Disclaimer: I do not own Titanic in any way, shape or form.
Summary: Some nights are just like that night.
Rating: K+
Just Like
This night, she is in the garden. It is April again and the sky is deep black, spotted with stars. The wind is cold. Each gust stings her face, lifting her hair off of her neck and clawing down her spine in icy tendrils.
Just like that night.
She is curled up on the wood bench beside the pond. If she turns her head, she can see the dark glimmer of the water, still despite the wind. The house—her boarding house—is rising up behind her, lights sparkling in the windows. The house is mammoth, dwarfing her, black against black, a shadow. Her fortress.
"I'm sorry I didn't build you a sounder ship, young Rose."
A car pulls around the drive. The headlights slip over her face. Pause and go. She draws a breath. Her lungs ache with the cold.
Oh, yes. Tonight is just like that night.
She hears the front door open, the sharp click of shoes on the porch. Hurried. The mumble of voices. Mechanical clicks.
"Come Josephine…in my flying machine..."
On nights like these, she wants to go back to that night. She wants to start over, try again. If she had stayed in that lifeboat, would he have lived? Would he have swum through that cold, cold water, huddled onto that broken, carved wood alone?
"…and it's up she goes…"
Up and out, she thinks. The first rule. The cold is death. It takes everything.
"Don't you give up."
His voice is familiar, determined. Shaking.
I won't give up, she whispers silently. Her eyes burn. I haven't ever given up.
"I'll never let go. I promise."
If she closes her eyes, she can feel his hand in hers, can remember the sharp sting as she wrenched her fingers from his, the numbing cold of her lips against his skin.
"Come back—"
She watches him fall again, slowly, quickly out of sight, traveling down into that deep blackness. And that obliterating sting bites into her heart. It is a cold she has never gotten rid of, not with fires and blankets and coats. It is a pain that she carries, buried at the very center of her heart.
"You're going to go on."
And she does, has, will.
But these nights, just like that night, she doesn't want to.