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Chapter Text

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1904

Jack Kelly knew he ran too far. 

There was a lot that could be said about him. He was reckless and quick to snap back and even quicker to throw a punch. He was angry and volatile, a powder keg about to erupt. His ideas were too big for him.

None of that mattered in New York. In New York, Jack Kelly could run a strike against a newspaper tycoon at seventeen and win. 

 He moved west to Santa Fe and bought a cowboy hat in a train station. He did everything in his power to hide his Manhattan accent, to disguise the fact that the East still fit over his shoulders like a well-worn coat and the West fit him like a pair of boots that were too small. 

At twenty-two Jack runs a strike into the ground and has his face plastered on every street corner of Santa Fe. Now he’s all out of land to run west to. The dream is dried up. 

He’s sitting in the rafters of a barn, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and his foot swinging down, spurs shining in the late afternoon light that spills through the attic window. He nurses a cigarette between two fingers, and there’s a dime store novel in his hand, the spine cracked so bad he can’t read the title anymore; he tells himself he’s not hiding when he knows he is. 

The barn door creaks open. A thin man steps inside, his clothes ragged and loose on his frame, his hat dusty and hands rubbed raw from work. The land is cruel in New Mexico, but the man wears it well. He’s grown up with it and is accustomed to it in a way Jack never will be. 

Luis looks around as he steps in, smelling the fresh cigarette. “Jack?” 

“Up here.” Jack says, foot swinging off the rafter. Luis looks up at him, already frowning. Luis frowns a lot. Jack wonders if it’s because he’s from the West or if it’s simply who he is. 

“There’s a train going east in five hours that you can get on.” Luis cranes his head back to gaze up at him, his accent thick with his exhaustion. Jack just barely manages to catch the fact that he said east. 

“Luis, I can’t go east.” Jack hisses, tapping out the ash from his cigarette and tipping his hat back. He says the word east like it’s poison. 

Luis’s frown deepens. “Yes, you can.” 

“No I can’t.” Jack insists. East means New York, and New York is the one place in the world that Jack can never go back to. He thinks of smokestacks and the pound of machines in the early morning, of boys no older than five calling out headlines, thinks of ash in the wind and cold streets, knife fights in tenement hallways, and David, always David —

No. He can’t think about that. He cannot think about the way his stomach lurches at the thought of David. He can’t think about everything they could have been and everything Jack left behind without feeling sick and without feeling that old wound that tells him he made the wrong choice.  

“Jack.” Luis says sharply. He glares up at Jack, and Jack gets the distinct impression that Luis knows everything there is to know about him—that he’s known it all for years. He only confirms when he says, “What are you running from?” 

He’s known Luis for five years. Luis is a lot like him. He left Mexico for reasons he won’t tell Jack, although Jack suspects it runs deeper than lack of work. They don’t talk much. They don’t open up. It took a year for Jack to pry a last name out of Luis, and another year for Jack to tell him about being a newsie, about the strike. 

He’s never told him about David. 

They don’t talk, but when Jack ended up as the leader of yet another failed strike and socked a cop, Luis was the one he turned to for help and the one who gave it. They shared ideas, saw the world the same way, and that was enough for Jack. 

Which is how they’ve ended up here, in a barn a few miles south of Santa Fe, talking about New York like they’re not talking about New York. 

“I ain’t running.” Jack snaps, looking down at the wood of the rafters to avoid looking at Luis. 

Dust settles and the dry wind howls between the wooden slats of the barn, low and mournful. The sound reminds Jack of the wind that would whip off the Atlantic and slice between buildings in the winter, the wind that would send all his papers flying if he wasn’t careful and Jack would watch a day’s wages be tossed to the wind. 

It sounds like home. 

“Right.” Luis says slowly. “Then why did you come to Santa Fe?” 

It’s the most open either of them have been with one another. Jack’s gotten so used to telling everything to the stars and the whiskey that he doesn't know how to open his mouth and explain something as incomprehensible as New York. 

Jack knows he can’t lie. Luis is too smart for any of his bullshit. Luis might not be Race or Crutchie, but he knows Jack in his own way. He knew him enough to follow Jack into a strike, and he knew when Jack was lying.

“I led a strike in New York.” It’s not the whole truth, it’s something that Luis already knows. The whole truth is too much for Jack to ever say aloud, even in a dry, dusty barn that gets hotter than an oven beneath the white desert sun, miles from anything worthwhile. Sweat trickles down his spine and pools at the base of his back. Jack stubs out his cigarette. “I got in some hot water, some hard times. I couldn’t hide any more.” It’s more of a lie than the truth. His criminal record was expunged at the sake of his morals, but things had turned out okay in the end. Jack had gone to Santa Fe because it was what he always wanted, and he didn’t know how to want something new, how to make a new dream for himself. 

“Well history sure does like to repeat itself.” Luis’s lips turn upwards, and it’s not quite a smile, but Jack takes it for what it is : understanding. “Did you take it out on a cop in New York?” 

Jack laughs. “Sure did. Took it out on a few. Bulls out there know how to take a beating. They care too much here.” 

Luis shakes his head, lighting his own cigarette. The wind rattles the barn, bringing up a sleuge of dust off the ground and throwing it around so it stings Jack’s eyes. Jack thinks New York would suit Luis. 

“I don’t care where you go once you get on that train.” Luis says slowly after taking a drag. “You could go to Denver or Nashville, anywhere east of here. You’ve got the whole country. You don’t gotta go back to New York.” 

Jack can’t tell him that Santa Fe was the dream, can’t tell him about the sketches of adobe buildings and empty deserts, of horses and cowboys and a gleaming Colt .45, and of daydreamed scenes from his dime westerns. Jack can’t tell him that the dream dried up and there’s nowhere left for him to go but the place he swore he would never go again. 

“I know.” Jack breathes, shaking his head. The cowboy hat doesn't fit as well as the newsie's cap, but he can’t say that aloud either. “But I have to.” 

Luis leans against a beam, brown hat tipped back and cigarette between his crooked fingers. “We appreciate what you’ve done for us.” 

Jack blinks down at him. “What?” 

“What you’ve done.” Luis takes a long drag, the sort that burns up the lungs and clears a head. 

“What d'you mean?” 

“Most of them guys out here don’t believe in strikes no more.” Luis explains, even though they both know that Jack knows it. In New York you couldn’t walk three blocks without stumbling on a strike. Here the mention of one, the mention of labor rights at all was enough to get you a dirty look and an ugly nickname. 

Jack remembers using David’s words from all those years ago, the words that would perpetually change the trajectory of Jack’s life and snowball into what happened between them, into where they are now. The construction workers hadn’t spat on him at the mention of a strike. Jack knew they wouldn’t, David’s words were too smart, too eloquent, better than anything Jack or any of them could have said. 

He had been in a lot of strikes since the one in ‘99. None of them were successful, but strikes seemed to appear like new trees everywhere he went, sticking to him like a hitchhiker seed. 

“You made them believe in all that.” Luis explains, voice careful and sincere, more so than Jack has ever heard it. The late sunlight comes in through the door that creaks in the wind. The smell of their cheap cigarettes hangs in the air, heavy as the smell of dust and the growing weight of the decision that Jack knows he’s going to have to make. “That’s special.” 

“They would’ve figured it out eventually.” Jack swings his foot. “They’re smart.” 

“Maybe in another five years.” 

“The strike didn’t do shit.” Jack counters, voice sharp. “All it did was send me home.” 

Luis raises his brows, and Jack stumbles over his mistake. 

“Not — not home, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, you know, it used to be home and now it ain’t but — ” 

 “Jack.” Luis cuts him off. “Go home. You’ve done enough running.” 

It’s not what Jack wants to hear. He wants Luis to tell him that he can hide in this barn for as long as it takes, that he can still help with the strike, that he can still pull the men together and make something of them, that he can bring them results. But he’s asking more of Luis than he can give. Luis is telling him what he needs to hear. 

The thought of going back to New York—to the ragged city and the crooked streets, to horse shit in the gutters and newspapers flying in the wind, to grey skies and rain, to new buildings reaching for the sun, to all those people he left behind—makes his stomach twist sharply. His hands shake like leaves in the wind.  

The late afternoon sun is warm on his face, and the barn smells of dust and cheap cigarettes and old hay. The red dust clings to his clothes, to the brim of his cowboy hat and the wheels of his spurs. He doesn't have a penny to his name, he’s got nothing but Davey’s old words and ideas that are too big for him and a little place like Santa Fe. 

Santa Fe didn’t save him. The moon did not turn the night into day, and even here, even all the way out on the ragged edge of America, the old men denied him his pay. Santa Fe was anything but green. He hasn’t kissed anyone in five years. The freedom, the stability and money he sought, could not be found in Santa Fe. 

“I could go to California.” Jack says slowly. It’s almost peach season. He heard some of the men talking about going west to pick fruit, going so far west the continent ended in the great gaping maw of the Pacific. “I hear the picking season starts soon.” 

Luis sends him a glare so sharp that it could rival Spot’s. Jack’s throat goes dry. 

“Don’t go to California.” Luis tells him, voice sharp and clear. There’s no room for Jack to question him. Luis looks up at Jack beneath the brim of his hat, but Jack gets the distinct feeling that he’s looking down on him. “There ain’t nothing for you in the west or anywhere that ain’t New York.” 

Jack swallows the lump in his throat and looks away from Luis. He swings his leg, the desert sun is relentless above them, as though it were pushing him away. He wasn’t made for heat like this, for sand that shivered like water beneath the sun, and puddles of heat that formed on the asphalt at a distance. There was sand under his nails, between his teeth. It stained his clothes orange. 

There was nothing for him here. He looked like the protagonist in his paperbacks, big cowboy hat and shining spurs, face hardened and tanned by the desert sun, brown vest fitted over his chest that had been bleached raw by the sun. Jack might look like a cowboy, like the big impossibility of the west and the dream, but in his chest there was a city and the old world of the east, and he was nothing if not a fake. 

Jack’s got all of America behind him now, all of it stretched thin in its grandiosity and shivering beneath the sky. He came west for the dream, in the big iron horse that knifed open the uninhabitable plains and desert, and he has found nothing but a twisted version of the east, plagued by the same greed so characteristic of all the country. 

