Race: We Need You To Create A Diversion. We Have To Get Out Of This House.

the struggle ...

ohhhhgggKAY y'all

I have some personal albert hc's based on a character workshop today (very based off of other peoples Albert hc's)

- he has a mother and two younger sisters, his dad either walked out or died

- his mother is either sick or drunk so it's mostly up to him to provide for his family.

- his closest/only friends are the New York newsies. he's very apprehensive of katherine at first.

- he wears his newsie hat backwards (though we knew this)

- he's super hyper masc and stoic and cold to hide his insecurities about his feminine traits- he wants to go to culinary school and become a chef, and is also grappling with his sexuality and a crush on jack/race

- the abscencr of his father also played a hand in his demeanour and insecurities, he never really had a male role model to show him how to act.

- he has anger/emotional processing issues becuase if his mental health, sexuality and absent father. it's very rare to see him smile, and the only times he really does in the show is during numbers like kony.

- during his rare downtime while he's not selling papes or caring for his mum and sisters he likes to visit this one diner downtown. sometimes they give him food for free or just let him watch the process in the kitchen. they don't let him help because they'd have to pay him and also hes too dirty but it's his comfort place. he would never tell the other newsies. the line cook there is a gay guy and he and Albert talk a lot about everything that albert would never open up to anyone else about.

anyway yah! that's my albert! my silly guy!

ps im starting on the writing reqs :3c

i just saw “illinoise: a new kind of musical” in chicago which features ben cook in it and i would absolutely recommend it if youre at all interested. ben cook was absolutely incredible as was everyone else. genuinely a life changing show.

Jack can't contain his emotions in just his body. he externalises his love, his anguish, his hate, his frustration into any medium that will bend to his will just enough to become his own. His paintings not only depict beautiful landscapes, but also the freedom he wants; the freedom he needs. The music he listens to is filled to overflowing with annotations and marks only jack can hear; the way certain songs get him crying.

Jack only sees himself as a husk- a skeleton of what could have been, if only Jack was given a little more. If only jack had been given a family, he might not have more than half of his personality and traumas displayed on his walls. If jack had been given a family, maybe he would just be better. Maybe it would all be fixed.

Maybe he wouldn't need to move to Santa Fe.

Buttons, who loves cooking for the other Newsies but is extremely self-conscious about his skill and is shaking like a leaf every time they try out his food.

Elmer scarfing down his bowl: Holy shit, Buttons, this is really good!

Albert, already going back for seconds: Seriously, this is delicious.

Buttons, stood in the corner, practically hyperventilating with tears in his eyes: Oh, thanks fellas.

im just saying katherine as a famous if somewhat controversial author, jack as the photographer of a trashy gossip mag trying to get pictures of her and davey as her stressed manager who keeps thwarting him at every turn. discuss.

aaaaaaanother poll it will b over soon

crutchie n jack

love your writing! could you do some more for ralbert?

Aaaa thank you!!! I’m so sorry that this took so long, school has been beating me up lately, lol. Enjoy this little bit of rambling!

There’s a crack in the mirror in Albert and Race’s home.

Neither are quite sure how it got there- perhaps a box was dropped onto it during moving and hit the glass a bit too hard, perhaps one of them had bumped into it and just didn’t remember- but it’s been there for as long as the two of them can tell you. It was there when they signed the lease on the house, it was there when they came home one day with a shining bundle of joy in their arms, after years of waiting, and it’ll be there when the time comes to put the mirror away.

When you stand in front of it, your view of your reflection is distorted a bit where the glass has chipped. Right above your heart lies a star-shaped crack, your skin seeming fragile and broken underneath it. Both Albert and Race have looked into this mirror hundreds of times, a quick glance on the way out to run an errand or for several minutes as they laughed at the faces their kids made in it.

Their youngest barely comes up to the crack, a little puncture mark poked into his face when he passes by. He laughs when he sees it, brushing his hand just close enough to feel the groove where the mirror’s broken, smiling at his reflection.

Race has to blink tears from his eyes when he sees this, his beautiful child so happy with what he saw in that glass. Albert isn’t so lucky- he’s always been sentimental anyways. It had taken a long time for the two of them to find that, for their own reflections to not punch a hole through their heart.

Their children won’t ever have to suffer through those long years of waiting before freedom, trapped in the hopeless purgatory of no support before they finally get the courage to stand up. That mirror will never haunt them. Their names will not be a source of pain. They’ll never be afraid to be who they were- both Race and Albert had promised that long before they’d first adopted.

For now, that mirror will distort their children’s faces, hear their giggles as they stick out their tongues at the warped image. As they grow, they’ll fall into the same routine, ignoring that old crack in the glass as they fix their jacket or comb through their hair, the slight bend in light unnoticeable now. Their hearts will break, just like the glass, and be mended together again with some sort of miracle. When they leave their childhood home, that mirror will watch, still the same as ever yet having bore witness to the molding of two human beings, just as it had done before. They’ll come home for holidays and birthdays, funerals and reunions, their fingerprints left on the mirror and wiped off again, like when they were little.

Sooner rather than later, it’ll become no longer useful, and it will sit in a basement or old antique shop, slowly staining and losing its light. It will heave its final, weak breath, the memories made lost to time and decay, to all except those who lived it- those who still dream of the time spent in that house, with that mirror.

That glass may one day be broken, but those men and their family? They never will be.