her at home to learn how to survive on her own, without having to resort to desperate measures unless she wanted to. She came to the Barge deeply traumatized by almost every authority figure in her life thus far, her maturation halted by a father unwilling to let her grow into an adult and hampered further by various adults who chose to use her as a pawn or mold her into their image of her rather than letting her be herself. She also had to confront her issues with hypervigilance, manipulation, and mistrust.

Perhaps what Abigail got most out of the Barge was an ability to use her own discretion in deciding how to act, rather than lashing out defensively as she did to Nicholas Boyle. Admittedly she got to this point through a seriously dangerous method of trial and error, as when she experimented with murder by actually committing a murder. However, this did end up working. She learned that not only does she have a conscience - that she is not a monster - but that she has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and she is perfectly capable of judging when someone deserves her mercy and when someone is trying to manipulate or hurt her.

A lot of damage had to be undone in order for Abigail to be able to stand on her own two feet. The crimes that her father and Hannibal forced her to commit, as well as the trauma of being idealized and then rejected by Will Graham, stigmatized by the FBI and the news media, and stripped of all her physical possessions and left without restitution, all left Abigail completely incapable of entering the adult world capably and competently. She needed to process her grief and trauma, learn coping skills, and re-develop her own empathy in the company of a strong support network.

In the end, she came out the other side of her Barge experience more self-aware and in control. She is still ruthless, still manipulative when she needs to be, and still a very dangerous person - but she doesn't stand for injustice against herself or against those she claims as hers. In fact, one of the greatest strengths she's drawn from her Barge experience is the ability to address injustice on both a large and small scale in a way that she wasn't able to when she was under her father's thumb. A good example of this is the act of speaking out that she engaged in shortly before her graduation: a warden used transformation of an inmate into an animal as a punishment, and Abigail spoke out fervently against it, in a way that she wouldn't have been able to do before her time as an inmate. Her supports on the Barge molded her not only into a capable, independent adult, but a young woman with the savvy, intelligence, and self-control of a politican, or a very dangerous journalist.

Abilities: Abigail is 100% human, with no superpowers whatsoever! However, she does have a number of learned skills. She excels at fighting with firearms (rifles and semi-automatics), knives, and hand-to-hand. She's also trained in survival skills (including first aid), trapping, and hunting. During her time with Hannibal, she learned some basic anatomy and very minor surgery.

Augment Skillset: Communications!

Sample: TLV: Abigail learns she's graduated. Note: I chose this sample for two reasons. One, it demonstrates her close relationship with her warden, her primary caretaker and supervisor during her years on the Barge; two, it demonstrates a range of emotion and reaction to an unusual and lifechanging event, so hopefully it will give y'all all you need to see! If you'd like more samples, though, just let me know.

Additional Notes: Abigail's application for The Last Voyages is here! There's some duplicate information here, but it might provide some useful information both about Abigail and about the somewhat unusual setting of TLV. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to clarify Abigail's CRAU journey!