“Yeah.” Jack says slowly, the ash from his cigarette being blown off the rafters and  away in the wind. A hawk cries out in the distance. The land is still and quiet, false in its gentility. There’s nobody around for miles, just them in the big empty barn on the barren edge of the world. 

It was incredibly lonely. 

Jack misses the sounds of New York, the way one never truly felt alone because there were always signs of someone else. Orange peels near the market in summer, water leaking from a hydrant and children’s footprints running from the puddle, the smell of cigarettes, horse hooves in the muddy streets, the shout of a newsboy out late, trying to sell his last pape. 

That was home. The open range never was, and as hard as Jack has tried, he can’t mold himself into the west, into the character of himself that he had always imagined. 

“You’re right.” He adds, brushing the dust from the rafter. 

Luis looks up at him. “You mean that?” 

“Yeah.” Jack looks out through the open window at the top of the barn, at the flat horizon between the orange sand and the blinding blue sky, towards the east and away from the setting sun. Towards David. 

“Yeah. I do.” 

Five hours later Jack finds himself on a train bound for the northeast on the Union Pacific Railroad. An odd part of him feels guilty for getting on a train, thinking back to all the railway strikes that had occurred a few years earlier, and all the ones that still go on. 

Jack watches Santa Fe slip past through the dusty window, his hand pressed to the hot glass as the evening sun dips beneath the edge of the desert, the sky the color of spilled paint. Jack’s fingers itch for a pencil.

Santa Fe disappears in a cloud of dust kicked up by the train. The clay buildings are swallowed by the horizon until there is nothing but desert and the occasional dilapidated barn and dry homestead. There’s no sharp ache in his chest when he leaves Luis behind, not the way he felt as though he couldn’t breathe all the way to Santa Fe when he left New York, haunted by the way David’s hand had brushed his shoulders, and the way Les had looked up at him with anger in his brown eyes, resenting the way that after everything, he was still leaving New York. 

“You’re letting Pultizer win.” Les had snapped at him on the train station platform with more anger in his voice than Jack had heard at any point of the strike. The words had smacked him across the cheek and left him clutching his face. The sting never went away. 

That was five years ago now. Les would be fourteen now, almost fifteen. Jack wonders if he’s as tall as David yet, if he’s still got the gap in his teeth. Jack wonders what David is doing. 

It’s a line of thinking he doesn't let himself wander down often. Although thoughts of Davey follow him like the perpetual desert sand beneath his nails, never something that Jack can clean off, he’s never allowed himself to think about what David is doing now. It makes his gut hurt so bad that he has to close his eyes against the wave of emotion that crashes over him. He presses his fingertips to his temple as the train sways, the glass warm against the side of his head as the sun sets. The sun had fallen in New York three hours earlier. 

David had mentioned something about being a teacher. He had said it in the tentative, drowsy hours of dawn the day after the strike ended. The newsies had celebrated well into the night, the one time Mr. Kroppman hadn’t forced lights out at ten. Jack and David had sat on the roof of the lodging house, sharing a cigarette and watching the city stir beneath the quiet light of dawn. David told him about going back to school in September. 

“What about after?” Jack had asked with the cigarette between his teeth, his eyes on New York to keep from staring at David. 

“What do you mean?” David had a bruise on his face from the strike. Jack wanted to rub it away. 

“After school. What are you gonna do then?” 

“Oh.” David said, and the question had momentarily stunned him into silence. Jack hadn’t pressed it, he knew the levity of such a question, the weight of the train ticket in his pocket burned a hole through his pants. “I’ve thought about teaching.” 

Jack glanced over at him. He gives David the cigarette. “Really?” 

David nodded, taking the smoke between his fingers and taking a long drag. There were bruises beneath his eyes from weeks of sleepless nights and long days fighting for a decent wage. Jack looked at him, and he could see David as a teacher remarkably easily. David is good with words, with crowds and with kids. He’s smarter than anyone else Jack has ever met, smart enough to drag himself out of the Lower East Side to somewhere better, and to make others better too. 

“That’s great, Davey.” Jack had said. He meant it. “You’d be a swell teacher.” 

David had taken another drag to settle his nerves. “You mean it?” 

“Of course.” Jack had said instantly. “Of course I mean it.” 

“What about you?” David asked, passing the cigarette back. It was smoked to the nub, and Jack didn’t want to think about how in a few minutes they were going to have to go down onto the dirty streets and start selling papes.

That was when Jack had taken the last selfish drag of the cigarette and told David about Santa Fe. 

On the horizon dark clouds gather and clot together like blood, the wind shaking the train as the sky darkens. Jack can’t remember the last time there was rain in Santa Fe, and it reminds him painfully of New York in the spring, and it seems as though everything always comes back to New York, like water circling the drain. 

Les will be getting old for a newsie now, Jack thinks. Jack hopes he is better at selling than his brother was, hopes that Les doesn't have to sell papes anymore and that he can be a kid for once instead of trying so hard to keep his family from sinking beneath the waves of destitution. 

“Les makes more money than any of us.” David had told him quietly before the strike, his voice bitter. Les never should have been in that position, and all Jack can do now is sit on a train two thousand miles away and pray that things had gotten better for everyone he had left behind. 

Rain freckles the window, the glass a little cooler beneath Jack’s cheek, and he looks up at the clouds in wonder. He has grown so used to the blinding brightness of the desert sun, to hot days that melted the clay houses and wooden taverns, that the gentle salvation of rain was a distant memory. 

The rain worsens, thickening until it pours in an angry tirade, the dry soil of New Mexico thawing beneath it, sludging away into mud. The cactuses reach towards the water falling from the thick clouds, the lizards climb onto the wet rocks and let it fall between their scales. The tortoises poke their heads out of their shells, the jackrabbits clean their ears, and here is Jack, on a train bound for New York with nothing but a lifetime of regret behind him, looking up at the great clouds and hoping they can offer him something too. 

The train ride takes four days. He has to switch trains twice to get on one that will take him far enough north, up through Missouri and Illinois and the flat, plate-like plains of the Middle West. Jack sleeps through most of it in the luggage compartment, but he eventually gets honest tickets once he’s far enough from Santa Fe that he won’t be recognized. 

Jack is at a station in Pittsburgh and he’s so close to New York that he swears he can taste the salt of the Atlantic in the air and the dusty ash of the factories. 

Pittsburgh isn’t all that different from New York. Jack can see the smokestacks from the big Carnegie factories rising up out of the jagged skyline, and the sky above is dull and grey as a fresh bruise. 

The trains shake the wooden platform. Jack grits his teeth as the bench under him rattles, his suitcase propped beneath his feet. The arriving train going west is loud enough that he almost doesn't hear the newsie until the kid is right beside him. 

“Hundreds lost in tragedy at sea!” The kid cries in a heavy German accent, waving the paper between the crowds. “One in seven survive!” 

Something twists so sharply in Jack’s chest that he has to grip the edge of his suitcase and breathe in the awful, ashen air of the city to keep from crying. The kid is wearing hand-me-downs that are too big for him, the elbows and knees patched with fabric that doesn't quite match the coat. His red hair is dark with dirt, and he’s so small that he doesn't even come up to Jack’s waist.  “Tragedy at sea! Norge crashes in freezing Nordic waters!” 

A woman buys a paper for a penny, and the boy smiles up at her with crooked teeth and tips his hat. He’s a natural. Jack can see himself in the kid. Jack can see himself in every poor newsboy hawking papers on the corner. 

“Kid.” Jack calls out, voice dry from disuse after days spent on the train. The newsie spins on his heel to look over at him while Jack fishes for a penny he can’t afford to give away. Jack glances at the newsie's bag as he steps beside him, he only has a few papers left. 

“Good headline?” Jack asks as he drops the penny in the kid’s dirt-stained hand. 

“Excellent!” The newsie gives him a paper and Jack scans the front page. A disaster at sea is sure to sell out within only an hour or too, but there’s a mention of the Russo-Japanese war too. 

“Hey,” Jack says, and the kid looks up at him with tired brown eyes. There’s dirt smudged beneath his cheek and Jack fights the urge to wipe it away. “If people get bored with the shipwreck, talk about this one.” He taps his finger on the headline about the Czar’s troops' failure to make the Motien Ling Pass. 

The newsie scrunches his nose. “But that’s boring!” 

“You gotta spin it right.” Jack explains. “Tell a story, but don’t give too much away or you’ll spoil it. People love to hear about war even if we’re not in it.” 

The kid nods. “Thank you, mister. I like your hat.” 

Jack had forgotten he was still wearing the cowboy hat. It’s disingenuous. Maybe back in New York, before the strike and when Santa Fe was still a dream, and Jack was called ‘Cowboy’ it would have been okay, but he’s not a cowboy. He never has been. You take off the hat and what is he? A city kid pretending he’s something he isn’t, grasping at something bigger and grander than himself. 

He’s an orphaned newsboy from New York and that’s all he’ll ever be. 

“Thank you.” Jack manages to say, and before he can think too much about it he takes off the hat and puts it on the kid’s head, right over his newsie hat. The kid is so small that it still slips down and covers his eyes and his vibrant shock of red hair. 

The newsie giggles, pushing it out of his face so it rests on the back of his head, the brim of his newsboy cap still peeking out from beneath the wide brim. The kid grins up at him and laughs, and the tight knot in Jack’s chest uncoils for the first time in years. He smiles back. 

“You keep it.” Jack flicks the brim of the hat, eliciting another round of giggles. “It suits you better.” 

“It’s too big!” 

“You’ll grow into it.” Jack assures him as the eastbound train comes to a gradual stop and people begin to move towards it, ticket in one hand and suitcase in the other. Jack wonders why he never considered selling at a train station. Maybe he’ll recommend it to the newsies when he gets back. 

“Thank you, mister.” The newsie says, looking up at Jack as he collects his things, newspaper tucked under his arm. “Where are you going?” 

“New York.” 

The kid’s eyes grow wide as saucers. “New York?” 

“Yep.” Jack shuffles his things to get them in order, the paper still clutched between his arm and side. 

“I’ve never been to New York. My family went from Kiel to Boston to Pittsburgh.” He says the cities with emphasis, as though he likes the way the words sound, like he’s proud of it. Jack supposes he has every reason to be proud of it. A shrill train whistle splits the afternoon. 

“Maybe when you’re older you can visit.” Jack says, ignoring the way his head feels empty without a hat, the wind feels odd as it runs through his hair and against his scalp. He’ll have to buy a hat as soon as he gets to New York. “Just ask for Jack Kelly.” 

