A/N: Hey! This is just a little one shot that I thought up. It might end up as a two shot, but I make no promises. Let me know what you think. As always, if you recognize it, it ain't mine. If its someone new, they're mine but I don't make any profit from allowing them to interact with the Newsies. On with the show!

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He slipped quietly down the stairs in stockinged feet, his red suspenders hanging down his sides. His eyes were shadowed and heavy with exhaustion but he couldn't sleep. The burden of being the leader did that at times. Some nights, the weight of the decisions he had to make made rest impossible, but others, like tonight, something much older than responsibility clawed at his brain. He'd gone to sleep hungry so many times in his sixteen years that the loud rumbling of his stomach was easily ignored while he lay in the dark surrounded by his boys. The silence felt so lonely and desolate in that bunk room all of a sudden that he had to get out and was pulling his pants on and walking out the door before he really knew what he was doing. He knew she would be awake in her room at the back of the main floor. She never slept much, it was one of the few things that time never changed. He padded as silently as he could down the plank floors, knowing where to step to avoid the loudest creaks. He should know them, he'd been walking these floors for more than ten years. No one, no one but her, had been there longer than him.

Sure enough, the soft glow of lamplight frayed out from under the door and he paused to listen to her hum to herself. She only hummed when she was sewing, claiming that it was the only way to keep herself from falling asleep during the tedious task. He always liked to listen to her sing, it was the sound that soothed him to sleep as a small boy when nightmares haunted him. She would wake to his whimpers and cries and begin to sing softly, never acknowledging that she knew it was him, but comforting him all the same. He woke many times during the years she was in charge to the sound of her voice soothing other small, tormented souls, but always felt like maybe she knew he was listening too, taking comfort in the quiet alto voice wafting through the quiet lodging house.

"I can see your feet you know," her voice called out. He smiled, of course she knew he was there, years didn't change a person so much that she would ever let her guard down. He pushed the door and poked his head him, smiling at her mischievously. She stopped him with a frown, "Price of entry is one holey sock for me to mend." She pointed at his foot, where his big toe peaked out of his ragged brown sock.

"I think this ones a lost cause, Marta," he answered, sheepishly shuffling his feet back and forth against her worn rag rug, avoiding her hazel eyes. He couldn't look at her, she would see what he was after in a heartbeat, she always knew him better than he knew himself. "There's more darn to it than sock. If you patch it much more, it wont fit me foot anymore."

"Check the basket there for a new one then." She nodded her head to the little basket at her feet. "The fearless leader needs socks on his feet same as everyone else." He dug through the scores of socks in every shape color and size, all washed and mended to be recirculated as their fallen brothers made it to her wash and mend pile. She was always good at things like that, those little things that maybe the boys took for granted, but that made them feel cared about all the same. She watched him dig with a soft smirk on her tired face. Her skin was still fair, despite years of her youth being spent in the sun and grime of the city. Her peaches and cream skin was improved, not marred, by the hundreds and thousands of light freckles that adorned it. "While you're at it, check the bin for some new pants. That pair is too short for you; it looks like you're waiting for a flood and I doubt those have anything left to let down in them."

He looked up at her, his blonde hair falling over his still roguishly boyish face and scowled. Those eyes, sometimes steely and grey and sometimes the lightest of blues blazed at her audacity. Who was she to give him orders? But she just laughed, her pale cheeks pinking up. "That look doesn't work on me, Spot Conlon! You might be able to scare your hooligans like that but not me. Now go. Longer pants. NOW." She gave him her own cool, steady look, daring him to cross her again. Her dark brown hair was still twisted up loosely on her head, but the length of her day was showing by how much of it fell around her face and neck in whisps.

He trudged over to the pile of mended clothes and found a pair of pants that draped all the way to his toes when he held them up to his hips. "There. Happy?" he grumbled. "Damn woman."

She was out of her seat and standing menacingly close to him before he turned all the way around. "You watch how you talk to me Kieran Conlon," she warned, her voice suddenly low and soft, a mere murmur, reminding him of exactly who she once was. "I take a lot of shit from you and your boys without a word, but YOU don't disrespect me." Her voice, the threat in her eye, reminded him that the worn but still fashionable cranberry colored skirt, the clean shirt and the trim shirt waist might make her look like a respectable middle class lady, she might wear her hair piled on her head instead of down her back in a braid but she was still Kisser underneath it all. She might just run the lodging house now, but once upon a time, she was the right hand woman of the leader of Brooklyn. Back then, she would never have scrubbed floors or made soup, but she could always be depended on for a kind ear and a scrap of bread in her pocket. That was back before Spot Conlon was equal parts legend and boy. Back when Kieran Conlon was a runty five year old with big blue eyes that always looked hungry. Hungry for food, attention, money, family…everything.

