I think I used to have a voice

User Name/Nick: KaOS
User DW: thiswasatriumph
E-mail: promotedtocondiments [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: none

Character Name: Barry Berkman
Series: Barry
Age: kind of nebulous but I'm guessing somewhere in the realm of mid to late 30s
From When?: towards the end of the season 2 finale

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Barry's a contract killer by trade, and while he's been doing his best to get out of it, nonetheless he's still a pretty damn violent guy by nature. He's given to lashing out with violence when pushed, to something akin to a fugue state where he can commit all kinds of terrible things.
Item: n/a
Arrival: for the purposes of the Barge, in the shoot-out at the stash house one of the Chechans gets in a lucky shot and takes him out before he can leave

Abilities/Powers: Nothing especially superhuman, he's bog-standard human to start. That being said, he's a trained Marine who's kept up with his training since getting discharged and is touted as one of the best contract killers in the business. He's been shown to be able to shoot a man at 700 yards with deadly accuracy and take out multiple targets efficiently with minimal effort and extreme precision. He's good at improvising, and tactics, and more than accomplished at disguising his kills to cover his tracks, either by disposing of or concealing the evidence or making the hit look like it was done by somebody else to tell a narrative that will keep the cops from looking his way.

...granted, his job is about the only thing he's really, truly, sincerely good at, but hey. Everybody's got to have their Thing.

Personality: When most people look at Barry, they don't see much on first glance. An awkward, nervous man afraid of his own shadow, maybe. A guy who's not particularly distinguishable from those around him. He's great at fading into a crowd, at seeming perfectly unremarkable. Even at 6'2", Barry is still the guy you probably couldn't pick out of a crowd, and it's by design. He's uncomfortable in his own skin, and social situations are a little daunting (more so since his discharge), so he's learned how to keep under the radar. How to not stick out.

Because sticking out, in his line of work, tends to land you prison time at best, killed at worst, but that's maybe getting a little ahead of things.

Barry, at his core, just wants to Belong. To be Somebody, even if it's just somebody to one other person. He set himself apart as The Crack Shot during his service, and that got him kudos and acceptance, so that's what he became. When he came home Fuches wanted him to be A Killer, so he did, in exchange for validation and affection. Sally wanted him to be An Actor, so he tried his best even though it made him uncomfortable and he wasn't very good at it, because it meant she would keep talking to him. Kept filling the roles the other people in his class wanted him to no matter how awkward he felt in them because it got him acceptance. His classmates call him generous, because he continually puts them above himself. Lets them have the spotlight while he plays the foil, pushes himself into dark places no matter how uncomfortable it makes him to give them better material to work with. Continually gives up his own wants and opportunities and comfort for the sake of them, except as altruistic as it sounds its born more of training than good nature. He's
been trained to follow orders, to go along with the Plan, and in the face of more forceful personalities he inevitably folds and does what he feels is Expected rather than face uncertainty and the discomfort of getting it wrong. Barry himself doesn't really know what he wants, so he adapts to what other people want for him and tries to fit the best he can.

Even when he knows it isn't good for him, or when he really wants something else. He continues to go back to his mentor or get dragged back into his schemes right up until Fuches starts directly threatening the people he cares about to try to bring him back into the fold, because Fuches Understands Him and is the only person he feels he can really talk to about everything he's going through. He can't tell his girlfriend, he can't tell his acting teacher, and he doesn't trust anybody else enough.

Because despite all the good aspects, the fact that he cares deeply for the people he lets into his circle to the point where he would do literally anything for them and legitimately wants to Do Good in the world and generally comes across like a lost puppy easily led by anyone who shows it a little kindness, he's not as inherently Good a person as he wants to be. Maybe he was once upon a time, the residual impulses are still there like guilt and empathy and wanting to help others, but it's been scraped down over time until they're not always the first things up. He's been manipulated and mind-fucked and deliberately shaped to peel away the things that didn't suit his mentor and feed the things that did to turn him into the perfect weapon, one that could be turned against whoever he needed to be and would follow through without question. Fuches learned Barry better than he knew himself, what made him tick, all the traumas that shaped him overseas, and used it against him to turn him into a monster.

Consequently, Barry is a fiercely angry and violent person underneath, despite the harmless exterior. He responds to frustration with lashing out, generally at inanimate objects but history says it's more a deliberately learned choice than anything else. He does his best not to be pushed over the edge, pleading with people if he has to, but nonetheless threats on his life and the lives of those he cares about are generally met with violence of one kind or another. And when Barry engages in violence, there's nothing half-assed about it.

Barry was initially institutionalized for killing a noncombatant in the heat of the moment, and the tendency hasn't dulled much since then. When he's angry, Barry has no problem with killing, no matter who stands in his way. Even if he knows them, even if he likes them. He almost shot his girlfriend when he went to confront her abusive ex, only narrowly stopping himself at the last minute, and he gunned down a group of Chechan footsoldiers he spent weeks personally training and bonding with in his pursuit of Fuches. And even when he's not angered to the point of casual violence, he can push himself there without much effort when he feels threatened. He guns down some Chechans who try to kill him, he shoots a cop he knows personally who threatens to arrest him, he kills a friend he served with because he doesn't trust he won't go to the cops about a job gone bad. Sure, he feels legitimately bad about them, to the point where they haunt him day to day, and he tries to talk his way out of the situation first, but it doesn't lessen the impulse or the outcome any.

