Little Women/Newsies XOver: Falling Up, Ch 1 (Jo/Jack, Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy)
All right. It's official. You see, I have a problem.
Somehow, even though I've spent a little over six months in the Little Women fandom, I seem to have become committed to writing the strangest crossovers in it imaginable, if only because I keep watching movies with Christian Bale and thinking... 'gee, what would Jo March do if she was in that situation? How much ass could she kick, exactly?'
It was probably outlandish enough when it dragged me into writing a Little Women/Batman Begins crossover, of all things. But now, thanks as well to the brilliant madness of my co-writer Madwomanpoems (also known as Captivatedbythesky on fanfiction.net), I also somehow ended up working on a fic that crossed over Little Women with the Newsies. (A musical starring Christian Bale which must be seen to be believed. Look it up on youtube for free if you don't believe me!)
And it all came about because we wondered what would happen if, instead of settling down with the incredibly boring, if sweet, Professor Bhaer, Jo had decided to go back to New York after getting her heart torn in half by her new brother-in-law Laurie... and then gone on to meet his exact double, a certain former newspaper merchant by the name of Jack Kelly.
And then saw the sparks start flying.
And then, alight with this new vision, we ended up writing the first chapter to the story. Here's to hoping you enjoy the fruit of our labors presently. ;)
Title: Falling Up, Chapter 1
Fandom: Little Women & Newsies Crossover
Series: Falling Up
Co-writer: Madwomanpoems / Captivatedbythesky
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Jo, Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy, Cast of Both Series
Rating: R
Summary: When Jo March flees to New York to escape an old friend's betrayal, she never thought she'd end up meeting his exact double. But then, Jack Kelly didn't exactly know what he was getting into when he met her either... Jo/Jack, Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy.
Note: This is a Little Women/Newsies crossover, with all the madness that entails. Remember that Christian Bale played both Laurie (in LW) and Jack Kelly (in Newsies) and it makes marginally more sense.
***
In the short time that Miss Josephine March had been in New York and in the even shorter time that she'd been a successful writer, Miss March-- better known as Jo-- had learned quite well that there was only one constant possible in a literary spinster's life.
It was not adequate payment, God only knew. When she had first arrived in this city of a thousand fragile dreams, she had had to eke out a rather miserable living as a governess first and an authoress second in order to make her month's rent, though truth be told, she was about as tender toward most young children as your average squadron of battle-shocked soldiers. (Though as she had told everyone who'd listen, it wasn't as though she'd meant to lock her last pair of children up in a cupboard overnight... although it had stopped their tantrums surprisingly well.) And even when she had finally gotten to the point in her life where she could finally quit menial occupations nannying children in order to churn out the wild Gothics and moral pap that her publisher demanded month after month in her life, she was not always been assured of something substantial in renumeration, something that she had gritted her teeth often all too much of the time.
So adequate payment was certainly not something assured in her occupation. And truth be told, fame, adulation or even simple respect could not be assured either. Any writer worth their salt knew enough never to expect fortune from the start, lest they be ill prepared for lean times that were surely coming.
No, Jo thought as she stifled a sigh and looked around the small office she was waiting for this 'reporter' to come into, it was hassle that was the one constant of a working writer's life. Hassle, hassle, hassle on every which side. And such hassle never went away, even when one found themselves actually successful, as she had somehow found herself recently becoming.
Because with success in the publishing industry, hassle merely multiplied-- especially when one found success as she did, in peddling the idealized story of her childhood so that starry-eyed girls all across the country could place themselves within the feet of the characters in Tiny Women... creating enough interest in her that her publishers had decided to flood her with reporters sent to poke and pry and dig up any interesting details that could be found to sell volumes yet to come.
It would be downright grateful for Jo to bemoan the fact that she had somehow, miraculously, become an overnight success in a very difficult occupation she had dreamed of conquering since she had been old enough to hold a quill in her hand and ruin her outraged older sister's drawers. But that didn't mean she enjoyed having to ruin a perfectly beautiful Saturday morning that she could have spent in bed, avoiding an old friend's far too jovial letters.
Which was why she kept her head down and looked sullenly at her nails while she waiting, her ears hearing the tell-tale tap of the promised reporter's light steps across the hall coming to her room, but half deciding it wasn't worth the bother to look up even as she heard him come to a stop right outside the doors of the office she was encased in.
After all, how could he, in any way, be a startle or surprise?
Best to simply get this over with, after all.
-
At the age of 25, Jack Kelly found that he didn't have much to complain about in terms of his life.
Oh, there were a lot of people around who'd probably think he loved his job much too much. What glory, they might ask, was there to being an investigative news reporter? It meant spending most of your time chasing wild headlines, heading off to some of the most dangerous parts of the city, and getting a meager weekly paycheck that barely compensated him for having to avoid being knocked down by the police after they took offense to some of questioning.
But Jack, with the days of Cowboy and Francis Sullivan far behind him, found that he loved being a reporter. And if anyone bothered to ask why, his simple answer to this was usually: "Hell, it beats sleeping in the gutter."
And that was damn well true, even if Jack had other reasons for loving his job. After spending a good part of his childhood and teenage years living hand-to-mouth and sleeping in a room with forty other young newsies to earn a dime a day, he had learned to appreciate being able to write headlines behind his desk instead of hawking them on the street, the paychecks that allowed him to regularly eat and bathe, and the ability to sit behind a desk once in a while, instead of having to trudge through the mean streets worrying about frostbite or muggings.
Nah, Jack was a reporter now and he knew he had it good. In fact, he believed his editor when he told him that Jack was a natural and had the newspaper business running through his veins. It made sense, especially since Jack had spent most of his childhood elbow deep in newsprint, figuring out what headlines sold and what people would get excited about. Also, his deep seeded hate and suspicion of corporate power were, in the words of David, "exactly the quality these papers need in an investigative journalist!" And when all of this was coupled with his nonchalant attitude about breaking laws and bothering police, it was no wonder he was on his way to being a major player for the paper and seeing his name on the front page any day now.