He was so tiny that he barely came up to the bawdy newsgirl's waist the day he toddled up to the Distribution Center in tears because someone stole the dime he found on the street that he was going to buy his first papers with. She knew he was different right then, because she had nine and ten year old streetwise kids who would have found a dime on the street and run straight to see the flickers or to a sweet shop. To see a dime and decide to try to double it before he worried about filling his tiny stomach proved that he had brains in his little head. She pulled him over to Scatter that day and handed the kid twenty of her seventy papers. "Got me a new selling partner, Scat," she said proudly, patting the little boy on the head. Scatter, not one to ever question Kisser's judgement, just nodded and smiled at the kid.

"Stick close to Kisser, den Kid," the leader said. "She'll teach you your place, but don't get mouthy. We don't call her Kisser for nothing. You see a Newsie in Brooklyn missing a front tooth, its probably her fault." He winked at the little boy and grinned, showing his own gapped smile before sauntering away. Kieran later learned that Scat and Kisser were rarely apart, seamlessly leading Brooklyn as a team.

The woman and they boy stood in her private quarters still facing off in steely silence, grey eyes against hazel. Grey dropped to the floor first, "Sorry Kisser," he mumbled. "I didn't mean it." He rocked on his heels and nervously picked at his cuticles.

She stood, all of the barbs in her stance dropping and she smiled as she realized that they were the same height now. She was always tall for a girl, and he was just sixteen, so she knew he still could have a fair few inches to grow. She put her hands on his shoulders and roped him back into her steady gaze, "Nevah evah forget where you came from kid," she said, the Brooklyn drawl coming out thick even though she normally kept it carefully under wraps. "You and I know bettah than most what can happen when ya let yaself get too big to remember where ya came from and why ya on top." His eyes grew wide and she could see the starved urchin he used to be. She affectionately ran her hand down his cheek and pushed his shaggy hair out of his face, smiling at the way he leaned into her hand like an eager pup before he could stop himself. When she spoke again, she had her street talk under control, "I wont let it happen all over again, so you watch yourself, Spot."

He shook himself out of the stupor she put him in and flopped down onto the floor, crossing his long legs Indian style. "I ain't gonna end up like Scat, Marta."

"Aren't you?" she asked, gracefully lowering herself back into the rocking chair and picking up a shirt to begin mending. "Can you really say that with all of this 'King of Brooklyn,' dockside throne bullshit?" Her eyebrow raised piously, but she never looked up from the shirt.

"That reputation keeps me boys safe!" he snapped. "Ain't no one in New York gonna mess with Brooklyn because if they mess with me boys, they mess with me." Again, turned that signature Spot Conlon stare on her again and again she smiled sadly and shook her head. Oh to be an arrogant teenage boy, she thought.

"Maybe so," she answered, looking back to her work, "but reputations don't just send messages to other newsies, Spot. You have to worry about the messages being sent outside your little bubble, out in places where there are people who think that brutal, cold and calculating are wonderful traits for their new recruits. Do you want to be a respectable man someday or a common hood your whole life?"

He picked at the hole in his sock, refusing to answer her. Of course he didn't want to be a hood, but he was a leader, natural born. Everyone said so. He couldn't go back to being some underling. He was raised for this life, raised by the woman lecturing him, to be this way, and now she seemed to want him to throw it all away. He'd had his share of thoughts about it, though. Being leader was a lonely life of fake friendships and he'd seen the consequences of it last summer during the strike. This grafters that he saved Jack-Boy and the 'Hattan crew from, one of them was Scat, he was sure of it. Scat was his idol for his first two years as a newsie, that face was indelibly marked on his young brain, and that face had come at him with a club without a second thought. He never told Marta when they returned because he protected her the same way she had protected him when he was little, and for the same reason. He wouldn't be responsible for her already broken heart being further shattered by the knowledge that they boy she loved was now a ruthless thug, a fist for hire. If he thought about it hard enough, he would see that she clearly already knew this, but he preferred the idea that he was protecting her from it. He didn't like to think that she knew that a man she nearly lost her life for ended up taking money to beat the very kids he once protected.

He looked up at her from his place on her floor, "What should I do?" His voice was small and lost, not at all the arrogant bark the boys upstairs were used to hearing. She was the first girl, not even the first girl, the first person he could remember loving him in any way. The first person who gave a damn about him and thought he could be something more than just another drain on society, and as a small boy, he had loved her fiercely for it.

"I can't tell you what to do," she answered simply, gently tugging thread through the eye of a needle.

He snorted, "Really? Never stopped you before."

She tried to hide her amusement behind a scowl but failed miserably, managing to look faintly like she sucked the juice out of a lemon instead. After a deep breath she explained herself, "You have to decide what you want. I can't pick for you. If you want to be the immortal King Of Brooklyn, then you change nothing. You keep going exactly as you are and hope for the best. Hope that you can find someone willing to give you a job when the time comes. Hope that you have the gumption, or even the choice to say no should the big boys come looking for you to keep playing these games. But, if you don't like the idea of having to turn against everything you know, everything you believe in because the man slipping coins in your pocket says you believe otherwise, then you slow your roll and calm your swagger a bit. You soak who you have to to keep your boys safe, but otherwise you keep your nose clean and save your pennies so that when its your time to go you can go anywhere you like, free as a bird, and escape this hellhole."

