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Less is more, that's the secret to acing this life. Take it from a Time Agent who survived all seven T-Levels with merit, before he was twenty-five. The only way to successfully jump through the infernal hoops they dangle, is not to want whatever the bloody carrot is. Well, not so as anyone else can tell that's what you're itching for. And that rule of thumb doesn't only apply to training. A poker face will save your ass as often as a full clip of ammunition. Wear it to the right parties, get dealt a half-way decent hand and you'll go far. And if you don't, well at least you'll make it home with nothing worse than a bloody nose... if you've got somewhere you call home that is.
Thirty six hours after I first came aboard, Rose made some cutting remark about how easily I'd acclimatised. Said it took her days to find her way around, weeks until the water in the bathroom didn't freeze or scald her. I filed that piece of information away while quipping something which, no doubt, included the words 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere.' Rose wasn't wrong, I'm... readily adaptable. I've sacked out on more mattresses than she ever will, time ship or no time ship. But she wasn't right either. I damn well knew I was here on the Doctor's sufferance. Taking advantage of precious down time, I watched. Listened. Planned to become, if not indispensable, at least useful.
I showered.
Tried to remember how to sleep straight through a solid block of time.
Less is more. Training for mission preps teaches you to sleep lightly. Want to survive duty rotation? You train yourself to need the minimum shut-eye. As that twentieth century pop song says, you can sleep when you're dead. That was my plan. Before that day came, an hour when I wasn't insensate from sleep was a half hour or less at a card table, thirty minutes or more lying between someone's perfumed or muscular thighs. So... well let's just say it took a while for me to realise that I was sleeping badly when I managed to get any REM-sleep at all. It took a while for my... restlessness to build to critical mass. Took longer for me to get a handle on what they'd done to me. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Less is more. I lived and breathed that belief. Then they fucking mind-wiped me. It seems easy to blurt it out in anger, doesn't it? They took two years of my life away, stole seven hundred and thirty-odd days from my memory. And the scariest thing is that, for the longest time, I didn't know there was anything wrong. Memory doesn't sit in one place in a human brain. It's a map, a puzzle, a string of Christmas lights interconnected, but scattered, across a wide surface. You can't excise it like a cancerous frontal lobe. What did the Agency do? Smashed numerous lights on that flickering rope. Then disavowed all knowledge. They took pieces of me. Left me with nothing but a feeling of deep unease which I struggled to shrug off every morning. Usually, I stopped wanting to crawl out of my skin by the time I'd choked down the first forkful of lunch.
What happened? I reported my ... unease. Got confined to base for psych-evaluation and one rainy Tuesday I chocked on that forkful of lunch, punched a C.O. in the jaw and went AWOL. Headed off world on the first transport shuttle that hadn't filled its standby quota. Didn't know what I was running from. All I knew was that I wasn't getting anywhere mainlining adrenaline and caff-boosters. My plan? To fall down the rabbit hole in my own head, with the help of a chemical chaser. And then I saw her. She was a real beauty. Streamlined. Compact. Time-worthy. And yeah, someone else's baby.
When my transport stopped at a refueling jump, I'd disembarked to get myself a snack and a bottle of something vacu-sealed. Chattering crowds of humanoids milled and stampeded around me, eating, drinking, dealing, shooting up. I'd headed for some quiet corner that could double up as an observation point and it was from that vantage point, that I first saw the Chula racer. I left Lang Prime (the Agency's home-world) intending to fall off the stellar map and into oblivion, had made it off world with all five of my concealed weapons, a blaster and most of my mind intact, but that didn't mean I was confident I could ... appropriate the racer. Didn't mean I wasn't itching to try though. And then Lady luck kissed me and smiled.
Heading back down to embarkation I overheard someone discussing a high-stakes game. I followed the sound of international credits. Untraceable credits meant transport. Untraceable transport equaled freedom. And at that time, mine was in dwindling supply. I was willing to bet that the Time Agency had frozen all my resources ten seconds after I'd decked the C.O.