The newsie nods his head so frantically the cowboy hat over his face again and he has to push it back, tongue poking between the gap in his front teeth. “I will!” 

“And remember that tip about the war!” Jack calls as he walks towards the crowd that had gathered near the train doors. The conductor helps a woman with a feathered hat step up onto the train. 

“I will!” The kid shouts again, waving at Jack as he leaves, paper in hand, tongue still poking between his teeth. The ashen, grey skies of Pittsburgh unfurl above them, the smokestacks of the steel factories pumping smoke into the jaw of the sky. There is still dirt and ash smudged on the kid’s cheek, and there is a missing button on his shirt, but he’s grinning as Jack steps onto the train and he sells another paper to an old man. 

Jack watches the kid as the train pulls out of the station, and he asks himself why he ever thought Santa Fe could give him something New York couldn’t. 

It’s late when Jack arrives in New York. 

The horizon swallowed the sun hours earlier by the time the tired train dragged itself into Grand Central. Jack steps out of the terminal with his suitcase and the pape from Pittsburgh still tucked beneath his arm. 

Hatless and with a rumpled vest, sleeves pinned at his elbows, Jack takes in his first breath of home in years. New York smells just as it always did, like cooking food and ash, of sweat and too many people crammed into a few acres of space, of horse manure and decay. The sky isn’t filled with stars like it was Santa Fe, and is instead like a swath of black silk above the brick buildings. 

It’s like he’s seeing it for the first time all over again. 

He leans his head against a dirty lamppost, listening to the sound of the crowd, smelling the dampness of the city, his hair already curling at the ends from the humidity. He wonders why he gave this up. 

Jack stands on the corner of 42nd and Park Avenue and thinks of David. He doesn't push the thought of him away, but instead clings to it, tangles it in his hands and remembers the broken look on Davey’s face when Jack told him he was leaving New York. 

It’s a pain Jack will never be able to take back, and he doesn't know what will happen in the next few days or hours, if David will want anything to do with him. Regret burns so hotly in him it makes him sick, and he closes his eyes against the nausea that rises up at the old memories. It’s always, always the memory of David’s heartbroken face and the sun slipping from the sky, New York spread beneath them. 

Someone bumps into Jack, pushing him against the lamppost. He looks back to see who did it, but the stranger is already gone, sucked into the crowd. It forces him to pry himself off the lamppost and collect himself. He reaches up to adjust his hat only to remember it’s gone. Jack shrugs his shoulders, adjusts the paper beneath his arm, and starts south to Lower Manhattan, leaving a trail of red sand on the sidewalk. 

The walk takes Jack an hour and a half. The streets aren’t as busy as they would’ve been a few hours earlier, when the factory bells rang out across the city announcing the end of a long work day. He doesn't see any newsies, for which he is grateful. It means the headline was good, that they all get a bed and something to eat.

 It also means Jack isn’t recognized. 

He walks with and without purpose. He has nowhere to go. He has somewhere to be. He’s had somewhere to be for five years, and he’s been anywhere but there. Even after all this time, Jack knows New York. He does not have to think about the turns he takes, and each street grows gradually more familiar as it begins to rain, light and gentle as a butterfly’s wing. 

He sold the paper about the Maine on that corner. He had never sold out so fast, even the distribution yard had sold out of papers, and all the newsies had gone to Jacobi’s and gotten soda for the first time in their lives. They had clinked their glasses and celebrated the war without knowing what it meant, only that they had enough money for a glass of Coke. 

Jack crosses a street. He had been in a fight with someone in front of that garment factory and had learned how hard it is to pick yourself back up with a broken rib. The rain turns the sidewalk dark beneath Jack’s feet now, and without the hat his hair is soaked in minutes. 

He has nowhere to go. There is no house for him to turn to, no apartment or boarding house that he can afford. New York is just the same as he left it, only now he’s twenty-two and desperately pretending he’s more mature than he was at seventeen. 

Jack has nowhere to go and that’s exactly how he ends up on the stairs of the Lodging House, staring up at the sign that hasn’t been repainted in well over a decade. The windows are dark and the house is quiet. It’s well after midnight, and Kloppmann kept a strict lights-out at ten policy. It’s yet another sign that New York hasn’t changed. 

Jack stands on a knife-edge. He can turn around, find a corner to spend the night in, he knows a few. He could get a job in a factory within a few days, a tenement apartment in a week or so. Perhaps less if he’s lucky. He could never have to see any of the newsies again, could still be home in New York without ever having to face the consequences of his actions. 

But he’s taken the coward’s way once already and he isn’t doing it again. Jack wanted to go to Santa Fe because he didn’t believe there was anyone in New York who would genuinely miss him, and when he found that people would, he panicked and did the only thing he knew he could do — run. 

But Jack Kelly knows when he’s run too far. He takes a deep breath, rain sticking to his clothing and drenching his bangs, and tries not to feel the way he did when he protested the formation of the union. He swallows the lump in his throat. He knocks on the door. 

The rain drums against the pavement that shines like silver. Jack shifts from foot to foot, water dripping down his forehead, his back, his hair. It washes away the sludge of the city, dilutes it into something manageable. The knot in his stomach thickens as he looks at the door. He was five years old when he first came here, abandoned by his father and with a mother who died in a tenement, he went to the only place he knew he could get work, that would take him in. It had been winter then, and the day after Jack’s mother died he was selling his first paper. 

He expects for Mr. Klopmann to answer the door, for his face to be a little more lined but for his eyes to still brighten in recognition. Jack expects it to be easy because Klopmann won’t ask much, maybe just a small, “Where have you been all this time?” before he offers Jack tea and a bed. 

Jack shouldn’t have expected any of it to be easy because instead of Mr. Klopmann opening the door it’s Racetrack goddam Higgins. 

Jack nearly runs away again. 

For a terribly long, drawn out moment that stretches like a tightrope over a canyon, all they can do is stare at each other. Race looks a bit older, sharpened over the years like a knife on a sharpening block. Race is all sharp angles, his hair is darker but the same brown newsboy's cap is still stuffed over his curls, and his bright blue eyes shine in the dark. There’s lamplight coming from behind him, and the silence is so loud that Jack can hear the Hudson. 

“Jack?” 

He grins back in a wavering attempt to abate the tension. “Hey, Race.” 

“Jesus Christ.” Race mumbles, stepping back and running a hand over his face. “Jesus fucking Christ.” 

Jack says nothing, giving Race the time he needs to compose himself. Jack shifts from foot to foot, hoping to God that every newsie is still asleep, that nobody else will be awake to witness the disastrous conversation that is about to take place. 

Jack had been prepared to see Mr. Kloppmann. He had not been prepared for Racetrack Higgins. 

“What the hell are you doing here, Jack?” 

Jack shrugs and grins. “I missed your ugly mug.” 

“Nah. Nuh uh. We is not doing that right now.” Race shakes his head. “Fuck, I need a cigar.” 

“Can I come in or do I need to keep standing in the rain?” 

“Youse damn well deserve to stand in the cold ass rain.” Race snaps. “I mean, Jesus Jack, it’s been five years .” 

He doesn't remember Race swearing this much, but he also can’t remember a time that Race didn’t have a bruise around his eye, or Race ever wearing a shirt that looked halfway clean and a buttoned vest, yet here he is. 

“Yeah.” Jack says slowly, not really sure what else there is to say. “Yeah it has been.” 

Race mumbles something to himself that Jack doesn't catch before he turns back around. “You’re lucky it’s me that answered the door.” 

“Where’s Kloppmann?” 

“Kloppmann’s dead.” 

Race might as well have slapped him across the face. Jack’s jaw falls open, and he doesn't think he’ll ever be able to forget the look of contempt that Race is giving him. Jack knew a lot could happen in five years. He knew this. But death seemed too sudden, too unfair. Kloppmann, who had grown up a newsie, had devoted the rest of his life to keeping newsies alive by running the Lodging House, dead. Jack doesn't know how many times he had seen Kloppmann allow a kid to spend the night even if they couldn’t afford it, how he always made sure everyone had something to eat and that nobody was out selling too late.  

Once when Jack was young, young enough that he remembers newsies that only Kloppmann would remember now, he had been out selling late. It had taken him too long to sell the morning edition, and by the time he got the evening edition it didn’t seem worth it to try, but Jack needed the money, so he’d placed the dime on the counter and gotten his papers. 

The headline was shit. It was well after lights-out when Kloppmann came up to him in the night, a lantern clutched in his hand and a cold autumn wind cutting through the tenements. Kloppmann had told him not to worry about the papers, about the money. He had taken Jack in like none of that mattered, had made sure he got a bowl of soup and a bed. Jack owes so much to the man, and now he learns that in the five years he had been gone, Kloppmann was dead. 

He manages to shut his jaw, thunder rumbling above the city. He swallows the knot in his throat. “Oh. When?” 

“Two years ago in April.” Race says, voice slightly less jaded, like a stone that was very slowly being rubbed smooth by a river. “Got sick and couldn’t shake it.” 

“Oh.” Jack mumbles. He should have been there. “I’m sorry.” 

“Ya know,” Race leans against the doorframe. “He was the only one happy about you going to Santa Fe. Says you’d make something of yourself. The rest of us wanted to be happy for you, but couldn’t. Not in the way he could.” 

A knife twists in Jack’s gut. His heart pounds, loud and frantic. “I wish I was there.” 

“You weren’t.” 

“I know.” A raindrop drips off the tip of Jack’s nose, splashing onto the steps. Race is still dry, and Jack stands in sharp contrast on the other side of the impossible threshold between them. “Who is watching the Lodging House now?” 

“Crutchie.” 

It’s another name Jack hasn’t heard in years, and one that does have him reaching for the brick wall to steady himself as he fights the nausea that rises in him. He’s so hungry he could vomit, and so tired and worn down that just the sound of an old friend’s name has him reeling. 

“He’s asleep now.” Race explains. “I was just stopping by.” 

Jack nods, praying that he won’t pass out on the rain-slicked steps. “Okay.” 

Race studies him. “You look pale.” 

“I’m tired.” 

“We all are.” 

“I didn’t think I would see you yet.” Jack admits, and the thought of seeing Crutchie again is even worse than opening the door to see Race. Race he can handle, but he doesn't know what he’ll do if Crutchie yells at him. 

