A/N: Finally. I'm posting something! Eeeeh! (this is me being excited. :P) Thanks very, very much to Arlene2 who suggested Dutchy to me...and then told me who he was. Trust me, I wouldn't have known otherwise. ;)

S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G B-E-E.

Spelling bee. He had heard the words countless times from his father's mouth. His woefully proud father. Woefully proud of his eldest son, the genius of the family. Countless hopes rode on that eldest son. That eldest son wasn't Dutchy -- it was Tom. Tom the genius.

When Dutchy was younger he was stupid enough to be jealous of Tom. At the age of three he watched in envy as Tom spelled his way to victory in a dimly lit, dingy little room in front of twelve tired looking people. Parents mostly. Working parents that had dragged themselves, sore though they were, into that ugly little room to listen to their children spell words like "discretion" and "elegance." They weren't words that belonged in the mouths of those spelling them. Words like "factory" and "penny a pape" belonged in the mouths of those who watched longingly as their children grasped at a life better than theirs, a life were those words -- "discretion", "elegance" -- were useful and accurate. And a three year old Dutchy watched admiringly as Tom won that spelling bee by correctly spelling "gracious."

His parents glowed with pride and put the slightly tattered blue ribbon that Tom's teacher had scrounged up the money to buy up on the wall. It hung there proudly, its blue brightening the small room, a constant reminder that this family had hope thanks to their "genius" son.

Father was constantly, tersely reminding Tom that he could "really be something" and that he would "really help the family." Dutchy listened in awe because helping the family sounded important, and waited impatiently for his turn to come to "be something." When he grew a bit older he would sneak into Tom's room and opened up the second-hand dictionary that Tom had received on his eighth birthday. He opened its worn cover with reverence and would pick the first word he saw, be it aardvark or zealous. Then he'd learn it. He'd stare at the word, and repeat the letters to himself over and over until he could close his eyes and recite, sing-song fashion, exactly how to spell that word. It didn't matter if he knew what it meant, all that mattered was that he could spell it. That much was clear from Tom's nervous face as he stood up in front of the smattering of an audience and haltingly recited the letters that made up those long, important words.

It was funny in that wry way, Dutchy would later realize, that though he could spell, he couldn't read. He just knew how to spell the words – didn't know what they meant.

As Dutchy got older still, as he reached the age of six and then seven, he began to understand that he wouldn't, for a million dollars, swap places with Tom. Tom who always went about looking like the weight of the world was on his shoulders, Tom who was constantly muttering how to spell "conscientious" or "testimony" under his breath. Tom who began to spend less and less time at home because home was a constant reminder of all the expectations that were bundled up in being able to spell "expectations." Dutchy watched as Tom flung himself into fights and into selling papes, and finally just stopped coming home.

His parents raised a fuss for a few weeks, rushing around frantically, trying to make the police care that a twelve year old working class kid – and a newsie to boot – was missing. Dutchy holed himself up in Tom's room and studied that dictionary for hours on end. M-I-S-S-I-N-G – but Dutchy knew Tom wasn't really missing. He still V-I-S-I-T-E-D him sometimes, down at the lodging house. It was there that he got his first introduction to selling P-A-P-E-R-S. When his parents stopped B-O-T-H-E-R-I-N-G to look for Tom, Dutchy left too, going down to the lodging house for longer and longer periods of time until finally he just lived there. Tom left – or maybe his body lay in some back alley 'til the bulls carted it away – but being a newsie stuck in Dutchy's blood. And, for some reason, so did all those words.

Useless words. Words that spoke of an education and an opportunity that newsies didn't have. But Dutchy remembered them anyway. The dictionary fell apart and Dutchy threw it away in a fit of rage, rage that the last pages of his old life had simply fallen apart and rage that he hadn't thrown them away sooner. The pages scattered into the Brooklyn River and unobtrusively drifted away with the rest of the muck and trash, just some soggy unimportant papers.

A few years later Dutchy sat with a piece of paper in front of him, staring at the blank white expanse, trying to remember the last time he'd had to spell something. And yet it returned to him immediately. Strike. S-T-R-I-K-E. Strike.

"So, did I spell it right Kloppman?" He asked idly, knowing the answer before it came.

"Very good, very good."

When Dutchy had been learning those words, so long ago, in his brother's dimly lit room, petrified at the thought that, at any moment, someone might wander in and discover him where he didn't belong, snooping through his brother's things, he hadn't understood why he was doing it. He didn't really understand what a spelling bee was, or why it was so important. He just knew it was, and so he dutifully, almost compulsively, memorized the spellings of every word he came across in that beat up little book. And once he became a newsie he hadn't needed the skill anymore.

It was years later, at a sort of newsies gathering at the race track (Race, as usual, had money on a horse, Mush was trying to convince him that he had bet on the loser, Kid Blink was insisting that they were both idiots) that David had cast him a glance.

"Hey Dutchy," he'd said curiously, "you know how to spell?"

"A little." Dutchy replied, trying to speak quietly. He'd never advertised it -- why bother? "Why?"

It was his spelling that got him the job at David's paper, writing up the news briefs, spelling that had finally brought him his own piece of security. He bought a dictionary because it was just what reporters did. It wasn't until he got it back to his office that he realized it was only a later edition of the old, worn one that he had once slowly but steadily learned to spell from in the first place.

Now that was I-R-O-N-Y for you.

A/N: I have been very busy lately and am about to become very busy again. Basically, I knew that if I didn't get this out now, it might be eons before I pulled it off. So I may post a different version of it later, but until then, please let me know what you thought of this one!

Thanks, as always, for reading.