fairlytales
steadfast tin soldier.NAME Charles "Charlie" Toussaint
AGE & DOB Born November 11, 1976; 32 years of age.
OCCUPATION Private Investigator and Consultant for the NYPD. Initially it might seem like an odd choice for someone who was, once upon a time, a soldier (although made of tin), but much like his fairytale counterpart who watched his paper Ballerina from afar, Charlie has a knack for watching people without being noticed. It's a low-key job, with a lot of research and waiting in the shadows, and not nearly as glamorous as television makes it out to be. Prior to becoming a P.I., Charlie was one of the best homicide investigators in NYC, but the accident five years ago (see history) put an end to that.
RESIDENCE A small studio apartment in a rent-controlled apartment complex in NYC. It's not what you would call Buckingham Palace-aside from the sad excuse for a kitchen and sneeze of a bathroom, there's only true "room" to speak of, where Charlie lives and sleeps. Still, what little space he has, Charlie takes advantage of; it's surprisingly clean for a bachelor's apartment and easy on the eyes, but one can't help but feel as if they're in some kind of tin can.
FAIRYTALE The Steadfast Tin Soldier, from the eponymous story by Hans Christian Andersen.
ABILITY None, unless being a total hardass counts as some sort of special ability.
STATUS Charlie doesn't announce who he is by any stretch of the imagination. He will tell someone who he is if they ask, but generally doesn't delve into who he used to be. However, the whole one-legged man act should really speak volumes for any person who meets him in person and happens to see the prosthetic leg.
personality.FIRST IMPRESSION I'm waiting for him to disappear into the phone booth and re-emerge in tights and a cape.
At first glance, there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about Charlie save for the fact that he is entirely too wholesome to be a private eye; he never drinks, cusses rarely, and doesn’t go looking for trouble. (Unfortunately for Charlie, trouble has an innate ability to find him, but that’s another story for another time.) In a world that’s obsessed with the glamour of sex, drugs, and alcohol, Charlie is an outsider, something that he accepted a long time ago.
That said, you would be foolish to call him naive. Even before his years as a private investigator, Charlie was familiar with seedy bars, drug rings and grimy back streets, dealt with corpses, blood splatters and murder weapons, seen the rich and met the famous-and generally it all left him feeling very unimpressed and underwhelmed. To this day he wouldn’t take fame and fortune if you offered it to him. Ultimately, Charlie just wants to get by, snap a few pictures of men cheating on their wives, maybe try the marriage thing himself, do some traveling and then die. Nothing special.
But all too often Charlie’s unwavering sense of responsibility keeps him from obtaining what he wants from life. In social circles, he’s the moral compass, the rock, the big brother-whatever you want to call him, he’s obligated to do the right thing, to be the crying shoulder, the one to call for bail money, and feels responsible for the well-being of those he cares about. However, Charlie leans more on the side of tough love than he does doormat, so think twice before taking advantage of him.
He’s not as tough as he seems, though. If the truth was to be known, Charlie’s sentimentality and inability to let go of the past is his proverbial Achilles’ heel-but call him on it and he’ll probably break your jaw. Charlie is of the persuasion that men are not meant to share their feelings, and even if he did, years of responding to grisly crime scenes with professionalism have deadened his ability to express himself emotionally.
It’s this deficiency that has made all of his romantic endeavors tragically short-lived. Charlie has difficulty flirting and otherwise carrying out the communication that relationships require. Instead, Charlie shows his affections for someone by being a provider of sorts; he’s quick to buy presents, do favors, and otherwise take care of the subject of his devotion, but he’ll never say the ‘l’ word. On many occasions, Charlie has seen women he had definite feelings for slip away because of this-so many, in fact, that Charlie has resigned himself to the position of friend. It’s a decision he’s yet to regret; after all, he’s been admiring various women from afar since the very beginning of his existence. Besides, a woman would interfere with his work.
And his work is such an integral part of his life that it stands worth mentioning. On one hand, he enjoys the problem solving and anonymity that being a private eye offers, but it lacks the purpose and sense of justice that being a homicide investigator gave him. When it comes right down to it, Charlie is all about a sense of greater purpose and he’s definitely of the persuasion that good will always triumph over evil, so this middle ground that private detectives walk on doesn’t always set well with him. He enjoys justice, but not vigilantism-he’d much rather work with the system than outside of it. Ultimately, he’s a boy scout, a do-gooder, a law-abiding citizen, a goody-two-shoes-whatever you like to call it, there’s just something undeniably good about Charlie.
history.Although you’d never guess, Charlie wasn’t always a New Yorker. No, his story this time around begins at Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was born to parents Anne and Gregory Toussaint-or, as they were known on the job, Martha and George Washington. Ironically enough, the two had been character actors at the popular Colonial Williamsburg historical site and had so enjoyed playing husband and wife that they decided to make it official. He was not the first child of the Toussaints-Michael, the eldest, and John, the middle, had preceded him-but he would be the last, much to Anne’s relief. After all, a household with three boys was already testing the limits of her sanity.
