application ( ruby city )

[versusnurture]

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



content warning; cannibalism, brainwashing, suicide, torture

PLAYER
Name: Anne
Age: 26
Personal Journal: fataler
E-mail: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
AIM/etc: passiones

CHARACTER
Name: Abigail Hobbs
Canon: NBC's Hannibal
Age: 19
Timeline: 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. It's immediately after she successfully does this that I'll pull her to Ruby City.
Items with character at canon point: One journal, one large uncut ruby, one polaroid camera with film, one brown teddy bear, one ring, one boline
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A

Personality:

➵ CANON. ➵

Without a doubt, the first impression Abigail Hobbs gives off is of an intensely fearful young woman. It becomes clear eventually that some of this is an act, an impression she wants to give off — but not all of it is. No, however she wants to seem, underneath all of the layers Abigail is not just scared but terrified, and not just sometimes but almost always. Years of trauma have left her certain that the next disaster is just around the corner, and unless she does something now, right now, it's going to bring her to her knees. At her calmest, she's caustic but nervous; at her most agitated, she's an animal backed into a corner, liable to lash out at anyone who could conceivably be a threat, or even anyone who reminds her of someone who used to be a threat. This makes her simultaneously a very vulnerable and a very dangerous person, unpredictable and seemingly wild, ready to do anything and everything she must in order to survive.

Part of what makes her so dangerous, too, is that she's constantly, almost pathologically curious. Curiosity is frequently depicted in Hannibal as dangerous — Hannibal himself "was curious what would happen" when he manipulated Abigail into murdering Nicholas Boyle, for example — and Abigail's own curiosity is no exception. She could be described as voracious for information, whether about things or (more often) about people. This is in part a survival mechanism, because the more she knows about her situation the less likely it is that something will take her by surprise. On the other hand, it is in no small part a malicious desire to see what makes people tick; in this way she's not terribly dissimilar from Hannibal, their desires to see how a situation will change if tweaked just so springing from the same source. Furthermore, sometimes Abigail's curiosity puts her in danger. Her consistent pushing at Hannibal just goes to show that not every hornet's nest is worth kicking.

Her curiosity doesn't only stem from those twin desires for safety and entertainment, however. It's obvious from Abigail's first visit back to Minnesota with Hannibal, Will, and Alana that she's incredibly intelligent, both academically and intuitively. She has (or, well, had) high academic ambitions, applying to a number of colleges cross-country (and killing girls with her dad along the way), but that's in no way the limit of her intelligence. She's got a great deal of knowledge of the natural world, of hunting techniques, of biology, of psychology — but more than that, she relies on her ability to read people and reflect back what she thinks they want to see in order to get what she wants.

So it is that Abigail's intelligence leads directly into her manipulative tendencies. It's probable that, once again, her instinct to manipulate those around her developed as a survival strategy; she was faced with the reality of her father's desire to kill her and the understanding that if she didn't do what he wanted and be who he wanted, she would certainly die. Even after his death, she doesn't feel safe, and so she continues to manipulate those around her, presenting a slightly different face to everyone she meets. With Alana she's the backtalking, sarcastic teenager, because she anticipates presenting as "normal" will lead to her release from psychiatric hospital; with Will she's the damaged, broken girl in need of a father, because she senses that will put him on her side without question; with Jack, she's the quaking, defiant survivor, because she desperately wants him to believe in her innocence; and with Freddie, she's the savvy, ambitious young woman she believes Freddie sees herself to be. Abigail tailors her self-presentation both to what she wants from the other party and what she believes the other party wants from her, so that she can sail out the other side of the encounter or relationship undamaged and, ideally, with a new ally.

It's worth noting, too, that her manipulation leads more than once to overtly duplicitous behavior. Abigail doesn't have a problem bonding with people as such, but she does have trouble prioritizing other people's safety over her own. As such, she's far more likely to go behind someone else's back when threatened than she is to allow even the threat of harm against her to persist. The best example of this is when she sneaks out and uncovers Nicholas Boyle's corpse from where it had been buried, her greatest act of defiance against Hannibal. When he asks her why she did it, apparently upset and worried about his culpability in the cover-up, she tells him that before she couldn't control when the body was found; now she has, so it's no longer hanging over her. Hannibal's culpability was never a concern for her, not even for a moment. She also has no problem whatsoever throwing Will under the bus to Hannibal, telling him immediately about Will's erratic behavior even though it would likely have tanked Will's career if it had gotten out. A final example, which is still relevant despite being from a later canon point, is when Abigail surprises Alana by still being alive, stunning her with her sudden appearance for just long enough to push her out a window. Abigail is apologetic for this, but she still does it without much hesitation, because it's Alana or her.

