Hadley McQueen

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Hadley McQueen (July 11, 1959) is a werewolf and mercenary for hire. She is nomadic by habit and has no lasting ties to any group. She was once romantically involved with Bryant Masters.
==Bio==
Write the first section of your article here.
==Trivia (interactive)==
01. Hadley was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and raised in Huguenot, New York. She was born as half a set of twins--the other half being her sister Holly--to a single mother (something almost unheard of in Huguenot when Hadley was born in 1959). She and Holly were raised by their mother and grandmother until they were fourteen, when the entire family was taken captive and brutally tortured to death. Hadley was the only survivor.
02. Contrary to Hadley's assertion that she has no living family, her father is still very much alive. Edwin McQueen (whose last name Hadley and Holly both inherited, a break from tradition for their mother) was a very young and very low-ranking member of another pack. Her mother, Susan, was the alpha female of an Amazonian (i.e, all female) pack and chose him to father her children when the time came. Hadley's met her father, of course, but she doesn't think of him as family in anything other than biology. She's actually prone to occasionally forgetting he exists.
She's aware that this colors her outlook on both men and relationships, but doesn't think it's much of a hindrance to her lifestyle.
03. Hadley's had very few romantic attachments in her life. She kissed a boy at school once when she was thirteen, she briefly traveled with another wolf who'd been orphaned by a similar tragedy as she had when she was thirty-five, and she dated a guy she met online in the mid-nineties who had a fetish for anthropomorphic animals.
The boy was just typical teenage experimentation; the other werewolf was someone she cherished during the short time they had together, and parted amicably with when the relationship more or less hit its expiration date. The anthro-fan broke up with her in a panic when he found out that she was a real werewolf.
She wasn't traumatized by any of these, but she did decide she'd never date anyone she met in a chatroom ever again.
04. Hadley doesn't admit this often, but she is very slightly religious--she's actually a (barely) practicing Catholic. Her family weren't Catholics, and she's met very few people with her approximate level of faith. She attends mass once or twice a month, and she carries a rosary in her purse wherever she goes.
When asked about the rosary, she says it's for vampires.
05. One of Hadley's favorite things about herself is that she has very few bad habits, at least in terms of stress-related quirks or ticks. She doesn't nibble her fingernails, chew her hair, drink, or smoke. She doesn't disapprove of any of the above; she just works her damnedest to not have any "tells" for when she's nervous or uncomfortable.
The ones she does have are that she fidgets and bites her lip. She's never noticed that she does either.
06. Hadley's first transformation into a wolf went slightly wrong, something her mother attributed at the time to poor genes on her father's side. It wasn't painful, exactly, but it did leave behind traces. She's able to selectively transform parts of her body outside of a full moon, but only on a very limited basis, and some have been permanently stuck since the first time she changed. Her eye color--actual, true green, without any traces of blue or hazel flecks--is distinctive because it isn't human. Her eye teeth are slightly longer than a normal human being's, and her fingernails are longer, sharper and tougher.
Before her first transformation, her eyes used to be brown.
07. Hadley doesn't technically live anywhere. She has post office boxes in every time zone, so that she can always be reached by mail, and has contacts that can link her with work in almost every state. She still owns the house she grew up in, and sends money to caretakers to manage it, but she hasn't actually set foot there more than a handful of times since her family died, and the last time she did so was ten years ago.
08. Hadley has spent time in therapy off and on since the late 1980s. Often, she's been prescribed medication for depression. She's always taken it, even though she metabolizes the pills too fast to get much benefit from any of them. She wanted to be able to justify to herself that she'd made every effort to have better mental health.
She hasn't seen a shrink in over a year.
09. One thing she was diagnosed with while in therapy was a "borderline personality disorder," specifically--as her psychologist at the time euphemistically put it--a "cocktail personality." She observes the behaviors of those around her and adapts her own behavior to both meet their expectations and to make them like her more. She calls this the ability to "run with the hares and hunt with the hounds." It's mostly based on her trust and intimacy issues, and is a defense mechanism that cushions her against the probability of rejection and keeps others from getting close enough to really know her.
10. Pursuant to #3, Hadley can count on one hand the number of times she's had sex in her life. She doesn't regret this, and doesn't consider it unusual for a woman of her age to have had sex only a few times and with only one person. She's very secure in her sexuality and comfortable with her body in general--which is why Bryant seeing her naked the first time they ever met didn't bother her.
In her opinion, the sex she's had is special, but there's nothing particularly unique about her "admittedly fantastic girly bits."
