[player nick / name]: Caru

[series]: Godchild
[character]: Cain Hargreaves

[character history / background]: A bit thin, but serviceable

[character personality]:

An elegant young gentleman--and an earl besides. Cain is seventeen in his canon, but he will, of course, be aged to eighteen in the game. There will be no noticable physical differences when he is aged up, and it's doubtful that Cain will even notice that he's older. Cain is slender, and perhaps somewhat smaller than average. There is no canon height or weight given for him, but he seems to be around 5 feet, 6 inches tall, maybe a little taller.

In appearance, he's what one might call painfully beautiful. Characters in canon say he looks like a religious painting or like a dark angel, and he has, with success, disguised himself as a woman more than once. His hair is dark, like his father's (and his aunt's/mother's, though he only saw her after it had gone white with distress), and his eyes would be green like his father's too, if they weren't tinted and flecked with gold. His golden eyes are one of his most recognizable features, but Cain hates the color of his eyes, as it's a reminder of his cursed existence and his incestuous parentage. Unfortunately for him, his eyes are also quite striking and more than a few characters remark on them.

More significant than his eyes, though, are the scars that lace his back from his father's nightly ritual whippings. From about the age of four to about the age of ten, his father would literally whip him in a ritual intended to cleanse him of his sins--whatever sins his father saw in him, at least. No one is allowed to see these scars except for Riff. And no one is allowed to touch these scars except for Riff. Cain will never admit to them and will never reveal them, and he's clever enough to know how to hide them.

But he denies that past to all appearances. He dresses elegantly, if slightly darkly, in long coats and top hats, as suits his Victorian world. He also wears a small black earring in his left ear--it's a piece of a stone he found in his father's things. He had it made into an earring, and Riff is the one who pierced his ear. The sight of it, he says, will remind him of the pain of it and what he's endured to come to where he is now (there's more to the stone than that, but...). He seems young for his position sometimes, but he carries it extremely well.

Cain is charming. This is his primary persona. He is charming, cool, flirtatious, witty, aristocratic, fond of parties and balls, the one standing in the corner catching everyone's eye... But he also exudes an air of the Byronic hero: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He has a Reputation as an eccentric for his and his family's poison collection and as a playboy for all the women he's been with and, if he's not proud of it, he's content with it. But all of this has a darker edge to it. His personality has a bite to it. He's as quick to be cruel in his flirtations as to be charming. He's fond of "difficult women" and is happy pushing them to their emotional limits. They may smack him with their fans, but he knows they love him and will keep coming back to him. He's not wantonly cruel or sadistic, but he is and can be cruel. At his best, he comes across as darkly charming and mysterious.

And yet, at the same time, he can be remarkably logical and deductive. In several stories, he acts as kind of Sherlock Holmes (with Riff standing in for Watson). The crimes are inevitably shocking and twisted, and Cain seems not to bat an eye. A girl who kills people and turns them into dolls, a woman set on collecting the eyes of others for an arcane ritual to make her beautiful again. He's angered by them, perhaps horrified by them, but he's cool in the face of them. It's especially bad (and especially common) when they're committed by DELILAH, Cain's father's organization devoted to black magic and inhuman medical experiments. It's often Cain's half-brother, Jezebel, who commits these crimes too--cutting out eyes or murdering without concern. So Cain seeks to set things to rights--especially if it's Merryweather, his sister, who's gotten herself caught in the middle of something. But his way of setting things to rights...well...

But this coolness and charm is all a cover for a more turbulent background and mind. And, it's little wonder that he is as dark as he is. His father kept him a prisoner in their house and beat him nightly to "cleanse his sins". If that dark charm of his seems a little twisted, that's probably because it is. He'll use people, drive towards his own ends, break the law occasionally, even murder, but driving this is a sense of justice, if slightly tinged and slightly twisted itself.