That said though, there was just one thing that he could never seem to get his head wrapped around - and that was that he really shouldn't be running his smart mouth off to his boss unless he wanted to be spanked like a red-headed step-child. And after he had gone and made another wise-ass comment to his editor that hadn't been received well, his boss had gone and done something much worse than just pulled down Jack's pants and give him a whupping like Jack's Pa would have done.
No, his editor had gone and made sure Jack was spending what would have otherwise been a very pleasant Saturday morning napping or catching up with friends into a morning where he had to interview some hoity-toity old lady spinster about some book she'd written about her childhood-- Little Ladies or Midget Women or whatever. Like Jack really gave a damn about a happy, idyllic childhood in some happy, idyllic life spent frolicking in the woods with a happy, idyllic family.
Which was why Jack was now in front of an office door, clearing his throat and bracing himself for an excruciatingly boring interview that had to last for at least an hour.
"Miss Josephine March?" he finally asked, trying to suppress the coarse accent he didn't want to be judged on. "This is the reporter from the New York Sun. Can-- I mean, may I come in right now?"
-
When Jo first heard the voice of the reporter coming to her, she startled and actually looked up a bit in surprise, although of course she saw nothing more than the thin, cheap wood of the door that still separated the both of them, the man standing before her apparently being too polite to open it without permission.
It was a younger voice than she had expected, first of all-- much younger than most of the gentlemen she was used to seeing, and much coarser and lower of class as well, frankly speaking. He spoke in the thick, rather baroque accent of the streets, the sort of accent that treated 'g's' as optional and tended to add 'es'es unnecessarily. It was the sort of accent that would have Amy's prim golden curls seizing up in horror and send Aunt March into a veritable frenzy of disapproval... which, as far as Jo was concerned, as enough reason to tentatively approve of this man already.
Which was why, holding the memory of her family to the side, Jo finally looked up and over at the sturdy door, her mouth quirking into a faint, bemused smile.
"If I tell you that I'm not here," she began quite playfully, "you're not likely to believe me, are you? I keep trying that gambit with others and it never, ever works. And I suppose a reporter would be even harder to dupe in an interview he ought to own completely!"
-
Jack needed the interview to go well so he could be off probation next Saturday. That way, he could spend it as he pleased, instead of trying to make up for some crack he may or may not have made about the publisher’s mother and the orangutan she may or may not have met nine months before said publisher had been born. He liked to be able to roam the city on Saturday morning, sitting in coffee shops and smiling at any pretty girls who walked by and catching up with David about how working in the governor's office was going for him now.
And if David was busy, Jack always liked to nap as he saw fit, maybe even reading a little if he could find a good cheapie to tuck into. Jack thought of these lazy mornings as his right, due to the childhood that had been spent making a living instead of playing stick ball in the street. It was only fair that when he finally had a decent job, he got a bit of time to lie around.
So, for the sake of sleep, which he never managed to get enough of due to deadlines, he laughed at the woman's jibe which, after all, wasn't that bad of one. Besides, it cost him nothing to try and sweet-talk this dame into liking him and after all the experience he had received at interviews, he'd gotten pretty good at that part.
"We ain’t hard to fool," Jack admitted, grinning though she couldn't see. "Though I gotta to leave if you say anything too bad about my paper. They make you take an oath about keeping up its honor and integrity, ya see, and they're not shy about chopping your thumbs off if you can't live up to it either."
-
"Oh really?" Jo said, and felt her smile grow a little. "However will you write about this titillating interview with me should they do that, my dear fellow? I suppose I'll have to do my level best to make sure you keep all the fingers you want."
He laughed again and her smile widened even further. It still wasn't wide enough to make her actually glad she had forgone a cozy morning in bed and a delectable breakfast and her ritual dance around answering her oldest friend's letters without wanting to die a little inside from the natural newly-wed happiness in them, of course, but...
Well, perhaps whoever it was behind the door maybe wouldn't be so terrible to talk to after all. Perhaps this interview, for once, might actually be painless and not end with her throwing (or at least thinking of throwing) something heavy at someone's condescending head. Perhaps instead of receiving thinly veiled questions wondering what was wrong with her that she hadn't ended up married by the ripe old age of four-and-twenty, she'd actually-- for once!-- get a little respect.
Perhaps. It was simply a possibility for now but given the dark few last months she'd spent in New York, trying to pretend her heart hadn't been breaking in her miserable breast, Jo would take any chances she could get.
"And you shouldn't tell anyone else about that oath," she added thoughtfully, and propped her head on her palm. "Imagine if the word got out to the criminal underground and they knew all they had to do to get you all away was badmouth the letters column? Which-- sorry to say --is rather terrible. I'm still unsure of how your good readers manage to write in while suffering what appear to be massive head-traumas that rob of them of their ability to spell properly every which way."
There was a long silence. Jo finally smiled sheepishly, although she knew all too well the man still hidden behind the door couldn't see her.
"...Not that I mean any disrespect whatsoever."
-
Jack dropped the placating act and laughed in earnest. After all, he liked talking to people, especially when they came equipped with charming feminine attributes, and even if this woman was a wrinkled old hag-- as Jack's editor had gleefully described her-- at least she had a sense of humor.
Mind you, Jack would still much rather have been roaming around with David or snug in his own bed. But for a lady of-- how old was she supposed to be again?-- fifty-five, she made pretty good conversation. It was enough to keep him interested, anyhow.
"I wish I could disagree with you there," Jack said cheerfully and quite honestly. "But, given some of the mooks that I know read the paper, it's no wonder that the letter writers ain't that bright either. If anyone with a brain in their head actually read anything we printed, I'd have a goddamn stroke right here and--"
And then Jack realized from the sudden hush behind the door that he really shouldn't have cursed in front of some ancient literary woman that probably never even spent much time with men in the first place anyhow.