“I know.” Race says. “You wouldn’t have come here if you thought you would.” 

Jack can only nod. “Probably.” 

Race sighs and runs a hand over his face, flinching when he prods at his bruised eye. “I need my cigar.” He looks back at Jack, looks him up and down, and sighs again. “Come on.” 

Race leads him past the stairwell and into the kitchen, where all the important conversations have always taken place. The wood table is marred with scars and knocks, and it’s older than even Kloppmann was. There’s a lit candle on one of the counters, and another on the table because the lodging house still lacked electricity. On the table there’s a mess of papers, a few unsold newspapers dated from a few days ago, and stuff that looks like union business. Jack picks up a sheet detailing the union dues paid by each newsie, and before he can stop himself he’s looking for David Jacobs. 

He doesn't find David Jacobs. He does find Les Jacobs. 

Race rips the paper out of his hands. He’s got an unlit cigar between his teeth and a scowl over his face, “You don’t got no right to look at that. Not no more.” 

Any dignity Jack still has slips through his hands like sand. His hands burn from where the paper was ripped away, and he slowly drops his hands. “Race.” 

“I mean it Jack. You left.” 

“I came back.” 

“You left.” Race leaves no room for argument. Jack’s jaw slams shut, and he’s never been like this with anyone, except maybe Davey, but something about the circumstances, about the way Jack is aware that he is the one in the wrong, makes him go quiet. 

“Yeah.” Race lights his cigar. “That’s what I thought.” 

“I want to make it better. Make it right.” Jack tells him, sitting down at the table where they used to discuss the strike and Pulitzer and the unstable, tentative formation of a newsboys union. “Race, I know I screwed up.” 

“I’m not the one to tell you what happened after you left.” Race leans against the counter, putting distance between them. He lights his cigar. “I’ll let David do that.” 

It’s the third time that night that Race has hit him without laying a hand on him. His stomach curls in on itself at the mention of David’s name, and yet he has to ask the question, he can’t stop it from rising out of the nausea and up his throat and spilling out into the kitchen. 

“How is he?” Race looks at him, his blue eyes dark and tired. “David, I mean.” 

“I know who you mean.” Race snaps, exhaling a cloud of smoke. It’s the same cigars he smoked as a kid, the same old Coronas. Upstairs he can hear the faint sound of the newsies laughing, talking quietly amongst themselves, unaware of the catastrophe occurring beneath. The rain cleans the city. There’s a trail of wet footprints leading from the front door to the kitchen table. 

Jack looks up at Race, both of them tired from a life of scrabbling to survive. It’s an exhaustion that can never truly be relieved. Jack isn’t asking for Race’s forgiveness. He knows better than that, isn’t even sure if he deserves it. All he asks of Race is news of David. 

“Race.” Jack whispers, and the words are gutted and more honest than the two of them had ever been with one another. It’s just shy of pleading. 

Racetrack sighs again, tapping out the ash of his cigar. The thin light of the candle highlights the strands of red in his hair, and for an impossible second Jack is reminded of the little boy in Pittsburgh. The lump in his throat grows. Race takes a long drag of the cigar, breathing it in like it’s been years since he’s had one. A clap of thunder shakes the building. The candles flicker. 

“David’s okay.” Race eventually admits, tapping more ash out. Jack slumps forward at the words, holding his head in his hands and breathing out like he’s just taken a long drag from a cigarette. Five years of tension floods out of him like water slipping through a storm drain. 

Maybe it’s all he needed. Maybe now he can go back to Santa Fe with the knowledge that the only person he’s ever loved is doing okay. 

“Thank god.” Jack mutters to himself. Lightning flashes. “Did he become a teacher?” 

Race is still glaring at him, but Jack can handle an angry Race. This is something he’s familiar with. “Yes. He teaches high school English at a public school a few blocks away. The kids like him a lot.” 

Jack nods, the tightness in his chest loosens and the weight on his shoulder lessens with the image of David in front of a chalkboard, explaining Don Quixote to a classroom of teenagers. The knowledge that in spite of what Jack did, in spite of David’s poverty, he’s doing okay. 

Goddam American Dream. 

“That’s good.” Jack says slowly. “That’s real good.” 

Race looks like he wants to say something else but holds his tongue. Jack just holds his head in his hands and breathes in and out, fighting against the smile that spreads over his face. “I should go see him.” 

“What?” Race hisses. 

Jack looks up. “I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna see him.” 

“Jack.” He warns, but there’s something wrong with him. He isn’t thinking clearly anymore. He hasn’t slept properly since before the construction strike in Santa Fe, and it’s messing with his head. He knows he’s messed up, and he’s done running. He’s come all the way back to New York and he’ll be damned if he never sees David Jacobs again. 

“I gotta see him.” Jack tells Race, already standing up and grabbing his suitcase. “Do you have a spare hat? I gave mine to a boy in Pittsburgh.” 

“Jack!” Race yells as he begins to move towards the door, loud enough to wake the newsies. 

Jack stops, looking over his shoulder at Race who had jumped down from the counter. “Just stop it. It’s one in the morning. You ain’t slept in days, youse is soaking wet, about to pass out, and you haven’t eaten.” 

Jack stares at him. Somehow, impossibly, despite the five years separating them like a canyon and Jack’s own selfish decision, Race cares . 

“I gotta see him.” He argues weakly as Race steers him back to the table and sits him down. Jack’s so tired he can’t even follow the conversation anymore. Half delirious, all he can think of is Davey. Thunder booms, rattling the windows. Jack flinches. 

“I know you do.” Race says, voice still ragged and sharp, but gentler than it was. “You’ll see him, okay? You’ll see him in the morning.” 

“I gotta see him.” He repeats, eyes locked on the door that’s only a dark shape beyond the candle light. “It’s been five years.” 

“What’s one more night?” Race sits down across from him and Jack’s throat goes dry. “Exactly. You’re gonna stay here and we is gonna figure this all out in the morning, okay?” 

“Where’s David?” 

“David isn’t here, Jack.” 

Right. David isn’t seventeen anymore. He’s got his own place. “Oh.” 

“You’ll see him tomorrow.” Race tells him, firm but gentle. Jack can’t remember Race ever having the emotional capabilities for a conversation like this, but he’s too tired, too hungry, too out of it to give it more than a passing thought. 

Race pushes him up the stairs, through the rows and rows of bunks of sleeping newsboys, up another tight, cramped set of stairs and through another handful of bunk rooms until he reaches the top floor. There’s a spare bunk that Race forces him onto with a long, drawn-out sigh that sounds as though it’s coming from the very cavity of his chest. 

“Youse gonna haveta talk to Crutch’ tomorrow.” Race warns him. “I ain’t gonna hide you like you hid on Roosevelt’s carriage. Can you believe he’s president now? You rode on the back of the goddam president’s carriage.” 

“He helped end the strike.” Jack mumbled, as though Race hadn’t been there, as though Race hadn’t heard the story a million times from him and Davey. Jack wonders how he went so wrong, how he took the best thing in his life and destroyed it with the plastic idea of a dream when all he ever needed was in New York. 

“I know.” Race placates, taking off his hat and running a hand through his curls. “I know he did.” 

“I shouldn't have left.” Jack mumbles. 

“Jack?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Shut up.” 

“Okay.” He mumbles, and before he can make sense of any of it, process the fact that the rain has slowed or that he’s made his way all the way back to the Lodging House and that Racetrack Higgins of all people had just all but carried him to bed with the vague promise of seeing David tomorrow. Before Jack can process that he feels better than he has in years, he’s asleep.  

Chapter Text

Jack only knew David for five weeks. 

He met David on a Monday, on a day that was thick and humid, the city tired from a heat wave that was entering into its second week. Tenement windows were thrown open in an attempt to catch a breeze, and people slept out on fire escapes, looking up at the stars. Jack and Crutchie’s penthouse above the city had grown crowded with newsies desperately trying to escape the suffocating heat of the Lodging House. 

It had been like any other Monday. The headline was bad, the city stunk horribly beneath the sweltering sun, and Albert was complaining about the papes not moving like they used to. Then Davey had arrived like some sort of mythical omen out of the morning crowd, and nothing had ever been the same again.

Jack had thought of him as a stuck-up kid with a brain too big for where he had come from. He wasn’t a natural newsie. His clothes were too nice, his vest fit him well and his white shirt was not horribly stained and patched up. Les had hand-me-down shoes. David was respectable in a way Jack never could be. 

Jack didn’t know that was David’s best clothes. He didn’t know that his mother had pushed him into it to make him look more respectable, having some sort of notion that he would need to interview or make a good impression. It wasn’t until David showed up in that worn blue shirt and vest that Jack understood. David wasn’t all that different from them at all. 

Two days later Jack looked at David like he’d hung the moon and all her stars. When a bull swung at David, Jack had put himself between the two without a second thought. 

“You didn’t have to do that.” David had told him a few days later when he found Jack in Medda’s theater, desperately trying to hide the way his ribs hurt from the blow and the fact that he was very much hiding from everyone. Perhaps nothing had really changed since then. 

“Yeah I did.” Jack had told him, hands covered in black paint from the cartoon he’d painted. “Couldn’t have that bull hitting your skull and taking out the only voice of reason in Manhattan.” 

David hadn’t laughed. He was tough to crack. “How bad is it?” 

“I’ve had worse.” 

David frowned. He frowned a lot. His hands hovered a few inches away from Jack. “Let me see.” 

Jack had quietly shown him the bruises. David had found a slab of cold meat, the best they could do, and slapped it on Jack’s side. There wasn't anything else that could be done for broken ribs. 

“The newsies miss you.” David had said, the distant sound of a vaudeville show filtering in through the wall. The music was fast and catchy. Jack couldn’t quite grasp it. His head was pounding, and Les and Katherine had long since left, and despite Jack's agreement to return to the strike, he had needed another few minutes before he could handle seeing all of them again. He knew Race would be angry with him, he knew Albert and Finch would be glaring over Race’s shoulder, and knew that none of them would ever really understand. “They want you to go back. They’re like a chicken with its head cut off.” 

Jack grimaced. “What?” 

“You’ve never heard of that?” 

“No. I didn’t grow up on no farm like you.” 

David smiled. He was sitting on the ground beside Jack, picking at something on his worn shoes. “I grew up in New York, Jack. I was born in Warsaw.” 

