bete noire } { application
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Emily Proulx
Current characters in Bete Noire: AU!Dean Winchester, Buffy Summers, Remy Hadley
2. Character Information
Name: Don Flack, Jr.
Livejournal Username: and_dontgetcute
Fandom: CSI: NY
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/66965610/12403683
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=1893430#t1893430
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Flack is 32 years-old, tall, a little over six foot, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. He’s a good looking guy, and a confident guy, and he carries himself as such. He usually dresses in suits for work, but he also can dress down a bit, more in jeans and Henley’s.
History: Here!
Flack is going to be coming in post-525: Pay Up, but before 601: Epilogue. Flack is in state of flux due to the death of his girlfriend and the shooting of the bar where he and his best friends were toasting her memory. His closest friend is paralyzed because of it, he’s on administrative leave due to everything that’s been going on, and he’s not dealing with his loss. He’s pushing it down with alcohol, mostly, and it would be interesting to see if he can pull himself up while still being stuck in Bete Noire that’s trying to pull him down further.
Personality: At the end of the day, Flack is a good guy. In fact, he’s probably one of the saner, well-adjusted characters I play, which isn’t really saying all that much because I play a lot of crackpots but regardless, Flack is a good person with a big heart who is very much committed to doing the right thing. He’s a friendly, smart, and snarky, with a good sense of humor and sharp tongue. Despite the snark, he’s still polite and respectful, the kind of guy who opens doors for women and will give up his seat on the bus if someone else needed it. He’s also a New Yorker at heart, he loves his city, and being a part of it-all aspects, even the bad. As far as he’s concerned, it’s part of the experience of living in the city, and you have to be part of all of it to have any of it. He’s also a foodie, which makes living in the city even more enjoyable, with all the different restaurants and food experiences. He can’t afford to do it all the time, but he takes the opportunity when he can.
He’s a cop, and born into a cop family. He was raised with his sister by his NYPD legend of a father. While it’s likely that he went into the family business due to pressure from his father, he does have a genuine love for the law and the idea of getting justice for the victims. He also doesn’t want to be compared to his father, He loves being a cop and all that in entails, and in his mind, it isn’t just a job. It’s a lifestyle and all that he is-he doesn’t know what he’d be without it. The members of the force are also his family, and he looks after them as such. He’s also fiercely loyal to them, and will try to defend them above all else. He can come at outside criminals hard-if you disrespect the law, he has little respect for you-but when it comes to dealing with things internally, he tries to go about it at a slower pace than Mac tends to appreciate. He and Mac have butt heads over this several times when it came to dealing with corrupt cops over the years-the first of which being Flack’s training officer, Gavin Moran. In the end, Flack did the right thing and turned Moran in, but he took his time with the evidence, asking tests to be run off the books so that if his assumptions were wrong, he wouldn’t get his friend and fellow officer called into question. When the evidence comes up against his friend, however, he treats that person with respect, but still does the right thing and takes him to central booking. He tries to straddle the line both ways, respect the cop and still acknowledge their crimes, but it’s hard. The decisions weigh on him, and Mac doesn’t give him a lot of leeway to deal with that.
As far as the members of his team are concerned, those people are Flack’s family, and he will protect them with his life. He’s worked with them day in and day out for years, he knows them, jokes with them, and can’t imagine doing the job without them. He doesn’t do much in the way of collecting evidence and analyzing it-he’s not a scientist. He mostly does legwork, collecting statements, canvassing for witnesses, and interrogations. A lot of his work is done more with his gut than with science, and that’s what sets him apart and what he adds to the group. They all trust his instincts and trust him to have their back, which is important when they do the job they do. He grows close to the people he works with, and rarely socializes outside them, which is why when it came to dating, he dates within the department, a fellow detective named Jessica Angell. He’s discrete about it in the station, and it takes time for them to progress to a relationship, but it can be seen simply in the way they relate to each other. It’s the only long term relationship we’ve seen him have in canon, and it means a lot to him.
It’s for this reason that the only variation in Flack’s behavior as a cop is shown at the end of the Season 5 finale, when he shoots and kills the man who killed Detective Angell. While the man himself was highly dangerous, at the time at which Flack apprehended him, he was unarmed and injured, trying to escape the cops. Flack was more overwhelmed by the urge for revenge than his sense of what is right, and shot him at point blank range in cold blood, which goes against everything that Flack believes is right against the law. This is moment that haunts him for a long time, longer than his grief for Angell. He starts drinking, his appearance and work suffers, he freezes when dealing with potentially dangerous suspects, and isolates himself from the rest of his team. It comes to a head later in the season when he hits rock bottom, but that’s all prior to his canon point here.
