endless prom } { application
NAME: Emily
JOURNAL: iluvroadrunner6
CONTACT: AIM = iluvroadrunner6 / iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com / PLURK = iluvroadrunner6
CURRENT CHARACTERS: N/A
CHARACTER NAME: Lance Sweets
FANDOM: Bones
GRADE: He’s a prodigy kid so a really young Senior.
MOST LIKELY TO: Most likely to wind up in a really, really frustrating job.
YEARBOOK QUOTE: “Trust yourself, trust your friends, and let 'er rip!”
PERSONALITY: Sweets is extremely intelligent. He’s only twenty-three years old and has already completed his doctorate and become a psychologist for the FBI as well as earning two Master’s degrees, which means he had to have entered his undergraduate study at the age of fourteen or fifteen. He’s proud of what he’s accomplished with his intelligence, but he also has a need to fit in and belong with the group he’s in as well. He tries to balance and deflect away from his intellect by using a lot of common vernacular in his speech-for example, USADA Julian often tells him to use ‘big boy words’ when he’s testifying in court. Also due to his high intelligence, he can push his professional opinion on people without their asking, and has a tendency stick to the fact that he is right, even when doing so is somewhat obnoxious on his part.
What Sweets wants more than anything else is to find a place to belong. He’s a good person, with a good heart, but as an adopted child (he was adopted by an older couple when he was six years-old), he doesn’t really have a “place” where he knows he belongs, so he’s constantly searching for one. In canon, he’s trying to make that place the Jeffersonian, where he works, but he encounters a lot of friction that way due to his profession and how he interacts with the people around him. He also has shown a great deal of sensitivity towards children who are abused or lost to the system via foster care, due to his own experiences before he was adopted. He has scars on his back from one of his foster homes, and while he doesn’t like to talk about it, he knows that it’s necessary and will automatically go to bat for a child in need.
Generally speaking, Sweets is very laid back and easy going. He tries to get along well with most of the people he works with, and to fit in, but at times, due to his age, profession, personality, etc., he’s consistently seen as an outsider, looking in on the happenings in the lab, which really brings to light the nosier end of his personality. He is generally graceful when dismissed, at least when he’s in charge in a professional capacity. He is very good at reading people, however, which makes him an asset to the team as a profiler, and, on occasion, a place to go for support or advice. He tries however, to have his co-workers best interests at heart, regardless of some exceptions that he makes in the name of his own research (i.e., not telling Brennan that Booth wasn’t really dead in the beginning of 316: The Pain in the Heart in order to perform an experiment).
Sweets is also a giant nerd. That itself should be self-explanatory.
[IF YOU ARE AGING YOUR CHARACTER DOWN] HOW WILL AGING YOUR CHARACTER DOWN AFFECT THEIR PERSONALITY?
Being that Sweets is fourteen and a senior, he’s even more desperate to be accepted into a group, any group than he is as an adult. He hasn’t come into himself yet, so he’s not just looking for a family or acceptance, he’s also looking for himself. High school’s a rough world, but he’s got a positive attitude so while inflicting himself on the rest of the student populace may just get his ass kicked into next week-he’s gonna do it anyway.
Despite that, however, he can still be a pretty angry kid. He was heavily into death metal in the early years of high school, and to a point he still is, but now that he’s coming to the end of his high school years, he’s looking forward to the prospect of college and getting out of the hellhole that he logically knows high school is.
AU HISTORY: Lance Sweets was born to a carnival psychic who later gave him up for adoption, and an unknown father. The first few years of his life involved him being bounced from foster home to foster home where his foster parents were neglectful at best, and abusive at worst. He still has scars on his back from when he was whipped by one of his foster parents, though it’s unclear as to which one it was-he doesn’t like to talk about it.
When he was six years-old, he was adopted permanently by an older couple, the Sweetses. It was rough going at first-Lance was used to not being able to trust the people that he was living with, and he fought against them a lot, but eventually he learned to accept his new home, and let himself be nestled into a happy, loving family. They discovered early on that Lance was smarter than your average boy, and let him take the proper aptitude testing that allowed him to skip a few grades and start high school at West High at the age when most other children are starting middle school.
This is the part where things get rough.
By nature, Lance was the kind of kid who wants to find a place, more than anything else. When he got to high school, trying to fit in wasn’t easy, and a lot of the kids around him resented him for either his intelligence or his age. He was bullied, he was miserable, but he was smart, and he knew that all of this wasn’t going to last forever. He’s always been drawn to music of all kinds, but when he was in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, he was drawn to the metal genres of music because he felt they connected with the anger that he was feeling in his search to fit in to the world he was joining.
Through all of this, though, he stuck with where he was smart and kept his focus on school. He was accepted to the University of Toronto earlier in the year, and now that he knows that all he has to do is graduate, he’s trying to fly towards that date at lightning speed. Also, despite his social issues, there was no way on earth he was going to miss his prom, even if it means going stag because everyone he asks shot him down.
THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE: He knew that pushing the issue of Booth’s father in the interrogation room would get an adverse reaction. His defense was that he was just doing his job-Booth was a suspect, and given that information he had to use what he knew and what he could see in order to get an accurate answer-but Booth knew better, and Booth was probably right. And Sweets tended to hate it when Booth was right, because that meant he was starting at square one with the trust building all over again.
He probably should take that as a sign that there were some issues he shouldn’t push, but professionally-and maybe a little personally-he just couldn’t help himself.
He’d seen Booth in action. He considered a hockey game an accurate measure of what kind of aggression a person was capable of, and this didn’t disappoint. There was anger boiling under the surface of what was normally a cool, calm, and collected FBI agent (he broke his hand on the guy’s helmet, for Christ’s sake)-anger that needed to be addressed, and sooner, rather than later. Bottling up that kind of emotion with only one slightly unhealthy outlet for it was never a good thing-the kid of thing that was prone to make a man explode with just the slightest trigger, and given the situations that Booth was usually in? That was prone to be happening sooner, rather than later.
All Sweets wanted to do was help.
As expected, however, the help was thrown back in his face, as the reason for the anger was a subject Booth didn’t want to approach. He guarded it as tightly and carefully as he guarded his feelings regarding his partner, and every other secret he’d ever kept. While Sweets tried to offer a more conducive outlet for the anger, it was shoved in his face. That, however, was nothing new, and not something he was going to push. Booth would come to him when he was ready. Eventually.
Or, at least, so he hoped.
FIRST-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE: Here, have a Paradisa sample.