“Oh.” Jack had said. His ribs hurt with every dull pound of his heart, and he closed his eyes against the pain and the pulsing headache. “Where is that?” 

David was still picking off the mud from his shoe, pointedly not looking at Jack while giving hands something to do. “Poland.” 

David’s face was pinched, like it was something he didn’t particularly like to talk about. So Jack had carefully driven the conversation back towards New York and the strike. The conversation had occurred only a few days into their friendship. 

In total, Jack only knew David for five weeks, but it was the most pivotal five weeks of Jack’s life. They haunt him, even now with all those years separating him and that moment. David haunts him. 

He wakes with all this in his head, staring up at the bunk above him as a beam of sunlight cuts through the gap in the curtains. The room smells of soap and old clothes, of summer and the stink of the Lower East Side. Jack’s suitcase is under the bunk, and the Lodging House is quiet. He overslept. 

The impossible emptiness of Santa Fe and the vast stretches of the Chihuahuan Desert is gone, replaced by tightly packed buildings and the stink of sewage, and the unmistakable, pressing feeling of millions of people around him. It doesn't make Jack feel claustrophobic, really it’s all he’s ever known. There’s comfort in having so many people around, if anything it’s the emptiness of the Lodging House that makes his skin crawl uncomfortably. 

The day stretches ahead of him like an impossibility. The lingering wounds from his conversation with Race still pinch at his skin like the old ache of his ribs. He presses his palm to his head and breathes out, hands twitching for a cigarette as his eyes squint against the sun and turn towards the window, to where Jack knows a fire escape is. 

He pushes the thought aside. He’s done enough running for a lifetime. 

Jack slowly gathers himself, picking himself back up like crumbs from the floor as he sits up and rubs at his head. He pops his neck and tries to prepare himself for another awful conversation in what was quickly becoming a long line of awful conversations. 

He finds Crutchie downstairs with a boy Jack has never seen before. The boy is maybe eight, with hair so dark it looks like spilt ink. Crutchie was forcing a cup of water in his hands and talking to him in a firm voice. Jack hangs back in the doorway, staring at the person he had grown up with. He shared a rooftop with Crutchie. They shared blankets and stories and helped sell each other's papes. On days that Crutchie’s leg was too bad to get out of bed, Jack would sell twice as many papers and bring back food. Crutchie did the same when Jack was sick. They looked out for one another, and now they are strangers to one another. 

Jack used to walk into the Lodging House like it was his own. It used to be the only place he could relax in, the only thing that resembled safety and comfort in a city that had so little. Now he stood on the outskirts, thinking back to the fire escape and a way out. 

But he needed to find David, and in order to do that he had to talk to Crutchie. 

“I gots to sell, mister.” The kid says, looking minutes away from passing out on the table. 

“You is not selling.” Crutchie says firmly. “You’ve got heatstroke.” 

“I don’t have a nickel to stay the night.” 

Crutchie sighs. “I am not going to charge you, Socks. You know that. I don’t charge any of youse unless you can spare the money.” 

Socks looks over at Jack. “Whose that?” 

Crutchie frowns and looks over his own shoulder, an unidentifiable expression flashing over his face. “An old friend.” He places a wet cloth in the kid’s hand. “You keep that on your head, okay? Let me know if you start feeling even worse.” 

“Is he the one that came in late last night?” 

“Yes.” 

“Why?” 

“Socks.” Crutchie warns, and the kid’s mouth slowly closes. He presses the cloth to his head and Jack is mildly impressed by the authority Crutchie wields so well, with so much care and dignity that Jack can’t understand how he never saw Crutchie like this before. 

Crutchie sighs and reaches for his crutch before standing. He looks the same, perhaps a little less tired and ragged than the last time Jack had seen him when he was still recovering from the Refuge. It’s comforting to know that in his absence things seemed to turn out alright for everyone, if anything it was a humble reminder that the world kept spinning and lives kept going, whether or not he was a part of them. 

Jack follows Crutchie into the kitchen where he and Race had their conversation the night before. The streets are dry now, the day bright and sunny, as though any remnants of the previous night had evaporated beneath the morning sun. Outside, a horse cries out. An argument breaks out between two women in Russian. A newsboy waves a paper. 

“Where’s Race?” Jack asks as he leans against the doorway. The room smells faintly of bad coffee and dust. 

Crutchie frowns at him like he’s stupid. “At work.” 

“Right. Where does he work?” Jack is genuinely curious, but Crutchie sighs again, running a hand over his face. The window is open in an attempt to get air moving through the building, but it isn’t doing much other than letting in the stink of the street. 

“It’s been five years Jack and you’re asking me where Race works? Really?” 

There’s no hiding beyond the reaches of the flickering candle for this conversation, no excuses blamed on his own delirious head and exhausted state. It’s nine in the morning, the city has been up for hours and Jack is just now crawling out of bed and facing his demons, and he’s not off to a very good start. 

“Sorry.” Jack says, running a hand through his hair. He needs to get a hat. Crutchie doesn't seem mad at him, not like Race was, just tired. Disappointed. “I shouldn’t have left New York the way I did. It ain’t kind to all of you.” 

Outside the window, somebody breaks up the fight between the Russian ladies. A street vendor sets up a stall of colorful fruit, and the newsie sells a pape and tips his hat up at the woman who bought it from him. The quiet after Jack’s confession stretches between them and fills the corners of the room like an old smell. He doesn't think he ever told Race he was sorry about leaving. 

“I don’t understand why you left.” Crutchie explains, gathering some of the papers on the table and trying to organize them. He’s always been painfully understanding and empathetic, even to the Delancey brothers he extended some semblance of empathy for why they did what they did. If anyone wanted to be mad at Jack it was Crutchie, someone who he saw as a brother yet wronged so many times throughout his life. Jack ran away when the bulls showed up, and Crutchie was thrown into the Refuge, then he promised Crutchie a life of freedom in Santa Fe and was never able to give it to him. 

Jack sits down at the old table across from Crutchie. The day grows hotter with each passing minute, muggy in a way that the dry heat of New Mexico never was. He doesn't know how to explain all of it, all of what he felt and went through, but Crutchie was there for so much of it that Jack knows he has to try. He wishes he was as good at articulating himself as Davey was, or that he had a fraction of Race’s confidence, but all he has is himself. 

“I never viewed New York as a place to stay.” He explains slowly, Crutchie’s eyes bearing into him. “It was always just a place to live for a little bit until I was old enough or had enough money to get out. I saw Santa Fe in a painting, read about it in books, and it seemed as though anyone with enough gumption could take their life by the horns and get there. I thought Santa Fe was a place I could live, not just survive.” 

Crutchie already knew all this. “And what about after the strike, huh? Did that mean anything?” 

“The strike changed my life.” Jack said with honesty, struggling against the urge to sugar coat, to hide what he really means beneath layers and layers of other words and double meanings. “It did. But I saw what happened to all of you. You especially. I knew what the Refuge was like and I was so scared of going back that I ran instead of helping you. Race got a black eye, Albert a concussion, Romeo a sprained ankle. Mush had nightmares about the bulls, and Les was right there in the middle of it, just a little kid. I did all that to all of you, and I couldn’t do it again.” 

“I had this big dream of seeing Santa Fe, of finally getting out of New York. I’d had it since I was small. I didn’t know how to give it up, especially when I finally had the money to do it.” Jack explains, foot tapping the ground as he wrings his hand together. Crutchie sits perfectly still across from him, the scattered mess of papers now a neat stack in front of him, expression impossible to read. The kitchen smells faintly of Race’s cigar. 

“So I took my chance. I wanted the goddamn American Dream.” 

“Did you find it?” 

Jack looks up. “What?” 

“Did you find the American Dream?” 

Jack leans back in his chair, chewing on his cheek. He knows the answer instantly, but it still stops the words from leaving his mouth and his brain from formulating any sort of meaningful response. Everyone who could afford to go west went west. It was a mark of progress, a way to say I’ve made it. Even if the west had been settled for two decades now, the allure was never truly lost. He had spent the majority of his time in New York trying to pretend he was anything but what he was- a streetrat without a family or a dime to his name, selling papers on the street just to scratch by. Going west felt like a rebellion in some sense, a big middle finger to all the people who said it wasn’t possible for people like Jack to get that far. 

He’d been so focused on his own dream and distorted ambition that he didn’t realize he was throwing away the best thing he ever had. 

“No.” Jack says eventually, reaching into his pocket for his cigarette and lighter. “No, it wasn’t in Santa Fe.” 

Crutchie is quiet for a long moment, and Jack thinks about the desert sand turning into the pavement of the city, and he thinks about how he wants to see the ocean again, even if it’s just the harbor that’s so polluted the water looks green on a sunny day. He wants to buy a hat and a newspaper, and go watch a vaudeville show. He wants to hold the city in the palm of his hands, wants to hold every last dirty, crippled inch of it and never let it go. 

“It was here.” Jack mumbles, half breathless. He feels dizzy with the realization that he should have come to five years earlier. He thinks of Davey pressing against him, cheeks sunburned and smiling. Jack thinks of Les having his first soda after the strike, Race griping about being out of cigars, Katherine’s bright laughter, the stink of the city and the view of the sunrise from a rooftop. “It was always here.” 

“I ain’t mad at you, Jack.” Crutchie says carefully. There’s a jar in front of the window with nothing in it but smudges of dirt and dust that catch in the sunlight. Socks is humming quietly to himself, and the noise of the street is low and constant. “Not anymore. I know why you left. I always have, I think, just wanted you to tell it.” 

Jack leans over his knees like he’s going to be sick, staring down at the crack in the floorboards, breathing in and out as a weight is lifted off his shoulders like a newspaper in the wind. “You ain’t mad?” 

“Jack, if anyone was ever gonna get outta this place it was you. I can’t blame you for taking the chance when it was blinking right at ya like yesterday’s headline.” Crutchie takes off his hat and sets it down on the table so it feels as though they’re on equal footing. There’s a green glass ashtray in the middle of the table, empty of butts. It’s there for Race. Jack taps out the ash from his cigarette slowly, worried that he’s not allowed to, but Crutchie doesn't say anything. 

“I’ll always be upset that you left. You had a family here.” 

A knife twists in his chest, and nausea churns his stomach. “I know.” 