The ironic thing, though, is that despite Abigail's intelligence, savvy, and manipulative tendencies, she's still highly manipulable. The reason for this is actually quite simple: she is tired. She's spent so much time fighting to survive, hating herself for what she's had to do to stay alive, trying to figure out why the one person in the world who's supposed to protect her above all else wanted to kill her; she's had so much blood on her hands, and all she wants is someone to trust. But like so many abuse survivors, she gravitates to people like her abuser. Most of all, despite what she might say, she wants a father figure, someone like who her father should have been to her, someone to protect her and listen to her and love her unconditionally. If someone's on the lookout for that craving, it's easy enough to spot — and if you add to that her desperate desire to disclose some of her secrets to someone, anyone, she can trust, it's easy to become that person, too. It just takes a few kind words and a shoulder to cry on, and she'll trust you with her life. Ask Hannibal; it really works!

An enterprising manipulator will also find her a source of constant entertainment, because, as aforementioned, she is incredibly volatile. Trauma, especially consistent exposure to violence and betrayal, have made her quick to snap from low-level fear to homicidal lashing out. At this point, she doesn't understand how to temper that impulse, how to protect herself only far enough that she can get away. Instead, if she's triggered, she's much more likely to do what she did with Nicholas Boyle: gut the offending party quickly but methodically from belly to throat like a fish or, well, let's be honest . . . like a deer. Furthermore, her understanding of power is deeply skewed by her time spent as her father's accomplice. When she was with him, violence against other young women who looked just like her was the only way to keep herself alive; she equated the violence that enabled her survival with power, and psychologically speaking, that association wore down quite a groove in her. After killing Nicholas Boyle, she confesses that it felt good and implies that it was less the action of killing and more the taking of power from another than made the experience worthwhile.

None of this is to say that Abigail doesn't feel guilt for what she's done. On the contrary, she feels an extraordinary amount of guilt. Some of her guilt manifests in a purely pragmatic desire to keep the true nature of her association with her father's crimes under wraps; however, it seeps into her life in countless insidious ways, too, some surprisingly subtle. She has constant nightmares, waking up frequently from dreams in which all of her father's victims sit in group therapy with her, accusing her and claiming that her father should have killed her instead — a belief she occasionally seems to agree with herself. She seems agonized when she sees the word CANNIBALS painted on her house's door during the trip to Minnesota. Most tellingly, with Hannibal, the person she's most honest around, she calls herself a monster when she finally confesses to her culpability in her father's crimes. It's important to note, too, that in some ways she seems to want a do-over. This is part of why she seeks out father figures. There's a strong implication that she believes there was something wrong with her, not her father, and that's why he wanted to kill her; that if she could just try it again with a different person, she could do it better, somehow.

Despite all of this, Abigail is remarkably resilient. If things had gone differently for her — if she hadn't gotten the unlucky dice roll of being noticed by Hannibal Lecter — there's a very high chance that she would have gone on to recover well from her experiences. One of her first priorities after losing everything important to her in her life was reestablishing some financial security; this points to her ability to plan and to look to the future, both crucial when recovering from trauma. Even with Hannibal's influence in her life, she still makes a consistent attempt to pull herself away from the effect her father had on her life, as is most evidenced in her desire to tell "her story" (even if a highly edited version) to the public.

Above all else, Abigail seeks agency. Admittedly she seeks it in the wrong places very often, but that's hardly her fault. She's spent all her life influenced by a man with an unhealthy, obsessive attachment to her, so she doesn't quite understand what's normal and what isn't. Even so, almost everything she does can be traced back in the end to a desire for agency, something she's never had. Certainly she seeks safety first, but even that is an avenue towards autonomy in the end. Her tendency towards manipulation, too, is a sometimes-desperate, sometimes-calculated grab for autonomy; she desires freedom, so she models it, even though most of her models are manipulative in their own right — and she sees her own agency as crucial enough to manipulate others to achieve. Even her need for reassurance from Hannibal is a building block towards her ultimate independence, something she expresses a constant desire for. She wants to get out of the psychiatric hospital. She wants to be financially stable. She wants to have a home again. She wants to tell her story in her words with her lies built in. She wants to define her relationships, all of them, and refuses to let others (especially Will) define them for her. More than anything, she wants to define herself. She wants to be Abigail Hobbs, not the Minnesota Shrike's daughter — and her terrible luck in this endeavor sure as hell doesn't stop her trying.

➵ 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.

Background: 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 . . . then Ruby City . . . which was not in the plan.

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.

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