Likes:
"The finer things." Brad has sophisticated tastes -- he likes nice clothes, preferably suits, good food (though this can be hard to find in Schwarz-quarters if he doesn't do the cooking), fine wine, and so forth. In short, nothing but the best for Brad Crawford. His tastes in music run towards older styles -- classical and blues; he doesn't really care for modern music that much, though he does have a sort of perverse liking for the more chaotic forms of metal rock. If pushed, he'd admit to owning Nirvana CDs. In general, he likes order in his own life and chaos in everyone else's.
If he actually has some spare time on his hands, he'll pop on a movie or something. His taste in movies is surprisingly ecclectic - he usually likes rather offbeat movies, perhaps because movies that aren't offbeat strike him as just another one of the insidious masses. He likes Beat/Kintaro Takeshi movies in particular, but also has a penchant for American indie flicks and Hitchcock. He doesn't get to read often, but when he does, he prefers good, dark horror novels, like "Silence of the Lambs," which appeal to the more sadistic side of his nature; but they -must- be well-written. He also has to read the newspaper every morning, a habit carried over from memories of his father. In Japan he'll read the Yomiuri Daily, but if he can get it, he prefers the New York Times for its simple informativeness. He likes tabloids for their silliness, but would never read them.
Dislikes:
Chaos in his own life. As much as he likes to mess with other people, Brad likes his own life, particularly his work and living environments, to be fairly well taken care of. He's not really a neat freak, nor an order maniac, but he does believe that a machine rusts without oil, and he likes to keep things well-oiled.
He also -very- strongly dislikes weakness, particularly in himself. Brad has high standards, but for no one as much as for himself. He despises illness, but also respects it, because illness is the most insiduous way to weaken people physically.
More mundanely speaking, he dislikes things he considers 'silly,' like most of television. He won't watch television, except for movies. Even when he does get a chance to read, he often shies away from getting new books because of the sheer volume of money-and-stomach-churning bad fiction like the works of Danielle Steele and Robert Jordan.
He also hates smoking, though he'll tolerate drinking and drugs - it's more because he hates the smell of smoke, a mild leftover from his parents' death.
Favorite Food:
Brad likes a good, strong cup of coffee in the morning. Actually, he likes his coffee throughout the day. He takes it black. He has a fairly refined palate, and appreciates good, gourmet food as well -- most particularly French cuisine. And being raised out in the American midwest, he does sometimes get cravings for big, fat cheeseburgers.
Hated Food:
Brad doesn't really like Japanese food that much -- he finds it elegant, but far too spare. Also, he's lactose intolerant, so no dairy for him.
Favorite Subject:
Well, Brad is far out of school, but when he did attend, he was very fond of science and of gym class. Science because he simply found it fascinating -- when he was younger he wanted to know every what and why he could; gym because he liked any chance to build himself up.
Hated Subject:
Surprisingly, he never really liked math. Math was far too easy for him -- simply silly rote memorization with no real applicable use most of the time. The idea of learning mostly useless things bothered him badly.
Organization:
SS.
Personality:
Brad acts almost exactly the same in public and in private. He is well-kept, well-built, and well-cultured. He is an excellent diplomat and almost always acts as the go-between between Schwarz and the rest of the world when such things are necessary; in particular, when Schwarz was hired by Takatori, it was Crawford who acted as the primary member of Schwarz. In reality, Schwarz has no precise leader; Crawford does tend to take charge of situations, though -- it's simply his nature to do so. He likes to and is good at giving orders. He is -very- smart, also, much smarter than the average Joe, and he damn well knows it, though he does not flaunt this knowledge unless he's in a sadistic mood. He does get those, sometimes.
Most of the time, Brad is very calm and business-like. He is -not- dry, though, nor fussy. He's a man who knows exactly what he wants at all times and usually knows how to get it. He likes order in his own life, and likes to cause chaos in the lives of others when possible -- part of his sadistic streak. He is very strong, both physically and mentally, and emotionally he is all but impossible to crack, for better or worse. The other three members of Schwarz are the only three people alive who have even come close.
Brad does not get visibly angry very often. Usually, if something upsets him, he gets very, very cold, and this is why people often seem to think of him as an ice man. He can be extremely cruel, if his mood is bad enough. The reason he likes to cause chaos, the reason that can be considered part of his sadism, is that he knows that above everything else, above even death, people fear anarchy. He feels that he himself has conquered that fear, though whether or not that's true can possibly be debated.
Appearance:
Brad is tall and quite muscular, having once been a middleweight boxer in America. He is very pale, which is only set off by his very dark (black, in fact) hair, short-cut, with long bangs. His eyes are a pale brown, or perhaps even golden, and he wears glasses -- very finely made, of course. All of his clothes are well-tailored, even the casual outfits; at his most casual he usually wears slacks and a button-down shirt of some kind, and when working (which is rather often) he usually wears suits. He has been known, on a wearying day, to get down to shirtsleeves, even get rather mussed (loose collar, etc.), but before he leaves the job he'll usually straighten out. His body language changes, depending on where he is. On the job, he has excellent posture, and will maintain it whenever possible, radiating a cool, capabable, even cold image. He lets himself relax a little more at home and around Schwarz.
Family/Friends:
No living family. His parents and his unborn sister are all dead, as is the great-aunt who took care of him. The only people who could really be considered family or friend to him are the other three members of Schwarz. Of those three, he is closest to Schuldig -- Schuldig has been with him the longest and also seems to understand the way he is more than the other two. He feels almost parental towards Nagi, who he found as a child. Farfarello and he are a little more distant, as they both have a natural distance from people more than the others do.