For a minute, the world went slow and the excruciating moment where he had humiliated himself in front of her replayed itself like something out of a horror novella. Eyes wide, Jack reheard the curse fall from his lips and suddenly felt weeks of Saturday napping fall out of his grasp as it replayed round and round. He saw his editor slamming weeks of monotonous stories that would get him up at God-forsaken hours of the day. He saw the warm bed that he would not get to lay in for a very long time flashing in his head. He saw David staring happily at a chorus of pretty girls tramping by their usual spot in the shop together, himself nowhere to be found.
"Oh, ma'am. I'm... I'm so sorry!" he moaned, feeling his idiocy falling on them like a veritable weight, his accent slipping in with full force. (It always happened when he was flustered.) "I shouldn't of done that in front of you. I should of watched my mouth! I have a terrible problem with lettin’ it run when it really isn't connected to my brain at all. Are you... uh... are you gonna report me to my editor? Please, ma'am, if you've got an inch of mercy... please don't do that to me now."
-
Jo laughed.
Long and loud.
And even though she knew she probably ought to be afraid of hurting this young man's feelings-- Lord help her, she couldn't help but almost choke as he had innocently stumbled on!
It was just-- oh he was so-- he was simply trying so hard and making all these assumptions about her habits and apparently mistaking her for Aunt March or Marmee in how upright her moral fiber was currently--
Jo laughed, long and hard, while an appalled and finally confused silence emerged from his end. And when finally she could stop and wipe the wetness around her mouth away with the back of her hand-- how ladylike, as Amy would sardonically note, and how indicative of her fine breeding!-- she had to grin like a lunatic, keenly aware he couldn't see it.
"Don't worry!" she finally managed, in between a few lingering giggles. "I won't tell on you to the morality police! I've already experienced enough of their own approbation!"
"Really," she added, and the smile lighting up her plain, honest face made her look like a girl of sixteen again. "I've tasted their vengeance quite enough already. I couldn't throw a fellow sinner out to the sharks. Even if you do like to curse in front of women, I doubt you were as bad as I've ever been."
-
All right. It was official. This was definitely the most interesting old woman he had ever met in his life. In fact, he was beginning to like her alarmingly well right now, especially given that she was a washed-up old spinster who had gotten him out of bed at an unreasonable hour and had written a book that was, as far as he knew, dull as dishwater.
After all, it wasn't every day he met someone who could mock him relentlessly without being in the least mean-spirited... and make him like it either.
It was really a shame, Jack was coming to realize, that she was so damn old. She must have been a firecracker when she was younger and he thought he would have liked getting to see her spark.
Instead, he leaned forward and grinned, his hand falling up to smooth out his unruly hair before he saw her. "Ma'am," he said instead, his voice becoming just as playful as hers, "I have to tell you that I gotta doubt that. In fact, you were probably an angel compared to the stories I could tell you about my sordid youth. They'd probably make you blush hard enough to make something pop!"
-
Jo ended up snorting. Couldn't help herself, really.
Since when was she a ma'am? And one with such delicate sensibilities?
Either the whelp outside the door thought she was decades older than she was... or he was testing her. And with a slightly wolfish smile, Jo decided she was willing to rise up to the occasion presently.
"Oh, don't worry about me," she said airily, waving a hand at him that he couldn't see. "I'm a literary spinster of a very ripe old age, after all. I've seen it all before and what I've witnessed first-hand, I can make up in my mind. That's the difference between my profession and yours, after all."
And then, like a shark, she struck.
"When I play at fiction, I don't bother to pretend that I'm not pretending."
-
And with a laugh, Jack found he had to concede. There was no winning a battle of wits with this old woman, not when her voice was so bright and teasing and so honestly perceptive about some of the antics of his colleagues and-- truth be told-- Jack as well.
So instead of trying to win a few points back, Jack just laughed and gave in, curious to see what she really looked like anyhow.
His editor had made her seem like a gorgon with a hair-bun but Jack was finding it surprisingly hard-put to match that image to her warmth, her laughter, and her almost tangible charm.
So Jack simply pressed on.
"Ma'am, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to open the door," he said, his voice warm and his hand already moving to the door knob. "Ya see, I'm an immoral journalist who'll do anything to sell a story, and if you don't let me have an interview, I'll have to write that you’re two and a half feet tall, sparkling yellow, and have an impressive wart in between your eyebrows."
-
"You forgot to add in the bit about my hideous wrinkled face," Jo said, not even bothering to hide the laughter bubbling up through her voice. "And I am considerably taller than you expected, although I'll give you the sparkling yellow skin and the wart. There was the result of a tragic accident that somehow went on between me, a horde of elephants, far too much mica and a glue factory that had far looser vats than it should have had. Best you not ask, honestly."
And finally, she stood up, smoothed out the smart gray evening dress she had donned for the occasion-- hell, if she had dressed up for him so far, she might as well make an impression-- and smiled again, this time rather slyly.
"And if you want to come in, you might as well come in. Or aren't you the strong, strapping man and I the helpless, feeble old woman?"
-
Jack still wasn't entirely sure that this wasn’t some terrible trap in which this old Miss March would finish completely bewitching him, ambush him, and turn him into a pair of boots, like a witch from the stories his mother had used to tell him before her time had run out.
But in any case, it was time to finally meet this woman. So Jack took a quick breath, took off his hat (Jack’s mother, God rest her soul, had taught him better than to go around talking to a woman with his hat planted on his head, even if she hadn’t been around long enough to teach him to keep his mouth in check), opened the door--
And tried not to embarrass himself when his eyes fell on the woman that his editor had assured him was an old and loveless gorgon.
After all, though Jack didn't know whether she was loveless or not, 'old' and 'gorgon' turned out not to even fall into the same territory as Miss Josephine March.
It wasn't that she was beautiful. Even a single glance at her reassured Jack that she was not. Honestly, even the word 'pretty' would be a bit too much a stretch to properly apply to her, given the thinness of her face, the severity of her features, and the way she completely lacked long, flowing hair, big, innocent eyes, a cupid-bow's mouth and all those other charms Jack had been taught a woman shouldn't do without.