More often than he'll ever admit, Cain has acted as kind of Angel of Death or Angel of Revenge. He'll take justice into his own hands, though not directly. If a man is guilty of a crime and happens to die, what fault falls on Cain for that? As one character says, "An angel of death must have cursed him." A cup of tea with some ink in it looks like the poison a man used on his brother--it's only ink, but in his panic, he drives off a cliff and what a shame it is. But justice is done. It's a matter of flushing out the crime. How useful that Cain can apply his Sherlockian logic to it all. He sees himself as something like a "scourge", a medieval idea of someone damned but sent to bring justice and cleanse the sins of others with impunity to his actions because he is already damned. He never doubts that what he does is proper, though he knows it's not within the law. He acts on behalf of others, not out of kindness or sympathy as much as out of revenge on their behalf. Likely, this stems from his own wants for revenge.

He's emotional, though not expressively. He dislikes appearing vulnerable and, yet again, it's only with Riff that he can be more honest in terms of his emotions. That is the kind of intimacy and trust he has with Riff: it is only with Riff that he will say what he means or feels. He only really mourns the deaths of two lovers with Riff. He's desperate and frantic when he loses Riff. Riff looks after him, takes care of him, makes his tea, ties his shoelaces. Is it love? Probably not. But it is devotion and needing. He does not cry and has not cried since he was ten years old, when he saw his father (apparently) leap to his death and Riff held him back from jumping after him. Riff, he says, dried up his tears that day. That is how central a presence Riff is to his life. It's only with Riff that he can really be the disturbed teenage boy he really is.

He's affectionate with his younger (half-, later step-) sister, Merryweather, as best he can be. He's not especially overtly affectionate, but his intense protectiveness of her (and Riff too, to some extent) and wanting to provide for her and entertain her do prove how very much she matters to him. She is the last of his immediate family to him. Yes, he has uncles and aunts, but he wants the strength of close blood ties, or something deeper than blood ties.

But blood ties are a messy thing, especially with a father like Alexis and a half-brother like Jezebel.

The deepest, darkest motivation for him of all is vengeance against his father and his father's organization, DELILAH. Between the tortures that his father put him through, the tortures that his father put his mother (his father's sister) through, the tortures his father puts Cain's friends and lovers through, there's more than enough reason to try and stop them. Cain doesn't yet know the full extent of what DELILAH is or does, but he knows his father is their head. He knows that his father is essentially after him, moving very slowly and unstoppably. And the member of that organization he sees the most is, yet again, his half-brother Jezebel. Women he's with die by his father's orders. Friends vanish. Traps are laid for him. It's all by his father's orders. But no one but his father is allowed to kill him, proving Alexis's god-complex in naming him "Cain". It's just important to torment him. And he is tormented. As close as he came to saving a boy, so similar to him, from jumping to his death, he still failed. And his father was there to remind him that Cain cannot save anyone.

It's no wonder, then, that his charm seems a little dark. He really is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The end of volume 5 of Godchild (which is volume 10 in the entire Cain Saga series).

[third person / log sample]:

There was a certain pleasure--call it a perversion if one likes, of course--he could find in moments such as these, in crowds, in the ivory-and-gilt ballrooms of one household aspiring or another in trembling decline. It didn't matter: they were all painted in the same colours, only one would bear more gilt than the other and everyone who really knew already knew who was aspiring and who was declining. Their daughters made it clear if nothing else.

So that enjoyment, as that's another word, that came in such times and places as these, surrounded by a crowd or kept to himself at the side but knowing full well that he was watched, there was an enjoyment in seeing what was unseen or in knowing more than he might say. That was the game.

Cain Hargreaves, they'd say, the young Earl Hargreaves. And then there was a choice of rumour to follow the name. His eccentric collection, the tragedy of his lost fiancee, his youth, his wealth, his peculiar eyes, his family's whispered past. It all depended on the lady (or gentleman, one might as well be honest) and her taste. Those bright flowers and the girls dressed in white, they might whisper in one tone of wealth or horrors. And those ladies who wore more black than was seemly, they might whisper in a very different way of those same horrors.

And he would smile when they glanced his way--he knew what they were saying even if they were too far across the room for him to hear. And that, of course, would set them to whispering again.

But that was only half the game. There was his half yet: the half where he let them believe they knew all his secrets and that they kept them all amongst themselves. But they knew nothing. They knew nothing and only entertained themselves with the same stories that had circulated about his father--and perhaps even his father's father. They knew nothing of the curse he carried in his blood, of the monstrosity of his own parentage, of the torments he endured for nights without end, of why he would never give a woman roses if he could at all help it. They knew only the frayed edges of these truths but they would never know the whole of it.

