#[oh yeah this post is kinda outdated now. shout out lesbians!]

[jackkennedyofficial]

i love having my ocs interact with my favorite chars for normal reasons

[violetwolfraven]

Crossover Headcanons

((I know I have requests in my inbox but I just had to get this out of my head. Also I probably won’t be posting those requests for a while because my writer’s block is only barely starting to lift, so...))

Anyway this is gonna start off from one perspective and go to more later. Enjoy. 💜

Tw: past death, nightmares

...

So this is a... spin-off? Of the reincarnation au? An alternate timeline? A variant? Whatever it is the newsies are reincarnated and remember their past.

Also somehow most of them are going to the same college here, (I’m not going to say which one because I don’t want to research colleges right now) even if they’ve got a wide range of majors.

There’s only one dorm building even if people are only allowed to share a room with someone of the same gender.

This works out well for Elmer, because he’s pretty happy to be rooming with his boyfriend, Buttons.

But then he gets up to the floor their dorm is on and almost drops the box he’s holding.

Because it’s fuckin her. His national-level math nemesis since 11th grade. They’ve only faced off twice, the first time with her team winning and the second with his winning, but they’re each the only one who can beat the other in a math competition.

Elmer can see the shock in her eyes as she recognizes him and shouts YOU and then she’s stomping over to him aggressively enough that he’s pretty sure she wants to throw down physically.

Jack (who’s also on that floor with Davey) figures that too, and steps in front of him before she gets too close, but that girl acts like she doesn’t even notice him and shouts I WAS HALF A SECOND BEHIND YOU SOLVING THAT PROBLEM!

Elmer is kinda terrified but he defensively shoots back well I still solved it first and moves around Jack because this is his math nemesis and his fight.

The girl scowls at him for a couple more seconds then just sticks out her hand to shake, and Elmer realizes that he doesn’t actually know her name beyond the surname he’s seen on the back of her mathletes jacket. She introduces herself as Cady Heron.

Elmer Kazprzak, he responds, and Cady looks like she’s trying not to laugh, but he figures that’s probably fair, with how ‘Elmer’ was a common name in 1885 but not so much in 2003.

Jack clears his throat so Elmer introduces him but forgets that this isn’t their high school so things like oh this is Jack. He’s basically my dad. are weird.

Cady definitely thinks it’s weird but she doesn’t question it. Instead she just asks where Elmer is living, and it turns out, of course, he and Buttons are right next door to her and her roommate, Karen.

(I say Cady is living with Karen because Gretchen wanted to live with Regina and rules be damned Janis is with Damien.)

Elmer isn’t completely sure he’s not going to get murdered in his sleep but he guesses if he could handle the 1899 Newsboy Strike and World War I he can handle Cady Heron.

Meanwhile Katherine is going to Harvard so Sarah is rooming with someone she’s never met and she’s a little nervous.

And in stomps a girl who declares I’m a lesbian and if you have a problem with that tell me now so I can switch dorms.

And Sarah responds with my girlfriend out at Harvard would be pretty pissed at me if I did have a problem with that.

The girl lets her guard down, explains that she comes from a small town, and says her name is Alyssa Greene.

After that little bump, they get along good. Alyssa explains that her girlfriend, Emma, registered late and couldn’t get a dorm with who she wanted.

And Sarah’s just kinda like wait Emma as in Unruly Hearts Emma? Alyssa’s just like yeah!! I’m so proud of her!!

Sarah brags a bit about how Katherine is studying to be a journalist with a specialty in queer stories and long story short they become besties and eventually Alyssa introduces Emma for real and Sarah introduces Smalls and Sniper.

Emma and Alyssa are a bit thrown by the whole nickname thing but hey whatever now they have a Lesbian Club!

They do meet up with the boys occasionally but the Lesbian Club meets on a video call with Katherine every Saturday.

Anyway Jack meets Janis in art class and initially they kinda think each other is weird because their styles are very different but then they get in an actual conversation and get along amazingly.

Jack is definitely a fan of Janis’s philosophy of when someone hurts your friends you attack and grind your foe into the ground.

Janis tells her new bestie about Cady and Damien (and Regina, Gretchen, and Karen, though she still keeps Cady and Damien closer than the former Plastics) and she’s honestly shocked by the amount of friends Jack tells her about.

She does recognize some names, though. Romeo and Damien are both theatre majors and they’ve become friends.

But anyway Jack and Janis are like. Super good friends. Art buddies. Mlm/wlw solidarity. Protective friend pals.