“But I ain’t mad.” Crutchie clarifies as the smoke fills Jack’s lungs. He breathes in deeply and lets it go, head swimming in the summer heat as he takes his first deep breath since he’s arrived in New York. His head clears. “I just wish you hadn’t done it.” 

“Yeah.” Jack exhales, straightening in his seat. “Me too.” 

They’re both quiet again. Jack isn’t used to hearing the Lodging House so quiet and it’s mildly unsettling. Normally it is so full of noise and rowdiness that he couldn't hear himself think. 

But all the newsies are out selling, and it’s just him and Crutchie and the ashtray between them, a hat on the table and a jar on the windowsill. He thinks about going to see the ocean. 

It’s a regret he’ll likely harbor for the rest of his life, and he doesn't think enough time in church will make up for it. He doesn't even remember how to pray. 

Jack means to ask for a cup of coffee, but he can’t take anymore from Crutchie than he already has. “Where’s David?” 

It’s not at all what he meant to say, but just like it did last night, the question comes spilling out of him tactlessly. It’s burning him up inside. He just needs this one last thing from Crutchie. 

Crutchie smiles and shakes his head fondly. “I was waiting for you to ask that. Race said you wouldn’t shut up about it.” 

Shame crawls up Jack’s face at the thought of Race explaining all that had happened last night to Crutchie, and he feels even worse when he realizes it’s only a matter of time before the other newsies hear about it too, if they haven’t all scattered to the wind. 

Crutchie stands up and opens a drawer near the gas stove. Jack watches him carefully as he looks around for something, returning to the table with a thin scrap of a newspaper and a pen. He scribbles on the paper before handing it to Jack, who gingerly takes it as though he’s just been handed a five dollar bill.

In Crutchie’s painfully neat handwriting is an address in the Tenth Ward followed by a room number. It’s only a few blocks away, and Jack’s hand begins to shake as his jaw tightens around the cigarette. He’s traveled two thousand miles, and now he’s only a few blocks away. He rubs his thumb over the paper, careful not to smear the ink. There’s a lump in his throat he cannot swallow. 

“It’s a school.” Crutchie explains. “He teaches English to the little kids over the summer. He says it’s for a little extra money, but we’s all knows he does it ‘cause he wants to.”  

The lump grows in Jack’s throat, and he looks away from Crutchie as he stubs out the cigarette and inhales shakily at the thought of David in a classroom with little kids, guiding them through stumbling pronunciations and sentence structures, and whatever piece of Jack that had held strong for five years finally crumbles. He clutches the paper in his hand and breathes in and out sharply to keep from crying. 

“His class gets out at two.” Crutchie’s voice is soft the same way it was when he was talking to Socks and all the younger newsies. 

“Thank you.” Jack manages to say, eyes blinking as he stares at the cracked floor and the odd stain beneath his chair. His fingers twitch against the scrap of newspaper, and a hot wind blows in through the curtains. 

“I ain’t doing this for you.” Crutchie stands, hobbling back towards the sink to wet another cold washcloth for Socks. “I’m doing this for David.” 

The sunlight slants through the window, the jar casting a distorted shadow over the counter. There’s a pack of cigars on the highest shelf where the kids can’t reach, and a newspaper from two weeks ago beside the sink. There’s a jar of coffee beside an unlit candle. The cabinets have no food. It’s so far from the dust and sweltering heat of Santa Fe, from the great emptiness of the American west and a lone cowboy on a horse. David, only a few blocks away. 

“He was upset when you left, Jack.” Crutchie wrings out the cloth over the sink, and Jack wonders when they got a sink instead of using the pump outside. “Real upset.” 

The knife in Jack’s chest twists further, gutting him like a fish. He clings to the anchor of the newspaper scrap in his hand, breathing against the breaking waves. 

Jack’s eyes flash. “I’ve gotta see him.” 

“I know.” Crutchie says. “That’s why I gave that to you and Race didn’t.” 

Jack looks up, meeting Crutchie’s tired gaze. His right foot is still pointing towards his left, his socks are still bright beneath his shoe and pulled up to his calf, blond hair shining like straw in a field. “Thank you.” 

Crutchie smiles back. “Don’t run away again.” 

Jack looks at the address in his hand, thinks of dust between his teeth and the cowboy boots still on his feet and the newsboy's cap on the table. He thinks of when David kissed him during the strike in an alleyway and knows that he can’t, that he’s doomed to circle New York like the moon spinning around the earth. “I won’t.” 

Jack leaves his suitcase in the Lodging House and kills a few hours on the street. He thankfully doesn't see anyone he knows, the Lower East Side is crowded enough that he could walk these streets for a whole day and not see somebody he knows. He buys a hat and cracks the brim so it doesn't look brand new and thinks idly about trying to find a job before deciding that it can be a problem after he sees David. He gets lunch from a Polish street vendor and tries not to think about Esther Jacobs. 

The school David works at is newly built, gutted out of a burnt-down tenement. Despite being so new, it still appears trodden and run-down, haunted by the fire and what it was born out of. The school is large and stately, eye-catching amongst the small shops and tenements that surround it. There’s a small courtyard in the front where a group of kids were playing, none of them speaking in English. 

Jack stands across the street, gazing up at the foreboding building. It reminds him of the few  years that he spent in school, back when his father still watched him before he was killed in a work accident, and they still lived in a crowded apartment in Five Points. That was twelve years ago now, and he hasn’t thought much of his short academic career until now as he watches two little girls read from a book on a dusty corner. 

He adjusts his new hat, lighting a cigarette and trying to look inconspicuous as he waits for the school bell to ring. There aren’t as many students as there would normally be, the only kids being new immigrants who needed English lessons or those who had been held back a grade. 

Jack twists the lighter in his hands, his stomach rolling with anxiety. He feels as though he is on a small ship being tossed about in a storm, waves cracking against the hull and crashing over him, hands wet with seafoam and nothing but the great emptiness of the ocean around him. He swallows the bile in his throat, leaning against a brick wall warmed by the summer sun as a newsboy walks past, shouting the headline in Yiddish and waving the paper over his head. 

Jack does not know what he will say to David. He does not think that there are enough words in any language to convey all of his feelings. He doesn't know how to tell David that he’s the best thing that ever happened to the newsies, that if it wasn’t for him they’d all still be eating their leftover papers and paying sixty cents per hundred for the same work. There wouldn’t be a union without David. Without David, Jack would be only a sliver of the man he is now. 

The bell rings, and kids spill out from the front doors, running as though they’re late for something else. The kids are smiling and pushing at one another. Jack looks up, cigarette still between his teeth as he watches the kids scatter with a fondness that makes his chest hurt. 

It only takes a few minutes before the courtyard is empty, and Jack crosses the street. The front doors are propped open to reveal an empty hallway lit by flickering, uncertain electricity and sunlit windows at the far end. The floor reflects the light, marred with scuff marks from children’s shoes. 

Jack checks the room number on the paper as he stands in the hallway. Two American flags hang outside the door, and the hallway is hot and muggy from the heat. There are scratches on the floor and pictures of presidents between classroom doors. Jack’s heart pounds against his ribs as he quietly makes his way down the hallway towards room seventeen. 

The door is propped open by a brick, and Jack stops just outside the door when he hears two people talking. He strains to hear the conversation, fingers shaking as he stubs out his cigarette beneath his boot and tucks the paper into his pocket after triple checking that he’s got the right room. There’s no need for it, because as soon as Jack realizes that he can hear David talking the world stops spinning and it’s just them and the hallway and the sound of David’s voice. 

Jack presses a hand to the wall, breathless. His head spins and he shuts his eyes against the thick cloud of emotions that rises up from his chest at the sound of David’s voice, and god, this is just his voic e —

“Rose,” David is saying gently, “it’s okay that you have to be here over the summer. Many children do. You’ve made fantastic progress in only three weeks, your mother has no reason to be worried.” 

A young girl responds angrily in Polish. David replies in an odd mixture of English and Polish, the conversation going back and forth for a little while, giving Jack enough time to calm his racing heart and swallow the nausea in his throat. He adjusts his hat over and over again and wipes the dust and grime from his shirt and pants. Afternoon light seeps in from the window down the hall, and a picture of James K. Polk glares down at Jack as he wipes the sweat from his brow and shakes out his hands. 

A teacher leaves a classroom, giving Jack an odd look before she continues on her way, her shoes loud in the quiet corridor. He does not know how long he stands there in the hallway, but it gives him plenty of time to turn around and walk right back out of the school. He looks at the open doors and thinks of leaving, of forgetting this whole conversation and pressing onward. He doesn't have to see David. 

Except he does. He cannot rest until he sees him one more time, until he finds the words to apologize for everything that he has done. 

The door creaks open, and a little girl in a tattered blue dress stomps out. She glares at Jack with dark eyes and asks, “Who are you?” 

“I’m here to see your teacher.” 

The little girl has a gap in her front teeth. “Do you need English help?” 

Jack smiles awkwardly. “Something like that.” 

The door opens once more with the noise of the world shattering, and Jack is face to face with the person he’s been thinking about every day for five years. 

David is still just as tall as he remembers, with the same kind eyes and sharp nose, the same callused hands and blue shirt. He doesn't hold himself like he’s trying to hide anymore, he’s no longer the bundle of anxiety Jack remembers,  instead standing tall and blinking at Jack like he’s just seen a ghost. He’s just as gorgeous as the day Jack left him. 

Heart pounding and hands shaking, Jack manages a crooked smile, the hallway painfully silent around them. “Hey, Davey.” 

A long, painful moment passes. The hallway is heavy with summer and all the years and unsaid words that sit between them. David looks at him as though he has risen from a grave, eyes wide and haunted. Jack shivers. David takes a step back, shaking his head. “Why are you here?” 

Jack looks back at Rose, her eyes flickering between the two suspiciously. “Maybe we should talk inside?” 

David glances down at Rose as though just realizing she’s there. He takes another deep breath to collect himself before smiling at her. “Go home okay? You don’t want Matka to worry.” 

The girl gives them both one last glare, her eyes lingering on Jack as he does his best to look like he’s supposed to be there, before she leaves them.

David pulls the brick out from the doorway and steps back to let Jack inside, the door closing with a loud finality behind them. Inside the classroom is neat, the windows open to keep the room from being oppressively hot. There’s an American flag on the wall and portraits of Washington and Roosevelt above the chalkboard. The alphabet is written neatly in large chalk letters, big enough to be seen from the furthest desk. There is a stack of old children’s books on David’s desk at the front of the room, and the desks are all lined up in neat rows. 