Fake ID's and numbered bank accounts were rendered anachronistic by DNA-tech which proliferated by the end of the twenty-first century. With no funds squirrelled away and black market DNA re-sequencing more often a death sentence than not, I knew that agency would use their ample, complex resources to eventually drag me home by the scruff of the neck. And then? It would be the stuff of whispers and silent screams. I'd be lucky to be invalided out with my brain matter shredded like spaghetti. The more distance I could put between them and me, the more chance I had of delaying that particular stay of execution.
I dealt myself into the game with knuckles that were still bloody and bruised, thanks to my C.O. and prayed that the game lords running this crap shoot weren't pumping mind-altering substances out through the air filtration ducts.
Lady Luck smiled on my shoulder. I bet small and my ship came in, someone seated at the table had bet the start codes to the Chula racer. The stakes were stratospheric, so when I cleaned up, well let's just say that I wasn't Mr. Popularity. I shot up most of the gaming room escaping, melded the exits shut and tore the ship-tethers from the station as I blasted away. But my luck held. I could have ripped the ship apart like a torn paper towel. I could have spaced myself.
I'd been lucky. Stayed lucky as I slid down the time line. All the way back to the end of the twentieth century I was running sensor checks, docking and diving behind space junk, and generally praying to any god whose name I could half remember that no one who had ever heard the name Jack Harkness would catch up with me any time soon. Prayed that I hadn't won the pot from out of under a member of an interstellar Triad.
The third time in my life I felt truly safe, an omnipotent alien being held me in his arms and kissed me, warmth and tenderness flirting with banked desire. My first memories of safety are shot through with Mama's laugh, and if I concentrate hard enough I can almost remember the scent of her perfume. Scent memory lingers long after broken song lyrics. Candle wax and joss sticks will forever remind me of Charlie and just thinking his name reminds me of the second time in my life when I felt safe. Mama's arms had been reduced to fading memory and infrequent letters when I was seven. Charlie? Seven months after we first met I ran from him one morning. I left no forwarding address. I didn't have one.
I still don't.
Maybe that's why I watched my flirtatious tongue when I first came on board the TARDIS. Oh I wasn't stupid enough to think that the Doctor trusted me as far as he could throw me on a bad day - not at first - but where better to fall off the time map, than inside a ship that travelled the length and breadth of everywhere? If my scent had been picked up by any interested parties, they'd never find me here. Not unless I pissed the Doctor off badly enough. Then I wouldn't be surprised if he broadcast my co-ordinates out on a universal frequency. He'd probably think it served me right if he transmitted my vital stats at the same time and sold me to the highest bidder.
He's unpredictable. That's what makes him so dangerous, so damn attractive too. But then, I'm a bit warped that way, my safety and danger wires got crossed way back. I'm as likely to think that the man holding the bomb is the one who's going to save our collective asses. If you're left holding the bomb, what do you hope for? A controlled detonation. A little order sprinkled into your chaos. Same thing you hope for on a mission, or in your daily life. Look at it another way and it's a whole lot like surfing.
Waves and my wanting to catch one were what made me hitch a ride cross country with Charlie. I'd landed on earth at the tail end of the surfing craze in North America. If I'd been aiming for the West Coast as I made my getaway in the Chula racer, well I'd be looking to get my sense of direction re-calibrated. But I had a reason for landing when and where I did. Living history. That was why I'd dreamed of being a time agent back when I'd been a snot nosed basic brat. The places you'd be sent, the people you could meet. The crowds you could blend and disappear into.
Having parked and tethered the ship to the Chrysler building, I then headed to the nearest pawnshop I found listed in the tatty directory left to mould in a phone booth. Semi-precious gems are frequently part of the pot in a card game, they travel well and have a good rate of exchange no matter where or when you find yourself. A handful handed over under the counter and I had enough for bus fare, food and basic lodgings. Not to mention threads, to use slang from the period. And that was after I'd got myself a gun. Small enough to holster in the small of my back, powerful enough to blow a whole lot of trouble through someone if I had to. I left the sonic blaster and the rest of my stash onboard ship, then boarded the first bus heading to upstate New York.