Growing up in the historic City had a profound effect on the boys: their days were spent with toy swords and tiny muskets rather than action figures, and if you were to ask Anne today she might be able to produce a picture of five-year-old Charlie dressed as a patriot (complete with bayonet!), much to his chagrin. The boys fought a lot, but that’s hardly out of the ordinary for siblings, and generally they looked out for each other through school. Overall, it was a picturesque childhood.
Highschool was when Charlie set himself from his brothers. When they were off romancing cheerleaders at Chowning’s Tavern, Charlie threw himself into his schoolwork. His GPA rose far above his parents’ initial expectations, and in tenth grade Charlie started taking Advanced Placement courses. He excelled in the social sciences, especially US Government; when it came time for the school’s yearly mock presidential election, he was quickly selected to run for the Republican “ticket” by his peers and won. In fact, there was a whole lot of political talk in Charlie's future when he entered his senior year. He was offered a full scholarship from West Point, much to his parents' delight, but Charlie was less than enthused. It seemed like his future was unfolding right in front of him-and it was one he had no control over.
But Charlie realized the responsibility that sat on his shoulders. His brothers were going nowhere fast; John got his diploma by the grace of God, and it was clear Michael was going to marry his highschool sweetheart as soon as he saved up enough money to buy a house in Mechanicsville, and all that was left for the Toussaints to believe in was Charlie. He accepted his fate, but much to his surprise his fate didn't accept him. He was rejected only a few minutes into his first physical. The reason? Unbeknownst to the Toussaint family, Charlie was flatfooted. The doctors said he would not be able to withstand the extended amounts of marching that West Point, and later the Army, would put him through.
His parents were disappointed, of course, but West Point wasn't the only institution interested in Charlie. He quickly accepted an offer from NYU, and began studying towards a degree in Criminal Justice. Though there was still talk of Charlie going into politics, he had other plans; he had fallen prey to the Law and Order craze that had swept through the 90s, and with a little bit of research, Charlie decided that Police work was what he wanted to do. Within six years, Charlie's whole life was changed-he was out of college, and had put enough time in as a constable for the NYPD that he was promoted to Homicide Investigator. Though it hadn't been what his parents were expecting, they were proud nonetheless.
Life as a homicide investigator was more exciting than anything Charlie could remember. He really excelled with the work, putting over two dozen murderers behind bars with the help of his investigative partner, Detective Natalie Pryce, all within his first four years with the CSU. But his fast track to success was about to come to a screeching halt, and all because of the Emma Sarver case.
The Emma Sarver case was one of those Hollywood murder cases; the kind you see on shows like 48 Hours Mystery. Emma Sarver had been the daughter and only child of Fredrick Sarver, the owner of a chain of hotels all across the East coast. Her family described her as the perfect child--responsible, smart, and likeable among her peers. They were all shocked when she disappeared just three weeks short of her fifteen birthday. She remained on the Missing Persons list for only a week; CSU was called in after a severed finger identified as Emma's was found in a dumpster. Further search of the dumpster revealed the jacket Emma had been last seen wearing, but her body was nowhere to be found.
At the time, it seemed like a typical homicide case, but Charlie was about to learn that it was anything but. A week into the investigation, he started receiving death threats. "Keep your eyes to yourself," warned the messages, found scrawled on a newspaper jammed in Charlie's P.O. box, and then as a garbled recording on Charlie's answering machine. After he turned them in to be analyzed for any possible identification, Charlie didn't think much of them. After all, death threats were hardly groundbreaking news in his line of work. But in the upcoming week, he would learn how serious they really were.
It was a cold, rainy night when the accident happened. Charlie was taking Natalie home to her house in Tarrytown, and there was a lull in their conversation as they approached the Tappan Zee bridge. There was some traffic, and Charlie tried to hit the break-but it did him no use. He swerved to miss a car and instead slammed head-on into the concrete Jersey wall, before flipping five times end-over-end and landing in the Hudson River.
Miraculously enough, Charlie surfaced from the water shortly after the car had been submerged, but Natalie never did. He swam to shore, but realized as soon as he hit dry land he had no chance of finding help on his own: the adrenaline rush from the accident and cold waters of the Hudson had numbed the pain temporarily, but Charlie could see now that his left shin had been almost completely severed from his knee. He tried to stop the bleeding while he could, but it did him little use. Charlie passed out, and the next thing he remembers is the awful day he woke up in the hospital without a left leg-and without Natalie.
Police Investigation revealed that the car, indeed, had been tampered with prior to the accident, but any other evidence of foul play had been washed away by the Hudson long before the Police arrived. The Emma Sarver case has since gone cold.
