Rain gently raps at the rooftop, teasing depression with its muted volley of taps through the ceiling.
Crutchie would have predicted the oncoming storm, Jack Kelly thinks bittersweetly, though even the sweet turns sour quickly. Humor was always their shield against the snares of the city life. Crutchie's especially.
And it is because of that fact that humor now captures no avail.
Artists and dreamers, they have the gift of perspective that makes them who they are. They get lost in their worlds of light and dark, of bleakness and color, fantasizing of the things they can create and control. An optimist among these things can bend the perspective of reality. But in this case, reality is brittle and broken and simply Jack Kelly's worst nightmare.
His knees grow sore from his knelt position by the hospital cot.
His eyes remain sealed tight and his head bows in submission, wishing, imploring, begging that when he opens them again, Circumstance will perhaps possess a kinder will.
The boy who has never believed in anything higher giving a damn about the children of the New York slums, who has never relied on the hand of God to deliver him from the scrapes he so often recklessly threw himself into, who always stared the helpless down under a cynical eye, feels he has been pleading with Fate for an entire week.
His weary, sweat-smeared grip still cages the hand of his best friend, its fingers long limp.
He waits for them to lace back around his palm as they always did in times of anxiety, when he needed hope, when he needed to know his buddy was right there by his side. Because right now, Jack is the one who needs hope from the eternal optimist.
He waits for the soft snorts that his friend would utter in his sleep from time to time, though the faintest delusional mutterings have ceased long ago.
He waits for the bright, golden meadows behind Crutchie's eyelids to reveal themselves once more.
He waits for the twenty-yard smile to crack.
He waits for the cruel joke to be over.
They had said he would be okay. They had said that there was no way that the polio could work its way up the spinal cord. They had said that it couldn't possibly be terminal in someone so young.
They had lied.
The kid had finally bit it at eleven o'clock that morning.
Jack vaguely hears the gentle scrape of curtain rungs as someone else steps in, heels slowly clacking against the tile floor, as if afraid of startling him. The sound seems as if it is echoing from miles away. He dares not look up.
His hold on Crutchie's hand tightens. For just a moment, he thinks that maybe enough strength will bring his brother back.
Katherine's touch lightly grazes his back.
"Jack."
His shoulders cinch by impulse. He can't do this. He is not ready to let go.
"No."
That is all he can manage. That is all that he can cough out without his voice cracking, without losing it, without screaming bloody murder, without telling the girl he loved to go stab herself in the God damned throat-
"Jack..."
"Just...one ... One more minute," He struggles. His voice wobbles to a whisper of a whine.
Seconds pass. They feel more like hours. Yet Katherine eventually obliges. With a swish of a curtain, Jack assumes she's gone.
Why is it not Pulitzer, rotted out from old age? Why is it not himself? Why is it not anyone else in the world?
Why does it have to be the dreamer, the child, the innocent, the one full of hope, the one who never wanted himself in the place of pity, the one who was always full of light in this haunting hellhole of a city?
Why the hell does it have to be Crutchie?
Jack staggers to his feet, not even looking at the body as he turns to the white curtains that surround him.
It isn't fair.
The bedside cabinet beside him holds an arrangement of vials of medicines and legal documents that were to be addressed by the squad of doctors who didn't even try.
He snatches up the stack of papers and tears it right down the middle, sending shreds of practical nothingness fluttering down to the floor. The glass bottle of clear fluid is the next object that fumbles into his hand, and he hurls it to the ground to shatter to meaningless shards.
It isn't fair.
He claws his fingers tight into his dark hair and lets out a strangled scream. Like a pathetic child. He, the fearless Jack Kelly, can't keep his level head anymore. He just can't.
Screw Jack Kelly. Francis Sullivan is devastated.
And he snaps.
His vision and thoughts are blurred. Blurred with regret, anger, agony, soul-scraping agony that slaps him across the cheek and makes him demand of himself what he could have done, what he should have done, why it had to happen, how it could have happened, how much he wanted to take his place, why he couldn't take his place...
Two more vials explode against the tile with pathetic clinks and clacks. It isn't enough to save him.
Why the hell did it have to be him?
He stumbles back over something wooden. He bends, he picks it up.