11. A typical day in Hadley's life involves getting up at noon or later, having a cold-cut sandwich (usually roast beef or turkey) and a liter of water for breakfast, then alternating between working out and researching possible leads on her family's killer on her laptop and/or in the newspaper of wherever she happens to be. She has no cleaning routine (she sleeps in motel rooms over ninety percent of the time and feels the tips she leaves are large enough to cover any mess she might've made) and does surprisingly little that she actually enjoys. (Her main hobbies are reading, solving crossword puzzles and playing Soduko, and she usually does those things while riding in a bus, plane or train) Her workout routine is vigorous, but spotty; she'll often get up in the middle of a half-finished set of push-ups to go back to researching, or stop doing reverse curls to pace around her room and make a few phone calls. Once she's finished with these things, she showers, and chooses her clothes for the day based on what she has that's clean. If she needs to do laundry, she re-uses her clothes from the day before and drops the rest of her stuff off with the nearest laundry service. If she's in a town where she has a post office box, she'll go check her mail, then find some way to kill time--usually poking around to make new contacts, or going to talk to the contacts she already has. She takes work if it's offered to her, or packs up and heads off to a new city if there is none and there's no new information to be found. She usually goes to bed between three and six A.M, depending on what timezone she happens to be in.
12. Hadley's nutritional intake is generally punishing. She rarely eats (usually only consuming one meal and a snack or two each day) and when she does eat, she doesn't cook. She primarily lives on sandwiches and packaged food, like beef jerky or trail mix. She's certainly able to cook--her mother began schooling her in cooking at a very young age, and she is more than capable of preparing some very fabulous meals if she feels like it. She never does.
13. Hadley often avoids using other people's names to a level that would do an Old One proud. Calling people by their actual names, to her, is personalizing, and implies a level of companionship she's not comfortable with when she lives such an isolated, Spartan existence. Her repetoire of nicknames for most people she meets is not her way of being friendly. It's her way of distancing herself from just about everyone she meets.
14. Hadley genuinely likes Bryant, and trusts him more than she trusts most people she meets. Considering how little she trusts people in general, however, this doesn't say much. The trust he's earned for himself so far stems from how well he's reacted to her throughout the very strange circumstances they met under--which has also earned him her respect. The actual affection didn't take much; Hadley often likes people, even though she doesn't trust them.
15. Hadley also truly likes Peter and Satrai. They're very pleasant people, and they were willing to both be nice to her and help her out when they didn't know her and had no reason to think anything positive about her. However, she trusts them far less than she trusts Bryant. Satrai's an Old One, which automatically makes him a tad on the intimidating and vaguely creepy side. Peter worships Old Ones, which automatically puts him on the weirdo side.
16. Hadley speaks perfect Lycan, maintains relatively solid contact with her pack, and keeps up with werewolf politics ("Which, by the way, your highness, means I do know about what happened between you and your brother three years ago, mmkay?"). Despite all this, she's not particularly into actually being a werewolf. She's not ashamed of it, but if she were magically turned human tomorrow, she'd shrug and learn to live with it. It's not a huge part of her identity, and while the abilities she has as a result of being a werewolf are nice, she doesn't typically rely on them enough to truly miss them if they were gone.
17. Hadley knows that, by all rights, she should be the alpha female of her pack right now. She's free from this responsibility at the moment, because some woman (possibly a distant cousin) was willing to assume the role until Hadley was ready for it, and said maybe-cousin has been very understanding of her desire to find and destroy the people who murdered her family. (After all, they are a threat to the well-being of the pack)
This knowledge is the only thing that makes her hope--with a lot of guilt and self-loathing for having such a wish--that she never really finds them. She doesn't want to be Lupa, and never has. When they were kids, Hadley was sure Holly would be the one to take over from their mother, and she was happy with that idea. It's one more reason she hates the men who killed her mom and Holly--they marked her for a job she hoped she'd never have.
18. Surprisingly, Hadley's favorite genre of movies and theatre is musicals. She likes dancing (both doing it and watching it, though with more emphasis on the latter), she likes music, she likes attractive cinematography and she really likes simple storylines that don't take much thought to follow. Musicals often have all of these in abundance, and they often get remade or revived, so she gets to enjoy something she already loved as a new experience.
Her favorite musical is "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." ("There's just something inescapably awesome about people singing cheerfully about killing and eating their neighbors.")
19. Hadley likes beaches and oceans a lot, and is something of a water snob. She thinks the Atlantic is far, FAR more attractive than the Pacific, and feels both are inferior to the Mediterranean. (She is aware that the Mediterranean is technically part of the Atlantic; that doesn't mean that it isn't better, anyway.)
20. Hadley fully subscribes to the Tyler Durden philosophy that the things you own end up owning you. As such, everything she owns fits in a single dufflebag, and nothing she owns, with one exception, is irreplaceable or expensive. That one exception is her laptop. It is, however, the cheapest one she could find, so perhaps Tyler won't raise his eyebrows at her too much.
==Notes==
Category:Characters
Category:Therianthrope
Category:Irish Characters