History:
Brad's early childhood was actually a fairly happy one. He grew up in Illinois, not too far from Chicago, the only son of John and Mary Crawford (he was a top executive and she was a psychoanalyst, so they were pretty well-off). He started getting headaches when he was about six years old, but no matter how many specialists they sent little Brad to, no one could figure out what was wrong with him. At about seven the headaches developed into migraines, and then into full-blown "episodes" -- he would sometimes faint in the middle of class. After awaking from these faints, he sometimes had severe deja-vu, though he could never quite tell why. He managed to remain in school despite the episodes by working as hard as he possibly could, even though sometimes he would miss days at a time thanks to migraine. He wound up being the top in his class year after year, but between the strangeness of his episodes, his many absences from class, and the hard hours spent studying, he also wound up finding himself alienated from others at an early age.
Brad didn't get along with other kids, but he got along unbelievably well with his parents. His mother's office was in their home, and since he spent so much time at home as well, he was very close to her. He and his father also got along very well. Despite his relationships with kids his own age, he was delighted when his mother conceived another child -- a girl, to be his baby sister Dana.
One day, though, when Brad was twelve years old, his mother six months pregnant, he got the most excruciating headache yet. He was at home with the babysitter while his parents went out to a movie. He fainted, of course, but just before he passed out he saw clearly in his mind the theatre his parents were supposed to be going to -- burning, and ringed round with ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks. He woke up and ran out of the house in a frenzy to try to reach the theatre and warn his parents -- somehow he knew the vision was truth -- but just as he arrived, the entire place all but exploded and burst into flame due to a gas fault. His parents, and his unborn sister, were killed immediately.
After his parents' death, Brad was sent to live with his great-aunt in uptown Chicago. He was a distant child at this point, and she, an old woman, could care for him little. He mostly took care of himself, even though they lived in the same house. He was sent on to a rather good high-school, thanks to the large amounts of money left to him in his parents' wills, but he did not get along very well there. He had never gotten along well with other kids, and the general torment of American high school made things worse -- especially once his peers found out about his episodes. At first it was merely distance, but after a few years, the other kids began to bully him for being a "freak" and a "brainiac" and other such things. Brad learned two things from this: first he learned how to defend himself, and then he learned how to make sure people didn't bother him any longer. He discovered that he rather liked making other people upset, and soon he was known as a tyrant at school, but he hardly cared. He was beginning to discover something no one else knew, that he knew made him better than the rest of them -- he could see the future. After his parents' death, he began to see more clearly and understand the visions he saw. They came sporadically, and he could not control them, but he began to try and teach himself to.
Brad began to become obsessed with power and strength, as well as with chaos and order. The latter came from the visions, and from his parents' death -- chaos in his life, but chaos he realized he could come to use against others. The former... well, he knew he was better than the other kids in that he had a gift they did not, but he now wanted to be superior in other ways. He trained his mind and rose to the top spot in his class. He trained his body as well, and by age 15 he was so strong and, thanks to his psychic powers, quick, that the school fitness programs were no longer enough for him and he began to take up underground boxing in downtown Chicago -- which is where SS found him, hearing of a boy who seemed to be able to see the punches before they were thrown.
Not much is known about the next two years of his life -- except that he shot up in SS's ranks like nothing anyone had ever seen before. His brains, his young untapped cruelty, and the business sense and sense of people he had picked up from his parents, along with the incredible potential in his power, made him a shoe-in for success in SS. By 17 he was ready to run his own organization, which he called "Schwarz," the German word for "black." The only catch was that he could not use trained SS agents -- he was not so high up in the ranks yet that he could waste precious manpower. He had to take his agents where he could find them, or from the training schools. He found Schuldig in Rosenkreuz's labs. Brad's connection to Rosenkreuz is unclear -- the only thing that is known is that he spent some time there when in SS training, presumably so that his abilities could be probed into. The only thing that -is- clear is that he despises the place for his own reasons. Schuldig and Brad were for quite a while the only two members of Schwarz, and for that reason, they are probably the closest to each other -- it was not until five years later that Nagi was found, picked up off the streets of Japan, and another year until Farfarello was tapped; and such was Schwarz born.
Like the rest of Schwarz, of course, Crawford feels no remorse about his past - it simply was what it was, and it made him into what he is now. However, he does still have a slight wariness about fire - and he despises smoking, as stated above.
Talent:
His most notable talent is his psychic ability -- he can see into the future. At first, it was simply random glimpses, completely uncontrolled, but over time he's learned to control it to some degree. He often still gets random flashes, but he can also project his consciousness forward to look consciously into the future for some event. If he does this for too long, he can get very bad headaches. The uncontrolled flashes are often very serious events, and if he is unprepared enough for them, or if the flash he recieves is severe or shocking enough, these can also give him headaches.
Because of his controlled-premonition ability, Crawford is -very- hard to hit in a physical fight. He can detect most attacks before they come and dodge easily. He is also very talented at hand-to-hand combat thanks to his boxing. Beyond his psychic ability, his greatest asset is his brain -- he has an excellent tactical mind and can plan out strategies quickly and easily.
Weapon:
Brad's weapon of choice is the gun. Specifically, he usually carries two guns with him, a Walther PPK and a Magnum speedloader. His best skill is at hand to hand combat, though. Guns are simply convenient for him to use, since 1) they can be used at range and 2) he can usually tell where his victims are going to move to dodge -- therefore it's easy to shoot them.