If Jack had seen her on the street, he probably would have passed by without even bothering to smile at her. But he had just finished quite a conversation with her and right now, it seemed pretty miraculous that she wasn't an old hag, that she was young, that the hair coiled atop her head wasn't peppery but brown, that all of her slender, smartly clad frame seemed alive with vitality, and that her sharp gray eyes held no disadvantage on his own as they met him--
At least, until she seemed to get a good look at him.
And then they simply went wide as her once-flushed face went bloodless and Jack turned a bit panicked himself and wondered what he had done now.
-
Jo opened her mouth.
Jo tried to make out a few words.
Jo made a noise more reminiscent of asthmatic bears than of human beings.
In other words, Jo failed miserably at what she was trying to do now.
Her eyes took in his face. Her pupils contracted as she took in all the handsome features arrayed before he presently. And even as she looked up and down, right and around, side to side and ways to ways--
All Jo could see was-- was--
Something that really shouldn't be.
That dark hair...
Those thick brows...
That handsome profile...
That broad smile...
Even the slender curve of the idiosyncratic nose and the cool, sharp outline of the cheek...
God help her but if this wasn't Laurie, she wouldn't gaping at the man before her as though she had suddenly been struck across the face with a plank.
And even though there was no mirror before her, Jo knew she was gaping quite spectacularly.
"T-T-T--" she half-began and then felt her brain shut down and sputter out from surprise, before she could fully finish anything.
-
Jack had always been aware that he was uncommonly handsome. He usually managed to only be mildly insufferable about this fact.
But even if he had even managed to get some of the looser women in New York to slash their prices for him in the past, he had never before managed to make an otherwise apparently normal woman sputter like she had just lost her tongue in an interesting factory accident or had her teeth pulled out by one of the less respectable loan sharks the city had to offer. Even Jack's well-known vanity didn't quite stretch that far.
So, alarmed that she was either having a stroke or an ill-timed nervous break-down, he found himself grabbing Miss March around the waist (and damn but she had a tiny little waist) and sitting her down into a chair, helplessly watching her continue to sputter as he contemplated calling for a doctor.
Honestly, he wasn't even sure what he could do right now. The doctor bit sounded good but where the hell could he possibly go to find one at this hour? And how on earth was he supposed to keep her from wandering off while he went off, or even from being blamed for this? Knowing his editor, the sunnofabitch would probably assume he'd done something to set the poor woman off.
So instead, Jack simply hovered helplessly over her as she stared at him, not even bothering to hide the fact that he was staring back.
Damn, she really was kind of cute, wasn't she? It was a shame she was apparently going into a catatonic stupor right now.
-
It took Jo quite a while to gather her wits, a quite a while that seemed to crawl by agonizingly as she stared and stared and stared at the man who was now gazing at her with his own curiosity. Given all of that, Jo understandably took her time while trying to puzzle out what on earth could be possibly happening to bring Laurie to her-- in such a bizarre disguise as well, as if they were once more play-acting.
But even as she did her best to piece the puzzle before her together, her confounded mind could not understand it in the least.
After all, she had left Massachusetts for a reason a year earlier, right after she had learned that Laurie had come back, with a lovely new wife, with a charming and nubile bride, with her own sister as a radiant substitute to the drab literary spinster he had once promised to love eternally. She had left and although Laurie had argued and pleaded with her not to go, and sent letter after letter asking for her to come back to the place where she was loved, she had held fast to New York and its cold, lonely streets. She had left, and although Laurie would never know why, the truth was that she had left because of him-- because she could no longer stand to be where she could see the man loved, the man she had lost, be happy with any other woman, even if that woman was part of Jo's own family.
She had left Massachusetts months back, and she had left it for a very specific reason. And if this specific reason had sudden decided to-- to-- to come after her after all this time and after-- after marrying her bloody sister-- after showing her she was not good enough for him and probably never had been, never could be--
She made up her mind in an instant. After all, there were only two real possibilities here.
Either this was not Laurie and she was about to make a very embarrassing fool of herself or--
It was Laurie and she was about to stuff her manuscript down his pants and set it on fire for coming here after all this time, after pretending to be someone else, after taking her heart in his hand and showing her how easily it could be replaced, how simple that procedure could be--
And frankly, in the war currently tearing her apart between potential embarrassment and pyromania, the pyromania was winning.
And before the man hovering over her could stutter his embarrassment once more and go running for a doctor, Jo's hand snaked out and gripped his sturdy wrist with surprising strength, as she clenched her strong jaw and lifted suddenly blazing gray eyes up to look at him.
"I know I might regret this very much," she said, her voice nearly glacial. "But Teddy, if that's you wearing those strange clothes that Amy would as soon burn as see and masquerading around in that ridiculous accent to come after me, so help me God, I am going to do unspeakable things with a pair of numerical ledgers to you and parts of you that have never before been exposed to such things."
He stared at that and before Jo could lose her nerve, she stared back, her eyes grim and her teeth forming words she almost spit out at him, so furious at what he might be pulling she was willing to leave propriety behind entirely.
"And take your pants off, will you? We'll see whether or not you're really who you claim to be!"
***
Author's Note: As always, thanks for reading! I seem to be developing something of a mania for crossing Little Women over with movies Christian Bale has starred in (let's hope I never get around to writing a LW/American Psycho crossover, yes?) but this was an absolute blast to write with my wonderful partner, Madwomanpoems, and I very much hope you keep reading! There will be a lot more madness and hijinx coming up and plenty of characters from both Little Women and Newsies popping up soon. And for the Jo/Laurie shippers in the audience... yes, Laurie will come to play a huge role in this and there will be lots and lots of Jo/Laurie angsty goodness. I hope you all don't end up giving up on this fic because Jo also has a chance with Jack Kelly... who, after all, looks and acts more like Laurie than anyone will end up comfortable with. ;)
Also, reviews are greatly appreciated. If nothing else, they spur my partner and I on to write much, much more. Please do review if you've read this story-- we love comments, questions and constructive crit!
