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[thehobbsgirl]

Name: Rose
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E-Mail: platoapproved@gmail.com
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Character Name: Abigail Hobbs
Series: Hannibal
Timeline: just before episode 1x12
Canon Resource Link: At the Hannibal wiki

Character History

Abigail Hobbs is the only child of Garret Jacob Hobbs, the infamous serial killer known as the "Minnesota Shrike". Over the course of eight months he abducted and murdered eight girls. One - Elise Nichols - he returned to her house upon discovering she had suffered from liver cancer. The others, he butchered and fed to his unwitting wife and daughter. Abigail was applying to colleges at the time all of this was happening, about to leave home and her parents (with whom she was very close) for the first time in her life. However, she was not completely ignorant of her father's doings. Over the years, GJH had taught Abigail to hunt - deer, mostly - and how to butcher. Once she started looking forward to leaving home, he coerced her into helping him select and lure his victims, insisting that he was murdering them so he didn't have to murder her. Each girl looked strikingly similar to Abigail, and attended a college where she had applied. Abigail, terrified for her life and knowing that it was a choice between helping her father murder other girls and being murdered herself, would seek out his chosen victims and speak to them, getting information on where they lived, when they would be alone.

This continued until one morning, her father received a phone call from a mysterious stranger. Upon hanging up, he immediately cut his wife's throat, throwing her out the front of the door to bleed out, and attempted to kill Abigail in the same fashion. He told her not to struggled, and that he would make it all go away. As she fought to get free, Special Agent Will Graham of the FBI and Hannibal Lecter arrived at the house. When GJH cut Abgail's throat, Will shot him ten times, killing him almost immediately. Abigail bled a considerable amount but was rushed to the hospital and survived, though she was in a coma for several days. While she was in her coma, Will Graham saved her life once again from another serial killer who attempted to kidnap her from the hospital with the intent of burying her alive.

Once Abigail woke up, she had to deal with the aftermath, both of her own trauma and her father's crimes. Jack Crawford (head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit in the FBI) believed she might have been complicit in her father's murders. Abigail immediately put her skills to use, showing an aptitude for lying, manipulation, and psychological insight into those around her. She was set upon by mental health professionals (including Alana Bloom) and reporters (including Freddie Lounds) wanting her to give them the scoop and find out how involved she was. Abigail denied any knowledge of her father's murders. Abigail also bonded with the two men who had been there when her father attempted to murder her. Will Graham, she discovered, had found her father by using his unusual (and uncanny) empathy to get into his mindset. Abigail was aware of Will's guilt over murdering her father, and of his feelings of intense paternal affection for her (which sank in by a kind of mental osmosis after all that time trying to think like her father). Abigail and Will, who are both deeply traumatized by the events of that morning, share a strange kind of intimacy, but Abigail also attempts to distance herself from him. She conceals from Will (who never doubts her for a second) that she (albeit very unwillingly) helped her father to kill. She also rebuffs some of his attempts to become a second father figure to her, fearing his similarity to her father and his unmistakable mental instability.

Hannibal, on the other hand, Abigail accepts more readily as a paternal figure. Though both men become her legal guardians, Abigail more readily seeks out Hannibal as a mentor and protector. At some point shortly after she wakes up, Abigail recognizes Hannibal's voice, and realizes he was the man who called her father just before he murdered her mother and attempted to murder her. Will tells her that whoever called is a copycat killer, likely an extremely dangerous psychopath; Hannibal insists the call was an accident that would be easily misinterpreted. Abigail keeps this secret for him, partly because Hannibal is keeping a secret for her. When Abigail returned to her home, a neighbor and friend of hers, Marissa, was murdered in her father's hunting cabin. Signs point to a young man named Nicholas Boyle, who accosts Abigail while she is alone in her house later that day. Abigail, already in a state of extreme emotion from returning to her house and from losing Marissa, runs from Nicholas. When he grabs her, Abigail stabs him in the stomach, killing him. Hannibal, upon seeing what she has done, insists that no one will believe it was self-defense, that she will immediately become a scapegoat for all of her father's crimes. Abigail, who is in a very susceptible state of mind, allows Hannibal to talk her into hiding the body. They concoct a story about him attacking them and running off in the night.

Abigail, now living at the Port Haven Psychiatric Facility, tries to deal with the trauma of her near death, with her mother and father's deaths, with her guilt over helping her father kill and over killing Nicholas Boyle herself. Alana Bloom continues as her therapist, but Abigail also sneaks over the wall of the facility to visit Hannibal now and then. On one occasion he gives her mushrooms, telling her it will be helpful to her recovery process. At some point her family's house is sold, but Abigail won't see any of the money - her father's victims sued for all his assets. Needing money and also wanting to battle the public perception that she was her father's accomplice, Abigail reaches out to Freddie Lounds, asking for her help in writing an autobiographical account of what has happened to her. Though Will and Hannibal are strongly against this plan, Abigail goes ahead with it.

She sneaks out one night and goes to wherever she and Hannibal buried Nicholas Boyle, unearthing his corpse so that it will be discovered. Once it is, Jack Crawford, suspicious of her, brings her in to identify it. Abigail believes she successfully plays surprised victim, saying she's not sad that he's dead but that she had nothing to do with his murder. Hannibal is very angered by this action, saying that it put him at risk as well. Abigail, however, insists that it was better for both of them to get it out of the way. Around this time, Will figures out that Abigail was the one who murdered Nicholas Boyle. He is angered and saddened by this, preferring to think of Abigail as completely innocent and helpless. However, he agrees to keep her secret, and Hannibal's. Soon after this, Abigail confesses to Hannibal that she helped her father lure his victims, and he says that he knew already, but had been waiting for her to tell him. Abigail's breakdown at this time shows a glimpse behind her manipulative mask; she cries and insists that she is a monster for what she has done. Hannibal assures her that he's familiar with monsters, and that she is a victim and a survivor.

