A/N: well, this was originally going to be a one-shot because I didn't actually know who killed who (so they were going to remain artfully anonymous. To disguise my uhh…lack of imagination…) But I thought of an answer…it's a little strange and I don't like what I did to two of my favorite characters sob, sob. I'm getting out the marshmallows for all the flames I think I'll get for it.
Thanks to everyone who reviewed! Wisecracker88, Unknown-Dreams, kaitins, Pancakes, and madmbutterfly713 (I can't whistle either), and volatile.virgin for the constructive criticism. I was experimenting with the style, so yes, it is kind of overdone, but just as a warning this chapter isn't all that less choppy.
Disclaimer: I am so broke. So don't sue me.
Jack was dead.
Jack was dead and it was obvious who did it. His knife was lying right there.
He would have known everyone would come after him. He would have run.
And he did run. All the way to the train station. Made it all the way there and into the path of the next train to Boston.
So now he was dead too, just like Jack. He had to have known he was dead anyway, living, breathing, but dead. He just saved everyone else the trouble of making it legal.
Why did he do it?
He was just a little kid, really, maybe not even ten. He looked up to Jack like a little kid looked up to an older brother, like Les looked up to me. Jack was nice to him. Jack taught him stuff. Where to sell. How to sell.
The damn little shit, we all liked him!
Was he crazy?
Was there really any other explaination?
The knife was just…a knife. A nice knife, but pretty run-of-the-mill. Usually, when a newsie left, his stuff was up for grabs.
But we buried the knife in a deep, deep hole. No one wanted it. It was evil.
Evil was a concept that escaped most of the residents of the Duane Street Lodging House. It wasn't relevant to their lives. Their rule was: you did what you had to do to survive and that was it, bad, immoral, whatever.
But for him to stab Jack, that was different. That was an evil that they could understand.
Jack couldn't have been threatening anybody's survival. At least, not anyone he regarded as an honorary little brother. And a friend.
Right?
I didn't think we'd ever know.
Maybe we didn't want to know.
They scraped him off the tracks and off the front of the train and put him in a grave marked "unknown." that's all that was written on the marker, the tiniest, cheapest charity marker possible.
They kept him around at the city morgue for a while to see if anyone would come in to identify him, and they ran a two-sentence sidebar in the Sun: "Young boy, nine or ten years old, found on the railroad tracks at Grand Central Station, dead of an apparent suicide. If anybody can positively identify this boy, please contact the city morgue…"
We all read the papers. We all read the article.
No one came forward for him.
We didn't decide it that way, we just didn't do it. Like an unspoken agreement. A pact in invisible blood.
And so he remained unknown. And always will remain unknown.
The irony was, no one seemed to know his actual name.
We all just called him Boots.