Disclaimer: Newsies is not mine.
A/N: I wrote this in about ten minutes, but I thought I'd put it out here and see what people thought. It's kind of depressing and strange, but shrugs Just tell me what you think :)
Life After Newsies
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That was the fifth person to pass Skittery by in favor of a younger newsie. Five customers he lost, purely because he was no longer eleven.
It didn't help his case that he was tall and that the streets had aged his face along with his mind. He looked older than he nineteen years, which were already too old for most newsies. But Skittery held onto his papers.
Jack had stopped being a newsie just a few weeks after the strike. No one buys from a seventeen-year-old young man hardened by life when they can smile at a young face with wide eyes still full of hope instead. Jack did not like to be outdone.
He started work in a factory, the only option for him, where seventeen was still young. But he would not stay young long. The days, trapped in a hot, dirty, windowless factory, felt like years and aged the workers accordingly. Workers were rewarded for hard work with more work and punished for working themselves to death with being fired. Working in a dark factory with the only future visible the day one would be fired killed the soul. It left no hope, no imagination, no freedom. People cannot survive with no hope.
Jack would emerge from that factory a dead man. He would be lucky if his body died with his soul because then he would not have to live the false life awaiting a man with no soul and no hope.
Skittery knew what lay ahead for him in a factory and this is why he held onto his newspapers so desperately.
