Newsies Imagines

from you i'd buy anything (jack kelly x crutchie morris)

Imagine, for a moment, that there is a boy on a fire escape, and he is listening to his best friend talk about leaving, and that boy is you. And your best friend is your best friend. And he matters more than anything.

Imagine that you have lived your entire recorded life in one city in one country in one world selling newspapers. Your birth was announced in a newspaper, probably, a newspaper that was sold by a newsboy quite like you in many ways but vastly different in the ones that matter, and when you die, your obituary will be placed in a newspaper sold by a different newsboy who is, again, both similar and dissimilar to you, a newsboy whose birth announcement you sold in a newspaper. You will sell the paper announcing the death of the boy who sold the news of your birth, and you will sell the paper announcing the birth of the boy who will sell your death. And so the chain goes on. You will sell many papers of many boys, and you will not even know it, or maybe you will. It does not matter if you read the newspaper. It only matters that you sell it.

Imagine that you have been selling newspapers with your best friend. He is your best friend because you sell newspapers with him, or perhaps in spite of it. You love him completely; you adore him like a devotee gazing upon a god. If you were one of the well-suited men writing up the articles that get to be in print, you would put your best friend in the newspaper. Not because he was born or died, but because he lived, and he lived extraordinarily.

Imagine that your best friend is telling you how much he cannot wait to leave this place, the only place that both of you have ever known. He could do it, you know. Leave. He would be good at it like he is good at every other thing except staying. Although you are his best friend, there is nothing you could say to make him stick around, so instead of saying anything, you listen. You do not like what you are hearing, although you pretend otherwise.

Imagine that your best friend could have left town a thousand times before now, but he waited for this early morning, this stolen breath before dawn, so that he could tell you he was going and judge your face to see how you would take the news. Imagine that he has already spent hours and days and weeks coming up with every possible argument you could make to keep him in New York City, Gotham, the City That Never Sleeps, so that you would think him clever, and laugh, maybe, and want him here. Imagine that he does not know that you already think him clever. Imagine that he thinks he has to prove it somehow, as if years of friendship and ill-concealed longing were not enough to cement that belief in your mind already. It is printed on your brain with permanent ink. Like in a newspaper.

Imagine that you are on the fire escape and listening to your best friend talk, and imagining what will happen one day when you wake up and are alone. You have been lonely before, but this would be worse. He would be fine at it, you think, your best friend. He is good at making friends. Even best friends. You think about them now, someone taking your place in sunny Santa Fe, where the city is not gray and lifeless, where the children do not starve in the streets. It does not matter if your replacement is a girl or boy, if Jack Kelly loves them as much as he loves you, they are not you and therefore they are an enemy.

Imagine that your best friend does not want to swap you out for anybody. You are the crucial part in his plans, the piece that completes the puzzle, but he does not know how to say it and you do not know how to say it, either, so it goes unsaid completely. The bell rings and the two of you hurry to the place where they give you the newspapers that you will sell together, and neither of you get rid of the words hanging leaden on the tips of your tongues. Tomorrow, he will repeat this conversation, and it will go the same way. Imagine that you might know what to do tomorrow. You won't, but there is no loss in trying. Imagine that it might work out in the end. Imagining is easier. It always is.