The Abigail I will be playing will be taken from a canon point JUST BEFORE the following events:

As Will gets closer on the trail of the real copycat killer (having decided that Nicholas Boyle was framed), he seeks out Abigail's help, bringing her with him to Minnesota. Will, who recently collapsed and was taken to the hospital, is still acting very strangely. Abigail, alarmed by his behavior and trying to deduce whether he is the copycat without being aware of it, missteps and admits that she helped her father kill those 8 girls. Will, enraged, hallucinates that he kills her. Abigail is not necessarily aware of this, but she can see that he is acting erratically and, afraid for her life, leaves him at the cabin.

Meanwhile, at the FBI, conclusive evidence has been found that Abigail was in some ways involved in helping her father catch his victims. Crawford believes Abigail herself is the copycat, and wants her arrested and brought in as soon as she is found. Hannibal is aware of this, and the fact that Abigail knows far too much about him, which she might reveal if questioned while in custody. So, when Abigail leaves the cabin and returns to her old house, Hannibal is waiting for her, right in the spot where her father attempted to kill her. Abigail goes to him in relief but, over the course of their conversation, realizes that he must be the copycat killer, not Will. She also finds out that it was his call that prompted her father to murder her mother and try to murder her, that Hannibal knew he was a killer and alerted him to the fact that he was going to be arrested any moment because he was curious what the man would do. Abigail asks Hannibal how many people he has killed, and he admits to having killed many more people than her father. She asks if he is going to kill her, and he says he is sorry he couldn't protect her in this life.

At this point, there is a gap in the canon. It is 90% certain that Hannibal kills Abigail. A significant amount of her blood is later found on the floor of the kitchen. In addition to this, Will Graham, now back at his home in Virginia, vomits up one of Abigail's ears. He remembers, months later, that Hannibal drugged him, shoved a tube down his throat, and forced the ear into his stomach, as part of a plan to frame Will for her murder, and many others. Soon after the ear incident, Hannibal serves a meal of veal, and the show heavily implies that the meat is Abigail.


Abilities/Special Powers

No supernatural powers or abilities.


Third-Person Sample

The thing Abigail hates the most about Port Haven was the lack of privacy. It isn't as if she isn't capable of keeping her own secrets, of sneaking around within the facility and slipping out whenever she chose. The nurses are underpaid and overworked and, generally, scornful of her. Abigail is convinced that at least a few of them believe she is a murderer. It's something about the way they look at her from the corners of their eyes, how they walk just a bit slower when she's near. Maybe, though, it's just curiosity. She is, after all, the most famous patient there. Abigail isn't sure which would be worse: being avoided because they assume she's a psychopath, or being gawked at because she was the victim of one. Can't win either way.

So, above and beyond the customary surveillance of a place like this, she feels watched. Assessed. Evaluated. At least three times a day she feels the skin on the back of her neck prickle, turns to see someone quickly turning away. Now, any girl would hate being watched all the time. Secrets are a healthy and necessary part of life. But for Abigail it's something more. She remembers, with a nauseating clarity, the way her father's eyes would follow her around. Not only when they were visiting colleges and all the rest of it, but at home. Picking her up from school. When they went hunting. With a little bit of distance, Abigail recognizes that there was something covetous in the way he looked at her. Tyrannical and calculating and loving and possessive, and every time she thinks about it she feels like she needs a shower.

She goes to the city more often than she does to the woods, when she climbs over the wall. In the woods she is alone, but she never feels it. She can hear the echo of another set of feet crunching through the leaves or the new snow, can feel the prickle on the back of her neck as if her dad were still there, waiting patiently as she learned to hunt. But in the city, she feels a blissful freedom. With people all around, no one in particular focuses on her. Oh, there are stray glances, of course. Even a few lingering ones. Yet there's still an anonymity to the interest she feels that is a relief. Abigail goes to bookstores, mostly. Finds a corner to sit in and some piece of trash to read and loses herself for a few hours. It's escapism, pure and simple; and who is more in need of escape? Abigail sets aside her life - all the pain and shame and boredom and confusion and doubt - and lets herself enjoy the boundedness, the simplicity of fiction. She doesn't like unreliable narrators, or surprise endings. Every now and then she shoplifts a book, gets away with it easily. Hard to feel guilty about stealing a heap of pages when you've felt someone's hot blood pouring over your hands as you watched them die.


First-Person Sample

[ The video turns on to reveal a pale-faced young woman with very round, very blue eyes. Her expression is determined, but with an unmistakable fear vibrating just behind the facade of confidence. When she speaks, her voice is tightly controlled, but it shakes and she pauses on multiple occasions to swallow and compose herself before continuing ]

So. From what I can see, looking through these videos, we're all, um. Stuck in some kind of… magic palace. No one seems to know where it is, or- or how we got here.

[ Abigail shifts the video device to her other hand, and the screen briefly showing a flash of her setting: she's sitting on the floor in a candle-lit hallway, one arm wrapped around her curled-up knees. ]

It doesn't seem like it's going to do any good asking how any of that's possible. It's all just- [ She cuts herself off, looking down and away from the video. Abigail chews her bottom lip briefly, and when she speaks up again there is less emotion in her voice; she's become calmly practical ]

I'm going to need a place to stay. Is there some sort of system in place, or administrator who assigns them? What about food?