Janis is pretty surprised when she introduces him to Cady and they’ve already met, and apparently oh fuck your math nemesis is Jack’s Elmer???

Jack’s just going oh fuck Elmer’s math nemesis Cady is Janis’s Cady???

Also Regina met Spot and Sarah at the gym and now they meet up with a few other people every other week to throw down like their own personal fight club.

At first Regina was just angrily trying to fight with no technique, but don’t worry, Spot and Sarah teach her.

There weren’t a ton of out gays at Northshore High, so yeah the Mean Girls crew definitely gets along with the Newsies crew out of solidarity.

Janis and at least one of the Plastics but I can’t choose which one(s) join the Lesbian Club.

Meanwhile Race is super hyped to meet Emma cause like I choreographed a dance to your song wanna see???

Emma is flattered but kinda weirded out and she mentions her friend Angie who’s a dancer too and Race is just *error 404*

Cause of course he saw the news story and knows Emma knows these 4 big Broadway stars but it just. Hasn’t connected until this moment that she like has their numbers.

He tries not to freak out too much cause he knows that’s weird but Emma eventually goes do you wanna meet her? And Race goes do I wanna meet her? She’s only my IDOL!! she’s been dancing like 20 years and she’s still got it!!

Emma calls Angie partially because she likes her new dancer friend and wants to make him happy and partially because she wants to prove to Angie that people do appreciate her zazz and despite how she was just a chorus girl until a few months ago this random boy from New York has been a fan since he was 12.

Angie can’t exactly fly over at the drop of a hat but she watches some videos on YouTube of Race dancing and like holy hell this kid is good. And his friends are too but this kid right here has zazz off the charts.

When she finds out he’s an orphan she’s lowkey can I adopt him??? but then she finds out he already has an adoptive mother and it’s Medda Larkin.

Medda Larkin who did more than a few shows with Angie when they were young but left Broadway to open her own theatre.

They fell out of touch years ago but still follow each other on Instagram and stuff.

But Angie shows Barry and Dee Dee and she’s super excited like remember Medda Larkin??? THIS IS HER ADOPTIVE KID AND HE’S AMAZING

And they watch YouTube clips of Emma’s new friends in high school shows and like wtf these kids are fuckin talented why aren’t they on Broadway???

They almost tell Emma to tell her friends to drop out of college and come straight (haha not that straight) to Broadway but Trent is like wtf no education is important.

Whatever the actors aren’t that relevant.

Sarah has a nightmare about her death one night. And with the others it’s not as big of a deal because they’re all rooming with each other, but Sarah’s roommate isn’t one of them.

She thinks Alyssa is asleep so she calls Katherine crying about how scared she was, how guilty she felt to be leaving her brothers and friends and Kath without a goodbye.

And Alyssa isn’t quite awake, but she’s awake enough that she hears Sarah whisper about how everything is just so stupid complicated. I shouldn’t be afraid of dying when I’ve done it before—when we’ve all died horribly—but I still am, Kitty. I can’t stop being afraid.

Alyssa is out of it enough that she falls back asleep, but when she wakes up she knows what she heard. That her roommate thinks she had a past life and died and implied that all her friends did.

Emma notices she’s acting weird and when she asks what’s wrong she tells her.

They both know it sounds crazy, but...

Emma tentatively points out some weird things about their friends from New York.

She’s study buddies with Race and occasionally he points something out she got wrong on her history homework. Something so small and inconsequential that it would’ve been almost impossible for him to know unless he was there and remembered from experience.

Smalls and Sniper have a habit of jumping apart if they were so much as holding hands and someone walks in on them, even though they come from a mostly accepting city with an accepting friend group.

That whole group straight up skipped history class the whole week they were learning about World War I and refused to make up the work.

They bring the half-baked theory to Janis who immediately remembers all the times she’s seen Jack draw small war-torn towns in France and dirty city streets and an outdated skyline as if seen from a rooftop, all of them too detailed to be anything but directly copied from something Jack has seen before.

But the question is if they’re drawn from a reference photo or a memory.

Cady realizes, upon hearing the theory, that Elmer and Buttons never take her up on offers to come to football games because they don’t like the noise.

More specifically, she remembers the look on her nemesis/frenemy’s face when he said he didn’t like fireworks.

Aaron notices that Davey always solves math problems by hand. He never uses a calculator unless someone reminds him it’s an option. And half the time, he defaults to using his right hand with terrible handwriting even though he’s left handed. Almost like he was raised with the whole ‘left hand devil’ thing, which doesn’t make sense because he went to a public school; not a religious one.

