Newsies in an a/b/o universe.

Obviously do not read if that combination appalls you.

Jack Kelly differentiated at the Refuge. He was maybe thirteen. Maybe twelve. He didn't know, exactly.

The boy sharing his bed was Crud Finney. Crud was six or so and scared. But Punsly Schultz knew what was happening. He got up and told Crud to swap bunks and Crud didn't want to do it; he was scared Snyder would notice. But Puns was already a tall, lanky seventeen, and he pulled Crud easily out of the bunk and said, "Beat it and go guard the door, or the one you'll have to be scared of is me."

So Crud did that. And then Puns crawled onto the top bunk where Jack was, which none of the other boys could see up into, being so much smaller than Puns was. Puns put a hand dramatically on Jack's forehead, like he was feeling for a temperature. Jack couldn't figure out why he was doing it. Jack didn't feel sick. Or at least not like how sick was supposed to feel.

He felt intense down below, down where his nightshirt was riding up, and he knew he was hot all over but he couldn't think about that. His body hurt, especially down there, but down there it felt like something else too. Almost a feeling like he was heavy and empty at the same time, and his penis was slick and leaking and upright, and then further back, behind that, he felt something in a place he had never felt anything before. Like he had to go, right then. From right where it hurt so much.

Puns Schultz touched him there with his right hand, while his left hand still rested soothingly on Jack's forehead and he said indistinct things about a bad fever. His fingers worked cleverly under the nightshirt, and Jack felt a rush of wet and then, briefly, some buzzing respite. A small relief.

"Don't tell nobody, Francis," Puns said. "For your own good. Don't tell nobody."

Denton was of course a beta. All respectable people were.

But the other men at the Sun were almost disappointed about it. Because Denton had been to war. And nothing ought to make a man differentiate like a war.

"Sorry to disappoint you," Denton told them wryly one morning, dropping by the office with his latest. A piece on the murder of a Bowery cigar shop owner. Not his usual line; Denton was supposed to be doing local interest at that time. But then Denton had friends in high places.

"You sure the Governor didn't differentiate?" said Grand, who did the local politics section. "Now that would be a story."

Nearly everyone present laughed uproariously. Not Denton. But everyone else.

"Teddy Roosevelt differentiate?" said van Kirk, who ran the society pages. Disbelief colored his voice. "Not possible. The only people who do that are-"

"Soldiers, brave men," Denton said evenly. "Men the governor respects."

"Can't be that brave if they got hold of what ails the convict and the shoeshine boy," Grand said, flippant.

"Are the convict and the shoeshine boy especially cowardly in your eyes?" Denton said. "In mine they aren't."

"No?" Grand said, like he was exchanging a funny joke with someone who wouldn't quite get it.

"Not necessarily," said Denton.

After Mayer's accident things became hard, very hard. And the first person to try and fix things wasn't David, because David had to keep going to school, that was paramount. The first person to try was his mother, who was soon fired from the factory because she couldn't work fast enough. And then it was Sarah, who kept a job a little longer but who, in the end, punched the foreman when he groped her. So she was sent back home with no pay, and things became even harder.

Les was offered a job washing dishes in the back room of a bar on Lafayette street. No one wanted him to take it. He took it for a few days but was caught daydreaming. The barman boxed his ears. He lost the job.

Things got harder. But David kept going to school.

Until one night something odd happened. Sarah and Mayer lay in their beds and howled and howled, and when David tried to touch Sarah to calm her his mother came in and shoved him away. Esther Jacobs said, "Don't," like he had been about to do something terrible, and then she'd shook Les awake and told them both to run for Dr. Bloom.

So they did. The doctor came and looked at Sarah and Mayer, and asked lots of personal questions. And when they told him about the accident, and the groping, and how they hadn't had anything today but some watery coffee, and nothing the day before that except watery coffee either, and how the landlord would be throwing them out soon, and how neither Mayer nor Sarah wanted to eat (so that the boys could), the doctor nodded.

He explained what happened sometimes, when things got too hard. New teeth. New senses. Changes in places nobody respectable would know about.

Mayer and Sarah weren't respectable people. Not anymore.

They weren't betas anymore. And if the rest of the family wasn't careful, it would happen to them too.

David left school. He had to find work.

Now when Jack Kelly met Dave Jacobs he talked up his abilites. And David gave him a skeptical look.

But Crutchie, who knew better, pointed out that Jack was the best.

And, low, in Dave's ear so only he could hear, he said, "He's an alpha, see."

David turned around and stared at him. Crutchie nodded his funny-looking, amiable face, and he gave one of his funny-looking, amiable smiles.

It made sense to Crutchie. Everybody knew about alpha Jack Kelly. Jack could smell out a sucker at fifty paces: his nose was that good, maybe as good as Spot Conlon's. And when the Delanceys came to rough up the weaker boys, there was Jack Kelly flashing them a smile with those sharp incisors of his, real dogs' teeth like he had. He knew all the best spots, and could mark out his territory and fight for it. That was maybe too animal-like for the Astors and Vanderbilts of the world, but for Jack and the newsies it was fine.

For the newsies to be an alpha was a gift, even. No shame in being an alpha. Differentiation wasn't common - most people died when they went through it, or died from whatever was bringing it about, starvation or disease or abuse, and the boys that survived were shipped off to the Refuge almost as a matter of course. But still. If you had to differentiate, an alpha was what you ought to be. A fighter.

"He could be huntin' pretty-skirted, soft little omegas from here to Canarsie with his time," said Racetrack Higgins, who was always hearing things in odd places and therefore had picked up on what Crutchie had said. "Instead Jack's offering to help you."

"Fifty-fifty," David said.

Within the day, he realized that since Sarah was an omega now, and Jack was an alpha, that was something. That was something big and possible.

And he liked Jack anyway. In spite himself. In spite of the niggling feeling he had that Jack was almost compulsively dishonest.

Anyway he knew that Jack would come down to fifty-fifty when he met the family. Jack didn't seem like he'd deny them in person.

Mayer and Sarah both smelled the alpha on Jack right away, and so that was why they took to him so quick, David figured. That and that Jack was easy to like. Les worshipped him already. This was not sensible, David felt, but it was understandable. When Jack smiled it was wild, lupine, with teeth too sharp. But there was something in his eyes that was not so dangerous, really.

Something hidden. Secret.

Pulitzer and Hearst were at war and it was a very stressful business. But they wouldn't have dreamed of differentiating. People of their caliber did not differentiate. Pulitzer and Hearst both felt that they had too much self-control and value to ever let themselves become animals.

And it was never even on the table for them. They had never starved. No one had ever shamed them and beaten them. Real misery was not a thing they knew.

That was what it took. Differentiation was a kind of defense. It was supposed to make people better equipped to face down impossible circumstances.

Sometimes it failed, though, and made them omegas instead.