He glares at it with inflamed rage.
It's the handicap.
It's that godforsaken handicap.
It's the warning label his brother had on his side all these years.
It's the only thing that could ever slow him down, though he rarely let it.
Jack brings it over his knee and splits it like a twig.
CRACK.
His face is on fire. The tears gush from his eyes without hesitation. It's all over.
He roars with hatred of deceitful Fate. He sobs with defeat. He casts the two sides of the crutch to the icy ground.
At least he won't need them anymore, where he's headed.
The infuriation slowly dilutes itself back to utter misery with each heave of a shuttering breath that Jack takes.
His brother is dead.
And he took a piece of Jack with him.
He thinks he can't even bare to look at the body anymore, but he hazards one more glance before he leaves. His own head feels like it weighs four tons as he turns it to the side.
Crutchie - Crutchie's body, Jack has to remind himself, acknowledging that there is now a difference - lays completely straight, skin a sickly white pale. His face looks like it might still be off dreaming, mouth closed but perhaps providing the ever-so-slightest suggestion of a smirk. He is wearing his undershirt and rolled-up pants from when he came in with muscle disfunction just last night, worn with the filth of the urban mousetrap he more than happily called home.
That was Crutchie. He didn't need anything more than his family to be happy.
If nothing else, Jack hopes he is happy wherever he ends up.
He carries that hope with him now, as he sits in the back seat of one of the Pulitzers' carriages, clutching Katherine's hand this time. He is completely silent on the entire journey to the intimate ceremony.
There should have been none at all. The boys should not have been able to afford it. But between scraped-together profits and compromises from the indebted Joeseph, they were able to make it happen for the highest spirit of the gang.
Glancing out the window dotted with crystals of rain, Jack now remembers Crutchie's barely-coherent mutters toward the end.
"It's... It's real... pretty, Jack..." He had said when the two were alone. His eyes had already closed for good. The poor guy was delusional - he could just barely make the words form. "Jus' like... Y-y-ya said..."
Jack had stood frozen, bent right by Crutchie's side, hanging on his every vowel.
"Ain't... Ain't no r-road. ...No sir."
Then there was that grin. That God damned grin. The grin that he could sustain every second of the day and fool anyone that he was happy as a pup. Half of the time, Jack thought he used it to fool himself into thinking it too.
"There's air. It's way... way open. Look...lookit me, Jack," he mused in a faint, faraway voice. "Wa... I-I-I'm wa... I'm wa... I'm..."
Dear God. The kid was practically gasping for air. Jack got frightened and quickly grabbed his hand.
"Don't give up on me now, Buddy," he encouraged, convincing himself that the disease was just toying with his nervous system again. He'd come back out of it. "We need ya. I need ya."
"Train," Crutchie muttered next. It was as if he had not even heard Jack. Perhaps he hadn't. "Train... On a train." A wisp of a laugh whistled out of him. "We's... We's gonna see it."
The grin grew limp. Jack hated when that happened, more so in that moment than ever.
"H-hey..." He pondered. His brow lightly furrowed. "Ain't... Ain't ya comin'... With me?"
His grip grew lighter and lighter on Jack's hand by the second.
"Not yet, Kid, not yet," Jack choked. He closed in his palm. "Hang in there. Please. Oh, God, how I need ya to stay, Bud."
Crutchie didn't make full words after that point.
Jack realized at last what he must have been seeing.
His heart crumbled like overused clay.
But how?
The wall of water began to rise in his eyes. This was happening. And he just had to face it.
"Jus'... Jus' hold on," he had murmured, the world's saddest smile creeping up onto his face. He swiped the tears from his cheeks and dug his fingers into Crutchie's hand.
"Jus' hold on, Kid, 'til that train makes Santa Fe."
Now, as he completes his improvised eulogy to the united newsboys of New York in the old cemetery, he places the repaired crutch beside the bouquet of lilies on the casket, adorned with the "STRIKE" banner his dear friend had brought charging into battle just that previous summer.
Even with the complete silence of the young mourners, Jack does not hear the most heartfelt applause ever given ring out from behind the crowd.
It is provided by a wisecracking, sideways-smiling blonde boy lingering in the back, clapping as he springs up and down on both feet.