Somehow, even though I've spent a little over six months in the Little Women fandom, I seem to have become committed to writing the strangest crossovers in it imaginable, if only because I keep watching movies with Christian Bale and thinking... 'gee, what would Jo March do if she was in that situation? How much ass could she kick, exactly?'
It was probably outlandish enough when it dragged me into writing a Little Women/Batman Begins crossover, of all things. But now, thanks as well to the brilliant madness of my co-writer Madwomanpoems (also known as Captivatedbythesky on fanfiction.net), I also somehow ended up working on a fic that crossed over Little Women with the Newsies. (A musical starring Christian Bale which must be seen to be believed. Look it up on youtube for free if you don't believe me!)
And it all came about because we wondered what would happen if, instead of settling down with the incredibly boring, if sweet, Professor Bhaer, Jo had decided to go back to New York after getting her heart torn in half by her new brother-in-law Laurie... and then gone on to meet his exact double, a certain former newspaper merchant by the name of Jack Kelly.
And then saw the sparks start flying.
And then, alight with this new vision, we ended up writing the first chapter to the story. Here's to hoping you enjoy the fruit of our labors presently. ;)
Title: Falling Up, Chapter 1
Fandom: Little Women & Newsies Crossover
Series: Falling Up
Co-writer: Madwomanpoems / Captivatedbythesky
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Jo, Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy, Cast of Both Series
Rating: R
Summary: When Jo March flees to New York to escape an old friend's betrayal, she never thought she'd end up meeting his exact double. But then, Jack Kelly didn't exactly know what he was getting into when he met her either... Jo/Jack, Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy.
Note: This is a Little Women/Newsies crossover, with all the madness that entails. Remember that Christian Bale played both Laurie (in LW) and Jack Kelly (in Newsies) and it makes marginally more sense.
***
In the short time that Miss Josephine March had been in New York and in the even shorter time that she'd been a successful writer, Miss March-- better known as Jo-- had learned quite well that there was only one constant possible in a literary spinster's life.
It was not adequate payment, God only knew. When she had first arrived in this city of a thousand fragile dreams, she had had to eke out a rather miserable living as a governess first and an authoress second in order to make her month's rent, though truth be told, she was about as tender toward most young children as your average squadron of battle-shocked soldiers. (Though as she had told everyone who'd listen, it wasn't as though she'd meant to lock her last pair of children up in a cupboard overnight... although it had stopped their tantrums surprisingly well.) And even when she had finally gotten to the point in her life where she could finally quit menial occupations nannying children in order to churn out the wild Gothics and moral pap that her publisher demanded month after month in her life, she was not always been assured of something substantial in renumeration, something that she had gritted her teeth often all too much of the time.
So adequate payment was certainly not something assured in her occupation. And truth be told, fame, adulation or even simple respect could not be assured either. Any writer worth their salt knew enough never to expect fortune from the start, lest they be ill prepared for lean times that were surely coming.
No, Jo thought as she stifled a sigh and looked around the small office she was waiting for this 'reporter' to come into, it was hassle that was the one constant of a working writer's life. Hassle, hassle, hassle on every which side. And such hassle never went away, even when one found themselves actually successful, as she had somehow found herself recently becoming.
Because with success in the publishing industry, hassle merely multiplied-- especially when one found success as she did, in peddling the idealized story of her childhood so that starry-eyed girls all across the country could place themselves within the feet of the characters in Tiny Women... creating enough interest in her that her publishers had decided to flood her with reporters sent to poke and pry and dig up any interesting details that could be found to sell volumes yet to come.
It would be downright grateful for Jo to bemoan the fact that she had somehow, miraculously, become an overnight success in a very difficult occupation she had dreamed of conquering since she had been old enough to hold a quill in her hand and ruin her outraged older sister's drawers. But that didn't mean she enjoyed having to ruin a perfectly beautiful Saturday morning that she could have spent in bed, avoiding an old friend's far too jovial letters.
Which was why she kept her head down and looked sullenly at her nails while she waiting, her ears hearing the tell-tale tap of the promised reporter's light steps across the hall coming to her room, but half deciding it wasn't worth the bother to look up even as she heard him come to a stop right outside the doors of the office she was encased in.
After all, how could he, in any way, be a startle or surprise?
Best to simply get this over with, after all.
-
At the age of 25, Jack Kelly found that he didn't have much to complain about in terms of his life.
Oh, there were a lot of people around who'd probably think he loved his job much too much. What glory, they might ask, was there to being an investigative news reporter? It meant spending most of your time chasing wild headlines, heading off to some of the most dangerous parts of the city, and getting a meager weekly paycheck that barely compensated him for having to avoid being knocked down by the police after they took offense to some of questioning.
But Jack, with the days of Cowboy and Francis Sullivan far behind him, found that he loved being a reporter. And if anyone bothered to ask why, his simple answer to this was usually: "Hell, it beats sleeping in the gutter."
And that was damn well true, even if Jack had other reasons for loving his job. After spending a good part of his childhood and teenage years living hand-to-mouth and sleeping in a room with forty other young newsies to earn a dime a day, he had learned to appreciate being able to write headlines behind his desk instead of hawking them on the street, the paychecks that allowed him to regularly eat and bathe, and the ability to sit behind a desk once in a while, instead of having to trudge through the mean streets worrying about frostbite or muggings.
Nah, Jack was a reporter now and he knew he had it good. In fact, he believed his editor when he told him that Jack was a natural and had the newspaper business running through his veins. It made sense, especially since Jack had spent most of his childhood elbow deep in newsprint, figuring out what headlines sold and what people would get excited about. Also, his deep seeded hate and suspicion of corporate power were, in the words of David, "exactly the quality these papers need in an investigative journalist!" And when all of this was coupled with his nonchalant attitude about breaking laws and bothering police, it was no wonder he was on his way to being a major player for the paper and seeing his name on the front page any day now.
That said though, there was just one thing that he could never seem to get his head wrapped around - and that was that he really shouldn't be running his smart mouth off to his boss unless he wanted to be spanked like a red-headed step-child. And after he had gone and made another wise-ass comment to his editor that hadn't been received well, his boss had gone and done something much worse than just pulled down Jack's pants and give him a whupping like Jack's Pa would have done.
No, his editor had gone and made sure Jack was spending what would have otherwise been a very pleasant Saturday morning napping or catching up with friends into a morning where he had to interview some hoity-toity old lady spinster about some book she'd written about her childhood-- Little Ladies or Midget Women or whatever. Like Jack really gave a damn about a happy, idyllic childhood in some happy, idyllic life spent frolicking in the woods with a happy, idyllic family.
Which was why Jack was now in front of an office door, clearing his throat and bracing himself for an excruciatingly boring interview that had to last for at least an hour.
"Miss Josephine March?" he finally asked, trying to suppress the coarse accent he didn't want to be judged on. "This is the reporter from the New York Sun. Can-- I mean, may I come in right now?"
-
When Jo first heard the voice of the reporter coming to her, she startled and actually looked up a bit in surprise, although of course she saw nothing more than the thin, cheap wood of the door that still separated the both of them, the man standing before her apparently being too polite to open it without permission.
It was a younger voice than she had expected, first of all-- much younger than most of the gentlemen she was used to seeing, and much coarser and lower of class as well, frankly speaking. He spoke in the thick, rather baroque accent of the streets, the sort of accent that treated 'g's' as optional and tended to add 'es'es unnecessarily. It was the sort of accent that would have Amy's prim golden curls seizing up in horror and send Aunt March into a veritable frenzy of disapproval... which, as far as Jo was concerned, as enough reason to tentatively approve of this man already.
Which was why, holding the memory of her family to the side, Jo finally looked up and over at the sturdy door, her mouth quirking into a faint, bemused smile.
"If I tell you that I'm not here," she began quite playfully, "you're not likely to believe me, are you? I keep trying that gambit with others and it never, ever works. And I suppose a reporter would be even harder to dupe in an interview he ought to own completely!"
-
Jack needed the interview to go well so he could be off probation next Saturday. That way, he could spend it as he pleased, instead of trying to make up for some crack he may or may not have made about the publisher’s mother and the orangutan she may or may not have met nine months before said publisher had been born. He liked to be able to roam the city on Saturday morning, sitting in coffee shops and smiling at any pretty girls who walked by and catching up with David about how working in the governor's office was going for him now.
And if David was busy, Jack always liked to nap as he saw fit, maybe even reading a little if he could find a good cheapie to tuck into. Jack thought of these lazy mornings as his right, due to the childhood that had been spent making a living instead of playing stick ball in the street. It was only fair that when he finally had a decent job, he got a bit of time to lie around.
So, for the sake of sleep, which he never managed to get enough of due to deadlines, he laughed at the woman's jibe which, after all, wasn't that bad of one. Besides, it cost him nothing to try and sweet-talk this dame into liking him and after all the experience he had received at interviews, he'd gotten pretty good at that part.
"We ain’t hard to fool," Jack admitted, grinning though she couldn't see. "Though I gotta to leave if you say anything too bad about my paper. They make you take an oath about keeping up its honor and integrity, ya see, and they're not shy about chopping your thumbs off if you can't live up to it either."
-
"Oh really?" Jo said, and felt her smile grow a little. "However will you write about this titillating interview with me should they do that, my dear fellow? I suppose I'll have to do my level best to make sure you keep all the fingers you want."
He laughed again and her smile widened even further. It still wasn't wide enough to make her actually glad she had forgone a cozy morning in bed and a delectable breakfast and her ritual dance around answering her oldest friend's letters without wanting to die a little inside from the natural newly-wed happiness in them, of course, but...
Well, perhaps whoever it was behind the door maybe wouldn't be so terrible to talk to after all. Perhaps this interview, for once, might actually be painless and not end with her throwing (or at least thinking of throwing) something heavy at someone's condescending head. Perhaps instead of receiving thinly veiled questions wondering what was wrong with her that she hadn't ended up married by the ripe old age of four-and-twenty, she'd actually-- for once!-- get a little respect.
Perhaps. It was simply a possibility for now but given the dark few last months she'd spent in New York, trying to pretend her heart hadn't been breaking in her miserable breast, Jo would take any chances she could get.
"And you shouldn't tell anyone else about that oath," she added thoughtfully, and propped her head on her palm. "Imagine if the word got out to the criminal underground and they knew all they had to do to get you all away was badmouth the letters column? Which-- sorry to say --is rather terrible. I'm still unsure of how your good readers manage to write in while suffering what appear to be massive head-traumas that rob of them of their ability to spell properly every which way."
There was a long silence. Jo finally smiled sheepishly, although she knew all too well the man still hidden behind the door couldn't see her.
"...Not that I mean any disrespect whatsoever."
-
Jack dropped the placating act and laughed in earnest. After all, he liked talking to people, especially when they came equipped with charming feminine attributes, and even if this woman was a wrinkled old hag-- as Jack's editor had gleefully described her-- at least she had a sense of humor.
Mind you, Jack would still much rather have been roaming around with David or snug in his own bed. But for a lady of-- how old was she supposed to be again?-- fifty-five, she made pretty good conversation. It was enough to keep him interested, anyhow.
"I wish I could disagree with you there," Jack said cheerfully and quite honestly. "But, given some of the mooks that I know read the paper, it's no wonder that the letter writers ain't that bright either. If anyone with a brain in their head actually read anything we printed, I'd have a goddamn stroke right here and--"
And then Jack realized from the sudden hush behind the door that he really shouldn't have cursed in front of some ancient literary woman that probably never even spent much time with men in the first place anyhow.