Barge Reactions: Barry will, in general, not have a particularly easy time settling in. After years of military life, followed by contract killing which he structured pretty much the same, Barry likes something like routine. Things he can predict, a structure he can operate within, and nothing about the Barge is structured or routine. He'll grasp the general concept of the Barge pretty quickly, since he was institutionalized for a bit and he knows, in general terms, how prisons work, but floods, breaches, and the idea of fictional characters he knows being real, not to mention that he's on a spaceship in actual space, will put him through a little more of a wringer.

Path to Redemption: Barry's entire arc from the beginning of season 1 to the end of season 2 has dealt heavily in whether people can change. Whether the bad things you do in your past shape who you are permanently. His military service started shaping the facets of himself he doesn't like, trained him to kill without thought for the consequences and to do what he was told without thinking past the order, but punished him when he crossed a line nobody had explained to him before he crossed it. Fuches molded him further, got in his head and manipulated him so he stopped considering the consequences and saw himself more as weapon than person.

But it's already been shown to not be a permanent change. He's started having second thoughts about that at the start of the show, and from there the question has only grown as he's started to rejoin society bit by bit. The bulk of what got him into the situation was the treatment he got after he came home. He spent some time in a mental health facility before getting discharged but it never solved the problem, and Fuches' solution was to monetize it and exploit it for his own financial gain instead of actually recognize the problem for what it was and try to get him help so he could integrate back into civilian life. Barry doesn't want to kill people, in fact for most of his kills on the show he does his level best to avoid it, only following through when he's pushed into it, and he constantly struggles with whether the fact he kills without too much second guessing in the moment or his desperate want to be something Better is the Real version of him. Whether he's actually a terrible person because of what he does and whether he can change.

Consequently, any warden he gets would do well to monopolize on the latter. On the idea that people are mutable, and what you've done doesn't have to be who you are. He hasn't been able to do much of the work on his own because he can't tell anybody, either because he doesn't want to go to prison or because he's been conditioned to think people will always assume the worst, and he's terrified of being abandoned by the people he cares about once they learn the truth. He needs to work through his darker impulses and find healthier outlets (like talking about his feelings? that might be a good start), and take steps to actually leave his old life behind.

And learning that your 'purpose' in life doesn't have to be anything concrete. Sometimes just existing is purpose enough.
Deal: n/a

History: There's not really much known about Barry's life pre-military so far. It's safe to assume he enlisted in the Marines right out of high school, and we know he did two combat tours. The first one's when he got his first confirmed kill, with another two on its heels, impressive because of the distance and because it was his first more than anything else. He told his acting class it was a terrible experience, that it shook him and he felt guilty and cried over it, but it's not the truth. His unit congratulated him and made it sound like something great. An achievement, something to be proud of, so it made him feel good instead. It was something he was good at, it made him an asset. Part of the team.

So he helped fight the Good Fight. Killed the Bad Guys, and worse yet he was really good at it. It fanned something dark in him, some impulse that had been lurking his whole life but had never really been given much of a voice, but it was useful, channeled into something good, so he let it exist, and nobody said much about it. War changes people, but it wasn't the kind that made him dangerous, they figured.

Right up until the end of his second tour, anyway.

His closest friend in his unit was shot by an insurgent, while they were shooting the shit with the locals, trying to get intel for the next mission. It wasn't fatal, ultimately, but it was plenty to pull out that darker place. He tried to stop the bleeding first, but a flash of movement in the doorway of one of the buildings caught his attention, and anger took over. Cold and deliberate, he went in after the movement and eliminated the target, except it wasn't the guy. Just some local in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the actual shooter had been up on a roof the whole time, something he would have known if he'd been thinking straight. But he wasn't, because he thought his friend was bleeding out on the sand and the only thought in his head was revenge. Eliminating the target.

He spent a few months in the psych unit at a military hospital in Germany after that, only saved from a dishonorable discharge by a family friend he'd known his whole life who got the incident swept under the rug and brought him home.

Not that he ever left, not really. Since then he's essentially been in stasis; the first few months after he got back were spent rudderless, quickly descending into a depressed funk with the one thing he was good at removed. He'd done well enough in school but he'd never gone to college. He'd screwed up his military career, so there wasn't much for him there, Fuches' connections the only reason he could still use it as an asset, and he was pretty sure he couldn't face going home the family psycho.

Fuches let him stew in it for about as long as he could stand, then swooped in to pick up the pieces when he was most vulnerable. Told him there was an alternative, a way to use his skills to do good in the world. Got in his head, exploited his loneliness and directionless feeling to shape him into his own personal weapon instead. A hired killer who'd kill anybody for a price, fed a steady diet of assurances that they were Bad People. It went on for a few years, until the shiny edges started to wear off. Until the guilt and self-loathing started to set in and the deaths on his conscience started to weigh. Because they weren't always bad people, sometimes they were just regular people who had gotten on the wrong side of bad people.

Which was how he ended up in LA, with grand hopes of being an actor. Of doing something Better with his life and leaving his old life behind.

And so the show starts.

Sample Journal Entry:
[ PUBLIC - video ]

[ Barry looks a little frazzled on the network today, but there's no new blood or tears on the hands that adjust the camera, so that's a start. Progress, maybe, or just resignation. He takes a breath, chewing at the inside of his cheek in indecision, but ultimately steels himself and goes for it. ]

My warden said I need to start giving back? To make up for what happened a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure how much it'll help, but, uh.

[ Another huff of breath, another chew, this time accompanied by a wrinkle of his nose and a flex at his jaw, but he keeps going. ]

I don't have a lot of marketable skills. I can fold clothes, I can hurt people, and that's about it. But...fuck, I don't know. Considering the last place we stopped was a clusterfuck, I could do a survival class or something? Let me know if that works.

Sample RP: test drive link here!

Special Notes: