{Disclaimer: Newsies is owned by Disney. The title and summary are lyrics by Secondhand Serenade, and are thus copyrighted. Any original characters belong to me, and if you steal them without asking, I'll beat you.}

"Never Too Late"

"This is the way that I'll tell you that I'll leave you alone if you want me to, but I've had enough of this life alone—I'll give it up this time. I know I don't deserve to tell you that I love you. There's nothing in this world I'd take above you. I'm dead inside. Bring me back to life. It's never too late to show you who I am. And I know you wanna love me. I know you understand that I could be your missing page."

Prologue

When I fled Brooklyn, I headed north east, to that always talked about, never seen place they called Upstate New York. I found work on a farm-yes, me, a farm. I was trained for nothing, what else could I do but something that required very little training, merely an ability to follow orders?

You may hesitate there, thinking I'm the least likely person to follow orders. But you have to remember, I wasn't always the leader of Brooklyn. Once upon a time, I was just another newsy, following the orders of my leader, going along like everyone else.

But just like in Brooklyn, I set myself apart, and within two years, a few months shy of my twentieth year on earth, I'd been promoted to foreman, and was working for more hours, more money, and more responsibility.

It's strange, and nothing we realize in the moment, but our lives often carry a pattern. A person likely to lead as a child is likely to lead in adulthood. And just like in childhood, when what I led was a ragtag group of dirty-faced kids, what I led in adulthood was a ragtag group of dirty-faced men.

Men. Somehow, I held myself in a separate category: not quite child, not quite man. Years had passed, I was twenty-one, and I knew I had changed, hopefully had grown up, but I didn't feel like an adult. I wonder if anyone ever does. I doubt it.

I looked like a man now, I knew. Looking in the mirror was still a shock. I was always expecting the wiry, short, baby-faced boy of my youth. Instead, what I saw was lean, well-built man with tanned skin and rough hands. I've gained a few inches. Not many, to be sure, but any inches count when you were five feet, five inches tall as a seventeen year-old.

A lot had changed. I had a new life. But how different was I?

I saw them all in my dreams at night. Bourbon, Cowboy, Skittery, Water, Brandy, Zip, all the rest of them, too...but mostly, her.

I wish I had a name for her. I had names for the rest of them: Ben, Jack, John, Bobby, Paul, Charlie...on and on it went, and I knew them all. I even knew her friends' names: Kassidy, Mandy, Sophie, Ginny, Marie.

But not her. I'd asked, and she hadn't told me. She'd given too much of herself to me already; I understood that now. I'd taken it all, too.

And then I'd thrown it all back in her face and left. I avoided her for months, until my eighteenth birthday: November thirteenth, 1899, the day I appointed a new leader, then took off without so much as a goodbye.

I have dreams sometimes where I go to say goodbye to her, like I should have. In my dreams, she touches my face with her silky fingertips and presses her lips to mine one last time. She doesn't cry, and for that I'm grateful. "Remember me," she says.

I wish I didn't. I've tried to forget. It worked for a while, too. Eighteen, nineteen, it worked. I could bed a girl and not think of her once. I could keep her from my mind in my waking hours, only having to be tormented by her face in my sleep.

When I made foreman, though, there she was, all the time. There's that pattern theory again. She came to me for the first time when I became leader, and here she was again, dogging my every step, just as I became another kind of leader.

Now, I sleep with girls and can't see their faces. Just hers.

I expected her face to fade over the years, but it hasn't. It's there all the time. Everything conjures her. The shade of a horse's mane is the same color as her honey-colored locks. The owner's wife has her nose. A buddy's wife has her full, soft, pink lips. I look in the mirror at my own eyes and see hers.

Some days it's all I can do not to bolt down the drive and hitch a ride back to the City.

But I can't go back. I don't know where she is now. I don't know where any of them are. And what would it look like, me, Seth "Spot" Conlon, crawling back for a girl?