Creative Writing Please help.

All right all, I need your superb and almighty help right now with a character I made up.

His name is Raphael, tall, skinny, short layered hair, and so on. He's mentally unstable, the kind that would kill anything that moves. He's also armed. I think he's going to be an assassin, I haven't decided yet.

Here's the problem -- how do I get a story out of that when a) I can't see him as a villain vs. a good guy, b) I can't see him as having a love interest, a partner in crime, or real friends, and c) he potentially endangers everything, including himself? At the very least, I need other characters, then I can come up with something. But it would be nice if I could think up at least a base story for him, too.

Any ideas?

 

The idea that comes first to my mind is that he wakes up somewhere, maybe an institution/military facility, with no memory of who he is or anything. Sometimes he might do stuff that makes him seem good, like saving someone, then turn around and do something completely horrific, causing the reader to not know whether to like him or hate him. This doesn't sound too good though, the same sort of thing's probably been done hundreds of times, and it all sounds really cliché. I think maybe just waking up in a dumpster would be better actually. Maybe he could be a programmed assassin, so that he kills some people without knowing why, and this could cause him to go a bit crazy and start killing others, but seeing as he's been trained so well as an assassin that he becomes unstopable. Again, sounds a little cliché though. Perhaps you could make it so that he has to kill people to harvest their souls or something, so he can save the world/save himself/become superhuman or something like that. Whether his mission is real, or whether he's just delusional could be up to you, and remain ambiguous until the very last.
You would definately need other constant characters. Somone hunting him would be the obvious one. Maybe family members, a brother or sister that he could interact with might be work. Imaginary friends are always good, especialy when they become real. And you could give him a pet rat or something, to show his sensitive side.
This is all written in kind of a stream of conciousness type way, so it lacks coherence, it's just a bunch of ideas that came to me. All of them sound pretty heavily Vasquez influenced though... Well I don't mean this to form an entire base for your story, you might just find a couple of things you like. After all, even a clichéd story can be made good by good writing.

 

I like that idea, actually, DL. Mord mentioned something about Raphael doing good things as well when he's motivated, which I also like. Perhaps he does good things without really doing it FOR good (a good example would be Johnny C. and the sexual pervert guy and Squee in JTHM, you know what went down). It might be a little cliche, but it's a start.

Thanks for the input.