Sprawled across two vinyl covered seats on the bus and dressed in flared jeans and a faded t-shirt, carrying a suede jacket and a tatty backpack I could have been anyone on the magical mystery tour. Where was I headed in mid-August of 1969? White Lake, Bethel, NY. Three days of peace love and music. That's what the tag-line for Woodstock was. Three days of mud, love and pot smoke. Three days of music and laughter and Charlie's agile fingers daubing paint on my shoulder blades and down my back.
How did I meet Charlie? I was walking alongside a traffic jam of cars and there he was, sitting cross legged on the roof of a VW beetle, banging on a bongo drum. Not that that was why I slowed and watched him. It was the signpost that made me stop. The signpost that made me laugh. Charlie and I? We met on Happy Avenue. He introduced himself when I'd stopped laughing, told me that the drums had a message for me. Didn't tell me what it was. Not then and not later. I'd thought the car was his, after all it wasn't as if there was anyone sitting in the drivers seat, but it turned out that his was stopped further along the petrified snake of cars.
Lady Luck was still with me. Charlie not only had a camper van, but sleeping bags and a blindingly bright pink lilo, which I crashed on for weeks. The summer air in upstate New York was heavy with pot smoke and guitar riffs. Bathed in purple stage lights Charlie was beautiful, or maybe I was stoned and spaced-lagged, but I lost my heart to him on the second day and didn't try to take it back until some seven months later. Unrequited love's a bitch. And it was unrequited. Oh Charlie liked me, liked flirting with me and was willing to kiss me sloppily when he'd had too much to drink, but love? That was reserved for his brushes, his canvases and on days when the sea was in a good mood, the right wave he could ride on the board he'd painted and varnished. But, one night in August, he made me feel loved.
How? Simple. We laughed, stared up at the stars. Charlie traced the contours of my face, seeing me with hypersensitive fingertips. He traced painted patterns on my back with those same careful fingers. Have you ever had your whole body stroked and caressed with no objective? No one wanting you to fuck them hard or slow? No one wanting to pin you beneath them and wrestle you to orgasm? Have you ever truly had a moment when you knew that your entire body was an erogenous zone? The backs of your ears, the inside of your knees, your ankle bones? Charlie petted and stroked and worked my flesh the way I'd seen him work a canvas. My skin cried with joy as I sobbed like a kid. I wanted lust, he gave me gentleness. Lust was a language I was fluent in, tenderness was a foreign tongue.
There was once a race of beings whose speech sounded like birdsong and musical notes played on a triangle. Long-since extinct, one brief recording remains. It's studied annually by each new intake of agents, makes up a third of the linguistics course. First time I heard it, I cried. If Charlie's fingertips spoke to me as musical notes in fragments of a symphony. The Doctor's kiss was that symphony's crescendo.
Less is more. Sometimes, it's everything.
Wish I could tell you I knew what became of Charlie. Wish I could tell you that I hadn't pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth one night, many moons later, and fled back across the country. Memories fade like watercolour paintings left out in the rain. Scent memory? That stays. And maybe that's why I've been thinking of Charlie in the quiet hours when I lie drifting towards sleep. When I kissed the Doctor, he'd tasted faintly of beer, just like Charlie always had. Charlie's hair had smelt of bong-smoke and good, pure pot. The Doctor? He smells of worn leather and incense. Of soap and ... if starlight has a smell, then that's what I'd like to imagine it smells like.
I started keeping a notebook... after Charlie. Maybe as a way to try to ensure I'd be able to keep some memories intact if they caught up with me. Maybe it was someway to keep part of my summer of love with me. Photos were sello-taped in, song lyrics were scrawled and, when I managed to get hold of good dope, I'd re-read what I'd written and let myself remember places and faces.
I salvaged one thing from the Chula racer and it wasn't the notebook. No point wishing I'd done differently.
The letters?
I'll rewrite those. It's not as if I was ever going to send them anyway....