I’m bringing him into the game a week after Angell’s shooting, when he’s still on bereavement leave and waiting to come back to work. Here, he will have to learn to work through his feelings and fears on his ability as a cop and a person, while the city is consistently trying to pull him in the opposite direction. I think it will be interesting to play through, and a struggle that I’m really looking forward to writing out.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Flack is heterosexual and monogamous. In the show, there has only been evidence of him showing interest in women-he’s been referenced as having dates, a brief fling with a socialite in Season 4, and then a long term relationship with Jessica Angell in Season 5. He’s too stand up and respectful a guy to cheat on a girl, and considering that he’s slow to make a move in the first place, it’s highly likely that he wouldn’t wind up with a girl unless he was truly interested, therefore not looking to cheat. Not to say that he wouldn’t have the occasional one night stand, but he’s more interested in getting to know the girl than having lots of sex, with lots of different women-it’s about the person, not the sex.
Essentially, he’s not a manwhore but he’s not dead either.
Powers: None, nix, nada.
Reason for playing: Flack is one of my oldest muses, and my favorite characters to play. He’s a lot of fun, both in terms of snark and in terms of being a good guy who for the most part, does the right thing. Plus, I’ve always had a yen for cop muses from real worlds and shoving them into situations far out of their comfort zones, and seeing how they handle it. Also, I think Bete Noire could use some more cops, actual cops, who know what they’re doing at least on a legal level. It would make for an interesting dynamic with the cops who are more supernatural heroes.
As for what I plan to do with him in Bete Noire-with the canon point I’ve chosen for him, Flack has wavered a bit from who he is, and who he used to believe that he is. He’s taken another man’s life, outside the confines from which he’s allowed to do so and at the moment, he’s questioning himself as a cop. It would be interesting to see what the city does with those feelings, and how the pull and nature of the city will impact his trust in himself and in what he does.
5. Samples
First-Person: Here!
Third-Person: Here!
Third-Person #2:
He can’t go to work and he can’t stay home.
He’s on bereavement leave, which means no work, and home holds too many memories. In all honesty, both places hold too many memories, and he’d rather not be at either of them, but he can deal with it. Memories he can deal with. He sees flashes of her smile in the corners of the room, and that’s okay. She was here, and she was a part of his life, and there isn’t anything that’s going to change that. On top of that he wants to remember. She deserves to be remembered, even if he misses her more than words can say.
It’s his actions that make things hard. His actions are the things that haunt him. He shot a man in cold blood, and even though it was ruled a clean shoot, even though it was the person who killed Jessica, he was unarmed, down, and not going anywhere. Flack should have cuffed him. And instead, he shot him.
That’s why he can’t stay in his apartment. He sees her memory looking out at him from the corner of every room, and he can’t live up to what he was when he was with her. He crossed a line he never should have crossed, and now, there’s no way he can go back. So he doesn’t stay in the apartment. Instead, he goes out.
He goes out to a bar, far from the one where Danny lost his legs, and he drinks. He tries to drown out the disappointment in himself, the look on the guy’s face, and every memory he has of that day, but it doesn’t get him very far. He’s still alone with his own thoughts. He still can’t seem to bring himself to focus on anything else, until he feels the soft brush of hair against his arm.
She’s pretty. Red-head. Pretty much the exact opposite of Jess in every way, and that’s what he needs. If he’s going to do this, he doesn’t want to be reminded. He flirts, and smiles, and says all the right things, all the things that he knows how to say and usually chokes on, and plays the role that she wants him to play. For a little while, he forgets. For a little while, the focus isn’t on himself, and he can pretend to be the guy that he used to be before he made the mistake he couldn’t take back.
They go back to her place, never his, and she pushes him up against the wall of her entryway as she kisses him. It’s this small little studio, probably all she could afford in this city, and it doesn’t take them long to get from the wall to her bed. After that the moment passes in a blur, nothing but skin, passion and heat, there are still a few quiet moments where he’s still that guy, the good guy, the one who doesn’t make the mistakes he has.
But then the moment fades, she falls asleep, and he’s left alone, awake with his thoughts again. He waits for a moment, to be sure she’s asleep, before slowly starting to move and pull his clothes back on, and quietly let himself out.
This isn’t a place he belongs anymore-no matter how much he wants to.