Reincarnated ~ A Modern Newsies Au (Nowsies)

The King Of New York | August 31, 1899

Aaaaa I'm so excited!! :)

Wow. This is part 49. We've come a long way from where we began.

Wrong song haha.

So I've known for awhile that I needed to write this flashback chapter.

So here we are: summer of 1899. No hardships, no death, no sorrow. They're kids. They just won their strike, and they have their whole future ahead of them. Everything is alright.

And, most importantly: every single one of them is the King of New York.

Enjoy! :)

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All the newsies are eating lunch at Tibby's right now. The sun's shining bright outside. It's a good day. 

And now they've had a whole month where everything is alright.

Kid Blink and David Simmons are back. Everyone knows the two actually wouldn't have ever betrayed the strike, much to the pair's relief, as well as to the relief of Mush and Jack.

It was the start of this month where they first made the compromise with The World to have the prices of papers go down; and even though that didn't happen, they're still happy with the compromise that they were able to make. And now that it's been a month, they can still say that everything is going great. No newsie has had to eat what they didn't sell since July. They sell newspapers now with an extra skip to their step, just a little extra bit of smile, just a little more enthusiasm in their hawking headlines. They're all happy.

They look at the papers they have in front of them on the table. Papers from The Sun, The Brooklyn Eagle, The Evening Post, The Evening Telegram, The Herald, The New York Times, The New York Tribune, every newspaper company that wrote stories about the strike. They have a big collection from those two weeks. True, they don't have every paper written about them in that time; but they still marvel at what they've been able to find. 

"All them words there, written about us?" Boots comments out loud, intrigued by just how many people wrote about them.

"It's just so cool," Crutchy says as he traces the letters on the page.

"Hey look! "The Looker-On" Observing Racetrack Higgins," Race finds a headline. He smirks. "I must've gotten their attention."

"Well of course you did," Spot tells him. "I would be more surprised if you didn't catch their attention."

Race smiles.

"You did this," Mush tells Blink as they look through all the articles about Kid Blink together. "This amazing Kid Blink in the papers is you."

Blink smiles. "Yeah." 

The thing is, no one will truly be able to explain how seeing these words on these pages really makes them feel. True, they're happy and excited, but they also feel seen.

Because these papers are telling their story. Someone is telling their story. And that's something special. That's something powerful. It makes them feel euphoria like nothing else. It just makes them so, so happy.

And the World will know. The New York World will know. The whole world will know.

And because of these newspapers, that will never change.

"I don't mean to be a downer, but if ya got your picture in the papes, so what?" Skittery asks suddenly. "Where does that get ya?"

That gets a lot of them indignant. How can he just say that?