Damien realizes that Romeo has a habit of correcting the costume department, like he knows the period clothing for Hello, Dolly! better than they do. It annoys the hell out of them because upon some research, he is always right.

Regina notes how Spot and Sarah fight like they’re fighting for their lives in a street brawl. She knows that because she started taking karate in an attempt to win fights. She noticed months ago that her friends use technique that’s barely sustainable, like they’re just trying to stay alive until they can run or backup comes.

However all this is just fun and games, a crack theory they’re all mildly creeped out by but don’t really believe, until Gretchen finds it.

An article on the Newsboy Strike of 1899.

There’s a copy of the Newsies Banner, written by Katherine Plumber, which references strike leaders Jack Kelly and David Jacobs.

But they could write that off as just a creepy coincidence if not for the photo.

It’s the one Katherine and Darcy took that first day, which is in black and white and not the greatest quality, but clearly shows a lot of familiar faces.

A later story by this Katherine Plumber documents lives of street kids with interviews from kids with the same odd nicknames as the group they know.

Regina was the most cynical about this theory and even she can’t deny it now. There’s just too much evidence.

Especially when Karen finds Crutchie’s obituary, but Regina stops her from showing it to anyone else because that’s just too creepy.

The Mean Girls crew and Alyssa and Emma are... unsure if they should confront their friends about this, because a) this is freaky and b) the newsie gang is clearly still harboring trauma due to their deaths.

Plus, as Damien points out, being gay was illegal in 1899. Do you think they want a reminder of how they had to hide their feelings for each other back then?

Emma and Alyssa share a knowing look because they know what that’s like.

In the end Karen lets it slip when she asks Davey a question about her history homework involving World War II, mistakenly believing he was there.

Davey naturally questions her about it and she spills the entire story about how Alyssa heard Sarah’s phone call and they figured everything else out from there. She even shows him the article with the 1899 photo and the Newsies Banner.

And... shit, there’s a lot of memories behind that picture. And that’s them, over a hundred years ago, when they were kids and they weren’t all the same age like this time around.

The old Davey looks so big compared to Romeo and Elmer and god was Specs tall for a 15-year-old.

Davey didn’t even meet Smalls and Sniper in this lifetime until they were 16, but in that picture they’re only 13 and they’re so small.

A sidenote on Katherine has a picture of her in a hairstyle he hasn’t seen her in since 1917.

It’s a mixture between ptsd and nostalgia and Davey can’t decide whether to freak out or be happy.

He takes the article to Jack and tells him about how Gretchen found it and their non-reincarnated friends know.

Jack’s silently cursing the fact that he really should have been more careful with what he drew around Janis, but it’s kinda a relief that they know, honestly.

He shoots a quick text to the group chat and then turns his phone on do not disturb mode while he sits Janis down for a little chat.

He doesn’t go into graphic detail, but he does tell her an abridged version of everything. How they were basically a family and all lgbt+ in the early 20th century and how they died before their time and got a second chance.

It’s more than a little freaky for Janis, but it does explain a lot.

Such as how Jack demonstrates on a dare that he can still do some parkour because once upon a time, he used it to run from the cops.

Elmer tells Cady he’s so quick at math because he used to have to calculate change quickly and later had to help Jack and Davey come up with battle plans based on numbers vs tactics and terrain.

Regina definitely trusts Spot’s combat advice a lot more now because he was essentially a gang leader as a teenager and it has literally saved his life.

Race admits to Emma that her song made him cry because... in this lifetime he might not have had to be closeted, but in his last he was constantly worried about getting arrested or worse if people found out not just about him and his boyfriend, but his friends. His family.

Emma may or may not collaborate with him after that to write a song about how much it hurts to be closeted for your own safety and how much better it feels to be free to be who you are. Race dances in the music video and many of the other newsies make appearances but it’s mainly him and Emma. Spot and Alyssa cry when they see it. Damien does, too.

Who am I kidding everyone cries.

They get like 4 million hits on YouTube and it’s amazing.

The title is probably In the Light or something.

Also Cady, Aaron, Kevin, and Elmer form their own college level mathletes team and no one can beat them.

(Kevin’s not as close with the main group literally only because I don’t know that much about him as a character.)

(Also Stacy, Kailey, and whatever their boyfriends’ names are might be there somewhere but I don’t know them either.)

Katherine does get to meet the new kids in person eventually. And also I didn’t mention this earlier but Specs goes to Harvard too and he comes to visit too.

The power when the Lesbian Club finally gets to meet all in person? Unparalleled.

:)