“Why are you here?” David demands as soon as the door has shut, and even when he’s righteously angry he looks beautiful. Jack can’t look away. 

“I had to come back.” Jack says, voice raw and dry. His hands are violently shaking, and he hides them behind his back. A warm breeze ruffles the papers on the desk. The room smells like chalk. It’s the only thing he can say. He knew he had to come back to him, even after all this time. 

“I didn’t think I would ever see you again.” David says, while still looking at Jack like he’s appeared out of a dream, ghost-like and unreal, someone who’s crawled right out of David’s past to haunt his present. Jack has dragged himself across the country and back to stand here, and all he can say about any of it is that he never should have left in the first place. 

“Davey,” Jack says, voice wet. He swallows the ball of emotion stuck in his throat that makes it hard to speak. David’s face twists when Jack calls him that. “I shouldn’t have ever left. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

David mutters something under his breath in a language that Jack doesn't quite catch. It’s said so softly that Jack knows he wasn’t meant to hear it at all. 

“You did leave.” David snaps. “You left just like you did during the strike, only this time you didn’t come back.” 

“I’m here now.” 

“Five years!” He yells, Jack flinching. He can count the number of times he’s heard David yell on one hand, and never had it been directed at him. David is looking at him like he did when Jack took that money from Snyder. He’s looking at him like he did in that theater five years ago when Jack voted to disband the union and there was a crowd of angry newsboys around them and it felt like they were the only two people in the room. 

It’s that same haunted, betrayed look that Jack has spent years attempting to forget, and now he’s seeing it all over again. Somehow it’s worse this time. There’s nobody to blame but himself. 

“Five years!” He repeats. “You come here,” he gestures between them, “after five years with cowboy boots and dust under your nails? You left the union you made as soon as the strike was settled. You took that money from Pulitzer and used it to leave us. You took everything that we had built and tossed it aside like yesterday’s paper! Did what happened between us mean anything, Jack? Did any of it mean anything to you?” 

“I was scared!” Jack admits, and it’s like he is tearing a part of himself loose and he’s bleeding all over the classroom floor at two in the afternoon. The classroom smells of dust and chalk, of a realized dream beside a shattered hope and the pieces that lie between the two. “I finally had all I wanted and I threw it away. It took me five years to understand that.” He can’t tell him that he doesn't know if he ever would have come back if it weren’t for the bull that got in his way and another failed strike. He could’ve spent the rest of his life in the puddle of his own ambition and the pages of an old dime store novel clutched in his hand, trying to make himself into something he’s not. 

“I waited for you.” David mutters, quiet as though he doesn't mean for Jack to hear. 

“I’m here now.” Jack says, stepping towards him. His hands are shaking, eyes wet. “I’m here.” 

David glares. “How was Santa Fe? Was it worth it?” 

It’s a punch to the gut. Jack grimaces. “It ain’t what I dreamed it would be. I shouldn’ta left New York. All I wanted was a family again and folks who cared about me. I found it here, and I was so scared of it that I threw it away because I didn’t know how to let go of the thing that I had dreamed of since I was a kid. The dream was the only thing that mattered to me. It was all I had.” Jack fights the urge to take David’s hands in his own. “It took me five years to realize that. I’m sorry.” 

David looks at him, his chest rising and falling. Jack will spend the rest of his life making it up to Davey if he has too. He’ll buy him a goddam mansion on Fifth Avenue if that’s what it takes. He’ll do anything to take away that betrayed look in his eye, the pain in his shoulders and the anger that is directed at him. Jack’s never known how to say sorry, or how to be a decent person, but Lord is he trying to better. It starts with this.  

“I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you.” David says eventually, his shoulders drawn up. “You have to understand that. I don’t know if I ever can.” 

Jack nods. “I do. I’m sorry for leaving you the way I did.” 

“Why did you do it?” David finally asks, voice raised again. He gestures wildly around the room, at Jack, at everything that’s put them in the position they’re in now. “That’s what I can’t understand.” 

Jack’s breath hitches slightly. “Did I never tell you?” He could’ve sworn that he told David why he was leaving. That day on the rooftop of the Lodging House when David had told him about becoming a teacher and Jack had told him about the money, about finally having what he needed to go west. After years of scraping by on pennies and nickels, without a proper place to call home, no parents, nothing to call his but the hat on his head and the bunk in the Lodging House, Jack had enough to do what he’d been dreaming of since he was a kid living in the worst Irish neighborhood in lower Manhattan. 

“No.” David spits. “All you said was you had to leave because you finally had the money and it was what you’d been dreaming of for so long. That was all.” 

“Oh.” Jack swallows. That isn’t how he remembers it, but he also knows he has spent enough time trying to forget his last days in New York, so he doesn't truly know what happened at all. He remembers arguing with Race and Albert, and with Les. He remembers David’s heartbroken face and a bitter goodbye. He remembers the city disappearing into a forest, and the ocean being swallowed by the land and the great continent as he looked towards the setting sun. 

Jack says everything. He explains all of it. The words pour out of him like rain from a heavy cloud, like water from a sodden sponge.  Jack tells David about the anger, about the lifelong desire to prove that someone like him could climb his way out of the Lower East Side, that he too could have the American Dream of cowboys in the desert. He tells David about how that dream evolved into something that would get him up in the morning and carry him through a long day of spinning lies just so he could eat. He tells David about the way he felt nobody in New York would care if he was gone, how he was replaceable, just another kid on the street. He tells David about how he and Crutchie wanted to go west together, but Crutchie was smart enough to recognize a good thing and Jack wasn’t. Jack was never that smart. 

Jack tells David about how he didn’t know how to let all of that go, and how when Snyder had given him that stack of cash it felt hollow and cheap despite being the most money he had ever seen in his life. He’ll always regret taking that money. Maybe he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in now if he hadn’t, or if he had given it back, maybe he and David wouldn’t be shouting at one another in an empty classroom in the Tenth Ward, trying to reconcile something that they might never have again. 

David is quiet through Jack’s long-winded explanation, only nodding along and prompting him forward when Jack pauses. Throughout his conversation he only looks more and more wounded, as though Jack is just twisting the knife further. When Jack is all out of words, all out of apologies and reasons and explanations, David only sighs and asks, “What about us, Jack?” 

The question knocks the wind from his chest. He breathes in and out, trying to regain his balance and find his voice. It was always David. It was always him. “I should have come back for you. I shouldn’t have ever left.” He says again, because he can’t say it enough. He can’t ever mean it enough. “I thought of you everyday.” 

David sucks in a sharp breath. “Don’t say that.” 

“I did.” Jack takes off his new hat and holds it to his chest. “Every day, Davey.” 

David looks at him, and Jack doesn't know what to do now that he has him in front of him, in person. He is no longer a faded memory. Life changes in an instant. Three days ago Jack was hiding in a barn in Santa Fe, listening to the rattled whispers of tumbleweeds over the sand and the wind between the slats. Today he is in the Lower East Side looking at the love of his life. 

Jack’s life is a long list of regrets. But this will always be his biggest. 

David pauses, looking away from him. Jack steps back to give him space even though it hurts. “I’m going to have to think about this.” 

“Okay.” Jack says. He nods slowly, trying to process everything that has just happened. He knows that as soon as he is away from David he will sit down and he will run the conversation through his head over and over again like a broken phonograph. He will go over every word and pick it apart with his hands and he will try to make sense of it, try to swallow it like a cup of hot water. But all of that will come later, because right now Davey is still in front of him and Jack can still see the way he steps back, the way he squares his shoulders like he’s tired but readying for a fight, the way he wants nothing to do with him. 

“Okay.” He repeats, slowly stepping back, nodding along because he doesn't know what else to do. “Will I see you again?” 

“I don’t know, Jack.” The sound of his name nearly makes Jack fall over. He reaches for the wall to steady himself, reminds himself to breathe. “I don’t know.” 

Jack nods and steps away. He turns his back to Davey and he takes one step after another, and he knows if he turns around he won’t be able to leave, he’ll crumple into a pile and fall apart. But he loves David. He loves him enough to take one step after another and leave him all over again, because this time it’s David asking. 

He hates that they’re always leaving each other. He knows that when David pictures him, he sees him leaving. But this time it isn’t Jack’s choice, he isn’t in control of it, but it’s a grave that he has dug himself into. So Jack doesn't turn around, and instead he puts one foot in front of the other and he doesn't stop until he’s out of the school and stepping into the sunlight streets messy with dirt and grime. He doesn't know where he is going to go, where his feet are going to take him, only that he wants to be as far from that school as he can get. 

Jack walks south, passing through a busy fish market while he keeps his head down, heart hammering against his ribs. The smell of so much fish in the muggy summer afternoon makes him sick, the ice beds melting as the vendors do their best to keep the fish cold. An old woman with a headscarf argues with a younger woman in a shawl, both of their hands lined by years of work. A father holds his daughter’s hand while she points at a tuna and giggles and he tugs her along. A man with a graying beard holds out a cup where he lays slumped against a brick building. Laundry lines are stretched over the street, dresses and shirts flapping like ghosts in the wind and catching in the light of the sun. 

Jack walks through the crooked streets, not caring much for where he goes. Which isn’t smart, but he’s learned that if you look like you’re supposed to be somewhere, most people won’t question it. He passes through an Italian neighborhood, ignoring the dark eyes that peer out of tenement windows. He walks and he walks, as though he can shake off the sands of Santa Fe and the conversation he’s just had with David and drown himself in New York. 

He would do anything David asked of him. Jack meant that. He would leave even. But it doesn't stop the way it hurts him all over again, the way his chest is caving in on itself and he’s holding himself together by threads. One strong breeze, one more bad thing, would shatter him like splintering glass. 

Jack doesn't know where he is going until the street opens up to the harbor, and the wind smells of smoke and sea salt and brine. The wind pushes his hair back and he has to press a hand to his hat to keep it from flying off, his chest heaving as he looks out at the Atlantic pressing up against America. 

The Brooklyn Bridge stretches across the harbor towards Brooklyn, and the Manhattan bridge is half built, suspended over the water. Ships bob in the harbor and float towards the docks, big steam ships full of supplies. There’s the noise and clatter of men working and hauling crates off the massive ships. The wind stinks of salt and brine. 