For a minute, the world went slow and the excruciating moment where he had humiliated himself in front of her replayed itself like something out of a horror novella. Eyes wide, Jack reheard the curse fall from his lips and suddenly felt weeks of Saturday napping fall out of his grasp as it replayed round and round. He saw his editor slamming weeks of monotonous stories that would get him up at God-forsaken hours of the day. He saw the warm bed that he would not get to lay in for a very long time flashing in his head. He saw David staring happily at a chorus of pretty girls tramping by their usual spot in the shop together, himself nowhere to be found.
"Oh, ma'am. I'm... I'm so sorry!" he moaned, feeling his idiocy falling on them like a veritable weight, his accent slipping in with full force. (It always happened when he was flustered.) "I shouldn't of done that in front of you. I should of watched my mouth! I have a terrible problem with lettin’ it run when it really isn't connected to my brain at all. Are you... uh... are you gonna report me to my editor? Please, ma'am, if you've got an inch of mercy... please don't do that to me now."
-
Jo laughed.
Long and loud.
And even though she knew she probably ought to be afraid of hurting this young man's feelings-- Lord help her, she couldn't help but almost choke as he had innocently stumbled on!
It was just-- oh he was so-- he was simply trying so hard and making all these assumptions about her habits and apparently mistaking her for Aunt March or Marmee in how upright her moral fiber was currently--
Jo laughed, long and hard, while an appalled and finally confused silence emerged from his end. And when finally she could stop and wipe the wetness around her mouth away with the back of her hand-- how ladylike, as Amy would sardonically note, and how indicative of her fine breeding!-- she had to grin like a lunatic, keenly aware he couldn't see it.
"Don't worry!" she finally managed, in between a few lingering giggles. "I won't tell on you to the morality police! I've already experienced enough of their own approbation!"
"Really," she added, and the smile lighting up her plain, honest face made her look like a girl of sixteen again. "I've tasted their vengeance quite enough already. I couldn't throw a fellow sinner out to the sharks. Even if you do like to curse in front of women, I doubt you were as bad as I've ever been."
-
All right. It was official. This was definitely the most interesting old woman he had ever met in his life. In fact, he was beginning to like her alarmingly well right now, especially given that she was a washed-up old spinster who had gotten him out of bed at an unreasonable hour and had written a book that was, as far as he knew, dull as dishwater.
After all, it wasn't every day he met someone who could mock him relentlessly without being in the least mean-spirited... and make him like it either.
It was really a shame, Jack was coming to realize, that she was so damn old. She must have been a firecracker when she was younger and he thought he would have liked getting to see her spark.
Instead, he leaned forward and grinned, his hand falling up to smooth out his unruly hair before he saw her. "Ma'am," he said instead, his voice becoming just as playful as hers, "I have to tell you that I gotta doubt that. In fact, you were probably an angel compared to the stories I could tell you about my sordid youth. They'd probably make you blush hard enough to make something pop!"
-
Jo ended up snorting. Couldn't help herself, really.
Since when was she a ma'am? And one with such delicate sensibilities?
Either the whelp outside the door thought she was decades older than she was... or he was testing her. And with a slightly wolfish smile, Jo decided she was willing to rise up to the occasion presently.
"Oh, don't worry about me," she said airily, waving a hand at him that he couldn't see. "I'm a literary spinster of a very ripe old age, after all. I've seen it all before and what I've witnessed first-hand, I can make up in my mind. That's the difference between my profession and yours, after all."
And then, like a shark, she struck.
"When I play at fiction, I don't bother to pretend that I'm not pretending."
-
And with a laugh, Jack found he had to concede. There was no winning a battle of wits with this old woman, not when her voice was so bright and teasing and so honestly perceptive about some of the antics of his colleagues and-- truth be told-- Jack as well.
So instead of trying to win a few points back, Jack just laughed and gave in, curious to see what she really looked like anyhow.
His editor had made her seem like a gorgon with a hair-bun but Jack was finding it surprisingly hard-put to match that image to her warmth, her laughter, and her almost tangible charm.
So Jack simply pressed on.
"Ma'am, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to open the door," he said, his voice warm and his hand already moving to the door knob. "Ya see, I'm an immoral journalist who'll do anything to sell a story, and if you don't let me have an interview, I'll have to write that you’re two and a half feet tall, sparkling yellow, and have an impressive wart in between your eyebrows."
-
"You forgot to add in the bit about my hideous wrinkled face," Jo said, not even bothering to hide the laughter bubbling up through her voice. "And I am considerably taller than you expected, although I'll give you the sparkling yellow skin and the wart. There was the result of a tragic accident that somehow went on between me, a horde of elephants, far too much mica and a glue factory that had far looser vats than it should have had. Best you not ask, honestly."
And finally, she stood up, smoothed out the smart gray evening dress she had donned for the occasion-- hell, if she had dressed up for him so far, she might as well make an impression-- and smiled again, this time rather slyly.
"And if you want to come in, you might as well come in. Or aren't you the strong, strapping man and I the helpless, feeble old woman?"
-
Jack still wasn't entirely sure that this wasn’t some terrible trap in which this old Miss March would finish completely bewitching him, ambush him, and turn him into a pair of boots, like a witch from the stories his mother had used to tell him before her time had run out.
But in any case, it was time to finally meet this woman. So Jack took a quick breath, took off his hat (Jack’s mother, God rest her soul, had taught him better than to go around talking to a woman with his hat planted on his head, even if she hadn’t been around long enough to teach him to keep his mouth in check), opened the door--
And tried not to embarrass himself when his eyes fell on the woman that his editor had assured him was an old and loveless gorgon.
After all, though Jack didn't know whether she was loveless or not, 'old' and 'gorgon' turned out not to even fall into the same territory as Miss Josephine March.
It wasn't that she was beautiful. Even a single glance at her reassured Jack that she was not. Honestly, even the word 'pretty' would be a bit too much a stretch to properly apply to her, given the thinness of her face, the severity of her features, and the way she completely lacked long, flowing hair, big, innocent eyes, a cupid-bow's mouth and all those other charms Jack had been taught a woman shouldn't do without.
