Hi guys :) My first Titanic fanfiction, which I am very excited about writing :) Lots of thanks to my wonderful beta-reader! Hope you enjoy ;)
Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognize from the film.
It's a bit annoying, in hind sight, that my whole life was changed by an event that I didn't actually witness. No, I wasn't there in the dingy little pub when Jack and Fabrizio managed by an odd combination of luck, desperation, and skill to win that fateful game of cards.
I was outside, chewing my fingernails and praying to every saint I could think of. On a normal occasion, I might have settled myself in one of the bar's corners and bought myself a pint to settle my nerves, but lately, as the money had begun to disappear at an alarming rate, one drink could become five before I knew it.
I wanted to play too, since more than a third of the money Jack had pushed into the center of the table was mine, but that idea had been quickly dismissed by my two companions, not without putting me off slightly.
"If Jack plays, we might lose," Fabrizio had said before the game. "If you play, we will lose." I pretended to slap him after that, but he just continued to laugh even more than he had before.
This candidly put comment was annoyingly true, and my friends' way of teasing me for it didn't help my confidence. The last time I had tried to play cards in a pub, I lost the three of us so much money that we'd been forced to spend a couple of hours working in the kitchen just to pay off our bar tab. Jack and Fabrizio still joked about it, much to my obvious annoyance.
I gave in, and watched with heavy heart as the cards were dealt. Jack looked on top of the world, but then again that's how he always looked, and Fabrizio just shifted in his chair nervously, making it painstakingly obvious that his hand wasn't a winner.
"Jack, if you lose, I'll kill you," I whispered from behind him. "That's all the money I've got left."
"Just you wait, Gwen," he told me, grinning, not even turning around to acknowledge me. "We'll win this one."
Normally, I would have responded to this with some sort of sarcastic comment, one worthy of even the King of Sarcasm himself, but I was too nervous for that. Instead I pulled on my coat and stepped outside, breathing in the fresh air with considerable relief. The last remnants of winter were still fading in the cool English breeze, but the cold air what just what I needed to settle my nerves down a bit.
And so I waited, watching the crowd, and thinking about Jack Dawson.
I'd know him for what? Two weeks? Three? It was hard to keep count sometimes. I met him and Fabrizio in a park, where he had been sketching while his Italian friend had been fast asleep on a nearby bench. They had both looked pretty poor, which wasn't unusual, but neither of them seemed particularly unhappy, which was a little hard to come by once I though about it.
And me? Well, I wasn't exactly sitting in the lap of luxury. Far from it, in fact. It was hard for a seventeen year old, uneducated, untrained girl to get work anywhere. Well, that's not exactly true. It was hard for a seventeen year old, not remarkably good-looking girl to get work if she drew the line at making her living on her back, as it were. Insensible people have an uncanny way of getting their own jobs, just for the reason that no one else would be willing to take them.
I'd been wandering around England for two years, ever since I'd first set out from Ireland, fresh faced and naïve, ready to make my mark on the world. That optimistic attitude departed quickly enough, along with the majority of my money. By the time I met Jack and Fabrizio, I was down on my luck and down on the world, with scarcely enough cash to buy my supper and too much pride to go crawling back home to Dublin.
'You're your own worst enemy, Gwendolyn,' my mother was always fond of saying.
But, anyway, I met Jack and Fabrizio, and, finding them easy, good company, I fell in with them in a way. Our situations were fairly similar; all of us were living in hard times, and all of us had places we wanted to go. For them, it was America. Personally, I just wanted get out of the rut my life had become, and if that meant going to America, I was fine with it.
And it had all boiled down to me, leaning against the wall of the pub, smoking a cigarette and whistling the tune of an old music hall ditty between my teeth to try and stop myself from going crazy from the anticipation.
One can only stand on one's feet for so long without getting bloody uncomfortable, and I was about to wander off in search of a crate or something to sit on, when I heard a terrific babble of voices coming from inside the pub.
"What the hell?" I muttered, to no one in particular (yes, that's when you know you're starting to crack; you're talking to yourself).
Had someone been caught cheating? Had a brawl broken out?
I dropped my cigarette and stamped on it. If there was a scrap going on, rushing in bravely to help my companions would probably not be a good idea. A childhood of working on my dad's farm had resulted in me growing up to be quite strong, for a girl, but from the look of the blokes who had been sitting on the other side of the card table, rushing in bravely might be the equivalent of suicide. Especially (and here my mood got a little blacker) hampered by a bloody skirt.
No, maybe the best thing to do would be to sidle off and wait it out somewhere. Did Jack and Fabrizio really need my help? A girl in there would probably just get in the way...
My thoughts thus treacherously occupied, I was just preparing to disappear from the scene, when the door of the pub flew open and out sprinted Jack, Fabrizio close behind. Both were grinning from ear to ear.
They'd won?
"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey! What happened?"
"We won! We won!" Jack yelled over his shoulder.
WHAT?
I took off after them, hitching the stupid woolen skirt up with one hand. I caught up with them as they waited for a motor car to pass, and grabbed Jack's arm.
"J-just give me my share of the money," I panted, pushing my dirty blond hair out of my eyes.
"We can give you a lot more than that," Jack told me, waving a few sheets of now rather crumpled paper in front of my face.
"You got three tickets?" I asked, still holding onto his arm to stop him from sprinting off again.
Jack's face fell, as did my previously rising hopes.
Ah. Well, maybe it was a bit too much to hope for...
"You. Only. Won. Two. Tickets," I said, my grip on his arm tightening slightly "So, how am I supposed to get on, then?"
It never really occurred to me that I might not have had to be the one without a ticket.
Jack looked me up and down, his head tilted slightly on one side, a smile already tugging at the corners of his mouth. Then he pulled his rather worn sack (empty except for his folder of sketches and his set of charcoals) off his shoulder. I'd known him long enough to recognize the look in his eyes that signaled that he'd had an idea.
I stared from him, to the bag, then up at the impressive bulk of the Titanic.
"No," I said, flatly "No. Bloody. Way."
"C'mon, Gwen, it'll be perfectly comfortable. You'd only be in there for a few minutes."
"Well, in that case, you climb in and give me your ticket," I said, hotly.
Jack grinned, holding the sack open for me.
"I wouldn't fit, would I? Now come on, or we'll miss it."
Fabrizio was waiting on the other side of the road, and I saw him beckon to us anxiously. Well, if I didn't make up my mind soon, my friends would be too late to get onboard.
"All right," I said "Fine."
Never the less, I couldn't stop myself from grinning. The plan, though undoubtedly crazy, was actually quite promising, and had its appeal. I stepped into the sack and pulled it up so that it covered my head, imagining all the stares that passersby must have been giving us.
I felt Jack pick me up and hoist me over his shoulder, then begin to run again, although slightly slower than before. I bumped up and down against his back, feeling the blood rush to my head.
Well, it wasn't exactly the most dignified way to board the Titanic, as she embarked on her maiden voyage (hell, it probably didn't even make the top ten), but hey – it certainly was original.