Nathaniel Graison

Name: Nathaniel Graison
Door: Submissive Door Pass

Canon: Anita Blake
Canon Point: Beginning of Narcissus in Chains

Age: 20
Appearance: 5'9". Dark brown/auburn hair almost down to his ankles. Lavender eyes. Physique like a gymnast. As a wereleopard, black.

History: Nathaniel @ Fandom Wiki

Personality:
Positive Trait: Charming. There are two things behind Nathaniel's charm. One is pure personality. Nathaniel has the type of smile that encourages others to smile back. Oftentimes, he's unaware of this charm. At one point, he charms one of the local detectives so well that she thinks he's interested in him. He's not but doesn't become aware of her interest until it's too late to avoid hurt feelings. Sometimes he can turn it on at will, like when he's working at Guilty Pleasures, a strip club. He has an almost rabid fanbase and is one of the more popular strippers in the club. But behind the other reason lies something darker. After his mother died, he lived in an abusive home with his stepfather and brother. He learned to be as much of a people-pleaser as he could to try to mollify his stepfather.

Negative Trait: Needy. Of course, another consequence of living in an abused home is that Nathaniel has a tendency to cling for better or worse. First to his brother Nicholas, the boy who would literally take the beatings so Nathaniel wouldn't have to. Then to a sadistic leader of his pard, Gabriel. A man who, on the one hand, cleaned Nathaniel up before he could become a leopard, but also who pimped him out. It might have been at classier hotels, but he was still being sold. And finally to Anita Blake, the woman who killed Gabriel. The woman who 'freed' them. He tries to attach himself to her in the only way he knows how. With sex. Encourages her to watch his porn videos. Asks her to dominate him. It only when she sees how hurt he is by his rejection that she finds a way to compromise, leaving him more secure without compromising what she intends their relationship to be. But even as he grows more independent, grows more secure in his position in the pard, he still tries to make more of that relationship than Anita wants their to be.

Negative Trait: Addictive. Nathaniel's brother was killed by their stepfather when Nathaniel was seven. By the age of ten, he was living as a child prostitute along with all the risks that came with that. All the damage people were doing to him in the present as well as the memory of the damage that had been done to him by his stepfather. It's small wonder that he turned to drugs. He craved the feeling of drugged-out bliss and the ability to hide away from the abuses, past and present. Eventually, he meets Gabriel and Gabriel forces him to get clean before turning him into a wereleopard. But he only gets clean from the drugs. Instead, he's taught submission in the hands of a couple of sadists. That ability to accept what's done to him that he learned as a prostitute becomes even more twisted into one where he learns to obey without question and even to crave the harm they do to him. After Gabriel's death and under the gentle guidance of a good leader, he's been learning to regain his own sense of self. His own sense of what he truly desires and what's just been trained into him. But a decade worth of training takes time to truly get past.

Negative Trait: Masochist.
Masochism can mean multiple things. One, of course, is sexual masochism. The ability to feel pain as pleasure. And Nathaniel fits that quality. But a masochistic personality is one that desires love and affection but accepts emotional pain instead of that affection, usually because they have long since understood that love is either given conditionally or not at all. And Nathaniel had love. But his mother died of cancer and his brother died at the hands of his stepfather and after that, it was a series of usually men in his life who only cared what they could do for him. It could have turned Nathaniel cynical. Instead, he kept looking for the love he'd known he'd had as child but would never find from men who used him.

And then came Gabriel. A man who paid attention to him. Who wanted to help him. Not the false offers that some johns had made about 'saving' him. Instead, he actually got Nathaniel clean and turned him into something powerful, a wereleopard. And if Gabriel had been a different man, it might have been the saving of Nathaniel. Instead, he only doubled-down on what Nathaniel had come to learn: love was conditional at best. Because Gabriel sent him out on sex work again, getting one of the local vampires to teach him manners and etiquette so that he could work as a high-end escort instead of just a street whore. Gabriel introduced him to Raina, a werewolf who was as much a sadist as Gabriel was and together, they honed the sexual side of Nathaniel's masochism until it became something he craved.

A sexual need along with an emotional need for attention and affection with a dash of deep-rooted insecurity makes it almost impossible for Nathaniel to say no in any given sexual request. If he knew that his life was in danger, he might object, but he's rarely told ahead of time when his life is in danger and he doesn't always recognize it coming when his life is on the line. When Gabriel was alive, he was the one who chose who Nathaniel could and couldn't see, mitigating the danger because, broken as he was, Nathaniel was an asset. Afterwards, that control was given to people who either didn't understand what they were doing or who left him on his own and he was nearly killed on at least three separate occasions. Gutted, impaled, betrayed. And a dark voice deep inside says that he deserves it and that it's the best he can expect to get.

Powers and Abilities:
Superhuman Strength - He is significantly stronger than humans while in human form. His strength increases in his leopard form to the point where it rivals a young vampire and is sufficient to lift cars with ease.

Superhuman Speed

Heightened Senses - His senses are heightened to the point where he can hear whispers from some distance away, see in the dark, and tell a person's emotional states from their scent.

Accelerated Healing - He is extremely difficult to harm. Wounds from most objects, even bullets, heal in seconds without causing him any seeming discomfort and can regenerate severed limbs.

Transformation - Can change to and from a leopard at will, though the act of transforming back into a human wears him out for several hours.

Inventory: A wide curved sword, a gag, a large bag of hair ties

Samples: Sample 1, Sample 2