After Ebenezer Scrooge's life-changing Christmas, he hadn't just upped Bob Cratchit's salary and helped get Tiny Tim medical care, he'd made Bob full partner in the lending firm. Tim's treatment worked well enough for him to be able to walk on his own.

Two years after that Christmas, in 1845, Scrooge died peacefully of old age. Bob then took over the business. His oldest son, Peter, technically didn't have to join his father in taking over what had once been Scrooge and Marley's, (Peter already had a job elsewhere in town) but he did anyway.

And so it went for another decade: Cratchit and Cratchit took over the firm that has once been Scrooge and Marley's, which had been Fezziwig's before that.

One day in April 1855, Bob Cratchit unexpectedly died of a heart attack. And it began to tear the family apart more than Tim's death would have in the possible future shown to Scrooge in 1843.

While Mrs. Cratchit and most of the Cratchit children grieved as anyone would've expected, Peter started showing early signs of bitterness and greed that nearly corrupted Scrooge after his sister's death.

And Tim? He took his father's death hardest, as he'd been particularly close to Bob. He wouldn't eat; he wouldn't talk; he'd stopped showing up to his job in the town's bookstore; he'd even started to lose the faith in God that he'd held so long while unable to walk.

In May, Tim began growing tired of hearing the arguments between Peter and their mother about Peter's personality change. One night, Tim took a bag and filled it with as much clothes a he could and the small amount of money he'd stowed away under his bedroom floorboards instead of in the old lending firm. As soon as he felt sure his family was asleep, he crept downstairs to the kitchen for a small knife and a bit of food before sneaking out the door.

As Tim walked through the town of Wall, he thought, Why now? before thinking, Why not now?

He had to cross the wall itself.

Everyone in Wall knew the story of what happened 21 years earlier, the year before Tim was born. The old man who guarded the Crack in the wall on the edge of town had been there for ages: before Tristan Thorn first tried to cross the wall through the crack in 1834 to find the fallen star Yvaine; even before Tristan's father Dunstan crossed the wall eighteen years before that (leading to some... questions in town for several years about Tristan's heritage). The old man was seemingly ancient but still took his job extremely seriously.

If Tim could get somewhere further down the wall itself from the guard's position at the crack, he could try crossing the wall. Assuming that he could find somewhere that was open field like where the crack was, as opposed to thick forest.

And find a field Tim did. Climbing over the wall there seemed suspiciously easy.

Author's Note

This is probably going to sound a bit like I'm rambling, but I'm taking a few liberties with the timeline of Stardust, as far as the actual years go.

Bookverse!Stardust had Dunstan's time crossing the wall sometime when Dickens was writing Oliver Twist, which would've been sometime between 1837 and 1839, making it so that the main action of the book takes place sometime between 1855 and 1857. I'm assuming that movieverse!Stardust, which I'm drawing the most inspiration from, takes place around the same time.

If I use that timeline, I'd create serious inconsistencies when assuming that the "present" in A Christmas Carol actually takes place in 1843, since I'm making Tim be 20 for this fic.

If my OC kid of Tristan and Yvaine is supposed to also be 20, I can't have him be 20 using the canon Stardust timeline, because that would set my story in at least the mid- to late-1870s... which is why, for the sake of this story, the main action of Stardust takes place in 1834 for Tim and my OC to both be born in 1835 and have this fic set in 1855.