If Jack had seen her on the street, he probably would have passed by without even bothering to smile at her. But he had just finished quite a conversation with her and right now, it seemed pretty miraculous that she wasn't an old hag, that she was young, that the hair coiled atop her head wasn't peppery but brown, that all of her slender, smartly clad frame seemed alive with vitality, and that her sharp gray eyes held no disadvantage on his own as they met him--
At least, until she seemed to get a good look at him.
And then they simply went wide as her once-flushed face went bloodless and Jack turned a bit panicked himself and wondered what he had done now.
-
Jo opened her mouth.
Jo tried to make out a few words.
Jo made a noise more reminiscent of asthmatic bears than of human beings.
In other words, Jo failed miserably at what she was trying to do now.
Her eyes took in his face. Her pupils contracted as she took in all the handsome features arrayed before he presently. And even as she looked up and down, right and around, side to side and ways to ways--
All Jo could see was-- was--
Something that really shouldn't be.
That dark hair...
Those thick brows...
That handsome profile...
That broad smile...
Even the slender curve of the idiosyncratic nose and the cool, sharp outline of the cheek...
God help her but if this wasn't Laurie, she wouldn't gaping at the man before her as though she had suddenly been struck across the face with a plank.
And even though there was no mirror before her, Jo knew she was gaping quite spectacularly.
"T-T-T--" she half-began and then felt her brain shut down and sputter out from surprise, before she could fully finish anything.
-
Jack had always been aware that he was uncommonly handsome. He usually managed to only be mildly insufferable about this fact.
But even if he had even managed to get some of the looser women in New York to slash their prices for him in the past, he had never before managed to make an otherwise apparently normal woman sputter like she had just lost her tongue in an interesting factory accident or had her teeth pulled out by one of the less respectable loan sharks the city had to offer. Even Jack's well-known vanity didn't quite stretch that far.
So, alarmed that she was either having a stroke or an ill-timed nervous break-down, he found himself grabbing Miss March around the waist (and damn but she had a tiny little waist) and sitting her down into a chair, helplessly watching her continue to sputter as he contemplated calling for a doctor.
Honestly, he wasn't even sure what he could do right now. The doctor bit sounded good but where the hell could he possibly go to find one at this hour? And how on earth was he supposed to keep her from wandering off while he went off, or even from being blamed for this? Knowing his editor, the sunnofabitch would probably assume he'd done something to set the poor woman off.
So instead, Jack simply hovered helplessly over her as she stared at him, not even bothering to hide the fact that he was staring back.
Damn, she really was kind of cute, wasn't she? It was a shame she was apparently going into a catatonic stupor right now.
-
It took Jo quite a while to gather her wits, a quite a while that seemed to crawl by agonizingly as she stared and stared and stared at the man who was now gazing at her with his own curiosity. Given all of that, Jo understandably took her time while trying to puzzle out what on earth could be possibly happening to bring Laurie to her-- in such a bizarre disguise as well, as if they were once more play-acting.
But even as she did her best to piece the puzzle before her together, her confounded mind could not understand it in the least.
After all, she had left Massachusetts for a reason a year earlier, right after she had learned that Laurie had come back, with a lovely new wife, with a charming and nubile bride, with her own sister as a radiant substitute to the drab literary spinster he had once promised to love eternally. She had left and although Laurie had argued and pleaded with her not to go, and sent letter after letter asking for her to come back to the place where she was loved, she had held fast to New York and its cold, lonely streets. She had left, and although Laurie would never know why, the truth was that she had left because of him-- because she could no longer stand to be where she could see the man loved, the man she had lost, be happy with any other woman, even if that woman was part of Jo's own family.
She had left Massachusetts months back, and she had left it for a very specific reason. And if this specific reason had sudden decided to-- to-- to come after her after all this time and after-- after marrying her bloody sister-- after showing her she was not good enough for him and probably never had been, never could be--
She made up her mind in an instant. After all, there were only two real possibilities here.
Either this was not Laurie and she was about to make a very embarrassing fool of herself or--
It was Laurie and she was about to stuff her manuscript down his pants and set it on fire for coming here after all this time, after pretending to be someone else, after taking her heart in his hand and showing her how easily it could be replaced, how simple that procedure could be--
And frankly, in the war currently tearing her apart between potential embarrassment and pyromania, the pyromania was winning.
And before the man hovering over her could stutter his embarrassment once more and go running for a doctor, Jo's hand snaked out and gripped his sturdy wrist with surprising strength, as she clenched her strong jaw and lifted suddenly blazing gray eyes up to look at him.
"I know I might regret this very much," she said, her voice nearly glacial. "But Teddy, if that's you wearing those strange clothes that Amy would as soon burn as see and masquerading around in that ridiculous accent to come after me, so help me God, I am going to do unspeakable things with a pair of numerical ledgers to you and parts of you that have never before been exposed to such things."
He stared at that and before Jo could lose her nerve, she stared back, her eyes grim and her teeth forming words she almost spit out at him, so furious at what he might be pulling she was willing to leave propriety behind entirely.
"And take your pants off, will you? We'll see whether or not you're really who you claim to be!"
***
Author's Note: As always, thanks for reading! I seem to be developing something of a mania for crossing Little Women over with movies Christian Bale has starred in (let's hope I never get around to writing a LW/American Psycho crossover, yes?) but this was an absolute blast to write with my wonderful partner, Madwomanpoems, and I very much hope you keep reading! There will be a lot more madness and hijinx coming up and plenty of characters from both Little Women and Newsies popping up soon. And for the Jo/Laurie shippers in the audience... yes, Laurie will come to play a huge role in this and there will be lots and lots of Jo/Laurie angsty goodness. I hope you all don't end up giving up on this fic because Jo also has a chance with Jack Kelly... who, after all, looks and acts more like Laurie than anyone will end up comfortable with. ;)
Also, reviews are greatly appreciated. If nothing else, they spur my partner and I on to write much, much more. Please do review if you've read this story-- we love comments, questions and constructive crit!