Author's Note: For most of this, the first chapter, it may seem as if this story has nothing to do with Newsies or the plot thereof and the characters therein. I am begging you on my knees to bear with me. I promise that after this chapter, it will quickly become clear that the story is extremely focused on the aforementioned subjects, and that my OC's and the subplots they create are only there to flesh out the fic. Merci beaucoup for your understanding, and I hope you may enjoy.

Oh, yes...I am a review whore...one click of that button, a few lines of type, and I'm at your service forever.

Midnight Haven  By Alias

On a moonless autumn night, in a narrow brick alley, in the infamous section of New York City known as Five Points, a boy was shoved against one of the two walls that formed the alleyway. His assailant, a boy much older and larger than himself, held a blade to his throat. The victim closed his eyes, accepting the fate that he had been anticipating for all the years he had spent on the streets. He could not silence the pounding of his heart or steady the trembling of his hands, but aside from the physical consequences of his predicament, the adrenaline that inevitably rushed through his body, he was not afraid. Three faces appeared, vivid, in his mind, serenely waiting, and he was almost glad.

            But before the cold, sharp edge of steel against his neck perform its fatal task, a voice spoke from close behind the wielder of the blade, a soft and light voice, void of all emotion except a commanding tone.

            "Let him go."

            The younger boy felt the edge of metal slide ever so slightly against the fragile skin it touched, as its bearer turned to view the one who dared to issue such an order. A moment later, the knife clattered to the bricks with a sound that bounced off the walls enclosing the alley, throwing its echoes out into the pitch-black night as the weapon's owner fled without a backward glance.

            Deprived of the muscled hand that had pinned him to the wall, the boy collapsed onto the icy bricks, overcome by the injuries he had received from his attacker. A thin crimson stream leaked from his head where it had struck the wall, and his left arm also bled rusty stains onto the surface where he lay. One arm was undoubtedly broken, and perhaps the other as well; his eyes were blackened, his nose gushing a scarlet river, his lip split and his body decorated with a gothic rainbow of bruises. The waves of pain that broke over him were so powerful that a scream surfaced in his throat, struggling to be torn from his lungs in protest at the volume of this physical agony, though it emerged as nothing more than a harsh, strangled gasp.

            "Mother of God," proclaimed a velvet whisper, a voice other than that which had ordered the would-be murderer away. A girl knelt gingerly beside the boy, cupping his face and turning it toward her with a roughness that was clearly unintentional, administered by a hand unaccustomed to gentle purposes.

            "What happened, kid?"

            "Nothin'." He was amazed that he could speak, that he would even be motivated to speak by such a pointless and meaningless question, coming from a stranger who only wished to satiate her crude, natural human curiosity. "I made a mistake," he murmured wryly, blood bubbling from his lip and trailing down his chin with each syllable. The sound of his own voice was alien to his ears, like sandpaper scraping over splinter-studded wood.

            "One hell of a mistake, I guess."

            The girl leaned over him, and he caught a flash of steel in her hand. She had not retrieved the knife that had come so close to spilling the last of his blood; this was a switchblade, her own, which she quickly flipped shut and pocketed when she saw his eyes on it.

            "I ain't gonna hurt ya, kid."

            How could she? She was tiny, he could see as he squinted in the suffocating darkness; the body of an adolescent, but in miniature proportions. Her voice was feathery and sweet, and she had a face to match, resembling that of an innocent child. But the doll face was scarred, the hands that took one of his between them were like leather, and the switchblade still gleamed in his mind's eye, like black wings on an angel.

            "Get outta here." With an effort that sent flames of pain burning down his neck and back, the boy turned his face away. "He'll be back, or someone else'll come. No girl in her right mind sits in an alley in Five Points at night. Get away."

            He wanted to die alone. To have someone else, a stranger, witness his death, would be crude, almost embarassing.

            "No one will come. Not with Dire here." She nodded toward the entrance of the alley, where the tall, muscled form of a boy was silhouetted by the hazy gleam of a street lamp behind him. Perhaps he had been the source of the forbidding voice which had postponed the inevitable. The boy on the ground sighed raggedly and closed his eyes, too tired to argue. So tired.

            "Don't go to sleep on me," the girl ordered coldly. He felt his head lifted, causing another explosion of pain that nearly stole his consciousness, and something soft and heavy was wound around the gash. For a few moments, pressure was applied with this makeshift bandage, and when it stopped, so had the bleeding. Carefully, he was lowered back to the ground, his head cushioned in what seemed to be a shirt or vest of some sort, probably donated by the young guard called Dire.