He sat in silence, mulling over her speech. "Did they give him a choice?" he asked quietly.

"No," she answered, swiping a hand across her eyes and furrowing her delicate brow. "It was join or be beaten within an inch of his life. If he lived, he was welcome to live as he pleased. He chose to live and fight another day."

"Why didn't you go?"

"Go where? Away?" she asked, bending her head back to the shirt in her lap, avoiding his piercing gaze.

"With him," he answered. "You were both the leaders, why didn't you go with him?"

For a long while she din't answer, pretending to be very absorbed in choosing a patch for the elbow of the shirt that she had yet to put a single stitch into. He looked back down at his hands and chewed his fingernails, black with printer's ink, to the nubs. "I loved him too much to watch that, Spot," she finally whispered, her voice wavering with emotion long since bottled up and fermented over the course of time. "I couldn't watch him destroy himself. It was terrible enough to know he was doing it, but I couldn't watch the light in him go out slowly. It was too cruel. And I couldn't save him. He wouldn't let me."

"I'm not gonna be like him, Marta," he said, his voice fiercely determined. "I won't let you down."

She smiled sadly again, and he couldn't understand how something that was supposed to mean she was happy could possibly look so sad. "You can't do it for me, or for Brooklyn or for a girl, when you find one who you want to stick around, you have to do it for yourself, Kieran." She was suddenly too tired to make another stitch. Her eyes were blurring and her shoulders stooped. "You have to make yourself proud enough to carry you through until someone else notices the man that you are, the way that Trots did when he tapped you to be his successor. The way that I did when I trained you starting when you were five. You have the same light in you that I always loved about Scat, the light that makes people who need a leader gravitate towards you. Maybe thats why I was always so fond of you. There will come a time when someone else will see it and know like I do that you are bound for great things if only you can be patient enough to use it for the right things, and not the things that come along first."

"He always said you could make a guy feel like an ant and a giant all in the same sentence." He smiled sadly, remembering Scat's Jack-o-lantern grin as he poked fun at his girl's ability to wax poetic.

"All men are both ants and giants, it all depends on where you're looking at them from," she answered, enjoying that he he still came to her with his problems. "Finding the right perspective and acting like a man is the key."

He shook his head, his bangs falling in his face again. "Did you always talk in riddles and I just forgot about it, or are you gong crazy in your old age?" He had no time to duck the swat that she lashed out with, walloping him up side his head.

"Old, my ass, I can still kick your teeth in, little boy!" she grumbled. He cackled wildly on the floor rubbing his skull ruefully as she cleaned up her sewing supplies. The lamp oil was low and in the dimming light she could see from the mantle clock that it was nearly one in the morning. He wiped the tears from his eyes as he stood, and she gave him a good once over. He was still scrawny, still angry, still hungry just as he was when he was the little boy permanently attached to the pocket of her trousers. Together, they had perfected his rendition of "*cough cough* Buy me last pape, Mistah," as well as "Please, Lady, Papa says I can't go home till I sells all me papes!" His sweet face and striking eyes were like gold. Now, his face wasn't sweet anymore, but it was growing handsome as manhood began to take hold, carving edges out of the softness of childhood. Those eyes though, they never changed. She stood, and placed her basket neatly next to her chair, but then cocked her head to one side and stared at him thoughtfully. "You were prowling outside the door earlier when I caught you. Did you ned something?"

"Nope," he answered, smirking, "I fell asleep for years listening to you sing or talk to Scatter. Sometimes, it helps me sleep just to hear your voice before I lay down." His face went stony as he realized what he just admitted. "But I'll deny it and tell everyone you're going senile if that leaves this room."

"Senile!" she laughed. "I'm not even thirty, and you act like I'm some old crone!" She had to admit than when she was sixteen, thirty did seem endlessly old. Thirty was an age where people had jobs and families, it was a lifetime away from selling papes and running territories. "Your reputation is safe with me, no one will know that Spot Conlon is a big softy."

"Shaddup," he growled, throwing his new pants and new sock over his narrow shoulder.

She pulled him quickly into a tight embrace, "Sleep well, Little Spot," she whispered in his ear.

"Night, Marta," he answered, hesitantly returning the embrace at first, but then sinking into the warmth and comfort of it. She still smelled the same, like she had all those years ago, when she would tuck him in and her braid would fall into his face and he would drink in her smell so he could fall asleep. Tomorrow, when she woke the boys, they would have no inclination that Spot and Miss Marta knew each other beyond being the leader and the house manager. They kept their shared past a secret, for the sake of Brooklyn. But, for the moment, they soaked up a little bit of the affection that they were both still so hungry for after all those years.