AN: This is short and uninteresting but important oops

The days got colder as they went, and at the beginning of Jack and Louis's fourth week in the asylum, Jack (who was awake, as usual) was concerned to find that the younger boy was coughing in his sleep. It wasn't bad enough for him to feel the need to wake him, but Jack had enough sense to know that nobody coughed while they were asleep just because they had a tickle in their throat. That only happened when someone got sick.

The constant cold definitely wasn't doing any good, and neither were the freezing baths they were still being forced to take once a week, so Jack pulled his own thin blanket off and walked over, draping it over Louis. He didn't have a clue whether or not it helped, but there wasn't anything else he could do.

A few hours later when Louis woke up, Jack looked over at him.

"You feeling okay, kid?"

Louis gave him a quizzical look, but before he could ask what Jack meant, he answered his own question as he was sent into a coughing fit. Once he was done, he looked back over at his roommate and tried to keep the worry out of his face.

"I'm fine, guess I just have allergies or something."

Jack nodded and told himself that yes, it was just allergies, because he refused to believe that Louis was sick. Because if Louis got sick in here, it wasn't very likely that he would get any treatment.

oOo

Katherine didn't have near as much free time as she'd like - her editor had been running her ragged lately - but a few days after her visit with Jack, she finally had a few spare moments to head over to The World. She knew that this article would be even harder to convince him to let her write for him, but she didn't even want to waste time trying with The Sun.

She hastily made her way over to his office, stopping in front of Hannah's desk.

"I need to speak to my father."

To her surprise, Hannah nodded and motioned towards the door.

"Head right in."

Katherine nodded and walked straight into her father's office. Pulitzer looked up with an expression of surprise, which quickly turned to concern once he saw that it was his daughter.

"Katherine? Is everything all right?"

She took a deep breath. "I need you to let me write another article for you."

He raised his eyebrows. "Katherine, do I need to remind you that you work for The Sun by your own choosing?"

She gave him a sheepish look. "There's no way my editor will let me do this, if I asked him, he'd only agree to it if a man did it instead of me."

Evidently, this was not the best way to get Pulitzer to agree. "And why is that? What is it that you're asking me?"

"I want to go the Blackwell's Insane Asylum and expose them for mistreating their patients."

"And what proof do you have of any mistreatment?"

"Davey told me when we saw Jack a few days ago that they were improperly using electric shock therapy on him, and something about how the guards are physically abusive to the patients."

Pulitzer sat for a minute, deep in thought. "You're absolutely sure that, regardless of details, something dangerous is going on there? There's no chance that it's nothing?"

Katherine shook her head. "Something's going on there."

He nodded slowly. "And do you plan on going undercover?"

"I'm hoping that I'll be able to get enough out of the doctors, nurses, and patients without having to resort to that. If I can't... I'll think of something else."

Her father was silent for another moment. "Alright. Come by again tomorrow and we'll work out the details."

Katherine was immediately flooded with relief. She officially had a way to help free not only Jack, but all the other patients subject to the abuse of the asylum.