All Jack can do is stand there and drink it in. Perhaps he hasn’t fully processed that he is back home, back to the place he was raised. He has bled and cried in New York. But he has also laughed and smiled and loved in this city. The sun shines down, but it isn’t cruel and blinding like it was in the desert. It welcomes him. It sparkles off the harbor as the American flag waves from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Jack sighs, his breathing finally steadying. 

He walks to one of the smaller piers, where the only ships are privately owned and there’s only a small handful of people about. There’s a group of teenage boys beneath the pier, mostly Italians, jostling one another and laughing at something. Jack sits down at the edge of the deck, head tilted up to look at the sun and the city and everything he had taken for granted. 

Jack’s feet dangle off the edge, and a lump forms in his throat when he recalls the way Davey had asked him to leave. He cannot get that shocked expression out of his head, the gentleness David had once treated him with long gone. He doubts they will ever be what they were during the strike, doubts that he will ever get that back with any of the newsies. 

He looks at the Brooklyn Bridge, then turns his head to look at the fledgling Manhattan Bridge stretching tentatively across the bay towards the other side, like two hands reaching for one another. The bridge dwarfs the men who are working on it. Perhaps he can build a bridge between himself and everyone he has left behind. He doesn't know if he can ever make it up to them, not really, but he’s tired of running and jumping into situations without thinking. He isn’t seventeen anymore. 

Jack looks down at the blue water beneath him, his dusty boots hanging over it. He grips the edge of the wooden dock, fighting the insane urge to jump in. The lump in his throat breaks, and he chokes back a sob. 

Five years without David, five years without so much as writing a letter. Jack had tried. He’d written so much that his hands hurt and his pen ran out of ink. But he didn’t know what he knows now, or perhaps he always did and he was too frightened to process it. He wishes he held onto David tighter than he did, wishes he had at least sent a letter. His life is tainted with regret. 

Jack sniffs, fighting against the wall of emotion that was being chiseled away. He rubs his eyes and breathes in raggedly. He thinks about the way David’s hand felt in his, the way David had taught him what to say at the union meetings, how Jack sat down with his family for dinner, how they had kissed on the fire escape in spite of the dangers. The world was so alive back then, reduced to the size of Jack and David and the strike that was too big for either of them that came to encompass the entire city. He thinks of how David looked in the morning, papes between his hands as Les tries to grab them from him, thinks of David smiling in the sun, David looking at him over the light of a candle. He thinks of David now, angry and shocked and saddened by what Jack had done to him. 

The guilt drags at Jack like an anchor at the bottom of the sea. He lights a cigarette with shaking hands, thoughts careening through his head a mile a minute. It takes a few flicks of his thumb before the light catches, the wind working against him as he cups his hand over the light and the end of the cigarette before the flame catches and he breathes in deeply and desperately, barely holding back another sob. 

He is so caught up in his own thoughts, in the whirlwind of emotions that have gathered around him, that he doesn’t hear the person walking up to him until they’re sitting beside him on the end of the dock. 

Jack looks to his right, cigarette between his teeth and fingers, and nearly drops it into the harbor. 

“Hey, Cowboy.” Albert grins. 

Jack blinks. Why does he keep running into folks? Why is he forced to keep having conversations he doesn't know if he can handle? There are tear tracks still staining his face, his hair is a mess beneath his new hat, and for a moment he can’t do anything but stare at the man beside him. 

Albert doesn't look all that different either. He’s somehow even broader than Jack remembers him, his hat still worn backwards over his red hair. His sleeves are rolled up, vest unbuttoned in the heat. He takes off his hat and uses it to fan himself, looking as though he really couldn’t give less of a shit that Jack Kelly was back in New York but he’s here anyways. 

It’s a nice change. 

“What are you doing here?” Jack asks. For a city so big, he is certainly running into a lot of people. 

“What am I doing here?” Al asks, eyebrows raised, and yeah, that was probably a stupid question. “What is you doing here? Shit, it’s been what, four years?” 

“Five.” Jack mumbles, looking back out at the harbor. A big steamship slides beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, breathing smoke into the air. 

“Time flies, huh?” 

Jack glances at him, but Albert doesn't seem upset. For someone who was always fidgety and just as quick to fight as Jack was, the reaction surprises him. “Sure does. Did you knows I was back?” 

“Yeah, Racer told me.” He admits, pulling out a little container of food and starting to eat it. “We’s lives together now.” 

Jack raises an eyebrow. The lump in his throat had subsided, and his eyes had stopped stinging. “Really?” 

“Yeah.” Albert nods, chewing on a roll of bread. “I work on the docks, he’s up there.” He points vaguely in the direction of a skyscraper going up and Jack’s blood runs cold. 

“He’s a roughneck ?” 

“Scares the shit out of me.” Albert agrees. “But the pay is good.” 

“Jesus we gotta get him out of there.” Jack rubs his head, tapping out the ash into the ocean. 

Al shrugs. “He likes it. Can’t do it forever, it wears a guy out fast. He works in the factories in the winter, whatever sort of job he can get.” 

Jack doesn't understand why Albert is treating him like this is normal, like Jack didn’t leave him and the rest of the union immediately following the strike to fend for themselves while he went off to pursue his impossible dream. He couldn’t delude himself into thinking that the union would have stopped the trajectory of their lives entirely, they were all poor kids who couldn’t afford so much as a seltzer after work, but Jack could delude himself into thinking that things would have been different if he had not left. Maybe it’s all Jack’s fault that they’ve been stuck in this life of poverty still, stuck in an unbreakable cycle of dangerous, endless work just to survive. 

It feels like a punch to the gut, learning that Race is a roughneck of all things. The idea of him walking across a beam suspended high above the city, placing one foot in front of the other as the wind howls and tears at him, threatening to knock him down onto the faraway street below, makes Jack sick.

“Race mentioned you were back.” Albert continues, oblivious to the tightness of Jack’s jaw. Jack appreciates his ability to bulldoze headfirst through a conversation, stepping easily over tension and awkwardness to get straight to the point. Albert never did anything half-heartedly in his life, and that’s true even now. Albert put everything he had into every thing he did, whether it was selling papers or throwing a punch, or watching out for the newsies. Albert didn’t believe in anything less. 

“Did he?” Jack asks around the cigarette in his mouth. 

Albert nods. “Seemed a bit overwhelmed about the whole thing.” 

Jack glances at him. Albert is still eating his lunch as though there’s nothing amiss, and Jack decides that maybe for him it is. It’s been five years, and he wasn’t as close with Albert as he was with Crutchie and Race. Maybe it’ll be easier coming back to all the others, the wounds aren’t as deep. 

“And you?”

Al glances at him, red hair shining in the afternoon sun. “What about me?” 

“You ain’t mad that I left?” 

“Used to be.” Albert shrugs, tearing off a hunk of bread and chewing. “So’s was everyone. Les especially. I think he still is. He gets real mad when anyone brings ya up in conversation.” Jack looks down at the water, at their shadows on the moving waves. He grimaces. 

“You ain’t mad no more?” 

“Too busy being mad at everything else in the world.” Albert looks out at the water, squinting against the sun reflecting off the waves. A steam ship bellows in the distance, and the Italian kids at the end of the dock walk off towards better things. Jack takes a long drag of his cigarette, studying Albert carefully. 

“Yeah?” 

“It ain’t better now that we is grown.” Bitterness creeps into his voice for the first time since he’s sat down. It’s not directed inwards, or even at Jack, but out at the harbor and the city and everything that their lives have been. “I always thoughts it would be. I kept thinking it would get better once I wasn’t a newsie no more. I would get a good job with decent hours and Race and I would find a way to make it work.” He rips off another piece of bread, the crust crackling and crumbs falling onto the dock. The realization that Race and Albert really are together is enough to leave Jack momentarily stunned, and he almost misses the rest of what Albert says. “We did, but the work stinks. Don’t know why I thought it would get better just cause I wasn’t a kid no more. If anything it got worse.” 

“Ain’t no crime to being poor.” 

Albert laughs, and Jack knows they’re both thinking about the strike. About what they were and what they can never be again. 

“There ain’t.” Albert tears the bread with dirt stained fingers and offers half to Jack. “You have to tell the rest of the world that.” 

Jack takes the bread. He asks the question he’s too scared to ask. “Is it my fault?” 

Albert stares at him. “What?” 

“Is it my fault?” The words clump up in his throat like phlegm. “Is it my fault that you’re where you are?” 

“Jack.” Albert says sternly. “The strike all those years ago? It changed my life. It was a miracle what we did. But for everything we did, for every broken bone and battered nose, every kid in the Refuge and stopped wagon, it didn’t drop a pile of cash in my hands. Nothing could have prevented this life, and it ain’t your fault. Don’t you ever think it is. You leaving is not the reason I’m where I’m at now.” 

Jack looks down at the bread in his hands and curls his fingers over it, shaking. He wants David. 

“I ain’t ashamed of it.” Albert continues, voice firm. There’s no room for Jack to question it. A breeze blows off New York Harbor. The Brooklyn Bridge stretches like a grand colossus beyond Albert. “I ain’t ashamed of what I am and what I do for a living. Don’t you ever think I am. There ain’t nothing in my life I’m ashamed of.” 

“Then what are you so angry at?” 

“It ain’t that you left, Jack. It’s the fact that you took that shining dream with you and left the rest of us.” 

Jack’s throat dries. The cigarette hangs between his fingers and falls into the water. “I’m sorry.” 

“We was enough Jack. We was all enough for eachother.” Albert says. “It’s you who we lost.” 

It’s too much for Jack to hold. The implications, the meaning of all of it, is too much for him to hold in his hands. He knows how he must have looked to the rest of the newsies, someone bigger than life, someone who could take them all into a bright and  prosperous future because he had the guts and the charisma to do it. Jack dreamed big enough for all of them, and his ideas were too big for him. For all of them. 

Maybe they don’t need the west, or the dream and a pile of cash in their hands. Jack looks to Albert, to the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan, to the scrap of bread in his hands, to David. All they ever needed was each other. 

“I can’t be what I was.” He admits quietly. “I ain’t who I was at seventeen.” 

“None of us is.” Albert shrugs. “Are you going to eat that or can I have it back?” 

Jack eats the bread.