For Charlie, life without half of his left leg was a lot easier to adjust to than life without Natalie. He spent the first few weeks at the hospital only half-conscious. When he was awake, he mourned for Natalie and begged to be medicated, and when he was asleep-well, it was then that he began to feel as if all of this had happened before. Maybe it was the medication, or maybe it was something less easily explained by reason, but for days on end he had dreams so vivid that he had trouble seperating them from reality. When the nurses came in to check on him, he desperately tried to communicate what he had seen, what he was seeing, but none of them really listened. Not too long afterwards, he received a most unusual bedside visitor: a representative from the Atheneum. Their confirmations of what he had experienced sated him and brought him back to lucidity. He was the Steadfast Tin Soldier.
Charlie flew through rehabilitation, much to the astonishment of his physical therapists. It seemed as if he was just as suited to walking on a prothesis as he was his old leg, and before too long Charlie was released. While he initially returned to his position at the NYPD, his coworkers noticed that there was something... a little different about Charlie. To be honest, they were right: As soon as the hospital disappeared into the distance, Charlie had headed straight for the Pentamerone. For a long time he was the bane of the Librarian's existence with incessant questions and loitering in the library until the small hours of the morning, pouring himself over books. He needed to know and understand outside of what his memories gave him. He researched his past incarnations, their friends and families-but most importantly, their wives.
Since learning who he was, Charlie had seen a brief glimmer of hope that maybe that the accident wasn't the last of Natalie Pryce. After all, he felt at home with her like no one else he had ever met before, like an old friend he had known his entire life, or maybe even longer. So he hoped and prayed that, perhaps in this small little world, Natalie was his Ballerina; that maybe, not in this lifetime but his next, he would see her again, and maybe things would be different.
He was crushed when he found he was sadly mistaken.
To make matters worse, not two weeks after this revelation he learned that he was going through what his superior called "an extended hiatus." His long nights at the Pentamerone and increasingly absentminded behavior had taken its toll on his performance with the CSU. His supervisor said that they were going to take him off the force initially because of his leg, but that really wasn't the problem and they both knew it. Natalie was.
Charlie knew he could never tell him the real reason. Even if he did, he'd never believe him...and he was right, in a way. So Charlie left the NYPD and the CSU. Though you can take an investigator off of the force, you can't take the force out of the investigator; he opened up his services as a Private Eye not three months later. He's regularly called in for consultation by the NYPD, but he'll probably never make a permanent return. The damage, he thinks, has been done.
PLAYED BY Alex O'Loughlin
charlie and his story.There's probably no one closer to their story than Charlie is to The Steadfast Tin Soldier, which might come as a surprise seeing as it's not the happiest of tales. But Charlie respects his fairytale counterpart because the tin soldier maintains an unwavering sense of duty in the face of adversity, a trait Charlie admires and emulates to this day. Yes, it's a sad story, but it's one to be proud of.
It should also be noted that, in each incarnation, the tin soldier always dies prematurely in a fire. Charlie is aware of this, thanks to his vivid memories of previous lives, yet he's untroubled by his story or his inevitable fate. It's foolish, he surmises, to be worried by a death he's endured many times before.
PREVIOUS INCARNATIONS In times of war, Charlie is incarnated as a soldier. In previous lives, he has served in WWI (for Russia, prior to the Revolution), WWII (for the British Empire; he was one of over 156,000 soldiers that was involved in the Normandy Invasion on D-Day), and in his most recent incarnation prior to this one, Vietnam.
appearance.HEIGHT 6'2"
BUILD Broad shouldered, with a toned, sculpted body. He's got exceptional upper body strength from the extended amount of time he's had to spend in a wheelchair.
EYES An intense steel-blue. His eyes are careworn; when he smiles, his laugh lines are prominent.
HAIR Dark brown, nearing black in some lights. At its longest, it reaches his jaw. When left to its own devices, his hair is wavy, and the ends hang in tight curls. He usually has a bit of a five o'clock shadow.
WARDROBE Boring, but dependable, Charlie has learned to find one thing that looks good on him and stick to it. The current formula consists of: jeans that have definitely seen some better days, a plain t-shirt, a suit jacket in an inoffensive color, and a pair of leather shoes. Good luck trying to get him into anything else.
SCENT Though he's never stepped foot near a fireplace, Charlie always gives off a faint smell of woodsmoke, with a tinge of something else-melting tin, maybe? It's hard to say.
HANDICAP Charlie is missing his left leg from the knee down from an attempt made on his life five years ago. Because walking (and sometimes running) is so essential to his occupation, Charlie was fitted for a prosthesis. However, the artificial limb undergoes so much stress from constant use that it needs to be regularly replaced. When that happens, Charlie opts for a wheelchair and a few days off work until he can stand on two legs again.
odds & ends.
FAVORITE BOOKS Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
FAVORITE TV SHOWS M*A*S*H, Magnum P.I.
FAVORITE MOVIE Forrest Gump
FAVORITE FOODS Steak, chocolate chip pancakes, black coffee.
out of character.NAME Gena
EMAIL mochi.delicious@gmail.com
AIM mochi attacks. Please note that this screen name is friends locked, so you won't be able to reach me unless I've added you first! (If for some reason you don't think you've been added, feel free to comment this post with your aim screen name.)