Small Victories (Formerly "Respite")
Summary: Taking stock of the small victories was the only way he got through the day sometimes.
The first small victory was generally getting out of bed. The morning bell would chime, clear and high and incessant, and he would be tempted, oh so tempted, to simply tuck his head under his arm and close his eyes again, to grasp for the last few vestiges of sleep and to ignore the impending reality. Getting up meant committing to the day, and some days, he wasn't ready to do that yet.
But each morning he got up, dressed, and waded into the chaos that was the lodging house washroom. The cheerful grousing for toiletries, the good-natured heckling of those who - miracle of miracles, actually were morning people - and the general push-and-shove sometimes grated, and the constant slamming of the lavatory doors could put him on edge if he was especially tired, but he tried to wash the weariness away and comb civility into place as he fought for a space at the sink. Surviving the washroom rush in the morning was always a small victory.
Sometimes, the younger newsies helped; it was hard to stay irritable when Romeo was chattering away about the dream he had or Buttons was trying to tell him the latest joke he'd come up with while laying in bed the night before when he really should have been sleeping. They loved him, and he knew it, and sometimes that was enough to carry him through the day.
But other days, it wasn't enough. He'd arrive at the circulation gate with the rest of the boys, jostling and joking and channeling his energy into heckling Weasel like the others, but as soon as the stack of papes hit his hands, the weariness was back. He'd scan the headlines, years of experience spinning sensation and scandal from even the most humdrum of the bunch as his mind instinctively turned the words just as the words would turn a profit...but even as he was strategizing, he was listening, too, listening to the boys around him, taking in their excitement, their dismay, and the feelings that lay beneath what was spoken, the worries that went unsaid.
He knew he wasn't the only one who did this. He saw the same awareness in the faces of a few - Henry, Davey, Specs - circumspect, attentive, and always-listening, silently watchful, quietly burdened, perpetually musing, though each of them carried it differently, and none of them spoke about it. Sometimes, though, one of them would catch his eye, and something glimmered there before both of them looked away and went about their business. It wasn't a victory. But eased the isolation just a little.
Selling papes wasn't hard, but each pape sold, as easy as he made it appear, was a small victory in and of itself. Each pape he moved got him closer to the end of another day. Each penny in his pocket was tangible proof of progress, a shiny little bit of hope that he could hide away, believing that if one day he could finally amass enough, he could leave behind the burden he carried, maybe for good. Some days that dream seemed so close that he could touch it; most days he knew it was too vaguely ambiguous to be real.
So he turned his focus back to the small victories.
He ate at Jacobi's often, because he'd learned the hard way that if he didn't eat, he got tired quicker, or was more prone to sickness, or had an even shorter fuse than normal at the end of the day, so he ate, not just for himself, but for the others, and he told himself this strengthening was a victory, too.
Another round of papes, another several hours of walking the city, putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, another penny, another little victory…
Sometimes he had it in him to stop and help one of the younger newsies who was struggling to move his papes. Sometimes he didn't, and kept walking. Sometimes, he'd toss out a free copy of The World to the bums he saw along his route. Sometimes he simply ignored them, not because he didn't see them, but because it only added to his burden to know that they were homeless and hungry and that his pape wasn't really doing much for them in the long run. Sometimes he could reach outside of himself to ease the load of someone else's burden, but often it was all he could do to just carry the weight of his own. But either way, it wasn't easy, and he'd come to count each end result as a small victory in its own way, because if you did not count the small victories, then the day could too easily go down as a defeat, and while that may have been accurate on occasion, it was rarely helpful.
(He hadn't managed to free himself of the burden - at least, not yet - but he had learned along the way how to carry it better.)
And so the day passed, and he took these tiny moments of respite and of re-orientation to anchor himself amidst the chaos. They made him stand a little straighter, walk a little quicker, and smile a little more, and he suspected that his brothers knew, and loved him for (in spite of) it. They knew that he strengthened himself so that he could be strong for them. He met the day so that they too could see that there was something worth getting up for, even if it was only to put one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. And he reminded them, in example if not in words, that each day finished was a small victory...
...because it truly was.