So he kept his shadows in the shadows of these gilt ballrooms and he turned about lady across the floor (all the better if it infuriated the gentleman with whom she had arrived or perhaps had just danced; he didn't care). He had a reputation, yes, and he did nothing to change it--indeed, he rather cultivated it, and happily. Let them think that they had learned some great secret, some whispered story that he collected poisons. It was true. He wouldn't deny it. Nor did he want to.

Let them follow the wrong trail and let him carry on as he always had. They could whisper amongst themselves and behind fans about poison and poor dead Emmeline Lauterdale, but they would never hear of Meridiana nor of the nightmare of her life and death and life again and death again (at last). They would never hear by whose hands she lived and died. And, indeed, some of these ladies would have met her and the doctor who attended her. Let them forget that. That was a trail for him to follow and him alone.

Besides, it was best that they keep out of his shadow. He'd said the same to Merry and more than once. The shadows that fell on him and that he cast were long and deep; to fall into those shadows was to fall forever. Those he had loved and those who had died were so often the same. And he would not lose Merry as he had lost so many others. Even his uncle--nearly! Uncle Neil was fortunate enough that time. But the next time and the next--because that was his father's way, as he'd learned when Emile had thrown himself from the roof of his house in despair. He couldn't save anyone.

And yet he had: he had saved his uncle, hadn't he? He had lived and he would live.

How strange to stand in the midst of a ballroom, with an open window to his back and the night beyond, and think of the war with his father. And all before him, the young unmarried and hopefuls of the London Season turned and swirled, with ladies spinning about their partners like bright flowers tied to dark stakes. And they had no notion that the spate of fires, the wild purchases of the burned land by the Barabas Company, the shape of those holdings, the disaster so recently in the Precious Garden (well, he'd been on stage there, not that anyone could have recognized him under that wig and cape--really, do pay more attention)--they saw these things in the papers and thought nothing of them beyond what they seemed at the surface. How could they know? How could they bear to know and to go on, twirling in gilt ballrooms, knowing that these fires, these murders, these strange occurances that from time to time shook even the drawing rooms of Society were all orchestrated by his father's hand? That would shatter this fragile illusion they had of Empire and Society.

There was something bittersweet in it all, to know these things of himself and of these conspiratorial happenings but to say nothing--save to Riff, but Riff knew all these things already and would always know them. But it was bittersweet, to hold these things back in a smile as a lady with dark hair and darker eyes finally garnered courage enough to ask him if it was true that there was a serpent in some parts of Africa which would kill a man before he took seven steps.

Of course there was, and he had the poison from its fangs to prove it, but he would only confess to having such a thing to her. And his golden eyes smiled into her dark ones and she toyed with her garnet necklace and he asked her for the next dance. And the lady looked pleased at having had such a secret bestowed on her alone and he entertained ideas about whether she would be the sort to permit a secret encounter later in the evening (though he doubted it at the moment, which was a shame).

But, still, he would dance with her. And she would never know how far the shadows stretched out behind and beyond and over him. She could draw no closer lest the true poison take her. And he didn't care, quite honestly, for he had no real interest in letting her draw closer--not only to save her from the fates that would strike anyone around him, but because his heart had gone out of him long ago.

So they danced and she turned back to her friends with her prize secret and he, perhaps, would retreat again to the curtained places near the windows and let the whole of it turn again until the early morning hours. But he did enjoy it. There were rumours to hear about oneself and rumours to hear about others. Word spreads very fast among such friends as one finds in Society. So, yes, he would entertain himself amidst the tedium--and this was a better party than most. Not least of all because the family giving it had such grand aspirations. He was enjoying himself.

Besides, he thought it must frustrate his father to hear--as he would hear, certainly--that Cain, his son and enemy, was enjoying himself and moving unconcerned amongst the heights of society. Call it boldness, call it his next move. He enjoyed this dance too. It was war. It was a game.

And it was a game that, like so many others, he was certain that he would win.