Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out by now, I don’t own Newsies. Disney owns Newsies. I just own the plots. Or lack thereof.

Everybody Bows to Someone

They had him again. It hadn’t been his fault. Not at first. He had lost a couple of bets, needed to eat, needed somewhere to stay, so he borrowed some money. No big deal, right? People borrowed money all the time. Hot tip on the second. Enough payback to cover those little debts and line his pockets a considerable bit better. If he won. He didn’t, of course; had to get a little more in loans. It had happened before. Nothing to worry about.

Then things had started to snowball. He needed track money, needed pape money, still was losing, still borrowing. And being the good guy he was, he even lent some out to the other newsies when they needed it. After all, it wasn’t their fault he couldn’t control his money. They didn’t know. He guessed the blame started to fall on him then. He knew he didn’t have money to bet, to throw around, but he did anyway. Knew he should have told someone. Told Jack, told Spot. They’d gotten him out of scrapes before. But this times things were worse. A lot worse, and he was afraid of how they would react, what they would say.

They had been clever, how they had done it. Course they had been. They were too smart to get caught, the only way of getting caught was when a connection went bad. This time there were no connections, just a poor newsboy who needed money. Needed too much money, too much of their money, with none paid back. Just a typical poor newsboy. Nobody’d miss him.

They had waited until he was alone. Not unsuspecting; he’d been on edge ever since he’d realized that he was in too deep to pull out. There had been a hell of a fight. But a hell of a fight just wasn’t enough against five of their men. A dull, throbbing ache in every part of his body reminded him of that. Stupid to try and fight, only made them angrier, but he had been told never to go down without one.

Some good it did him now. He’s dimly aware of being lifted up by his arms, feet dragging across the floor towards that door. He couldn’t move a muscle, even if they hadn’t drugged him. He was scared stiff. Stories had been told of that door. Tales whispered in the back streets. Once you went in, you didn’t come back out again. If you saw the door, you were in real trouble.

A big hand belonging to one of the faceless giants holding him reached out and pulled the handle down, the door swung open.

Racetrack shut his eyes….