            Dizzy, nauseous, half-conscious, the boy watched blurry visions of figures moving around him. He felt his arms and legs lifted, inspected, the remainders of his tattered shirt torn away. Someone sucked in her breath sharply, and more dressings bound various throbbing parts of his anatomy. When at last his vision cleared, the other forms had vanished, leaving no evidence of whether they had been there at all, or mere phantoms conjured by the wandering mind of a dying child. Only the girl remained, sitting beside him with her knees drawn to her chest and her elbows rested on them, her chin cupped in her hands.

            "That's better," she informed him as he blinked in confusion, his hand twitching in hers. "I told you not to go to sleep."

            "Can't help it," he replied faintly. "Too tired."

            "I'll keep you awake, then."

            "How?"

            The girl paused, her lips pursing together and her eyes closing softly, then snapping open to hold her patient's gaze so that his eyes would not close.

            "I'm going to tell you a story."

            He would have laughed, except the capacity to recognize humor or lunacy seemed to have leaked out of him among the quarts of blood. It seemed almost right and reasonable, that a porcelain doll with a switchblade should sit by his failing body in an alley at midnight and tell him a story.

            "It's going to be a long night, and this will help pass the time. It's an exciting story, for the most part, so I daresay you won't have trouble keeping awake. It doesn't start with 'once upon a time', or end with 'happily ever after'. It's not a story of kings or queens, dragons or unicorns. It's a story of pain and bloodshed, fear and envy, hatred and betrayal. But it's also a story of love, and loyalty, and strength. It's a story of dancers, singers, artists, thieves, whores, gangsters, and newsboys. And it's a story of life...more than anything, of life."

            That was the last thing the boy wished to hear about. She knew it, this girl, this stranger, but he was at her mercy, and she wanted to keep him awake.

            "Stealth?" She suddenly addressed the darkness, her nightingale call echoing timelessly, like the clatter of the blade.

            In answer, a boy emerged from the shadows, one of the mysterious forms that had drifted across the delirious vision of the broken creature lying on the bricks. The girl said no more to this silent figure, but "Stealth" seemed to understand the nature of her unspoken request; he placed in her hand a stub of candle and a matchbox. Nodding her thanks to him as he disappeared again into his shrouded corner, she struck a match and lowered the flame to the candle's wick, placing the flickering pinpoint of fire beside her charge, so that its ghostly light danced across his battered face, making him squint in annoyance.

            "Light always improves my storytelling. And now, I'm going to begin..."

            "...In the spring of 1898, hope was awakening along with the possums and foxes and bears. Signs of it were visible even in New York City, in the freeing of the East River from its icy prison, the blooming of the trees in Central Park, and the lusty shouts of the newsboys on the corners, hawking headlines with renewed vigor at this golden promise...the end of starving until your stomach felt shredded apart from the emptiness, and nights so bitter cold that the cold invaded your mind, replacing every thought and dream and memory with a single-minded longing for quick, simple death."

            "Spring was a new chance, as it must always be, but even the sunbeams of April cannot chase away the darkness. When New York, like a nobleman going out for the evening, donned his raven cloak of night, the secrets of the city came to life. Do you know those secrets? Of course you do...everyone knows them; they are accepted yet denied, silent infamy, hidden in plain view.

            The seediest of bars. The most provocative of nightclubs. The opium dens. The brothels.

            But I am getting ahead of myself. There are things I must tell you first, things you must remember for this story to have any significance. Four things, specifically, that I need to disclose before this narrative can continue. Four facts about that spring.

            In the spring of 1898, the Newsboys Lodging House on Duane Street, in East Side Manhattan, had a leader, as these establishments inevitably do. He was tough, smart, kind and charismatic, well-liked among the boys. They called him Hunter.

            In this same spring, tension began to build between the newsboys of Duane Street and this very neighborhood, Five Points. A grudge started to develop between the leaders of these two tiny nations, and it was only a matter of time before the grudge exploded into something climatic, something that would serve as a catalyst for a conflict like nothing any of these boys had ever before experienced.

            Thirdly, you must know that in the spring of 1898, a boy by the name of Francis Sullivan was arrested for stealing food from a street vendor, and imprisoned in the...charming...children's penitentiary, ironically called the House of Refuge.

            And finally, you must be aware that in the center of the darkness I described earlier, in the center of the tornado of open secrets and ugly truths, in the very center of the dreaded nocturnal world of Five Points, New York City, was a nightclub called the Midnight Haven. It is there that our story truly begins."